Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “As a matter of fact I am never wrong about that,” Dorothy said. “Or so very rarely that it’s the same as always being right.”

  “And?”

  Dorothy put her right hand on Cara’s belly. She was carrying high, which tradition said meant the baby was a boy, but this had nothing to do with Dorothy’s feeling that the child was unquestionably male. It was just a feeling. There was nothing mystical to Dorothy about it.

  “That’s a little boy. A son.”

  Richard shook his head, face pinched, and let out a soft, hopeless gust of air through his teeth. He pulled Cara to her feet, and handed her her purse.

  “Son of the monster,” he said. “Wolfman Junior.”

  “I have been wrong once or twice,” Dorothy said softly, reaching for his hand.

  He eluded her grasp once more.

  “I’m sort of hoping for a girl,” he said.

  “Girls are great,” said Dorothy.

  Cara was due on the fifth of May. When the baby had not come by the twelfth, she went down to Melrose to see Dorothy, who palpated her abdomen, massaged her perineum with jojoba oil, and told her to double the dose of a vile tincture of black and blue cohosh which Cara had been taking for the past week.

  “How long will you let me go?” Cara said.

  “It’s not going to be an issue,” Dorothy said.

  “But if it is. How long?”

  “I can’t let you go much past two weeks. But don’t worry about it. You’re seventy-five percent effaced. Everything is nice and soft in there. You aren’t going to go any two weeks.”

  On the fifteenth of May and again on the seventeenth, Cara and a friend drove into Laurel Canyon to dine at a restaurant whose house salad was locally reputed to contain a mystery leaf that sent women into labor. On the eighteenth, Dorothy met Cara at the office of her OB in West Hollywood. A nonstress test was performed. The condition of her amniotic sac and its contents was evaluated. The doctor was tight-lipped throughout, and his manner toward Dorothy Cara found sardonic and cold. She guessed that they had had words before Cara’s arrival or were awaiting her departure before doing so. As he left to see his next patient, the doctor advised Cara to schedule an induction for the next day.

  “We don’t want that baby to get much bigger.”

  He went out.

  “I can get you two more days,” said Dorothy, sounding dry and unconcerned but looking grave. “But I’m going out on a limb.”

  Cara nodded. She pulled on the loose-waisted black trousers from CP Shades and the matching black blouse that she had been wearing for the past two weeks, even though two of the buttons were hanging loose. She stuffed her feet into her ragged black espadrilles. She tugged the headband from her head, shook out her hair, then fitted the headband back into place. She sighed, and nodded again. She looked at her watch. Then she burst into tears.

  “I don’t want to be induced,” she said. “If they induce me I’m going to need drugs.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “And then I’ll probably end up with a C-section.”

  “There’s no reason to think so.”

  “This started out as something I had no control over, Dorothy. I don’t want it to end like that.”

  “Everything starts out that way, dear,” said Dorothy. “Ends that way, too.”

  “Not this.”

  Dorothy put her arm around Cara and they sat there, side by side on the examining table. Dorothy relied on her corporeal solidity and steady nerves to comfort patients, and was not inclined to soothing words. She said nothing for several minutes.

  “Go home,” she said at last. “Call your husband. Tell him you need his prostaglandins.”

  “Richie?” Cara said. “But he …he can’t. He won’t.”

  “Tell him this is his big chance,” Dorothy said. “I imagine it’s been a long time.”

  “Ten months,” said Cara. “At least. I mean unless he’s been with somebody else.”

  “Call him,” Dorothy said. “He’ll come.”

  Richard had moved out of the house when Cara was in her thirty-fifth week. As from the beginning of their troubles, there had been no decisive moment of rupture, no rhetorical firefight, no decision taken on Richard’s part at all. He had merely spent longer and longer periods away from home, rising well before dawn to take his morning run around the reservoir where the first line of the epitaph of their marriage had been written, and arriving home at night long after Cara had gone to sleep. In week thirty-four he had received an offer to film a commercial in Seattle. The shoot was scheduled for eight days. Richard had never come home. On Cara’s due date, he had telephoned to say that he was back in L.A., staying at his older brother Matthew’s up in Camarillo. He and Matthew had not gotten along as children, and in adulthood had once gone seven and a half years without speaking. That Richie had turned to him now for help filled Cara with belated pity for her husband. He was sleeping in a semiconverted garage behind Matthew’s house, which he shared with Matthew’s disaffected teenage son Jeremy.

  “He doesn’t get home till pretty late, Aunt Cara,” Jeremy told her when she called that afternoon from the doctor’s office. “Like one or two.”

  “Can I call that late?”

  “Fuck yeah. Hey, did you have your baby?”

  “I’m trying,” Cara said. “Please ask him to call me.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “No matter how late it is.”

  She went to Las Carnitas for dinner. Strolling mariachis entered and serenaded her in her magic shroud of solitude and girth. She stared down at her plate and ate a tenth of the food upon it. She went home and spent a few hours cutting out articles from American Baby, and ordering baby merchandise from telephone catalogs in the amount of five hundred and twelve dollars. At ten o’clock she set her alarm clock for one-thirty and went to bed. At one o’clock she was wakened from a light uneasy sleep by a dream in which a shadowy, hirsute creature, bipedal and stooped, whom even within the dream itself she knew to be intended as a figure of or stand-in for Derrick James Cooper, mounted a plump guitarrón, smashing it against the ground. Cara shot up, garlic on her breath, heart racing, listening to the fading echoes in her body of the twanging of some great inner string.

  The telephone rang.

  “What’s the matter, Cara?” Richard said, for the five thousandth time. His voice was soft and creased with fatigue. “Are you all right?”

  “Richie,” she said, though this was not what she had intended to say to him. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “No, I … Richie, I don’t want to do this without you.”

  “Are you having the baby? Are you in labor now?”

  “I don’t know. I might be. I just felt something. Richie, can’t you come over?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour,” he said. “Hold on.”

  Over the next hour Cara waited for a reverberation or renewal of the twinge that had awakened her. She felt strange; her back ached, and her stomach was agitated and sour. She chewed a Gaviscon and lay propped up on the bed, listening for the sound of Richard’s car. He arrived exactly an hour after he had hung up the telephone, dressed in ripped blue jeans and a bulging, ill-shaped, liver-colored sweater she had knit for him in the early days of their marriage.

  “Anything?” he said.

  She shook her head, and started to cry again. He went over to her and, as he had so many times in the last year, held her, a little stiffly, as though afraid of contact with her belly, patting her back, murmuring that everything would be fine.

  “No it won’t, Richie. They’re going to have to cut me open. I know they will. It started off violent. I guess it has to end violent.”

  “Have you talked to Dorothy? Isn’t there some, I don’t know, some kind of crazy midwife thing they can do? Some root you can chew or something?”

  Cara took hold of his shoulders, and pushed him away from her so that she could look him in the eye.

 
“Prostaglandins,” she said. “And you’ve got them.”

  “I do? Where?”

  She looked down at his crotch, trying to give the gesture a slow and humorous Mae West import.

  “That can’t be safe,” Richard said.

  “Dorothy prescribed it.”

  “I don’t know, Cara.”

  “It’s my only hope.”

  “But you and I—”

  “Come on, Richie. Don’t even think of it as sex, all right? Just think of that as an applicator, all right? A prostaglandin delivery system.”

  He sighed. He closed his eyes, and wiped his open palms across his face as though to work some life and circulation into it. The skin around his eyes was crepey and pale as a worn dollar bill.

  “That’s a turn-on,” he said.

  He took off his clothes. He had lost twenty-five pounds over the past several months, and he saw the shock of this register on Cara’s face. He stood a moment, at the side of the bed, uncertain how to proceed. For so long she had been so protective of her body, concealing it in loose clothing, locking him out of the bathroom during her showers and trips to the toilet, wincing and shying from any but the gentlest demonstrations of his hands. When she was still relatively slender and familiar he had not known how to touch her; now that she loomed before him, lambent and enormous, he felt unequal to the job.

  She was wearing a pair of his sweatpants and a T-shirt, size extra large, that featured the face of Gali Karpas, the Israeli kung fu star, and the words TERMINATION ZONE. She slid the pants down to her ankles and lifted the shirt over her head. Her brassiere was engineered like a suspension bridge, armor plated, grandmotherly. It embarrassed her. Under the not quite familiar gaze of her husband, everything about her body embarrassed her. Her breasts, mottled and veined, tumbled out and lay shining atop the great lunar arc of her belly, dimpled by a tiny elbow or knee. Her pubic bush had sent forth rhizoids, and coarse black curls darkened her thighs and her abdomen nearly to the navel.

  Richard sat back, looking at her belly. There was a complete miniature set of bones in there, a heart, a pleated brain charged with unimaginable thoughts. In a few hours or a day the passage he was about to enter would be stretched and used and inhabited by the blind, mute, and unknown witness to this act. The thought aroused him.

  “Wow,” Cara said, looking at his groin again. “Check that out.”

  “This is weird.”

  “Bad weird?” She looked up at Richard, reading in his face the unavoidable conclusion that the presence of the other man’s child in her body had altered it so completely as to make her unrecognizable to him. A stranger, carrying a stranger in her womb, had asked him into her bed.

  “Lie back,” he said. “I’m going to do this to you.”

  “There’s some oil in the drawer.”

  “We won’t need it.”

  She lowered herself down onto her elbows and lay, legs parted, looking at him. He reached out, cautiously, watching his hands as they assayed the taut, luminous skin of her belly.

  “Quickly,” she said, after a minute. “Don’t take too long.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Just—please—”

  Thinking that she required lubrication after all, Richard reached into the drawer of the nightstand. For a moment he felt around blindly for the bottle of oil. In the instant before he turned to watch what his hand was doing, his middle finger jammed against the tip of the X-Acto knife that Cara had been using to cut out articles on nipple confusion and thrush. He cried out.

  “Did you come?”

  “Uh, yeah, I did,” he said. “But mostly I cut my hand.”

  It was a deep, long cut that pulsed with blood. After an hour with ice and pressure they couldn’t get it to stop, and Cara said that they had better go to the emergency room. She wrapped the wound in half a box of gauze, and helped him dress. She threw on her clothes and followed him out to the driveway.

  “We’ll take the Honda,” she said. “I’m driving.”

  They went out to the street. The sky was obscured by a low-lying fog, glowing pale orange as if lit from within, carrying an odor of salt and slick pavement. There was no one in the street and no sound except for the murmur of the Hollywood Freeway. Cara came around and opened the door for Richard, and drove him to the nearest hospital, one not especially renowned for the quality of its care.

  “So was that the best sex of your life or what?” she asked him, laughing, as they waited at a red light.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It wasn’t the worst.”

  The security guard at the doors to the emergency room had been working this shift for nearly three years and in that time had seen enough of the injuries and pain of the city of Los Angeles to render him immobile, smiling, very nearly inert. At 2:47 on the morning of May 20 a white Honda Accord pulled up, driven by a vastly pregnant woman. The guard, who would go off duty in an hour, kept smiling. He had seen pregnant women drive themselves to have their babies before. It was not advisable behavior, certainly, but this was a place where the inadvisable behaviors of the world came rushing to bear their foreseeable fruit. Then a man, clearly her husband, got out of the passenger side and walked, head down, past the guard. The sliding glass doors sighed open to admit him. The pregnant woman drove off toward the parking lot.

  The guard frowned.

  “Everything all right?” he asked Cara when she reappeared, her gait a slow contemplative roll, right arm held akimbo, right hand pressing her hip as though it pained her.

  “I just had a really big contraction,” she said. She made a show of wiping the sweat from her brow. “Whew.” Her voice sounded happy, but to the guard she looked afraid.

  “Well, you in the right place, then.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I’m supposed to be at Cedars. Pay phone?”

  He directed her to the left of the triage desk. She lumbered inside and called Dorothy.

  “I think I’m having the baby,” she said. “No, I’m not. I don’t know.”

  “Keep talking,” said Dorothy.

  “I’ve only had three contractions.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Contractions hurt.”

  “They do.”

  “But, like, a lot.”

  “I know it. Keep talking.”

  “I’m calling from the emergency room.” She named the hospital. “Richard cut his hand up. He … he came over … we …” A rippling sheet of hot foil unfurled in her abdomen. Cara lurched to one side. She caught herself and half-squatted on the floor beside the telephone cubicle, with the receiver in her hand, staring at the floor. She was so stunned by her womb’s sudden arrogation of every sensory pathway in her body to its purposes that, as before, she forgot to combat or work her way through the contraction with the breathing and relaxation techniques she had been taught. Instead she allowed the pain to permeate and inhabit her, praying with childish fervor for it to pass. The linoleum under her feet was ocher with pink and gray flecks. It gave off a smell of ashes and pine. Cara was aware of Dorothy’s voice coming through the telephone, suggesting that she try to relax the hinge of her jaw, her shoulder blades, her hips. Then the contraction abandoned her, as swiftly as it had arrived. Cara pulled herself to her feet. Her fingers ached around the receiver. There was a spreading fan of pain in her lower back. Otherwise she felt absolutely fine.

  “You’re having your baby,” Dorothy said.

  “Are you sure? How can you tell?”

  “I could hear it in your voice, dear.”

  “But I wasn’t talking.” Though now as she said this she could hear an echo of her voice a moment earlier, saying, Okay … okay … okay.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Dorothy said.

  When Cara found Richard, he was being seen by a physician’s assistant, a large, portly black man whose tag read COLEY but who introduced himself as Nordell. Nordell’s hair was elaborately braided and beaded. His hands were manicured and painted with Fr
ench tips. He was pretending to find Richard attractive, or pretending to pretend. His hand was steady, and his sutures marched across Richard’s swollen fingertip as orderly as a line of ants. Richard looked pale and worried. He was pretending to be amused by Nordell.

  “Don’t worry, girlfriend, I already gave him plenty of shit for you,” Nordell told Cara when she walked into the examination room. “Cutting his hand when you’re about to have a baby. I said, boyfriend, this is not your opera.”

  “He has a lot of nerve,” said Cara.

  “My goodness, look at you. You are big. How do you even fit behind the wheel of your car?”

  Richard laughed.

  “You be quiet.” Nordell pricked another hole in Richard’s finger, then tugged the thread through on its hook. “When are you due?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Uh-huh.” He scowled at Richard. “Like she don’t already have enough to worry about without you sticking your finger on a damn X-Acto knife.”

  Richard laughed again. He looked like he was about to be sick.

  “You all got a name picked out?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Know what you’re having?”

  “We don’t,” said Cara. “The baby’s legs were always in the way. But Richard would like a girl.”

  Richard looked at her. He had noticed when she came into the room that her face had altered, that the freckled pallor and fatigue of recent weeks had given way to a flush and a giddy luster in her eye that might have been happiness or apprehension.

  “Come on,” said Nordell. “Don’t you want to have a son to grow up just like you?”

  “That would be nice,” Richard said.

  Cara closed her eyes. Her hands crawled across her belly. She sank down to the floor, rocking on her heels. Nordell set down his suturing clamp and peeled off his gloves. He lowered himself to the floor beside Cara and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Come on, honey, I know you been taking those breathing lessons. So breathe. Come on.”

  “Oh, Richie.”

  Richard sat on the table, watching Cara go into labor. He had not attended any but the first of the labor and delivery classes and had not the faintest idea of what was expected of him or what it now behooved him to do. This was true not just of the process of parturition but of all the duties and grand minutiae of fatherhood itself. The rape, the conception, the growing of the placenta, the nurturing and sheltering of the child in darkness, in its hammock of woven blood vessels, fed on secret broth—all of these had gone on with no involvement on his part. Until now he had taken the simple, unalterable fact of this rather brutally to heart. In this way he had managed to prevent the usual doubts and questions of the prospective father from arising in his mind. For a time, it was true, he had maintained a weak hope that the baby would be a girl. Vaguely he had envisioned a pair of skinny legs in pink high-topped sneakers, crooked upside down over a horizontal bar, a tumbling hem conveniently obscuring the face. When Dorothy had so confidently pronounced the baby a boy, however, Richard had actually felt a kind of black relief. At that moment, the child had effectively ceased to exist for him: it was merely the son of Cara’s rapist, its blood snarled by the same abrading bramble of chromosomes. In all the last ten months he had never once imagined balancing an entire human being on his forearm, never pondered the depths and puzzles of his relationship to his own father, never suffered the nightly clutch of fear for the future that haunts a man while his pregnant wife lies beside him with her heavy breath rattling in her throat. Now that the hour of birth was at hand he had no idea what to do with himself.