Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “Nothing,” Daniel said, letting the letter fall shut again. “They, uh, they seem to be having some problems, the people who live in this house.”

  “Nothing that’s our business, Daniel,” Christy said, with what seemed to him excessive primness, taking hold of his hand.

  Daniel yanked his hand free. He could hear Mr. Hogue muttering to himself in the other room.

  “Ouch!” said Christy, bringing her fingers to her lips to kiss the joints he’d wrenched. She eyed the pile of letters on the counter. “What did it say?”

  “It said maybe they ought to try rubbing each other’s feet a little more often.”

  Now Christy really looked hurt.

  “If you didn’t want to do it, Daniel, I wish—”

  “What’s going on in here?” said Mr. Hogue, returning from the family room.

  “We’re just coming now,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It’s just—man, this kitchen is incredible.”

  Hogue gave a sour nod, lips pressed together. There was an obvious bulge in his right hip pocket now, and what appeared to be a table-tennis paddle protruding from the left one.

  “Incredible,” he agreed.

  In the family room, when they joined him there, Hogue stole a well-thumbed paperback copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography which was lying out on the coffee table, and in the small, tobacco-stained den off the foyer he took a little brass paperweight in the shape of a reclining pasha with curled slippers. When they went out to the garage, where, along with a long, slender automobile hidden under a canvas cover, there was a well-stocked workbench, he filched a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure, and something else that Daniel couldn’t quite determine the nature of. The thefts were blatant and apparently unself-conscious, and by the time they got upstairs to the second guest bedroom, Christy, too, was watching in a kind of jolly dread as Mr. Hogue worked the place over. He took a souvenir Space Needle, and a rubber coin purse, and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts. When he led the young couple at last into the master bedroom, his pockets were jangling.

  He stopped short as he entered the room, so that Daniel and Christy nearly collided with him. He looked around at the big four-poster bed, the heavy Eastlake dresser and wardrobe, the walls covered in an unusual dark paper the red of old leather books. Once again Hogue marveled, in the same openmouthed, oddly crestfallen manner, as if the bedroom’s decor, like the living room’s, came to him, somehow, as a blow. As in the living room, there was no indication that the sellers had been expecting anyone to come through. The bed was unmade, and there were some ruffled white blouses and several bras and pairs of women’s underpants heaped on the floor by the door. Hogue crossed the dark red room to a door opposite, which appeared to give onto a screened-in sleeping porch. Windows on either side of the door let in some of the bright September light pouring through the outer windows of the porch.

  “I’d sure like to lie down in that hammock out there,” Hogue said, with surprising wistfulness. He gave the knob an experimental twist. It was locked. He pressed his face to the glass. “God, I’m tired.”

  He reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette and found nothing there. He looked back and smiled thinly at Daniel and Christy, as if they had played a cruel trick on him, hiding the only solace of a weary and overworked man. Then he patted down all his clattering pockets until he came up with a tattered Pall Mall. He went over to a marble-topped nightstand beside the bed and pulled open its drawer. He scrabbled around inside until he found a book of matches. His hands were shaking so badly now that he dropped the cigarette. Then he dropped the burning match. At last he succeeded in getting the thing lit. He blew a plume of smoke toward the pillows of the big, disorderly bed.

  “You’ll get the sun almost all day long in this room,” he said, dreamily. “It’s a shame to paper it over so dark.” Then he flicked ashes onto the polished fir floor.

  “All right, Mr. Hogue,” said Christy, with all the sharpness of tone she was capable of mustering. “I guess we’ve seen enough.”

  “All right,” said Hogue, though he didn’t move. He just stood there, looking out at the canvas hammock that was hung between two pillars of the sleeping porch.

  “We’ll meet you downstairs, how about?” Daniel said. “How about you just give us a minute to talk things over between ourselves. You know. Look around one more time. You can’t rush into something like this, right?”

  Hogue swallowed, and some of the old flush of anger seemed to return now to the tips of his ears and to the skin at the back of his neck. Daniel could see that it was Hogue who wanted to be left alone here, in this bedroom, contemplating all his untold mistakes and whatever it was that was eating at him. He wanted them out of there. Christy sidled up to Daniel and pressed herself against him, hip to his thigh, cheek against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and pressed his fingers against the slight bulge of skin under the strap of her bra.

  “You know how important the bedroom is,” Christy said, in a strangled voice.

  Hogue took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, eyeing them. Then, as before, the fire seemed to go out of him, and he nodded.

  “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “You kids take all the time you want.”

  He went out of the room, but before he did so, he stopped by the pile of laundry, picked up a rather large pair of lobelia blue panties with a lace waistband, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest of his loot. They heard his tread on the stairs, and then, a moment later, the sound of a cabinet door squealing open on its hinges.

  “He’s going for the silver,” Daniel said.

  “Daniel, what are we going to do?”

  Daniel shrugged. He sat down on the unmade bed, beside the nightstand that Hogue had rifled for matches.

  “Maybe I should call my parents,” Christy said. “They know Bob. Maybe they know what to do when he gets this way.”

  “I think it’s a little too late for us to snub him,” said Daniel.

  Christy looked at him, angry and puzzled by the persistence of his nastiness toward her.

  “That’s not fair,” she said. “God! Just because my parents—”

  “Check this out.” Daniel had been rummaging around in the nightstand drawer, where he had found, in addition to a bag of Ricola cough drops, a silver police whistle, and a small plastic vial of a popular genital lubricant, a greeting card, in a pink envelope that was laconically addressed “Monkey.” He pulled out the card, on the cover of which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were locked in a passionate black-and-white embrace. The greeting was handwritten: “I have tripped and fallen in love with you. Herman.” After a moment Daniel looked up, feeling a little confused, and handed it to Christy. She took it with a disapproving frown.

  “Herman,” she read. “Herman Silk?”

  “I guess it’s a little extra service he provides.”

  “He must be selling his own house.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “Do they do that?”

  “Why not?” Daniel said. “Plenty of people sell their own houses.”

  “True.”

  He showed her the vial of lubricant.

  “Maybe he should have said, ‘I have slipped and fallen.’ ”

  “Daniel, put that back. I mean it.” She gestured downstairs. “Just because he’s doing it doesn’t mean you should.” She snatched the little plastic bottle out of his hand, tossed it and the greeting card into the drawer, and then slammed the drawer shut. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”

  They glared at each other, and then Daniel stood up. He felt a strong desire for his wife. He wanted to push her down onto the bed and pound her until his bones hurt and the smell of smoke from her hair filled the bedroom. But he would never do anything like that. And neither would she. Not in someone else’s house, in someone else’s bed. They were, both of them, hypochondriacs and low rollers, habitual occupants of the right lane on freeways, inveterate savers of receipts, subscribers to Consumer Reports, filterers of tap water, we
arers of helmets and goggles and kneepads. And yet their prudence—prudence itself, it now seemed to Daniel, watching Christy’s freckled breast fall and rise and fall—was an illusion, a thin padded blanket they drew around themselves to cushion the impact from the string of bad decisions each of them had made. For all their apparent caution, they had nonetheless married each other, willingly and without material compulsion, in the presence of the three hundred people. Christy had agreed to join herself in perpetuity to a man whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist, and Daniel had consigned himself to a life spent as a hundred and sixty-two pounds of hair in her mouth and elbows in her rib cage and hot breath in her nostrils.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  For a moment she looked very surprised by this admission. Then she stuck out her jaw and narrowed her eyes.

  “Well, I hate you, too,” she said.

  Daniel fell on top of her. He was a little self-conscious at first about the animal sounds he heard them making and the way they were biting and tearing at each other’s clothes. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of a key scene in Spanking Brittany Blue. Then some spasm sent Christy’s hand flying, and she smacked Daniel in the eye. Inside his skull a bright red star flared and then winked out. After that, he forgot to pay attention to what they were doing. The bed underneath them smelled of its right occupants, of the night sweat and the aftershave and the skin lotion of Herman Silk and his Monkey. A loose board in the old fir floor rhythmically creaked. When the proper time came, Daniel reached into the drawer for Herman’s little bottle of lubricant. He turned Christy over on her belly, and spread her legs with his knee, and greased her freely with the cold, clear stuff. His entry into her was, for the first time, effortless and quick.

  “That was fun,” Christy said, when it was over. She stretched her limbs across the wrecked bed as if to embrace it, and rolled, like a cat, back and forth, until it was smeared with the manifold compound of their lovemaking.

  “Still hate me?” said Daniel.

  She nodded, and that was when Daniel saw the mistake that they had made. Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe—a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

  “I had lunch with your father the other day,” he began.

  “Shh!” Christy said.

  He lay beside her, listening. From downstairs they could hear the sound of raised voices. A man and a woman were shouting at each other. The man was Mr. Hogue.

  “I’m going to call the police, Bob,” the woman said.

  Daniel and Christy looked at each other. They stood up and scrambled to reassemble their clothes. Daniel slipped the vial of lubricant into his pocket. Then they went downstairs.

  When they came into the kitchen, Mr. Hogue was lying on the floor, amid hundreds and hundreds of spilt threepenny nails, cupping his chin in his hands. Blood leaked out between his fingers and drizzled down his neck into the plaid of his madras jacket. The reclining brass pasha, the Ping-Pong paddle, Space Needle, and all the other things he had stolen lay scattered on the floor around him. A handsome woman with red spectacles, whom Daniel recognized as Mrs. Hogue, was kneeling beside him, tears on her face, wiping at the cut on his chin with a paper towel.

  “Christy,” she said. “Hello, Daniel.”

  She smiled ruefully and looked down at Mr. Hogue, moaning and whispering curses on the terra-cotta floor.

  “Is he okay?” Daniel said, pointing to the realtor, who was, he saw now, no stranger to these troubled rooms.

  “I certainly hope not. I hit him as hard as I could.” Mrs. Hogue dabbed tenderly at the cut with the paper towel, then looked around at the kitchen she had renovated at such great expense. “So,” she said, “what do you two think of the house?”

  Daniel looked at Christy. She had lost her scarf sometime in the course of their struggle upstairs. Her face was a blur of smeared lipstick and streaked mascara and the radiant blood in her cheeks.

  “It’s perfect,” he said.

  Son of the Wolfman

  WHEN THE MAN CHARGED with being the so-called Reservoir Rapist was brought to justice, several of the women who had been his victims came forward and identified themselves in the newspapers. The suspect, eventually convicted and sentenced to fifteen years at Pelican Bay, was a popular coach and math instructor at a high school in the Valley. He had won a state award for excellence in teaching. Two dozen present and former students and players, as well as the principal of his school, offered to testify in behalf of his good character at his trial. It was the man’s solid position in the community, and the mishandling of a key piece of evidence, that led some of his victims to feel obliged to surrender the traditional veil of anonymity which the LAPD and the newspapers had granted them, and tell their painful stories not merely to a jury but to the world at large. The second of the Reservoir Rapist’s eight victims, however, was not among these women. She had been attacked on August 7, 1995, as she jogged at dusk around Lake Hollywood. This was the perpetrator’s preferred time of day, and one of three locations he favored in committing his attacks, the other two being the Stone Canyon and Franklin Reservoirs; such regular habits led in the end to his capture, on August 29. A day before the arrest, the faint pink proof of a cross, fixed in the developing fluid of her urine, informed the Reservoir Rapist’s second victim, Cara Glanzman, that she was pregnant.

  Cara, a casting agent, was married to Richard Case, a television cameraman. They were both thirty-four years old. They had met and become lovers at Bucknell University and at the time of the attack had been married since 1985. In their twelve years together, neither had been unfaithful to the other, and in all that time Cara had never gotten pregnant, neither by accident nor when she was trying with all of her might. For the past five years this unbroken chain of menses had been a source of sorrow, dissension, tempest, and recrimination in Cara and Richard’s marriage. On the day she was raped, in fact, Cara had called an attorney friend of her best friend, just to discuss, in a vague, strangely hopeful way, the means and procedures of getting a divorce in California. After the attack her sense of punishment for having been so disloyal to Richard was powerful, and it is likely that, even had she not found herself pregnant with Derrick James Cooper’s child, she would never have counted herself among the women who finally spoke out.

  The first thing Cara did after she had confirmed the pregnancy with her obstetrician was to make an appointment for an abortion. This was a decision made on the spur of the moment, as she sat on the crinkling slick paper of the examining table and felt her belly twist with revulsion for the blob of gray cells that was growing in her womb. Her doctor, whose efforts over the past five years had all been directed toward the opposite end, told her that he understood. He scheduled the operation for the following afternoon.

  Over dinner that night, take-out Indian food, which they ate in bed because she was still unwilling to go out at twilight or after dark, Cara told Richard that she was pregnant. He took the news with the same sad calm he had displayed since about three days after the attack, when he stopped calling the detective assigned to the case every few hours, and dried his fitful tears for good. He gave Cara’s hand a squeeze, then looked down at the plate balanced on the duvet in the declivity of his folded legs. He had quit his most recent job in midshoot, and for the three weeks that followed the att
ack had done nothing but wait on Cara hand and foot, answering her every need. But beyond sympathetic noises and gentle reminders to eat, dress, and keep her appointments, he seemed to have almost nothing to say about what had happened to Cara. Often his silence hurt and disturbed her, but she persuaded herself that he had been struck dumb by grief, an emotion which he had never been able adequately to express.

  In fact Richard had been silenced by his own fear of what might happen if he ever dared to talk about what he was feeling. In his imagination, at odd moments of the day—changing stations on the radio, peeling back pages of the newspaper to get to the box scores—he tortured and killed the rapist, in glistening reds and purples. He snapped awake at three o’clock in the morning, in their ample and downy bed, with Cara pressed slumbering against him, horrified by the sham of her safety in his arms. The police, the lawyers, the newspaper reporters, the psychotherapists and social workers, all were buffoons, moral dwarves, liars, contemptible charlatans and slackers. And, worst of all, he discovered that his heart had been secretly fitted by a cruel hand with thin burning wires of disgust for his wife. How could he have begun to express any of this? And to whom?

  That evening, as they ate their fugitive supper, Cara pressed him to say something. The looping phrase of proteins that they had tried so hard and for so long to produce themselves, spending years and running up medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars, had finally been scrawled inside her, albeit by a vandal’s hand; and now tomorrow, with ten minutes’ work, it was going to be rubbed away. He must feel something.

  Richard shrugged, and toyed with his fork, turning it over and over as if looking for the silver mark. There had been so many times in the last few years that he had found himself, as now, on the verge of confessing to Cara that he did not, in his heart of hearts, really want to have children, that he was haunted by an unshakable sense that the barrenness of their marriage might, in fact, be more than literal.

  Before he could get up the courage to tell her, however, that he would watch her doctor hose the bastard out of Cara’s womb tomorrow not only with satisfaction but with relief, she leapt up from the bed, ran into the bathroom, and vomited up all the matar paneer, dal saag, and chicken tikka masala she had just eaten. Richard, thinking that this would be the last time for this particular duty, got up to go and keep her hair from falling down around her face. She yelled at him to close the door and leave her alone. When she emerged from the bathroom she looked pale and desolate, but her manner was composed.