Free Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon Page A

hills. Cara had a bottom-tier job at a second-rate Hollywood talent agency; Richard was unemployed. Every morning he dropped her off at the office on Sunset and then spent the day driving around the city with the bulging Thomas Guide that had been her wedding gift to him. Though by then they had been lovers for nearly two years, at times Richard did not feel that he knew Cara at all well enough to have actually gone and married her, and the happy panic of those early days found an echo whenever he set out to find his way across that bland, encyclopedic grid of boulevards. When he picked Cara up at the end of the day they would go to Lucy’s or Tommy Tang’s and he would trace out for her the route he had taken that day, losing himself among oil wells, palazzos, Hmong strip malls, and a million little bungalows like theirs, submerged in bougainvillea. They would drink Tecate from the can and arrive home just as the palmist’s string of electric jalapeños was coming on in her window, over the neon hand, its fingers outspread in welcome or admonition. They slept with the windows open, under a light blanket, tangled together. His dreams would take him once more to El Nido, Bel Air, Verdugo City. In the morning he sat propped on a pillow, drinking coffee from a chipped Bauer mug, watching Cara move around the bedroom in the lower half of a suit. They had lived in that house for five years, innocent of Cara’s basal temperature or the qualities of her vaginal mucus. Then they had moved to the Valley, buying a house with room for three children that overlooked the steel-bright reservoir. The Thomas Guide was in the trunk of Richard’s car, under a blanket, missing all of the three pages that he needed most often.
    “I can’t believe you didn’t see it,” he said. “It was a fucking hearse.”
    For the first time she caught or allowed herself to notice the jagged, broken note in his voice, the undercurrent of anger that had always been there but from which her layers of self-absorption, of cell production, of sheer happy bulk, had so far insulated her.
    “It wasn’t my fault,” she said.
    “Still,” he said, shaking his head. He was crying.
    “Richard,” she said. “Are you … what’s the matter?”
    The light turned to green. The car in front of them sat for an eighth of a second without moving. Richard slammed the horn with the heel of his hand.
    “Nothing,” he said, his tone once again helpful and light. “Of course I’ll drive you anywhere you need to go.”
    Midwives’ experience of fathers is incidental but proficient, like a farmer’s knowledge of bird migration or the behavior of clouds. Dorothy Pendleton had caught over two thousand babies in her career, and of these perhaps a thousand of the fathers had joined the mothers for at least one visit to her office, with a few hundred more showing up to do their mysterious duty at the birth. In the latter setting, in particular, men often revealed their characters, swiftly and without art. Dorothy had seen angry husbands before, trapped, taciturn, sarcastic, hot-tempered, frozen over, jittery, impassive, unemployed, workaholic, carrying the weight of all the generations of angry fathers before them, spoiled by the unfathomable action of bad luck on their ignorance of their own hearts. When she called Cara Glanzman and Richard Case in from the waiting room, Dorothy was alert at once to the dark crackling effluvium around Richard’s head. He was sitting by himself on a love seat, slouched, curled into himself, slapping at the pages of a copy of Yoga Journal. Without stirring he watched Cara get up and shake Dorothy’s hand. When Dorothy turned to him, the lower half of his face produced a brief, thoughtless smile. His eyes, shadowed and hostile, sidled quickly away from her own.
    “You aren’t joining us?” Dorothy said in her gravelly voice. She was a small, broad woman, dressed in jeans and a man’s pin-striped oxford shirt whose tails were