Werewolves in Their Youth by Michael Chabon Page B

agreed to join herself in perpetuity to a man whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist, and Daniel had consigned himself to a life spent as a hundred and sixty-two pounds of hair in her mouth and elbows in her rib cage and hot breath in her nostrils.
    “I hate you,” he said.
    For a moment she looked very surprised by this admission. Then she stuck out her jaw and narrowed her eyes.
    “Well, I hate you, too,” she said.
    Daniel fell on top of her. He was a little self-conscious at first about the animal sounds he heard them making and the way they were biting and tearing at each other’s clothes. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of a key scene in Spanking Brittany Blue. Then some spasm sent Christy’s hand flying, and she smacked Daniel in the eye. Inside his skull a bright red star flared and then winked out. After that, he forgot to pay attention to what they were doing. The bed underneath them smelled of its right occupants, of the night sweat and the aftershave and the skin lotion of Herman Silk and his Monkey. A loose board in the old fir floor rhythmically creaked. When the proper time came, Daniel reached into the drawer for Herman’s little bottle of lubricant. He turned Christy over on her belly, and spread her legs with his knee, and greased her freely with the cold, clear stuff. His entry into her was, for the first time, effortless and quick.
    “That was fun,” Christy said, when it was over. She stretched her limbs across the wrecked bed as if to embrace it, and rolled, like a cat, back and forth, until it was smeared with the manifold compound of their lovemaking.
    “Still hate me?” said Daniel.
    She nodded, and that was when Daniel saw the mistake that they had made. Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe—a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.
    “I had lunch with your father the other day,” he began.
    “Shh!” Christy said.
    He lay beside her, listening. From downstairs they could hear the sound of raised voices. A man and a woman were shouting at each other. The man was Mr. Hogue.
    “I’m going to call the police, Bob,” the woman said.
    Daniel and Christy looked at each other. They stood up and scrambled to reassemble their clothes. Daniel slipped the vial of lubricant into his pocket. Then they went downstairs.
    When they came into the kitchen, Mr. Hogue was lying on the floor, amid hundreds and hundreds of spilt threepenny nails, cupping his chin in his hands. Blood leaked out between his fingers and drizzled down his neck into the plaid of his madras jacket. The reclining brass pasha, the Ping-Pong paddle, Space Needle, and all the other things he had stolen lay scattered on the floor around him. A handsome woman with red spectacles, whom Daniel recognized as Mrs. Hogue, was kneeling beside him, tears on her face, wiping at the cut on his chin with a paper towel.
    “Christy,” she said. “Hello, Daniel.”
    She smiled ruefully and looked down at Mr. Hogue, moaning and whispering curses on the terra-cotta floor.
    “Is he okay?” Daniel said, pointing to the realtor, who was, he saw now, no stranger to these troubled rooms.
    “I certainly hope not. I hit him as hard as I could.” Mrs. Hogue dabbed tenderly at the