Hunger of the Wolf (28 page)

“You talk like he was born on the streets of Mumbai or something.”

“You can be abandoned anywhere,” Kate insisted.

Aren't we all, I wanted to say. Aren't we all the orphans at the beginning of a Charles Dickens novel? Aren't we all Hansel and Gretel, lost in the deep dark woods, searching for the traces of the trail of bread crumbs?

“What are you thinking now?” Kate asked, seeing the unasked questions pass over my face.

“I'm wondering what my excuse will be,” I said.

*  *  *

Solzhenitsyn said that a man who is warm cannot understand the point of view of a man who is cold. I was the warm man with the cold man inside. When we snagged a table at Kajitsu, and the check came, Kate's card snapped down neatly at the conclusion. My non-Platinum equivalent would have been embarrassing, I told myself. Her card was like a cleaver to hack through the gristle and bone of life's little embarrassments.

She paid for the trips. To London. To Paris. To Los Angeles and then Hawaii and then Cambodia because why not, we were practically there. I could never have afforded them. Sometimes neither could Kate. Sam and Ricky, a couple who had invested early in PayPal and whose daughter Sexton went to the same ballet class as Sigma, flew us in their private jet down to Saint Barths in May. I liked Sam and Ricky. Sam was a rotund ex-frat boy with a heart of molded plastic who spent his time waiting for what he called the “next perfect pitch,” whatever that meant. He was not instantly bored with me when he realized that I had no money. Ricky was a Long Island princess who had made a good match. She was impressed that I knew one of the wedding reporters from the
Times
, so she deigned to audition her version of a winning smile on me.

The stay in Saint Barths was less exciting to me than the private jet, but good value. Uma Thurman was splashing around the beach with her kids, which is something, I guess. Her presence certainly justified any expense as far as Sam and Ricky were concerned. The horror began as we were leaving. Sam was late for takeoff. More than an hour late. Ricky was worried, though not for her husband or for our schedule. On a private jet, the fuel per hour costs about ten thousand dollars,
and it was running the whole time we waited for him, to keep our spot on the tarmac. Sam eventually showed up with Chinese food. There was a chow mein place he loved on the island. Ricky was furious. “For Chinese food?” she shouted. “Are those noodles worth ten thousand dollars?” Sam looked surprised, genuinely. She was suddenly appalled at his taste for luxury? “Look where you are,” he shouted back, sweeping his arm around the jet cabin. “What more do you want?”

That's really the question, isn't it? What more do you want? Sigma and Sexton wanted
Archie
comics that they consumed in studied silence in a pool of jet-window light after takeoff. I could not quite manage to hide my discomfort so casually. Kate noticed. After we landed, after we were alone in the cab on the way back to SoHo, she leaned over Sigma's sleeping head and whispered, “We don't have to be like that.”

“We couldn't possibly be like them,” I said.

“I mean, the money doesn't have to come between us. We can work something out. We don't have to end up screaming at each other in a private jet.” It took a moment for me to realize what she meant. For Kate, money was a source of difficulty, of anger and loss. It was so ravishingly naïve I almost told her I loved her. But it was not that moment.

“Don't worry,” I said instead. “We'll find some other reason to scream at each other.”

Then Sigma roused herself. “Who's screaming?” she asked dreamily.

“Nobody's screaming,” I said, kissing the top of her head as delicately as my rough lips could manage, which could never possibly be delicate enough. “Nobody will ever be screaming.”

After Saint Barths, for a kind of vacation—a desperate pull for an ending perhaps—I visited Champlain. Number 17 Flora Avenue clung to elegance with an almost charming precariousness in a neighborhood that remains what it was in the early days of the Wylies, a repository
of the recently arrived, upwardly mobile, lower middle class, though hardscrabble Sikhs had replaced hardscrabble Scots. The thick-matted dandelioned yard in front and the rusted-shut front gate marred an otherwise impeccable street, groomed by fiercely house-proud new owners.

The property on Larchmount Crescent was rotting splendidly—the roof spider-veined with cracks, the windows boarded, the yellowish bricks crumbling in ever larger chunks from the Victorian façade. The inside of the house was a phantasmagoria of distressed gentility, like a melancholy dream of childhood. The old Edwardian carpets stank of their threadbare decline, the voluptuous wallpaper curling in defeated sheets off the rot-poxed walls, the brass lamps squatting forlornly, and the lovely ceiling moldings dripping small black stalactites. No one had touched the place since George and Lavinia's death, obviously. One of the upstairs rooms must have been discovered by teenagers or drug addicts. The cream-colored wallpaper was scrawled with graffiti that had wept itself into indecipherability, cigarette butts and empties were disintegrating and, in the room's center, I don't know how, a maple sapling stirred out of the floor.

I came back from my tour of the collapsing American dream to find that the money had called. “He's coming,” Kate said.

“Who?”

“The gigolo.”

Leo hadn't seen Sigma for a year. Kate wanted me to be there when he came. I owed her.

*  *  *

The town car curled up to the curb. Leo emerged in a Prada suit, looking like a schoolboy lover. Prada has a gift: They make clothes that appear expensive in a way that implies the wearer never earned the money
to buy them. They have mastered the look of otiose finance. Before the door closed, I caught a shard of Poppy Wylie in a black crepe cocktail dress. It was ten in the morning. A funeral or an all-hours party? Time itself seemed to have lost meaning in her impossible elegance.

“She looks bored, Leo.”

At the front door, Leo looked tougher than before, more of a hustler, the shiny suit up close like a leather jacket of a 1950s pimp. His smile stole over his face like a childhood memory but he betrayed no surprise at my presence. “You can't still hate me.”

“I think you're confusing hate with contempt.”

He looked quizzically up at the sky. “Your heart is full of something black, but not contempt. Envy?”

“We all have to make a living,” I said.

“I understand,” he said in the spirit of sympathetic benevolence that a corporate raider might demonstrate to an employee he's just fired.

“What do you understand?”

“I understand everything. That's why we shouldn't hate each other. We do what we have to. Now let me see my daughter.”

My heart was pumping with some thick, hateful sap. It could have been envy but I'm not sure. He was implying that I had brought Poppy to him so I could have Kate for myself, bumping him up so I could bump myself up. Was that what I had been doing? Was I a kept man? Had I done what I had to do?

I was still in New York, after all.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself a scotch—a seventeen-year-old Bowmore—and when I returned Poppy was sitting in the living room, her regal hands on the horseheads of my favorite chair. She was staring into the distance. Hers was a dazed beauty. And then I realized she was staring at
The Wolf
, which hung in the next room, on the
wall of the study. With a pang of terror I could see in her gaze that the painting was an answer to many questions she hadn't thought to ask until then. We both knew that I was some kind of thief.

“I remember you now,” she finally said. “North Lake. You're from North Lake. You're from Alberta, aren't you?”

I couldn't deny it.

“I can't think of a better place to die,” she said.

“I do everything backward,” I said. “I was born there.”

“I remember you in the fields. You were standing in the weeds beside a rusty swing set. The caretaker's son. You were husk brown. It reminded me, seeing you just there. You were a boy, so free, so wild.”

The thought of my father sobbed to my throat. Her eyes had seen me when he was alive. And when had I been free? When?

“My mother said to me when we were in North Lake, ‘You must never tell anyone, Poppy. You must never tell a living soul.'” She smiled at me. “But you already know. You probably knew all along. You must have understood that I couldn't let you tell the world this. You must have known.”

“Can I ask you something?”

She seemed a little surprised but nodded.

“Why are all the men buried in the north?”

She wreathed herself in the meaning of her secrecy. She could talk as much as she wanted now. “My mother loved the wolves. They would have called her a witch a century ago. She loved her French-Canadian rituals. She loved Father being a wolf and rising up again as a man. Thought she was in some folktale of the
loup-garou
. For me, my papa was dying. For her, the meaning was going out of the world.”

She teased out a cigarette from a pack of Sobranies, put it to her lips, then removed it, threaded it back into the pack. “You have no idea how I wish I'd
met my grandmother, my great-grandmother. The wolf was nothing to them but a chore. They knew we should never have left the old house on Flora Avenue where they had been
maitresses chez elles
.”

She seemed to clear her head, recall vaguely that there was a question and a questioner.

“You're right,” she said. “The men are all buried out there in the north with nothing above them but sky.”

“They buried Ben up there, too, didn't they?”

She rambled like a scattered animal. “Mama brought me down to the cage but I could never stand the smell. For her, everything about the wolf was pleasure. ‘The smell of the naked earth,' she called it. It smelled like shit to me.” Her eyes met mine, concentrated as diamond. “You want to know about his body in the snow, don't you?”

I started to answer but caught my breath in my throat, terrified that a word would thwart her answer.

“It was an act of love,” she said. “He was born to go naked into the wild. I let him go. I let him out of the cage. That was my job. It wasn't my mother's. When I found him in the cage, how could I not let him be the wolf?”

She had released him into the wild and he had run all the way to his death—becoming the beast he had longed to be. I had misunderstood. The story of men who died was the story of women who lived. The Wylies are not men who come out of Abermarley, out of the broken-down stones and trees to find a land of opportunity. They are the women in quiet villages, the women looking up from their kitchen tables, their beaded prayers, to the dark fields on the edge of town. They won't be married properly by the church door. Instead, they run through the narrow, cruel forest, momentarily free. Then they wake up in a silent mansion where not even the servants gossip. The men remain in the
basement, howling into themselves. The women are in the empty upstairs, silent, scrutinizing their own desperations.

“I can't stand to talk about this anymore,” she said, and walked away as she had always walked away before, the way she would eventually walk away from Leo, I knew. In the inconclusive life of Poppy Wylie, nobody lasted long.

She turned back for me. “I'm going to let you keep that,” she said, nodding to the painting.

Generosity is what I never could have expected. Mercy. Or was it carelessness? The allure of Poppy's floating world, her easy life, her sumptuous declining beauty was that it could cancel little lives like mine, that it didn't need to bother with the mere stuff of the world anymore. Money is everything now. Poppy had been to the end of money and human wildness. She wandered the exhaustion of all possible desire.

I was so lost in my relieved and greedy reveries that I didn't even notice Leo leave the house. I just saw his Prada suit entering the car, then the car pulling away. Kate was standing beside me and I hadn't noticed her either. I wasn't noticing much apparently. “He's gone,” she said.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to feel guilty.”

She knew her man. Leo's guilt was friction to grit himself against the grease of all the money. With his guilt emblazoned on his secret heart, he could betray his wife and abandon his child and catapult himself into the stratosphere. So long as he felt bad about it.

Sigma joined us, her eyes heavy with suppression. She wanted to watch a Star Wars movie with me, she muttered. I asked her if we could see
The Empire Strikes Back
, my favorite, and she agreed, and then I knew she must be really down, so we put on
The Phantom Menace
, her favorite, and cuddled.

*  *  *

Things were starting to look up. The graphs were growing pleased with their human subjects once again. The stock market soared above its pre-crash mark, the unemployment rate tripped below eight percent, and even median incomes inflated the slightest little puff. Therefore restaurant front offices again giggled dismissively at apologetic requests for Friday night tables, glossy magazines thickened tumescently on the newsstand shelves, and I heard stories of friends leaving jobs of their own volition—exhausted Americans at least imitating hope. The delirious music that had stopped was starting up again, not quite out on the street but in small rooms off the alleys. The ancient dreads continued to rumble underneath it all: inequalities widening, food prices spiking, the natural world more threadbare with each season. But the apocalyptic mode has always nestled comfortably at the heart of American prosperity. The world has always been about to fall apart, which is fine so long as I can make a living.

There was more action, more fun, more stuff, more chances to get lucky. And nothing can compare with the blessed state of getting lucky. A big score succors the soul more than God or heroin or justice. One night at the party for a book about the crash on the rooftop of the Chamberlain, high above the city, I theorized to myself that the species was gathering money into fewer and neater piles so we could burn it in bigger and brighter conflagrations. The potlatch of the earth had begun. And there, in the crowd swaying without dancing, the tight suits in dark colors, the loose drapes of rich textured fabrics, lamés and laces, gold hoop earrings and sculpted bodies, I saw Jorn Pelledeau again. He had left
Vice
by then. He was with MSNBC, I think. Our gazes crossed each other's, recognition immediately swallowed by our mutual acknowledgment that we didn't
matter to each other. I had won. I didn't need stories anymore. I already had the girl and the money. Media, in its petty Götterdämmerung, was of the least possible concern to me anymore. I loved the times I had been given to live in. I wanted to gamble more.