The Female of the Species (21 page)

At no point was this made clearer than one Friday night his senior year in high school.

As usual, Raphael strung his extension cord over the spikes of the telephone poles and crept noiselessly over Ida’s beloved front lawn to plug it into the side outlet. He had to keep low, because the light was on in the den, a window of which opened right over the socket. It was an unusually warm fall night and
the window was cracked open, the curtain partially back; he couldn’t help but linger when he found he could hear their conversation.

“So are you going to run off and screw that kid, or are you in for the night?” asked Walter. His voice was grainy and low, and reminded Raphael of his father’s.

Ida stretched. “No, he’s having one of his Friday-night parties. I avoid those.”

“Why, Ida, my dear. You’re only thirty-two. Already reluctant to spend your weekends with a bunch of drunken teenagers? I’m surprised at you.”

“Eat it, Walt.”

“Well, if you’re willing to screw little kids, why not go to their little parties?”

“Walt, you sound jealous. I’m impressed.”

“I’m not jealous. I just wish you’d move on. I’m getting bored. Same old stories.”

“I’ll move on. When I feel like it.”

“If you want a son, Ida, why don’t you just get pregnant?”

“By whom?”

“You’re such a bitch.” But Walter sounded less angry than amused. “This guy’s still all in love with you, right? It hasn’t let up?”

“Nope.”

“It’s, like, this galumphing adolescent passion.”

“Sure,” she said, with distraction. She was drawing pictures with a set of Magic Markers.

Walter shook his head. “God, I’d hate to be that kid. I really feel sorry for him.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t feel sorry for anybody, Ida.”

“Why should I? People put themselves in the situations they put themselves. I didn’t make him fuck me. Nobody put a knife to his throat. I didn’t make him keep fucking me. It’s not my problem.”

“Yeah, you don’t have any problems, do you, Ida?”

“That’s right. And I mean to keep it that way.”

Ida concentrated on her pictures and Walter flipped through the paper. Raphael slipped back to his mill. It was a big party, but he didn’t dance, and he made everyone go home astonishingly early.

“You didn’t tell me Walter knew we were fucking.”

Ida didn’t seem interested in how he’d found out. “So?”

“So you told me all the lies you’ve told him. The cover-ups. You’ve been pretty explicit.”

“It happens I didn’t tell the lies to Walter. I told them to you.”

“I guess the two of you find this funny?”

“No.” She considered. “Not funny. He just knows, that’s all.”

“Since when?”

“Since always. Or I could say since last year, or last week, or since yesterday. What does it matter?”

“I shouldn’t believe a word you say, should I?”

“I told you before, that’s your business. I don’t care. Pick and choose, Raphael. Take what you want.”

“You mean,” he said unsteadily, “you could be anyone. If nothing you say is true. If I pick and choose. You could be anyone.”

This sounded incoherent to his own ears, but Ida seemed to understand him. “That’s right,” she assented calmly. “I could be anyone. You think you know me. You haven’t begun. That’s because there’s nothing to know. No matter how hard you grab, I’ll always invent someone else you haven’t met. It’s no use, sweetheart. It’s like trying to pick up a reflection in a lake. When you dip your hands in the water it ripples into little pieces and floats away. That’s the way it is.”

Raphael licked his lips. “I think. Sometimes.” His lips felt heavy. It was hard to talk. “Sometimes I do believe you’re crazy.”

“Go right ahead. Believe that. But a crazy lady is just one more person that I won’t stay for you. That you can’t keep.”

Raphael felt as if his lungs were filling up with water. This
conversation was too much for him, too adult or something. He was only seventeen. This was too liquid to breathe in. Carefully putting one foot in front of the other, he crossed his living room to open a window, leaning out into the cool night air to clear his head.

Yet it went on for the rest of the year. He had to have her. Knowing that Walter knew about their affair, Raphael grew brazen and would sometimes stand under their bedroom window and call for her. She usually ran downstairs, to go with him or dismiss him, but once Walter himself came to the window.

“It’s two in the morning,” said Walter from the second floor. “What is your problem?”

“I want to fuck your wife.”

“Is that so?” said Walter, perhaps at last a little incredulous. They’d never spoken before. “She’s asleep, Sarasola. How about you get that way, too. I’m tired.”

Raphael said, “I don’t care,” a phrase he’d heard so often from Ida that he was beginning to use it himself. “I want to fuck your wife. Now.”

“Son, why do you have to become a part of my life every time you get a hard-on? Seems like you should have figured out by now how to take care of that little business yourself.”

“Walter,” said Raphael, “don’t call me ‘son.’ And, Walter, I didn’t say I wanted to jerk off tonight or I wouldn’t have involved you, right? I want Ida. Wake her up. Wake her up so I can fuck her. Now.” Raphael was beginning to feel an anger and a directness of an intensity he had never known. He felt possessed, vertical, on fire.

Walter worked his jaw back and forth. “I’m just curious,
son
, whether this is some generational thing, like a fad, or whether you, personally, are out of your mind.”

“I’m not out of my mind. Your wife is. She set this up. These are her rules. See—” He was breathing too deeply but couldn’t stop, and the oxygen made his head float higher, his body shoot taller. “I know this is crazy, Walter. But that’s the way it is.
We’re both in Ida’s nut house,
Walter
. We’re in her Looney Tunes cartoon, Walt, my buddy, understand? So I don’t have any choice but to stand here under your fucking window and you don’t have any choice but to wake her up, or I’m coming in to get her.”

“You poor schmuck,” said Walter softly. And the odd thing was, he sounded sincerely sympathetic.

Walter pulled back into the house, and a minute later Ida appeared at the front door in a light robe. It was March, and still cold; she wrapped her arms around her. “Raphael,” she whispered, “go home and go to sleep.”

He walked up the porch stairs. He slid his hand between the flaps of her robe and took hold of her hip firmly. “No, Ida. I’m not going home.”

Her hip pulled at his hand. “It’s late. And cold. Walter’s home.”

“Since when are you so practical?” He took his other hand and swept back the robe, holding her in front of him by both hips. She was naked underneath, and her small angular pelvis squirmed. “Right now, Ida.”

He pushed her against a post of the porch; holding her with one hand, he loosened his jeans with the other, and slipped them over his buttocks to the floorboards.

“Raphael, not here,” she said, and squeezed out from between his prick and the post, only to be caught again by his left arm. She pulled him down the steps, but Raphael swung her to the side against the edge of the porch. Her robe fell open, and the moonlight hit her body along its full length, which was now white from winter. He lifted her up so she was half sitting on the porch and shoved inside her all the way up. She was wet, extremely, but she thrashed from side to side until she worked her way off him and ran toward the lawn.

Toward the lawn
. Not into the house to lock the door, but onto the lawn, where he overtook her at just the place Ida sunbathed in summer. He swung her onto the grass, wet with dew, and stretched her out on her back, pinning her arms down. Just as he urged into her he saw a shadow on the porch
out of the corner of his eye, and turned to find a figure standing at the front door. Walter.

The moon was out, and surely the view was good, of Ida pinned, her robe splayed on either side, his buttocks catching blue light over this man’s wife. At last Raphael did feel a little demented, for the image of what he was doing became so strong that it floated more clearly in front of him than Ida’s face as it reeled from side to side on the wet grass. The picture of the two of them from that porch overtook even the sensation of his prick pushing rapidly into her. For a moment he slowed down and took longer, keener, more meditative slices of her insides. He shook his head over her and laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. “Oh, Walter,” he shouted, looking up at the sky, “I’m so glad you could join us.”

The stars glimmered and fattened and doubled. He wondered fleetingly if he was raping her, but he knew as he felt the walls of her vagina spasm and contract, and looked down to see her lips fall open and flush, her eyes blur and go liquid, that it was entirely the other way around.
She
had set this up. She had somehow made him do this, in front of her husband on the lawn, and it was Raphael who was being raped, not Ida. With anger, a sense of his own abuse, he racked against her, and their pelvises met bone against bone. “I’m coming, Walter,” he shouted. “I thought she’d want you to know that.” Raphael felt used and sick, and came like spit. He rolled off her onto his back and wept. Ida stood up and pulled her robe around her, facing away from both men.

“Ida,” said a tired voice on the porch. “Come inside, sweetheart. It’s too cold.”

He heard her take one breath, a single breath, a sigh of some sort, he supposed. That was all he got: his reward, his punishment, he wasn’t sure which. She strode numbly back to the porch. Raphael heard the screen door creak, bang shut, and rattle. It was coming off its hinges, and he lay on his back with only a shirt on, listening to that door creak and waver in the wind for a long time.

“I don’t believe this,” said Dave.

“I do not have such a sick mind,” said Errol, “that I would make this up.”

“He fucked her in the front yard, with her husband watching.”

“So I understand,” said Errol.

“And I thought
I
was a wild kid.”

“So what happened?” asked Gabe.

“I’ve got it,” said Nathan. “She divorced her husband and married Raphael, and now they have three kids and a cocker spaniel.”

“Right,” said Errol wanly, feeling the same perverse sympathy for Raphael that Walter had from that window. “That’s the way these stories always end up, isn’t it?”

Errol shivered; the sky was scarlet. Regretfully, he pulled on his pants and drew on his shirt.

“You’re not going?”

“No, but what do you say we go get a couple of drinks indoors? It’s getting cool.”

So the four of them drove off to a nearby bar, where there were only a few other customers; as Errol told the end of his story, strangers switched stools to sit nearby. It was such a familiar and predictable ending, Errol wondered that they were interested. A boy, a married woman who was a lunatic—what would happen, really? Errol was saddened there weren’t more surprises in the world.

All through those high-school summers Raphael and his crew had regularly made trips to Cape Cod, so he knew the feeling of riding the crest of a wave, keeping his board just inside the curl, and surveying the whole beach as he rode forward. He knew how to cut a fine figure and stand high on liquid with a balance as on solid earth. He reminded himself that March that he knew this feeling, and tried to remember the light spray in his face, the feel of his hair whipping back, the keen cut of the board as it shore its way into the water. All he could recall, though, were earlier trips to the beach, family vacations when he was five or six. He had forged into the water then, too, but
with no board and no height and no exhilaration either, only that stoic bravery that had gotten him through his entire childhood. At five he had trudged dutifully into the surf, stumbling at first in knee-deep foam, but walking on, even quickly and easily as the water drew back, until suddenly he faced a wave three times his height. He’d stand straight before it and wait, as he did in front of his father when Frank was going to hit him. In sickening slow motion the wave drew up and crumbled him under. The boy rolled and hit against the stony bottom and saw nothing. As he tried to stand up and stumble back, he’d no sooner get the water away from his eyes than the undertow sucked his legs out from under him and tucked him under the next wave, and the next—it wouldn’t have been so bad, he remembered, just one wave, some salt in his eyes, a few swallows of brine—just one wave, and the others saved for another time, he could have taken that. But it never stopped. Over and over the water broke and pulled and dragged him down, and little by little Raphael swallowed too much water and not enough air, until he could no longer stand between waves and he gave over to his life as being lived below the surface of the ocean. Finally, and always a little too late, Frank would wade out and drag his son, coughing and limping and blinded by salt, back to shore.

But Raphael had left his father behind, and the steady crush of his affair with Ida was unrelenting. No one was pulling him out for air. Gradually his lungs were filling with water. Gradually his balance was less steady; there was no resting, no shore. The breakers from across the street bore down on him, and little by little he was being plowed under. With the same terrifying slow motion of a wave about to break, April and May curled over his head.

So much had changed. He did his homework with insane eagerness, and was frightened when it was through and he no longer had a sure distraction. He began to lose weight, for he wasn’t very good about stringing girls along for pies lately; besides, at eighteen they expected more than a kiss at the door. Louis and the crew were loyal and brought him what they
could, but at the end of senior year all their lives were widening and speeding up; Cleveland Cottons seemed smaller now, and behind them. And Raphael did not reliably deliver what he’d always traded for food: stature, silence, live black eyes. There were times his tensile strength failed, and he had trouble keeping his height; he could be heard to mumble; his eyes would deaden and go white.