The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “It’s not cold,” Errol might point out. “It’s only September.”

  “I just can’t get warm,” she’d claimed more than once. “No matter what I do.”

  Toward the end of the month, Errol found Gray one such evening huddled in her straight-backed chair wearing her fur coat. It was surely no colder than fifty-five, maybe even sixty degrees, but still Errol went downstairs and built a fire in the den. He fixed hot buttered rum, and placed the two mugs beside a pile of heavy quilts and pillows by the hearth and brought her downstairs. It was absurd, of course, for this was the kind of scene Errol was used to preparing after a long day of skiing in January; but she seemed pleased, and huddled in the quilts, cupping her hands around her mug and breathing in the steam. At last she admitted she was getting warmer, though it had been four days since Raphael had called.

  “You know, I’ve never been to where he lives,” Gray confided. “We’ve never even passed by.”

  “That’s odd. Why don’t you stop in sometime, then?”

  “I can’t. I don’t have his address.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I even checked his fellowship application,” she admitted sheepishly. “He gives a box number at B.U., no help. He says he lives in a big house in the better section of Belmont. That’s all I can get out of him.”

  “A tony location, for a student.”

  “Yes.” She stared into her rum pensively. “But I don’t think he pays rent.”

  “How does he swing that?”

  “The owner is evidently—an older woman.”

  Errol looked up sharply. “Interesting that he told you that.”

  “Very interesting.” She sighed. “Furthermore—” It seemed she had to talk to someone tonight. “He never makes appointments with me.”

  “Appointments?”

  “Plans, anything. He says he’ll call. That’s all, or sometimes not even that. Sometimes he just leaves.”

  “Well, that’s his problem, right? You have a busy schedule. People who don’t make appointments with you don’t get to see you.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Then you can always call him.”

  “I do. But lately I don’t. I can’t. Sometimes it rings for ages, ten, twelve times, before he finally picks it up. I picture him looking at that phone, watching it tremble. I have to let it ring twenty times before I know he’s not home. And even then I can’t be sure. He picked it up on nineteen once. I counted.”

  “Maybe he’d just walked in.”

  “Oh no. He was there. Imagine watching the phone ring for nineteen times and then picking up the receiver as if nothing were unusual.”

  “Let it ring six or seven times and hang up.”

  “If I call him, I want to talk to him, Errol. I’ll wait if I have to.”

  “But if he knows that, then next time it’ll be twenty rings, then twenty-one.”

  “Then I’ll wait twenty-one.”

  “Gray, there are limits.”

  Gray shook her head and stared into the fire. “No, there aren’t. I thought there were, but there aren’t.”

  The phone rang. Gray’s eyes widened. Her body went rigid and wavered. She stood and untangled herself from the quilts with uncharacteristic awkwardness. She picked up the receiver and swallowed.

  “Hello?” Her voice was thin. Her ears were bright red. “Hello?” She held the receiver away from her, looked at it, held it back to her ear, and hung up the phone. “Nothing,” she said, leaning on the desk. “Dial tone.”

  “Wrong number, I guess.”

  Gray hung her head and breathed deeply, as if she couldn’t get enough air.

  “Gray, are you all right?” Errol walked over to the desk. She tried to stand up straight, but immediately had to grab Errol’s shoulder for support. Her eyes were glazed and her coloring blotchy. Errol took her hand; it was limp and cold. He held her wrist, and after a moment or two made her sit down. Surely he was making a mistake. He tried again, this time putting his hand around her neck. He placed his fingers over the artery there. There was no mistake. The rate of her pulse was astounding—not only frantic, but uneven: bu-bum…BUM. BUM. Bu-bu-bu-bum…

  “Gray, your heart—”

  “I know.”

  “Does this happen to you often?”

  “Only when the phone rings.” She stopped to breathe. She let her head hang over the back of the chair. “When the doorbell rings. I have a problem with bells, I suppose.”

  “Gray, you should take it easy.”

  “What am I supposed to do, wear earplugs?”

  “Maybe you should lie down.”

  It rang again. Gray closed her eyes.

  “I’ll get it,” said Errol.

  She shook her head, prepared herself however she did that, and picked it up again. “Hello?” She put it back. “Dead.”

  “It’s late. You should go to bed.”

  “Have you ever tried to sleep with your heart beating like the drums in ‘Marjorie and Her Filthy Dog’?”

  “I’ll take the phone off the hook.” Errol started for the receiver.

  “NO!”

  Errol withdrew his hand. “All right,” he said quietly, the way he would talk to a child who had just gone wild-eyed when he reached for her bedroom light switch.

  Gray fell asleep in front of the fire that night. Errol stayed to watch it die to embers, until in the glow of the last red coals he wrapped a quilt around Gray’s thin frame. She was still breathing too fast and whimpering in her sleep. He picked her up and carried her up the stairs to her bedroom with her head on his shoulder. As he climbed he had a clear picture of this ascent from the foyer floor. When he left her on the bed with the four posts, by the straight-backed chair and the bureau with the small white cloth and the porcelain dish for pins, he had to leave the room quickly and shut the door. He was sure that when she woke in the morning she would not understand that her sleeping upstairs that night had cost him some pain.

  Something was happening. Errol had to admit it even to the dog. Something was happening, and it was serious.

  “Did you know she’s impossible to see?” Ellen asked Errol. “No one can make an appointment with her. Is she too busy getting ready for this next project?”

  “I wish she were,” said Errol. “She spends most of her time obsessing over the Charles Corgie documentary. But what do you mean, no one can see her? She’s home all the time. More than ever, sometimes all day.”

  “That’s strange. Because I’ve tried. Bob’s tried; Tom. No one’s seen her in weeks.”

  “What does she say on the phone?”

  “Just that her schedule is completely packed for the next month and I should call later. I got the impression—much later. Like in about five years.”

  Errol heard this himself: “I couldn’t possibly” would come drifting through the cracks of Gray’s office door. “Next week is out of this world.” “I wish I could.” “You would not believe…”

  Because they shouldn’t have believed. There was Gray, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. With exceptions, of course. Always the same exception.

  “Do you ever tell him,” Errol asked one morning, “that you’re busy?”

  “What do you mean?” She knew exactly what he meant.

  “When he wants to get together. Do you ever tell him you have something else you have to do?”

  “Not often,” she said warily. “If I want to see him, I will. I’ll cancel something else if I have to.”

  “Gray”—Errol spoke slowly and distinctly—“is that wise?”

  “Why can’t I see him if I want to? No one is looking over my shoulder. Except you.”

  “That’s not true. There is one other person watching you.”

  Gray glowered at the kitchen table. She did not like this conversation.

  “Our buddy Ralph is watching you awfully closely, don’t you think? And you’re never busy. You never kick him out in the morning so you can get to work.”

  She hit
the table. “I don’t want to! I want him to stay as long as he’ll stay!”

  Errol couldn’t tell if she was missing the point; more likely she didn’t care about the point. “Is he ever busy?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well…” Errol was glad that Gray wasn’t a man, because it takes a lot longer for a woman to get to the point where she will actually hit you. “Perhaps it would be diplomatic—whether or not you have commitments—to say you do—once in a while.”

  Gray stood so quickly that she knocked her chair over backward. “Diplomatic! I’ve been a diplomat my whole life! For once I’m not a representative of my country or my profession, for once it’s just me, Errol! Diplomatic!” She raged around the kitchen as if looking for something to break, though she didn’t do that sort of thing. “I know,” she said with loathing. “Don’t you think I know? What I’m supposed to do? Put him off, make it weeks before I see him, let the phone ring two or three times and hang up, forget five or six? Don’t you think I know? I WON’T. Errol, I WON’T. I don’t want it I don’t want it I don’t want it.” She shook her head back and forth with her hand over her face. There was no helping her, Errol knew that, so there was nothing to do but to give her advice she wouldn’t take, in the end just to make Errol himself feel better, for saying the “right thing.”

  “But you’ve got it,” said Errol softly. “I’m sorry it’s a contest, but it is, and you’re losing.”

  “I want,” she said, “to lose.”

  “But do you understand what that means?”

  “Not at all, Errol. That’s what I intend to find out.”

  She started finding out that very week. It was October now. One of the things she discovered was that losing costs you. Costs money.

  Gray had seen Raphael the day before. Late that next afternoon Errol was highlighting sections of the transcript of the Leonia Harris interview. Gray came into his office and sank into a chair by his desk. Errol looked up; she was touching her forehead and staring out the window. Errol went back to his transcript. It was too bad such a fine woman as Leonia was pinning so much on some lousy drunk. Gray sighed several times. Each time Errol looked up, she looked away. After five or six bouts of this, Errol put down the paper and sat back in his chair. “All right. What has he done now?”

  “Nothing much, I suppose,” she said, chewing her lip. “It’s little, actually.”

  “Anything to do with Ralphie at this point is not going to be little.”

  “It shouldn’t matter.”

  “Which means it does.”

  “Well, I have plenty of money, don’t I?”

  “Didn’t you just skip over something? Like the whole story?”

  “It’s not much of a story.”

  “Gray!” said Errol impatiently. “What?”

  “All right. We went to lunch down at the wharf.” She stopped.

  “And—”

  “They brought me the check, as usual.”

  “Right.”

  “It wasn’t that much, compared to sometimes…”

  “Gray, this is like pulling teeth.”

  “Well, Raphael has always paid for lunches. I pay for dinners, and a lot of other expenses, too—play and concert tickets, gas and tolls, even his clothes. It’s seemed fair he should pay for something.”

  “Doesn’t sound unreasonable.”

  “I put the check by his plate. He looked at it and handed it back.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’ He said, ‘What wealthy people do with lunch checks.’ I said, ‘I’m a wealthy person, and what I do with lunch checks is give them to you.’ He said, ‘Then maybe you should learn a new trick.’ All this time he’s holding out the check across the table waiting for me to take it, and people are looking over at us. I said, ‘I’m an old dog if there ever was one. I don’t care for new tricks.’ Then he said, ‘You can’t screw twenty-five-year-old men and still claim the benefits of old age.’ That last line made me shudder.”

  “And?”

  “And I knew what I had to do.”

  “Walk out.”

  “Exactly. Stand up, say something very biting and very clever, and stride coolly out of the restaurant.”

  “So did you?”

  Gray looked down at her lap and ran her fingers over the back of her other hand.

  “You didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Errol.”

  “I am, too, Gray.”

  “If I’d left, I’d have gotten a taxi. I’d have come back here and worked, maybe grabbing a sandwich for dinner, if that. Then I’d have gone to bed. By myself. That’s how I would have ended up paying for that lunch: lying there wide awake by myself. I’d have won, Errol. Terrific. I didn’t want it.”

  “But you know what this means, don’t you?”

  “It means every check.”

  “So bringing him home with you last night cost you a good deal.”

  “I can afford it.”

  “I wonder.”

  She stood up. “I just had to tell you. Errol. To confess, I suppose.”

  Errol pushed the interview aside. “Listen. It’s getting late.” He took her hand. “I’ll take you out. My treat.”

  She smiled wanly. “Only if you understand that it won’t make much difference.”

  “Unfortunately, I do understand that.” Yet despite her glumness and his inability to relieve it, Errol led her out the door and proceeded to buy her the most expensive dinner he’d ever paid for in his entire life.

  The one appointment Raphael rarely canceled was his weekly tennis game with Gray. Errol couldn’t play her anymore. Playing Raphael she’d gotten too good. Was this just fine with Errol? Well, on Thursdays he got a little edgy.

  One Thursday afternoon in November, Gray called. “Errol,” she said, “please come pick me up.”

  “You’re at the courts?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Why can’t Ralphie give you a lift?”

  “I have sent him home.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I am not in a joking mood. Now hang up the phone and get in your car.”

  “Well, Gray, I’m in the middle of something here. Why don’t you get a taxi?”

  “I do not wish to take a taxi. Please come take me home.”

  Errol listened carefully. There was something about her voice. Something about the way she wasn’t using contractions. “All right. But give me half an hour.”

  “Come right this minute.”

  “Don’t be unreasonable—”

  “Right this minute. Goodbye.” She hung up.

  Well. Where did she get off? Come right this minute. Who did she think he was, her valet?

  Errol got in the car.

  When he arrived, Gray was standing against the front wall, her racket at her side. Her expression was composed. So she’d sent Ralphie home. Maybe something wonderful had happened. She looked powerful, even serene, against that wall. Tennis did that to her. Winning anything did that to her.

  Yet when Errol walked closer to his mentor he noticed something overly balanced about her face, excessively careful about the set of her bones against one another, and the fine lines in her skin looked suddenly as if they went all the way through her to the wall. She was deceptively assembled, perched. Someone had left her against that wall as an irresponsible dinner guest might leave a broken glass at his setting, delicately resting it against the edge of his plate so that his host will find the thing in pieces only after reaching for it to clear the table.

  Errol reached for Gray, and she fell apart. Her arms broke over his shoulders; her head cracked at the neck and fell against his cheek. Errol picked up her tennis racket and half carried her to the car. He lifted her into the bucket seat, collecting the pieces of her body like shards in a pail. She shook her head from side to side. Tears leaked down her cheeks in a steady stream.

  “Tell me it didn’t happen.”

 
“It happened.” She could only whisper.

  “Maybe it was just a bad day—”

  “No, it was a good day, Errol. I played—” She put her fingers over her eyelids and pressed, but the tears still found their way out the corners; some of them trailed down her fingers and trickled down her arm. “I played the best game—I have ever played—in my life. And he played—”

  “Sh-sh—”

  “Better.”

  When they got home the phone rang as Gray walked upstairs; she froze. “No,” she instructed Errol. “I can’t.”

  Errol picked up the phone. “I think you’d better take it, Gray,” he shouted up. “It’s one of your contacts in Ghana. He says it’s important.”

  “All right,” she said leadenly. “I’ll take it upstairs.”

  Half an hour later, as Errol had a drink earlier in the day then he usually allowed himself, Gray wandered into the den and fell into the leather armchair. She looked dazed, even disoriented. She wasn’t blinking. Her mouth fell a little open.

  “Gray?”

  Her eyes darted around the room, fixing on stray objects, until they found the soapstone lion on the desk. She stared at it as if waiting for it to talk, as if it could explain something.

  “What was that about?” asked Errol.

  “The Lone-luk,” she told the lion. “The women—have been overrun.”

  “By whom?”

  “Whom do you think? By the men. Yesterday. They took the villages by force, with guns. The Lone-luk,” she said quizzically, “are no longer…matriarchal.”

  The lion grinned.

  Much as Errol would have liked to suggest to her that the Lone-luk were only a society for study, and had nothing to do with this manse in Boston and Gray in her chair, he could not shake the feeling that everything had to do with everything and that this was bad in that everything-being-bad way. He said nothing. They stayed like this, until Errol decided that the best therapy was to proceed, and he picked up the phone.

  “Lenny, this is Errol McEchern. I want you to book us a couple of tickets to Ghana. I know this is the last minute, but something’s come up. Money’s no object. We have to get over there tout de suite.—Just a second.” He covered the receiver. “Gray, how soon can we get out of here? You need a day, maybe? Try for Saturday?”