The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver

       chapter one

      Errol, I’m tired of being a character.” Gray leaned back in her chair. “When I meet people they expect, you know, Gray Kaiser.”

      “You are Gray Kaiser.”

      “I’m telling you it’s exhausting.”

      “Only today, Gray. Today is exhausting.”

      They both sat, breathing hard.

      “You think I’m afraid of getting old?” asked Gray.

      “Most people are.”

      “Well, you’re wrong. I’ve planned on being a magnificent old lady since I was twelve. Katharine Hepburn: frank, arrogant, abusive. But I’ve been rehearsing that old lady for about fifty years, and now she bores me to death.”

      “When I first saw you in front of that seminar twenty-five years ago I didn’t think, ‘What a magnificent old lady.’”

      “What did you think?”

      Errol McEchern stroked his short beard and studied her perched in her armchair: so tall and lean and angular, her neck long and arched, her gray-blond hair soft and fine as filaments, her narrow pointed feet held in pretty suede heels. Was it possible she’d hardly changed in twenty-five years, or could Errol no longer see her?

      “That first afternoon,” said Errol, “I didn’t hear a word of your lecture. I just thought you were beautiful. Over and over again.”

      Gray blushed; she didn’t usually do that. “Am I special, or do you do this for everyone’s birthday?”

      “No, you’re special. You’ve always known that.”

      “Yes, Errol,” said Gray, looking away. “I guess I always have.”

      They paused, gently.

      “What did you think of me, Gray? When we first met?”

      “Not much,” she admitted. “I thought you were an intelligent, serious, handsome young man. I don’t actually remember the first time I met you.”

      “Oh boy.”

      “You want me to lie?”

      “Yes,” said Errol. “Why not.”

      Errol found himself looking around the den nostalgically. Yet he’d be here again, surely. He was at Gray’s house every day. His office was upstairs, with a desk full of important papers. And though he kept his own small apartment, he slept here most nights. Still, he seemed to be taking in the details of the room as if to mark them in his memory: the ebony masks and walking sticks and cowtail flyswitches on the walls, the totem pole in the corner, the little soapstone lion on the desk, and of course the wildebeest skeleton hung across the back of the room, leering with mortality. In fact, it was a cross between a den and a veldt. The furniture was animate: the sofa’s arms had sharp claws, its legs poised on wide paws; the heads of goats scrolled off the backs of chairs. In the paintings, leopards feasted. The carpet and upholstery were blood red. The lampshade by Gray’s head was crimson glass and gave her skin a meaty cast. “I am an animal,” Gray had said more than once. “Sometimes when I watch a herd of antelope streak over Tsavo I think I could take off with them and you’d never see me again.”

      Yet there was no danger of her taking off on the plains today. They were in Boston, and Gray did not look like an animal that was going anywhere. She’d been wounded. She was sixty years old. Though in fine shape for her age, she’d been sighted and caught in a hunter’s cross hairs. He had shot her cleanly through the heart. Though she sat there still breathing and erect, Gray had never talked about being “exhausted” before, never in her life.

      “I don’t think—less of you,” Errol stuttered, apropos of nothing.

      “For what?”

      “Ralph.”

      “Why should you think less of me?”

      He’d meant to reassure her. It wasn’t working. “Because it ended—so badly.” Then Errol blurted, “I’m sorry!” with a surge of feeling.

      “I am, too,” she said quietly, but she didn’t understand. He was sorry for everything—for her, for what he’d put off telling her all night, even, of all people, for Ralph. Jesus, he was certainly sorry for himself.

      Pale with regret, Errol paced the den, trying to delay delivering his piece of news a few minutes more. And perhaps it is possible for parts of your life to flash before your eyes even if you’re not about to die—because for a moment Errol remembered this last year of a piece, holding it in his hands like an object—a totem, a curio.

      A year ago Gray had uneventfully turned fifty-nine. Errol had finally convinced her to do a follow-up documentary on Il-Ororen: Men without History. Her now classic book of 1949 had sidestepped her most interesting material: without a doubt, Lieutenant Charles Corgie. That February, then, they’d flown to the mountains of Kenya to the far-off village of Toroto, at long last to set the world straight on the infamous lieutenant. Though he’d struck the most compelling note in the story of her first anthropological expedition, until now Corgie had been peculiarly protected.

      Shocked that Ol-Kai-zer was still alive, Il-Ororen were at first afraid of her. Yet no one could remember having seen her die. When she described how she’d escaped from Toroto, the natives dropped their supernatural explanations and soon decided to cooperate with Gray’s film. They recalled that in ’48 she’d taught them crop rotation; a few claimed she’d shot “only fifteen or twenty” Africans, which struck Il-Ororen as moderate, even restrained. The rest, of course, declared she’d shot “thousands,” but then the whole story of Corgie had clearly gotten out of control. Il-Ororen lied fantastically. Charles Corgie had taught them how.

      The first day Errol remembered as out of the ordinary was the afternoon they were hiking from the airstrip to Toroto, since some of their equipment had