The Female of the Species (11 page)

Gray shook her head slightly. Errol knew what she was thinking. Arabella was wearing eyeliner in the bush. Arabella had well-manicured nails.

Errol was thinking something else. He was thinking that Arabella was gorgeous. She had big green eyes and light skin. Her breasts were full, her hips wide. She had one of those lush bodies that in later years, without her losing weight and doing an awful lot of jogging, would run to cellulite, but just now, in her mid-twenties, it was holding up nicely. Errol found it comforting to be around her kind of beauty—plush, expansive, curved. Certainly Gray was beautiful in a more sustainingly interesting way, but Gray’s whole body was tautly strung, and somehow to be around it for long stretches of time was tiring.

“Well,” said Arabella when Errol introduced her to Raphael. “So you’re my replacement.”

“Don’t worry,” said Raphael. “You and I are after different prizes.”

“I’m not after a prize,” said Arabella warily. “I’m here to do a job.”

Raphael shook his head. “Every nose has its carrot.”

“Oh?” asked Arabella. “So what’s yours?”

“The nature of a man’s carrot,” said Raphael, “is his biggest secret.”

“Sounds phallic.”

“Yes.” Raphael smiled. “Doesn’t it.”

They started shooting with Arabella the next day. Mid-morning, Gray said quietly from the sidelines, “I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

“Why?” asked Errol. “I think she’s doing beautifully.”

“She’s too flighty.”

“She seems vulnerable. I think that makes her more sympathetic.”

“She seems helpless, you mean. And the way she looks at him all the time with those wet green eyes? It’s off. It’s coquettish.”

“Gray!” said Errol in exasperation. “What do you want, that she should roll onto the set like a tank?”

“No, but she comes across as weak.”

“She comes across as a
woman
.”

“Are you implying—”

“I’m implying that maybe you should watch her and learn something.”

Gray opened her mouth, and closed it.

“I’m sorry,” said Errol.

Gray looked as if she wanted to walk away again, but she must have realized she was doing that an awful lot lately; she stayed. Her eyes curdled.

“Maybe you’re right,” Errol stammered. “Maybe she should be stronger—”

Gray shook her head and looked at the ground.

“Is there some problem?” asked Arabella, walking over to Errol and Gray when the take was finished.

“No,” said Gray, her voice with a slight throttle to it. “You’re doing a lovely job. You’re quite—winning. Likable. Keep it up. Go on to the next scene.” Gray tried to smile.

“Listen, I have a question, Dr. Kaiser.”

“Arabella,” said Errol, “maybe later—”

“Go ahead,” said Gray.

“Is this a romance?”

She smiled wanly. “That depends on how you play it, I suppose.”

“How do you want me to play it?”

“…No,” said Gray, thinking. “There’s no going back and fixing things, is there?”

“What?”

“Arabella—” said Errol, hoping to urge her away.

“It’s just the situation is a natural,” Arabella went on. “And if you want to appeal to a popular audience—”

“It is not a romance,” said Gray heavily. “You are here to work. He occasionally interferes. He makes you angry, or for you—a
little
angry. As for popular appeal, I wouldn’t worry about it. Charles was a very interesting man.”

The evening after they filmed the worship service, Errol leaned back on his mat, hands behind his head. “I wonder what it would take to get Americans to go bonkers like that. To bow down in the middle of the common and offer up their Cuisinarts and frozen wieners.”

“Exactly the same thing,” said Raphael, with his aviator goggles still on his forehead and his red baseball cap on backward. “A man like Charles.”

Errol’s mouth twitched. He’d been asking Gray. “In Boston we’d recognize Corgie as the small-time opportunist he really was.”

There was a funny tingling in the following silence. Errol looked back and forth from Raphael to Gray, at their coolness, their embarrassment.

“Il-Cor-gie!” a native called at the door. Raphael turned. Silently the Kenyan slid a tray into the hut, along with a stack of beautifully folded clothes, and crept away. Raphael put the
laundry by his mat, sipped the drink he’d been given, and wrapped the hot towel lying beside it around his neck.

“Gray,” said Errol with annoyance, “you’re the brand-name anthropologist. Do Il-Ororen understand about actors?”

“The concept, yes. But not about Raphael.”

“Or maybe they do,” said Raphael.

Errol was tired of these enigmatic quips. He sat up. “Are you a ghost? Is that what you mean? Or is it a god?”

Raphael looked back at Errol, his eyes dancing.

“It is odd,” said Gray, with anthropological diplomacy, “that they’ve debunked white people. But Charles was exempt. I was always afraid for him that they’d find out. But they never did.”

“There was nothing to find out,” said Raphael. “They always knew who he was.”

“You’re evading my question,” said Errol. “How do you think you know so goddamned much about Charles Corgie?”

“You’re the sort who’s done his homework,” said Raphael, barely smiling. “How many societies believe in reincarnation?”

“So you were Charles Corgie in a past life?” asked Errol squarely.

“Now, how would I know?”

“Well, if you were,” said Errol, “that’s not much to be proud of, is it?”

Raphael shrugged.

“Gray?” Errol pushed. “
Is
it?”

Gray turned her back. Errol pulled the sleeping bag over his head.

The whole next day Errol watched the filming with a different eye. They shot the scene with Login that afternoon; Errol watched Raphael fire a blank into a young boy’s chest and shuddered as the sound rippled through his own body. Yet when they filmed the scene in which Gray broke her arm, with the ensuing unrest, the fall of the house of Corgie was shot as a tragedy. Errol took a long look at the script after dinner.

“Gray,” said Errol, “what’s the angle on this project, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“The point of view. On Charles Corgie.”

“Mixed…” she said, taking a step back from him.

“By mixed, do you mean critical?”

“In a sophisticated portrait,” she hedged, “a man is neither hero nor villain.”

“So you don’t see him as a hero?”

“Not exactly.”

“Gray.”

“What.” She busied herself with some papers.

“He enslaved a thousand Africans and murdered God knows how many of them—what do you mean you don’t see him as
exactly
a hero?”

“His actions,” she said steadily, “were morally dubious—”

“Dubious!”

“But he was a complicated man and he had his reasons and he had many admirable qualities.”

“Like what?”

She spoke quietly. “He was powerful.”

“And he used that power to do what? I’m warning you, if this film turns out as some rhapsodic elegy about dear old Charles, I’m taking my name off it.” It pained Errol as he said this that in the eyes of the world, as long as Gray Kaiser’s name was still attached, Errol’s withdrawal would have no effect whatsoever.

“I would hate for you to do that, Errol. That would hurt me.”

Before he left, she stopped him and added, “You’re a very nice man. We’re not the same.”

“You’re not nice?”

She shook her head, once. “I don’t think so.”

Errol wondered as he walked out of their hut how difficult it had been for her to admit this—whether she was ashamed of not being nice or proud of it. Errol was convinced as he grew older that niceness was a much underrated quality.

When they filmed the fire, everyone else’s color rose; Gray went pale. She couldn’t eat dinner. When in an extension of the day’s pyromania the village lit a bonfire that night, Gray went to bed early.

The following day was the last scene, with the plane, the
bomb. They needed a take of Corgie surrounded by smoke and flames. Errol was close to Raphael when they shot these frames, and would long remember his glimpse of that face. Raphael had all along seemed in sync with the production; as aggravated as Errol got with Raphael’s remarks about reincarnation, the man did seem to understand Corgie with an uncanny intuition. In this last scene, then, Errol was curious how Raphael would play it. He was surprised. Astride the plane, the man ordered Il-Ororen away with a remarkable kindness. Swinging his gun from the crowd to the back of his plane, Raphael swept toward the bomb and squeezed the trigger with an odd lyricism, even grace, like a dancer, and in the midst of the explosion the face the camera zoomed in on was not pained or regretful but ecstatic; relieved.

The movie was shot. They packed up and said goodbye to Il-Ororen. The chieftain had been eyeing the film crew’s bullhorn; Gray left it as a gift. Raphael had grown fond of the red baseball cap and aviator goggles, and she said he could keep them. Il-Ororen presented Gray with a parting gift of pottery. Errol and Gray exchanged glances. Il-Ororen were still imitating Gray’s Grecian urns and collapsed “modern” vessels from thirty-seven years before.

On the plane from Nairobi Raphael inquired conversationally about Gray’s next project.

“Are you familiar with my other work?”

“Not really.” He didn’t seem embarrassed.

Errol found this incredible. Gray was covered even in most introductory syllabuses. “And you’ve been in anthropology how long?”

“I don’t read much.”

“How do you manage that?” asked Gray.

“I do well. In school. For some reason I always read what I have to. Though I may have read nothing else in the book, I will always have read the one passage covered on the exam. Uncanny,” he observed.

“That uncanniness may fall out from under you one day,” said Errol.

“We’ll see. Things have a way of working out for me.”

Errol had taken offense at Raphael’s reading lapses, but Gray, it seems, had chosen not to.

“Had you read my work,” she went on, “you’d know I’ve done considerable research on matriarchies. One of them, in Ghana, is the Lone-luk. I’ve followed their society for thirty-five years. We plan to spend several months with the Lone-luk next year, starting in February.”

“Why?”

“Matriarchies are important to me,” she said simply.

“Politically?”

“Personally. It’s personally important to me that they exist. I don’t feel—incapable. I never have. Lesser. I’m not talking about political movements at all, opinions. I mean the way I feel.”

Raphael nodded. “It has nothing to do with groups. With anthropology.”

“That’s right.” She smiled; they seemed to understand each other.

“Do you have,” she asked with unusual delicacy, “opinions? On sexual politics? On—supremacy?”

“None. I don’t care. Men mean nothing to me. I am—” He seemed about to complete a statement, but it turned out he was finished. Raphael himself seemed surprised. “I am.” That was it.

“The matriarchy is still politically useful,” Errol horned in. “It’s of obvious importance in dispelling biological assumptions of natural male dominance.”

Raphael looked over at Errol with, he thought, the most inappropriate disdain.

Gray sighed. “That’s true, of course. Except the Lone-luk haven’t been dogmatically—tidy. Few things in anthropology are. Messiness is the field’s annoyance, also its appeal. You know, the whole concept is a lie, in a way,” she mused. “Defining ‘cultures,’ the way people are. Construct the ‘typical American,’ you’ll have put together the one person in the country who doesn’t exist. I find people behave as much in resistance to their culture as in cooperation with it. No one embraces his
inheritance completely, just as no one absolutely obeys the law.”

“I like that,” said Raphael.

“What?”

“I like that you said that. You’re intelligent.”

Gray laughed. “I’m so relieved you finally decided that.”

“I know you are.”

Gray shot him an odd look, then went on, adjusting the tilt of her seatback. “Anyway, the Lone-luk. When I first studied them they did make near-perfect dogma. The stuff of pamphlets. A lovely, smooth society. Artistic and prosperous. As far back as I’ve been able to ascertain, this tribe has been led by women. The women were the acknowledged heads of household, and held all positions of power. They did prestige work; the men did brute labor. The firstborn daughter inherited. Et cetera. However…” She proceeded with some pain; the Lone-luk had become a sore spot with her from way back, which was why she’d finally put a definitive update at the top of her agenda. For some reason, perhaps because she’d first lived with them when she was so young, she took their fate personally. “Unlike Toroto, their villages aren’t cut off. They’ve been exposed to both Western civilization and other tribes in Ghana, largely patriarchal. The men of the Lone-luk got the idea that elsewhere men were king of the mountain. Shortly after my first visit there, the men grew resentful, sullen, and uncooperative.”

“You can hardly blame them,” said Errol. “They really were treated like oxen, you know.”

“True.” Gray chewed her lip. “The women weren’t about to abdicate, though. So the most peculiar thing happened. There was a rift, a split. The men actually moved to separate villages. For years now the schism has done nothing but get more hostile and more entrenched. There’s never talk of compromise, of parity. Both sides want the upper hand. For thirty years the Lone-luk have been in a state of war. Marriage even more than sex has become taboo. Occasional intercourse has become fast and ugly and often aggressive; a high percentage of pregnancies
are the result of rape. An entire generation of women has passed through its reproductive cycle largely without offspring. Huge numbers of middle-aged women are single and barren. The population has plummeted. The age structure of the society has shifted, gotten older. The children that are born, boys and girls alike, are raised by the women, but the boys are treated badly, like runts. Once they’re about thirteen, the boys either run away or are kidnapped to the other side. And that’s not all…” Gray’s eyes gazed out the window forlornly. They were in a cloud; there was nothing but lost gray air outside.