Hunger of the Wolf (24 page)

*  *  *

His mother liberated Ben after two years. In the middle of the full moon, the George-wolf sleeping, she led her confused son out of the basement cage.

“I think we should take this as a blessing,” she said, as she held her son in the moonlight, sobbing in his absence of beastliness.

“Is Dad angry about it?” Ben asked.

“He's more confused than upset. He traveled everywhere to learn about a condition he thought you would suffer from, and then you escaped. You cured yourself.”

“I didn't do anything.”

“Nobody knows what they're doing,” she answered softly. His mother guided him inside, around and up the marble staircase, to the parental bedroom, where a large red-and-white abstract painting filled a wall. The canvas was clawed on, scarred with impression. “T.T. painted this for me,” she said. “He wrote the duet for lovebirds for me and then he painted this for me. When I left my family to tour the first time, when I left Quebec and never wanted to return but still carried that smell of Quebec in my hair.” Her loitering gaze hinted at the mélange of what that fragrance must have been: the smoke from maple fires and whore perfume and the slime of salmon skin and mossy stones and sweaty sheets and old piano music and Cathedral incense . . .

“Was T.T. a wolf?”

“No, but he wanted to be. I realized this much later. He wanted to be what your father was. He wanted to be magic.” Her eyes were saucers of black water. “I always wondered if I should have explained to him all that I saw, if I should have said, ‘The magic is a curse.' He thought that George was a stupid Anglo businessman. Imagine.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She was now enmeshed in the million dewy spiderwebs of her own memories and looked up with a slow and luscious blink. “I don't think either of them would understand. The magic is the curse and the curse is the magic. Can I make you understand that, Ben? Do you understand?”

Ben failed to understand anything. “Yes, Mother, I understand.”

She unlocked a cabinet and handed over a raft of Ben's smeared drawings, ragged from the cage. Between their hands, a mille-feuille of paint and shit instead of the inexpressible, the inconsolable.

“Your father has not seen a full moon since he turned fourteen,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

The moon nestled like a stone in the tall grasses by the ravine where Larchmount Crescent sloped down to the wilderness. Ben wandered down, as lonely as any merely human soul, to crouch like a stone, like the moon, in the tall grasses. He began to weep. He wept the way only teenage boys weep, from the floor. Eventually he heard rustling from the house. He sucked himself up, for his mother, for his father? It was only Poppy. His kid sister back from school for Christmas. She said nothing. She stood beside him, a little above him, and then began to comb his hair with her fingers. Into the sudden pause of her tenderness, Ben Wylie unleashed the howl he so wished could be real.

*  *  *

That was the year old Jack Taggart died. The second stroke took him at a dog track in Sarasota, and the tragedy of his final moments was that he never saw Seeya Later romp home, paying handsomely at a hundred to eight.

The whole flight to Sarasota, George and Lee had nothing to say, frozen by the death of a man neither had seen for almost a decade. The funeral had been arranged on the pink and floury sand of the Siesta Key beach, where Jack had lived his later years in a little mango-colored bungalow with a secretary named Tammy. Siesta Key was one of the peculiar paradises America has scattered over itself like glittering ashes. A grotesque highway spewed diesel fumes beside an eternal pillow of beach
on which sea turtles dug egg holes by night, surrounded by piratical bars and old folks' homes and crab restaurants and little stores selling garish sunglasses and key chains and local handmade pottery. Jack had died surrounded by life's cheaper pleasures.

“Do we have the wrong place?” George asked as they pulled up to the beach address. A party seemed to be under way. Several hundred men and women—buyers and sellers, lovers and gamblers, friends and enemies from the mad, capable, fanatic, gorgeous, moneyed world—had showed up in Technicolor finery: Hawaiian shirts and knee-length shorts, and fluorescent bikinis, and one man in an unforgettable suit of yellow linen, and another in open-necked teal. Stepping out in black from a blue Cadillac, George and Lee plopped like lumps of coal into fruit salad.

“It looks like Dad's people,” Lee said.

George waded through the jocular mourners to the rosewood casket, luscious and antiquated, and there he was: Jack. George's memories of the whole rough world of joking, smoking, farting, flesh-squeezing men with their tumblers of iced whisky and their smokes and their dumb puns and their communities of winks and their pockets jangling with change lay dead in the casket with him.

“It's him,” George said.

“And I don't know a man or woman here,” Lee said.

Eventually, the crowd, exuding tutti-frutti skin cream and tacky cheerfulness, settled into the sand and a buffoonishly drunk obese man in a purple suit took the microphone beside the casket. He was holding on to a fistful of rum in ice with mint like a speaking stick. “My favorite Jack Taggart story,” he announced. When a semblance of silence breached, he ran into it shouting: “My favorite Jack Taggart story happened at the track. If ever the track had a saint, it was Jack Taggart. And every
saint has his miracle, right? We were driving, I remember, upstate New York, and he asks, ‘Want to go to the track?' and I say, ‘Sure,' and we're driving and, bam, a white squirrel runs out onto the road. Albino. Nearly killed us. ‘Wasn't that a bit lucky,' said Jack.

“So we're at the track that afternoon, it's the seventh race and wouldn't you know it, there's a horse called Whitetail. And Jack comes to me, he says, ‘Look at this, it's a horse called Whitetail, just like we saw on the road.' Sure enough and I know what's coming next. Horse is running at a hundred to three.

“So Jack figures this out, and he figures that out, he borrows from this guy, he scrapes from that guy, stuff he shouldn't, rent, kids' money, wives' money, money he has that belongs to other people. Everything and more. On a hunch. You understand? Just on some stirring in that gut of his.

“And sure enough, Whitetail wins and he had to carry the money out in a bag. He had to buy a bag from the gift shop to carry it out. We had to go somewhere, too. Business deal. Now, I know that he lost it all, and I know he made a lot of dumb bets that didn't pay off, but that's how I'll always remember him. Laughing his ass off, rich with the track's money, on the road to a deal.”

The next woman in line took the mic. She looked like Teri Garr. She spoke like Teri Garr. She may well have been Teri Garr. “I just want to say that I was with him when he went broke after two days in an underground Chinese casino in New York and I saw him give the last five dollars he had in the world to a rummy off the street and he laughed about it. He laughed just as much as he must have laughed in that car.”

A whole line of men and women told their favorite Jack Taggart stories, grasping at his amusing and infuriating brilliance, his unique capacity for incomplete collapse and partial recovery, his fleshy hope.
Some laughed. Some wept. Some railed. Some boasted. Some worked themselves into rages and had to be shushed to mollifying grumbles. Like water running through the earth, money had coursed through Jack Taggart in rivulets and mighty floods, in underground rivers and vast sucking tides, and pillars of clouds that drenched down, and mile-thick glaciers. Like water leaves stories on the earth, money left stories on Jack Taggart. The man that money poured through.

Until the light began to fall, Lee and George listened to the stories money had wrought. Then they drove in silence to the jet. They didn't speak till they were at twenty thousand feet.

“Maybe I should have told a story,” Lee said.

“What story would you have told?” George asked.

Lee ran the talons of his hands over his skull, and then folded them virtuously on his lap. “I suppose I have no story.”

George understood, as he always seemed to understand with Lee. Their lives ran parallel through a diabolical, inevitable magnetism that imitated friendship at least.

“He was a true American,” George said.

“That's fair.”

“I wish my father had a funeral like that.”

“I wish my mother had.”

*  *  *

Ben sucked the thumb of his own contempt, peered down the row of girls leaning against the wall of the gym, and thought: You could never be with me. I'm so much richer than you. I'm just so much richer than you. So so much richer than you.

The annual Orange Blossom Ball between the Amherst School for Girls and Hamilton College was held at the beginning of spring. Ben stood
apart. Ben was happiest standing apart, least vulnerable. Over twelve years of coexistence, the boys of Hamilton College had learned to hate Ben Wylie, and he had learned to hate them back. Class warfare is more acute between the rich and the megarich than between the rich and the poor. Moneyed people cannot stand the eccentricities of those with more than them and the richer find the slightly less rich intolerably money-grubbing. There is a world of difference between being born on third, thinking you've hit a stand-up triple, and being born on home plate.

Ben insisted on knotting his school tie as he entered the school and unknotting his school tie when he left, as if the uniform was a tangled net he was caught in every morning and struggled to escape every afternoon. He scowled. He carried a heavy book of Caravaggio reproductions in his satchel. He hated the thumping stadium rock that everybody else liked. He knew he was easy to despise.

So he was standing apart when Anna Savarin came for him. Through the darkened gym, clanging with a brittle “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah),” across the space whose edges were arranged with clusters of boys ignoring girls and girls fascinated with the clusters of boys ignoring them, her eyes came first. Green auras with gray centers. Then her breasts. Anna Savarin cut like cruel fate wearing a delicately patterned pink floral dress. Ben watched the distances between them narrowing helplessly.

“I believe we're supposed to dance,” she said on arrival.

“I'm sorry?” muttered Ben.

“It's tradition for the head girl at Amherst and the prefect of Hamilton College to dance at the Orange Blossom ball.”

She pulled him out onto the floor. “The Lady in Red” drifted overhead, while Ben's hand on her waist waited, the faint moisture of his palm
softening the starch of her dress. Aware of his own smell, the odor of fumbling and indelicacy, aware that he was supposed to say something, aware that he should say only the perfect thing, he shifted his weight left to right, right to left, left to right. “Ever feel like you're being watched?” he asked, nodding his head to the suppressed gazes on the edge of the dance floor.

“They should watch us,” Anna replied. “We're role models.”

“Not me.”

“You're prefect of Hamilton College,” she asserted, as if he were questioning her status by doubting his own.

“Headmaster Reynolds made me prefect because the prefect automatically becomes head of alumni fund-raising after graduation. All the other boys resent me. At least thirty of them deserve it more than me.”

“Hatred is a sign of jealousy.” The maxim instant on her lips.

He was already appalled by her. “I bet all the girls at Amherst love you.”

Anna laughed, a bright and silvery sound like the tumbling of knives through the air. “They resent me, too. They resent me as much as the etiquette teacher.”

“Because you're cruel or because you're polite?”

“Ask me a less rude question.”

“All right.” He straightened. “Where are you going next year? That's what I'm supposed to ask, right?”

“I'm going to travel,” she said. “Then, I don't know where. Probably Princeton. Like my dad.”

“I'm going to Harvard,” Ben said.

“Harvard? How very interesting.” She was obviously wondering what donation his father was making and he nearly told her about the shrubberies.

“Not really,” he said instead.

“No, not really. But you know what is interesting?”

“What's interesting?”

“If you can find us a private place, I'll teach you how to fuck me.” Her eyes fixed his with expansive phoniness.

They sneaked through the halls, away from the music and light. Headmaster Reynolds, a defeated man terminally spooked by his wealthy charges, poked his head around the corner at the sound of their rustling and instantly ducked away. Ben froze, hissed, “He's seen us.”

“You want him to see,” Anna whispered. “That way he won't interrupt.”

In the locker room of the hockey rink, among bags stuffed with fish-scented gloves and the splintery planks of the sweaty shin guards, she spread her floral skirt and tucked out her limpid bee-sting breasts.

She showed him what it was. She showed him how it worked.

Afterward, she straightened herself out, sheathed the blade of her smile, and stole away without a word, and he remembered, for some unknown reason, Mrs. Lansing, the mother of one of the boys, from earlier in the week, by the school gate. Wreathed in a fox stole, with its sad glass eyes questioning the whole of the human race, she had sized him up properly, head to heel, the petrified stink of her foundation mixed with rouge. At the mention of his name, Mrs. Lansing's eyes had opened like the delayed headlamps of a Porsche with faulty electrics. “You'll be quite the catch, won't you?” she had cooed.

Alone in the locker room, Ben would have cried if he hadn't just come.

*  *  *

The last time Ben and George shared a cage was the night before Ben left for Harvard. The Wylie men rarely shared each other's company by then. What do mere men have to say to one another? Better to sit in
the cage, waiting. After the ancient beastliness flowered up in George's veins, Ben would silently stroke his father's fur in the darkness. The wash of the wolf's lick on his cheek was a rugged bath, lovely and cleansing. One last time, they leaned their heads back together, man and wolf, and howled into the emptiness.