The Female of the Species (14 page)

North Adams, Massachusetts, is a dark industrial town in the western part of the state that has not, unlike the eastern half, gotten the word about electrodes and microcircuits, the boom of high technology. North Adams invested in low technology, so is overshadowed not just by the foothills of the Berkshires but by long, brick textile mills, boarded, broken into, boarded again. On top of every hill these monuments loom; they’ve given the last two generations of fathers something to say. “Stay out of those old factories, boy. There’s rats there bigger than you. Big as me, even. You think I’m scary? How’d you like a big old rat with whiskers and sharp teeth to tell you to finish your supper?”

But for Raphael Sarasola, imagining his father as a large and dangerous animal must not have been so difficult. Errol could see Frank Sarasola as a wide, hairy man who beat his child, as his father had beaten him, with a kind of sociological dutifulness, as if he’d read articles. What did he do for a living? Gray didn’t know. Surely like everyone in that town he was professionally
disappointed
. Errol had driven through North Adams before, and he imagined the place as a mecca for bleak, disillusioned personalities who’d been romantic in their youth.
Errol suspected the entire population sat at home listening to the radiator hiss day after day (it would be winter—it must always be winter in North Adams), listening to the wind shaft its way through the cracks in the window frame, always cold, always lonely, no matter who else was in the room, always put upon and grudging, and of course disappointed. On Fridays they probably passed out checks for the diligent disappointment the people had worked on all week, and there were bonuses for overtime, for those who made flat, eventless dreams in their sleep, full of dust and broken things and boarded-up brick.

Now, what did Frank do? Was he the mailman that children were afraid of, who never delivered any news? Errol liked that: Frank putting one more catalogue in the box, shoddy correspondence courses, death announcements of distant relations, last month’s magazines.

It was his mother who’d named the boy Raphael, and you can bet Frank hated the name. “Ralph,” he might say, “Ralph, you don’t get that garbage carted off to the dump, you’re going with it, understand? You can just move there. You could lie down on that mattress that caught fire over at Mrs. Willis’s when she fell asleep smoking in bed. You saw that thing, all black and springy? Sound comfy,
honey, sweetie, lover boy—
” He imitated Raphael’s mother by spitting these endearments like a string of profanities.

Raphael had to come by his looks from somewhere, so his mother must have been pretty. A little cringing; she was married to Frank. (What was her name? Errol made one up with care. Elise, Camille, Gabrielle…No, something simple. Dora. Nora. Nora would do.) But even given the occasional lucky throw of genetics and the unattractive cowering with which Nora must have buried her looks, for Raphael to have turned out with those long, sallow, carved features, his mother must have been something to see. Then how did she end up with Frank? All right, Frank the Inventive, Frank the Strong, but also Frank the Violent, Frank the Mongoloid? For Errol imagined Frank as a man of colossal thickness in every respect.

Errol had several theories. The first, pregnancy, he discarded
as dull. It too patly explained why Frank would resent his son, and it did not explain how Frank would ever be in a position to get Nora pregnant in the first place. Why would she even share a Coke with a man like that? Pretty Nora, with all those ideas of hers, all her pictures? For Nora wanted to be an artist. When she first married she could only finagle enough money from her husband for cheap, chalky watercolors, though she yearned for oils. She used to explain to Raphael when he was young that the pale pink in her pictures was really “naphthol crimson,” that a wash of leaves should really have been “peacock green,” and she would search the house for the right color to show him, scrounging around scraps of material and the bright printing on ten-cent coupons and the quick-sale vegetables darkening in the hydrator until she found the sample she was looking for.

No, Errol had to get back to this: Frank and Nora. Nasty Old Frank and Lovely Nora. Explain this, Errol told himself. You’re an anthropologist. Put some of those theories to work for once.

It made sense that for a whole town to make its living being disappointed, each citizen had to do an initial internship in expectation. Errol figured this precious period of enchantment hit at about seventeen. That was the age that Nora had hung a bedspread down the middle of the room she shared with her sister to create her “studio,” with an old bulletin board for an easel and the chair swiped from her mother’s vanity as a stool. Nora did portraits of people she’d never met and landscapes of places she’d never been. In the faces there wasn’t a line or a sag, in the landscapes not a board or a brick.

Now, Frank had been seventeen himself. Frank had not always been so wide. Perhaps, too, the beatings he’d endured as a child had given him resilience, power, energy. No doubt he’d learned to hit back. No doubt he had plans, Frank did. Frank was going to “get out.” (Surely planning to get out was a major pastime in North Adams—and judging from the number of digits dropping off the population sign every time Errol drove through town, an occasionally successful one. Errol knew that pastime well, though. Getting out always meant getting back
in somewhere else. When you were born breathing that kind of bleakness in the air, it got into your lungs. You developed a taste for it, as for nicotine. Tarry and dangerous, bleakness was easy to pick up elsewhere—there were a lot of nasty boarded-up little towns in New England to absorb refugees from North Adams and make them feel at home.)

That’s right. Nora, in this illness that struck the residents of the town in the prime of their young adulthood, could paint landscapes but could also have remained indefinitely in the room with the 60-watt overhead light and the bedspread beginning to tear on the nails that held it to each wall and the hairs falling out of her cheap brushes one by one and sticking into the paint. She wanted privacy, and she was pretty, with amazing thick dark hair and tall bushy eyebrows that mingled sweetly above her nose, but she didn’t have a fire under her; she needed Frank to “get out.” And it was the oddest thing. In the end he did help her do just that. But by staying where he was.

So it wasn’t hard to picture. The illness subsided. Frank layered in thickness like a candle being dipped once, twice, three times in a vat of hot wax. Nora at least had her pictures; nothing presented itself, as nothing ever presents itself, and there was always a living to be made being disappointed in North Adams.

Frank might have made it suddenly through with an occasional housewife on his route who asked him in for coffee on a cold day, with hot fresh bread and solid sleep, with one child who waved and wasn’t afraid of him—Frank might have anchored himself to these minor satisfactions like a rock climber pulling from chink to chink, but what fouled Frank’s steady, dutiful climb through his life was prettiness. Nora cowered, but in the morning when she was still asleep, the cringing wouldn’t have been squeezing her face together yet, so Frank would wake up to her hair wide on the pillow, her lips full and parted, her small brown nipples hard from the cold when Frank took too much blanket. Now, you might suggest that Frank use Nora’s hair on the pillow as one more chink to lift himself through the rest of his day, that he, all right, love her; you
might also suggest, since there were many mornings when Frank looked over to find her lips fuller than usual and purpling, her eyes webbed in blue veins and swollen to thin slits, her nostrils encrusted with red crystals clinging to the hairs inside, that he did not. Yet to imagine that because Frank pulverized his wife he didn’t love her would be to misunderstand prettiness—or at least Frank and prettiness. Surely Frank felt that ache next to her in the morning, that yearning for what, presumably, he already had, that drawing as if even in her sleep she’d gotten hold of string in his gut and was tugging from a point just under his rib cage and could at any time pull out a stream of his insides through a little hole she had drilled there. What was a man like Frank to do with prettiness? When he’d already entered it, married it, even? Frank, not a sophisticated or a subtle man, had done all he knew to do. There it was, always pulling and tugging on the pillow, and Frank didn’t like wanting something, especially wanting something he already had. What good was marrying the bitch, for God’s sake, if he still had to get her somehow, do something?

So Frank came up with his own private therapy. To hit her was to do something, and to punish her for making him feel funny in the morning, not as a man should. And if he hit her long enough and hard enough, the next day he didn’t feel funny or drawn or aching at all, because Nora no longer had a problem with prettiness.

If it were only Nora, Frank might have been able to keep this doing something under control. But there was the other prettiness, harder to suppress. There were her pictures, outside him, of places he couldn’t recognize, of faces that made him jealous. There were strange men in his house with high cheekbones and dark complexions and heads of hair like the one he was losing. They had wide-open eyes without any disappointment glazing over the pupils like cataracts. He began to suspect her of seeing someone else, someone dark and quiet and somehow terrible, until he looked hard at his own son.

That was the way the boy always looked, even when Frank beat him, or especially then, with that stoic set of his mouth,
stupidly relaxed, with the wide cavern of his eyes, stupidly trusting. Unlike Nora, his son grew more beautiful with violence: his color rose, his lips deepened, his eyes drove farther to the back of his head. Frank tried hard to teach the boy fear, hatred, and dishonesty—anything unattractive—but Raphael simply seemed to take in the beatings of his childhood like so much information, like part of the way the world was put together that he had better understand early. Frank got the impression as the boy watched him step by step take down the leather strap and call him over that his son was grateful for the instructions he got on his father’s knee, the way other children were glad to learn about birds and flowers and trees. So Frank taught him about violence, and he taught him about beauty and about power: that is, by the frustrated look in his father’s eye, even after the most drastic afternoons, with Frank finally off at the kitchen table slumped and picking at his food and his son red but erect and standing in the opposite corner of the room, Raphael understood that his father had beaten him, but the son had won. They both knew that; Frank would beat him again for winning and so lose once more, and again after that, and again.

Frank lost always and everything, out of love. If Frank had cared nothing for beauty and promise, he would have left the boy alone. If Frank had cared nothing for his wife, he wouldn’t have staged a scene so carefully, so perfectly, to lose her. If he hadn’t loved her, he wouldn’t have known so well what to do to make her leave.

Raphael had told Gray of coming home from school one day to find the house in a shambles which, even for the Sarasolas, was impressive. Errol assumed that, as in most violent households, fighting was ritualized: we can break this, we don’t break this; we stay out of this room; we say these things, we do not say these other things, ever. In this case the rules had evidently been broken, along with a lot of furniture.

“You waiting for some professor to walk in off the street and discover you, Nora? ‘Oh, what
genius, mad
-ame! This one picture is worth a
mil
-lion dollars!’”

“Stop it, Frank,” said Nora. She would have been standing straight. She would have spoken quietly. She would have looked pretty today.

“Grow up, will you?” Frank went on. “When a kid brings home his scribbling, you put it on the wall, but at some point you gotta put the crayons away. It’s today, Nora. Today’s your graduation, Nora. You’re thirty-five fucking years old, with little lines around your eyes and your tits down to your elbows—kindergarten is
over
.”

“It’s not a good idea to do this, Frank,” said Nora. “Maybe you should stop now.” She might have warned him then almost kindly.

“I’ve humored you, Nora, but that picture’s pathetic, babe. That looks no way in hell like my face, darling. You just don’t have it.”

“I think, Frank, that it captures something—”

“Bull-fucking-shit, Nora!” Frank screamed. “That thing looks like some fantasy, some cartoon! You ever look at my face, Nora? Since you’re an
artiste
, you’re supposed to observe, right? Look at me, Nora. Look at the real fucking McCoy.”

For a moment the living room froze. Raphael remained where he’d come in by the door, searching the wreckage for the offending catalyst of this event. Somewhere behind a shattered lamp or crumpled chair he’d spotted it: Nora’s first portrait of her husband. True, it didn’t look too much like him. She’d made him thinner, shorn off the layers of wax, the heavy jowls, the width of his neck. She’d drilled his eyes out and cleaned the whites clear. He looked younger and not like a postman. He was focusing on something far away. He looked smart. He looked pretty.

Yet Nora did as she was instructed and looked at the real fucking McCoy. “I see you, Frank,” she said quietly, and walked upstairs.

There must have been some younger part of him, the Frank in the portrait, that wanted to bolt up the stairs and weep and throw himself over her suitcases. Instead, older Frank grabbed the portrait out of the shards of glass and flung it against the
wall. The stretcher cracked, and the canvas folded; the eyes narrowed; the expression soured and twisted on the floor.

“What are you looking at?” he shot at Raphael. Raphael said nothing.

Hangers clattered one by one above the ceiling; drawers of the dresser opened and closed; bags bumped stair by stair down from the attic. Frank’s stomach churned from a bilious satisfaction: no more desire, no more hole under his rib cage. Frank could get up in the morning and decipher incomplete addresses and misspelled names and bad handwriting, wrestle with packages a quarter inch too big for the box—that was the
story
, Nora. But no, Nora had to live in her own little world, and Frank couldn’t take it anymore. Frank imagined this sounded very good. He would have to practice: “Her own little world. I couldn’t take it anymore.”