The Female of the Species. Lionel ShriverЧитать онлайн книгу.
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.
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.