Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon Page B

Richard said, for the five thousandth time. His voice was soft and creased with fatigue. “Are you all right?”
    “Richie,” she said, though this was not what she had intended to say to him. “I miss you.”
    “I miss you, too.”
    “No, I … Richie, I don’t want to do this without you.”
    “Are you having the baby? Are you in labor now?”
    “I don’t know. I might be. I just felt something. Richie, can’t you come over?”
    “I’ll be there in an hour,” he said. “Hold on.”
    Over the next hour Cara waited for a reverberation or renewal of the twinge that had awakened her. She felt strange; her back ached, and her stomach was agitated and sour. She chewed a Gaviscon and lay propped up on the bed, listening for the sound of Richard’s car. He arrived exactly an hour after he had hung up the telephone, dressed in ripped blue jeans and a bulging, ill-shaped, liver-colored sweater she had knit for him in the early days of their marriage.
    “Anything?” he said.
    She shook her head, and started to cry again. He went over to her and, as he had so many times in the last year, held her, a little stiffly, as though afraid of contact with her belly, patting her back, murmuring that everything would be fine.
    “No it won’t, Richie. They’re going to have to cut me open. I know they will. It started off violent. I guess it has to end violent.”
    “Have you talked to Dorothy? Isn’t there some, I don’t know, some kind of crazy midwife thing they can do? Some root you can chew or something?”
    Cara took hold of his shoulders, and pushed him away from her so that she could look him in the eye.
    “Prostaglandins,” she said. “And you’ve got them.”
    “I do? Where?”
    She looked down at his crotch, trying to give the gesture a slow and humorous Mae West import.
    “That can’t be safe,” Richard said.
    “Dorothy prescribed it.”
    “I don’t know, Cara.”
    “It’s my only hope.”
    “But you and I—”
    “Come on, Richie. Don’t even think of it as sex, all right? Just think of that as an applicator, all right? A prostaglandin delivery system.”
    He sighed. He closed his eyes, and wiped his open palms across his face as though to work some life and circulation into it. The skin around his eyes was crepey and pale as a worn dollar bill.
    “That’s a turn-on,” he said.
    He took off his clothes. He had lost twenty-five pounds over the past several months, and he saw the shock of this register on Cara’s face. He stood a moment, at the side of the bed, uncertain how to proceed. For so long she had been so protective of her body, concealing it in loose clothing, locking him out of the bathroom during her showers and trips to the toilet, wincing and shying from any but the gentlest demonstrations of his hands. When she was still relatively slender and familiar he had not known how to touch her; now that she loomed before him, lambent and enormous, he felt unequal to the job.
    She was wearing a pair of his sweatpants and a T-shirt, size extra large, that featured the face of Gali Karpas, the Israeli kung fu star, and the words TERMINATION ZONE. She slid the pants down to her ankles and lifted the shirt over her head. Her brassiere was engineered like a suspension bridge, armor plated, grandmotherly. It embarrassed her. Under the not quite familiar gaze of her husband, everything about her body embarrassed her. Her breasts, mottled and veined, tumbled out and lay shining atop the great lunar arc of her belly, dimpled by a tiny elbow or knee. Her pubic bush had sent forth rhizoids, and coarse black curls darkened her thighs and her abdomen nearly to the navel.
    Richard sat back, looking at her belly. There was a complete miniature set of bones in there, a heart, a pleated brain charged with unimaginable thoughts. In a few hours or a day the passage he was about to enter would be stretched and used and inhabited by the blind, mute, and unknown witness to this act. The thought aroused