Werewolves in Their Youth (7 page)

“Christy,” she said. “Hello, Daniel.”

She smiled ruefully and looked down at Mr. Hogue, moaning and whispering curses on the terra-cotta floor.

“Is he okay?” Daniel said, pointing to the realtor, who was, he saw now, no stranger to these troubled rooms.

“I certainly hope not. I hit him as hard as I could.” Mrs. Hogue dabbed tenderly at the cut with the paper towel, then looked around at the kitchen she had renovated at such great expense. “So,” she said, “what do you two think of the house?”

Daniel looked at Christy. She had lost her scarf sometime in the course of their struggle upstairs. Her face was a blur of smeared lipstick and streaked mascara and the radiant blood in her cheeks.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

W
HEN THE MAN CHARGED
with being the so-called Reservoir Rapist was brought to justice, several of the women who had been his victims came forward and identified themselves in the newspapers. The suspect, eventually convicted and sentenced to fifteen years at Pelican Bay, was a popular coach and math instructor at a high school in the Valley. He had won a state award for excellence in teaching. Two dozen present and former students and players, as well as the principal of his school, offered to testify in behalf of his good character at his trial. It was the man’s solid position in the community, and the mishandling of a key piece of evidence, that led some of his victims to feel obliged to surrender the traditional veil of anonymity which the LAPD and the newspapers had granted them, and tell their painful stories not merely to a jury but to the world at large. The second of the Reservoir Rapist’s eight victims, however, was not among these women. She had been attacked on August 7, 1995, as she jogged at dusk around Lake Hollywood. This was the perpetrator’s preferred time of day, and one of three locations he favored in committing his attacks, the other two being the Stone Canyon and Franklin Reservoirs; such regular habits led in the end to his capture, on August 29. A day before the arrest, the faint pink proof of a cross, fixed in the developing fluid of her urine, informed the Reservoir Rapist’s second victim, Cara Glanzman, that she was pregnant.

Cara, a casting agent, was married to Richard Case, a television cameraman. They were both thirty-four years old. They had met and become lovers at Bucknell University and at the time of the attack had been married since 1985. In their twelve years together, neither had been unfaithful to the other, and in all that time Cara had never gotten pregnant, neither by accident nor when she was trying with all of her might. For the past five years this unbroken chain of menses had been a source of sorrow, dissension, tempest, and recrimination in Cara and Richard’s marriage. On the day she was raped, in fact, Cara had called an attorney friend of her best friend, just to discuss, in a vague, strangely hopeful way, the means and procedures of getting a divorce in California. After the attack her sense of punishment for having been so disloyal to Richard was powerful, and it is likely that, even had she not found herself pregnant with Derrick James Cooper’s child, she would never have counted herself among the women who finally spoke out.

The first thing Cara did after she had confirmed the pregnancy with her obstetrician was to make an appointment for an abortion. This was a decision made on the spur of the moment, as she sat on the crinkling slick paper of the examining table and felt her belly twist with revulsion for the blob of gray cells that was growing in her womb. Her doctor, whose efforts over the past five years had all been directed toward the opposite end, told her that he understood. He scheduled the operation for the following afternoon.

Over dinner that night, take-out Indian food, which they ate in bed because she was still unwilling to go out at twilight or after dark, Cara told Richard that she was pregnant. He took the news with the same sad calm he had displayed since about three days after the attack, when he stopped calling the detective assigned to the case every few hours, and dried his fitful tears for good. He gave Cara’s hand a squeeze, then looked down at the plate balanced on the duvet in the declivity of his folded legs. He had quit his most recent job in midshoot, and for the three weeks that followed the attack had done nothing but wait on Cara hand and foot, answering her every need. But beyond sympathetic noises and gentle reminders to eat, dress, and keep her appointments, he seemed to have almost nothing to say about what had happened to Cara. Often his silence hurt and disturbed her, but she persuaded herself that he had been struck dumb by grief, an emotion which he had never been able adequately to express.

In fact Richard had been silenced by his own fear of what might happen if he ever dared to talk about what he was feeling. In his imagination, at odd moments of the day—changing stations on the radio, peeling back pages of the newspaper to get to the box scores—he tortured and killed the rapist, in glistening reds and purples. He snapped awake at three o’clock in the morning, in their ample and downy bed, with Cara pressed slumbering against him, horrified by the sham of her safety in his arms. The police, the lawyers, the newspaper reporters, the psychotherapists and social workers, all were buffoons, moral dwarves, liars, contemptible charlatans and slackers. And, worst of all, he discovered that his heart had been secretly fitted by a cruel hand with thin burning wires of disgust for his wife. How could he have begun to express any of this? And to whom?

That evening, as they ate their fugitive supper, Cara pressed him to say something. The looping phrase of proteins that they had tried so hard and for so long to produce themselves, spending years and running up medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars, had finally been scrawled inside her, albeit by a vandal’s hand; and now tomorrow, with ten minutes’ work, it was going to be rubbed away. He must feel something.

Richard shrugged, and toyed with his fork, turning it over and over as if looking for the silver mark. There had been so many times in the last few years that he had found himself, as now, on the verge of confessing to Cara that he did not, in his heart of hearts, really want to have children, that he was haunted by an unshakable sense that the barrenness of their marriage might, in fact, be more than literal.

Before he could get up the courage to tell her, however, that he would watch her doctor hose the bastard out of Cara’s womb tomorrow not only with satisfaction but with relief, she leapt up from the bed, ran into the bathroom, and vomited up all the matar paneer, dal saag, and chicken tikka masala she had just eaten. Richard, thinking that this would be the last time for this particular duty, got up to go and keep her hair from falling down around her face. She yelled at him to close the door and leave her alone. When she emerged from the bathroom she looked pale and desolate, but her manner was composed.

“I’m canceling the thing tomorrow,” she told him.

At that point, having said nothing else for so long, there was nothing for him to say but, automatically, “I understand.”

Pregnancy suited Cara. Her bouts of nausea were intense and theatrical but passed within the first few weeks, leaving her feeling purged of much of the lingering stink and foul luster of the rape. She adopted a strict, protein-rich diet that excluded fats and sugars. She bought a juice machine and concocted amalgams of uncongenial fruits and vegetables, which gave off a smell like the underparts of a lawn mower at the end of a wet summer. She joined a gym in Studio City and struck up a friendship there with a woman who played a supporting character on a very bad sitcom and who was due a day before Cara. She controlled what entered her body, oiled and flexed and soaked it in emollients, monitored its emissions. It responded precisely as her books told her that it would. She put on weight at the recommended rate. Secondary symptoms, from the mapping of her swollen breasts in blue tracery to mild bouts of headaches and heartburn, appeared reassuringly on schedule.

For a time she marveled at her sense of well-being, the lightness of her moods, the nearly unwrinkled prospect that every day presented. In the wake of that afternoon at Lake Hollywood, which might have reduced her to nothing, she grew; every day there was more of her. And the baby, in spite of the evil instant of its origin—the smell of hot dust and Mexican sage in her nostrils, the winking star of pain behind her eyes as her head smacked the ground—she now felt to be composed entirely of her own materials and shaped by her hand. It was being built of her platelets and antibodies, strengthened by the calcium she took, irrigated by the eight squeeze bottles of water she daily consumed. She had quit her job; she was making her way through Trollope. By the end of her second trimester she could go for days on end without noticing that she was happy.

Over the same period of six months, Richard Case became lost. It was a measure, in his view, of the breadth of the gulf that separated Cara and him that she could be so cheerfully oblivious of his lostness. His conversation, never expansive, dwindled to the curtness of a spaghetti western hero. His friends, whose company Richard had always viewed as the ballast carried in the hold of his marriage, began to leave him out of their plans. Something, as they put it to each other, was eating Richard. To them it was obvious what it must be: the rapist, tall, handsome, muscled, a former All-American who in his youth had set a state record for the four hundred hurdles, had performed in one violent minute a feat that Richard in ten loving years had not once managed to pull off. It was worse than cuckoldry, because his rival was no rival at all. Derrick Cooper was beneath contempt, an animal, unworthy of any of the usual emotions of an injured husband. And so Richard was forced, as every day his wife’s belly expanded, and her nipples darkened, and a mysterious purplish trail was blazed through the featureless country between her navel and pubis, into the awful position of envying evil, coveting its vigor. The half-ironic irony that leavened his and his friends’ male amusements with an air of winking put-on abandoned him. For a month or two he continued to go with them to the racetrack, to smoke cigars and to play golf, but he took his losses too seriously, picked fights, sulked, turned nasty. One Saturday his best friend found him weeping in a men’s room at Santa Anita. After that Richard just worked. He accepted jobs that in the past he would have declined, merely to keep himself from having to come home. He gave up Dominican cigars in favor of cut-rate cigarettes.

He never went with Cara to the obstetrician, or read any of the many books on pregnancy, birth, and infancy she brought home. His father had been dead for years, but after he told his mother what manner of grandchild she could expect, which he did with brutal concision, he never said another word to her about the child on the way. When his mother asked, he passed the phone to Cara, and left the room. And when in her sixth month Cara announced her intention of attempting a natural childbirth, with the assistance of a midwife, Richard said, as he always did at such moments, “It’s your baby.” A woman in the grip of a less powerful personal need for her baby might have objected, but Cara merely nodded, and made an appointment for the following Tuesday with a midwife named Dorothy Pendleton, who had privileges at Cedars-Sinai.

That Monday, Cara was in a car accident. She called Richard on the set, and he drove from the soundstage in Hollywood, where he was shooting an Israeli kung fu movie, to her doctor’s office in West Hollywood. She was uninjured except for a split cheek, and the doctor felt confident, based on an examination and a sonogram, that the fetus would be fine. Cara’s car, however, was a total loss—she had been broadsided by a decommissioned hearse, of all things, a 1963 Cadillac. Richard, therefore, would have to drive her to the midwife’s office the next day.

She did not present the matter as a request; she merely said, “You’ll have to drive me to see Dorothy.” They were on the way home from the doctor’s office. Cara had her cellular telephone and her Filofax out and was busy rearranging the things the accident had forced her to rearrange. “The appointment’s at nine.”

Richard looked over at his wife. There was a large bandage taped to her face, and her left eye had swollen almost shut. He had a tube of antibiotic ointment in the pocket of his denim jacket, a sheaf of fresh bandages, and a printed sheet of care instructions he was to follow for the next three days. Ordinarily, he supposed, a man cared for his pregnant wife both out of a sense of love and duty and because it was a way to share between them the weight of a burden mutually imposed. The last of these did not apply in their situation. The first had gotten lost somewhere between a shady bend in the trail under the gum trees at the north end of Lake Hollywood and the cold tile of the men’s room at Santa Anita. All that remained now was duty. He had been transformed from Cara’s husband into her houseboy, tending to all her needs and requests without reference to emotion, a silent, inscrutable shadow.

“What do you even need a midwife for?” he snapped. “You have a doctor.”

“I told you all this,” Cara said mildly, on hold with a hypnotist who prepared women for the pain of birth. “Midwives stay with you. They stroke you and massage you and talk to you. They put everything they have into trying to make sure you have the baby naturally. No C-section. No episiotomy. No drugs.”

“No drugs.” His voice dropped an octave, and though she didn’t see it she knew he was rolling his eyes. “I would have thought the drugs would be an incentive to you.”

Cara smiled, then winced. “I like drugs that make you feel something, Richie. These ones they give you just make you feel nothing. I want to feel the baby come. I want to be able to push him out.”

“What do you mean, ‘him’? Did they tell you the sex? I thought they couldn’t tell.”

“They couldn’t. I … I don’t know why I said ‘him.’ Maybe I just … everyone says, I mean, you know, old ladies and whatever, they say I’m carrying high …”

Her voice trembled, and she drew in a sharp breath. They had come to the intersection, at the corner of Sunset and Poinsettia, where four hours earlier the bat-winged black hearse had plowed into Cara’s car. Involuntarily she closed her eyes, tensing her shoulders. The muscles there were tender from her having braced herself against the impact of the crash. She cried out. Then she laughed. She was alive, and the crescent mass of her body, the cage of sturdy bones cushioned with fat, filled with the bag of bloody seawater, had done its job. The baby was alive, too.