The Female of the Species (15 page)

Errol had to tear himself away from Frank. Frank Sarasola was not the hero of this story. Frank would have to be left in that house, the clapboard in need of paint, the porch screen door coming off its hinges, the front yard with only patches of crabgrass. Errol would have to leave Frank with the dishes piling and breaking in the kitchen, stains permeating the enamel on the counters, Frank getting tired of frozen fried chicken.

It must have been a strange moment, and Errol was attracted to constructing it: the mother at the door with the bags announcing she was taking the car, the son right there, her son in the doorway; perhaps he’d even helped her carry the suitcases down the stairs; perhaps they loaded the car together. Frank and Nora not talking. Just Nora and her son, hurtling toward that moment when the key would turn in the ignition and one or both of them would never see that clapboard again, never pick at the flakes of paint while sitting in the porch chair, never listen to the door squeal and rattle on its one and a half hinges. One or both of them. The mother would take the son, or not. Take, or not. Or not.

The car packed, Nora ran a comb through her hair and didn’t cry. Deftly she and Raphael positioned themselves on the porch, the son careful not to be any closer to the house, to Frank, to
her whole past life with the swollen lips and Frank’s peculiar hatred of his own desire, than she was. They faced each other equidistant from the broken porch door. A long time. Until Nora made a gesture toward him, but one which looked less like the kind of motion of enclosure that people make toward each other when they are about to take a long trip together than the gesture of despair and regret that a woman makes when she leaves by herself. So Raphael took a step toward the screen door; Nora was now nearer the stoop. Nearer the car. Nearer wherever she was going.

The boy shrugged. “How would you support us? Me?”

Nora shrugged back.

“How will you support yourself?”

Nora laughed a little. “Portrait painting.”

Raphael was Frank’s child, too. “Sure,” he said. “You mean you’ll waitress in a diner a couple towns away from here.”

“Farther,” Nora shot back.

He could have cried; he was only thirteen, and that would have been fine. He could have run to her. He could have held her and they would have gone together. But some people don’t do that. Frank didn’t do that. Raphael didn’t do that, not that afternoon and not once since then, Errol was sure.

“Maybe,” said Nora, her eyes flooded in a panic as she saw her son standing too straight against the doorway, searing black eyes dry and lips together and still and cheeks sucked in against his teeth. “Maybe we could work something out—later—”

“Don’t say that,” said Raphael coldly. “I’m supposed to sit here and wait for you?
Mother?
”

Nora took a step backward.

“I have school,” said Raphael. “I don’t want it interrupted. I want out of this ugly town, Mother. But if I go with you now, I’ll just end up in another one. Won’t I?”

“I thought Boston—”

“Come on! You know what the rents are like in Boston.”

“Are they bad—?”

Raphael stamped his foot. “Mother! Like Dad said, grow
up
.” Ah, thought Errol. He meant, Mother, you’re supposed to be
saying this. You’re supposed to tell me about rents; you’re supposed to tell me why I can’t go with you. Why are you making me do this for you, come up with your excuses?

Nora looked down at the steps. “All right,” she said quietly. “I don’t have much money. I’ll come back for you when I have a job. Understand?”

“I understand, Mother. That I can live without you. That you can live without me. So, good luck with your little paintings, Mother. I’ll be
fine
.”

“Sweetheart,” she might have said after he closed the door in her face. “Everyone can live without everyone else.” And the sad thing is, she would have been right.

“Did she ever come back?” asked Errol.

“Raphael claims she might have, but she wouldn’t have been able to find him. That seems unlikely, though. Even in his situation a lot of people in town must have known where he was.”

“So Ralphie has illusions like the rest of us.”

“At least on this point. It’s rather encouraging.”

“Did he tell you much about the next few years? The hole he moved to?”

“Only what I told you. Why, are you interested?”

“Sure. I was a movie fiend as a kid.”

“Then I’ll find out more. He does seem almost proud of it.”

Errol waited, then, for the background research before he filmed the next reel.

By the time Gray turned the knob of the front door, Errol had strode quickly away from the window and was sitting in one of the armchairs on the opposite side of the den. He’d managed to find a book and pose himself as if in great concentration, loudly turning a page as she walked in.

Errol looked up to find Gray closing the door behind her with exaggerated care, the way preachers close their Bibles. It was a sentimental scene he wished desperately to deface. Had someone handed him a shaving-cream pie, Errol would have thrown it.

“What are you reading, Errol?” she asked vaguely.

With irritation he found himself holding
Il-Ororen: Men without History
. “Nothing important,” said Errol, throwing the book down. “Have a nice ride home with Ralphie?”

“He has an amazing car.” Her voice sounded different. Soft. “A Porsche.” Gray leaned against the wall and tilted her head back. “White, with black interior. Leather. He has windshield wipers for his headlights.” She laughed.

“You sound like a sixteen-year-old.”

“Yes, that car brings it out in me. But when I was really
sixteen—let’s see, it was the end of the Depression—no one had Porsches, Errol.”

“So you’re reliving the youth you never had? And that explains it?”

Gray cocked her head. “Explains what?”

“Your perfectly normal behavior this evening.”

She looked at Errol with curiosity, but let the barb go by. “As I was saying, it will do 130. Without even breathing hard.”

“Please don’t tell me that you drove from Tom’s to here at 130 miles an hour. Please don’t.”

“All right, I won’t.”

Gray distractedly collected magazines on the table in front of him and looked down to find Errol’s heel rising rapidly up and down. Errol found he couldn’t make it stop. His leg shook the floor, and a vase on the coffee table rattled on its protective glass.

“We are either having a small earthquake,” she said carefully, “or you are annoyed.”

“Well,” said Errol.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t want to drive the coupe back for you, Gray. I’d planned to go home from the party.”

“That’s what you said, so—oh, you meant your own apartment. I’m sorry. You haven’t been there in a couple of months. I just assumed—”

“Don’t assume.”

“Fine.” She was impossible to perturb this evening. “Next time, though, be a little more demonstrative. I would have driven you home if I’d known that’s what you wanted. However, if you know ahead of time that you’re going to make yourself suffer in that cardboard box for the night, it might be better to take your own car.”

“Of course,” said Errol coldly. To keep his leg from shaking, Errol stood up and faced away.

Gray and Errol were accomplished partygoers. Like most things they did, parties were a team effort. Errol would pull Gray
away from climbers; Gray would save Errol from divorcées. Gray would be eccentric and even insulting; she’d tell stories and try to draw lots of attention and then get it and be bored. Errol would be lower-key but surprise people with his sense of humor, though most of his jokes would be at his own expense. They were a pair.

But this evening at Tom Argon’s they had gone once more from pair to trio. As Errol walked into the dining room with Gray, there, squarely positioned by the rum balls and fudge pies—all Gray’s favorites—was the inevitable Mr. Sarasola. At each elbow Raphael had collected a beautiful woman: a tall underweight blonde with a fistful of carrot sticks, and—Errol cringed—Arabella. Both women were chattering away, the sharp shoulders on one side and the high, lightly freckled breasts on the other, both rising and falling with excitement, over a movie, a book—it obviously didn’t matter. Raphael himself stood between them, nodding his head once or twice and meticulously taking apart a heart-shaped strawberry tart. While he did seem to be cocking an ear, most of his concentration was going into this tart. Most people at stand-up gatherings eat quickly and with embarrassment; Raphael ate slowly and with precision. Flake by flake he dissected the pastry. Delicately he edged his fingernail between the slices of strawberry to separate it into discrete cross sections. Lightly he swabbed the gelatinous corn-starch binding from around the fruit, taking the red filling drop by drop to his lip on the tip of his forefinger. Gradually he laid the specimen bare, nudging the raw red tissue out of its shell. At last, in the middle of the china lay four flaps of clean wet fruit. Raphael looked down at them with the satisfaction of a surgeon, as if he expected the slices, like ventricles, to beat on his plate.

Raphael looked up between the two women, his eyes flushing like torches; Errol stepped back from the heat. Color rose in the sallow cheeks. The lips filled and darkened, like fruit before fire.

“Mr. Sarasola,” said Gray.

He collected the slices on his plate and held them out to
Gray. But he had licked them! Errol wanted to warn her, But it has his saliva on it! Gray walked forward and took the strawberry in her mouth. Her lips touched his fingers.

An hour passed, and Gray disappeared. Searching for her through Tom’s sprawling Tudor house, Errol felt inarticulate and short. When guests tried to talk to him he mumbled and wriggled away. Errol had to remind himself that he was an adult and he knew these people. Still, an odd little-brother feeling was overtaking him in every room. Errol felt lost and deserted and sad. How many times had she done this to him? Not Gray. His sister Kyle.

Four years older, pretty and popular, Kyle had naturally gathered groups. Wherever the brother and sister went, Kyle would have a band behind her after only a few hours. As young as ten, Kyle collected mostly boys, whom she would order about. They obeyed gratefully, and so did Errol. Kyle was physically strong, and up to sixteen was still able to beat boys her age at races and arm wrestling.

Kyle had been inventive, Errol had to concede. He could have played by himself, after all, or made his own friends. But it was more fun with Kyle; she had better ideas and older friends. She directed plays with intricate plots and created wild injuries after fights, wrapping swaths of torn sheet around Errol’s arms and legs until he could hardly walk. Yet for all those ideas, all that energy, Errol had paid plenty. Like most petty tyrants, Kyle had been fickle, and her loyalty, fierce one day, dissolved the next. You couldn’t trust her; that was part of the excitement. Kyle was on your side, “Kyle and I,” but one false move and it was Kyle and somebody else. All this had been entirely instructive. As an adult Errol had often used his experience with his sister in understanding manipulative tribal leaders and dangerous Central American dictators.

Yes, that was how she kept her command from being boring, with “endless shifting alliances.” Still, there were single incidents for which Errol had yet—for Christ’s sake, at forty-eight—to forgive her. Somehow, isolated and confused and removed from his escort in this party full of people he knew who seemed
like strangers, Errol remembered being eight years old more vividly than he wished to and felt bitter.

“The Lowry Boys will be here in a few minutes,” Kyle had told him. “You’re going to listen to their conversation and find out where they hid the secret tapes. Then, when they’re not looking, you spring out of the cabinet and capture them. I’ll be behind this door, and I’ll help you tie them up.” Kyle laughed and looked with a sidelong glance at two other band members. Everyone laughed, but in a slightly odd way. When Errol joined their laughing, they stopped, and Errol found he was hee-hee-heeing by himself.

“Okay, Kyle,” said Errol soberly. “Can we leave them tied up to the table for hours and hours, like last time?”

“Errol,” said Kyle slyly, towering tall and thin and clever above him, “whenever I capture somebody I leave them for quite a while. You know that.” Laughter again. Errol joined in. They stopped. “Ready?”

Errol faced the built-in corner cabinet in the dining room. Kyle had removed one of the shelves so that there was just enough room for Errol to crawl in. Scrabbling up on a chair, Errol found he could fit in only by burying his head in his shoulders and drawing his knees tightly to his chest. Even then Kyle had trouble getting the double doors completely closed.

“Get all the way into the corner, Errol.”

“Kyle—”

“Sh-sh. You have to be quiet and wait, Errol. Wait and wait.”

Errol bunched up even more and moaned faintly as he heard the latch click. Through the panes of glass he could see his sister grin and stride away.

After a few minutes Errol’s neck began to hurt and he yearned to unbend his legs. It was getting hot. His breath fogged up the glass, and Errol could no longer see whether the Lowry Boys had entered or not. Errol hummed a little tune. He wrote his name in condensation on the pane. He tried another position but found he hadn’t enough leeway. Soon small shooting pains ran up and down his back. Errol pressed his head against the shelf above him, but this one was nailed in. Gently he tested
the double doors, though hoping not to open them all the way because that would make Kyle angry. There was no danger of that, though. The doors gave slightly and stopped fast. Errol pressed harder, taking rapid shallow breaths. The doors still stuck. Gradually it dawned on Errol that the latch closed on the outside, so there was no way for him to “spring” out of the cabinet, Lowry Boys or no Lowry Boys.

“Ky-le!” cried Errol softly. For some reason, even though she’d fooled him about the doors, Errol still imagined she was stationed in the next room as she’d promised. “Kyle, I can’t get out!”

Nothing. The glass buzzed from the vibration of his voice. Errol cried louder, until the sound of his sister’s name hurt his ears in that small space. He rapped his knuckles loudly against the panes. His grandparents weren’t home; Kyle was babysitting. No one came. When Errol stopped shouting for a moment, the compartment was deathly quiet.

Finally, Errol remembered, he’d lost control, and that was what saved him. Errol felt his knees and elbows ram up against the doors. His lungs filled and his shoulders widened, until, his voice hoarse and his knees bruising, Errol heard a long, high crack and the latch splintered free. Gracefully the door swung open.

Panting, Errol had to pick up his legs with his hands to swing them off the edge. He was alive; he could breathe; he was going to kill Kyle.

He’d found them at last in the basement. On an odd impulse, then, Errol found the door to Tom’s basement and ambled downstairs. He heard laughter. He had heard laughter. Kyle and the boys of the neighborhood were clustered on the Ping-Pong table, conspiring.

“You ditched me,” said Errol in the middle of the stairs. “Why didn’t you just say you didn’t want to play with me today?” Errol began to cry, and all the boys were silent. “Why did you lock me in the cabinet?”

“’Cause I couldn’t just tell you that, Errol,” said Kyle clearly. “You wouldn’t get the message, would you? You tag along with everything I do. How else was I going to get rid of you?”

“Who’s there?” asked Gray from below. Errol had remained halfway down the stairs. He walked down a few more steps to find Gray and Raphael playing pool by themselves.

“It’s Errol,” he said stiffly. “Don’t let me disturb your game, though. I was just exploring the house.” Errol began to walk back up.

“No, don’t go!” Gray called back. “You can play the loser. Which will be me, I assure you.”

“Is that Gray Kaiser?” asked someone from the top of the stairs. “In flight again?” Five or six anthropologists-at-large came trooping down the stairs, and Errol had no choice but to go down with them to get out of their way. “There’s no getting away from fame, Gray,” said their leader, a rangy guy of about forty whom Errol had run into before. Bob Something. His face was waxy and tan, for he’d done a lot of fieldwork in New Guinea, and handsome in that ageless American Western way.

In no time fifteen people gathered in the basement, so there was no longer an intimate duo to interrupt; Errol stayed.

Raphael and Gray had only been practicing shots; Raphael racked the balls for the upcoming game. Now, Errol asked himself as Raphael arranged the balls quickly and in order, how well do you think Sarasola plays pool? How well exactly? Tell me, Errol begged of whoever controls these things, tell me he is awkward. Tell me he talks a big line, but when his turn comes around he bounces the cue ball onto the floor. Tell me that in the middle of the game he frequently ruins the table by digging his stick into the felt, tell me this will happen tonight and we will
all be embarrassed
. Tell me, Errol pleaded as Raphael removed the rack and lined up the cue ball, that when he breaks the cue goes
puh
and meanders into a corner pocket and we will laugh
—tell me
, Errol heard screaming in his head as Raphael’s stick pumped quickly behind him,
this guy can’t play pool
.

The cue whacked hard and fast just to the side of the one and bounced back. The balls sprang over the table. Two sank, and they were both solids. Errol sat down heavily. Big surprise. It was going to be a long night.

The entire basement began to watch. Raphael went about
the table,
pock, pock, pock
, simple and direct. No consideration, no angling, no figuring of dots. His game was fast and easy and sweet. The balls cracked against one another and followed mathematically perfect trajectories toward their pockets.

“Looks to me like this guy grew up with a table in his parents’ den, Gray,” said Bob. “You’ve been suckered.”

“No,” said Raphael coldly.

Gray hadn’t taken her eyes off Raphael since he first chalked his stick. “Where did you pick this up?”

“Rudy’s Blue Tip Billiards Parlor, North Adams, Mass.”

“Played a lot of hooky, huh?” said Bob.

“I went to school every day,” said Raphael, not looking up from the table. “Played pool late—three, four in the morning. In the winter.” He nicked a ball into a side pocket.

“So that was where the guys hung out when you were a kid?” asked Bob.

“The guys”—Raphael shrugged—“were a bunch of old drunks. Never brushed their teeth. Breathed in my face. Put their hands on me.”