The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ Even with Charlie Corgie ready to cart them off down the trail. But you would.” Charles looked at her steadily. “We’re not so different.”

      It was appalling. Gray found herself flattered. That was how she knew he was right.

      “I know,” said Charles, looking Gray up and down. “You think of yourself as some sort of warm, gooey-hearted darling. I don’t buy it.”

      “How do you know what I’m like?”

      “The way you move. That’s the way I get everybody’s number. I’m never wrong. For example, I’ve never met such a tall woman who walked around so straight.”

      “You can tell I would shoot you because I have good posture?”

      “Sure. And more. You use your hands a lot when you talk. They cut the air, slash, slash.” Charles did a comic demonstration. Gray couldn’t help but laugh. “Listen, I’ve made a study of this. I didn’t know the language when I got here. We used sign language. The natives signed completely different for the same word. Some signed way out here.” Charles flailed his hands on either side. “They’re wide open. Trusting. Crazy. You operate from the center. You keep your hands close in, stab and parry. You’d be good with a knife. And,” he went on, “you keep your chin up. You have an unnerving stare and a long stride. You’re sarcastic and you obviously think you’re so smart. In short, Miss Kaiser,” said Charles, taking his gun back from the table, “you move like a real bitch.”

      Charles walked out the door, letting his hand graze her hip as he walked by. Gray let out a slow, controlled breath and ground her molars together. No one had warned her that anthropology was going to be so complicated.

      Gradually Gray and Charles worked out their truce. Charles would allow Gray to study Il-Ororen as long as she did her part in promoting his mythology. Gray cooperated, but she didn’t understand how they got away with it. While they took the most obvious precautions with injury and excretion, they still sweated and coughed and laughed, ate and grew tired and slept long, heavy nights. There was a thin line between being improbable and being debunked altogether, and the two of them trod this line as precariously as she’d skirted the ledges to this village. It was a long way down.

      The other abyss before them was their future. Gray would conclude her study, and then what? Likewise, Corgie’s religious gadgetry was nearing its demise: the spare airplane batteries off which he ran his miraculous radio were finally running down. His stores of ammunition were running down.

      “Do you ever think about going back to the U.S.?” asked Gray one day.

      “I’m a god,” said Charles. “Why should I go back and be a schmo?”

      The trouble was, while when Gray arrived Charles had seemed beleaguered, he now seemed to be enjoying his life among Il-Ororen with great gusto.

      While Corgie was working on his projects, Gray helped the natives with their spring planting. It was right before the rains, but the only crop Charles cared about was his ersatz tobacco, so Gray taught Il-Ororen about topsoil and terracing while Corgie milled wood. Their first conflicts were over allocation of labor. Gray wanted tillers; Corgie wanted lumberjacks. Finally, Gray asked in the middle of a ritual confrontation over a work crew, “Why are you building that stupid tower, anyway?”

      “Because I’m going to put a restaurant on top, why do you think?” said Charles blackly. “Three stars, with a great view of the city lights.”

      “It seems about as useful—”

      “Just the point, I don’t care about useful. I will build a scale model of King Kong or a ten-foot wooden replica of the Great American Hamburger if that’s what I feel like. Understand? And if I wake up one morning and decide that I can’t live without an Egyptian pyramid in my back yard, then these poor bastards will spend the rest of their lives mining stone—”

      “Until they starve to death, and you with them. That’s all very capricious, but without a few Egyptians growing bananas along the Nile, those pharaohs would never have gotten past the first story. Alot-too-toni,” she said imperiously to the men, and looking confusedly from Gray to Corgie and back again, they followed Gray down the path to her fields, leaving Corgie by his half-built Babel furiously without lumber for the rest of the day.

      Grudgingly, Charles walled off a portion of his one-room Olympus for Gray. It was thanks to this arrangement that she discovered the advantages of being a god extended well beyond architecture.

      Lying in bed one night, Gray heard the ladder outside clatter and a woman’s shy, nervous laughter. The ladder was withdrawn again, and set with a clack on the other side of Gray’s bedroom wall. Fully awake now, Gray listened stiffly to the noises from Corgie’s bed. She was used to his gruff, angry orders in the night; Corgie didn’t sleep easily, as, she thought, he had no right to. She was used to the occasional clatter of his rifle when it fell from his arms; though it was terrifying to wake this way, she actually preferred those times the rifle fell and even went off to what she was hearing now: the rustling, a chuckle, a light feminine squeal. A growl and snuffling as if an animal were rummaging through his things. Then, worst of all, the sound of Charles Corgie peacefully, silently asleep for the first time Gray had ever heard.

      Gray’s toe cramped. She found she had a headache. Her eyes narrowed in the darkness. She rearranged herself loudly, sighed, and drummed the bedside with her fingertips. She was still awake when early that morning she heard the pad of small feet, a brusque grunt from Charles, and the ladder again, down and up. A great male sigh. Only then did Gray turn limply on her side and doze for a couple of hours.

      “You slept soundly last night,” said Gray as they peeled mangoes at breakfast.

      “Yes,” said Charles. “I feel refreshed.” He was imbedded in his mango up to the second knuckle.

      Gray only toyed with hers, listlessly pulling the gooey orange strings apart and then leaving them in a pulpy pile. “I think you and I need to have a religious conference.”

      “Convened,” said Charles. “Shoot.”

      “Do you have to be so jaunty?”

      “You’re always badgering me for being surly at breakfast. For once I wake up in a good mood and you run me down for that, too. I can’t win, Kaiser.”

      Gray squashed a piece of fruit between her fingers. “I want to discuss a point of catechism.”

      “Philosophy! So early, too. That brain of yours must start ticking away as soon as your feet hit the floor.”

      “Some mornings,” said Gray. “But I don’t want to talk theory. I want to talk practice.”

      “Which makes perfect, as I remember.”

      “That depends on what you’re practicing.”

      Having finished off his mango, Charles started in on a banana with large, lunging mouthfuls. “Want one?”

      Gray shook her head. “You’ve got quite an appetite today.”

      “I have quite an appetite, period,” said Charles. “So what’s our Sunday-school lesson for today?”

      Gray crossed her arms. “Listen, I think we should discuss this, but not because I’m prim. We take so many precautions to avoid the appearance of mortality. But СКАЧАТЬ