Ranjeet exclaims, “This is the most important moment of the entire season, this moment when these characters must sit down for the Thanksgiving meal! It is the region of New England, and they have nothing for the Thanksgiving dinner, they have only the cold cut variety of turkey, such as you might find at any delicatessen! You could get it anywhere, and it is always inferior! It’s a loaf of turkey, nothing more! This is all they have! This is meant to be the feast that proves that America is most bountiful and can survive the entirety of the winter with its bounteous harvest, and yet all these persons possess is the cold cut turkey, and they are attempting to make instant potatoes from a box of potatoes, and they have the Jell-O and it has small bits of fruit floating in it, and this is the great bounty of America! It is not even real food. It is chemicals. And this is what they have because they are disenfranchised by reason of their color and by reason of a disadvantageous political system.”
Jeanine tells him: Put a lid on it, because the moment is poignant, and he is actually talking through the program, and she wants to see what the kids are going to say. Because the kids are gathered around the character named Felicia Adams in the kitchen, which is tiny, with just a couple of cupboards that will not close because they have been painted over too many times, and inside these cupboards is her great collection of mismatched plates bought mostly from tag sales. And yet despite the grimness of the Thanksgiving, the Adams boys are gathered around their mother. They know, even if she doesn’t say so, that she’s trying hard. That counts for a lot on Thanksgiving. Even Bennett, the older boy, is attempting to be kind of generous. Still, young Vern asks, “Mom, this all we’re going to have?”
“It’s what we’ve got for now,” his mother observes. “You think the Pilgrims had Jell-O? They didn’t have any Jell-O. They didn’t have one piece of fruit or anything. Orange slices in that Jell-O? Oranges come from Florida, probably. Florida was a swamp back then. The Pilgrims all had scurvy. Their teeth were falling out, and they never flossed.”
Bennett says, “It’s because we’re poor.”
“We’re not poor,” Felicia says. “We’re busy. And sometimes we’re too busy to manage. Folks are penalized for being busy these days, at least in our tax bracket. There are a whole lot of people who are a lot poorer than we are.”
The doorbell rings.
In the Means of Production office, in the conference room, with the tiny little office television on the brand-new conference table, Jeanine shifts in the arms of her Sikh lover, thinking not about the poignancy of Felicia’s attempts to fix dinner for her family, and not about how family is always capable of rising above grim circumstances. No, Jeanine is thinking about her lover’s wife and son, and the Thanksgiving they are going to have this coming week. This ushers in a sinking feeling. It’s a sinking feeling that she imagines is not unlike the feelings of the television character Felicia Adams, who is in a race against time to fix Thanksgiving dinner by 2:30 so that she can get the dishes cleaned, including the pots, before moonrise. Because as soon as the moon rises, Felicia will not be in the mood for housework. Jeanine imagines that her situation is like Felicia’s situation, in that their lives harbor secrets. And this is the way that The Werewolves of Fairfield County does its job, not through the richness of its screenwriting, nor through able performances, but by virtue of the simple human tendency to see one’s vulnerabilities in others, to be, in these instances, full of pity for the frailty of both human beings and werewolves.
At the sound of the bell, Felicia goes to the door, and there, framed in it, is Edwin. Down the corridor, she can see neighbors peeking out of their own units. They all gander at Edwin because Edwin is carrying the most enormous turkey, the most enormous turkey Felicia has ever seen, housed in a beautiful new turkey pan. It’s as if he stepped out of a Dickens tale.
Felicia says, “Where did you get that turkey?”
As smiling Felicia attempts to take the pan from him, hefts it out of his arms, Edwin slumps to the floor. Bleeding. Yes, Edwin is bleeding from a gunshot wound in his left shoulder. Edwin has been shot.
Felicia Adams cries out. Because it’s one more thing. Because she just doesn’t have time. Because the meal is not ready, and if the meal is not ready, we can easily surmise, the meal will not be done on time, and if the meal is not done on time, Felicia will turn into a werewolf before it is done. And so there is no time for more catastrophe. And yet here it is. Now Bennett and Felicia (the latter having set down the turkey pan in the front hall) drape Edwin’s arms around their shoulders and they drag him into the apartment. He’s groaning in pain, and it’s a sort of feral moan. Mother and son drag the injured man through the corridor and into the bedroom, where they lift him as best they can onto the bed. Felicia hurries into the kitchen to make a compress. She seems to suspect immediately what’s going on.
“You want me to call the doctor?” she says with a frosty reserve.
“No doctors,” Edwin says, according to his part.
Then, in a moment that is so artful it doesn’t seem to belong on television, the audience realizes that the enormous turkey, in its enormous Williams-Sonoma turkey pan, is still out in the hall. The camera has paused upon this culinary item. A beautiful amber light shines upon the turkey. The camera is panegyrical. We hear Felicia and Edwin in the bedroom, and Felicia is whispering, “What did you get into? Did you get into what I think you got into? What were you doing down there? Do you have something you want to tell me?”
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. All I wanted was to provide, I swear to you. I wanted to provide something. For you and the boys. For the dinner. All I wanted to be was the man who provided.”
The camera has never once strayed from the turkey in the hall, and gradually we are aware that there’s some kind of scraping taking place in the hall, right behind the camera, and only incrementally do we realize that it’s the sound of crutches, crutches edging into the shot. And then Vern is everywhere in one margin of the frame, like a seal pup on dry land, flopping in the hall. It’s just Vern, trying to get himself down to the level of the turkey, which involves dropping the crutches. Now he tries to lift up the pan. He tries in different ways, to no avail. Soon he tumbles weakly onto his side, on the floor, beside the turkey.
Felicia says to Edwin, “What am I supposed to do with you?”
“It went clean through,” Edwin says. “Just leave me for a few days. It’ll be fine.”
“I can’t look after you all day, Edwin.”
“Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about the money or the rent or anything for right now.”
“I don’t want you coming back here telling me not to worry about money and bleeding from a gunshot wound in your shoulder!”
Vern, who has given up trying to lift the pan, gets a grip on one of the turkey legs and rips it off. He pauses at the sight of his good fortune at first, as if there’s some built-in hesitator in him. And this is when we hear Bennett’s voice for the first time, back in the other room, and Bennett is saying, “Is he going to die, Mommy?” At the word, the camera slowly tracks back from Vern, back toward the kitchen. With a Hitchcockian uncanniness, it enters the bedroom, where, in afternoon light, the tableau is as in the Northern Renaissance. The potential is for another missing father, like all the fathers missing from the life of young Bennett Adams, who once had a real father, and who found a replacement father in Mike Woodwell, only to suffer when his mother could no longer live with Mike, because of Mike’s paralyzing sadness, and now here is Edwin, lying wounded on the bed, and Bennett is unable to lose another father. Felicia says, “No, he’s not going to die; he’s going to live so that I can yell at him some more,” at which point she looks out into the hall and calls, “Vern, you put that back in the pan right now! Darn it! We’re not going to eat that turkey. We’re going to take that turkey down to the church and we’re giving it to people who really need something to eat.”
“Oh, come on now,” Edwin says.
“I’m not eating the turkey if it’s an ill-gotten turkey,” she says. And then, looking out into the hall, “Vern!”
And Edwin says, “Look in the coat, at least look in the coat. A neighbor gave me those, I swear. Look in my coat.”
The camera closes in on Bennett, who is nearest to the bloodstained bomber jacket flung on a chair. And he reaches into the pockets and pulls out . . . three turnips.
Edwin says, “No Thanksgiving holiday is complete without turnips.”
What to make of these root vegetables, in the eyes of Jeanine Stampfel? She knows these are not stories well told, if judged against a Chekhov or an O’Neill, but she has cried at commercials for antidepressants and at medical programs with deformed children on them, even though she knows better. Should she be judged for crying at this moment because of turnips, and because of Vern, who can’t get up without his crutches and who is laid out sideways next to the turkey, dutifully refraining from any pilfering? You would think Ranjeet would be crying, too, but he’s not crying, he’s saying, “Root vegetables! Root vegetables! Of course! The root vegetable is the symbol of the thing that is being forged in this family, which is a provisional family, but which is nonetheless better than many biological families! They must eat the roots to feel the roots! The thing which is born of the earth! A tuber!”
A motel just off the interstate in the great swing state of Ohio, the interstate that goes all the way from coast to populous coast, this is the place that two miscreants, Lois DiNunzio and Arnie Lovitz, have holed up for the past five days, imagining that if they lay low and pay for everything in cash they will not be traced to this motel. They imagine that every day spent in this way is an improvement on the day on which they ran off with the funds. It is a part of their every transaction with the world, the money, not as a guarantor of ease, but of ultimate condemnation. They have this money, but sooner or later they are going to be found out. Is it possible for them to love each other with the stolen monies hanging over them? Is it possible for them to love each other in a sequence of motels with names like Defiance Motor Court? The answer to these questions is yes, they don’t seem to have a problem loving each other, at least so far. They put the dread about the money in one compartment and they put their love in a different and more roomy compartment. They try to keep the two separated as much as possible. And so they love each other and they worry, and tonight they are loving and worrying in front of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, except that so far Arnie has been expressing some disappointment with the episode because, he says, when there’s not enough werewolf stuff in the program he just doesn’t like it as well. He’s got control of the remote. He clicks it relentlessly. While dragging on a Gitane cigarette, his third in a row.
“Lay off. I want to watch the end,” Lois says.
“Checking the scores.” He exhales deeply. “Anyways, how can you have a show that’s supposedly about werewolves and you don’t have any werewolves in it?”
“If you’d be patient, you’d probably get what you want.”
When the show comes back from the break, it’s one of those transitional sequences that is mainly a teaser for the ongoing serial narrative, namely, a sequence of Bob Gallace and Clay Goldberg talking on the phone as the light dwindles. Bob is calling Clay because he’s worried. He’s in his little house in Norwalk, and his kids are out in the yard, throwing a football, and he’s got the game on, and he’s whispering.
“Clay,” he says, “I’m feeling really fatigued today. I just feel like . . . well, I don’t know what I feel like. I feel like I can barely stand up without . . . without fainting or something. You feel okay?”
“I feel okay, partner, I sure do. I can give you the once-over before the moon crests, if that’ll help. Running a fever?”
“I am, Clay. Nothing serious yet, but it’s a little bit of a fever. And I’m just incredibly thirsty, you know. I just can’t stop drinking. You don’t think I have that wasting disease or anything, do you? I mean, it’s not like —”
“Creutzfeldt-Jakob? I think that’s a big stretch, Bob. I think our . . . our particular genetic differences might protect us from stuff like that, and anyway, the incubation period on human spongiform encephalopathy is ten years. Talk to me about it when you’re on Social Security, okay? In the meantime, be sure to hydrate.”
Bob cradles the hands-free receiver. He’s pacing in the living room nervously, and while he is pacing it comes over him, the convulsion. The kids are visible through the window, throwing the football, and the football spirals in slow motion in the shot while a shank of mammalian fur trembles in one corner of it, and a long, desperate howl freezes everything.
“Excellent!” says Arnie.
Thaddeus Griffin, screen actor, turns on the show in the middle, just in time to see Bob Gallace suddenly overcome by supernatural transformation, and the cannabis he just smoked is so powerful, so much stronger than it was when, long ago, he was a teenage doper wannabe, that he’s not sure if he can watch this show without freaking out a little bit. It’s a bad idea to watch these shows without anyone else around. Like if you are smoking a lot of pot, for example. Like if you are a guy whose wife has just moved back in with her parents, or say you are a guy who has pretty much walked out on his producer’s job and who is just waiting around to go make some piece-of-shit movie in Morocco, it’s a bad idea for you to be buying dope on the street, where you could be photographed doing so by some tabloid. Bad idea. There’s something about that image of the wolf’s fur coat that’s so freaky, and Thaddeus starts to feel like, what does he feel like, he just feels really high, and he quickly changes the channel; he has to remember not to watch this fucking show, it’s too fucking scary, definitely he should not be watching it when he’s . . . so he changes to some reality thing; there are these people, and they are, where are they, they’re on some island, and they all look like they need to . . . they look so skanky, like they really need to bathe, and the guys all have these beards and everything, it’s like, uh, actually the guys kind of look like werewolves, if you really want to know the truth, and suddenly Thaddeus is kind of worried that maybe one of them is a werewolf, maybe that one guy, maybe he’s . . . He flips the channel back to the Werewolves, but he can’t even stand a minute of the thing, can’t stand it, but if he doesn’t watch it, then he’s just thinking about it, which is even worse than watching it, in a way, and now there’s some, uh, some black kid going to . . . he’s going to a keg party or something, nothing so bad, it’s just a party, see? It’s just a party, it’s nothing to get so freaked out about. But soon Thaddeus starts feeling like something really horrible is going to happen to the black kid, and soon there’s going to be that kind of music, you know, dissonant chords and stuff, and you know, and he can’t take it, he thinks the whole thing is just really freaky, and he shuts off the television because his breathing has become erratic, it’s all about his hyperventilations, if he can just get his breathing to settle down, then he won’t go on with this thinking that he’s, um, he just doesn’t even want to think it, but he’s looking at his arms, and his arms are incredibly hairy, his arms are all covered with this fur, he never really noticed it before, and if it weren’t for the perfect blond locks that the colorist gives him, wait a second, it looks like it must have got darker, he thinks it’s getting darker, the hair on his arms, and he tries to calm himself down, and he thinks he should call someone, maybe he could call his wife and tell her, and his stomach is bothering him, and maybe that’s the first sign, maybe stomach pain is the first sign, and he could call Annabel, he should call someone, come on, don’t be ridiculous, he’s just being ridiculous, but no, it’s not ridiculous, it’s incredibly serious. Nothing has ever been more serious. He starts peeling off layers, feels better if he takes off some clothes, his skin just needs to breathe a little bit, that’s it, his skin needs to breathe, it’s like everything is constricting, so he takes off his sweatshirt, it’s like a three-hundred-dollar sweatshirt, but he takes it off, drops it on the floor, and he takes off his T-shirt, that’s a lot better, things are better when he is not wearing a shirt, and then he takes off his jeans, and this is okay, at least for a moment it’s okay, until the panic, and he’s looking at himself, in the recessed entertainment den of his over- or underdecorated apartment, and there is no other conclusion, there is no other way to think about it. Yes, he is even more hairy than he was just a few minutes ago, he’s almost sure of it, and there’s the stomach pain, and he feels like he’s almost doubled over with the stomach pain, and he takes off his socks, because a man should never appear anywhere, not even in the privacy of his own home, in Y-front briefs and dark socks. The question must now be asked, there is no avoiding the question: Is mine the body of a werewolf? Has Thaddeus gone from being an actor in action films, highly regarded action films, to being a werewolf? Is this the fitting and karmic end of an actor in action films who has been prone to infidelity, like that singer who was unfaithful, and his wife waited until he was soaking in the tub one day and then she brought in scalding water and dumped it on him? At once, Thaddeus strips off his Y-front briefs, and now he’s nature in all its glory, he’s the animal in the human animal. Five hundred stations of cable and a hundred more radio stations, and even cable Internet hookup, joystick, and gaming options, and he cannot be distracted from thinking that there is definitely some kind of wolf taking over in him, because he is hairy everywhere, he is lupine, hair all over his back, all over his nipples, and the fur on him is thicker than it ever was, and he is going to need what a wolf needs, he’s going to need sides of raw beef, and he’s going to need woman flesh, and he’s going to have to go out tomorrow and have the whole wolf hide waxed off of his body, because, you know, he can’t show up on a movie set in Morocco looking like a wolf or he never will be able to work in the business again. Maybe if he showers he can calm down somehow. He’s not a wolf. Just go take a shower and put on some Yanni or something, one of the cable radio stations will have Yanni, all Yanni all the time, maybe there’s that video of Yanni playing, that always calms him down, when no one is around, he can put on Yanni and wait for the cannabis to wear off, Yanni will have the proper effect. The swelling repetitions of pan flute will move through him, and the lycanthropy will fade. When the sun comes up tomorrow it will all have been some horrible mistake.
Felicia has forbidden her strong-headed son Bennett Adams from going to the party at the Burns residence. Because of the trouble with Edwin. But that’s not the kind of forbidding that’s going to keep any teenager from doing exactly what he means to do. Felicia has to go out “to work,” or that’s what she tells Edwin and the kids, and there’s a van waiting at the curb, driven by Rose Liggett, also a werewolf, and it takes Felicia into the woods, where she will meet the thirty-five other members of the pack. The boys are left behind to finish the washing up, and Edwin is slumbering in Felicia’s bed, moaning in pain. Vern, who might have a little touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is lining up the flatware on the countertop in the kitchen, the knives with the knives, the spoons with the spoons. He doesn’t even see when his brother goes right out the front door.
Bennett telephones for a cab on the corner, and he gets in the taxi, spending money from his part-time job at the sporting-goods store at the mall in New Rochelle. He ditches the taxi on the road a block over from the Burnses’ house. He’s going to walk in the front door as if he’s come from the wilderness or as if he’s the hero from a Maupassant story, which he sort of is. He comes from New York, not from Connecticut, he comes from the disadvantaged part of Westchester County, but he can put on a good masquerade, and he’s putting one on now, having dressed up in the wardrobe of the kids of Fairfield Academy, featuring the threads of J. Crew and Banana Republic. He passes between the antebellum columns of the Burns residence, and then he crosses the imperial threshold. Inside, the kids are hanging off of every piece of furniture, and the music is blasting, the kind of music that occurs only at the parties of television shows.
Meanwhile, back among the audience, in the Park Avenue apartment of Madison McDowell’s parents, who, like the Burnses, are away for the night, Madison tells Zimri Enderby that she doesn’t know why they can get so much right on television, things that the movies can never get right anymore, like discomfort and awkwardness between people, and the long, slow development of characters, the ups and downs of long-term relationships, but they can never get the music right. Zimri doesn’t know much about it, since he was never allowed to go to parties as a kid, except parties where they served ginger ale and there was bingo and sing-alongs. He doesn’t know what the music should sound like. Zimri is sitting on the floor, so he can get closer to the television, and Madison is touched by the fact that he is on the floor and still wearing his impeccably polished loafers. Her cell phone rings, and she looks at the number, and she realizes that it’s the Vanderbilts calling. They always call during The Werewolves of Fairfield County. The Vanderbilts are just really pissed that this stuff is happening, that there are these shows, you know, that are just, like, really popular, and they have nothing to do with this popularity, mainly because the producer is, like, such a bitch. The Vanderbilts could really give her some phat ideas about guest stars, like models and recording artists who should definitely be on the show, but Madison doesn’t answer the cell phone, she just flings the phone across the room and then she tumbles back into the middle of the story.
Bennett Adams sees Merry Burns coming down the stairs! A blessing is promised in the moment, because Merry sees him, and he sees her, and the contagion of desiring passes back and forth like in a closed-circuit diagram. Everyone sees them seeing each other, and we see them seeing each other. Everybody knows better than to get in the way of that binding of gazes. There’s a hurtling movement to the episode, to the way that two beautiful teenagers draw near to each other. And there’s some witty repartee, as when Bennett says that he’s especially thankful this year that her parents have gone out to some cocktail party, and Merry says she’s thankful that they thoughtlessly “left the liquor cabinet open, wow, how did that happen?” She also tells him that the teacher from school, Ms. Carter, who was supposed to chaperone, called and said that she’d had a medical emergency and wouldn’t be able to fulfill her obligations. When this banter is over, the two of them are dancing to some slow ballad, and their heads are on each other’s shoulders, and it’s adorable, and Madison McDowell and Zimri Enderby, like so many other watchers of the program, are almost convinced that the episode is going to have a happy ending. It’s almost like Bennett Adams is not going to have to agonize for the rest of this ominous school holiday. Maybe he can forget about the drug cartel that left Edwin for dead on a street corner, and the legacy of his own absent father, and the money problems faced by his mother, and other forces too dark for him to understand yet. Merry Burns takes him by the hand, and they head up the stairs.
Madison slides down onto the floor, in her silk pants, and she rows herself across the floor to where Zimri sits, and she tells him that he’s sexy for a guy from Utah, and then they fall into their own forbidden embraces, during another commercial break. Before the break is over, he has lifted her up off the floor, so that she won’t get her pants any dustier, to carry her down the hall to the bedroom.
If Annabel’s mother, the psychologist, has a view on sexuality as depicted on television, it’s that the excessive saccharine of this sexuality is bound to create expectations, and not just among young people, who are almost honor bound to expect that when they finally get naked with their friends the earth will tremble or there will be the sounds of rockets going off in their ears or they will feel an overwhelming and intoxicating love, more addictive than heroin, and this love feeling, called forth by the commingling of bodily fluids, will never take leave of them, until death comes for them. The male characters on television, of course, are noteworthy for abandoning the girl characters. This is one of the guarantees on television these days. The male is often a cad. Whereas no feminine protagonist can possibly be wanton, nor can any girl toy with the male affections, according to the psychologist, and that’s according to some sort of misguided affirmative action, and perhaps it’s not the worst thing. Even the adults, according to the psychologist, are at risk in viewing these sexual encounters. It’s possible that they may feel a faint trace of jealousy about the long decades of adult sexuality, which are generally of muted and gentler tones. What television needs, according to Deborah the psychologist, is more sex, not less. Lots and lots and lots of sex, but sexuality that is resplendent in its many hues, not just this young man chasing the young woman up the stairs, and then getting into bed and pulling the covers up, and then banging away in missionary position. What television needs is bad sex, it needs premature ejaculations, and women forgiving men for premature ejaculations, and it needs impotence, lots and lots of impotence, it needs dry vaginas, it needs lubricants, it needs Viagra, it needs pornography as a marital aid, and it needs other performance enhancers, vibrators, perhaps dildos. Entire episodes devoted to these things. How often does a dildo get mentioned on television? Surely the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference wouldn’t begrudge the FCC a dildo or two? Nobody is hurt by a dildo, unless it’s boys using them on themselves without adequate preparation, or groups of girls using those two-headed jobs without knowing how.
“Shut up, Mom,” Maximillian says to his mother.
The camera picks up a pair of house cats in the Burns household. The cats just happen to be in the room with the two young lovers, and the cats are fighting, as house cats will do, one batting the other around the head. The cats freeze, dash just out of the shot and then back into it. We hear the breathy importunities of Merry Burns on the bed, and then we hear something else. We hear something very different; we hear something almost animal. . . .
“I knew it,” Annabel says. “It’s because he’s black. Everyone else gets to have sex on this show, but he doesn’t get to have sex just because he’s black. There’s never a shot of just black characters in a store or anything or discussing politics. They’re always the mutants.”
“Annabel!” Max says, who, though he is a strident critic of television culture and its seductions, is the one paying the closest attention. The Reverend Duffy, who has been known to use The Werewolves of Fairfield County in his sermons, is soundly sleeping. And Tyrone, who has said not a word about what’s going on, has been concentrating on the book in his hands. “Anyway, Edwin is black and he’s not a werewolf.”
Not yet, anyway.
The transformation, one of the things that initially set apart The Werewolves of Fairfield County from other programs, is by now so predictable that it’s difficult to bring anything new to it. The transformation of man into wolf, here in the fourth season, is just digital nonsense. The same makeup morphing through the same predictable stages. And yet each season, Christine Katz, the producer of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, has tried to hold in reserve a little improvement in the matter of the transformation. The hard-core fans of the program know to wait for the razzle-dazzle of this moment of improved metamorphosis. Sunday, during the Thanksgiving episode, it turns out, is the day of something new. So: Bennett Adams, just like his mother, Felicia, is a werewolf, and it is the moment of orgasm that has brought it out in him. The uninformed viewer will perhaps not be certain it’s an orgasm, but still. The scene is powerful, it’s almost garish, the way he arches up off the reclining, sweetly moaning body of Merry Burns and stretches up his arms, because it’s his virginity that he’s casting off, too, his innocence, and of course the irony of the moment of any deflowering is that the body always knows what it’s doing, it knows and loves the moment of its new awareness, as if it has always known; the body loves its animal exhibitions, and this is especially true of poor Bennett Adams, who is not only knowing and loving the animal aspect of his splattering seed, but just as he comes, the bristles of fur seem to burst out on his face instantly, not gradually, as in all the traditional werewolf programming of the fifties and sixties, but immediately. And that’s the great new effect in this episode. His cry is his own voice and the voice of the wolf simultaneously. The one is an aspect of the other, and then, again immediately, his shirt, his preppy polo shirt, which he’s still wearing at the commencement of the love scene, the polo shirt that his mother actually ironed for him, shreds like confetti, and you can see the threads hanging off of him, others flying out into the room. His old body is a piñata giving way to the new. He knows that something awful has happened, that he is not just a boy who has known the inside of a girl, and he knows, all at once, that he’s a thing, not a boy but a thing, and as a thing he should flee, and that the proper place for all animals is in the state of nature’s wildness, which is not in some mansion somewhere just up the street from where Martha Moxley used to live. He doesn’t even have his pants on, of course, he has nothing on, but he’s a wolf, and nakedness is not a shameful thing to a werewolf, and he goes bounding off the bed and down the stairs and into the thick of the party, which at this somewhat late hour has given way to intoxicated lassitude. It’s not the giddy carnival that we usually see depicted on television but is, rather, a lazy, fumbling, inert affair where boys who are too drunk to perform make passes at girls who are too drunk to refuse, and the werewolf bounds past all of them, and the few who are awake or alert enough to understand that they have just seen something supernatural rub their eyes, looking, nonetheless, unsurprised.
Vic Freese’s wife, Lise, says, during the commercial break, “You know, I can’t stand it that you’re suddenly taking notes during the entire show. Couldn’t we just sit here and watch the show? You used to watch the show because it was fun to watch, and now you just sit here and you take notes, like television is nothing but an opportunity to work for you. If we can’t sit together and have a quiet night together, like we used to do, then what’s the point? Now it’s all just the agency, agency, agency, agency, and how everybody is jealous of your success and how everybody wants to steal that teenage slut client away from you. But what about your kids, and what about me? I liked it better when you were a failure, if you want to know the truth. I liked it better when you used to say that work was neurotic and all the people at the agency were neurotic and never had any fun in their lives and they were all going to die young. Are you going to die young, too? Now that you’re mister codirector of the television division? Or are you just going to sit there taking notes and not even listen to me when I’m talking to you? You’re going to pretend I’m not even talking to you? I don’t really care if I wake the kids up. I want the guy I dated and the guy I married. He was sweet and gentle and would play miniature golf, and I think the kids want that guy, too, not some guy who never comes home or who comes home after they’re already asleep, and then when he does come home, all he does is turn on the television and start taking notes and blustering into his dictating machine. Is that what you want? Is that what you really want, to be like that? Forget it, I don’t even care what happens, I don’t care if the werewolf gets the girl, and I don’t care what happens to your miniseries. I’m going to bed.”
The director of the Duffy family documentary pans again over the assembled, as the final four minutes of the show begin. She’s part of her own melodrama now. Though it is so far unspoken. She has her own multigenerational secret, one that she has not announced to the American family, which lounges around her in its American-family tableau. It’s a melancholy secret, to be sure, an unwanted secret, and yet perhaps a hopeful secret, too, this secret of conception. Even in such a fraught moment, when her brother’s future is uncertain and the election is uncertain and her employment situation is a little uncertain, the chromosome-hauling spermatozoan will, given the right conditions, and notwithstanding the frequent impotence of the father, nonetheless occasionally perform its endurance-swimming trick and crash through the wall of the ovum, even if the birth control pill is said to be 99 percent effective. It’s melancholy that Thaddeus isn’t answering his cell phone, that he has apparently decamped for California, or that’s the rumor, before going off to Morocco to shoot his swashbuckling epic, and she doesn’t even know how to tell him about the spermatozoan and its accomplished mission. But because she hasn’t told him, hasn’t told anyone yet about her idea that she just might keep the little fetus with the action film- star daddy, it seems like nothing but good news, as if somehow it’s going to turn out all right for all the generations of the family; somehow they need one another, even if they can’t stand one another, and the little fetus needs everyone to give him or her a break, give him or her a while to turn into an actual person rather than just the potential of personhood. Love is best expressed as the likelihood of a little mixed-race baby for now, she thinks, over the forms of half-conscious family members in the living room, while ministering with her camera.
It’s going to be an amazing documentary, probably much better than her script about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, and one thing about it that will revolutionize filmmaking is the pacing. Instead of a lot of stuff happening all the time, the newly pregnant filmmaker has decided on a static approach, as in avant-garde film. There are going to be large patches of film where nothing much happens at all. The film will have mimetic aspirations. It will attempt to re-create the pacing of real family life, the long periods between revelation in which the manipulative and semifascist plot structure of Hollywood and contemporary television serial narratives will have no place. That fascist kind of work creates attention deficit disorder in audiences, and it probably creates that spike in the rates of autism that everybody talks about, too. And that’s why the newly pregnant filmmaker lingers on the sleeping form of the Reverend Russell Duffy, who can be expected to sleep through almost any after-dinner television programming. He always expresses strong opinions about what they watch: no on comedies, no on teen films, yes on Provence or Tuscany and anything with a classical music theme. But having expressed an interest in content, the reverend cannot stay awake longer than fifteen minutes, and often the volume has to be turned up so that everyone can hear over his snoring.
The others talk freely, despite the slumbering man of God, but before the newly pregnant filmmaker can capture the tenor of their conversation, the television program is back, and the flickering of the monitor plays across their faces.
What they are seeing is Felicia Adams in the morning. The morning after Thanksgiving, in the kitchen, at dawn, trying to straighten up things in the house before the others wake. Suddenly she hears the front door open. There she finds her eldest son, holding some scraps of a towel around his middle so as to conceal his Edenic nakedness from her. The close-up on Felicia’s face captures the slow play of meanings in her. He must have gotten into some kind of devilment with his friends. He must have gotten into some trouble with a girl. Or he must be . . . The surprise is in how long it takes, considering that the notion can’t have ever been far from her thinking. It’s always darkest right under the lamp. Apparently she has tried to believe anything but the notion that her son has the lupine gene, as any mother would.
“Mommy,” Bennett says, “something awful happened to me last night. I don’t even know . . . I don’t even know how to say it. I’m so scared, and I don’t know what to do.”
Now there’s one of those Madonna-and-child moments in the front hall of the apartment, where lately Vern reclined while romancing the carcass of a turkey. The two of them slide to the floor, the boy weeping as though he’s still just a kid trapped in the expanding body of an adolescent. There’s blood all over his hands and arms, a volume of blood that no person should have to see, especially no one as young as Bennett. His mother lets him cry for a while as he tries to describe what cannot be described. “There was something happening to my body. I was over at Merry’s house, and suddenly something happened to my body, and I was . . . I was covered in fur, and then I can remember that I ran out of the party on . . . on all fours.” And then a fresh helping of tears.
When she has said nothing for so long that it is maternal callousness, Bennett Adams finally looks up at his mother, and suspicion begins to pass across his own features. Her gaze is level, determined, unsentimental.
“We’ve got to get all this blood off you before your brother wakes,” she says. “Come with me into the kitchen.”
And the two of them, confederates, tread softly into the kitchen, where she turns on the tap in the big sink basin and immerses his hands in the water. With a generous bar of soap, she soaps his hands in her own, and the water cascades across his bloodied knuckles, and this water foreshadows developments in next week’s episode, the hydrophobia episode, about which there has already been voluminous conjecture on the chat boards.
“Mom?” he says, and the nakedness of the interrogative tells much about the suffering of werewolves, from their origin in Middle Europe to their postmodern anguish in the evolving genetic picture of the new millennium.
“Yes,” Felicia says.
“You, too?” he says.
“Yes,” she says. She knows. She has felt these things. She, too, has suffered. “But don’t say anything more about it now. Don’t say anything more.” And she gives his hands another round of soap and water and then dries them with a dish towel. Now Felicia leads the boy into the back bedroom, where his bed occupies most of the available floor, and she lays him down on the mattress and pulls the covers over him.
“It seems like it’s a curse,” she says to him. “It seems like you are doomed every month when the moon is full. But there comes a time when it seems like a blessing, like you’re better somehow. You know the taste of warm blood still pulsing, and that’s something that most people will never know. You’re special now, because you have ripped the limb from a living animal and watched it bleed to death, and because you no longer have to pay attention to property lines or the laws of the politicians or the morals of the churches, or any of that. You are the laws of nature. And yet after a while, even that becomes a curse, and then you learn the one bit of grace in all of this, and that’s the law of the pack. The pack is the one place you’re understood now. The pack is the place where your mistakes and your failures are your assets. The pack is where you can get out of any jam that you can get into. If you can’t find a job, go to the men and women of the pack. And if you don’t have a friend anywhere, go to the men and women of the pack. If you can’t believe in anything good on the face of this earth, go to the men and the women of the pack. They’re everywhere around you, though you’ve never seen them. Your mailman might be a member of the pack, and your teacher might be one, and your doctor might be, and even your own mother might be, though you’ve never known until now.” She smiles at him. “Okay, better get some sleep, because you’re bound to get into trouble again tonight.”
He’s already asleep. Or nearly so.
Felicia rises up from his bedside and she closes the door to his bedroom behind her, and on the far side, she slumps against the door, stifling sobs and wondering how she can take this, too, this on top of everything else. How much stronger can a woman be?
Closing credits. And theme music. The announcer tells all to stay tuned.
At which point the assembled constituencies, in all the millions of living rooms, the living rooms of some huge portion of the industrial West, exhale and begin to abandon the television set. There’s nothing worth watching after, and in one living room in Newton, Mass., the newly pregnant filmmaker of a powerful new documentary about family life looks down at the book that her older brother has been marking up throughout the episode of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, and it looks like this: