Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Hi, cutie,” Ruby said. She bent forward, hands on her knees, in an effort to put herself at eye level with Jocelyn. Green’s daughter turned her face away and buried it in the billow of his trouser leg. He was wearing a pair of loose linen Florida pants, the color of a boiled shrimp. “What’s your name?”

“This is Jocelyn,” said Green. “My little girl. We’re on our way back to her mother’s in Philly. In fact — this is embarrassing — well, I just realized that she’s expecting us today and not—”

“Your mom said you might show up,” Ruby said, her eyes still searching out Jocelyn’s in the pink folds of Green’s pants. A strand of hair fell across her face. She peeled it back and tucked it behind her right ear. It sprang loose. “She called.” She pointed at Jocelyn with a fingernail painted a dark purple the exact shade of a hammer-blow bruise. “She said you were a little angel.”

This information made no apparent impression on Jocelyn. She had worked a large patch of Green’s pant leg into her mouth and was chewing on it with alacrity.

“Jocelyn,” Green said, breaking one of his personal rules of fatherly conduct, which was never to employ his child’s name, alone, to reprimand her. Green was writing a book of rules of fatherly conduct. “A child’s name is a gift,” he had written in his manuscript, which was under contract to a New York publisher, “an object of power; in many cases, with the passing of years and the accretion of character traits and personality quirks, a richly descriptive adjective. It must never be, however, an expression of reproach.” The irony of Green’s writing a textbook on fatherhood while at the same time spending a total of less than two months a year with his own daughter was not lost on him. Few if any ironies ever were. Ironicism, by the way, was another typical resource of fathers proscribed by the rules in Green’s book.

“She told me you were in Europe someplace,” Green said to Ruby. It was only, in fact, because his mother had led him to believe that Ruby would not be present that Green had accepted the suggestion from his mother, who lived now in Denver, that as long as he and little Jocelyn were going to be passing through Washington, D.C., they might as well drop by the Kleins’ party and see Emily Klein, whose ovarian cancer appeared to be on the verge of killing her.

“Yeah, with my band,” Ruby said, rolling her eyes. “Ex-band. Fuckin’ losers. I came home early. The tour fuckin’ blew, oh, my God. Shit Jesus, it’s hot out here. What are you guys doing? You ran out of there like someone was chasing you.”

It was a mark of Green’s bewilderment that he allowed this torrent of foul language to flow over his child without comment, without even the minimally disapproving eyebrow arch that he reserved in situations where the swearer was, for example, an extremely large and menacing man.

“Oh,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know. Let’s go in. We were just…”

“Damn, I was so glad when you walked in there,” she said. “That whole scene is so fuckin’ tedious; all Seth’s friends are such morons—”

“Tedious,” Green said. He returned the car keys to his pocket. He would never make it out to see the wild ponies of Assateague Island, and this knowledge, for some reason, stirred in him a wave not so much of sadness as of self-loathing, as if he had already promised to take Jocelyn there and was now going to be forced to renege. “I’m afraid I’m pretty tedious myself these days.”

“Tedious is, like, not an absolute,” Ruby said, licking her lips. “There are degrees.”

Green recognized the humor in her remark and produced what he hoped would pass for a plausible smile. Everything he saw was bordered with a sparkle of nausea, and the blood boiled in his ears like the ocean. He picked up Jocelyn and settled her onto his forearm. “I’ll do my best to be entertaining.”

Ruby took his arm and pulled him toward the house.

“That’s what I always liked about you,” she said.

One night when he was thirteen years old, Green had put Ruby Klein into her bed and waited for her to fall asleep. On Friday and Saturday nights, when Emily Klein and Green’s mother — girlhood chums from Richmond whose divorces had beached them within a mile of each other in Rockville, Maryland — went out to drink wine and meet men, Ruby Klein was often left in Green’s care. Ruby was four, shy, docile, afraid of darkness, and Green’s feeling for her had always been one of impatient indifference tempered by occasional moments of embarrassed gratitude. He was a little-esteemed boy, and she looked up to him. He was often lonely, and she was always there. Then Green had begun to be driven mad by the idea of sex. He found books published by the Grove Press that described perversions and lewd acts that in the mind of an adult would easily have been judged inhuman, fanciful, or at least ill-advised. He masturbated on buses, in public rest rooms, lying across his grandmother’s bed. A desire overcame him to have sex with almost every woman he knew, from his mother and Emily Klein, to the French teacher Ms. Ball, to a retarded girl named Rojean whom he often saw after swim-team practice happily hosing down the pool deck in her tight red Speedo. The books he had discovered at the back of his mother’s closet gave him the impression that such polymorphous and indiscriminate behavior was not only possible but appropriate and common. On this one night, then, he had felt himself aroused by the glinting down on the neck of little Ruby Klein, by the tracery of pale blue veins at her armpits, by the sound of her water in the toilet. When he determined that she had fallen asleep, he drew the covers back and lifted the hem of the overlong T-shirt she wore and contemplated her pale belly and her tiny boy’s nipples. He bent forward to kiss her at the junction of her skinny thighs.

“Marty, what are you doing?” she had asked him, in a soft, strangely adult voice.

He pretended to her that he had been afraid she was developing a rash; he said it was something they had eaten. He dressed her and covered her and kissed her on the forehead as a hundred times before.

“Now be quiet,” he said. “And go to sleep.”

The madness had seemed to abate somewhat after this. He was shocked by his own audacity and unable to relinquish a certainty of having done, for the first time in his life, something genuinely bad. Shortly afterward his mother had moved them out to Denver, and although no one treated him any differently than before, he often wondered if he were not responsible for this imposition of a thousand miles between him and Ruby. Eventually he had made love in the conventional fashion to a girl his own age and had been introduced to the joys and limitations of conventional sex in the company of women he had professed to love. He studied psychology in college and graduate school, an education that provided him with any number of interesting, credible theories that might have explained the Saturday night in Ruby Klein’s bedroom years before.

He did not, however, seek such an explanation. He did not think of that night at all. He got married and fathered a girl and went into practice as a family therapist in the flat wastes of Broward County. He got divorced and took new lovers, and then one day awoke to discover that he had turned thirty-one.

The front lawn, hemmed in by a concrete driveway and a cracked slate patio that wrapped around two thirds of the house, was the setting for a hard-fought contest between dandelions and death. A pair of broad stumps, like the lids of two buried jars, marked the place where great trees must once have stood, cooling the house with their leafy shadows. Emily Klein’s rented house — she had been forced to sell the big neocolonial in Winding Way Woods when Harvey Klein refused to comply with his alimony and child-support obligations — was a modest box of Roman brick, in faded Froot Loop colors, tangled in a bramble of burnt-out Christmas lights, with a big, black iron cursive letter L bolted to the side of the chimney. It had an asymmetrical shape, a ribbon window in the living room, and a jutting flat roof and, like many modernist houses that have long been inhabited by humans, a defeated aspect, a look of having been stranded, of despairing of the world for which it had been intended but which never came to pass.