The Female of the Species (13 page)

After Gray had won the second set and was into the third, their court began to collect an audience. The fact was, Raphael had not suddenly begun to play badly. Rather, he brilliantly and at great cost put each ball where he was supposed to. The two of them played like instruments in a duet with narrow harmonies. While the balance of the chord was precarious, neither was a half step off. The games were composed, though, so that at the end of each phrase Gray hit the last note.

Up until the final game of the match Errol was so caught up with Gray’s computation that he neglected to scrutinize Raphael. When at last he turned to the other side of the court, Errol expected a red face with eyes constricted and grudging—after all, this twenty-five-year-old man with a splendid tennis game was now tied with an old lady. How happy could he be?

Very happy, it seemed.

Errol found when he faced Raphael not a blotch, not a rumple, not a single grimace of frustration. Raphael’s hair flamed ecstatically out over his headband. His skin flushed with the blood not of anger but of excitement. His face shone smooth and bright with open pores. Dilated and wide, his eyes consumed Gray’s every move. At length he stalked rather than returned her shots, licking his red lips, crouching behind the net, padding across the turf. Raphael prowled over the court with the gleam of a lithe and clever creature to whom hunting came so easily that slaughter had become a bore. At last, now, something faster and worthy of this predator.

The match point went back and forth for a long time. Raphael returned the ball with a meatier twist than he had all afternoon. Still, Errol didn’t imagine that Raphael was actually trying to win. Rather, he was losing with abandon. Finally, with a wrenching downward slam, he threw himself on one of Gray’s neat slicing shots; the ball smacked the top tape of the net and dropped, bounced, stopped. Still carried a few steps by his follow-through, Raphael continued to lope over to Gray’s side of the court. In front of her he breathed, watched, nodded. He took her tennis racket from her, reached for her hand, and kissed it.

“You lost,” said Gray. “Why do you look so pleased with yourself?”

“I’m not,” said Raphael. “I’m pleased with you.” His eyes were massive and fixed. He had not relinquished her hand. He turned it and ran his finger over the palm. “You have beautiful calluses.”

Gray took her hand and her racket back. “You really know what gets to a woman, Mr. Sarasola,” she said, and strode over toward Errol.

Errol kissed Gray’s cheek, congratulating her on her game. She thanked him with the attention she paid strangers in reception lines.

“Rapha-
el
!” They all turned to find a pretty young brunette clutching Sarasola’s arm. She was out of breath. “Long time
no see!” The girl raked her hair out of her eyes with her fingers so that it flipped attractively back. Raphael stared at her hand on his arm and said nothing until she laughed nervously and removed it. “So what are you doing here?”

Raphael glanced down at his racket. “Playing soccer.”

She laughed quickly and raked her hair out of her eyes again. “Right, sure.” She turned to Errol. “So didn’t anyone warn you not to play with Raphael Sarasola?”

Errol cocked his head and watched her shift her weight back and forth and smooth down her tennis dress and rake her hair back again, though it wasn’t in her eyes this time. “No,” said Errol, “but no one warned
you
not to play with him either, did they?”

She laughed again. “Oh, I learned my lesson.”

“If you’d really learned your lesson, Pamela,” said Raphael quietly, “you wouldn’t be here.”

Pamela blinked, decisively. In this small, strange silence it was if she’d just batted the remark away, like a bad ball. “Listen,” she said, “I was wondering if—next week—I could borrow the car. You see, my father’s going to be in town, and he thinks he bought it for me.”

“Tell him,” said Raphael, his eyebrows raised, “you lost it.”

Pamela’s head bobbed dully. “I lost it.”

“Yes,” Raphael instructed. “Just like that.”

Silence. Pamela didn’t leave.

“So how was your game?” she asked brightly.

“Superior,” said Raphael, looking at Gray.

“You mean you killed him,” said Pamela.

Raphael sat on the bench and began zipping up his racket cover. “You assume a good game for me is one in which I trammel my opponent. Actually, I dislike that kind of game enormously.”

“So it was a close game?”

Raphael pulled off his sopping T-shirt and completely ignored her. The silence got longer and longer, and still Pamela waited. Finally someone said, “Yes,” softly. It was Gray.

“What was the score? Did you guys play a whole match?”

Raphael compressed his lips, swabbing the sweat from his neck. Pamela followed the towel as it traveled down Raphael’s dark, tight, neatly haired chest. As he reached for a fresh shirt from his bag, Pamela looked regretful. She turned to Errol. “You must be pretty good to give him competition.”

“I’m quite mediocre,” said Errol, feeling sorry for her. “Dr. Kaiser gave your friend a good run around the court.”

Pamela noticed Gray for the first time. She looked quizzically at Raphael and tried to catch his eye.

Raphael looked stonily back. “She’s better than I am.”

The two women looked at each other. “Gray Kaiser.” Gray extended her hand.

“Pamela Rose.—Didn’t you use to be in sociology or something?”

“Anthropology. I still dabble in it occasionally.”

“I suppose it’s good to stay active,” said Pamela. “It keeps your mind alert.”

“Why certainly,” said Gray mildly. “I find that with anthropology, a little knitting, and charity work I can still remember the names of all my great-grandchildren.”

“Don’t believe a word of it,” said Errol. “Gray has never done charity work in her life. So what do you say, old lady? How about a beer?”

“I’d love one,” said Gray. “But I think we could buy Pamela something a little stronger.”

“No.” Raphael swung his bag over his shoulder, ready to go.

“Excuse me?” said Gray.

“No,” he repeated.

“No, what?”

“No, Pamela doesn’t feel up to it.” He turned to the girl. “Your behavior is unattractive, Pamela. Please stay away from me. Go home.” He spoke with the sternness one has to muster to discourage a dog that has followed one too far for its own good.

“I believe,” said Gray, “that I invited your friend for a drink. That
I
did.”

“I believe,” said Raphael, “that I just uninvited her.”

“I believe,” said Gray, and they were facing each other squarely now, “that you can’t do that.”

Raphael shrugged. “Then have a nice time.” With that he strode toward the parking lot, leaving Gray, Errol, and this woman an absurd threesome. They all watched Raphael walk away in silence until Errol turned his attention to Pamela Rose. All the remarks that Pamela had successfully batted away came pelting back at her. Pamela withered like a blow-up doll someone had pulled the plug on. The lines in her face curdled. Her stiffly held spine and firmly set shoulders collapsed. Her hair wilted strand by strand back into her face.

“This is silly,” said Pamela weakly. “I don’t know you. I’m sorry about…” She fluttered her fingers toward Raphael and looked off in a direction where there was nothing to see.

“Are you going to be all right?” asked Gray.

“Oh, just fine,” said Pamela, with an unsettling little laugh. “He’s always like that, you know. Kind of—funny.”

“If you find that funny,” said Errol, “then you have one sick sense of humor.”

“I mean just a little insensitive. Some people,” she said bravely, “like to spar. In conversation.”

“You were sparring?” asked Errol.

“I’m—well. I’m real nice. I don’t even know you, I’ll tell you I’m sorry, right?” Pamela swallowed and shook her head, wafting her fingers behind her as she walked toward an open field, dragging her racket behind her along the pavement.

As they walked through the parking lot they found Raphael waiting for them, leaning against Gray’s car.

Pamela Rose was the first evidence, but there was more. Errol didn’t need to hire any private agencies; information came to him as if he were being warned or led. Yet in a way these clues were wasted, for Errol did not need to be warned; it was not Errol who was in danger.

A colleague, Ellen Friedman, stopped by one afternoon. It was a lovely day, so the two sat out on the swing on Gray’s porch.

“I spent a lot of time on porch swings as a kid,” said Ellen, moving the swing listlessly with her foot. It made a high-pitched
ee
sound. “Sitting around with friends on a Saturday afternoon. We’d put up someone’s hair…”

“Talk about
relationships
.”

“Mm,” said Ellen. “Which at the time were fairly simple.”

“Were they, though?”

“Jane loves Mark; next week: Jane hates Mark. None of this Jane loves Mark but also hates him at the same time. That’s adult stuff.”

“Well, no,” Errol reflected. “I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you
also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.”

Ellen laughed. “That’s a dismal point of view.”

“It goes way back.”

“I can see why you never married.”

“No,” said Errol pleasantly, “you probably can’t.”

Ellen looked down at her hands. “Sorry. You’re quite right. I have no idea why.”

Her sudden embarrassment made her appealing, and Errol found himself watching Ellen Friedman move the swing back and forth with her heel and play with the ratty pillow at her side with real fondness for a moment. She was trim and short and had little feet. Her hair was dark and neatly styled close to her head; he imagined she’d once been pretty, and now—at Errol’s age? a little younger?—would be considered “smart.” She could have been his wife. Errol could have met her at twenty-five and gone to movies and agreed with her on everything she had to say about them; he could have been charmed by her idiosyncrasies and married her. This might be their house, with the porch swing to remind her of her adolescence; they’d be in the same field and recommend books to each other and have children and dinners and she would still be “smart.” They could have dinners and once in a while invite Gray Kaiser and be nervous about what to have, since Gray was so bored by gourmet cooking. Yet he couldn’t necessarily know that, since he wouldn’t really know Gray Kaiser, and that was the end of that fantasy.

“I think I resist generalizations about age,” said Errol. “Maybe if you learned more over the years, getting older would mean something, but I don’t have the feeling that I understand things much better than I did when I was twenty-five. My tendency is more to see myself in a big mess that I’ve always been in. Know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“That’s all right.”

“Are you always this abstract?”

“It’s safer.”

She smiled. Gray’s weimaraner, Bwana, muzzled at Ellen’s knee. She stroked his head diffidently. Bwana was a reserved dog and demanded a certain deference. “What a beautiful animal. How old is he?”

“Twelve. Feeble, for a dog.”

“I envy the way dogs age, don’t you? They get a little slower. They sit more. But physically they hardly show it. People fall apart.”

“Not all of us.”

Ellen smiled and shook her head. “You mean Gray. I know. I must have met her, oh, twenty years ago. Since then, well, her hair’s turned, her face is a little more drawn. Otherwise she hasn’t changed.”

“No doubt there’s a portrait up in the attic somewhere that looks terrible.”

Ellen chuckled.

“Go for a walk?”

They climbed down the steps and strolled onto the street. Ellen was quiet for a while.

“I saw a friend of mine this afternoon,” she began reluctantly. “We used to be quite close. Seeing her was upsetting.”

“Why?”

“She was up for tenure in the history department last year. She had a good shot at it. Now she’s a word processor at an insurance company.”

“How did that happen?”

“She got into something over her head,” said Ellen vaguely.

“You make it sound like a narcotics ring or something.”

Ellen smiled. “She did have an addiction, at that.”

“Pretty mysterious, Ellen.”

She sighed. “It was an affair, of course. And instead of tenure, they fired her. Capsule version.”

“Ellen, if everyone in the United States who had an affair lost their jobs, five people in this country would be working.”

“He was a student, that didn’t help.”

“That’s not so unusual.”

“No. But she started acting inexplicably irresponsible. Not
showing up for classes. Sometimes he’d come and sit in the hall where she was lecturing and stare at her until she forgot what she was saying and stuttered and dropped the chalk and scattered her notes. After he’d gotten her to really fall apart in the middle of the period, he’d get up and leave, looking disgusted. She’d make it about five more minutes and then dismiss the class. She used to come and see me afterward in tears.”

“She should have told him in no uncertain terms to stay out of her classroom.”

“You keep missing the point, Errol. She’d sacrifice her lecture just to have laid eyes on him that day.”

“Sounds pretty adolescent.”

“You mean you’ve never been so in love with someone that you organized every choice in your life around her? Ever?”

Errol grunted and shut up.

“Well, people began to report her, in droves. Meanwhile, he used her to the hilt. I’m sure it was largely her pressure that got him funding in graduate school. After that it was just fun and games, the way you play with a small trapped animal in a malicious mood.” Ellen sank down on a bench and leaned back. “I’m sorry to get so worked up, Errol. It’s just this came to a head only a few months ago, so it’s still fresh. Anita—I didn’t know people got like that, Errol. I wish I still didn’t. And all over this stupid kid. I don’t understand it.”

“Or you do,” Errol speculated. “As far as I can tell, that’s what disturbs you, isn’t it? That you understand it all too well.”

Ellen sat up. “If you mean that I’ve been in that situation, I certainly have not—”

“Oh no,” said Errol. “You and I, we’re too solid, right? Feet on the ground. Charting our careers. We’re sensible and responsible, and we make our decisions on the basis of what needs doing. We make everyone else feel better, because they know that at least someone will be paying bills on time and making airline reservations well in advance, showing up for work and sending routine correspondence, while they fly off the handle with these attachments of theirs. We grind away and make all their histrionics possible. Isn’t that right, Ellen? We’re the rational workhorses of the world.”

“That’s exactly what I meant, of course. I have no emotions. I’m a cold, efficient machine.”

“Me too,” said Errol. “What a relief.”

They both laughed. Errol put his hands in his pockets and the two of them strolled down the street in silence.

“Sometimes—” said Ellen quietly, after a few minutes. “Don’t get me wrong, Errol. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, even telling that story, but—sometimes I get tired of relationships. Just people and other people and their problems. Do you know what I mean? It’s so wearying: the phone and the fights and the divorces. Friends and enemies, both of them.”

“I know,” said Errol. “It never stops: endless shifting alliances.”

“Yes,” said Ellen. “I get tired. And anthropology is no distraction: how people marry and bury each other. Who steps on whom and why. It’s the same stuff, Errol. Sometimes I wish I’d gone into manufacturing. So I could talk about how two gears weren’t interlocking and how to fix them.”

“Sounds metaphorical. For a relationship.”

“See, you can’t get away! I just like something else sometimes. I like cleaning, even. Dirt here, a dried spot of jam to get rid of. For once a task rather than a gesture.”

“Yes,” said Errol, feeling in this last part of their conversation somehow lighter, sensing the air around him, hearing each silence between her words, walking with more spring.

“I’m divorced,” she went on. “I live alone now. Once in a while I do miss living with a man. I do. Sleeping with someone warm, talking. All right, even fighting, having a problem. But lately it’s more the case that I’ve been reading and it’s midnight and I stop. I brush my teeth. I take off my clothes and fold them on the chair. I pull back the sheet and crawl in and it’s cool, Errol. In five minutes, I’m asleep. It’s so sweet, Errol. It’s so simple. Such a relief.”

They walked a few more minutes in silence, watching the trees now leafed out and deep green bend in the breeze. Errol thought of Ellen Friedman lying straight and easily between those sheets, her small body quietly living its life there, dreaming of objects, of gears and cleaners and these trees, with the
sound of smooth breathing and the clock ticking on the dresser, for hours. He knew she didn’t toss back and forth or sweat or snore or grind her teeth. Errol would have imagined himself with her, but that would have ruined the picture—the air would be thicker then; limbs would have to be woven together; there would be conflicts and competitions and things to say. No, just Ellen Friedman, there in the bed. The image made Errol feel rested and clear.

“He has an interesting history,” said Gray out of the silence of the interstate. They were headed for New York, where Gray was a consultant for an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The sweetness of Ellen’s vision had completely worn off. Errol was in a mood.

“Don’t tell me,” said Errol. “He was raised by wolves in the wilderness, and that explains everything.”

“Errol,” said Gray, tapping the steering wheel testily, “these remarks of yours are beginning to accumulate.”

“Remarks?”

“About Raphael. What is your problem?”

“My problem.” That was a tall order. Errol tapped his own counter-rhythm against the car door. He measured his syllables with care into the small space of the coupe. “My problems,” he amended. “I have two. One: Sarasola is an egomaniac, but with nothing to back it up. Two: he’s a sadist.”

Gray readjusted herself behind the wheel angularly. The muscles in her jaw tensed visibly in and out. “All right,” she said. “One at a time. Ego. Did he have something to back it up on the tennis court?”

“Yes, Gray, he plays much better than I do.”

Gray shot Errol a look. “But did he brag about his game?”

“Of course not. He lost.”

“But how did he lose? Was he annoyed? Upset?”

“No, I got the impression he enjoyed it.” Errol stroked his beard and read billboards. “It’s his attitude toward you that gripes me, Gray. How can he be so blasé? As if he’s in his
element or something. As if he’d give Henry Kissinger a call tomorrow but he just doesn’t have the time.”

“You mean why isn’t he obsequious.”

“Fine. So he knows you would hate that. So he’s clever.”

“But why is he a sadist?”

“Because he tortures
me
,” Errol wanted to say; instead he told her, “Pamela Rose was the clincher, obviously.”

Gray sighed. “Granted, he wasn’t overly kind—”

“Overly kind! ‘Your behavior is unattractive, Pamela. Go home.’ My God, I’m nicer to infestations of silverfish—”

“Errol, all right—”

“That was not just a tired tennis partner in a bad mood, Gray. That was the kind of man you don’t want to run into on the T late at night—”

“Listen. Have you ever had a woman interested in you who wouldn’t leave you alone?”

“Errol the Eunuch have a woman interested in him? Never.”

“I tell you, lately this moping and baiting of yours all the time, Errol, it’s—”

“Unattractive?”

Though they were riding along at sixty-five, Gray and Errol looked each other in the eye.

“I think the word we use in the United States is ‘stupid,’” she said, looking back at the roads.

“Good.” Errol turned back to the billboards. “That’s a better word. Less chilling.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

Yet working together at the museum on case arrangements and slide order, they jockeyed back to Old Errol and Old Gray: usualness. They were a team. She smiled and hit him lightly on the shoulder and made jokes about pottery. By the time they were driving back two days later, Errol was in good enough humor that he could actually listen to stories about Raphael Sarasola without getting a headache.

“You believe this stuff?” asked Errol halfway through. “This sounds like Walt Disney to me.”

“Why would he make it up?”

“To impress you.”

“He probably thinks he can impress me without going to any lengths.”

“No doubt. Go on.”

While Gray tried to draw the narrative out for as much of the drive as she could, the story didn’t take long to tell, as Raphael’s version had been quick and dry. Errol, however, was used to making home movies on scanty material, so in his mind filled it out quite nicely.