Werewolves in Their Youth

Son of the Wolfman

WHEN 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.

“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.

“He doesn’t get home till pretty late, Aunt Cara,” Jeremy told her when she called that afternoon from the doctor’s office. “Like one or two.”

“Can I call that late?”

“Fuck yeah. Hey, did you have your baby?”

“I’m trying,” Cara said. “Please ask him to call me.”

“Sure thing.”

“No matter how late it is.”

She went to Las Carnitas for dinner. Strolling mariachis entered and serenaded her in her magic shroud of solitude and girth. She stared down at her plate and ate a tenth of the food upon it. She went home and spent a few hours cutting out articles from American Baby, and ordering baby merchandise from telephone catalogs in the amount of five hundred and twelve dollars. At ten o’clock she set her alarm clock for one-thirty and went to bed. At one o’clock she was wakened from a light uneasy sleep by a dream in which a shadowy, hirsute creature, bipedal and stooped, whom even within the dream itself she knew to be intended as a figure of or stand-in for Derrick James Cooper, mounted a plump guitarrón, smashing it against the ground. Cara shot up, garlic on her breath, heart racing, listening to the fading echoes in her body of the twanging of some great inner string.

The telephone rang.

“What’s the matter, Cara?” 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 him.

“Wow,” Cara said, looking at his groin again. “Check that out.”

“This is weird.”

“Bad weird?” She looked up at Richard, reading in his face the unavoidable conclusion that the presence of the other man’s child in her body had altered it so completely as to make her unrecognizable to him. A stranger, carrying a stranger in her womb, had asked him into her bed.

“Lie back,” he said. “I’m going to do this to you.”

“There’s some oil in the drawer.”

“We won’t need it.”

She lowered herself down onto her elbows and lay, legs parted, looking at him. He reached out, cautiously, watching his hands as they assayed the taut, luminous skin of her belly.

“Quickly,” she said, after a minute. “Don’t take too long.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Just — please—”

Thinking that she required lubrication after all, Richard reached into the drawer of the nightstand. For a moment he felt around blindly for the bottle of oil. In the instant before he turned to watch what his hand was doing, his middle finger jammed against the tip of the X-Acto knife that Cara had been using to cut out articles on nipple confusion and thrush. He cried out.

“Did you come?”

“Uh, yeah, I did,” he said. “But mostly I cut my hand.”

It was a deep, long cut that pulsed with blood. After an hour with ice and pressure they couldn’t get it to stop, and Cara said that they had better go to the emergency room. She wrapped the wound in half a box of gauze, and helped him dress. She threw on her clothes and followed him out to the driveway.

“We’ll take the Honda,” she said. “I’m driving.”

They went out to the street. The sky was obscured by a low-lying fog, glowing pale orange as if lit from within, carrying an odor of salt and slick pavement. There was no one in the street and no sound except for the murmur of the Hollywood Freeway. Cara came around and opened the door for Richard, and drove him to the nearest hospital, one not especially renowned for the quality of its care.

“So was that the best sex of your life or what?” she asked him, laughing, as they waited at a red light.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “It wasn’t the worst.”

The security guard at the doors to the emergency room had been working this shift for nearly three years and in that time had seen enough of the injuries and pain of the city of Los Angeles to render him immobile, smiling, very nearly inert. At 2:47 on the morning of May 20 a white Honda Accord pulled up, driven by a vastly pregnant woman. The guard, who would go off duty in an hour, kept smiling. He had seen pregnant women drive themselves to have their babies before. It was not advisable behavior, certainly, but this was a place where the inadvisable behaviors of the world came rushing to bear their foreseeable fruit. Then a man, clearly her husband, got out of the passenger side and walked, head down, past the guard. The sliding glass doors sighed open to admit him. The pregnant woman drove off toward the parking lot.

The guard frowned.

“Everything all right?” he asked Cara when she reappeared, her gait a slow contemplative roll, right arm held akimbo, right hand pressing her hip as though it pained her.

“I just had a really big contraction,” she said. She made a show of wiping the sweat from her brow. “Whew.” Her voice sounded happy, but to the guard she looked afraid.

“Well, you in the right place, then.”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m supposed to be at Cedars. Pay phone?”

He directed her to the left of the triage desk. She lumbered inside and called Dorothy.

“I think I’m having the baby,” she said. “No, I’m not. I don’t know.”

“Keep talking,” said Dorothy.

“I’ve only had three contractions.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Contractions hurt.”

“They do.”

“But, like, a lot.”

“I know it. Keep talking.”

“I’m calling from the emergency room.” She named the hospital. “Richard cut his hand up. He … he came over … we …” A rippling sheet of hot foil unfurled in her abdomen. Cara lurched to one side. She caught herself and half-squatted on the floor beside the telephone cubicle, with the receiver in her hand, staring at the floor. She was so stunned by her womb’s sudden arrogation of every sensory pathway in her body to its purposes that, as before, she forgot to combat or work her way through the contraction with the breathing and relaxation techniques she had been taught. Instead she allowed the pain to permeate and inhabit her, praying with childish fervor for it to pass. The linoleum under her feet was ocher with pink and gray flecks. It gave off a smell of ashes and pine. Cara was aware of Dorothy’s voice coming through the telephone, suggesting that she try to relax the hinge of her jaw, her shoulder blades, her hips. Then the contraction abandoned her, as swiftly as it had arrived. Cara pulled herself to her feet. Her fingers ached around the receiver. There was a spreading fan of pain in her lower back. Otherwise she felt absolutely fine.

“You’re having your baby,” Dorothy said.

“Are you sure? How can you tell?”

“I could hear it in your voice, dear.”

“But I wasn’t talking.” Though now as she said this she could hear an echo of her voice a moment earlier, saying, Okay … okay … okay.

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Dorothy said.

When Cara found Richard, he was being seen by a physician’s assistant, a large, portly black man whose tag read COLEY but who introduced himself as Nordell. Nordell’s hair was elaborately braided and beaded. His hands were manicured and painted with French tips. He was pretending to find Richard attractive, or pretending to pretend. His hand was steady, and his sutures marched across Richard’s swollen fingertip as orderly as a line of ants. Richard looked pale and worried. He was pretending to be amused by Nordell.

“Don’t worry, girlfriend, I already gave him plenty of shit for you,” Nordell told Cara when she walked into the examination room. “Cutting his hand when you’re about to have a baby. I said, boyfriend, this is not your opera.”

“He has a lot of nerve,” said Cara.

“My goodness, look at you. You are big. How do you even fit behind the wheel of your car?”

Richard laughed.

“You be quiet.” Nordell pricked another hole in Richard’s finger, then tugged the thread through on its hook. “When are you due?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Uh-huh.” He scowled at Richard. “Like she don’t already have enough to worry about without you sticking your finger on a damn X-Acto knife.”

Richard laughed again. He looked like he was about to be sick.

“You all got a name picked out?”

“Not yet.”

“Know what you’re having?”

“We don’t,” said Cara. “The baby’s legs were always in the way. But Richard would like a girl.”

Richard looked at her. He had noticed when she came into the room that her face had altered, that the freckled pallor and fatigue of recent weeks had given way to a flush and a giddy luster in her eye that might have been happiness or apprehension.

“Come on,” said Nordell. “Don’t you want to have a son to grow up just like you?”

“That would be nice,” Richard said.

Cara closed her eyes. Her hands crawled across her belly. She sank down to the floor, rocking on her heels. Nordell set down his suturing clamp and peeled off his gloves. He lowered himself to the floor beside Cara and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Come on, honey, I know you been taking those breathing lessons. So breathe. Come on.”

“Oh, Richie.”

Richard sat on the table, watching Cara go into labor. He had not attended any but the first of the labor and delivery classes and had not the faintest idea of what was expected of him or what it now behooved him to do. This was true not just of the process of parturition but of all the duties and grand minutiae of fatherhood itself. The rape, the conception, the growing of the placenta, the nurturing and sheltering of the child in darkness, in its hammock of woven blood vessels, fed on secret broth — all of these had gone on with no involvement on his part. Until now he had taken the simple, unalterable fact of this rather brutally to heart. In this way he had managed to prevent the usual doubts and questions of the prospective father from arising in his mind. For a time, it was true, he had maintained a weak hope that the baby would be a girl. Vaguely he had envisioned a pair of skinny legs in pink high-topped sneakers, crooked upside down over a horizontal bar, a tumbling hem conveniently obscuring the face. When Dorothy had so confidently pronounced the baby a boy, however, Richard had actually felt a kind of black relief. At that moment, the child had effectively ceased to exist for him: it was merely the son of Cara’s rapist, its blood snarled by the same abrading bramble of chromosomes. In all the last ten months he had never once imagined balancing an entire human being on his forearm, never pondered the depths and puzzles of his relationship to his own father, never suffered the nightly clutch of fear for the future that haunts a man while his pregnant wife lies beside him with her heavy breath rattling in her throat. Now that the hour of birth was at hand he had no idea what to do with himself.

“Get down here,” said Nordell. “Hold this poor child’s hand.”

Richard slid off the table and knelt beside Cara. He took her warm fingers in his own.

“Stay with me, Richie,” Cara said.

“All right,” said Richard. “Okay.”

While Nordell hastily wrapped Richard’s finger in gauze and tape, a wheelchair was brought for Cara. She was rolled off to admissions, her purse balanced on her knees. When Richard caught up to her a volunteer was just wheeling her into the elevator.

“Where are we going?” Richard said.

“To labor and delivery,” said the volunteer, an older man with hearing aids, his shirt pocket bulging with the outline of a pack of cigarettes. “Fourth floor. Didn’t you take the tour?”

Richard shook his head.

“This isn’t our hospital,” Cara said. “We took the tour at Cedars.”

“I wish I had,” Richard said, surprising himself.

When the labor triage nurse examined Cara, she found her to be a hundred percent effaced and nearly eight centimeters dilated.

“Whoa,” she said. “Let’s go have you this baby.”

“Here?” Cara said, knowing she sounded childish. “But I …”

“But nothing,” said the nurse. “You can have the next one at Cedars.”

Cara was hurried into an algae-green gown and rolled down to what she and the nurse both referred to as an LDR. This was a good-sized room that had been decorated to resemble a junior suite in an airport hotel, pale gray and lavender, oak-laminate furniture, posters on the walls tranquilly advertising past seasons of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. There was a hospital smell of air-conditioning, however, and so much diagnostic equipment crowded around the bed, so many wires and booms and monitors, that the room felt cramped, and the effect of pseudoluxury was spoiled. With all the gear and cables looming over Cara, the room looked to Richard like nothing so much as a soundstage.

“We forgot to bring a camera,” he said. “I should shoot this, shouldn’t I?”

“There’s a vending machine on two,” said the labor nurse, raising Cara’s legs up toward her chest, spreading them apart. The outer lips were swollen and darkened to a tobacco-stain brown, gashed pink in the middle, bright as bubble gum. “It has things like combs and toothpaste. I think it might have the kind of camera you throw away.”

“Do I have time?”

“Probably. But you never know.”

“Cara, do you want pictures of this? Should I go? I’ll be right back. Cara?”

Cara didn’t answer. She had slipped off into the world of her contractions, eyes shut, head rolled back, brow luminous with pain and concentration like the brow of Christ in a Crucifixion scene.

The nurse had lost interest in Richard and the camera question. She had hold of one of Cara’s hands in one of hers, and was stroking Cara’s hair with the other. Their faces were close together, and the nurse was whispering something. Cara nodded, and bit her lip, and barked out an angry laugh. Richard stood there. He felt he ought to be helping Cara, but the nurse seemed to have everything under control. There was nothing for him to do and no room beside the bed.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

He got lost on his way down to the second floor, and then when he reached two he got lost again trying to find the vending machine. It stood humming in a corridor outside the cafeteria, beside the men’s room. Within its tall panel of glass doors, a carousel rotated when you pressed a button. It was well stocked with toiletry and sanitary items, along with a few games and novelties for bored children. There was one camera left. Richard fed a twenty-dollar bill into the machine and received no change.

When he got back to the room he stood with his fingers on the door handle. It was cold and dry and gave him a static shock when he grasped it. Through the door he heard Cara say, “Fuck,” with a calmness that frightened him. He let go of the handle.

There was a squeaking of rubber soles, rapid and intent. Dorothy Pendleton was hurrying along the corridor toward him. She had pulled a set of rose surgical scrubs over her street clothes. They fit her badly across the chest and one laundry-marked shirttail dangled free of the waistband. As Dorothy hurried toward him she was pinning her hair up behind her head, scattering bobby pins as she came.

“You did it,” she said. “Good for you.”

Richard was surprised to find that he was glad to see Dorothy. She looked intent but not flustered, rosy-cheeked, wide-awake. She gave off a pleasant smell of sugary coffee. Over one shoulder she carried a big leather sack covered in a worn patchwork of scraps of old kilims. He noticed, wedged in among the tubes of jojoba oil and the medical instruments, a rolled copy of Racing Form.

“Yeah, well, I’m just glad, you know, that my sperm finally came in handy for something,” he said.

She nodded, then leaned into the door. “Good sperm,” she said. She could see that he needed something from her, a word of wisdom from the midwife, a pair of hands to yank him breech first and hypoxic back into the dazzle and clamor of the world. But she had already wasted enough of her attention on him, and she reached for the handle of the door.

Then she noticed the twenty-dollar cardboard camera dangling from his hand. For some reason it touched her that he had found himself a camera to hide behind.

She stopped. She looked at him. She put a finger to his chest. “My father was a sheriff in Bowie County, Texas,” she said.

He took a step backward, gazing down at the finger. Then he looked up again.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning get your ass into that room, deputy.” She pushed open the door.

The first thing they heard was the rapid beating of the baby’s heart through the fetal monitor. It filled the room with its simple news, echoing like a hammer on tin.

“You’re just in time,” said the labor nurse. “It’s crowning.”

“Dorothy. Richie.” Cara’s head lolled toward them, her cheeks streaked with tears and damp locks of hair, her eyes red, her face swollen and bruised looking. It was the face she had worn after the attack at Lake Hollywood, dazed with pain, seeking out his eyes. “Where did you go?” she asked him. She sounded angry. “Where did you go?”

Sheepishly he held up the camera.

“Jesus! Don’t go away again!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. A dark circle of hair had appeared between her legs, surrounded by the fiery pink ring of her straining labia. “I’m sorry!”

“Get him scrubbed,” Dorothy said to the nurse. “He’s catching the baby.”

“What?” said Richard. He felt he ought to reassure Cara. “Not really.”

“Really,” said Dorothy. “Get scrubbed.”

The nurse traded places with Dorothy at the foot of the bed, and took Richard by the elbow. She tugged the shrink-wrapped camera from his grasp.

“Why don’t you give that to me?” she said. “You go get scrubbed.”

“I washed my hands before,” Richard said, panicking a little.

“That’s good,” said Dorothy. “Now you can do it again.”

Richard washed his hands in brown soap that stung the nostrils, then turned back to the room. Dorothy had her hand on the bed’s controls, raising its back, helping Cara into a more upright position. Cara whispered something.

“What’s that, honey?” said Dorothy.

“I said Richard I’m sorry too.”

“What are you sorry about?” Dorothy said. “Good God.”

“Everything,” Cara said. And then, “Oh.”

She growled and hummed, snapping her head from side to side. She hissed short whistling jets of air through her teeth. Dorothy glanced at the monitor. “Big one,” she said. “Here we go.”

She waved Richard over to her side. Richard hesitated.

Cara gripped the side rails of the bed. Her neck arched backward. A humming arose deep inside her chest and grew higher in pitch as it made its way upward until it burst as a short cry, ragged and harsh, from her lips.

“Whoop!” said Dorothy, drawing back her arms. “A stargazer! Hi, there!” She turned again to Richard, her hands cupped around something smeary and purple that was protruding from Cara’s body. “Come on, move it. See this.”

Richard approached the bed, and saw that Dorothy balanced the baby’s head between her broad palms. It had a thick black shock of hair. Its eyes were wide open, large and dark, pupils invisible, staring directly, Richard felt, at him. There was no bleariness, or swelling of the lower eyelids. No one, Richard felt, had ever quite looked at him this way, without emotion, without judgment. The consciousness of a great and irrevocable event came over him; ten months’ worth of dread and longing filled him in a single unbearable rush. Disastrous things had happened to him in his life; at other times, stretching far back into the interminable afternoons of his boyhood, he had experienced a sense of buoyant calm that did not seem entirely without foundation in the nature of things. Nothing awaited him in the days to come but the same uneven progression of disaster and contentment. And all those moments, past and future, seemed to him to be concentrated in that small, dark, pupilless gaze.

Dorothy worked her fingers in alongside the baby’s shoulders. Her movements were brusque, sure, and indelicate. They reminded Richard of a cook’s, or a potter’s. She took a deep breath, glanced at Cara, and then gave the baby a twist, turning it ninety degrees.

“Now,” she said. “Give me your hands.”

“But you don’t really catch them, do you?” he said. “That’s just a figure of speech.”

“Don’t you wish,” said Dorothy. “Now get in there.”

She dragged him into her place, and stepped back. She took hold of his wrists and laid his hands on the baby’s head. It was sticky and warm against his fingers.

“Just wait for the next contraction, Dad. Here it comes.”

He waited, looking down at the baby’s head, and then Cara grunted, and some final chain or stem binding the baby to her womb seemed to snap. With a soft slurping sound the entire child came squirting out into Richard’s hands. Almost without thinking, he caught it. The nurse and Dorothy cheered. Cara started to cry. The baby’s skin was the color of skimmed milk, smeared, glistening, flecked with bits of dark red. Its shoulders and back were covered in a faint down, matted and slick. It worked its tiny jaw, snorting and snuffling hungrily at the sharp first mouthfuls of air.

“What is it?” Cara said. “Is it a boy?”

“Wow,” said Richard, holding the baby up to show Cara. “Check this out.”

Dorothy nodded. “You have a son, Cara,” she said. She took the baby from Richard, and laid him on the collapsed tent of Cara’s belly. Cara opened her eyes. “A big old hairy son.”

Richard went around to stand beside his wife. He leaned in until his cheek was pressed against hers. They studied the wolfman’s boy, and he regarded them.

“Do you think he’s funny-looking?” Richard said doubtfully. Then the nurse snapped a picture of the three of them, and they looked at her, blinking, blinded by the flash.

“Beautiful,” said the nurse.