Hunger of the Wolf (27 page)

She proceeded into the diner, somehow knowing his precise location. Mother's instinct? Anna Savarin?

“My son,” she announced, sitting.

“What are you doing here, Mom?”

“My daughter,” she answered. Her distress reared up in her inflection. What had Poppy done? “She won't speak to me.” Lavinia looked at her son, with the calm of true need. “How I wish I was embarrassing you with a wedding.”

*  *  *

Poppy needed, at last, to be taken away. The experiments in rock and powder, with smoke and needle, had concluded with the expected results; Poppy had worked out their various refinements with extraordinary thoroughness. The typical addict is limited by cash flow. Poppy received two hundred thousand dollars a day from her portion of the trust. She tried to huff every penny.

She had reached bottom near the top of the world on Central Park West. Ben opened the elevator into her private suite, into a mess. Paintings in crates. Clothes in silver and gold torn and strewn on the living room floor and over a zebra-skin sectional and Lucite coffee table. Books of photography, ripped. An avant-garde menorah. A rust-needled pine tree from Christmas past, nearly bare. The main window was smashed, cracked as if someone had thrown furniture from the forty-first floor. The apartment was naked to the sky. A pair of pigeons cooed and strutted over a row of three television sets. The window must have been broken for a while because pigeon shit was spackled over the crack pipes and the gear and a bowl of rot-excruciated tangerines and little green apples and a limp leek, and the stacked catalogues from Christie's and Sotheby's. A Penguin edition of
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
lay on top. Poppy was splayed out in new gym wear on the sofa in front of the smashed window, her eyes bruised, her skin flaky.

“Honey, you're home,” she said, looking up lizardly.

“It doesn't much look like anybody's home.”

“Why is it, you think,” Poppy wondered, “that Mother thinks I'll go with you?”

Ben sat beside her. If she decided to jump through the window he could grab her. “I think she thinks we're the only people on earth we can trust.”

Poppy fingered a small gold and ruby device hanging from a chain around her neck—it looked like a cigarette lighter—and took two automatic sniffs.

“We've let everything fall apart, haven't we,” he said.

She was high but spoke correctly. “It's amazing how it doesn't fall apart no matter what we do.” Then she stood up, tottering. “It's all just painted skin, whatever that means.”

*  *  *

After dropping his sister at the self-esteem factory in Connecticut—it was called Beginnings, an all-purpose rehab clinic that offered equine therapy and Japanese massage within the secure confines of a barbed wire fence—Ben left his job and his collection and New York and his family. If I have to be an experiment, he thought, at least I can decide what the experiment is.

So he experimented: He purchased a motorcycle and drove around Normandy, then flew the company Gulfstream to Cairo for kushari, then to Rome, where he bought a bronze Christ that had once hung in Bernini's studio for 30 million dollars and gave it to the University Art Gallery in Harvard for the tax credit. Then to Kiev, where he bought the Ukraine's largest steel factory, to Hong Kong, where he pissed in a glass urinal in a restaurant that served red panda meat, to Bangkok, to Mumbai, to Rome again, to Tokyo. He would buy all the Rothkos at an auction or an entire Chuck Close show, sight unseen, and bury them in the family vault in Kensington Palace Gardens.

To see, through the transcendent window of the Maybach, the scenes of everyday life—the homeless man outside the liquor store in New Orleans glugging electric pink wine, the Queen of England inspecting the horseflesh at the races, the gaggle of laughing girls on their way to a twelve-hour shift in a pharmaceutical factory in Shenzhen, a solitary boy climbing the hills of Kenya with fly-fishing equipment, the Saudis in their tasteless stupidity buying platinum toilets. Always the background rumble: Am I living now? Is this all there is? The present, to Ben, unrolled like a painting spilling to the floor in a burning museum.

In the Imperial Suite at the Ritz, at the
fons et origo
of luxury, Ben
ordered a hot dog and ate it in the bathroom overlooking the Place Vendôme. The room cost $12,389 dollars a night. In Los Angeles, Ben purchased a Lamborghini Countach, purple as grape soda and equally tasteful, crazy as a fatherless teenager. He thrust the mad machine up the Pacific Coast Highway, through green and blue and gold and white to San Francisco, and thought what a good road it would be to die on. The past fumed away like applewood smoke. All that was solid was melting into air, and the air was heating up. The world was beginning to break up, to shift. Mere geography, mere material, mere human beings—properties to be assumed into the one invisible, indivisible city of money, the one true universal brotherhood all men and women were hustling to join. He saw China rising in furious glory, the ancient civilization back for the most curious revenge in history. Ten thousand souls in a single factory made umbrellas and the imperial nations trembled, forecasting rain.

One evening in London, Ben paid what was then the largest sum ever paid for a Rembrandt: £25,897,543 for
Saint Francis and the Wolf
. He laid the painting outside the cage in the house in Kensington Palace Gardens to receive the flat expanse of the moonlight through the window.

*  *  *

The butler had to bring the phone down to the cage. It was his sister. “Come home,” she said, and hung up.

It had been seven years since Ben had returned to Champlain. The rot of the house on Larchmount Crescent was evident from the street, the margins frayed, the grass mopey, a house obviously in mourning and disrepair, although all of Champlain seemed to be permanently in mourning and disrepair. No butler to usher him in here. He knocked and entered to the flicker of women in the dark halls above, maybe
Poppy, maybe his mother. He seemed to know where he was supposed to go by instinct.

At the long oak table in the living room, ancient as winter, Lee Taggart waited. He had grayed. Even his graying was precise. The ghostly color of his hair matched the deferential steel of his eyes, the cut of his suit. Six piles of papers waited scrupulously on the table. As Ben entered, Lee moved as if he had been asleep until that moment, a robot switched suddenly on.

“You need to sign all these,” he said, handing over a gold fountain pen.

Ben endured the weight of the instrument in his fingers, dutifully leaning over, scrawling his name mechanically, in silence, over the rafts of English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Arabic papers.

“I was called back for some signatures?” Ben asked.

“I'm here for your father.”

“As you always have been.”

The old man's knobbly finger divinely pointed to the dotted line, life's fundamental truth. “I'm going to say it just like he asked me to, Ben. I owe him.”

“What do you owe?”

“Finish the signatures.” He waited on the completion of legal formalities. “What he wanted you to know is that his condition was just a lot more painful than it had ever been before.”

“His condition?”

“His condition, the spasms, were becoming agonies, real agonies, Ben. Your parents decided to go together. They didn't want to stick around without each other. That's how your dad wanted me to put it. Don't decide to take it too hard. He wanted me to tell you this way. He wanted me to say it just like this.”

“What's going on, Lee?”

Lee collected the papers into his briefcase, and then began to guide Ben by the elbow into the living room. “George was an amazing owner,” he said. “He knew exactly when to do nothing.” A coffin. A large and well-manufactured coffin, obviously from a well-reputed coffin company. From the edges of the universe, at the fastest speed there is, beams of pure darkness began their rush toward Ben. In the coffin lay his mother, and beside her the carcass of a wolf, smiling mildly.

*  *  *

As the sedation ebbed, Ben awoke with the refreshment of a great agony having passed. Slowly, by stages, his vision adjusted to the cage. The comfort of the familiar basement was smooth in the fresh ache. Lost, he forgot, and forgetting, he couldn't say how long he sat in the cage or how long she was there.

In the half dark, on the other side of the bars, utterly poised, Anna Savarin was patiently waiting.

T
he Wolf
saved me. I took the Paul Klee from the Wylie cottage nook and drove it from Alberta to New York—across the thousand-cornered room of America, the fields of the megafarms swaying with genetically modified wheat, the small towns abandoned by their ambitious young people, the rusting derelict cities abandoned by themselves. The country was a highway strung with escape hatches. Every crossroads, every side road, was its own temptation. Who would notice my absence or the painting's?

“It's beautiful,” Kate said dubiously when I hung it back over the desk in her study.

“I thought it belonged here,” I said.

“That's not what I mean,” she said in a voice like moss. “It's beautiful because you brought it back.”

Then she kissed me. I wish there were some more cynical, more contemporary way for me to describe it, but kisses will always be antiquated. Surprised kisses are practically nineteenth century, like carnations
pressed in leather-bound books, or four-poster oaken beds, or carved opaline silhouettes. She kissed me and I was surprised and it was as lovely as a watermark. Still, I had needed the painting. She could never have taken me without a gift and I could never have come without theft.

*  *  *

The following morning, I crept, shoes in hand, down the elegant stairs lined with Robert Frank photographs from his Mexican period and stumbled on Sigma perched at the granite-topped kitchen island, grumpily consuming an Eggo waffle that had been cut into stamp-sized squares by an absent nanny. She looked up with Leo's suspicious Greek eyes through a tumble of gold ringlets.

“I don't want this,” she said, pointing to the waffle.

I know nothing about children or their upbringing so I went simple. “What do you want?” I asked her.

“Pizza,” she said, grinning.

In the Miele fridge, a few slices of Hawaiian pizza limped forlornly over the edge of a plate. I passed the dish over cold, thereby earning eternal friendship through ham and pineapple. Kate came down a few minutes later to find me reading Garfield to her daughter from the back of a two-day-old
Post
. The easy beauty of her morning doziness was spine-softening. She tousled her hair silently, gorgeous in an entirely novel manner. She smiled the insider smile upon me, and I was redeemed by its ease.

*  *  *

So began my life in the money or beside it, rather. I still worked. I still kept my Portuguese basement. I still ran my freelancing gamble, just with lower stakes. At the dinners and parties and functions to which
Kate brought me over the next months I remained a spectator to the frictionless young men with their puffy-faced arrogance who fawned over anyone with more money than them, then flashed a dead-eyed contempt on anyone with less. Their backstories were all the same. They had graduated with degrees in finance from Ivy League schools and worked in family holding companies, or circled the network collecting investors for one scheme or another, off of which they slivered livable commissions. The whiz kids, the math PhDs, and the rocket scientists were supposed to have ended this clubbiness, or so I'd read. As far as I could tell, the whiz kids were on salary. Money's job was still to maintain the tribe, to give just enough money to other people's idiot sons so that your own idiot sons would have just enough people to ask for money in their turn.

I think that I offered Kate a kind of reprieve from the wealthy friends she neither wanted to know nor could bring herself to ignore. Plus I was helpful with Sigma. When Kate fell into a migraine, Sigma and I would skip her classes—integrated art or Talmudic math or Serbo-Guyanan dance or whatever it was—and drive Mommy's Audi to the Six Flags in Jersey. Sigma was pure Viking at heart. She wanted to go on all the rides, in every sense of the phrase. At the end of our days out, I would carry her sleeping from the Audi up to her delicate pink room like the exhausted animal she was happy to be. Then Kate would make me the exhausted animal I was happy to be.

One evening in late summer, the cool breeze wafting the faint odor of BBQ pork dumplings through the air, maybe six months after we had begun whatever we were beginning, Kate whispered in my ear the sum she had inherited from her grand old American forefathers: 47 million. That talismanic number, spilt like pomegranate seeds from her whispery lips, was more erotic than any other possible gesture of her tongue. I
would not at first tell myself what it meant, but my easing spine, my relaxing muscles already knew. I would never have to leave New York.

“Did you tell that number to Leo?” I asked.

She sighed. “You're not jealous of Leo, are you?”

“No, I just want to know if he knew.”

“You want to know whether you know what he knows?”

“Maybe that's it.” Actually I wanted to know how 47 million could be unsatisfying, how anyone could want more than that. Kate sat up into the cooling darkness, the moon through the window casting a glow like relevant history on her breasts.

“Leo knew. But to him numbers never mattered. More and less mattered, but not numbers.”

“Forty-seven million has to be enough,” I said, guffawing.

She almost took offense, then registered that I meant it and forgave me for my ignorance. “You know why you still love Leo?” she asked, and didn't wait for an answer. “When Leo was about six his mother went to live on a lesbian commune in Colorado. His dad had no money. Sales assistant for dishwashers in the middle of nowhere. Leo is one those boys you see on the playground, looking out through the fence. ‘Do you love me? Do you love me?' There's no
enough
for him.”