Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “I’m canceling the thing tomorrow,” she told him.

  At that point, having said nothing else for so long, there was nothing for him to say but, automatically, “I understand.”

  Pregnancy suited Cara. Her bouts of nausea were intense and theatrical but passed within the first few weeks, leaving her feeling purged of much of the lingering stink and foul luster of the rape. She adopted a strict, protein-rich diet that excluded fats and sugars. She bought a juice machine and concocted amalgams of uncongenial fruits and vegetables, which gave off a smell like the underparts of a lawn mower at the end of a wet summer. She joined a gym in Studio City and struck up a friendship there with a woman who played a supporting character on a very bad sitcom and who was due a day before Cara. She controlled what entered her body, oiled and flexed and soaked it in emollients, monitored its emissions. It responded precisely as her books told her that it would. She put on weight at the recommended rate. Secondary symptoms, from the mapping of her swollen breasts in blue tracery to mild bouts of headaches and heartburn, appeared reassuringly on schedule.

  For a time she marveled at her sense of well-being, the lightness of her moods, the nearly unwrinkled prospect that every day presented. In the wake of that afternoon at Lake Hollywood, which might have reduced her to nothing, she grew; every day there was more of her. And the baby, in spite of the evil instant of its origin—the smell of hot dust and Mexican sage in her nostrils, the winking star of pain behind her eyes as her head smacked the ground—she now felt to be composed entirely of her own materials and shaped by her hand. It was being built of her platelets and antibodies, strengthened by the calcium she took, irrigated by the eight squeeze bottles of water she daily consumed. She had quit her job; she was making her way through Trollope. By the end of her second trimester she could go for days on end without noticing that she was happy.

  Over the same period of six months, Richard Case became lost. It was a measure, in his view, of the breadth of the gulf that separated Cara and him that she could be so cheerfully oblivious of his lostness. His conversation, never expansive, dwindled to the curtness of a spaghetti western hero. His friends, whose company Richard had always viewed as the ballast carried in the hold of his marriage, began to leave him out of their plans. Something, as they put it to each other, was eating Richard. To them it was obvious what it must be: the rapist, tall, handsome, muscled, a former All-American who in his youth had set a state record for the four hundred hurdles, had performed in one violent minute a feat that Richard in ten loving years had not once managed to pull off. It was worse than cuckoldry, because his rival was no rival at all. Derrick Cooper was beneath contempt, an animal, unworthy of any of the usual emotions of an injured husband. And so Richard was forced, as every day his wife’s belly expanded, and her nipples darkened, and a mysterious purplish trail was blazed through the featureless country between her navel and pubis, into the awful position of envying evil, coveting its vigor. The half-ironic irony that leavened his and his friends’ male amusements with an air of winking put-on abandoned him. For a month or two he continued to go with them to the racetrack, to smoke cigars and to play golf, but he took his losses too seriously, picked fights, sulked, turned nasty. One Saturday his best friend found him weeping in a men’s room at Santa Anita. After that Richard just worked. He accepted jobs that in the past he would have declined, merely to keep himself from having to come home. He gave up Dominican cigars in favor of cut-rate cigarettes.

  He never went with Cara to the obstetrician, or read any of the many books on pregnancy, birth, and infancy she brought home. His father had been dead for years, but after he told his mother what manner of grandchild she could expect, which he did with brutal concision, he never said another word to her about the child on the way. When his mother asked, he passed the phone to Cara, and left the room. And when in her sixth month Cara announced her intention of attempting a natural childbirth, with the assistance of a midwife, Richard said, as he always did at such moments, “It’s your baby.” A woman in the grip of a less powerful personal need for her baby might have objected, but Cara merely nodded, and made an appointment for the following Tuesday with a midwife named Dorothy Pendleton, who had privileges at Cedars-Sinai.

  That Monday, Cara was in a car accident. She called Richard on the set, and he drove from the soundstage in Hollywood, where he was shooting an Israeli kung fu movie, to her doctor’s office in West Hollywood. She was uninjured except for a split cheek, and the doctor felt confident, based on an examination and a sonogram, that the fetus would be fine. Cara’s car, however, was a total loss—she had been broadsided by a decommissioned hearse, of all things, a 1963 Cadillac. Richard, therefore, would have to drive her to the midwife’s office the next day.

  She did not present the matter as a request; she merely said, “You’ll have to drive me to see Dorothy.” They were on the way home from the doctor’s office. Cara had her cellular telephone and her Filofax out and was busy rearranging the things the accident had forced her to rearrange. “The appointment’s at nine.”

  Richard looked over at his wife. There was a large bandage taped to her face, and her left eye had swollen almost shut. He had a tube of antibiotic ointment in the pocket of his denim jacket, a sheaf of fresh bandages, and a printed sheet of care instructions he was to follow for the next three days. Ordinarily, he supposed, a man cared for his pregnant wife both out of a sense of love and duty and because it was a way to share between them the weight of a burden mutually imposed. The last of these did not apply in their situation. The first had gotten lost somewhere between a shady bend in the trail under the gum trees at the north end of Lake Hollywood and the cold tile of the men’s room at Santa Anita. All that remained now was duty. He had been transformed from Cara’s husband into her houseboy, tending to all her needs and requests without reference to emotion, a silent, inscrutable shadow.

  “What do you even need a midwife for?” he snapped. “You have a doctor.”

  “I told you all this,” Cara said mildly, on hold with a hypnotist who prepared women for the pain of birth. “Midwives stay with you. They stroke you and massage you and talk to you. They put everything they have into trying to make sure you have the baby naturally. No C-section. No episiotomy. No drugs.”

  “No drugs.” His voice dropped an octave, and though she didn’t see it she knew he was rolling his eyes. “I would have thought the drugs would be an incentive to you.”

  Cara smiled, then winced. “I like drugs that make you feel something, Richie. These ones they give you just make you feel nothing. I want to feel the baby come. I want to be able to push him out.”

  “What do you mean, ‘him’? Did they tell you the sex? I thought they couldn’t tell.”

  “They couldn’t. I … I don’t know why I said ‘him.’ Maybe I just … everyone says, I mean, you know, old ladies and whatever, they say I’m carrying high …”

  Her voice trembled, and she drew in a sharp breath. They had come to the intersection, at the corner of Sunset and Poinsettia, where four hours earlier the bat-winged black hearse had plowed into Cara’s car. Involuntarily she closed her eyes, tensing her shoulders. The muscles there were tender from her having braced herself against the impact of the crash. She cried out. Then she laughed. She was alive, and the crescent mass of her body, the cage of sturdy bones cushioned with fat, filled with the bag of bloody seawater, had done its job. The baby was alive, too.

  “This is the corner, huh?”

  “I had lunch at Authentic. I was coming up Poinsettia.”

  It had been Richard who discovered this classic West Hollywood shortcut, skirting the northbound traffic and stoplights of La Brea Avenue, within a few weeks of their marriage and arrival in Los Angeles. They had lived then in a tiny one-bedroom bungalow around the corner from Pink’s. The garage was rented out to a palmist who claimed to have once warned Bob Crane to mend his wild ways. The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon pink bougainvillea,
and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the backyard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts. It had been fall, the only season in Southern California that made any lasting claim on the emotions. The sunlight was intermittent and wistful as retrospection, bringing the city into sharper focus while at the same time softening its contours. In the afternoons there was a smoky tinge of eastern, autumnal regret in the air, which they only later learned was yearly blown down from raging wildfires in the hills. Cara had a bottom-tier job at a second-rate Hollywood talent agency; Richard was unemployed. Every morning he dropped her off at the office on Sunset and then spent the day driving around the city with the bulging Thomas Guide that had been her wedding gift to him. Though by then they had been lovers for nearly two years, at times Richard did not feel that he knew Cara at all well enough to have actually gone and married her, and the happy panic of those early days found an echo whenever he set out to find his way across that bland, encyclopedic grid of boulevards. When he picked Cara up at the end of the day they would go to Lucy’s or Tommy Tang’s and he would trace out for her the route he had taken that day, losing himself among oil wells, palazzos, Hmong strip malls, and a million little bungalows like theirs, submerged in bougainvillea. They would drink Tecate from the can and arrive home just as the palmist’s string of electric jalapeños was coming on in her window, over the neon hand, its fingers outspread in welcome or admonition. They slept with the windows open, under a light blanket, tangled together. His dreams would take him once more to El Nido, Bel Air, Verdugo City. In the morning he sat propped on a pillow, drinking coffee from a chipped Bauer mug, watching Cara move around the bedroom in the lower half of a suit. They had lived in that house for five years, innocent of Cara’s basal temperature or the qualities of her vaginal mucus. Then they had moved to the Valley, buying a house with room for three children that overlooked the steel-bright reservoir. The Thomas Guide was in the trunk of Richard’s car, under a blanket, missing all of the three pages that he needed most often.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t see it,” he said. “It was a fucking hearse.”

  For the first time she caught or allowed herself to notice the jagged, broken note in his voice, the undercurrent of anger that had always been there but from which her layers of self-absorption, of cell production, of sheer happy bulk, had so far insulated her.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she said.

  “Still,” he said, shaking his head. He was crying.

  “Richard,” she said. “Are you … what’s the matter?”

  The light turned to green. The car in front of them sat for an eighth of a second without moving. Richard slammed the horn with the heel of his hand.

  “Nothing,” he said, his tone once again helpful and light. “Of course I’ll drive you anywhere you need to go.”

  Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds. Dorothy Pendleton had caught over two thousand babies in her career, and of these perhaps a thousand of the fathers had joined the mothers for at least one visit to her office, with a few hundred more showing up to do their mysterious duty at the birth. In the latter setting, in particular, men often revealed their characters, swiftly and without art. Dorothy had seen angry husbands before, trapped, taciturn, sarcastic, hot-tempered, frozen over, jittery, impassive, unemployed, workaholic, carrying the weight of all the generations of angry fathers before them, spoiled by the unfathomable action of bad luck on their ignorance of their own hearts. When she called Cara Glanzman and Richard Case in from the waiting room, Dorothy was alert at once to the dark crackling effluvium around Richard’s head. He was sitting by himself on a love seat, slouched, curled into himself, slapping at the pages of a copy of Yoga Journal. Without stirring he watched Cara get up and shake Dorothy’s hand. When Dorothy turned to him, the lower half of his face produced a brief, thoughtless smile. His eyes, shadowed and hostile, sidled quickly away from her own.

  “You aren’t joining us?” Dorothy said in her gravelly voice. She was a small, broad woman, dressed in jeans and a man’s pin-striped oxford shirt whose tails were festooned with old laundry tags and spattered with blue paint. She looked dense, immovable, constructed of heavy materials and with a low center of gravity. Her big plastic eyeglasses, indeterminately pink and of a curvy elaborate style that had not been fashionable since the early 1980s, dangled from her neck on a length of knotty brown twine. Years of straddling the threshold of blessing and catastrophe had rendered her sensitive to all the fine shadings of family emotion, but unfit to handle them with anything other than tactless accuracy. She turned to Cara. “Is there a problem?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cara. “Richie?”

  “You don’t know?” said Richard. He looked genuinely shocked. Still he didn’t stir from his seat. “Jesus. Yes, Dorothy, there is a little problem.”

  Dorothy nodded, glancing from one to the other of them, awaiting some further explanation that was not forthcoming.

  “Cara,” she said finally, “were you expecting Richard to join you for your appointment?”

  “Not—well, no. I was supposed to drive myself.” She shrugged. “Maybe I was hoping … But I know it isn’t fair.”

  “Richard,” said Dorothy, as gently as she could manage, “I’m sure you want to help Cara have this baby.”

  Richard nodded, and kept on nodding. He took a deep breath, threw down the magazine, and stood up.

  “I’m sure I must,” he said.

  They went into the examination room and Dorothy closed the door. She and another midwife shared three small rooms on the third floor of an old brick building on a vague block of Melrose Avenue, to the west of the Paramount lot. The other midwife had New Age leanings, which Dorothy without sharing found congenial enough. The room was decorated with photographs of naked pregnant women and with artwork depicting labor and birth drawn from countries and cultures, many of them in the Third World, where the long traditions of midwifery had never been broken. Because Dorothy’s mother and grandmother had both been midwives, in a small town outside of Texarkana, her own sense of tradition was unconscious and distinctly unmillenarian. She knew a good deal about herbs and the emotions of mothers, but she did not believe, especially, in crystals, meditation, creative visualization, or the inherent wisdom of preindustrial societies. Twenty years of life on the West Coast had not rid her attitude toward pregnancy and labor of a callous East Texas air of husbandry and hard work. She pointed Richard to a battered fifth-hand armchair covered in gold Herculon, under a poster of the goddess Cybele with the milky whorl of the cosmos in her belly. She helped Cara up onto the examination table.

  “I probably should have said something before,” Cara said. “This baby. It isn’t Richie’s.”

  Richard’s hands had settled on his knees. He stared at the stretched and distorted yellow daisies printed on the fabric of Cara’s leggings, his shoulders hunched, a shadow on his jaw.

  “I see,” said Dorothy. She regretted her earlier brusqueness with him, though there was nothing to be done about it now and she certainly could not guarantee that she would never be brusque with him again. Her sympathy for husbands was necessarily circumscribed by the simple need to conserve her energies for the principals in the business at hand. “That’s hard.”

  “It’s extra hard,” Cara said. “Because, see … I was raped. By the, uh, by the Reservoir Rapist, you remember him.” She lowered her voice. “Derrick James Cooper.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Dorothy said. It was not the first time these circumstances had presented themselves in her office, but they were rare enough. It took a particular kind of woman, one at either of the absolute extremes of the spectrum of hope and despair, to carry a baby through from that kind of beginning. She had no idea what kind of a husband it took. “I’m sorry for both of you. Cara.” She opened her arms and stepped toward the mother, and Cara’s head fell against her shoulder. “Richard.” Dorothy turned, not expecting
Richard to accept a hug from her but obliged by her heart and sense of the proprieties to offer him one.

  He looked up at her, chewing on his lower lip, and the fury that she saw in his eyes made her take a step closer to Cara, to the baby in her belly, which he so obviously hated with a passion he could not, as a decent man, permit himself to acknowledge.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “I don’t see how you could be,” Dorothy said. “That baby in there is the child of a monster who raped your wife. How can you possibly be all right with that? I wouldn’t be.”

  She felt Cara stiffen. The hum of the air-conditioning filled the room.

  “I still think I’m going to skip the hug,” Richard said.

  The examination proceeded. Cara displayed the pale hemisphere of her belly to Dorothy. She lay back and spread her legs, and Dorothy, a glove snapped over her hand, reached up into her and investigated the condition of her cervix. Dorothy took Cara’s blood pressure and checked her pulse and then helped her onto the scale.

  “You are perfect,” Dorothy announced as Cara dressed herself. “You just keep on doing all the things you tell me you’ve been doing. Your baby is going to be perfect, too.”

  “What do you think it is?” Richard said, speaking for the first time since the examination had begun.

  “Is? You mean the sex?”

  “They couldn’t tell on the ultrasound. I mean, I know there’s no way to really know for sure, but I figured you’re a midwife, maybe you have some kind of mystical secret way of knowing.”