Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  At once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer, Daniel and Christy agreed with Hogue.

  “We’re careful people,” Christy said. Carefully, she averted her face from Hogue’s gaze, and gave her husband a brief grimace of not quite mock alarm.

  “Careful people with limited resources,” Daniel said. He hadn’t decided whether to tell Christy that, two days earlier, her father had taken him to lunch at the University Club and offered to make a present of any reasonably priced house they might choose. After the war, Mr. Kite had founded an industrial advertising agency, landed the accounts of several major suppliers to Boeing, and then, at the age of sixty-two, sold his company for enough money to buy a condominium on the ninth hole at Salishan and a little cabaña down on the beach at Cabo San Lucas. Daniel, a graduate student in astronomy at U.W., where Christy taught psychology, didn’t have any money of his own. Neither, for that matter, did his father, who, in the years of Mr. Kite’s prosperity, had run two liquor stores, a printshop, and a five-and-dime into the ground, and now lived with Daniel’s mother amid the coconut palms and peeling white stucco of an internment camp for impoverished old people not far from Delray Beach. “Maybe we ought to just—”

  Christy cut him off with a sharp look. The lighter popped out, and Hogue reached for it, and they watched in uncomfortable silence as, hands shaking, he tried to light his cigarette. After several seconds and a great deal of fearsome wheezing, the few frayed strands of tobacco he had succeeded in getting lit fell out of the end of the cigarette, landed in his lap, and began to burn his chinos. He slapped at his thigh, scowling all the while at the house, as if it, or its occupants, were somehow responsible for his ignition.

  “Maybe we ought to take a look at it, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said.

  Mr. Hogue looked back over at the house. He took a deep breath.

  “I guess we’d better,” he said. He opened his door and got out of the car, eyeing the house warily.

  Daniel and Christy lingered a moment by the Mercedes, whispering.

  “He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Christy observed, buttoning the top button of her white cardigan. “He looks awful.”

  “Did he look better at our wedding?”

  Daniel understood that Bob Hogue had been among the guests at their wedding, the summer before last, but his recollection of that remote afternoon had grown vague. In fact, the great event itself had, at the time, unfolded around him at a certain vague remove. He had felt not like the star attraction, along with Christy, of a moderately lavish civil ceremony held on the slope of a Laurelhurst lawn so much as like a tourist, lost in a foreign country, who had turned in to an unfamiliar street and found himself swallowed up in the clamor of a parade marking the feast day of some silken and barbarous religion. He remembered this Bob Hogue and his handsome wife, Monica, no better than he remembered Bill and Sylvia Bond, Roger and Evelyn Holsapple, Ralph and Betsy Lindstrom, or any of the three hundred other handsome old friends of his in-laws who had made up the bulk of the wedding guests. He knew that Hogue was a college chum and occasional golfing partner of his father-in-law’s, and he was aware that an acrid ribbon of bad news was sent curling toward the ceiling of any room in which Bob Hogue’s name was brought up, though he could never keep straight whether Hogue had married the lush, or fathered the Scientologist, or lost a piece of his left lung to cancer.

  “To tell you the truth,” Christy said, “I don’t remember him at our wedding. I don’t really know the Hogues very well. I just kind of remember how he looked when I was little.”

  “Well, no wonder he looks awful, then.” He stepped back to admire her in her smart green Vittadini dress. Her bare legs were new-shaven, so smooth that they glinted in the sun, and through the gaps in her open-toed flats you could see a couple of slender toes, nails painted pink. “You, however, look very nice.”

  She smiled, and her pupils dilated, flooding her eyes with a darkness. “I liked what we did last night.”

  “So did I,” Daniel said at once. Last night they had lain on top of their down comforter, with their heads at opposite ends of their bed, and massaged each other’s feet with fragrant oil, by candlelight, while Al Green cooed to them in the background. This was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.

  “Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”

  “Sorry,” said Daniel.

  They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.

  “Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.

  “Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.

  When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.

  “Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”

  Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.

  “Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.

  Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.

  “Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.

  “Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”

  Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue—slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob—had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown
still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.

  “Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”

  “Well, yeah. We really do.”

  The blood went out of Hogue’s face.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I—I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be—” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned the ground under the long rhododendron hedges that flanked the door. He moved crabwise along the row of shrubbery until he disappeared around the corner of the house.

  “I remember him now,” said Daniel.

  Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.

  “I hope he’s all right.”

  “I think he just needs a drink.”

  “Hush, Daniel, please.”

  “Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”

  “Did he make a toast?”

  “It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”

  “Daniel.”

  “This is a waste.”

  “Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”

  “Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”

  “What else can I say?”

  “Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”

  “Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile—the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.

  “Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”

  They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand—three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club—seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.

  It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had been re-covered with pieces of a Persian kilim, a low Moroccan table with a hammered-brass top, an old blue Chinese Deco rug, and a small collection of art books and local Indian basketry, arranged with mock haphazardness on the built-in shelves. The desired effect was doubtless an eclectic yet contemporary spareness, but the room was very large, and to Daniel it just looked emptied.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Hogue?” Christy said, elbowing Daniel.

  Mr. Hogue stood on the Chinese rug, surveying the living room with his eyes wide and his mouth open, a hand pressed to his midsection as though he had been sandbagged.

  “Eh? Oh, why, yes, it’s just—they just—they changed things around a little bit,” he said. “Since the last time I was here.”

  From his astonished expression it was hard to believe that Hogue had ever seen the place before. Daniel wondered if Hogue hadn’t simply plucked it at random out of a listing book and driven them over here to satisfy some sense of obligation to Christy’s parents. Clearly the owners had not been expecting anyone to come through this morning; there was an old knit afghan lying twisted on the love seat, a splayed magazine on one of the chairs, and a half-empty glass of tomato juice on the brass table.

  “Mr. Hogue?” said Christy. “Are you sure this is okay?”

  “Fine,” said Hogue. He pointed to a pair of French doors at the far end of the living room. “I believe you’ll find the dining room through there.” Daniel followed Christy into the dining room, which was cool and shady and furnished with whitewashed birch chairs and a birch-wood table with an immense glass top. In the center of the table sat a small black lacquer bowl in which a gardenia floated, its petals scorched at the edges by decay.

  “Nice,” Daniel said, although he always misgave at the odor of gardenias, which tempted with a promise of apples and vanilla beans but finished in a bitter blast of vitamins and burnt wire.

  “Come on, Daniel. We can’t afford this.”

  “Did I say we could?”

  “Please don’t be a bastard.”

  “Was I being a bastard?”

  Christy sighed and looked back toward the living room. Hogue hadn’t joined them yet; he seemed to have disappeared. He was probably back in the foyer, Daniel thought, looking around for the fact sheet on the house, so that he could pretend to be knowledgeable about it. Christy lowered her voice and spoke into Daniel’s ear. Her breath played across the inner hairs of his ear and raised gooseflesh all down his forearms.

  “Do you think he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore?”

  “What do you mean?” Daniel said, taking an involuntary step away from her. Her scarf had come loose at the back, allowing a thick lank strand of her unwashed dark hair to dangle alongside her face. It was not healthy to overwash the hair—that was why she was wearing the jazzy scarf—and Daniel imagined he could still smell smoke on it from the Astronomy Department barbecue they had attended the night before.

  “I mean, with the lockbox, and all—do you think he’s been disbarred? Or whatever they do to realtors?”

  “They make them unreal,” Daniel suggested. He reached up and took hold of her scarf, and teased it loose. All of her smoky hair spilled down around her head.

  “Why did you do that?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. He handed her the scarf, and she bound up her hair once more. “I’ll go check on Mr. Hogue.”

  He went through the French doors back into the living room. Hogue was standing at the far end, where it opened onto the foyer, with his back to Daniel. There were built-in shelves on this side of the room, also, peopled with a sparse collection of small objets and half a dozen framed photographs of infants and graduates and an Irish setter in an orange life preserver. As Daniel came in, Hogue was fingering something small and glittering, a piece of crystal or a glass animal. He picked it up, examined it, and then slipped it into the right hip pocket of his jacket.

  “Coming,” he said, after Daniel, rendered speechless, managed to clear his throat in alarm. Hogue turned, and for an instant, before his face resumed its habitual clench-jawed jet-pilot tautness, he looked grimly, mysteriously pleased with himself, like a man who had just exacted a small and glittering measure of revenge. Then he accompanied Daniel into the dining room, and Daniel tried to think of something plausible to ask him. What did normal husbands say to normal real-estate agents at this stage of the game? It occurred to him that Hogue had not yet mentioned the asking price of the house.

  “So what do they want, anyway, Mr. Hogue?” he tried.

  “God only knows,” Hogue said. He reached down toward the black lacquer bowl and picked up the gardenia, holding it by the clipped, dripping stem underneath. He brought it to his nose, took a deep draft of it, and then let out a long artificial sigh of delight. With Daniel looking r
ight at him, he slipped the flower into the pocket of his jacket, too. “Let’s have a look at that kitchen, shall we?”

  So Daniel followed him into the kitchen, where Christy was exclaiming with a purely formal enthusiasm over the alderwood cabinets, the ceramic stove burners, the wavering light off the lake.

  “What a waste, eh?” Hogue said. A dark patch of dampness was spreading across the fabric of his pocket. “They put I don’t know how many thousands of dollars into it.” He reached over to a sliding rheostat on the wall and made the track lighting bloom and dwindle and bloom. He shook his head. “Now then, this way to the family room. TV room. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  He slid a louvered door aside and went into the next room. Christy gestured to Daniel to come and stand beside her. Daniel looked back at the dining room. A lone leaf spun on the surface of the water in the lacquer bowl.

  “Daniel, are you coming?” said Christy.

  “There’s something weird about this house,” said Daniel.

  “I wonder what,” Christy said, giving her eyes a theatrical roll toward the family room and Mr. Hogue. As he passed through the kitchen, Daniel looked around, trying to see if anything portable was missing—a paradoxical exercise, given that he had never laid eyes on the room before. Sugar bowl, saltshaker, pepper mill, tea tongs trailing a winding rusty ribbon of dried tea. On the kitchen counter, under the telephone, lay a neat pile of letters and envelopes, and Daniel thought Hogue might have grabbed some of these, but they had been rubber-banded together and they looked undisturbed. A business card was affixed with a paper clip to the uppermost letter, printed with the name and telephone number of a Sergeant Matt Reedy of the Domestic Violence Unit of the Seattle Police Department. Daniel peeled back the pleat of the letter it was clipped to—it was out of its envelope—and peeked at its salutation, typed on an old typewriter that dropped its O’s.

  “DEAR BITCH,” he read. “ARE YOU AND HERMAN HAPPY NOW, YOU—”

  “Daniel! What are you doing?”