Hunger of the Wolf (14 page)

For a few moments, they inhaled the smell of animal life, the perfuming rot and consumption and rage.

“Did this come with the property?” Lee asked.

“My father built it. He built all of this.”

“For himself?”

“For both of us.”

Lee opened the cage, gingerly creaking the joints, surprised at its realism. He stepped inside and closed the door. Lee's blank gaze posed a kind of question on the other side of the bars: Are you going to tell me or aren't you? The secret fell out of George: “Three days out of the month, we are wolves. We chain ourselves down here. I don't know if there are any others like us.”

Lee was still. Eventually he moistened his lips with a tongue tip. “I guess we're even,” he said.

“I guess.”

They were children of the same secrets. Even in the deepest, most unspeakable matters, George was practical. One lesson he had learned
from his father without ever having to be told was that no matter what nightmares came roaring out of him the business had to go on. Someday the business would pass to George and he himself was not smart enough to run it; Lee would be. He knew all of this when he was seventeen.

*  *  *

One final mystery remained. When Lee no longer returned to Larchmount Crescent, the coach house was empty. Outside the door, the newspapers stacked up, the milk soured on the stoop. Apparently, the boy, who was no longer a boy, had been living alone. And Scarlet Taggart? No one—certainly none of the Wylie women who had lived beside her for ten years and more—could say whether she had left or when. Once called, the police discovered a neat, well-maintained suite of properly decorated, thoroughly swept rooms. Were they dealing with a murder or a failure to cancel subscriptions? Lee was riding a train to Blind River, unavailable for questioning. Jack Taggart was somewhere in the South swallowing up newspapers and radio stations. Dale was in Atkinson, George at Harvard. What would they know anyway? Ultimately not even a missing person report was filed. There's too much oblivion in the world to keep track of it all.

S
ix weeks after the party, “the personal concierge to Poppy Wylie”—that was his title, right under his name—answered my seventeenth or eighteenth request for an interview: “Ms. Wylie will grant you a media availability,” the e-mail read. I called Leo at home to exult but he was away in Los Angeles for an audience with an idol of his own. Kate shared in my triumph, though she was more amused by my excitement than the note itself.

“Now we know what you give the woman who has everything,” she said.

“A personal concierge?”

“Fame. The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

Ordinarily with an interview like this, I would have thrown myself into preparations. The key with celebrities, even pseudo-celebrities, is to remember details of their lives they themselves have forgotten—movies straight to video, childhood indiscretions hushed up long ago, friends abandoned decades previously, any detail that gives the interviewer an asymmetry of information. But I had been preparing to interview Poppy
since her limousine had curled up outside the house in North Lake. My childhood had been preparation.

*  *  *

Poppy Wylie's personal concierge was a fastidious blond man named Marcus Koenig, a professional of the eccentric protocols and mannerisms of the ultrawealthy. The shade of overcome insecurities haunted his bright confidence. Maybe terrible acne as a kid? Maybe growing up gay in a small Midwestern town? Maybe a drunk mother? Maybe all of the above? Like everyone else on Poppy's staff, and there were at least a half dozen, Marcus wore pressed chinos and a pleated white shirt, the cuffs rolled perplexingly to the midpoint of the forearm. With slightly effeminate sandals, the look bordered on cabana boy even in the marble-paneled octagon foyer of a suite of apartments by Central Park.

Marcus led me to a small side table in the passageway off the kitchen, where a contract the size of a small book waited. I flipped through the pages. A standard attempt at post-interview approval. Marcus frowned judgmentally when I lied, obviously, and told him I'd sign it later. What was he going to do, disappoint his mistress? At first I disliked the man's affectation; he seemed to be imitating a butler he had seen on television. Later I understood how much effort went into maintaining the chaos of Poppy's life. Nothing requires more concentration than the enactment of whims.

I was Poppy's whim that day, so Marcus guided me into a gumwood-paneled library whose view of the park was pure will to power—as if the whole of New York had been built as an immense shrine around the patch of trees right there. Her magazine spreads spilled over the low table,
Vogue
from 1988,
Tattler
from 1991,
Esquire
, all informing me what I already knew: I was meeting one of the most beautiful women who had ever lived.
And yet I almost failed to notice her, still as a fallen leaf on the window ledge, her face darkened by the flood of light behind her.

“You made it,” she said, beginning to wring her hands nervously. Her impossibly elegant silken black blouse and pantaloons could have served either as a pajama or a ball gown. She could have taken off her watch to go to bed, or put on diamonds to go to the Oscars. “I hope this is the right thing,” she said. “Leo told me you were all right.”

She had already spoken with Leo?

“Leo would know,” I said.

“He told me you're old friends.”

The phrase was quaint, but it would have to do until a more accurate one came along. “I've known Leo forever, or since I moved to the city anyway. I knew him before his accidental marriage.”

“He's not married by choice?”

Mort Wilner taught me that you have to give confidences in order to receive them and therefore I dished about the shotgun wedding, the confusion of class, the difficulties of marrying when you're still infatuated. I contributed to the economy of pretended intimacy and she matched my contribution.

“There's no right journey, is there?” She was leaning over her legs, stroking their sheer surfaces, then sat up straight, with her hands on her lap.

“Tell me about your journey,” I said. Her hands had stopped wringing. Her shoulders had relaxed. I had her.

*  *  *

I knew I would have to wait for material about Ben. Poppy had fifteen minutes of prepared material, which she repeated on a half-varied loop. It was
HELLO!
magazine stuff mostly, with a whiff of Oprah, about
the horror of addiction, about how she had loved modeling but how there was a price to all that superficiality. I shouldn't dismiss her telling completely. She put the old story rather well. When your profession is having your photograph taken, you become a surface, she said. Her journey had been falling through surface after surface. That's how she put it. I let her ramble, nodding and feigning concentration, waiting for her to exhaust the topic. Then I could move in on what I really wanted to know: Why her brother had been lying naked in the Alberta snow. What she had known. The beastliness of her family.

Marcus and a fleet of servants entered and performed various rituals almost as though we weren't there. At promptly 10:30 a.m., a half glass of champagne and a carved half grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar appeared at Poppy's side. At 10:45, Marcus pulled the blinds down to exactly three-quarters height, and I noticed he had taken off his shoes. All the staff had. The rule for midmorning was everybody barefoot, apparently.

After she had said the line about falling through surfaces for the third or possibly fourth time I began to edge, gingerly, toward the question I cared about. “And your family? How did they deal with your drug use?”

She sniffed and lit a cigarette, an aquamarine Sobranie just to add to the absurdity.

“My family were very loving, but they had no experience with secrets. And I kept everything from them. My family is close but I've always been different.”

“You're adopted, aren't you?”

“My adoption doesn't matter as much as it does to some people.”

I paused some more and her eyes flickered through the creamy smoke, seeking reprieve from the awkwardness. “I don't want to paint myself as a victim, as a poor little rich girl, but I will say that money creates
problems in families and when that money grows to be billions, the problems that follow . . .” She drifted into a glazed reverie. “And it's not as if my parents were the kind of people who went to therapy. When you combine an addiction with unlimited resources . . .” She shrugged.

“It's harder than you think being a billionaire,” I declared.

She squirmed. “I am responsible for my journey. I alone am responsible for my journey. It's just that when you belong to a public family, one of the deepest cravings you can have is the craving for privacy. Heroin is the ultimate privacy. You have no name to live up to. You have no name.”

“Did your brother find it hard to be so wealthy?”

“Yes, I think he did,” she said cautiously, then quietened. She was not so desperate for celebrity that there were not some doors she was willing to slam shut. I kept mum in hope, but then her eyes drifted to a distant horizon and her voice turned tour guide, as it had at the party in the Four Seasons. “I never met my grandmother or my great-grandmother. My own mother never met them either because they died before my parents met. The men were making the fortune and the women waited at home in Champlain.”

“The men were in Alberta . . .” I suggested.

“Yes, and the women were in Champlain. I hated Champlain. Too small. They make you work all of that out in rehab. What are you running from? I knew right away when they asked that question. Champlain. My mother always cherished the memory of George's mother and grandmother. Kitty and Marie. They never went anywhere. Not me.”

Maybe I should have declared to her openly: Your family are animals. I'm just not that good an interviewer. I'm still a polite boy from Alberta and I have little truck with the impossible. “Do you think that need for privacy is part of why your brother died the way he did?” I asked instead.

The smoke drifted over her like a city.

“I sometimes think that if I understood my brother's death, I could understand the whole history of my family.”

I could think of nothing to say.

“If I could understand why he was out there naked in the snow. Do you know why?” she asked.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

She shrugged and smiled softly and I shrugged back. Our one moment of genuine connection was a profound ignorance.

Poppy put out her cigarette abruptly, then distracted me again. “How well do you know Anna Savarin? Do you go to each other's houses?” Poppy asked like we were old friends gossiping.

“I'm sorry. I don't know who that is,” I said.

“I thought you knew Ben. You don't know Ben's wife?”

“Oh, Anna. I know Anna as Anna Wylie,” I covered. “I did meet Max, the boy. At Sigma's birthday party.”

“WylieCorp now technically belongs to Max, and through Max to Anna Savarin. Savvy Anna Savarin.”

“I never managed to meet Anna,” I said.

“Anna hunted Ben. People believe it was a sweet story, that they met at the Orange Blossom Ball at Hamilton College, and they did. They did. She hunted him there. That was the first place she hunted him.” A tangent whisked her elsewhere. “Anyway, I think my journey is about leaving all that behind. And I think that what I have to share with the world is bigger than that. Every family has its secrets, its past.”

With that question, our interview turned away from the chance of Ben, and I had no choice but to watch it go, at least for the moment. She had danced me around the edges of the room in which her brother's body lay and out the door again. I would have to think of another way in while she went through Part Two of her prepared material. I knew I was about to
hear about The Cause. I had been expecting it. In
Down and Out in Paris and London
, George Orwell said that every waiter in Paris had to dream of opening his own restaurant. Not because the waiters were ever going to open restaurants but because the fantasy of opening a restaurant was necessary to endure the state of being a French waiter. Rich people are the same with their causes. Poppy needed to believe in something larger than herself to survive her narcissism. She lit another Sobranie, while I waited for her to unleash her justification for her own deification, the reason she deserved to be larger than ordinary people, a figure of public consciousness.

*  *  *

Zinc. Zinc was her cause. Zinc would cure everything. She explained: Countries with higher levels of zinc consumption are more peaceful and prosperous than countries with lower levels of zinc. Yeast has zinc. Countries that eat flatbreads are more violent and poorer than countries that eat leavened bread. Children with low levels of zinc perform at lower levels in schools. She supported charities that provided zinc supplements to poor countries. She wanted to raise awareness. She wanted the world to be aware of zinc.

About ten minutes into this simple explanation for all the world's problems—as I searched for ways back to her life, to her family, to the world of subjects people might conceivably care about, to the secrets I cared about—Marcus approached her the way a priest in Babylon must have approached the stone idol in the temple. She excused herself as if she were going to the next room for a pen.

Only Marcus returned. A sudden panic fluttered to my throat: What about all my questions? What about Senna? And Lou Reed? And her brother's body in the snow? Then admiration waked in the surge of regret. These rich people always manage to finagle the best of the situation.

“The media availability is closed,” Marcus intoned.

“Just like that,” I said.

Marcus returned my devastated smile with what amounted to fellow feeling. We were both creatures of her whim, lifted and dropped. “That's how she works,” he whispered. “She goes.” He said it with an almost Buddhist compassion, the way another might say “youth goes” or “the world goes.”