Читать книгу The Female of the Species - Lionel Shriver - Страница 10

I’ve decided what to do with you,” said Charles cheerfully the next morning. He was shaving, with a sheet of polished aluminum from the siding of his airplane propped up for a mirror.

“Oh?” asked Gray warily, still groggy and on the floor.

“Yes.” Charles raised his chin in the air to sweep the razor underneath. “I’ve decided to let you go.”

The blade made a sheer scraping sound that raised the hair on Gray’s arms. “I did not come here,” said Gray, “to go.”

“You shouldn’t have come here at all,” said Charles. “You made a mistake. Usually when we make mistakes, that’s it. But: you are dealing with Little Jesus. You have your own personal fairy godfather. Click your heels together and in your case it will work.”

Gray picked herself up in order to get a better view of his face. Charles did not look at her but scrutinized his chin more closely. There was a bullet hole in the siding, and his stubble distorted and rippled in the aluminum.

“Aren’t you concerned that I’ll tell?” asked Gray slowly. “About you? About Toroto?”

“Now, why would you do that? When I’ve been so gracious? And these people have someone to take care of them?”

Charles may not have been looking at Gray, but Gray was certainly looking at Charles now, very very carefully. “Because I’m an anthropologist. I’d want to come back with reinforcements.”

“So military! And I thought we were friends.”

“You’re the one who sees this village as one more battle of World War II.”

“Against them, not you, sweetheart.”

“Sweetheart is on their side.”

Charles clucked his tongue. “No racial loyalty.”

“The point is, I’d have every reason to return here with company. You’ve murdered people here. This is a British colony. You could be arrested.”

“Miss Kaiser, are you trying to convince me to shoot you?”

“I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already thought about.”

Charles said nothing. It seemed to Gray he should have finished shaving by now. His face looked smooth. Still, Charles picked at individual patches with great attention.

“What are you planning to do, turn me loose in the bush? I had a guide to get here. How would I find my way out?”

“You could have an escort partway. Why, maybe the Tooth Fairy himself would help you up the cliffs.”

“Maybe I’ll stay here.”

“Sorry. No room at the inn. Booked for the season. Manger’s filled, too. One Jesus per village. It’s checkout time.”

“When those Jews were gassed in the camps,” said Gray softly, “they were told they were going to take a shower.”

Charles turned toward her finally and looked her in the eye. He said nothing. His eyes were large and deep and black and hard to read. The muscles in his face did not move.

“All right,” said Gray. “Maybe you hadn’t decided. But it had occurred to you. There was a good chance.”

Still, he said nothing.

“It makes you feel a little funny, doesn’t it?” said Gray. “You think because I’m white, American, it’s different. But you also know, deep down, that it’s no different, and that you could do it.”

It was a strange moment. Charles still wouldn’t speak. There was nothing else for Gray to do but keep going. “I just feel we should discuss this, since I plan on staying here a while. For example, I find it pretty amazing that anyone could be so convinced of his own personal importance that no one’s sacrifice is too great. I mean, how many people, Charles? Is there any limit? You and Adolf. You may not like him, but. How many, Lieutenant?”

Charles seemed almost to smile. He turned his head a few degrees and looked at Gray from an angle. He pointed his forefinger slowly at her chest. “I don’t believe you,” he said at last.

“What?”

“I don’t believe you’re amazed. That you don’t understand.” Charles took his rifle from against the wall and slid it onto the table in front of her. “There. If you thought you could get away with it. If there weren’t several hundred religious fanatics outside that door. Would you use this? On me?”

This time it was Gray’s turn to be quiet.

“See?” said Charles. “If you climbed out of your cockpit a little dazed from an insanely lucky crash landing and you were surrounded by crouching men with sharp poles, would you be willing to shoot just one of them to make a point?”

Gray said nothing.

“And if one, why not two, if that’s what it took? And maybe, Miss Kaiser, over five years it would take even more than two.”

Gray stared down at the gun. “So is everyone like this?”

Charles stroked his chin. He touched it with a certain surprise, as if he’d never felt it so smooth; he didn’t seem to like it. He took his hand away. “Some women wouldn’t pick up that rifle, would they? 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 your adventure last night seemed perilously biological.”

Charles put his feet up on the table. “Kaiser, sweetheart, it’s great to hear you worry about keeping the old religion afloat. But believe me, when it comes to keeping an eye on my ass I am an expert—”

“Seems to me you had your eye on someone else’s last night.”

Corgie grinned. “They like it.”

Gray stood up. “Well, I don’t.” She walked out the door, Charles laughing after her.

“They think it makes them powerful,” said Charles, leaning over the ladder as Gray clipped rapidly down.

“That’s precisely my point,” said Gray. “I think it does.”

Charles must have watched her brisk and unusually rigid stride to her precious furrows with a smile on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eye.

In the process of overseeing the planting, Gray also conducted informal interviews. Especially after she’d applied first aid to several farming injuries, Il-Ororen confided in her completely. At the end of the day Gray would go back to Corgie’s cabin and take furious notes.

What fascinated Gray as she studied this tribe was that, on a scale of generations, they hadn’t been separated from the Masai very long. It seems they’d deliberately purged themselves of their own history. Maliciously they insisted on having no ancestors but those they could remember, no larger culture to which they owed their ability to throw pots, to mine and forge metal tools. Their creation myths and cautionary tales were no longer traditional Masai ones. While they still built kraals, they gladly constructed new blond structures. Nor had they gradually distorted Masai music, ceremonies, and dances; they had dumped them. Il-Ororen had invented themselves.

Most surprising of all, Gray now had no doubt that, while they resented particular tyrannies and didn’t understand the gymnasium, they cooperated willingly with Charles Corgie. She’d anticipated a gentle native population abused and manipulated by a cruel Western intruder. Instead, she found a ruthless people that had eagerly latched on to an appropriate sovereign. They liked Corgie’s projects. They enjoyed his anger as long as it wasn’t directed against them personally. They identified with his arrogance. They’d rooted Corgie deeply in their mythology, and told stories as if his arrival had been predicted for generations, like a messiah. Il-Ororen were the only people in the world, and they’d gotten themselves their own private god.

Gray’s concern, however, was with the arrogance that Il-Ororen and Corgie shared. It had bound them; it could sever them, too. A truly arrogant people were easily dissatisfied and individually ambitious. They would have a high leadership turnover. Corgie had been among Il-Ororen for five years, and that struck Gray more and more as a long time.

Several times a year Corgie had a church service.

“What if I don’t want to go?” Gray asked that morning. All around them Il-Ororen were painting themselves with colored clay and plaiting braids; it reminded Gray too vividly of Sunday mornings when she would pull the covers over her head while her mother put on makeup and fixed her hair with grotesque cheerfulness.

“Gray, darling,” said Charles as he prepared himself for the service, trying on his red baseball cap at different angles in his airplane mirror. “When you’re the one giving the party, you don’t get to decide whether or not to show. You’re on the program. How’s that?” He turned to her with the visor off to the back.

“Little Rascals.”

“Perfect. Now, Kaiser, you old cow, what are you wearing?”

Gray spread her hands. As usual, she was in khaki work clothes.

“You have no sense of celebration,” Charles chided.

“What’s there to celebrate?”

“Nothing more nor less than ourselves, Gray dear.” Charles was bouncing around the cabin so that the structure shook. “For you,” he added, “a tie.” He proceeded to tie a Windsor knot around his bare neck. In some wacky way, with the red cap, it was cute. Once Charles threw on his flight jacket, laced his boots over his pants, strapped on his Air Force goggles, and, the final touch, hung one of those long, hand-rolled cigarettes out the side of his mouth, he stood before Gray for inspection.

“You look—absolutely—insane,” she said, laughing until she fell over on the bed.

Charles flicked an ash. “Excellent. Now for you.”

“Not a chance,” said Gray. “The dignified anthropologist will take notes sedately in the back.”

“Don’t be boring,” said Charles. “What did you always secretly want to wear in church?”

“Khaki work clothes. I hated dresses.”

“Think again.”

Gray smiled. “Well. When I first got breasts, my mother used to foam at the mouth if I wore a low-cut blouse to church. So I’d walk out the door with my coat on, buttoned up to the chin. She’d find out about my neckline when we got there and take a scarf out of her purse, swathe it around my neck, and tuck it in the bodice. It would clash with my outfit, of course. I’d scream …” Gray laughed. “I tore it up once. Threw it down in the parking lot. I was like that.”

“You still are.”

“I don’t throw tantrums anymore.”

“You get what you want, though.”

“Yes,” said Gray, “everything.” She said this simply and with certainty; it must have disconcerted her later, since there were a few things she didn’t get—she was talking to one of them that morning.

“Then Gray will go to church in something plunging. Or how’d you like to go topless? It’s in vogue here.”

“Charles, I’d think you’d be bored by now with looking at women’s breasts.”

“Not by yours.”

Gray looked at her hands.

“All right,” said Charles with a clap. “I’ve got it.” He rummaged around the cabin until he found a long scrap of cheetah skin. “Your shirt.”

“No!” said Gray, but with Corgie’s urging she went behind her partition and tied it around her chest. For her skirt he dragged out his old parachute and began to tear off a long swath of the silk.

“Are you sure you want to rip that up?”

“Now, what good is a parachute going to do me in Toroto?”

“You never know when you’re going to have to bail out of here.”

“You bring that up a lot,” said Charles, tucking the chute around her hips, making a full, low-swung wrap, like a belly dancer’s. “My leaving. You don’t seem to get it, Kaiser. I’m gonna be buried here.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Ah-ah. No more morbid talk. Now, let’s see.” He patted her hip. “Step back.” She did so; Charles let out a slow whistle. “Terrific.”

Gray looked down at the thin band of animal skin around her breasts, the long flat expanse of her bare stomach, the blousy white silk draping down to her feet. She extended her leg between the folds and smiled. “It’s slit practically up to my waist, Charles.”

“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.