The Female of the Species (20 page)

Walter was out of town the following weekend, so Raphael invited Ida to the mill for the evening. That afternoon he didn’t know what to do. His preparations had been made. He peeked out the window and there was Ida on her towel, darker than ever, actually reading this time. Slowly he made his way out to the front of the mill, leaned against the brick, and stared. She smiled and kept on reading. He’d said seven. It was only three. It was hot, but he stayed against the brick, feeling the smooth, warm clay with his fingers, the rough rivulets of mortar, pressing his body up against the big, hot building, resting his cheek against the brick, feeling its redness, its pores. Now it was three-thirty. He would wait. The air was thick and humid and oxygen-poor, like breath under blankets. The three sections
of Ida’s body floated above her lawn. He smiled. She was actually turning pages. He wondered if she understood anything she read. But then she was older. Maybe at thirty you could actually read on afternoons like this.

Gradually the shade of her oak tree crept across the grass, and Ida picked up her towel to follow the sun. At five the patch of yellow was no longer large enough for her whole body, and she stood, stretched, and yawned in the spotlight left there. Methodically she marked her book, folded her towel, and swayed in the front door, without a wave or a nod.

Raphael returned to the mill, where brilliant orange rectangles shafted into the room. The walls and drapes blended in yellows and grays. He lay on the couch, and the sheet over it was cool and smelled bright. The hours were long and rich. He tried to think of as little as possible. The lean spears of light lengthened and flushed, cutting clean diagonals across the couch. He extended his legs into the sun and looked at them, as if for the first time. There were long muscles in his calves like unopened tiger lilies, soft and smooth and oily to the touch. He’d never really seen these muscles before. The hair on his legs was darker and thicker than he remembered. When he lay down, his legs would no longer fit entirely on the couch. He set them gently on the arm of the sofa as if they were an expensive present he’d just been given and he wanted to show the donor with what care he would treat them for the rest of his life.

At six-thirty, he reached over and put his bottle of French white wine in a cooler filled with ice, and leaned back on the pillow. Fifteen minutes later he reached back and pulled out two wineglasses, setting them on the table to scrutinize them carefully. They weren’t entirely to his taste, but he’d worked them out of a box of unsold garage-sale merchandise that had been thrown out; he could hardly complain. Besides, they rather suited him right now—tall and fluted, with rippled rims, the glasses were thin and tinted a delicate pink. He decided to give Ida the one with the chip.

At just seven he heard a hollow rap at his entrance and let her in, taking her hand as she stooped through the hole. She
handed him a spray of tiger lilies from her yard. Raphael put the flowers down on the table by the wine. She was wearing a short black kimono over the same black bikini and a string of tiny pearls around her neck. Ida went straight to the wine, opened it, and poured two glasses. They toasted, to nothing. The mill was fantastically quiet. Neither had yet said a word. Sipping her wine, Ida lingered around the room, looking out the front windows to note the view of her lawn. Raphael watched her legs, the crook of her elbow at her waist, her slow but wide stride, the sway of the black silk as she swung from window to window.

“The concrete,” she said, nodding at her feet, “is nice and cold.” She smiled.

Raphael said nothing. He stood where he’d been standing, and she circled back to him at last; her glass empty, she put it down. He did the same, and refilled them, not because he was going to drink any more but because they looked nicer with the wine, the small bubbles forming on the inside of the glass and gliding occasionally to the top, to float, to pop. He set them in the light, and the wine caught shards of sun.

Slowly Ida unbuttoned his blousy white shirt until it hung open. He looked down at his own chest, again with a feeling of newness and revelation, a sense of finally having been given something—not a pie or nails or a caulking gun—for which he was grateful. His chest was still hairless, though with a fine dark down between his pectorals that Ida smoothed with the pads of her fingers. She trailed her fingers between the halves of his rib cage, then swept her palm around his side and smoothed up and down the furrows of his ribs. With the most pastoral look on her face, a kind of simplicity and lack of conniving he’d never seen in her before, she slid this same hand down the flat left side of his stomach, down behind the waist of his cutoffs to the hollow of his hipbone, until she moved subtly toward his middle and ran the length of her hand along the round of his prick.

Raphael did nothing but breathe. He knew he should be tense, that he probably even was, but he felt as relaxed as if
he’d been drugged, and stood on his feet with a slight sway. He would have to lie down soon. His head was light, his balance precarious, for suddenly it seemed that two feet were far too few to stand on.

Ida unbuttoned his Levi’s and unzipped his fly; the cutoffs slid to the floor. With great concentration Raphael lifted one foot, then the other, out of the legs of his jeans. He didn’t want to fall. Not because it would make him look stupid; he just didn’t want to fall.

Ida seemed to understand the delicacy of his balance now, for she led him by the hand to the long trunk opposite the couch. It was only three steps, but he felt so appallingly tall by now that the floor seemed far away; though the ceilings in the mill were vaulted, he wondered if he might graze his hair against the roofbeams. As if on stilts, he tottered slowly on his new legs and let himself down; it was a long way, and took a long time to get there. Ida pushed him gently back until he was stretched out along the length of the trunk, which had cool white sheets tucked around it like the rest of his curbside furniture. His shirt fell to either side.

When Ida leaned over him a moment later, she was still wearing the black kimono, but the bikini was gone. Ida O’Donnell was no longer edited, and with relief he saw her as a unified body, not the three pieces he’d grown so used to. He looked at her small conical breasts, with the nipples sharp and angular and protruding like the rest of her. Between her legs was a severe, well-defined triangle; he had to smile. She was so consistent.

Ida drew herself over his pelvis, nestling one knee up against his ribs, letting her other leg extend between his, and together they held his prick tight between their stomachs. Ida looked down at him and smiled; she seemed pleased with what she saw. She took one of his hands in each of hers and pulled his arms over his head, over the edge of the trunk. Again he was conscious of his own span, and as Ida moved up his body until the tips of her pubic hairs tickled the head of his prick, he felt his whole body pull taut and lengthen, lengthen, until when
she pushed back down on him it was as if he weren’t three-dimensional at all, just a vector shooting from one end of the room to the other.

Raphael had expected his vision to blur, for the shapes in the room to go fuzzy as in soft-focus PG sex scenes; instead, their lines went sharp and hard. Perspective exaggerated, as the far end of the couch hurtled away from him and its closer end loomed large. The shafts of sun from the windows were at their longest and most narrow, and drew keen, even parallels across the floor. The wineglasses on the table were fully lit and glowed with a strange super-reality—not
un
reality, but an existence and dimension so startling that Raphael imagined he’d never perceived any two objects as so clearly present in his life. The whole room took on this quality, an exactitude, a definition, a clarity of edge, so that each piece of furniture was placed perfectly where it was and each chair was in the precise relation to the next one that it
was
, those folds fell
that way
and that shadow cut deeply
there
. The yellows and grays of the room were suffused with pigment, and textures rose from the cement; Raphael was sure he could see each thread and each interstice in the sheets on the windows and over the bed.

When he looked at Ida above him he could see it was from her that the clarity was emanating. The edges of her body were drafted with a square, the angles with a protractor, and she was really on top of him, until, fully alive at the age of sixteen, Raphael Sarasola came into a woman for the first time.

“I can feel your heart beating,” said Ida. “Here.” She pressed her hand on his pelvic bone. She raised herself up on her arms, but he was still inside her.

“I’ve still never kissed you.”

“That’s not what you wanted,” she said. “To kiss me.”

“That’s right. I’ve done that before.”

“I’m surprised,” said Ida. “I see pretty little girls sneak in and out of here at all hours.”

“Why do you think they come back? I don’t give them what they want.”

“I got what I wanted,” said Ida, “and I’ll come back.”

Raphael flushed with relaxation and relief. He stretched his feet and arms over the edges of the trunk and felt something he had never felt before and so could not name. He was already getting hard again; she smiled.

“You’re a natural for this stuff, you know that? You’ve got a future.”

“Do you do this all the time? With boys?”

“You know, sometimes I can’t tell what I’ve done and what I haven’t.”

“How’s that?”

“I think about a lot of things,” she said vaguely. “I do a few of them. It’s hard to keep straight after a while is all. What actually happened; what I read; what I dreamed; what I saw someone else do. It gets to be—all the same.”

“You mean you’re a nut.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” she said, rolling off him.

Raphael felt the air hit his prick with disappointment. It seemed lost dangling over his stomach, lonely and blinded. Ida bound the kimono closed with its belt, and he felt punished.

“I’m sorry.” He wasn’t used to apologizing for anything, and the words sounded funny coming out of his mouth. “It’s just I asked you a question and you didn’t answer it.”

“That’s right,” said Ida. “Some people think that asking a question gives them a right to know the answer somehow. Well, it’s not true. You’ve no right to anything. I’ll tell you what I want to. I don’t care what you ask.”

“Do you lie?” he asked on impulse.

“If I feel like it.”

“So I can’t believe you when you tell me something?”

“I don’t care if you believe me. That’s your business, what you want to believe. I don’t owe you or anyone anything. If someone doesn’t like that and they still stay around me, then they’re just stupid. ’Cause they can leave.”

“I find the truth very useful.”

“No,” said Ida. “I don’t believe in it. I think the truth is a lie.”

Raphael smiled and sat up. “You have one twisted little mind.”

“It may be twisted, but it’s mine,” said Ida. “People are always trying to get at it, but they can’t. It’s mine.”

“People like ‘Walter’?”

“Of course,” she said. “He thought he got me. He didn’t. But he knows better now. He leaves me alone.”

“Sounds like a great marriage.”

“It is, actually,” said Ida, with a warning in her voice. “It suits me just fine.”

Raphael showed her the rest of the mill by lantern light, for
the sun had set now. He led her around with a strange apprehension, for he realized he wanted to impress her. Annoyed with himself for this weakness, he went through his precious upper floors quickly and casually. It didn’t end up mattering. At last Ida broke down laughing and admitted that she’d come in here several times while he’d been out; she’d seen all this before. Raphael felt resentful, and pleased.

When they returned to the living room, he lit the line of lanterns in their sconces, and the room flamed on all sides with the white, clean glow of alcohol. They finished the wine. Both were still only in shirts. Raphael pulled Ida down on the couch and fucked her—even Errol had to admit there was no other word—fucked her hard. His position over her felt so natural he was surprised it was new to him. The gnashing of their pelvic bones felt so familiar, the withdrawal, the attack: it was his life—thrust, retreat; drive forward, deny; press, pull away; take, take back; take, take back. He liked it. It was his life.

He fell asleep with Ida on his arm. When he awoke it was light and the lanterns on the walls were out and dry. She was gone. Be that way, thought Raphael. He proceeded upstairs to work on some broken steps and polish textile machinery; with concentration he refused to look out the front windows to her lawn, on which she’d surely be lying. He got a good deal of work done that day, almost too much in an odd sort of way. There was an edge on his life now that he wasn’t sure he liked. No matter how brightly the metal shone on the spindles, levers, and wires, the shine gave him only the thinnest satisfaction, and he was sure that if he hadn’t fixed the steps he could have jumped over the broken ones without much trouble.

Raphael worked late that night, went to sleep, which was boring, and set back to work the next morning. Still, in everything he did he felt oddly undercut, as if while he built his supports for the second-floor ceiling someone were digging underneath him, tunneling out below his mill to make the whole foundation shaky. He kept changing tasks that day, assuming if he could hit on the right job he’d feel whole and stable and sufficient again. Nothing worked, though, and he quit
early to forage for food. He went out the back door and down the path by the river to avoid her house. The detour pained him, and he tried to hike a good distance. As he drew away from her neighborhood, though, he was overcome by malaise and wandered into the theater to score some half-eaten buckets of popcorn. Of course, he knew she sometimes came here on Sunday afternoons, and Raphael hated himself for staying through two showings of a movie he had seen and disliked. At dusk he scuffled home, passing in front of her house. She wasn’t out, and her husband’s car was back. He returned heavily to the mill, fidgeted restlessly around all three floors, and finally jerked off. It was no fun. This, too, had been undercut. The fucking had been fine, but he was none too keen on this erosion.

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. Raphael 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.