The Female of the Species

“Very sexy.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“Couldn’t if I tried. Whatever we put on you, the congregation will receive you with tragic seriousness.”

Gray put her hair high on her head, slipped on her sunglasses, and billowed down the ladder.

“Hold it,” said Charles. “Where’s that camera of yours? I want a picture.”

Gray told him, but by the time he returned with her camera she was disconcerted. “This will have to be developed, you know.”

Charles posed her by the ladder. “Raise your arm. Chin in the air. Come on, you’re a goddess! And let’s see that leg through the slit. Right.—Come on, what’s the problem? The pose is great, but your face looks like you’re still fourteen and your mother’s dragging you to church.”

“I just wonder how you propose to get this photograph if you’re going to be buried here.”

“Mail it to me,” said Charles, looking through the shutter. “Charles Corgie; The-Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere; Africa. Or send a caravan. You’ll think of something.”

Gray managed to smile, though wistfully. Errol knew this. He’d seen the picture: the wind catching the white chute, which trailed off to the side, her leg streaking toward the camera, and the poignant expression of a woman who hadn’t yet finished a story that gave every indication of ending badly.

On the way to Corgie’s cathedral they processed arm in arm with Il-Ororen decked out and ululating behind them. Corgie held his rifle like a papal staff; Gray’s camera swung from her hand like an incense burner. Charles led her into the cavernous interior, with its one huge, unadorned room. The great thatched ceiling let in an uneven mat of sunlight over the dirt floor. As Il-Ororen passed into the sanctuary they went silent, threading in neat rows before the dais. Charles pulled Gray up with him on the raised platform before the crowd and waited with gun in hand for the gathering to assemble. When as many as could fit in the room were seated and still, Charles stepped forward. A baby began to cry. Charles pulled the trigger on his rifle, and the shot vibrated up through Gray’s feet. There was an echoing rumble through the crowd, though they quickly sat still again. The mother of the crying child pressed the baby to her breasts and cowered out the door. Gray looked up at the roof. There was a whole smattering of holes in the thatch the size of bullets, and when she looked down she saw they let in absurdly cheerful polka dots of sunlight at her feet.

Deeply Charles intoned his invocation. His manner was so serious, his voice so incantatory, that it took Gray several moments to realize he was chanting a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.

Gray stared.

“Knock, knock!” boomed Corgie.

“Hooz dere!” the cry came back, with the solemnity of a responsive reading.

“Mm-mm, good!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

“That’s what Campbell’s soup is!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

Somehow Charles kept a straight face. Gray stuffed her fist in her mouth.

Corgie launched into a hearty version of “Whoopee tai-yai-yo, git along, little dogies,” and rounded it off with a Kellogg’s corn flakes jingle. He gave them tips on freshening their refriger-ators with Arm and Hammer and painlessly removing corns. He exhorted the merits of Wombley’s uncrushable ties. For his sermon, Charles pulled a tattered Saturday Evening Post out of his leather jacket and read a rousing portion of “We’ll Have Fewer Cavities Now,” the stirring story of Bobsie Johnson of Brockton, Mass., and her battle with bad teeth. After the sermon he led the congregation in a moving rendition of “Little Rabbit Foo-Foo.” He had taught them the hand motions, so an expanse of several hundred African tribesmen bounced their fists up and down, “scoop-nup de field mice an’ bop-num on de head.” Every once in a while Charles would look over at Gray and smile. Gray shook her head. Listening to Corgie was like putting your ear to the crack in a playroom door.

Yet the gathering also functioned in a serious religious sense, perhaps to Corgie’s dismay. His English rambling seemed no more sardonic to his parishioners in its untranslated state than Latin to uncomprehending Catholics or Hebrew to unschooled Jews, so that the feeling in that assembly built to true spiritual frenzy despite Campbell’s soup. The audience swayed and clapped in the best revivalist tradition. Finally, when Corgie turned to the miraculous radio behind him and delicately tuned in the one broadcast he could barely pick up—a Swahili station that also played American music—the Il-Ororen were on their feet craning forward and at a pitch of silence. Gradually the grainy voices drifted in, then out, then in—Il-Ororen’s ancestors, men from other planets, gods, fairies, whatever, until the talking stopped and Corgie smiled; the reception became exceptionally clear and loud and Louis Armstrong’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” blasted across Corgie’s cathedral. Charles reached for Gray’s hand, and they danced across the dais.

“Kaiser!” said Charles quietly, “you’re a great dancer.”

Gray smiled. She was a great dancer. Errol had watched her join celebrations all over the world. And this must have been something. Gray at twenty-two and this handsome, outrageous man in his red baseball cap and goggles and little strip of a tie whipping across his bare chest, all in front of hundreds of Kenyans in a swoon. Whenever Charles twirled her around or swept her back until her hair brushed the floor, Il-Ororen whooped. Finally he spun her until her feet lifted off the floor, pulled her out and into a turn and a bow, and the song was over. Il-Ororen roared. At a nod from Corgie they poured happily out the door.

Gray and Charles stayed on the platform until the last churchgoer was gone. The expanse of the room was serene. “How much of that was for my benefit?” asked Gray softly. The question echoed.

“In a way, all of it. But I don’t usually read Leviticus, if that’s what you mean. Last time I read them ‘The Other Woman Was My Best Friend’ and made them sing ‘One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ to the last verse.”

“That’s real despotism, Charles. So what’s next?”

“Everyone eats a lot and gets drunk. Then I coach the football team.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Hey, Sunday afternoon, right? I’m an American missionary. I’d bring them beer and pretzels and narrow-mindedness if I could, but as it is, we have to make do. I sewed my own leather ball. Works pretty well, too. And I’ve changed a few of the rules.”

“Why?”

“Because I could,” said Charles.

“It must be frustrating,” said Gray, looking around the big empty hall.

“How?”

“Well, they don’t know you’ve changed the rules, do they?”

“No. So?”

“When you make the rules you can’t break them, can you? A funny sort of solipsistic hell.”

“My, we are talking mighty fancy.”

Gray settled her eyes on this strange dark man in his little red baseball cap. Poor Charlie had surely spent his Sunday mornings as a boy sending spitballs arcing between pews; yet now if he were to introduce spitballs into his services, the whole congregation would obediently wad and wet them, and little boys would grow to resent sopping them in their cheeks every bit as much as Charles had resented stale communion wafers on his tongue. Here was a heretic whose every blasphemy turned uncontrollably to creed. Adherence to his own religion must have followed Corgie like a loyal dog he couldn’t shake. Gray pulled his visor affectionately over his face. “All I mean,” Gray explained, “is it must be hard when no one gets your jokes.”

“Were you amused?”

“Very.”

Corgie smiled a little. He looked at her. “You’re beautiful,” said Charles.

“Thank you,” said Gray.

There was an odd, fragile silence.

“You dance great,” said Charles.

“You said that,” said Gray. “But thanks again.”

Corgie took off his red baseball cap and aviator goggles, stuffing them in his jacket. He had trouble fitting them in his pocket. “Eat something?”

“All right.”

Corgie took her arm and they walked slowly toward the door. For two people on their way to a feast, they were awfully reluctant. Finally they ground to a mutual halt. In the wide quiet of Corgie’s cathedral, the dust settled on its earthen floor. Spears of sunlight through the thatch lengthened and warmed as the afternoon sun grew lower and more orange.

“You must get lonely here,” said Gray.

“Yes,” said Charles.

They looked at each other. The smell of wildebeest dripping on coals wafted into the room. The smoke stung. Their eyeballs dried.

Gray smiled, with difficulty. She took an inward step. Corgie’s head made a quizzical turn. It was hard to know what to do. It was hard enough for Gray anyway, in Africa, so young. Of course certain pictures had flashed before her since she’d first seen this man by his tower, heard his rich, sadistic laugh, caught the glitter of his dubious intentions. But it was different to think things than to do them. Thinking, you could look the man in the eye the next morning and he knew nothing and you could smile to yourself and ask him to pass the mangoes. Thinking was a smug and private business. Moving your real hand to his face was a drastic and public affair. You could not take it back. It was like chess, when you took your hand from a piece, having moved it a square.

Incredulously, Gray watched her own hand rise to Corgie’s cheek. Stubble bristled at her fingertips. Raking into his hair, she found it thick and coarse. Why didn’t he say something? His expression was opaque. Her fingers crawled over his ear, to the taut muscles on either side of his neck. Still his eyes were secret. Gray felt frightened and stupid. Yet, having been taught since she was small to finish what she started, Gray pulled his neck toward her and raised her lips to his.

Later she could pretend it didn’t mean anything at all.

Suddenly it was as if she’d nibbled at a trap and it had sprung. His arms clenched her with the strength of a stiff spring; his sharp fingers sunk into her ribs like quick metal teeth. Gray felt her feet lift from the floor, and Charles Corgie carried her in his arms out the door.

Charles carted her through the compound, past Il-Ororen, who stopped and stared with their shanks of meat poised in midair. Gray curled against his jacket, resting her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Her feet dangled helplessly from his arms. Il-Ororen shouted behind them. Their cries rose and fell in waves, like the serenade of cicadas in pines, wild and demented. Gray nudged the leather aside for his skin underneath; his sweat stuck to her cheek.

Charles worked his hand under the band of her skirt at the small of her back; Gray could tell that the parachuting was now precariously tucked around her hips. When he reached the ladder he swung her over his shoulder. As he climbed she clutched at the skirt.

Inside, Charles slung her off and she felt herself free-fall to the mattress. She wondered if the parachute would open. Charles slipped his hand under the silk and cupped her hipbone, moving down to the inside of her thigh. With his other hand he traveled up her bare stomach to the tiny strip of cheetah skin, which had slipped dangerously low. Tiny rolls of dead skin gathered under his palm. Gray felt a little sick. Saliva squirted and pooled in her mouth; she had to keep swallowing. Corgie leaned over and took her earlobe in his mouth; hunger rustled at her ear. He moved to the cartilage and licked inside. The pressure in her head changed as he sucked the air out; she heard a splashing and yawning “ah-ah,” like the roar of a conch.

Corgie let himself down slowly on top of her. He was heavy; though compact, his body was dense and buried her beneath him. Gray sunk into the bed so that the mattress rose on either side of her. Every part of this man’s body was hard like wood. He closed over her like the lid of a coffin. She couldn’t breathe.

Corgie worked the gathers from her hips. Fold by fold he pulled the parachuting from her body. The material collected in limp rumples beside her, thin and wan and white like funereal linen. He exposed the sweep of her thigh. With one hard pull he snapped the band of her underwear.

Gray’s eyes shot wide. She jockeyed him across her until she slid his body off to her side. Gray lay panting as Corgie propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her with a smile one might use after an excellent appetizer, when the meal to come promised to be even better. He took a deep breath and followed the indentations of her ribs with his fingertips as her chest rapidly rose and fell. Her cheetah skin had inched down still farther, and he trailed up to the swell of her slight breasts, up, over, down; up, over, down. Gray didn’t imagine for a minute he had stopped. He was resting. He was restraining himself. That was his pleasure. For now.

“I was wondering when you’d come around,” said Charles. Her ear was up against his chest, and the cavity amplified the sound, like a tomb.

“Oh?” Her voice was small.

“Yeah. You’ve been pretty funny, I gotta say.”

Gray struggled up on her elbows. Trying to look casual about it, she shifted the parachute to cover between her legs. “How is that?” She didn’t like the idea of amusing him just now.

“Sleeping in your corner; playing the anthropologist.”

“Oh?” she said again, pulling a little farther up on the pillow. The crease between her eyes indented, just a little. Playing the anthropologist. Gray remembered the snuffling in the night. How many other women had lain here?

“But I figured pretty soon you couldn’t stand it anymore. Really, watching you’s been a riot.”

Gray looked over at him, scanning for some sign that this was any different for him than one more snuffling. “A riot,” said Gray. The indentation between her eyes was discernibly deeper now.

“A one-woman amusement park.” He licked his lips. He seemed pleased with himself.

Gray tugged at her cheetah skin, now threatening to slide off her breasts altogether. “And how else have I been entertaining you?”

“Tromping out in those fields of yours. Taking notes. It’s cute. But it’s been obvious from the first few days what you’ve really been doing here. Guess the study’s gonna be real in-depth, right?”

Gray pulled herself to a sitting position. She rearranged the straggles of her hair. She felt her face tingle and her ears heat; she was sure they were red. How did she get here? What was she doing in this bed? She tucked the folds of her skirt one by one decisively into its band. “Well, I suppose it takes me a long time to do my work, Charles,” she said quietly, “since I spend so much time daydreaming about when big handsome Charlie Corgie will finally kiss me good night.” Gray swung her legs over the side of the bed. She looked down at her outfit, for the first time finding it regrettably ridiculous. She decided she did not want to cry. She looked down at her lap and decided this was very, very important to her, and asked herself not to cry, the way you would ask a favor of a friend of yours.

“Getting your back up?” Charles went on behind her, still leaning on his elbow. “You’re not gonna tell me you don’t lie behind that screen just eating your heart out. Those sighs that keep me awake at night? They’ve cracked me up. And that night I brought a bedwarmer up here? Next morning you went nuts. It was hysterical.”

Gray slowly uncurled and brought her spine straight. Her eyes were sharpening. “Funny,” said Gray. “I don’t remember going nuts.”

“Sure you did. But now’s the time to look back on it and laugh, right?”

“So far only one of us is laughing.” Gray rose from the bed. She was six feet tall.

“Come back here, toots, we’re just getting started.”

“No, we’re finished,” said Gray calmly, smoothing the billows of her parachute down her hips. “I’m going to hoe. I guess I’ve just looked forward to this with you so obsessively for so long, all the while pretending to be a professional at work on some silly study, that now the time has finally arrived and you deign to look my way, I just can’t handle the excitement.” Gray started out the door.

“Okay, you’ve made your little speech, now come back here.”

Gray started down the ladder.

“Come on,” said Corgie at the top, suddenly more serious. “Give me a kiss and forget it.”

Gray paused mid-step.

Encouraged, Corgie continued: “We’ve wasted plenty of time already, right? All these weeks we could’ve been having a fine time. Get up here. You look great. You’re driving me crazy.”

Gray came back up the ladder.

“That’s more like it,” said Charles with a smile. He gave her a hand up, but when he put his arm around her she slipped away, angling past him through the doorway.

“I need my work clothes to hoe.” She whisked back out with her khaki in a bundle and brushed coolly by again. In no time she tapped back down the ladder and strode off between the manyattas.

“You don’t know what you’re missing!” he shouted after her.

“I don’t expect I ever will!” she shouted back.

“That’s right, don’t think you’ll get a second chance!”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to live with that terrible disappointment.” Her parachuting swirled out on all sides, alive like white flames.

Corgie watched her go from his porch. No doubt he muttered something like “She’ll be back,” but, an intelligent man despite his recent behavior to the contrary, he wouldn’t be so sure.

chapter five

These scenes have their satisfactions, but they cost you. In Toroto, everyone paid for this one. Something had gone wrong; the script was awry. No one was happy. No one got what he wanted. Errol decided this is what it was like:

Corgie had “bedwarmers” almost every night. He laughed a lot then. He was loud. Gray lay on the other side of the partition trying to keep her breathing slow and audibly even. Yet the more asleep she sounded, the more Corgie rocked the frame of his bed. When he reached his pitch Gray even tried snoring. Finally neither of them slept well, or woke jaunty.

More than ever, they threw themselves into their separate projects. They drew up separate crews. The tribe was split tacitly down the middle, like troop divisions.

The tower got higher. Corgie liked to climb to the top at sunset very far away from everything.

Corgie had another worship service and Gray didn’t come. He hadn’t invited her. He came back and said it went wonderfully, though Il-Ororen seemed sodden enough afterward and didn’t fix much food; they mostly got drunk.

The rains made everything worse. Gray would record interviews, with irritation helping his cause with the miracle of her machine. Corgie would lope in long, hapless laps through the expanse of his gymnasium. But it was the tendency of the rainy-day mind to stay home. Gray would lie about in her corner craving a book to read, but in lieu of that, starting to write her own. This was no relief, though, as she wrote about Il-Ororen, and she was beginning to despise them—they all seemed just like Charles Corgie. For distraction she made herself a deck of cards from the stiff dividers in her notebooks. Refusing to play with Charles, though, Gray was left with solitaire. She hated solitaire. Gray tried drawing next, but she didn’t draw very well, and disliked doing anything she did badly. She wanted to hear music. She wanted to read a newspaper. She wanted to have a conversation.

Instead, they gave each other directions, edicts; they informed each other of passing incidents with great economy of language, as if every word were being telegraphed overseas.

Charles cleaned his guns. He worked on a new model. For several days Gray wouldn’t ask what the model was of. Yet the severe angular structure, with its jagged points and narrow corridors and tiny rooms with no doors, did not shape into anything recognizable. Finally Gray came up to Corgie in the midst of a torrential, desperately endless afternoon and asked, “What is that?”

“A monument.”

“To what?”

“To whom.”

“You decided the tower wasn’t pointless enough?”

“I’ve passed beyond functionalism,” said Charles mildly, “to pure form.”

“Pure something,” Gray muttered.

“What’s that?” asked Charles nicely.

“Is that just a monument?” asked Gray. “Or your gravestone?”

Charles turned to her squarely. “Now, why do you care?”

Gray turned away. “It’s a boring afternoon,” she said flatly. “It’s raining. It was something to say.” Gray wandered back to her corner and pulled the curtain tightly shut.

During the rainy season Il-Ororen worked in clay, for it dried evenly in the moist air. Out of raving boredom rather than anthropological duty, Gray made water jugs on rainy afternoons. To satisfy her own sense of irony, Gray fashioned Grecian urns with Apollos and Zeuses curling from the handles and sending fire and lightning bolts down the sides of the bowls. The women were delighted, and fouled Gray’s already limping study of their traditional vessel forms by immediately copying hers—one more eager betrayal of their fusty Masai inheritance. It didn’t matter whether Gray’s innovations were better so long as they were new. They imitated urns and Chinese vases and squat British teapots indiscriminately, though they did not make tea. Gray had never read of any African tribe so taken with modernity.

The kraal where Gray potted belonged to Elya’s family, once, before Corgie, the richest and most powerful in the tribe. The father had been the chieftain before Corgie arrived; Charles had shot him early on. Yet the remaining wives did not seem to hate Il-Corgie, and took Gray into their homes with deference but no anger. Corgie’s murder of their husband seemed to make sense to them. Unlike most of the Masai tribe, Il-Ororen had no problem with killing, as long as it worked to your advantage and you got away with it. The wives clearly admired Corgie for felling such an imposing man as their husband, and spoke of the scene of his death not with grief but with awe.

The sons, however, kept their distance. The oldest, Odinaye, regarded Gray with suspicion when she came to the hut. Even for a Masai he was tall and grave. His eyes smoldered before the fire while she built her vases. He would stare silently at Gray for hours through the smoky haze between them. Gray couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She would sometimes try to make conversation with Odinaye, but he never responded with anything but even keener scrutiny.

Gray began to notice Odinaye in her vicinity too often. She would look down from the porch when she was eating lunch and find him staring up at her with steady, unblinking accusation. She would lose her appetite, and go inside.

With Odinaye so often a few paces away, Gray found it increasingly difficult to slip off into the bush alone to attend to her all too mortal toilet. When she and Corgie had their dry, cryptic tiffs in the middle of the compound, Gray would turn and find Odinaye watching from the sidelines. Gray found herself talking more softly; though they were using English, she had the eerie sensation of being overheard.

“I’m being followed,” Gray finally told Charles. “By Odinaye. I dream about him now. He’s there every time I turn around.”

“Maybe he’s in love,” said Charles.

“This is serious.”

“Isn’t everything serious lately?”

“What should I do?”

“Why come to me? You’ve got a problem. So take care of it.”

It was an ordinary afternoon. Gray was struggling with a large water jug. She’d gotten the clay too wet; the sides were collapsing. Odinaye’s presence on the other side of the hut, crouching and staring as usual, was especially irritating. She couldn’t help suspecting—was it only the play of smoke between them?—that there was a wisp of a smile on his face today. She was sure he could see she was having trouble—well, any idiot could see that; the thing was falling apart.

Gray decided to take advantage of her role as the leader of the avant-garde and cave in the sides intentionally. She composed her expression. When one side fell in again, she looked down at it archly and revised a dent here and there, as if that was exactly what the goddess of modern pottery had in mind. Imperiously, she told Odinaye to give her the wooden paddle beside him; she would bat in the other side, too.