anatomy of distraction

richard and cara are husband and wife, both thirty-four years old, in love with each other, and childless despite years of trying. notwithstanding this seeming void, they remain faithful to each other and their married life is as normal as any other's. then something happens. she is raped by a popular math teacher - a serial criminal who, prior to his capture, was only identified as the reservoir rapist - and with this violent act against her person she gets pregnant.

this is the plot around which michael chabon's story son of the wolfman (from the book werewolves in their youth) revolves, and in the first few paragraphs alone, two ironies from this multi-ironied story are told: the first is that richard realizes what he had been trying in vain to accomplish in ten or so years of intimacy can be achieved successfully by another man in just a few minutes of violence. the second is that while cara's doctors had been previously helping her to conceive, they are now asked to do its very opposite -to expel the fetus now growing in her tummy.

in any other time i could have finished this story in under an hour, complete with analysis of its many layers, with notes flooding my journal of character studies - but i could not find enough focus to do this because ten feet away, in the southwest corner of my apartment where the stereo dwells, cassandra wilson's voice jazzily goes up and down like the rising and falling of the waves. i remember one time i was in manhattan, i was craving for nothing at all - not the hungarian pastries from across columbia university, not the raw oysters from the oyster bar in grand central station - but the sound of her voice delivered live and in person, and yet despite this time allotted to her music by the jazz station, my mind withers and flies back to where it was because

cara decides to keep the baby. she decides to keep the baby for some reason the narrator finds no need to disclose, even if we learn at this moment of one secret irony residing in richard's mind: all those times that him and cara were trying, he did not really want to have kids. double ouch.

and so the marriage becomes sour, the pain growing in him being multiplied by the number of days necessary to make the fetus become a full person, although less sour -or bitter for that matter - is the taste residing in cara's mouth even if she, much much more than richard, is the abused person. and as a reader, i don't know why i get to understand her feelings, her excitement over the movement in her belly and the bulging of her breast. maybe i do, i just do not know what i do not know because

my eyes swell and puff, i sneeze at a rate of 2-3 times every five minutes, and i remember the doctor telling me the other day, "you are this close, this close, to getting a pneumonia" gesturing an inch of thickness with his thumb and forefinger, the other hand giving me the prescription for bronchitis. i blow my nose on a tissue from the box knowing its rightful place on my nightstand. there is blood. another vein may have been ruptured by this constant sneezing. oh well, at least i don't have the pain that cara feels because

she is now ten months and the baby is growing, she hates to undergo c-section as she hates to have the thing end violently as it begun, and to assist in this painful contraction, she asks Richard to give her a natural lubricator that her midwife advised. prostaglandins. "and you've got them", she tells him. "i do?, where?", he asks. she looks down at his crotch and says it's her only hope. and so he understands the prostaglandin delivery, and this thought of entering the cave where a set of bones, a pumping mini heart, a blind creature witnessing his entry somehow arouses him, and she was surprised (i come to think that they may not have had sex for ten months) by his act and uttered, wow!

wow!, really, that's how i screamed as dwyane wade splits the defense, moves left, moves right, and halfway through his leap contours his body to avoid a charge call, and to hell with gravity, he dunks the ball over the outstretched arm of his hapless 7-foot defender.

and then i realize richard is right there, in the hospital, helping cara in her delivery, and as he waits to catch the baby, it goes out, head first of course, and he looks at him straight in the eye like nobody looked at him this way before, and so at this juncture i leave things to chabon -

"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 even progression of disaster and contentment. And all those moments, past and future, seemed to him to be concentrated in that small, dark, pupilless gaze."

wow. as i finish the story i tell myself, if it's good it's good despite cassandra wilson's and bronchitis' and dwyane wade's attempts at distractions, but in point of focus, chabon delivers the goods. in fact he tells the secret, through cara, in these words which we can all apply to our own distracted beings: there is a need to feel composed of our own materials, the need to be shaped by our own hands.

yesss!