Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

His heart leaping, he tucked the box under his arm, slid the drawer softly back in, and crept out of the room. He stepped into the relatively dazzling light of the hallway, and stood for a moment, breathing, his forehead against the cool plaster wall. There was no doubt in his mind that he had just broken something that could never be repaired. His old life lay on the other side of a jagged tear in the earth. He would never see Dolores again, although all at once he knew that seeing her again was the only thing he wanted to do. He remembered the photograph of her, on the Empire shelf in the sitting room, and went to look at it, indulging a brief and hopeless fantasy of returning the box to its drawer, getting in his car, driving back to Seattle, waking Dolores, pleading with her to take him back.

As he came into the darkened living room, he saw something that nearly caused him to drop the box of jewelry. Oriole was sitting in the green chair, her old Zeiss binoculars trained on some place away to the north.

“Gam?” said Eddie, after he recovered from the shock of finding her awake and in her chair, dressed in only a short, sleeveless white nightgown — more naked than he had seen her, or any old lady, for that matter, ever before. “Can’t you sleep?”

She seemed not to hear him. She sat still and ghostly in the reflected light of the city below, in her transparent nightgown; her cheeks, her bare arms and shoulders and thighs were streaked with veins and fissures, mysterious and mottled as the face of the moon. He found it an oddly beautiful sight. She was staring out at a point across the river, on the heights of the opposite bank of the Willamette, scanning slowly back and forth across a line high above the horizon. She was looking, he guessed, for the house on Alameda Street.

“I wonder if these goggles need a cleaning,” said Oriole. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Do you know anyone who might be able to do the job?”

“Are you looking for your old house?” Discreetly he set down the jewelry box on the dining table and went over to stand beside her.

She nodded. “But I don’t seem to be able to make it out.”

“I think it’s too dark, Gam. It’s awfully far away, too. I’m not even sure you’d be able to pick it out in the daytime.”

“Oh, there it is,” she said. “It has a pair of stone lions on the lawn.”

“I know it does,” said Eddie. “You can see it from here?”

Again she nodded her stolid head, without lowering the binoculars.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “You can see it perfectly well. The azaleas have been lovely this year. Have a look.”

She handed him the heavy old pair of 10x binoculars, through which, Dr. Zwang felt reasonably certain, it would be impossible to distinguish the old brown house, tucked into the shade of its fir trees, five miles away. He closed his eyes, and fit the field glasses to the sockets of his skull.

“Lovely,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly shut. “I see the lions, too,” he added.

“They’re colored, the people who live there now,” said Oriole. “But very nice.”

He turned his head and trained the glasses on the luminous cup of the ballpark, at those far-off happy men dressed in suits of brilliant white.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. He handed her the binoculars, picked up the box of jewels, and walked brazenly into her bedroom, where, as though she had asked him to, he replaced the box in the drawer. Perhaps it was no extravagance, after all, to have faith in oneself, or perhaps he was not quite down to his last dime in that regard. He closed the drawer with a feeling of renewed hopefulness. As he did so, however, he heard Oriole moaning, out in the living room — a long, slow, devastated sound, as of someone faced with the ruin of a dream. Eddie thought she might have fallen. He hurried back out to the living room to find the old woman standing, pointing at him with one outstretched arm that trembled from fingertip to shoulder, and he saw the real reason she had looked so oddly naked to him a moment earlier.

“You!” she cried. “You’ve stolen my beautiful necklace!” She clawed with one hand at the emptiness at her throat.

“What?” Eddie took a step backward. Was he that drunk? Had he stolen the necklace without knowing it? “No,” he said. “Gam, I didn’t! It — it must have fallen off.”

“It isn’t here! You’ve stolen it!”

Eddie held out his hands, palms upward, and took a step toward the old woman, but she drew back, and covered her face with her shaking arm.

“No, no, no, no! Don’t you come near me!”

As quickly as that, placid old Oriole Box became hysterical, and started to shriek. Eddie had heard such shrieking issuing only from the worst and most desperate corners of the world — from the back room of a police station in downtown Los Angeles at four o’clock in the morning, on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a bloody accident that had killed a young husband, from some distant corridor of the Swedish Hospital emergency room as he sat beside Dolores through the evening of her miscarriage.

“Gam,” said Eddie helplessly. “Please. Calm down.” He switched on a lamp, and the sudden efflorescence of light seemed to take the old woman by surprise. Abruptly she fell silent. Again Eddie started toward her, but as he did so he tripped on something and fell forward. The old woman reached out as if to catch him, and although Eddie knew she had only meant to ward him off, he lay happy in her arms, and for an instant she bore the weight of him. Then she shook herself free, and he sank to his knees before her, and something glittering caught his eye. It was Oriole’s necklace, lying in a crooked coil on the carpet underneath the green hassock.

“There it is,” he sang out, with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. “I found it.”

Eddie crawled over to the hassock on his hands and knees. He reached under it and fished out the necklace, then handed it up to Oriole. He had made a narrow escape, for the second time that evening. What if Oriole had awakened the neighbors with her screaming? What if she had summoned the police? How it would have confirmed all of Dolores’s worst opinions of him to learn that he had been arrested for robbing her grandmother! He looked around for the thing that had tripped him up, and saw that the fine calfskin briefcase, heavy with the authentications and certificates of his defeat, was lying flat on the floor behind him.

“Oh,” said Oriole. “Oh, thank heavens.” Her hands and fingers were still trembling badly, and he had to help her fasten the necklace around her soft old throat once more.

“You just sit down for a minute in this chair,” he said.

“My necklace,” said Oriole, running her fingers along the heavy gold branch, her voice coming breathless and faint. “It never leaves my body, you know.”

“I know,” said Eddie. Perhaps he had not escaped quite as cleanly as all that. It was proving very difficult for him to look Oriole in the eye. He bowed his head. Pretty soon, if he kept on this way, there would be no one left in the world with whom he would be able to make eye contact.

“What time is it?” said Oriole.

“Almost nine-thirty.” He wondered if it wouldn’t be better for him just to get back into his loaded-down Volvo and be on his way. If he drove straight through he could be in Rosario by this time tomorrow.

The telephone rang. Oriole lifted the receiver to her ear.

“Yes? Oh, hello. ” She patted at her hair, and drew upon all her ninety-odd years’ practice at the dissimulation of happiness and the repression of despair. “Yes, I know it is. And to think that I was just thinking of you!”

Eddie went to the window and looked north across the city, to the river and the lights and the distant black ribbon of his old life.