Werewolves in Their Youth (12 page)

“Daddy, what’s that?”

“It’s a bowl of tapioca pudding.”

“No, it’s a goldfish.”

“Oh,” said Green, through his teeth, wrestling her from the water’s edge, “so it is.”

“How long have you had her?” said Ruby, as Green scooped up his daughter again and this time toted her struggling form into the house.

“Three weeks,” said Green, attempting to mask his utter exasperation with a show of utter exasperation. Then he regretted his response. Ruby’s tone had been conspiratorial, implying sympathy with the trial of shepherding a toddler and with the fatigue it must be causing him, but the premise of her question was not merely that, since he was a divorced father with limited access to his daughter and hence limited experience with her, there must be a finite limit to his tolerance of her misbehaviors, but also that, on a more fundamental level, he must view Jocelyn as inherently inconvenient, annoying, even undesirable, as if she were a flu he had picked up and could not shake, or a cast on his leg. Once again Green found himself confronted with making the painful admission that he did not love his daughter in any way that was meaningful or passionate or useful to her. Their three weeks together had crawled by in an endless, desperate quest on his part to fill her hours with healthy amusements of the sort he recommended in his book and in a constant, successful effort on hers to exhaust the potential for amusement of each, with thrilling intensity and utter finality, within fifteen minutes. She was a well behaved enough child, remarkably so given the circumstances of her life, but every time she went into hysterics or pushed things too far or merely refused to surrender the wonder of consciousness at the end of the day, Green had found himself miserably, devoutly wishing for the visitation to end. The long drive up from Florida had been a nightmarish marathon of squirming, gas-station lavatories, and the sound-track albums from animated movies whose values, and lyrics, he deplored. Now he was having regrets. He ought to have driven them out to the ocean, to see the horses. He ought to have offered to keep her for the entire summer. He ought to have spent the rest of his life married to Caryn and pretending that he loved her even though, as he now must acknowledge, all the love of which he was capable had somehow been sacrificed in that one dark kiss eighteen years before.

Inside the house, the climate was hot, malarial, absolutely still. All the doors and windows were open, and flies chased one another from room to room. Rap music, or what sounded to Green like rap music, was playing loud enough in the backyard to make the glass in the living-room picture frames hum like tissue on a comb. The adoption of rap as the theme music of teenage white boys was one of the clearest symptoms, along with pierced eyebrow ridges, of the substitute world that had eventually shown up to claim the future in which the Kleins’ stark and crumbling house now languished.

Seth Klein’s graduation party was largely an affair of such white boys. Although it was hard for Green to tell them apart, and a certain amount of perceptual cloning may have exaggerated their numbers in his gaze, there were perhaps twenty-five of them. They threatened the ceilings with their brush-cut heads and angled their bodies out over the teenage girls, of whom there seemed to be substantially fewer in attendance. There were also a number of relatives, friends of the family, and inexplicable near-strangers like Green himself, with paper plates that they balanced on their laps or used to fan themselves against the heat. The only one Green knew, though time and illness had altered her in ways that made his stomach tighten, was Emily. He had no idea which boy might be Seth.

“Well,” said Emily. She canted her head to one side and looked askance at Green, exactly as she might have done twenty years earlier, when he tried to persuade her that there had once been another letter in the alphabet, called thorn, or that the television reporter Roger Mudd was a direct descendant of the Dr. Mudd who went to prison for setting John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg. She had always treated him like a bullshit artist, Green remembered, long before he’d ever had something to lie to her about, and the more sincere he became in his efforts to convince her of whatever unlikely truth he was trying to expound, the greater her doubt of him would grow. Now her thick hair, always, like Ruby’s, a mass of unplaited dark rope, was gone. In its place grew a sweet pale tuft of dark blond baby down. She had been plump and drinking and frowsy the last time Green saw her, at a fortieth-birthday party for his mother in Las Vegas ten years earlier, but the cancer had honed her and brightened her eyes. She did not look well, but being sick brought out something in her, a peppery, droll quality that went back to Green’s earliest memories of the first woman he had ever desired. “So what was that all about?” She looked Green up and down, then tried to peer around his back. “What did you forget?”

“He didn’t forget anything,” said Ruby. “He was just afraid of me.”

“And I was afraid of her, too,” said Jocelyn, loyally.

“That shows real sense,” Emily said. “Your reputation precedes you, Rube.”

“Ha. How are you?” said Green.

She shrugged. “Not great. Not dead.” She smiled, and her crooked teeth, with their coffee and tobacco stains, seemed to afford a glimpse of her yellowing skull, tinged with the residues of soil and water. He smiled back, feeding himself neat little dietetic packets of raw, unrefined panic. The cancer in Emily Klein—surely that was not his fault, too? But something inside him—a schizophrenic or a clergyman would have called it a voice—told him that it was. That it was all his fault—rap music, labial piercing, his divorce, everything that had come to pass since that long-ago night in Ruby Klein’s bedroom. What had become of little Ruby Klein? He felt like the poor time-traveling dolt in the Bradbury story who returned from stepping on a butterfly in the Triassic to find his own epoch altered abruptly, inevitably, with signs misspelled and everyone under the foot of a murderous and ignorant tyrant. How could one ever begin to repair the damage that he had so obviously done?

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

Emily shrugged. She thought he was merely condoling her for the cancer. She pointed to her daughter. “So, what do you make of that face full of metal, Doctor? You ought to see her tattoos. On the other hand, considering their location, maybe you ought to not.”

“He’ll see them,” said Ruby. “Everybody will.” She looked at her wristwatch. “I’m just, you know, waiting for Dad to turn up before I start the show.”

“I wish you would,” said Emily, looking a little dreamy.

“Don’t think I won’t.”

“Would he just die?”

“With any luck.”

“Especially the monkey,” Emily said thoughtfully.

Ruby punched her on the arm. “Goddamn it, Mom, you know it’s a fuckin’ Sasquatch.”

“A Sasquatch is not that skinny.” Emily turned to Green. “What is it with this tattoo shit, Marty? Can you explain this phenomenon?”

“Well,” Green said. He could feel the weak grin guttering on his lips. He knew what Freud had said about tattooing, of course, and he had his own private theory that people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had been only the blankest sheet of paper.
Don’t throw me away,
they were saying.
I bear a hidden message.
“It’s difficult to say.”

“I hope you don’t have one.”

“Not yet,” said Green. “Ha-ha.” He struggled to relax, to regain his therapeutic cool, to pick up the scattered index cards on which he had jotted down all his notes about who he was. Green was an excellent therapist, kindly but distant, supportive but ineluctable, deferential yet sure of himself, solitary but self-sufficient. None of these qualities had stood him in any good stead during the three years of his marriage to Caryn or given him the faintest clue of how to connect to his daughter, that wild, random compound of Caryn and him that they had, in their fantastic ignorance, set to wander loose in the world.

“Daddy,” Jocelyn said. She pointed to the buffet table, spread from end to end with a motley assortment of barbecue favorites, vegetarian fare, and polychrome latex-based snacks. She seemed to be indicating a pile of Toll House cookies. “What are those?”

She twisted herself in his arms, trying to get free. Again Green gripped her tightly. He could not rid himself of the erroneous sensation that this was the house in which, sometime around his twelfth birthday, something crucial inside of him had broken, never to be repaired. He was afraid to put Jocelyn down here, to let her wander its rooms alone.

“What are what, honey?” he said.

“Those. Those round brown things.”

“What things?”

“Those things that look like chocolate-chip cookies.”

“Those are chocolate-chip cookies.”

“Can I have one?”

“Yes, you may.”

“Can I get down?”

Green looked at her. What difference did it make whether he said yes to her or no? In forty-eight hours, she would slip across the border, into another jurisdiction, where his laws and statutes did not apply.

“Yes,” he said, “you may.”

He put her down, and she ran over to the table and reached for the cookie, rising up onto the balls of her feet.

“What a sweetheart,” said Ruby.

“Thank you,” said Green. “Now, tell me, which one of these boys is Seth?”

Emily turned to scan the room. “Which one of these boys is Seth? You tell me. I’m serious. I mean,” she said, “look at these kids. I swear, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, which isn’t too far-fetched, I’m afraid. Just look at them. Look at this one.” She slapped a young man on the back of his stubbly head as he passed. He grinned at her. “I tell Seth he looks like a penis, with his bald head and his pants all sagging down around his ankles like a big scrotum. It’s a room full of penises. Then again, I suppose that’s always true, isn’t it? Even when they’re wearing suits and ties.”

The screen door banged. Ruby jumped.

“Every time I walk into this house,” said the man who came in through the door, “someone is saying the word
penis.
I don’t know why that is.”

Harvey Klein was a small, solid, almost top-heavy man, jut-jawed and broad-shouldered. He wore a knit short-sleeve polo shirt of soft summer-weight wool, gray with black flecks, and tight black jeans, creased down the front like a pair of suit pants. His brushed-aluminum hair was cut short, except at the very back, where he wore it pulled into a neat little pigtail. His sunglasses hung on a cord around his neck. A few thick silver hairs curled up through the open collar of his shirt. He stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

“You’ve never been in this house before,” said Emily.

“But I’m certain I’m right nonetheless.”

“Harvey.”

“Em.”

They embraced. Green could see him taking stock of her, palpating her bones with his long, sentient fingers. He looked at least fifteen years younger than his ex-wife, though Green suspected that they were exactly the same age.

“This is your daughter,” Emily said, pulling away. “In case you don’t recognize her.”

“She’s hard to miss,” said Dr. Klein.

“Penis,” said Ruby. “Penis, penis, penis.”

He spread his arms wide, waiting for her to step into them. She set her hands on her hips and gave him a look, through lowered lids, face half-averted, lips pursed, mulling him over. She kept him waiting a long time, long enough for Green to wonder if she hated her father enough to leave him hanging there like a fool with his hands in the air. The expression on Dr. Klein’s face didn’t waver. He stood there, smiling like a man who had just come home from the track, up a couple of grand, to take everyone out for steaks and dancing. And, at the last possible moment, Ruby threw herself into his arms. Her feet kicked into the air, and she swung from his neck, tethered to him at one end, dangling loose at the other. She murmured something in her father’s ear. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply the smell of her hair. Green understood, though he could not have said quite how, that there had never been any other possible outcome.

“Yo, Duncan,” said one of the big boys elbowing one another in the living room. “Go tell Feeb his dad’s here.”

Dr. Klein unhooked Ruby’s hands from the back of his neck and restored her spindly bootheels to the terrazzo floor of the living room. He was looking around her now, past her, studying the room, taking in its motley population and random furnishings—some of which must have chimed dimly in his memory—with the remote but friendly air of a busy doctor, a study that eventually led him to Green. He looked puzzled. Then he turned back to Ruby and took hold of her chin with the fingers of one hand. He switched her face from side to side. “Christ, what is all this shit, Ruby Ellen? You look like a goddamn charm bracelet.” He let go of her chin, and her face seemed to hang there a moment, in midair, as if suspended on the lingering tension of his regard. Dr. Klein returned his pleasant, clinical gaze to Green. “You look like a hurricane fence.” He winked at Green and held out his hand. “Harvey Klein.”

“Martin Green. I, uh, I used to baby-sit Ruby.”

“Martin Green. Your mother was Carol, sure, sure. I remember her. Baby-sit. Hard to believe that”—he nodded toward Ruby, winking again—“was ever a baby. Isn’t it?”

“Never have children, Mr. Green. They’ll break your heart.”

Ruby simulated the sound of vomiting.

“Ruby,” said Emily, “isn’t there something you wanted to show your father?”

Ruby blushed. “Maybe later,” she said. “Shut up, Mom.”

“Now,” said Dr. Klein, “where is my son?”

“Where is my daughter?” said Green.

Jocelyn was no longer standing by the buffet table. Green craned his head to get a better look. An elderly uncle of Emily’s and one of the ersatz hoodlums were engaged in a transgenerational analysis of the
Planet of the Apes
series of films, while at the same time, armed with a couple of plastic forks, they made their way through the remnants of a macaroni casserole. The only other occupants of the buffet line were great black flies. Green called out to the two men, over the heads of several intervening partygoers. “Have you seen my little girl?” The men shook their heads and went back to their conversation. “Excuse me,” Green said to Dr. Klein. “I seem to have lost my child.”