“Who’s there?”
Raphael froze.
“I told you assholes to stay out of here! You’re gonna get hurt, you hear!” It was a woman’s voice, and sounded nervous.
Raphael took a breath so deep that Errol could see his chest expand from fifteen feet away. “Don’t worry, I know my way around here!” he shouted back.
“I don’t give a damn! This place is about to collapse. I’ve got a kid across the street, and I don’t want him to see people going in and out of here. I’m trying to keep this place boarded up!”
Raphael looked down at the pink glasses and ran his finger pensively around the rims. “A child,” he said, no longer shouting.
“Listen, I mean it, get out of here or I’m calling the police!”
“No, you won’t.”
“Oh yeah?” Someone was scuffling through the entrance. A bottle skittered away and a board tumbled. Suddenly a woman stepped into the light. “And why wouldn’t I call the police?”
Raphael turned toward her. He was right by the window, and the sun lit his one side brilliantly, leaving the other half in full shadow. “Because that’s not like you,” he said quietly. “You might board this place back up with me inside and bury me alive. Or forget the whole thing and go back to your towel, because you’ve gotten bored, or whatever it is you get now. But the police? Sedentary Ida. That’s not your style.”
Ida stared. “You son-of-a-bitch,” she said slowly.
Errol was surprised to be looking at a stranger—he had expected, ridiculously, to recognize her. She was wearing a faded denim shirt and cutoffs and heeled sandals that didn’t function well in this rubble. Errol noticed her legs. Her knees were a little knobby, but the legs were still long and thin and imperious-looking. Her face, though, was disappointing. That sharpness that Errol had imagined was there, but while at thirty it had possibly been insolent, provocative, now her skin had tightened and her weight was too low, so what remained was a look of strain, even harshness. Perhaps it was the light, the severity of shadow, but she didn’t look pretty.
“Kind of depressing here, huh?”
“No,” said Raphael. “Complex. Interesting.”
“Kids stayed away from here for a long time. They thought you’d be back and do something terrible. They’d take a board and run away. It wore off, but you had a reputation.”
“Funny, and I was never violent. Then.”
“Reputation has nothing to do with what you’ve actually done. Only with what you seem like you’ve done. For example, you look right now like you could’ve just run somebody through with your carving knife.”
“I have.”
“Trying to scare me?”
“I’ve always scared you.”
“You’ve gotten uppity.”
“You’ve gotten older,” said Raphael sadly.
“What did you expect?” she snapped. “So have you. Time marches on, right? I’m not superhuman.”
“Why so angry?”
“I’m tired of being told I’m older like some accusation. Like I’ve done something wrong.”
“Be easy on me, Ida. I’ve never watched people age before.”
“You’ll get bored with it soon enough.”
“I’m afraid you may be right.”
Gray walked into the light and looked Raphael in the eye. Ida started. Gray and Errol had been in the shadows, as they’d been, in a sense, all afternoon.
The startling thing was that now, with both of them in the light, Gray looked by far the younger of the two women. Gray was on the soft edge of sunlight; with the dust rising and flecking around her, she seemed at her most hauntingly timeless, looking both kind and grave, like a seraph who has come to deliver tidings which are not exactly bad but which will require mortals to make painful choices.
Ida, by comparison, looked ancient, and entirely of this earth. The lines in her face seemed to deepen, the veins on her legs to rise.
Yet side by side they were also joined by an odd commonality. Not only were they both tall and thin and physically strong; their resemblance had more to do with the way they held themselves, which was, more than inches, what made them tall. Each head lengthened so far over each set of shoulders. Simply, they both stood as if they were somebody. The difference was that Gray seemed to believe it; Ida was no longer sure, and stood that way out of habit, and anger. They both burned tall in that sunlight, but Ida from fury, Gray from something else, and something, Errol had to admit, new. By Gray’s fire you could warm yourself, put out wet clothes to dry, go to sleep in the surety that she would keep wolves away through the night. Ida’s fire would burn down your house.
“Gray,” said Raphael, “Ida.”
“This is the kind of scene you like, isn’t it?” Gray observed.
“Don’t act like you know me. I’ve never met you.”
“I do know you. I know you well.”
“You can’t believe anything he tells you. I never told him anything.”
“You told him everything.”
“Are you kidding? I lied my head off.”
“That’s what you think. But you can’t lie, Ida. You don’t know how. Every time you lie you tell the truth. How old are you?”
“What do you care?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Thirty-five,” said Ida warily.
“See? Now, I know you’re at least forty. It always intrigues me that it’s the people who think they keep secrets who are so transparent.”
“You’re going to invite us to your house,” said Raphael.
“Oh, am I?”
Now, as Errol emerged from the shadows, Ida must have felt a little invaded. She took a step back. “Well, we’ve got enough for a regular party, don’t we?”
“That’s right,” said Raphael.
Ida’s chin rose. “What if I’m not in a party mood?”
“Ida,” said Gray, “admit it. You can’t resist. Is Walter home?”
“Yes…” she said, not getting Gray’s drift.
“All the better,” Gray went on. “It would be twisted, wouldn’t it? Gnarled, even impossible. Think how awkward it would be, Ida—how pointless and painful.”
“You think you know so much,” snapped Ida. “You don’t. You predict what I’ll do, I do the opposite.”
“Maybe I know that,” said Gray evenly. “Maybe I don’t want to go to your house. Maybe I was just getting out of it.”
Ida looked confused.
Raphael stepped toward her and looked down; he could now make her look short. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? You’re afraid to take me home with you.”
“You must be joking,” she said bravely. “You’re a kid.”
“Not anymore.”
“I’m supposed to be so impressed you grew up? That happens to everybody, you know. It’s not some kind of accomplishment.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Raphael. “I regard every year as a trophy, won at some risk.”
“I guess by that way of thinking you’ve got yourself a regular award winner there.”
“She’s better than you are,” said Raphael, as if realizing this for the first time himself.
Ida smiled. “So. I still get to you, don’t I?”
“How do you figure that?”
“You came here to show off, didn’t you? Look how old I am. Look, I have another woman, even older than you are. Though God knows why you think that’s so impressive. And you took your shirt off. So you’ve got more chest hair! Did you go to college? Are you going to show me your report card?”
Raphael stared at her steadily. “I came to see if you’d changed. Somehow that was important.”
“Yeah? So what’s the verdict?”
“I can’t decide yet. You put on a very good Ida-act. I’m curious if it’s real, or just something you remember.”
“You never give up, do you? Why don’t you just forget about me? What’s your problem?”
Raphael sighed. Errol had, for once
, some clear sense of what was going on in his head: a certain tiredness. It must have occurred to him to claim that he’d forgotten her; that, like his father, she wouldn’t affect him if she died. To go through this again was boring, though. Sometimes that’s what’s wrong with lying, that it’s boring, because when you allow yourself to say anything at all, something convoluted happens and you can no longer say anything in particular—you get lost and you’re left with only words, or not, and they are too much trouble; you might as well keep your mouth shut. Raphael had not come here to bluster, for bravado. He was not sure why he’d come here exactly, but it wasn’t for bravado. Errol had to grant Raphael this much: he wasn’t interested in fakery. If the man acted cold, he felt cold. That’s what was frightening.
“Ida,” said Raphael.
“What?”
He stared down at her and didn’t let up until she looked back at him. “Ida,” he repeated. “There are a lot of hours, a lot of days. Only so much happens. I have to think about something.”
She began to look nervous, and broke their gaze. She looked down at her feet and tried to pick her way in her sandals a few steps away. She looked back up, with several boards and bricks safely between them. “I didn’t do anything to you, understand?”
Raphael just looked at her.
“I’ve got nothing to feel bad about.”
There were so many things Raphael was not saying that the ensuing silence was astounding.
“You had a crush,” she went on, but her voice was losing its bite; it seemed unlike her to explain herself. “It happens all the time. To kids. What was I supposed to do? I was nice to you.”
Raphael smiled, just a little.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nice is such a strange word to hear from you.”
“All right, so I wasn’t nice,” she said, tossing her hair back with a flick of her head. “Who cares about nice? I don’t have to be anything. Who cares about any of this? Just so much small change, I mean, who cares? The whole thing is trivial. Really, who gives one little goddamned fucking shit?”
“Are you all right?” asked Raphael softly.
“Of course I’m all right! I’m fine. I could hardly be better. You come here, you don’t come here, big deal either way, okay? It doesn’t matter to me. But you walk in, you expect me to get all broken up, don’t you? I’m supposed to say, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Gosh, I was so terrible! You poor baby, what have I done to you—”
“People have just done things to me, that’s all,” he said steadily. “So I’ve ended up a certain way. Good or bad, I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to ask Gray K.” He looked over at Gray. “She’s the one who will have to pay for what I’m like.”
“Oh?” asked Ida. “And what are you like?”
“I am”—Raphael paused and considered—“like this.” At that he turned simply to his left and picked up the pink wineglasses one by one off the sill and unceremoniously dropped them onto the concrete. The shattering lasted little time and barely reverberated; then it was over and they were broken. Raphael looked at Ida unperturbed.
It took Ida a minute. “Fine,” she said. “This is old business. Who needs it. I sure don’t.”
“You have new business?”
“I don’t need any business. I don’t need you or your woman or your friend, understand?”
“All you need is Walter.”
“Boy, do I not need Walter.”
“And you make sure he knows that, don’t you?”
“He knows. But he needs me. I put up with it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I have a little boy,” she said reluctantly.
“I’m going to meet him now.”
“What if I say you can’t see him?”
Passing Ida as he walked toward the exit, Raphael paused to stare her down. Beside him she looked brittle and small. “A little something I picked up from anthropology: If I’m bigger than you, I do what I like.” He walked on out.
“You’d just love to beat the living shit out of me, wouldn’t you?” she shouted after him.
Raphael laughed softly from the shadows. “You wish.”
“What a big man,” Ida muttered to Gray and Errol, and the three of them ducked out of the mill. Raphael was ahead of them, crossing the street toward Ida’s bedraggled clapboard. “He thinks he’s changed so much.”
“And has he?” asked Gray.
“He’s the same. He’s a baby.”
“He can’t be the same,” said Gray, more to herself than to Ida, “if he thinks he’s different. That in and of itself is a change. And maybe if you think you’re a certain way long enough and hard enough, you become that way. Maybe, Ida, those wineglasses were a performance. But how many times can a man discard objects of great sentiment and still be sentimental?”
They crossed the street. “You talk pretty weird,” said Ida, striding away from them to where Raphael was standing and staring at a boy on the front lawn. The two were facing each other, saying nothing.
“Sasha!” said Ida. “Come here.”
The boy didn’t move, and continued to look at Raphael with wary curiosity.
Ida knelt by her son and pulled him over to her. Even with her arms around him, though, the boy didn’t take his eyes off Raphael. “This is Raphael,” said Ida. “He wanted to meet you. This is Sasha.” She squeezed his shoulder and stood up. “Okay, you can go off and play now.” Sasha didn’t move. Ida looked down at her son as if he were broken. “Go on.”
“I played,” he said.
“Well, do it some more.”
“I don’t feel like it.” He kept looking at Raphael. Raphael kept looking back.
As Errol and Gray drew toward the boy, they gradually understood what Raphael was staring at. Sasha was thin, delicate, and dark. His hair was black and wild, like Ida’s, but heavier. His lips were small, sullen, and scarlet. His cheekbones were high. His eyes drove deep to the back of his head.
“How old are you?” asked Raphael.
“He’s five,” said Ida quickly.
“I didn’t ask you. How old are you, little boy?”
Sasha pulled away from his mother. “Six.”
“Sasha, how many times have I told you not to lie?”
“I bet not many times,” said Raphael. “Do you lie, Sasha?”
Sasha compressed his lips and shrugged his shoulders.
“You don’t even know,” said Raphael. “I believe that. But tell me—and you can lie if you want—are you five or six?”
Ida turned her son around to face her and knelt so their eyes met. “You shouldn’t round up, Sasha. I know you want to be older, but—” She looked sharply at Gray. “There’s plenty of time for that later.”
“But—”
“You’re as old as I say you are. I’m your mother. Now, how old are you?”
“Five,” he said reluctantly.
“That’s better.” She let him go, and Sasha drooped like a humiliated soldier who has just been demoted.
“Reality is so malleable with you, Ida,” said Raphael. “It doesn’t even exist within several feet of you, does it? Your life is one big multiple-choice problem, and every answer’s right. Every answer’s wrong. So there’s no answer, and finally no problem. I mean, you don’t exist, do you, Ida? Why don’t you just disappear?”
He was right. It was as if Ida were surrounded by a force field. Errol imagined if he reached into it his hand would shimmer and split into several translucent images; it would be impossible to tell which were his real fingers. In fact, he might no longer have “real” fingers. Ida’s game was like shyster threecard monte: the ace was not on the table at all.
“Why don’t you disappear, buddy?” A tall, massive, middle-aged man with a beard had trooped down the stairs of the front porch.
“Because I choose to be someone in particular,” said Raphael mildly, turning. “So I exist. If I keep a secret, at least I know what it is.”
“You’re not making
sense, boy, and I don’t care. I’m used to nonsense. All that matters to me is that you’re gone in two minutes, and then I’m going back inside to have another beer and I’m going to pretend you never showed up here.”
“Walter,” said Raphael, with a melting fondness that stopped Walter in his tracks. “Don’t you get tired of pretending? Pretending to have a wife. Pretending to have a son.”
“We’re not talking.”
“What an imagination. I could swear we were.”
“Get out of here.”
“Walter, we used to have such fine times. I’m beginning to think you don’t love me anymore.”
“You’re leaving now.”
Walter started to reach for Raphael’s arm, but Raphael quickly pointed his finger at him and said, “No.” Walter froze. Raphael didn’t need a switchblade. That finger did just as well; it held Walter at bay.
Ida’s husband took a different tack. “Listen,” he said quietly. “It’s been a long time. We’ve got a kid. She’s all right, or as all right as she’s going to get. Maybe this is just a joke to you. But I’ve gotta live with her, and we’ve worked stuff out. You’re a man now, so maybe you know women—if you do, you know they’re bugged out and anything can send them into a tailspin. So please just say goodbye nicely and get in your car. You’ve done enough damage already. Leave me to take care of her.”
“Oh, Walter, you’re breaking my heart.”
Walter punched Raphael in the stomach. Raphael doubled over. As he pulled himself upright again, he was laughing, but he didn’t make much sound because the air had been forced from his lungs. “Too late, Walt,” he rasped. “You missed your chance seven years ago. You’re wasting your time.”
In fact, Walter did not look as if the punch had given him much satisfaction. After all, there’s nothing to do after you hit someone but to hit him again. Yet Walter’s hands hung at his sides now, with boredom. “I could waste a lot more time like that if you stick around.”
The Female of the Species Page 32