Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

The principal reason for his divorce, Eddie believed, was that throughout their marriage he had foolishly devoted most of his time to the development of an ill-starred device called the Stylevision. This was to be a combination of video camera, liquid-crystal screen, keyboard, hard-wired image-manipulating software, and a six-thousand-entry fashion-eyewear database that would enable the optical consumer to “try on” six thousand different pairs of eyeglasses without moving a muscle. “A face processor,” Dolores had half derisively called it. He had sunk tens of thousands of dollars, not primarily his own, into the device, only to see his plans founder on the unfortunate tendency of the Stylevision’s screen to display, in addition to the face and prospective spectacles of the horrified client, the shadows of his nasal cavity and eye sockets, the naked grin of his teeth, all the delicate architecture of his skull. The device emitted neither radiation nor sonographic waves; the X-ray trick was simply an intermittent and unpredictable side effect — Geoff Eisner, Eddie’s wirehead partner, had called it “an artifact”—of the program which enabled it to manipulate images of the human face, so that every fifteenth or sixteenth trial, the machine produced not a fashionably bespectacled client in a range of attractive and affordable frames but a grinning death’s-head. Eddie’s investors withdrew their support and sued him for a return on their investment, while Dolores also viewed the failure of the Stylevision, after so many months of marital neglect, as a kind of broken agreement, and a perplexed Geoff Eisner — that bastard — who had done most of the soldering and software development and who had been the all-too-willing recipient of that extramarital kiss, vanished back into the cannabinaceous wastes of Oregon. In the end Eddie lost his patents and his wife through the inexorable efforts of attorneys, and found himself the prey and plaything of collection agencies and subpoena artists.

“I believe it’s quite valuable,” Oriole was saying. “Though I’ve never had it — oh, thingamajiggy.” Sadly she shook her head. “I don’t know what’s becoming of my memory! What do you call it when they take a look at your jewelry and — you know—”

“An appraisal,” said Eddie.

She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. I’ve never had it appraised. But I believe it’s quite valuable.”

“I believe,” said Eddie, as a thrilling and unwelcome idea entered his brain, “that you’re probably right.”

It was a kind of fantasy, at first — another foolhardy Eddie Zwang scheme. Stiff-necked old Mr. Box had been burdened by a romantic soul and over the years had given his wife all manner of baubles and gems, and although none of them alone was worth as much as the necklace, one ought, Eddie imagined, to be able to pawn her things for enough to install himself in Mexico in the miserable style to which he planned to grow accustomed. If they dined at Muller’s, say, where it was always Oriole’s habit to drink two cocktails, a thief would be able to lift her earrings and bracelets and watches while she slept, without fear of waking her. The kindness Oriole had always shown him, the affection that had drawn him from the freeway this afternoon into this misbegotten visit to the Farnham, the outrage and meanness of his contemplated crime — all of these he dismissed as the qualms of a man who had the luxury of having faith in himself. Nothing he did surprised him anymore. He would leave her the ugly gold necklace that lay so heavy on her windpipe. He told himself it was the only thing she really had.

“That certainly isn’t a very big suitcase,” said Oriole, pointing to the calfskin satchel at his feet.

“Well, I can’t stay very long,” said Eddie. The muscles of his face clenched into a hard knot, and as he smiled at Oriole his heart was filled with low enthusiasm. “But I think I will stay the night.”

They took a taxicab to Muller’s. The fare was $2.75, which Oriole insisted on paying, tipping the driver with the change from three one-dollar bills. Eddie was embarrassed. (He and Dolores had once tried to determine at what point her grandmother’s mind had ceased to notice increases in the cost of living, presidential-election results, the disappearance of unkind racial and ethnic generalizations from polite conversation. They’d figured the date of her last glance down at the instrument panel of life to be sometime in the early 1970s; that was when her husband had died, struck down in the middle of Tenth Avenue by a truck full of crawfish on ice, bound for Jake’s Famous.) The taxi driver made no effort to conceal his disgust at the proffered gratuity, and Oriole no effort to remark it. Eddie searched his pockets for change but found only a ten-dollar bill and the 1943 zinc penny that he carried for luck. He held on to his last ten dollars and his luckless lucky charm and slunk into the darkness of Muller’s cocktail lounge, which Oriole for some reason favored over the dining room. It was a morose and shadowy lounge — red Naugahyde, soft Muzak, favored by a certain type of quiet, middle-aged alcoholic — but Oriole seemed oblivious of its unsavory air and had a table she liked in the corner, under a chiefly orange but somewhat brown painting of a lighthouse. They ordered from the large, cholesterol-rich menu. They each drank a pair of vodka tonics, and the old woman told him, for what Eddie reckoned to be the fifteenth or sixteenth time and with steadily increasing divagation, about her mother’s summer kitchen in the backyard of the house in Davenport, about her trip West as a newlywed in 1920 on her husband’s railroad and her disappointment at not seeing any wild Red Indians along the way, and about her sisters — Robin and Linnet — both of them now passed on. They ate their tan-and-beige meals of gravy and crust. While Oriole’s attention was focused on her dessert, Eddie contrived to order a third drink for each of them. Then Oriole paid the bill, stiffing the waitress, and they made their hazy way back to the Farnham.

Although Eddie and Oriole went to bed at eight-thirty, the drinks he had poured into her appeared to have the unexpected effect of making her wakeful, and Eddie lay for what seemed like hours waiting for her to stop humming and commenting to herself in the next room and finally fall asleep. He was miserable. The fried food and all those ounces of cheap well vodka had begun to give rise to monsoon winds and tsunamis in his gut. There was still a narrow band of blue on the horizon, and he felt tormented by this last faint banner of daylight wavering at the limits of his vision. Although he had cranked open the windows, it was a warm evening, and the small guest bedroom was stifling. The weak breeze off the river did little to cool the room and carried with it a rich and bitter odor of hops from the Blitz brewery downtown. This was an unwelcome and nostalgic smell that seemed to intensify the weight of the summer night upon him. Every once in a while he thought he caught the cheering of the crowd and the flat patter of the announcer, wafted from the distant ballpark like the summertime smell of beer. He lay fully dressed upon the still-made bed, already regretting the crime that he was about to commit, forcing himself to concentrate on his own fitness for such a reprehensible act and on the bacon-and-flowers smell of a woman he had known for an evening in Juárez, many years ago.

At last silence descended over the apartment, tentative and provisional at first, then all-encompassing. Eddie got up from the bed and tiptoed down the hall to Oriole’s bedroom. Her drapes were drawn, and it was impossible to see. The old woman’s alcohol-slowed breathing was so shallow that Eddie couldn’t even hear it, and the unexpected blackness and quiet of the room almost turned him back. He took a long, deep breath and tried to visualize the layout of the room. Many times in the past he had watched Dolores help the old woman dress, and it seemed to him that Oriole kept her jewelry box in the upper-left-hand drawer of her Empire dresser, which ought to be immediately behind him and about three feet to his left. Reaching back with the fingers of one hand outstretched, he felt his way along the wall to her dresser, which he did not so much discover as collide with, producing a loud report that fortunately did not seem to awaken Oriole. He pulled open the top left drawer, and immediately his hand brushed against a smooth, firm surface that his fingers told him must be the green morocco lid of the jewelry box.