A Mocha with the Last Werewolf

“Oh, he’s looking angry,” my wait-staffer says.  She is referring to the face she had drawn in chocolate syrup on the foam of my mocha.  “He started off happy, but he got angry while we were walking over.” 

You be the judge. 

I am nibbling on a brownie, awaiting my angry mocha, and reading from Glen Duncan’s book The Last Werewolf.  It is possible that somewhere in the world there is someone who has it better than I do at this moment, but not very likely. 

The tables in Holy Cow Coffee are dark, paired with pale wooden straight-backed chairs. They have re-arranged the art on the walls and have some new pictures since I was in last time.  Directly in front of me, next to the door, is a long painting in greens, blues and silvers, a female nude.  She is standing, facing away from the artist, looking out into a starry sky, her torso turned slightly to the left so that the line of muscle between her spine and her scapula curves in a backwards capital C, shades of blue and gray.  She has short dark hair and it has the look of something polished and commericial. On the wall to my right, near the window, there’s a new bird picture.  The medium is “digital.”  I don’t know exactly what that means.  It’s a big picture, about three feet by three feet.  A red-eyed bird with a black mask, plumey white breast that, up close, looks like fern fronds, or maybe coral, fades into an ochre-colored belly. The wings are blue and black.  It perches on a bare branch, talons and feet perfectly articulated, back-grounded by shades of black, lavender and pale blue.

Here is a passage from The Last Werewolf.  Jacob Marlowe has just been told that the one remaining werewolf besides himself has been killed.

We were in the upstairs library of his Earl’s Court house, him standing at a tense tilt between the stone hearth and oxblood couch, me in the widow seat with a tumbler of forty-five-year-old Macallan and a Camel Filter, staring out at dark London’s fast-falling snow.  The room smelled of tangerines and leather and the fire’s pine logs. Forty-eight hours on and I was still sluggish from The Curse. Wolf drains from the wrists and shoulders last. In spite of what I’d just heard, I thought: Madeline can give me a massage later, warm jasmine oil and the long-nailed magnolia hands I don’t love and never will. 

He doesn’t love her hands, or her, and 38 pages later, as I read about them having sex, I believe that he never will. I believe that Jacob has trouble loving. I believe he turns into something part-wolf, part-man and all monster every 28 days. I sip foam, destroying the happy/angry face on my drink.  I turn the page. I want to know what happens.