Hunger of the Wolf (29 page)

Authors: Stephen Marche

That night I learned about Lee Taggart's death in the poker room of the Borgata, where a bank of distracting screens conveniently flashed financial news alongside horse and dog races. He died in chains, lashed to a cage in 15 Central Park West. Apparently at Taggart's request, a rent boy had beat and choked him to unconsciousness, and then accidentally to death.

The police never even charged the hustler. After all, the victim owned the cages.

*Â Â *Â Â *

I was given my last look at the Wylies the day after Halloween. They were in the crowd I was struggling against on my way to the subway. A few stores were putting up Christmas decorations, and Christmas in SoHo is the ultimate proof, if proof were necessary, that love is not enough. There must be spending money, too. Anna Savarin, in the frosty glory of an ivory cashmere coat, radiated. Beside her, a bounding bright boy ran from window to window. She tried to rein him in as he scampered from her grip for glimpses of the world's magnificent stuff. His eyes glimmered with curiosity and defiance, his messy hair and his face dusty from already forgotten adventuresâa fighter, a boy after my own heart, with a soul for any fate. I thought of my father as a boy. I thought of myself as a boy. If we could scrape away what time does to men, we would love every boy. If we could wash away the grime, the boy would be waiting at the beginning, full of greed indistinguishable from hope. Max's mother watched the tender futility of his animal
self with sorrowful eyes. She knew: We get what we want and then it destroys us.

All in a moment, mother and son drifted into the keen consuming crowd. Their vision passed from me. I'm no Communist: It seemed perfectly logical that the profit from the labor of tens of thousands would fall to them.

*Â Â *Â Â *

It hadn't yet snowed by mid-November, so I flew up to visit my mother again. Who could say when a sudden storm would render the road from Edmonton impassable?

On the way up I stopped at the Legislature Building in Edmonton to see the floors my great-grandfather laid. The Cabots were originally the Cabottos, until Ellis Island, and Cabottos were marble workers for generations before my grandfather insisted his sons graduate from high school. They came from Lucca, a miraculously unbombed Italian town whose cathedral floors are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, today covered in Plexiglas for the tourists' inspection, far too beautiful to be walked on. I suppose I should be proud of this heritage. In the 1990s, while all my friends were discovering their ethnicitiesâthe Jews upping their quotient of Yiddishisms, the Irish tattooing shamrocks on their assesâI could never be bothered with my Italianness. I figured that my ancestors came to the New World for good jobs and a chance at a family and an old age in which they could drink themselves comfortably to death, not so I could be proud of some shitheel village they'd abandoned. Patriotism is not a family trait: Our true tribe is the human dust blown from every continentâthe Italians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Greeks, the peripatetic Russians and Indians. We belong to that mongrel messiness that has no name and no flag.

Perhaps the men and women who know how to make things are obsolete. Perhaps the whirlwind of numbers will sweep their skills away. Nonetheless, I was proud of the floor of the Legislature. If there had not been a janitor mopping, wondering what the hell I was looking at, I might well have lain down on its simple pattern of black-and-white squares, spread myself like some initiate.

When I drove out of Edmonton the fall light was distant and intense, the sun farther away yet its heat somehow closer, less muted. The air is so crisp in an Alberta autumn that to pass from light to shadow is to skip from midsummer to midwinter in an instant. Northern Alberta is my country but it is not my home. It is nobody's home. The original tribe that lived in this place was the Beaver. Before conquest, somewhere around two thousand of them hunted and fished the whole of the Peace River basin, and even they stuck to the water, hardly ever venturing onto the hard lands beyond. When the paleo-people arrived in the new world, a world new thirty thousand years ago, their hunger poured down the continent, past vista after vista of infinite dangerous promise, but they looked at this country and passed by. They knew that humanity would find no welcome here. What I see and what the Beaver saw are the same: A place of no habitation and no name. Two hours outside of town, I pulled up on a pair of black wolves as they feasted on the carcass of a roadkill doe. They looked up as I rolled down the window, kept feasting, but after a few minutes of glut, they jogged away, looking back and then running, looking back and then running. Wolves are wilder than other wild things. They have refused civilization. I remembered my father. His smiling assurance: Fathers shepherd their children away from the pointlessness, the basic irrelevance of life, and then they die, leaving their sons shivering in the emptiness, just when we most need the warm cover of their deceit.

Only when dinner was on the tableâcrispy lake trout and wild rice with sweet crusty black breadâdid I remember the anniversary. My father had died in late November. We were eating his favorite meal. From the steam-cleaned earthiness of the smell, I was carried back to eating with my father at nine-thirty at night fresh from shooting a fourteen-point buck in Stellerton; I was once again at Nobu eating grilled maitake and a raft of tuna with an editor from the
Times
, bread and butter in a market in Berlin, and then back again at the orderly table of my mother.

“A simple meal feeds simple people,” she said.

“I'm not sure how simple I am anymore, Mom. My divorce went through last week.”

I hadn't told her about Kate and Sigma. I wasn't sure what I had to tell. She forked an asparagus tip with a few grains of rice and a bit of fish. She always ate things mushed together. “Where do you think you'll go now?” she asked. The pleasant thought that I was going nowhere suffused me. Before I could answer, the arrow of her gaze straightened to the window. For a moment I saw my mother the way she must have looked as a small child, my mother before duty. “The snow,” she said.

Outside very fine, very small flakes were beginning to sweep grandly down through the orange cone of the front porch light. She stood up from the table and shuffled in her sock feet to the window.

“It's always like this at first,” she said, wondering. “A few big flakes but when I see them I can already see the snow covering everything, can't you?”

“The snow's well overdue,” I said.

She stared awhile, then looked away, which always meant more than anything she said. “It's a new start for everybody.”

*Â Â *Â Â *

The wispy clouds, vague as suspicion, interrupted the huge silver moon that rose like a fin-de-siÃ¨cle postcard as I strolled after dinner into its bland glare. Now that I was certain I wouldn't have to leave New York, I could cherish the childhood fear that the dark wild creates. There were still anxieties about the situation. I had seen in Kate's eyes before I left, the fluttering of a doubt, though about what I couldn't say. I was confident I could deal with the situation. Even if Kate turned against me, her daughter loved me too much. I was part of the family now. I belonged.

The Wylie cottage was neat, and the first sight of its massy stones lingered in the smooth vapor of evening. The stars were rising. I sat on a boulder near the edge of one of the Wylies' lakes. The cold was settling in, drifting from the north. Happiness, surprising and urgent, rose to my throat. Was it the certainty about New York? Was it the moon? My father's black bread? My mother's sighting of the first snow? Say I was happy by constellation. A constellation is the light of stars removed by hundreds of millions of light-years striking the eye at the same instant.

Beyond the Wylie's cottage, the wilderness sloped away in the darkness like mist.

If I were stronger, I would have headed out into that infinite cold, into the vastness where a man can howl properly. Instead I turned back to the quiet, well-lit house of my mother.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jofie Ferrari-Adler delivered this book to the world with Jonathan Karp and PJ Mark and Jennifer Lambert beside him, and I am grateful to all of them for their care and their concern and their intelligence and their skill and their judgment and their ability to deal with money. For other kinds of help: Julian Porter, Bob Fulford, John Honderich, James Frey, David Granger. For all of the above and everything else: Sarah Fulford.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Â© DAVE GILLESPIE

S
tephen Marche is a novelist and culture writer. For the past five years he has written a monthly column for
Esquire
magazine, “A Thousand Words About Our Culture,” which in 2011 was a finalist for the ASME National Magazine Award for Commentary. He also writes regular features and opinion pieces for
The Atlantic, The New York Times
,
The Wall Street Journal
,
The New Republic
, and elsewhere. His books include two novels,
Raymond + Hannah
and
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
, as well as a work of nonfiction,
How Shakespeare Changed Everything
. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.