Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon [Chabon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3412-9
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Spikes

ONE AFTERNOON TOWARD the middle of April, Kohn’s lawyer, her patience exhausted, called and said she was giving him one last chance. He was to come into Chagrin Harbor that afternoon and sign the petition in which he and his wife informed the state of Washington that their marriage was irretrievably broken. If he once again failed to show, his lawyer regretted she would have to toss his file into a bottom drawer, send him a bill, and forget about him. His wife, and her lawyer, would then be free to reap uncontested the rewards of his recalcitrance. So Kohn pulled on his big rubber boots and slogged up the path to the slough of gravel where he and his neighbors on Valhalla Beach parked their mud-encrusted Jeeps and pickups. There was a chill in the air, and Kohn’s large, unshaven head with its spectacles and stunned features was zipped deep into the hood of a parka the vague color of boiled organ meat. He peered out at the world through a tiny porthole trimmed with synthetic fur and heard only the sound of his own respiration.

His marriage had been short-lived, a brief tale of blind hopefulness, calamity, and then the dismantling ministrations of psychotherapists and lawyers. Jill was ten years older than Kohn, a Chubb Island native, a Lacan scholar who taught at Reed College. She yearned to have a child. Kohn was an Easterner, socially awkward, obsessive. He was an instrument maker who built custom electric guitars, mostly for the Japanese market, and he preferred to keep his own yearnings pressed between the clear panes of a marijuana habit where he could safely observe them. He spoke with a slight stammer. His only good friend was one he had made in his freshman year of high school. Jill had mistaken his carpenterial silences, and a shyness that was purely physiological, for the marks of a sensitive soul. She was thirty-five and perhaps not interested in looking too closely or too far.

She had gotten pregnant right after the wedding. They left Portland and moved back up to the Puget Sound, to her parents’ old brown-shingled house on Probity Beach. The baby, a son, arrived in March, and for the length of a baseball season the three of them were contented, in a blurred way that at certain moments resolved itself into sharp foci of happiness no wider than a dime, no more substantial than a smell of salt in the hollow of the baby’s neck as Kohn carried him up the beach to his grandparents’ whitewashed porch. In October, the baby spiked a fever of 106°. He lost consciousness on the ferryboat, in his mother’s arms, on the way into Swedish Hospital. He was buried, along with his parents’ marriage, in a corner of Chubb Island Cemetery, with some of his ancestors and cousins. They got therapy, but it was a waste of money and time because Kohn didn’t like to talk in front of the therapist. He grieved at odd moments, privately, minutely, invisibly almost even to himself.

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