Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

Just beside the front steps, some long-ago hobbyist had set a goldfish pond. It was a small, irregular circle of greenish cement, encrusted at its edges with globules of brownish cement that had been molded and striated to suggest natural rock formations. As during their first journey up to the front door, Jocelyn was arrested once more by the sight of this forlorn puddle, with its skin of algae, dandelion fluff, and iridescent oil, and its lone occupant, a listless twist of gold floating like a discarded candy wrapper near the surface. She squatted beside it, wobbling, hands on her knees, and pointed toward the somnolent fish, the toe of one shining shoe dangerously near to the water. His daughter had a remarkable capacity for fascination with anything filthy, broken, or pathetic, from derelicts to dog dung, which in the book he was writing Green would have accounted as evidence of sensitivity and imagination but which in practice irritated and disturbed him.

“Daddy, what’s that?”

“It’s a bowl of tapioca pudding.”

“No, it’s a goldfish.”

“Oh,” said Green, through his teeth, wrestling her from the water’s edge, “so it is.”

“How long have you had her?” said Ruby, as Green scooped up his daughter again and this time toted her struggling form into the house.

“Three weeks,” said Green, attempting to mask his utter exasperation with a show of utter exasperation. Then he regretted his response. Ruby’s tone had been conspiratorial, implying sympathy with the trial of shepherding a toddler and with the fatigue it must be causing him, but the premise of her question was not merely that, since he was a divorced father with limited access to his daughter and hence limited experience with her, there must be a finite limit to his tolerance of her misbehaviors, but also that, on a more fundamental level, he must view Jocelyn as inherently inconvenient, annoying, even undesirable, as if she were a flu he had picked up and could not shake, or a cast on his leg. Once again Green found himself confronted with making the painful admission that he did not love his daughter in any way that was meaningful or passionate or useful to her. Their three weeks together had crawled by in an endless, desperate quest on his part to fill her hours with healthy amusements of the sort he recommended in his book and in a constant, successful effort on hers to exhaust the potential for amusement of each, with thrilling intensity and utter finality, within fifteen minutes. She was a well behaved enough child, remarkably so given the circumstances of her life, but every time she went into hysterics or pushed things too far or merely refused to surrender the wonder of consciousness at the end of the day, Green had found himself miserably, devoutly wishing for the visitation to end. The long drive up from Florida had been a nightmarish marathon of squirming, gas-station lavatories, and the sound-track albums from animated movies whose values, and lyrics, he deplored. Now he was having regrets. He ought to have driven them out to the ocean, to see the horses. He ought to have offered to keep her for the entire summer. He ought to have spent the rest of his life married to Caryn and pretending that he loved her even though, as he now must acknowledge, all the love of which he was capable had somehow been sacrificed in that one dark kiss eighteen years before.

Inside the house, the climate was hot, malarial, absolutely still. All the doors and windows were open, and flies chased one another from room to room. Rap music, or what sounded to Green like rap music, was playing loud enough in the backyard to make the glass in the living-room picture frames hum like tissue on a comb. The adoption of rap as the theme music of teenage white boys was one of the clearest symptoms, along with pierced eyebrow ridges, of the substitute world that had eventually shown up to claim the future in which the Kleins’ stark and crumbling house now languished.

Seth Klein’s graduation party was largely an affair of such white boys. Although it was hard for Green to tell them apart, and a certain amount of perceptual cloning may have exaggerated their numbers in his gaze, there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They threatened the ceilings with their brush-cut heads and angled their bodies out over the teenage girls, of whom there seemed to be substantially fewer in attendance. There were also a number of relatives, friends of the family, and inexplicable near-strangers like Green himself, with paper plates that they balanced on their laps or used to fan themselves against the heat. The only one Green knew, though time and illness had altered her in ways that made his stomach tighten, was Emily. He had no idea which boy might be Seth.

“Well,” said Emily. She canted her head to one side and looked askance at Green, exactly as she might have done twenty years earlier, when he tried to persuade her that there had once been another letter in the alphabet, called thorn, or that the television reporter Roger Mudd was a direct descendant of the Dr. Mudd who went to prison for setting John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg. She had always treated him like a bullshit artist, Green remembered, long before he’d ever had something to lie to her about, and the more sincere he became in his efforts to convince her of whatever unlikely truth he was trying to expound, the greater her doubt of him would grow. Now her thick hair, always, like Ruby’s, a mass of unplaited dark rope, was gone. In its place grew a sweet pale tuft of dark blond baby down. She had been plump and drinking and frowsy the last time Green saw her, at a fortieth-birthday party for his mother in Las Vegas ten years earlier, but the cancer had honed her and brightened her eyes. She did not look well, but being sick brought out something in her, a peppery, droll quality that went back to Green’s earliest memories of the first woman he had ever desired. “So what was that all about?” She looked Green up and down, then tried to peer around his back. “What did you forget?”

“He didn’t forget anything,” said Ruby. “He was just afraid of me.”

“And I was afraid of her, too,” said Jocelyn, loyally.

“That shows real sense,” Emily said. “Your reputation precedes you, Rube.”

“Ha. How are you?” said Green.

She shrugged. “Not great. Not dead.” She smiled, and her crooked teeth, with their coffee and tobacco stains, seemed to afford a glimpse of her yellowing skull, tinged with the residues of soil and water. He smiled back, feeding himself neat little dietetic packets of raw, unrefined panic. The cancer in Emily Klein — surely that was not his fault, too? But something inside him — a schizophrenic or a clergyman would have called it a voice — told him that it was. That it was all his fault — rap music, labial piercing, his divorce, everything that had come to pass since that long-ago night in Ruby Klein’s bedroom. What had become of little Ruby Klein? He felt like the poor time-traveling dolt in the Bradbury story who returned from stepping on a butterfly in the Triassic to find his own epoch altered abruptly, inevitably, with signs misspelled and everyone under the foot of a murderous and ignorant tyrant. How could one ever begin to repair the damage that he had so obviously done?

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

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.