Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Hi, there,” she said. “Brenda.”

She held out her hand, angled with a textbook display of confidence.

“Jake,” he said.

“I was wondering if you wanted to dance with me—” She registered the way Jake’s mouth hung open, the way Grace shifted a little on her stool. “But if you two are together I’ll just go back over to my table there and shoot myself.”

Jake turned to Grace, with a face that begged for mercy, his mouth forming inaudible words. Grace held out her hand to the girl and they shook.

“Grace.”

“Hi. Brenda.”

There was a wordless moment. “We’re just friends,” said Grace, with an embarrassed laugh. “Go on and dance, Jake.”

The contrast between Olivier’s and Jake’s styles of dancing, had there been anyone in the bar sober or interested enough to notice it, was marked. Jake seemed somehow to wear not just his clothes but his entire body too tightly. He chopped at the air with his hands. He and Brenda didn’t speak to each other — the crowd on the dance floor had forced them up against the jukebox, which was clanging loudly with Tom Petty’s cover of “Feel a Whole Lot Better.” Brenda’s best friend, Sharon Toole, shimmied up alongside her at one point, rolling a mocking but not unfriendly eye in the direction of Jake’s dogged, cramped performance, and the two of them exchanged a smile.

Jake’s departure from his place at the bar seemed to increase the male traffic around Grace. She remained folded carefully up into herself, legs crossed at the knee and then again at the ankle, fingers fitted carefully around the throat of her beer, but there was a perceptible rise in the volume and good humor along the adjacent barstools in Jake’s absence.

Among those whom Grace found herself talking to was Lester Foley, who had come right toward her, in his off-kilter headlong style, head angled one way, shoulders another, listing to one side like Groucho Marx after a severe blow to the head. He had been drinking for an hour now and was at the nightly peak, such as it was, of his physical aplomb and his powers of concentration. At some point he had gone back into the men’s room to run cold water through his hair and comb it back neatly with his pocket comb. There were still a number of feathers in his beard.

He reached out his right hand, with its three grimy fingers.

“Now you stepped in it,” he said. He laughed a wicked little laugh.

“Pardon me?”

“I told you this would happen. I told everyone. Hell, I even told myself!”

“Leave her alone, Your Honor,” said Mike Veal, looking a little uneasy. “Just ignore him,” he said to Grace.

She had not let go of his hand.

“Lester,” she said. “They used to call you Les.”

“No more or less,” he said, automatically.

“Do you remember me?”

“Sure I do,” said Lester, without any great sincerity.

“My parents had the place next door. Next to the Lichtys.”

He pulled his hand from hers. “The Lichtys.” He scowled and squinted at her as if trying to read a surprising text printed in very small characters on her face. His wrinkles smoothed out, leaving a staff of clean pink lines on his forehead. The color left his cheeks. He was working harder than he had in quite some time.

“I used to hang around with Dane a lot,” said Grace. “Their son. I braided your hair once, you probably don’t remember. I used to give Dane these crazy things, with seaweed braided in, and little sand dollars and junk we found on the beach.” She had started to braid the air on either side of her head, but now she put a hand to her mouth and laughed, as if she had embarrassed herself again.

“Grace Meadows,” he said. “Blond girl?” He looked for confirmation of this recollected scrap of a summer fifteen years before. “Dane’s girlfriend? Used to ride around on that motorbike of his. Go swimming with him in that cold, cold water. Always smoking my cigarettes. Grace Meadows, that you?”

“That was me,” said Grace, too softly to be heard over the music.

“Uh-huh. Well.” Lester stopped squinting, and left off trying to read her face. He rummaged around in the pocket of his filthy down coat and pulled out a surprisingly crisp one-dollar bill. “Well. You were crazy then, and I don’t doubt that you are probably crazy today. Everyone is crazy nowadays, which looking around I’m sure you probably noticed by now.” He laid the dollar bill on the bar. “A beer, please, Mr. Mike.”

“Put that away,” said Mike, flicking the dollar back toward Lester. He drew a pint and handed it to him. “But after this one you’re cut off.”

Lester opened his mouth to protest, but a big blond hand clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good evening, there, Mr. Mayor,” said Olivier.

“Oh, no,” said Lester. He peeled himself out from under Olivier’s hand, and, with a last squint sidewise at Grace, ducked around to the farthest corner of the bar, where he stood for a time with his knobby fingers wrapped around the untouched pint of Rainier.

“I love that guy,” said Olivier without apparent affection. He looked avidly at Grace, his eyes crinkling in a way that some uncharitable islanders might have described as patented, or even ominous.

“I thought I’d see you here,” he said.

“I’m having a hard time believing it, myself,” said Grace.

“Why didn’t you come tomorrow, like I told you? We aren’t playing tonight.”

Olivier was the drummer for a local band known variously as the Tailchasers, the Chubb Island Four Piece, and Olivier and Bo and Johnny. They had a more or less permanent ongoing engagement at each of the four island taverns, which is to say that they played nearly every Saturday night at one of them, until the complaints mounted or Olivier got into a violent dispute with the proprietors, at which point, sufficient time having elapsed in the interval since their last appearance, they moved along to the next stop in the circuit.

“I know,” said Grace. “You said you play country music.”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, I don’t really like country music.”

Olivier cocked his head and stared at her, his forehead crumpled in mock perplexity at her chilly tone. He was smarter than he looked — a condition as rare on Chubb Island as it is anywhere else. Mike Veal handed him the beer he had ordered and Olivier drank down half of it in a swallow.

“I’m not bothering you,” he said. “I should go?”

She shook her head.

“How’s the car?” he said, after a moment.

He saw that her gaze was focused on Brenda Petersen and the dark little jerking man she was dancing with. “Who is that guy?”

“That’s my husband,” she said. “His name is Jake.”

“Your husband?” For a moment he looked puzzled. “That’s cool,” he said, with the eye-crinkle on again.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh.”

“We haven’t had sex with each other in three and a half years,” she went on, with a sudden sweep of her arm. “We stopped living together back in January. We haven’t had sex with anyone else, either.”

“Huh.”

“No sex. At all.”

Her husband had stopped dancing. He was standing in the middle of the dance floor, just standing there, watching Grace, looking as if — over the stomping of bootheels, over the labored whooping of off-duty sheriff’s deputy Royce T. Sturgeon, over the dog-kennel laughter of a Friday night in the Patch, over the sounds of the islanders all around him as they shook their hair, their long key chains, the fringes on their vests — he had heard or could guess every word that Grace had just said.

Grace saw Brenda Petersen pulling on his arm, asking him if everything was all right. “I have no idea why I just told you that,” Grace said to Olivier. “I know I shouldn’t be saying it at all.” She turned and took hold of both his hands in hers. “I want you to forget what I said.”