The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  The week wore on, lapping at his projects, crumbling his ambitions. It was hard to pursue food with vigor, and he got hungry. He would now pass in front of Ida’s yard as before, and she’d be lying there, all right, and she’d even nod at him or shoot him a compressed, wry smile and go on reading. He puzzled over that smile back at the mill. What was the joke? It had been a week. Damn it, she said she’d come back.

  As firmly as Raphael tried to persuade himself that it didn’t matter—that Ida didn’t matter, that there were these other girls or even no girls, no girls and no boys and no Frank and no Nora and that was all just perfectly fine—he had to concede that Ida mattered. This information so startled him that he observed himself walk through the day, feeling different, doing things in different ways, with an almost clinical curiosity.

  It was the following Sunday before he got it. She’d said she’d come back. However: he would have to ask her. It was that simple. That was the smile. It meant that though he might successfully walk over and pull her across the street, she would not herself call him over to her towel in the next hundred million years. He was so used to girls showing up at the mill with food, with tools, with pairs of lips, that he hadn’t been refusing to ask Ida over; it simply hadn’t occurred to him. Here was one more new experience, then: pursuit. He learned quickly. From that moment on, he pursued Ida O’Donnell with a vengeance.

  “I want to fuck you again,” said Raphael, having marched straight across the street after his epiphany that afternoon.

  Ida laughed. “You want to announce that a little louder? Walter might have missed a word or two.”

  “I don’t care about ‘Walter,’” said Raphael, who had from the start put her husband in quotation marks, as if “Walter” were her imaginary friend and he was humoring her by referring to the man by name like a real person. “I don’t care about ‘Walter.’ He’s your problem.”

  “Walter isn’t a problem,” said Ida.

  “I told you I don’t want to hear about him. I want to know when you can stop by. I’m asking you to stop by.”

  She looked at him curiously. Perhaps she expected a game, a dance. “You are big on truth, aren’t you?”

  “Ida, I asked you,” said Raphael. “I asked you a question. I know you don’t owe me an answer. But it would be nice, Ida. It would be swell. If you answered me. I want to kiss you, which I still haven’t ever done. I want you as soon as possible. I want you to tell me yes or no. When or why not. Right now.”

  “The question is,” Ida mused, “have you just seen too many movies, or are you the most amazing little sixteen-year-old I’ve ever met?”

  “No,” said Raphael, hitting harder now, refusing to be flattered, “that’s not the question.”

  “Then what is the question?” She smiled.

  “I thought I was clear.”

  “You’ve noticed it yourself: sometimes I don’t pay attention.”

  “I asked you,” he said with elaborate patience, “to fuck me.”

  “What’s that?” She was still smiling.

  “I want to fuck you.”

  Ida leaned toward him. “Ask me again.”

  “I want to fuck you.”

  She laughed. “And when do you want to fuck me?” Her eyes were gleaming.

  “Right now.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.” Raphael, too, had to smile. “You like sets of three.”

  “I like,” she said, “you.”

  “Can I make you say that three times?”

  “You can’t make me do anything.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Surprise me, then. Make me do it on the lawn.”

  “Why, you think ‘Walter’ would like to watch?”

  “I’m sure he would.”

  “Then we can’t fuck on the lawn. I don’t want to do anything ‘Walter’ would like.” He pulled her up. “Come with me.”

  “You have an erection,” she said casually, walking with him away from her towel.

  “Yes, I do. It came in handy last time.” He led her across the street by the hand. He hoped Walter wasn’t a violent man, but he didn’t hope this very strongly. Ida didn’t believe in truth; Raphael didn’t believe in Walter. He had to concentrate: Her husband is in that house, because it was painful not to slip his hands around her tight, narrow, little hips, all dark brown and shining with a light sweat, around her even narrower waist, with the long muscles springing on either side of her spine as she sauntered across the asphalt.

  “The pavement must hurt your feet.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, still taking slow, deliberate steps on the street. “It burns. It hurts, even. I like it. Then I’ll step on your concrete. It’ll be cold. I’ll like that, too.”

  “You like all kinds of things.”

  “That’s right. I’m not a discriminating reader. I’m not a discriminating anything.”

  “Terrific,” said Raphael. “That makes me feel so special.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, “how it makes you feel.”

  She said this sort of thing a lot. She kept saying it for years. Raphael didn’t hear her.

  Raphael and Ida carried on. He told no one. He didn’t know whether their affair remained a secret or was common knowledge through the whole town.

  In the next couple of years Cleveland Cottons came into its own. The second-floor dance hall was complete, and on weekend nights Raphael would quietly string an extension cord for his stereo over the street between telephone poles and tiptoe to the side of Ida’s house to plug the cord into her outdoor outlet. He’d warn her ahead of time, and she’d keep Walter inside. Late into the night the cream of his class would show up at his door, lining up, hoping to gain entrance with the same anxiety they’d feel later at Area in New York. The floor upstairs was polished and shook with rock and roll. Raphael oversaw things and kicked people out when they got too drunk, and often had a fine time himself, until it got so late that the sky was turning light and he was reminded of that first time waking up at this hour with Ida missing from his arms. Tired and bored by his classmates, he would stare out the front windows and wonder what exactly she did to keep Walter inside nights. He yearned to have her here at these parties—she’d even helped him with the floor—but she was married and then everyone would know and that wasn’t the deal.

  Ida kept her lover on his toes. Her personality changed drastically depending on what she was reading, what movie she’d seen. When she read Madame Bovary she was dramatic, but would also pull back and dismiss their relationship as flimsy and cheap; she referred to it several times as a pathetic, manufactured illusion. When she came back from seeing Candida in Stockbridge with Walter, she was arch and condescending and “larger than life,” and Raphael stayed away from her for a week waiting for it to wear off. When she read The Wild Palms, she took on a Faulknerian fatalism; she was wan and dour and developed a strange bleak little laugh, which she used when nothing was funny. During this time she enjoyed short, dense conversations and awkwardness and silence. He found he had to read bits of what she was reading or see the movie she’d last watched in order to know how to play the next scene.

  When Raphael was seventeen he was smitten with the same spell that hit his father at this age, and he’d talk with Ida for hours about places he planned to go. It was unclear how he’d finance these departures, but Cleveland Cottons would be practically perfect within a year, and that meant, somehow, that he’d have to move on. Ida knew a lot about different places, and sometimes instead of fucking she’d tell him stories that she made up as she went along, stealing bits and pieces willy-nilly from movies and books to fill out what she couldn’t invent. Often in these tales Raphael and Ida were the main characters, and they got away with things all over the world.

  There was just one little problem, which he had to admit grew intrusive. That was Walter. Even in quotation marks Walter seemed gradually to exist. Raph
ael would see him walk out of Ida’s house in a surprisingly convincing imitation of a regular person, and the man would get into his car and drive to a plant in the next town where he was supposedly some sort of manager, and the car would be there, then gone—awfully persuasive evidence that an agent had moved the machine from one place to another. Also, unlike an imaginary friend, Walter was handsome, though in a manly, grown-up way, with a beard and decisive lines in his face and a substantial build. Were Raphael to imagine Walter, he would have a limp and a stutter and a hunched back. He would have no teeth, and even if he could stand up straight would reach only about four foot eight. Yes, Ida’s imaginary friend would be a grotesque little gnome. Walter, it seemed, was her real husband.

  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 he
re,” 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.”