Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  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.

  Leo rumbled over after the party began to wind down. “An argument over an animal,” he explained with sheepish pride. “Sigma and little Max had a fight over a blue-tongued skink.”

  “Everybody survive?” I asked.

  “Even the blue-tongued skink. Though I suppose there are better practices for my daughter than spitting on the heir to the Wylie fortune.”

  “That was Ben Wylie?” I asked, amazed as much by my failure to recognize him as by his attendance. I had never seen Ben before, but I could recall with ludicrous precision the one time I had encountered his more famous sister Poppy. I must have been eight, a boy in late summer, playing on the rusty swing set on our front lawn. Her limousine had pulled up beside our house. The window rolled down and a woman looked out, a great beauty—a great indifference would be a more precise term. I did not know then about her time on all the covers of the magazines, her celebrity, her reputed string of lovers, Lou Reed and Ayrton Senna and the others, but I knew, even before then, that she was the real world of which my own experience was only a dappled, incomplete reflection.

  “I hope you have good lawyers,” I said.

  Leo’s hand imbued my shoulder with mock gravitas. “At least the kid is meeting the right sort of people.” He needed my approval again. Leo was always in need of something. In need of a cigarette to smoke or a golf club to swing. In need of a helping hand. Probably in need of a good talking-to. Possibly in need of money. Just generally in need, though the man had everyt
hing that a reasonable person could desire.

  Kate joined us, miming exhaustion with a droop of her shoulders, hugging Leo loosely around the belly. “Sigma’s napping,” she said dreamily.

  “We all should be so lucky,” Leo said, kissing the part in her hair with the tenderness of a salesman before a negotiation.

  Kate’s good fortune radiated. The handsome husband. The beautiful daughter. The house in SoHo. The wealthy friends (Ben Wylie) and the interesting friends (me). Now I can see, looking back on my sole encounter at Leo and Kate’s house, that one of the reasons I didn’t recognize Ben was my incredulity that a Wylie would be out eating Moshi Monster birthday cake, looking at paintings, scolding children. In the recesses of my imagination, the Wylies dwell far, far from children’s birthday parties in the shivering wasteland of their utterly banal mystery.

  *

  It took my father’s death to bring me back to Alberta. A pulmonary embolism blew his brains out in the breakfast cereal aisle at the local Safeway. He died at the age of sixty-one, before he had a chance to grow old. A guy I went to high school with, a Mountie, informed me over the phone while I was on the Q train returning from Coney Island. Three Russian women inspected my pain with a reserved fatalistic air I appreciated as I began openly sobbing.

  I hadn’t seen North Lake in ten years. My parents had always visited me, traveling to wherever I happened to be. The funeral for my father was in the school gym where I had received my high school diploma and accidentally cut Jimmy Prescott’s eye playing ball hockey in the third grade, and where I had, one glorious April morning, skipping biology, fingerfucked curious, fervid Mellissa Leung in the darkest corner we could find. Everyone in town came for Dad. The managers from the pulp and paper mill where he had worked as an accountant, the farmers and ranchers, the townies who worked the resorts. My father had helped them all with money. He had been that guy. He had explained the difference between appreciating and depreciating assets, the connections between retirement savings and the tax code, the power of compound interest. All those rough men who wanted to shake my soft hand, all their wives who pressed against my too-crisp suit, their mourning was genuine, not sentimental. The world had lost a useful man. Are you useful? Am I? I tried to be that afternoon. I held my mother’s hand as a half dozen North Lakers spoke halting words over his manicured corpse.

  After the funeral, while my mother napped, I stared numbly out the front window; the Wylies’ lawn was ragged. So I found myself at the age of thirty-five mowing Ben Wylie’s grass. Then I found myself slipping inside the old cottage to smell the disintegrating country album smell, to stare upon the ridiculous paintings on nautical themes crowding the walls, to inhale the residue of my teenage naïveté, my teenage longing. To remember life before my firing, before my separation, before my father’s death. The slightly sweating walls were still sweating slightly. The thick white shag carpeting that my mother hated because it was so hard to vacuum remained thick and white. I lay down in the stale regret I was indulging so thoroughly that year. There seemed to be no end to the end of innocence.

  In a nook off the living room, a small well-lit space with a desk overlooking the lake, the painting surprised me. Sitting on a pile of books, leaning against the cracked wall, The Wolf by Paul Klee. I picked the canvas up to assure myself that it was no reproduction. He must have bought it from Leo and Kate. My wonder infused with doom: The painting must have taken the same ridiculous flight as myself, the same five-hour car ride. I was holding a concatenation of paint and canvas worth several million dollars.

  An envelope peeked out from a large leather folio of Audubon’s Birds of America. It was the letter George wrote to Ben in the eighties about his struggle to uncover their origins. All the personal papers, the private history of the Wylies, the record they kept to help each other through their inherited sickness—I found them tucked inside other books, in furniture crevices, inside a blue trunk that served as an ersatz coffee table. I had fled my hometown to gain an education in the world, but the education I sought, a glance into the hidden workings of the machinery, had been there all along. I discovered the basement too, its dirt floors scarred with claws and a large cage fitted with chain leashes.

  *

  I left the painting in North Lake. I took everything else, every paper I could suss from the nooks and crannies of the Wylie cottage, back to New York in their blue trunk. Sneaking out the material without my mother noticing was embarrassingly adolescent, but adolescently delicious as well; forbidden cigarettes and forbidden knowledge are always the best kind.

  The miniature Wylie archive I had purloined filled the shouty Portuguese basement. In the morning I would spread out the diaries and the letters and the photographs and the newspaper clippings that I arranged into a vast map to a subterranean geography, and in the evening I would fold up their secrets like a tablecloth, delicately fearful that a crumb of significance might tumble off. The presence of Wylies gave my subterranean life the thrill of a secret, the secret history of how money became everything. Stealing up to the street to eat, or to fulfill the conditions of some gig, I could anchor my drifting self to the blue trunk. I only wanted to be back with them, in my dark room. The Wylies had always been my unspoken fascination. The job of a writer is to monetize fascination. I was broke and alone but I had them.

  If I could uncover their story, I could sell their story, and if I could sell their story, I might have something like a future in New York. Every story is a little miracle. You make it out of nothing and you sell it for money.

  *

  The Mounties declared Ben’s death a hunting accident. His nakedness was easy to explain, at least to the professionals. In the final stages of hypothermia, the body often senses warmth as the blood ebbs into the core. Many hypothermic deaths end with naked corpses. Coyotes or a bear may have dragged off his clothes, or wolves, who would have buried the clothes. Even if Ben Wylie had been murdered, if somebody had wanted to kill him, that somebody was far away. The official cause was death by exposure. Everyone seemed to agree, without bothering to look too closely, that the wilderness had killed him.

  The mills of Champlain, Pennsylvania, now lie crumpled beside the brown sludge of the Monongahela River but for a hundred years they spat hot prosperity, rolling in iron and coke and manganese to be turned by the brawn of thick-tongued men on twelve-hour shifts six days a week into steel. Carnegie and Frick sold Champlain’s rolled steel for a penny a foot. In the middle of this grubby miracle, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, the grandfather of the dead man in the snow was a boy.

  Dale Wylie stood in the brickworks baseball diamond and watched his brother, Max, sprint around the corner and across the crushed red field. Dale had no time for rising excitement; his brother was there so quickly. Max panted his urgent message: “I found a dead dog.”

  A line drive cracked by, to the howled outrage of Dale’s teammates. Like Dale cared about the other boys when there was a dead dog waiting. His brother led him by the hand through the quiet streets of small but respectable houses, down to the intersection of the ravine and the train tracks. Under a mantle of pine branches lay a dead husky, its eyes already consumed to squandered holes by the tenderness of maggots.

  “You want to bring the boys down to see?” Dale asked.

  “Nah. They’ll just poke it. That’s why I brought you.”

  “We have to bury it.” No justification between the brothers was needed. Boyhood has its codes.

  “I know a place out of town. We could be home by supper.”

  By nightfall they had only reached the junction of the train tracks across the river, and the grandeur of the sunset meeting the water was no more vivid or apocalyptic than the punishment waiting for them at home. On the weedy banks beside the bridge, Max lay down the dead husky he had been carrying so he could rest, so they could contemplate the border they were about to cross. If they followed the river through the stubbly fields, they would eventually reach a place of no
human habitation. If they turned back, home.

  “Maxie, do you think he belonged to anybody?”

  Max sniffed. “No collar. No signs up asking for him.”

  “Maybe he belonged to a drifter who was passing through or something.”

  Max stared at the husky corpse for a moment, weighing.

  “If he belonged to anybody, would we be out here burying him?”

  They pressed on. Night pressed down. They found a stand of black pine forest, a zone of abandonment between two settlements which would have to do, smoothed out a patch naked from the needles, and dug, their cold fingers clawing at the earth, scraping the stony soil.

  They laid the dog’s body down in the hole, blanketed the corpse with earth, and smoothed the ground with leaves. No prayers, no condolences. Their hustle was their ceremony as they tore back home, lit only by the moon. They knew they had done the right thing. Nothing would shake their conviction, not the irritated policeman lounging in the kitchen, not the boys’ resigned, disgraced father, not their weeping mother. Neither did the salty cutting lashes from their dad’s belt. The beast needed to be buried in the wild. They had buried the beast in the wild.