Hunger of the Wolf (2 page)

*  *  *

Like the brothers who stumbled on his naked corpse at the end of the abandoned road, I failed to recognize Ben Wylie when we met six months before his death, despite my clandestine fascination. We met shortly after I had been fired from
The New York Standard
, a conservative paper read by about fifty thousand nostalgics lurking somewhere in the dry corners of the sweating city. My firing had a measure of grace I came to cherish later. Mort Wilner, the
Standard
's publisher, a robust old-timer
with a bow tie, a Tom Selleck moustache, and a moral code, held up a graph across his desk. I squinted to read that ad sales had fallen forty-five percent in a month. “These are the times you've been given to live in,” Mort announced and shook my hand.

You can't argue with graphs. In the struggle between the humans and the graphs, the graphs won. As the escalator drearily lowered me from the heights where a few blessed ones still had employment, I remembered all my clambering to be where I was: covering sports for Toronto papers, attempting big features on restaurant trends and real estate, hustling small gigs, then landing the job at the
Standard
. Making it had always meant making it in New York. Far worse than losing my job was the chance of losing the city. After the crash, my wife knew her Big Law starter position at Mainwire Price was fragile, and then Torys in Toronto offered her associate partnership. Toronto was then the only major city in the world that had managed to escape the financial calamity (mainly through ingrained caution and a tremendous capacity to endure boredom). For my wife, the deal was clear enough. She believed that a good life in Manhattan could not be earned anymore. You had to own it already or you never would. In Toronto, we could build. We could have “a real life.”

“Why does real life always have to be smaller?” I shouted, during our fourteenth or fifteenth fight on the subject. “Why does real life always mean moving to a shittier city?”

“Moving to Toronto is not the same as dying,” she said. My silence conveyed that I was not quite convinced. “It is amazing to me that you consider having children and giving them a comfortable life in your own country to be small.”

She was right, right about everything, but as I stepped onto the buzzing stream of noon-hour Fifty-fourth Street, I came to the surest decision of my life. No matter what I had to endure or destroy or abandon,
I would never leave New York. You know that scene before the intermission in
Gone with the Wind
, the one where Scarlett O'Hara is standing against the dawn, shoving parsnips into her mouth, shouting, “As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again”? It was sort of like that, except I wasn't hungry. No economic crisis or emerging trend would swallow me up.

Maybe my blazing defiance would have cooled, maybe I would have returned to sensible passivity, to making good Canadian decisions, if I hadn't seen Jorn Pelledeau walking on the other side of the street. Until that moment, he meant nothing to me. He was just another hustling Canadian lost in New York, whom I know vaguely from home. He was an editor at
Vice
magazine, mostly of bits like “A Russian Whore's Guide to Anal” or “How to Date Girls Who Are Much Richer than You,” a master of the fusion of exaltation and degradation which they sell as youth. Thirty-eight dressed as twenty-three, with rolled-up jeans and fluorescent blue sneakers, and a Paul Smith shirt worn loose, he looked like he was winning. I couldn't stand it. Jorn Pelledeau could not win. I refused to let him. I would not exist in a universe where that man could live in New York and I couldn't. I would remain in the city no matter what.

And so I am forced to contemplate the possibility that if I had not seen Jorn Pelledeau that day, I would still be married and living in Toronto, probably with children. I let that man shape the destiny of my genetic code. Perhaps Jorn was only an excuse. The geographical differences between my wife and me were pretexts, I've come to see. The truth is, like so many marriages, ours was a product of inertia. In the supposedly free-loving cities of Europe and the wealthy Americas, convenience arranges more marriages than Indian aunties. When we were kids, the sex was convenient. When we graduated, moving in together to save rent was convenient.
Getting married, to move to America, was highly convenient. But when we were no longer convenient, we no longer were.

Canada was just a name to me by then. My home was among the freelancers, that reluctant tribe found in every city, gathered in semipublic rooms, illuminated by the anxious coziness of Mac glow, drinking four-dollar coffees under the shade of cherry trees. The boys worry about whether their pornography is too weird and the girls worry about their Adderall supply. The more ambitious try to figure out which genre the publishers won't hate two years from now, and the less ambitious work on screenplays. I found myself in a fairly typical position: I was fighting with all the fury my body and soul could muster to belong to cliques I despised. There were the preprogrammed, utterly predictable Ivy Leaguers who approached every conversation as if they were trying to impress an invisible professor in a seminar they had never left. There were liberal arts college grads who had read
The Second Sex,
Susan Sontag on camp, and Roland Barthes on photography, and who had listened to The Smiths in high school, and watched a lot of reality television. There were the people who insisted that if you hadn't tried Molly you hadn't lived in your own time. There were the people who were in the middle of founding a sort of online version of the
Partisan Review
and who loathed the people who had founded other online versions of the
Partisan Review
, and who lived off instant noodles in their closet apartments but could taste the difference between ice cream whipped from local cherry blossoms and ice cream whipped from imported cherry blossoms. There were the children of writers and artists who had attended St. Ann's in Brooklyn Heights and would do whatever it took to send their kids there, too. And then there were the guys like me, from the sticks. The guys from the sticks usually warmed their suburban hands on the coals of the world's center for a few years and then slunk back to Omaha or Miami or one
of the Portlands with just enough information to assuage their need for superiority over their neighbors. But a few stay and rise. Graydon Carter is a boy from the sticks, from Ottawa. André Leon Talley one day took a bus from Durham, North Carolina.

*  *  *

The day after my wife moved home to Toronto, I used up my last chance for luxury and flew to Berlin to bandage my shocked pain, to mull over my catastrophes. Berlin is a great city for personal crises. Whatever your problems, the problems of Berlin are so much greater. It's history's high roller table; everyone wants to play for the highest stakes there are. I stayed at a youth hostel and wept with suppressed sobs in the shared bathtub. I ate curried sausages. At Checkpoint Charlie, I watched Chinese tourists photographing each other with dress-up American and Russian sentries—the new empire coming to witness the fresh ruins of the old. Even Chinese tourists made me think of the Wylies. They had somehow predicted the improbable handover of power, investing in Chinese manufacturing companies as early as 1986, being fully connected with the Red nobility who had straddled Communism and global markets with such improbable ease.

On my return, I understood my predicament clearly for the first time. New York was filling up with overeducated drifters and overweight homeless, and all my efforts would have to go into staying the former, not becoming the latter. Hanging on by the thinnest of margins, I rustled up some stringer sports and restaurant writing—the energy drink habits of the latest Yankee purchase, where to find real grits in Brooklyn, the quietest coffee shops on the planet—and rented a basement in Washington Heights from a shouty Portuguese couple. I wrote a lot of corporate prospectuses, for coffee chains and oil refineries and
macadamia nut farm collectives and sex toy manufacturers. They all paid but I was in that state of unwilling, pleasureless gamble known as “without benefits.” I couldn't afford for a single thing to go wrong. And I was in my mid-thirties, that time of life when you realize that the one thing life inevitably does is go wrong.

New York was the same at least, even if my role in its drama had shifted: It still had the little black girls at Greek corner diners poring through their pockets for nickels to see what size fries would be dinner that night. It had stores that sold three-thousand-dollar scarves made from the hair of Himalayan goat fetuses. It had the subway and Central Park: meeting places and the means to get to them. It had the best dive bars, the purest obsession with the next, next thing, and the frankest conversations. The greatest gift of New York is that it requires no justification to live there. It's New York. But slowly I was drifting into that shadowy category of New Yorkers who live in the city because living in New York is something and they have nothing else.

*  *  *

In this state of being, I met Ben Wylie at the fourth-birthday party of Sigma, the daughter of Leo and Kate Stathapolous. Leo and Kate are my rich friends. They own a Miró and a Paul Klee but are otherwise unostentatious, residing in a voluptuous, eccentric, sandstone four-story in SoHo, which they've filled with blond children and brown servants, both of whom they are continually trying to stop from crying. Sigma must have had fifty friends at her birthday. My ex-wife had always hated Kate and Leo. At first, I thought her contempt was mangled envy at Kate's clothing budget. Later I came to understand that my wife was prejudiced against people who seem to do nothing, particularly women who seem to do nothing—a natural enough point of view for a woman
whose quest for partner consumed between eighty and a hundred hours a week.

A caterer took my coat before I was carried away on a floe of sports commissioners' second wives and art dealers with trust funds and investors in online payday loan sites. I admit I like to watch these people. The men always look like they're waiting to see what they can get away with, the women have excluded from their lives anything a credit card won't solve. Kate's house was almost a gallery, or not a gallery so much as a freewheeling repertory of beauty where everything was available for purchase. Kate's job—an ancient profession in New York—was bringing together those who are interesting in themselves with those who are interesting because they have money.

On the other side of the room Leo glanced at me over a cynical shoulder with relief. Leo, like me, was not born into money. He had knocked up Kate after they had been dating for a month and their wedding invitations had shotguns printed on them as a half joke. I had met him when he was an editor of the real estate section of the
New York Observer
. His father sold appliances for a Greek outlet store in Long Island City, and Leo used me to maintain a fresh grip on the old realities. He needed me to look like I thought that ten thousand dollars was an absurd amount to spend on a child's birthday party without
saying
that I thought ten thousand dollars was an absurd amount to spend on a child's birthday party. I obliged.

Behind a Bertoia bird chair, fortified, I could reach the elk sliders and a glass of blaufränkisch from the circulating waiters, and watch the animals, too. Kate had hired one of those mobile zoos for the party. Not that any of the children were old enough to appreciate life's purchased variety. The lizards frightened them. The rabbits bored them. Only the chinchilla held their attention, its vivid fluff pleasing the investigations of
their puffy careless fingers. Fading to the emptiest room in the house, the study, I stumbled on a beast of another sort—a tall, bedraggled, hungry-looking dad in his mid-fifties who had similarly tucked himself away. He was crooked at an angle, crackling with looming tension though his body stood slack, intently studying the small Klee over Leo's desk.

“What do you think of this?” he asked me, gesturing with a half hand at the painting.

“I think it's a Klee,” I said. I have since realized that we lost each other in our incomprehension. I couldn't believe that I was in a house with a real Paul Klee, and he thought I was reducing the painting to its signature, to its market price.

“It's from 1938. It's called
The Wolf,
” he said. The painting itself was a composition of red and deep red and scarlet squares fringed by what looked at first like finely circled roofs. “He did no other drawings called ‘The Wolf.' He drew angels. He drew foxes. He drew men and women and houses. Why would he call this ‘The Wolf'?”

“It's red,” I said.

“That's stupid. Wolves are all colors. Brown, gray, but not red. Except for the nearly extinct red wolves of North Carolina. Foxes are red.”

“No, I meant the color of blood. The color of killing. It's 1938. The streets are running with blood.”

“So the city is the wolf,” he said, before we were interrupted by a kerfuffle from the direction of the children. His son Max had started a squabble with Sigma over one of the rented creatures, and he had to go tear the kids apart, scold, comfort. That little boy, Ben's son with his wife Anna Savarin, would, after his father's death, come into the possession of 28 billion dollars at the age of six.

So ended my sole encounter with Ben Wylie, the man who now crouches like an icon, frozen and naked, in one or another of the chambers
of my heart. Ben looked nothing like his photograph, much slimmer, more elegant; his eyes were more tired, more intelligent. No distinction of body hinted that I was discussing the meaning of Paul Klee with the eighth-richest man in the world. At the time, I imagined he was an outsider like myself, not yet attuned to the vibrations of the internationalized parochial urbanized elite and their code, which must be intuited by perpetual fiddling, like a radio station just out of range. If personality is dancing to music that nobody else may hear, then his jerky sudden gestures hinted at a rolling shuffle, a pastiche of florid, zany melodies, or perhaps silence, no music at all. Perhaps he did his dance over nothing.