Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“It’s perfect,” he said.

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 attack 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.

“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.