The Female of the Species (12 page)

“What?” asked Raphael.

“Well.” She sighed. “Any society is an elaborate system of interdependencies, not just sexual ones. Somehow the lack of trust between the sexes of the Lone-luk has spread to other things. They won’t cooperate intrasexually now. Each man or woman keeps a tiny separate garden. They won’t help each other build houses or effect repairs. They won’t take care of each other’s children or sit with the sick. In many ways they’re reminiscent of the Ik.”

“Colin Turnbull,” Errol interjected helpfully for the ill-read.

“Thank you,” said Raphael coldly.

“The economy has fallen apart,” said Gray. “Barter is limited and suspicious and full of fraud. Other tribes now refuse to trade with them. Their culture has become more racist. Crime, which was nonexistent when I first went there, has skyrocketed.”

“The original crime-free state was intellectually convenient,” said Errol.

“That’s true. But, Errol, crime isn’t on the rise just with men, but with women. Maybe because they’ve been used to an aggressive role, but even violent attacks among women aren’t uncommon.”

A stewardess asked if they wanted drinks, and Gray glared; she didn’t like to be interrupted.

“It used to be so beautiful!” she lamented once the woman was gone. “Their villages were peaceful and well kept and just. It was a warm, even idyllic community.”

“You were young,” said Raphael.

“I was young, but I wasn’t blind. It’s not just my ancient cynicism warping my perspective now. I am not talking about a subtle shift. Those villages are squalid now. Ugly, littered, impoverished, covered in feces. Full of flies and starving animals. And the people aren’t nice.”

“Sounds as if you should stay home,” said Raphael.

“No. I have to go. It’s my lot, I suppose.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Quite. It’s like an inner-city slum.”

“Actually, this worries me, Gray,” said Errol. “Since you and I are going to have to live in separate camps, there’s not going to be anyone to look out for you.”

“There’s me to look out for me,” said Gray. “As usual.”

“Maybe you should bring someone—”

“That doesn’t concern me,” she cut him off.

“You haven’t changed since you were twenty-two,” Errol muttered.

“And I don’t plan on changing, either,” she snapped.

“You may have to,” said Raphael.

“Why?”

Raphael said nothing.

“At any rate,” she continued gruffly, “in the meantime I’ll be doing a parallel study in the U.S. while I pull together this documentary about Charles. The one truly matriarchal element of our own society is urban black culture. Most households are headed, even supported financially, by women. So I’ve targeted an area of the South Bronx in New York. We’ll be putting together family histories and doing interviews on attitudes about sex and marriage and power. As far as I can tell, the situation there has degenerated to a similar state of siege. It should be interesting.”

But Gray didn’t sound interested. She sounded depressed.

It was a relief to be back in Boston, and a disappointment—as usual.

But then Errol liked usualness. Much as he thrived on the excitement in other people’s lives, in his own he liked predictable routines. One of the most distressing aspects of this whole next year was to be its constant sense of disruption.

Errol had hopes that Charles Corgie would die back down into history. They’d troubled his brittle bones, but that wasn’t to say they couldn’t be buried again. Yet ghosts, once disturbed, don’t settle so easily, especially when they are twenty-five and in good health and have found their “carrot.”

Still, when Gray announced the week following their return that she was going to play Raphael at tennis, Errol had to smile. In the film they’d skipped over the game between Gray and Charles, and this was a scene Errol would particularly enjoy seeing replayed.

“I bought you a cheesecake for the big day,” said Errol over breakfast. “The good kind. Third shelf.” Gray was a nutritionist’s nightmare; she lived mostly on sugar.

“Big day?”

“Aren’t you playing the reincarnate this afternoon?”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said quickly, gulping down her coffee so that it must have hurt her throat. “I’d forgotten.” A drip of coffee trickled down her chin; she wiped it away with the back of her hand. Gray got up and washed the stray dishes in the sink.

“I thought you hated washing dishes in the morning.”

“Big piles,” said Gray. “Crusty food. But a few water glasses and teaspoons can be relaxing. Warm water on your hands. Clean clear glass. Round metal.”

“Why would you need relaxing?” asked Errol. “You’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten what?”

Errol didn’t bother. “You’re really not going to eat that cheesecake?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Errol got up and plunked the whole two pounds of solid cream cheese in the middle of the table. “Gray, it’s not enough that you win. You have to do it with style. For that you need energy. I have no interest in wasting my time watching a routine victory. I want to see him weep.”

“That seems unlikely, don’t you think? Can you picture it? Raphael weeping?”

Errol thought a moment. “You know, it’s rather odd. I can.” For just as she said that, an image flashed into Errol’s head that he’d never seen: the long chin pointed up, the head tilted back, and the eyes wide and unblinking. There were tears marking an even, steady track down both cheeks, a drop every few seconds, with the precision of an IV. The face itself was set in its usual relaxation, as if the tears were part of its natural state. As always with his images of Raphael, there was no sound—just the faint flap of his glottis, swallowing, with the Adam’s apple lurching up and down.

Gray paused at the sink and looked over at Errol, and slowly nodded. “You’re right. I can, too. Isn’t that peculiar?”

“No sound,” said Errol.

“Completely still,” said Gray. “And in terrible pain.”

Errol felt his scalp shift over his skull. They were seeing the same thing. They’d been together too long.

Gray turned away and wiped the counters briskly, though they were clean. “I don’t think we’ll get him to cry over a tennis game.”

“No, I’m sure that wasn’t it.”

“It?”

“What was making him cry.”

Gray didn’t like this anymore. “What are you talking about, Errol?”

“An image. Which you saw, too, and can’t pretend you didn’t. I’d pay money to know what gets to a guy like that.”

“Spoiling his own happiness deliberately,” said Gray right away.

“He told you that?”

Gray stopped whisking the sponge across the table and laughed. “Raphael would never tell me something like
that
. I don’t know why I said that. It just came to me.”

“So why would he spoil his own—”

“Errol, this whole conversation is getting ridiculous.” Gray squeezed out the sponge and strode out of the room, leaving the cheesecake untouched in the middle of the table.

She walked down the stairs at three in her usual tennis dress. She’d worn this outfit to play ever since Errol could remember. The material was soft and gauzy, like cheesecloth; though once white, it was now the color of muslin. Gray wouldn’t buy a new tennis dress, because she wore her wide amber sweat stains with pride, like old war wounds. Like Gray herself, the material had lost some of its body, but made up for it in grace and texture. She’d wear this dress until its threads dissolved on her back, for she held on tight to all that aged well.

Once at the courts, Errol realized he’d expected Raphael to show up in dazzling boxer shorts with smartly turned cuffs and a blazing Ban-Lon polo—the untrammeled overstarched look Gray so detested in a tennis partner. Catching sight of Raphael leaning against a bench, with his racket cocked behind his shoulder, Errol was disappointed. His faded cutoffs certainly weren’t starched, and his broken-down T-shirt had the same amber mottling as Gray’s dress. He took off his sunglasses as
Gray approached. As imposing as he looked in their reflective chrome lenses, they were no match for Sarasola’s naked eyes. Today these were insanely open and a wide confessional brown—Raphael seemed to breathe through his pupils.

Raphael reached for Gray’s hand and kissed her deftly on the cheek. “Nice weather,” he said.

“Lovely weather,” said Gray.

They were talking about the weather, and Errol already felt left out. “Heat is good for suffering,” said Errol to Raphael.

Ignoring Errol completely, Raphael swung his racket languidly off his shoulder and strode to the court with Gray. Errol thought about leaving, seriously, but instead found himself following behind them to a green bench that would surely give him splinters. He wished he had a book. No, forget the book. He wished a beautiful blond woman in a short, flouncy tennis dress would sit beside him and complain to him about arrogant young men, how she wanted someone for once who was considerate and intelligent and responsible. Then Errol thought about these adjectives that described him and felt drab.

Raphael and Gray were warming up with a rally. Their play was careful and polite. Gray could return balls like that in her sleep—an inch above the net, but still with a slope, and when the balls hit Raphael’s court they actually bounced above the surface. Errol smiled and forgot about the girl in the flouncy dress who was obviously just looking for a father. This was going to be good.

Yet Raphael’s shots were solid and evidently easy for him. He never seemed to have to run very far. For the first five minutes neither player was sweating. Each was toying with the other. They were smiling. It was a joke.

Slowly, though, Gray drew her racket farther back behind her for a wider stroke. Slowly she took a deeper breath below the amber folds of her old tennis dress. Gradually the arc on the ball straightened and the yellow fur began to blur across the net. Gray leaned slightly more forward and crouched farther down. Her hand tightened around the tattered leather grip as her shots angled toward the corners and skittered in sickly curves off to the side.

But in dull horror Errol watched Raphael’s game respond in kind. Sarasola’s weight shifted fully onto the balls of his feet; the long muscles in his thighs rose over his knees to ripple under his cutoff jeans. His calves expanded above the rumpled cotton socks, and the tendons in his forearm caught the summer sun. His skin, already a deep brown in June, went liquid until his neck glistened and his forehead beaded like a tall glass of beer. The strings dangling from the fringe of his jeans moistened and matted and clung to his thighs. Errol shuddered and looked down at his lap. His own thighs were white. His shorts were beige and a little too long. He knew his legs were strong, but they didn’t, somehow, assemble in that way, and they’d certainly never carried him around the court with that loping, buoyant alacrity.

Errol tried to keep his eyes off Raphael, and looked back to Gray in time to catch a forehand that she snapped just over the net and straight down. Raphael stood motionless in the back court, watching the ball skim its way over the next two courts. He laughed, and his teeth were brilliant, as if they, too, were sweating.

“All right,” he said, “let’s play.”

They collected the balls. As Errol would have expected, Raphael was stylish in picking up balls, tipping them against the side of his tennis shoe or bouncing them quickly from the court with his racket from a stationary position. (Errol had never been able to do that, though he’d tried plenty of times when Gray wasn’t looking. He’d hit the ball with the face of his racket, and it would just sit there. He would hit it harder until the racket struck it at an angle and the ball would roll into the next court. Lately Errol just picked the damned things up with his hand.)

The rally for serve lasted a long time. Finally Raphael got her off in a corner and smashed it to the other side. Gray’s eyebrows shot up, and she looked keenly at Raphael for a good ten seconds before she nodded and centered herself to receive his serve.

Raphael stood behind the line very straight. He inhaled. Once he exhaled this breath, there wasn’t a trace of tension in his
face. His eyelids looked heavy. He tilted his head backward as if the muscles in his neck were no longer stiff enough to support it. His limbs went limp. Once, he bounced the ball in front of him, until in one rising motion like drawing himself out of bed he tossed the ball and fell into it in a gesture so complete, so full and uncontemplative, it brought tears to Errol’s eyes. Raphael was alive. The serve was in, and Errol was actually surprised that Gray returned it. Through the point, too, Raphael responded to the ball in one continuous liquid ripple. Sarasola plays tennis, Gray, like an
animal
.

Gray’s response was competent. She did not fall apart, and Errol had to admit that she was playing as well as she did with him. That wasn’t good enough. There was a dogged quality to her play that was new. She didn’t fall apart; neither did she win. She survived well into each point, and did put a few of her usual untouchables across, but she lost the whole first set without even making it to deuce.

In the second set, Gray’s head was cocked a little to the side. Between points she walked more slowly than usual; sometimes she forgot the score or went to the wrong side of the court to deliver a serve. Her eyes were fenced in, and Errol’s every effort to meet them and to somehow encourage her she pointedly closed off. Again, doggedly, she lost the next game, and the next.

“Gray!” Errol shouted after a game point. “Get over here!”

Gray rigidly shook her head. “Don’t interrupt me, Errol.”

The third game was a shutout. Switching sides, Gray didn’t look Errol in the eye as she crossed right in front of him. Errol stared down at his feet, drawing aimlessly in the green powder with the tip of his sneaker. Gray lost the whole fourth game without Errol looking up once.

Now it was a just a matter of waiting out the rest of the match. Dully Errol leaned back and watched the next game, sighing, sighing again; somehow it was hard to get enough breath or, once it was taken, to get rid of it. Gray looked smaller than usual, shorter even. Her legs didn’t look so taut anymore, simply thin. Her movements were abrupt, and there was an odd delay in her response to each of Raphael’s shots; with
Sarasola’s game you didn’t have the luxury of that hesitation. Errol made himself look at Gray’s face. He had never seen her defeated; he presumed that to observe this was good for his education. She’d taught him so much, but this was one lesson Errol wished he could have picked up somewhere else.

But where was the defeat? Errol looked hard at Gray’s face, watching for a clenched jaw, pain. Instead, he seemed to be observing the latest IBM computer running through its paces for prospective buyers. Her eyes weren’t glazed or flat but insanely busy, digesting information, filing each shot. The pong of each ball hitting the racket had the solid sound of a card falling into place, chocking into its assigned slot, and soon it made sense, though she missed them, that, yes, the shot would go there and nowhere else. Increasingly the game made sense, and it made sense that she was losing it. Now in this fifth game Gray lost perfectly, she lost more perfectly than she had lost any game, and at the game point she stopped and watched his last shot slam into its proper corner. She took a breath. She nodded her head.

She smiled.

Errol looked hard. That’s right, she was smiling. And the smile was real; she wasn’t just being a sport. Raphael, too, paused and stared. Gray looked different. She was losing, fantastically; she had one more game to go and the whole match was over, but she stood behind the back line leaning lightly on her racket like a cane, looking dapper, arch, amused; tall, spare, relieved. When she took the racket back in her grip to serve, it seemed to weigh nothing. As the ball rose and poised at its midpoint, there was a moment of complete stillness, Gray’s arm bent behind her back; Raphael crouched, frozen, on the other side; Errol balanced on the very last board of his bench. There was no breeze. The clouds above them were round and turfy and still, like the tennis ball over Gray’s head. In the adjoining courts, no one was finishing a point or retrieving a ball. There were no airplanes overhead, no children with scraped knees by the backboard, no birds—only Gray Kaiser and the pretty yellow target poised, tempting, waiting for her, until the
moment broke and Gray was still smiling grimly as the racket cracked forward and Errol wondered seriously whether some women did not reach their prime until the age of fifty-nine. Singing across the net went the most exquisite serve that Errol had ever seen. Raphael barely managed to whip his racket back by the time the ball was well behind him, flipping up from the fence and tripping back to the net.

Raphael whistled lightly between his teeth. Errol decided that even if this were the only such moment in the match, this last serve redeemed the entire humiliation; he leaned back on his bench to enjoy the rest of the game. Gray herself looked not smug or ecstatic or surprised but simply content. She walked quietly to the other side and did it again.

Gray aced this game on her serve alone, but later Raphael mastered jabbing his racket out in time for the ball to ricochet halfheartedly over the net, and Gray had to actually play the point. However, the data were in. The program had been run. The cards had all, chock, chock, chock, fallen into their proper slots. Each shot Raphael sent over, Gray was there, and there, and there again—simply: input, output, as if her coordinates came tapping out on fanpaper. Raphael played like an animal, but Gray played Raphael like someone who had studied animals.