Werewolves in Their Youth (8 page)

“This is the corner, huh?”

“I had lunch at Authentic. I was coming up Poinsettia.”

It had been Richard who discovered this classic West Hollywood shortcut, skirting the northbound traffic and stoplights of La Brea Avenue, within a few weeks of their marriage and arrival in Los Angeles. They had lived then in a tiny one-bedroom bungalow around the corner from Pink’s. The garage was rented out to a palmist who claimed to have once warned Bob Crane to mend his wild ways. The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon pink bougainvillea, and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the backyard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts. It had been fall, the only season in Southern California that made any lasting claim on the emotions. The sunlight was intermittent and wistful as retrospection, bringing the city into sharper focus while at the same time softening its contours. In the afternoons there was a smoky tinge of eastern, autumnal regret in the air, which they only later learned was yearly blown down from raging wildfires in the 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 festooned with old laundry tags and spattered with blue paint. She looked dense, immovable, constructed of heavy materials and with a low center of gravity. Her big plastic eyeglasses, indeterminately pink and of a curvy elaborate style that had not been fashionable since the early 1980s, dangled from her neck on a length of knotty brown twine. Years of straddling the threshold of blessing and catastrophe had rendered her sensitive to all the fine shadings of family emotion, but unfit to handle them with anything other than tactless accuracy. She turned to Cara. “Is there a problem?”

“I don’t know,” said Cara. “Richie?”

“You don’t know?” said Richard. He looked genuinely shocked. Still he didn’t stir from his seat. “Jesus. Yes, Dorothy, there is a little problem.”

Dorothy nodded, glancing from one to the other of them, awaiting some further explanation that was not forthcoming.

“Cara,” she said finally, “were you expecting Richard to join you for your appointment?”

“Not—well, no. I was supposed to drive myself.” She shrugged. “Maybe I was hoping … But I know it isn’t fair.”

“Richard,” said Dorothy, as gently as she could manage, “I’m sure you want to help Cara have this baby.”

Richard nodded, and kept on nodding. He took a deep breath, threw down the magazine, and stood up.

“I’m sure I must,” he said.

They went into the examination room and Dorothy closed the door. She and another midwife shared three small rooms on the third floor of an old brick building on a vague block of Melrose Avenue, to the west of the Paramount lot. The other midwife had New Age leanings, which Dorothy without sharing found congenial enough. The room was decorated with photographs of naked pregnant women and with artwork depicting labor and birth drawn from countries and cultures, many of them in the Third World, where the long traditions of midwifery had never been broken. Because Dorothy’s mother and grandmother had both been midwives, in a small town outside of Texarkana, her own sense of tradition was unconscious and distinctly unmillenarian. She knew a good deal about herbs and the emotions of mothers, but she did not believe, especially, in crystals, meditation, creative visualization, or the inherent wisdom of preindustrial societies. Twenty years of life on the West Coast had not rid her attitude toward pregnancy and labor of a callous East Texas air of husbandry and hard work. She pointed Richard to a battered fifth-hand armchair covered in gold Herculon, under a poster of the goddess Cybele with the milky whorl of the cosmos in her belly. She helped Cara up onto the examination table.

“I probably should have said something before,” Cara said. “This baby. It isn’t Richie’s.”

Richard’s hands had settled on his knees. He stared at the stretched and distorted yellow daisies printed on the fabric of Cara’s leggings, his shoulders hunched, a shadow on his jaw.

“I see,” said Dorothy. She regretted her earlier brusqueness with him, though there was nothing to be done about it now and she certainly could not guarantee that she would never be brusque with him again. Her sympathy for husbands was necessarily circumscribed by the simple need to conserve her energies for the principals in the business at hand. “That’s hard.”

“It’s extra hard,” Cara said. “Because, see … I was raped. By the, uh, by the Reservoir Rapist, you remember him.” She lowered her voice. “Derrick James Cooper.”

“Oh, dear God,” Dorothy said. It was not the first time these circumstances had presented themselves in her office, but they were rare enough. It took a particular kind of woman, one at either of the absolute extremes of the spectrum of hope and despair, to carry a baby through from that kind of beginning. She had no idea what kind of a husband it took. “I’m sorry for both of you. Cara.” She opened her arms and stepped toward the mother, and Cara’s head fell against her shoulder. “Richard.” Dorothy turned, not expecting Richard to accept a hug from her but obliged by her heart and sense of the proprieties to offer him one.

He looked up at her, chewing on his lower lip, and the fury that she saw in his eyes made her take a step closer to Cara, to the baby in her belly, which he so obviously hated with a passion he could not, as a decent man, permit himself to acknowledge.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“I don’t see how you could be,” Dorothy said. “That baby in there is the child of a monster who raped your wife. How can you possibly be all right with that? I wouldn’t be.”

She felt Cara stiffen. The hum of the air-conditioning filled the room.

“I still think I’m going to skip the hug,” Richard said.

The examination proceeded. Cara displayed the pale hemisphere of her belly to Dorothy. She lay back and spread her legs, and Dorothy, a glove snapped over her hand, reached up into her and investigated the condition of her cervix. Dorothy took Cara’s blood pressure and checked her pulse and then helped her onto the scale.

“You are perfect,” Dorothy announced as Cara dressed herself. “You just keep on doing all the things you tell me you’ve been doing. Your baby is going to be perfect, too.”

“What do you think it is?” Richard said, speaking for the first time since the examination had begun.

“Is? You mean the sex?”

“They couldn’t tell on the ultrasound. I mean, I know there’s no way to really know for sure, but I figured you’re a midwife, maybe you have some kind of mystical secret way of knowing.”

“As a matter of fact I am never wrong about that,” Dorothy said. “Or so very rarely that it’s the same as always being right.”

“And?”

Dorothy put her right hand on Cara’s belly. She was carrying high, which tradition said meant the baby was a boy, but this had nothing to do with Dorothy’s feeling that the child was unquestionably male. It was just a feeling. There was nothing mystical to Dorothy about it.

“That’s a little boy. A son.”

Richard shook his head, face pinched, and let out a soft, hopeless gust of air through his teeth. He pulled Cara to her feet, and handed her her purse.

“Son of the monster,” he said. “Wolfman Junior.”

“I have been wrong once or twice,” Dorothy said softly, reaching for his hand.

He eluded her grasp once more.

“I’m sort of hoping for a girl,” he said.

“Girls are great,” said Dorothy.

Cara was due on the fifth of May. When the baby had not come by the twelfth, she went down to Melrose to see Dorothy, who palpated her abdomen, massaged her perineum with jojoba oil, and told her to double the dose of a vile tincture of black and blue cohosh which Cara had been taking for the past week.

“How long will you let me go?” Cara said.

“It’s not going to be an issue,” Dorothy said.

“But if it is. How long?”

“I can’t let you go much past two weeks. But don’t worry about it. You’re seventy-five percent effaced. Everything is nice and soft in there. You aren’t going to go any two weeks.”

On the fifteenth of May and again on the seventeenth, Cara and a friend drove into Laurel Canyon to dine at a restaurant whose house salad was locally reputed to contain a mystery leaf that sent women into labor. On the eighteenth, Dorothy met Cara at the office of her OB in West Hollywood. A nonstress test was performed. The condition of her amniotic sac and its contents was evaluated. The doctor was tight-lipped throughout, and his manner toward Dorothy Cara found sardonic and cold. She guessed that they had had words before Cara’s arrival or were awaiting her departure before doing so. As he left to see his next patient, the doctor advised Cara to schedule an induction for the next day.

“We don’t want that baby to get much bigger.”

He went out.

“I can get you two more days,” said Dorothy, sounding dry and unconcerned but looking grave. “But I’m going out on a limb.”

Cara nodded. She pulled on the loose-waisted black trousers from CP Shades and the matching black blouse that she had been wearing for the past two weeks, even though two of the buttons were hanging loose. She stuffed her feet into her ragged black espadrilles. She tugged the headband from her head, shook out her hair, then fitted the headband back into place. She sighed, and nodded again. She looked at her watch. Then she burst into tears.

“I don’t want to be induced,” she said. “If they induce me I’m going to need drugs.”

“Not necessarily.”

“And then I’ll probably end up with a C-section.”

“There’s no reason to think so.”

“This started out as something I had no control over, Dorothy. I don’t want it to end like that.”

“Everything starts out that way, dear,” said Dorothy. “Ends that way, too.”

“Not this.”

Dorothy put her arm around Cara and they sat there, side by side on the examining table. Dorothy relied on her corporeal solidity and steady nerves to comfort patients, and was not inclined to soothing words. She said nothing for several minutes.

“Go home,” she said at last. “Call your husband. Tell him you need his prostaglandins.”

“Richie?” Cara said. “But he …he can’t. He won’t.”

“Tell him this is his big chance,” Dorothy said. “I imagine it’s been a long time.”

“Ten months,” said Cara. “At least. I mean unless he’s been with somebody else.”

“Call him,” Dorothy said. “He’ll come.”

Richard had moved out of the house when Cara was in her thirty-fifth week. As from the beginning of their troubles, there had been no decisive moment of rupture, no rhetorical firefight, no decision taken on Richard’s part at all. He had merely spent longer and longer periods away from home, rising well before dawn to take his morning run around the reservoir where the first line of the epitaph of their marriage had been written, and arriving home at night long after Cara had gone to sleep. In week thirty-four he had received an offer to film a commercial in Seattle. The shoot was scheduled for eight days. Richard had never come home. On Cara’s due date, he had telephoned to say that he was back in L.A., staying at his older brother Matthew’s up in Camarillo. He and Matthew had not gotten along as children, and in adulthood had once gone seven and a half years without speaking. That Richie had turned to him now for help filled Cara with belated pity for her husband. He was sleeping in a semiconverted garage behind Matthew’s house, which he shared with Matthew’s disaffected teenage son Jeremy.