Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  Emily shrugged. She thought he was merely condoling her for the cancer. She pointed to her daughter. “So, what do you make of that face full of metal, Doctor? You ought to see her tattoos. On the other hand, considering their location, maybe you ought to not.”

  “He’ll see them,” said Ruby. “Everybody will.” She looked at her wristwatch. “I’m just, you know, waiting for Dad to turn up before I start the show.”

  “I wish you would,” said Emily, looking a little dreamy.

  “Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Would he just die?”

  “With any luck.”

  “Especially the monkey,” Emily said thoughtfully.

  Ruby punched her on the arm. “Goddamn it, Mom, you know it’s a fuckin’ Sasquatch.”

  “A Sasquatch is not that skinny.” Emily turned to Green. “What is it with this tattoo shit, Marty? Can you explain this phenomenon?”

  “Well,” Green said. He could feel the weak grin guttering on his lips. He knew what Freud had said about tattooing, of course, and he had his own private theory that people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had been only the blankest sheet of paper. Don’t throw me away, they were saying. I bear a hidden message. “It’s difficult to say.”

  “I hope you don’t have one.”

  “Not yet,” said Green. “Ha-ha.” He struggled to relax, to regain his therapeutic cool, to pick up the scattered index cards on which he had jotted down all his notes about who he was. Green was an excellent therapist, kindly but distant, supportive but ineluctable, deferential yet sure of himself, solitary but self-sufficient. None of these qualities had stood him in any good stead during the three years of his marriage to Caryn or given him the faintest clue of how to connect to his daughter, that wild, random compound of Caryn and him that they had, in their fantastic ignorance, set to wander loose in the world.

  “Daddy,” Jocelyn said. She pointed to the buffet table, spread from end to end with a motley assortment of barbecue favorites, vegetarian fare, and polychrome latex-based snacks. She seemed to be indicating a pile of Toll House cookies. “What are those?”

  She twisted herself in his arms, trying to get free. Again Green gripped her tightly. He could not rid himself of the erroneous sensation that this was the house in which, sometime around his twelfth birthday, something crucial inside of him had broken, never to be repaired. He was afraid to put Jocelyn down here, to let her wander its rooms alone.

  “What are what, honey?” he said.

  “Those. Those round brown things.”

  “What things?”

  “Those things that look like chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “Those are chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “Can I have one?”

  “Yes, you may.”

  “Can I get down?”

  Green looked at her. What difference did it make whether he said yes to her or no? In forty-eight hours, she would slip across the border, into another jurisdiction, where his laws and statutes did not apply.

  “Yes,” he said, “you may.”

  He put her down, and she ran over to the table and reached for the cookie, rising up onto the balls of her feet.

  “What a sweetheart,” said Ruby.

  “Thank you,” said Green. “Now, tell me, which one of these boys is Seth?”

  Emily turned to scan the room. “Which one of these boys is Seth? You tell me. I’m serious. I mean,” she said, “look at these kids. I swear, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, which isn’t too far-fetched, I’m afraid. Just look at them. Look at this one.” She slapped a young man on the back of his stubbly head as he passed. He grinned at her. “I tell Seth he looks like a penis, with his bald head and his pants all sagging down around his ankles like a big scrotum. It’s a room full of penises. Then again, I suppose that’s always true, isn’t it? Even when they’re wearing suits and ties.”

  The screen door banged. Ruby jumped.

  “Every time I walk into this house,” said the man who came in through the door, “someone is saying the word penis. I don’t know why that is.”

  Harvey Klein was a small, solid, almost top-heavy man, jut-jawed and broad-shouldered. He wore a knit short-sleeve polo shirt of soft summer-weight wool, gray with black flecks, and tight black jeans, creased down the front like a pair of suit pants. His brushed-aluminum hair was cut short, except at the very back, where he wore it pulled into a neat little pigtail. His sunglasses hung on a cord around his neck. A few thick silver hairs curled up through the open collar of his shirt. He stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  “You’ve never been in this house before,” said Emily.

  “But I’m certain I’m right nonetheless.”

  “Harvey.”

  “Em.”

  They embraced. Green could see him taking stock of her, palpating her bones with his long, sentient fingers. He looked at least fifteen years younger than his ex-wife, though Green suspected that they were exactly the same age.

  “This is your daughter,” Emily said, pulling away. “In case you don’t recognize her.”

  “She’s hard to miss,” said Dr. Klein.

  “Penis,” said Ruby. “Penis, penis, penis.”

  He spread his arms wide, waiting for her to step into them. She set her hands on her hips and gave him a look, through lowered lids, face half-averted, lips pursed, mulling him over. She kept him waiting a long time, long enough for Green to wonder if she hated her father enough to leave him hanging there like a fool with his hands in the air. The expression on Dr. Klein’s face didn’t waver. He stood there, smiling like a man who had just come home from the track, up a couple of grand, to take everyone out for steaks and dancing. And, at the last possible moment, Ruby threw herself into his arms. Her feet kicked into the air, and she swung from his neck, tethered to him at one end, dangling loose at the other. She murmured something in her father’s ear. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply the smell of her hair. Green understood, though he could not have said quite how, that there had never been any other possible outcome.

  “Yo, Duncan,” said one of the big boys elbowing one another in the living room. “Go tell Feeb his dad’s here.”

  Dr. Klein unhooked Ruby’s hands from the back of his neck and restored her spindly bootheels to the terrazzo floor of the living room. He was looking around her now, past her, studying the room, taking in its motley population and random furnishings—some of which must have chimed dimly in his memory—with the remote but friendly air of a busy doctor, a study that eventually led him to Green. He looked puzzled. Then he turned back to Ruby and took hold of her chin with the fingers of one hand. He switched her face from side to side. “Christ, what is all this shit, Ruby Ellen? You look like a goddamn charm bracelet.” He let go of her chin, and her face seemed to hang there a moment, in midair, as if suspended on the lingering tension of his regard. Dr. Klein returned his pleasant, clinical gaze to Green. “You look like a hurricane fence.” He winked at Green and held out his hand. “Harvey Klein.”

  “Martin Green. I, uh, I used to baby-sit Ruby.”

  “Martin Green. Your mother was Carol, sure, sure. I remember her. Baby-sit. Hard to believe that”—he nodded toward Ruby, winking again—“was ever a baby. Isn’t it?”

  “Never have children, Mr. Green. They’ll break your heart.”

  Ruby simulated the sound of vomiting.

  “Ruby,” said Emily, “isn’t there something you wanted to show your father?”

  Ruby blushed. “Maybe later,” she said. “Shut up, Mom.”

  “Now,” said Dr. Klein, “where is my son?”

  “Where is my daughter?” said Green.

  Jocelyn was no longer standing by the buffet table. Green craned his head to get a better look. An
elderly uncle of Emily’s and one of the ersatz hoodlums were engaged in a transgenerational analysis of the Planet of the Apes series of films, while at the same time, armed with a couple of plastic forks, they made their way through the remnants of a macaroni casserole. The only other occupants of the buffet line were great black flies. Green called out to the two men, over the heads of several intervening partygoers. “Have you seen my little girl?” The men shook their heads and went back to their conversation. “Excuse me,” Green said to Dr. Klein. “I seem to have lost my child.”

  Making his way over to the buffet table, Green crouched down to see if Jocelyn was hiding underneath it. She had never hidden from him before, but as his book would have been only too happy to confirm, rapid tactical innovation was a hallmark of her age, and the acute sense of embarrassment he felt, getting down on hands and knees to look for her, seemed to confirm that he had fallen neatly into one of her traps. All that he found under the buffet table, however, was a back issue of Allure splattered with mayonnaise, a loose skateboard truck with neon orange wheels, and a small rubber pig.

  Green checked the kitchen. He checked the laundry room. He traveled down a dim back hallway of the house, checking in the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the closets, ending up in a recreation room, where, under a skylight, on top of a bumper pool table covered in tangerine felt, two young people were asymptotically approaching copulation. Nobody he asked had seen her; he didn’t interrupt the lovers.

  “Jocelyn,” he called out, again and again, his voice densely layered with irritation, embarrassment, anxiety, and an attempt to sound good-humored and accustomed to her mischief. “Jocelyn!”

  As he searched the house, Green’s calm inner therapist’s voice seemed to swell within him, repeating its stock reassurances and sensible explanations—his daughter was playing a trick on him, had gotten into a sewing basket or toolbox, was punishing him for leaving her, for taking her, for sending her back—with increasing imperturbability and lack of sense, like the intoner of useful foreign phrases nattering on about bus depots and the price of a postage stamp on a language tape playing in the dashboard of a car that is spinning out of control. All the while, in a dank, spiderwebbed corner of his thoughts, the story of his daughter’s disappearance from the world was being rehearsed, in flat and unexceptional newspaper prose: a graduation party in a down-at-heel suburban neighborhood, a divorced father returning his daughter to her mother, one terrible moment of inattention—

  “Uh, Marty?”

  It was a hoarse, raspy young voice, calling from the front of the house. Green ran back along the hallway from the rec room and nearly ran into a small, bony, frail-looking young man with large black eyeglasses, dressed in a Charlotte Hornets basketball jersey blazoned with the number one, carrying Jocelyn in his arms. She was crying, muddy, soaked to the skin, alive.

  “She fell into the pond,” said the young man, handing her over to him. “I think she’s all right. I’m Seth.”

  “Thanks, Seth,” said Green. “I’m sure she’s going to be fine.”

  Green carried his daughter into the bathroom and stood her on an oval of worn pink chenille. Her socks, dress, and blouse looked as though they had been splashed with thin coffee. Her cheeks were splattered with mud. She was incoherent and apneic with outrage and relief. Green spoke to her softly.

  “Did you fall into the pond?” He pulled the ruined dirndl up over her head. “Were you trying to see the fish?” He unbuttoned her blouse, rolled the tights down her legs, slipped off her shoes. “Did you hurt anything?” The murky water had soaked through to her panties. Green pulled them off. “Are you okay? Were you trying to see the fish, silly girl? Okay. I know. All right. You’re all right. Come, we’ll get you into a nice, warm bath.” He reached across her with his right arm, cradling her in his left, and opened the tap in the bathtub. “Okay. I know. All right.”

  The sound of the water seemed to calm or distract her. She left off sobbing and pressed a hand to her chest, feeling for the agitated throb under the bone. Green had undressed her without thinking, without hesitation, and now, after his encounter with Ruby Klein, the sight of her pouting, chubby vagina, glinting with down, filled him with an unaccustomed tenderness. It occurred to him that, in all but the most glancing and utilitarian of ways, he never looked at her genitals, or touched them, or allowed himself to think about them at all, and it seemed to him, as he lifted her into the air and set her down into the green, clear water of the tub, that this prohibition of consciousness, born on that night in Ruby’s bedroom eighteen years before, had somehow grown to include all of Jocelyn Green, his daughter. Because he was afraid of what he might do to her, he had removed himself from her life, for her own protection, as it were.

  “Daddy,” said Jocelyn. She was calm again. “I want you to take a bath with me.”

  “No, honey,” said Green, as he always did, refusing even to consider the suggestion. “A bath is something you do by yourself.”

  “Mommy takes a bath with me.”

  “I know she does.” His steadfast refusal to join mother and daughter for their nightly romp in the tub was one of several small but collectively fatal disappointments Green had caused Caryn during their marriage. “And you two have a lot of fun.” Green looked around for something that might pass as a bath toy and so distract Jocelyn. He picked up a flat soap holder, caked with green scum, studded on both sides with rubbery spikes. He rinsed the scum away in the bathwater and handed the thing to Jocelyn. “Look,” he said, his tone sickly and bright, “a hedgehog.”

  She knocked it away. It struck the tiled wall beside Green and ricocheted into his face.

  “No!” Blood flowed into her face, and she went limp with rage. He caught her before she slipped under the water, drenching his forearms and the front of his shirt. “I don’t want a headhog! I want you to take a bath with me!”

  “Honey. Sweetie. I’m sorry. I know you think it could be fun for us to do that, too. And I love to do things with you …” Jocelyn did not appear to be listening. She had curled herself into a ball, kicking at him, splashing him, screaming so loudly that it was all Green could do to keep from covering her mouth with his hand. There was an entire chapter in Green’s book devoted to dealing with the anger of children. None of the techniques he recommended involved gagging or straitjacketing the child. They were all about listening to and accepting a child’s emotional outbursts, in a supportive way, without giving in to them. The use of such techniques, however, was predicated on the parent’s staunch certainty of having the child’s best interests at heart. You were not to forbid things to your children simply and for no other reason than because you were afraid of doing them yourself. You were not to oblige your children to pay for the errors and calamities of your own upbringing. And you were never, not if there was a milligram of love in your heart for your children, to deny them the incalculable comfort of your own body.

  “Oh, all right,” said Green, gripping the slippery, squirming girl by the upper arms. “All right!”

  The transformation was breathtaking. She stopped crying at once, and the blood drained away from her cheeks. She laughed.

  Green took off his pants and folded them neatly, laying them on the closed lid of the toilet, with his underpants folded on top. He hung his shirt from the hook on the back of the door. Quickly he stepped into the tub with one foot, hesitating, his unfettered penis flapping like a tattered rag knotted to his body. Jocelyn looked at it with great interest, the way she had looked at the goldfish in the pond and the studs and pendants in Ruby Klein’s face. She pointed.

  “What do you have?” she said.

  “I have a penis,” he said. “How about that?”

  “It looks wobbly.”

  “It is,” he said. “Very wobbly.”

  He settled himself in beside her, around her, enclosing her small form in the slick black fur and protuberances of his thin, bony shanks. There was a knock at the door. Green jumped. He put a hand to his chest.

/>   “Marty?” It was Ruby. “Everything all right in there?”

  “Everything’s fine,” said Green. He took hold of his daughter’s hand and pressed it against his chest, over the breastbone.

  “Feel that?” he said.

  Mrs. Box

  THE FARNHAM BUILDING STOOD on a hillside in the northwest corner of Portland, overlooking the Nob Hill district and the Willamette River, from 1938 until late last year, when an elderly electric blanket belonging to one of the building’s many elderly residents started a fire that killed six people and left the Farnham a whistling black skeleton in the center of a ring of rubble and ash. Fifteen stories tall, painted throughout the course of its existence a somber and unwavering shade of wintergreen, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a hospital tower, the Farnham never aspired to a landmark brand of beauty—it was just imposing enough to pass for stately, just Moderne enough to qualify as hip—but it had been home to a number of decrepit, rich widows and fashionable restaurateurs and interior designers, its lines and fenestration had a certain Bauhaus gravity, and its unusual color and prominent site lent it, in the esteem of Portlanders, some of the authority of a brilliant cathedral or a domed capitol. It was visible from all over town and from as far away as Vancouver, Washington, where one summer afternoon it was spotted by Eddie Zwang, a bankrupt optometrist in a Volvo station wagon who was at that moment crossing from Washington to Oregon on the I-5, headed for someplace like Mexico or Queen Maud Land, the hatch of his car filled with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stolen optical equipment. His cheeks, as he drove, were already wet with tears, and a heavy muscle of sorrow pounded in his chest, and when he saw the cool, green Farnham rising from its lush hillside, he made a sudden, sentimental, and, under the circumstances, unwise decision to stop and say hello to Mrs. Horace Box, his ex-wife’s grandmother, who lived on its ninth floor, in Apartment G.

  Eddie left the clamor of the freeway and plunged into the calm, alphabetical streets of Northwest, then headed west on Burnside, toward Willamette Heights. Although he had spent most of his adult life amid the vast, amorphous, pale cities of the West Coast, cities built in rain forests and bone deserts and on the shoulders of terrible mountains, he had been raised in the corroded redbrick river towns of the old Midwest—nine years in Pittsburgh, eight in Cleveland, college at Cincinnati—and he had always found great comfort in the modest hills, narrow streets, and rusty brown riverscape of Portland. He thought of it as a city in which painted advertisements for five-cent cigars faded from the sides of empty brick warehouses. He drove past the ballpark where he and Dolores had taken Oriole Box to watch her beloved Beavers lose baseball games, and past Midler’s, her favorite restaurant, and then, heart beating as in anticipation of a wild tryst, he turned into the street that led up the hill to the Farnham.