Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.

      “Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”

      “Sorry,” said Daniel.

      They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.

      “Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.

      “Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.

      When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.

      “Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”

      Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.

      “Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.

      Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.

      “Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.

      “Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”

      Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue – slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob – had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.

      “Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”

      “Well, yeah. We really do.”

      The blood went out of Hogue’s face.

      “Excuse me,” he said. “I – I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be –” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned the ground under the long rhododendron hedges that flanked the door. He moved crabwise along the row of shrubbery until he disappeared around the corner of the house.

      “I remember him now,” said Daniel.

      Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.

      “I hope he’s all right.”

      “I think he just needs a drink.”

      “Hush, Daniel, please.”

      “Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”

      “Did he make a toast?”

      “It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’”

      “I don’t remember that.”

      “Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”

      “Daniel.”

      “This is a waste.”

      “Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”

      “Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”

      “What else can I say?”

      “Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”

      “Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile – the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.

      “Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”

      They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand – three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club – seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.

      It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had СКАЧАТЬ