Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  Dale stared through the grimy windows of train stations evaluating his slim chances while sucking back drab sodas and gray sandwiches, fending off despair with the stitchwork creed he inherited from his mother: Always find a way to get along. Atkinson was the opposite of Champlain. The money had mixed men up in their chances, their misery, and their furious gorgeous free women. Even the conservatives in the West are libertines. On the side of MacCormack’s business, he took orders for himself. Hats from Pittsburgh. Books. An old Arab paid him a high price for Egyptian cotton. Potpourri for the brothel. To the Chinese he sold incense. But mostly it was door-to-door. Knives. Gramophones. Subscriptions to magazines. As much as he could. He went into the radio business for himself. He bought them wholesale in Pittsburgh, rented out a sufferance space under his own name to store them by the station, and hustled them wherever he could.

  Luck is the by-product of effort. The effort was enduring other people, the maids who sneered and shook their heads from the sides of houses, the demented oldtimers, the busy men of business pushing by, the drunks taking cracks from the barstool, reeking of pickling spice and vomit, the broken women and their adamant hate. He needed luck. That’s the worst, needing luck. Dale’s biggest stroke of luck was that old MacCormack never figured out how rich the territory was. MacCormack always received him back without comment, neither praise nor blame. Dale had no idea why the old man kept him on. Inertia? Or were his sales excellent? How were the others doing? The answers wouldn’t have mattered anyhow. He just went out and sold.

  A slow train from the men of Atkinson trundled him back to the house at 17 Flora, to the women of Champlain. A long train ride to ask: Who am I? What do I amount to?

  *

  In the mornings, 17 Flora floated up like a ship on a tide of girlish laughter, anchored by stern Marie and silent Kitty, and, guided by gentle Marie and silent Kitty, 17 Flora floated down to sleep on billows of sighs in the Champlain evenings. The boarding girls, wearing their heavy ambitions lightly, miasmaed the house with a silly, soft, delightful fuzz. Dale was either leaving, with the quickening scent of desperation, or arriving with the smell of train furniture and too many cigarettes on him like a cloak. He would never be a great salesman because he couldn’t forget quickly enough. The face of each housewife who brushed him out the door like a dead mouse stuck in him. The dismissive eye of the shopkeeping Arab with his whoremaster’s odor of rosewater lingered slightly too long. The general mania of the men laughing in pool halls, stuffing thick-skinned sausages into their gapped faces, stuck just a little too much. At home, in Champlain, on Flora Avenue, he relished the comforting somnambulance of the rooms that hadn’t changed much since his childhood.

  One fine judgmental Sunday, at the hour he should have been returning from church, they were waiting for him in the parlor, the room dusted every day to be used once a year. His mother beside Aunt Millie, half her size, both in black.

  “You know why we are here,” Aunt Millie began. Dale perched himself on a chair designed for no one ever to sit on, and knew enough not to speak. “We want you to become respectable.”

  “I am respectable,” Dale answered.

  “You have a job,” Aunt Millie corrected him, upholding a bare finger. “That is something. That is not nothing. But it is not respectability.”

  Dale shuffled his feet. “What do I need to become respectable in your eyes?”

  “A wife.”

  They were offering Kitty. The whorehouses that filled the gulleys of Atkinson as the sprawl sloped into the darkness—how many times had he slunk to and from their doors? The eyes of the women crooking their finger on the porches. Come here. Come.

  “I don’t have the money to marry.”

  “Get married and you will have to find the money.” Aunt Millie stood up to leave. “That’s how men become respectable. Marie, I said what I had to say. Now I will go.”

  Dale watched his propertied aunt waddle down the street. The neighborhood children rolled their play out of her path, warping around her black mass. His mother had disappeared into the housework. Why did he slink from Kitty like he slunk from the whorehouses? It was a fair offer. Kitty would stay with his mother while Dale sold in Atkinson. He would have two lives, one in Champlain and one in Atkinson. Which would be the reprieve? His time in the dark quiet parlors of women with their still and total judgment, or the knockabout rampage of men’s business?

  Dale slouched into the old recliner in the parlor the way a frog plops into the primordial succulence of mud. Exhausted, his mind configured and reconfigured with a welter of pluses and minuses, properties available, deals he was making and their odds. He plunged through darkness to his bedroom off the kitchen, and tumbled into bed, asleep instantly.

  Sometime later, into his oblivion, Kitty wandered. She rose over him with her shipwreck eyes and the hot midsummer of her hair. Even the ecstasies were vague, smoothed over his body, then vanished. The next morning, the scraping of oatmeal out of the big pot woke him, and he let the impression settle at the bottom of himself. What had come into him?

  *

  Max would appear unpredictably—a vision of ragged liberty fresh from miracle or disaster—whether Dale was at home or at the MacCormack and Sons offices or on the path between. One evening he showed up after eight months’ absence to take his brother to a touring burlesque, the Chins of Chinatown from the Curtains Up Theater, where nipples were revealed, reportedly, momentarily, around the middle of the second act. Dale had work to do but Max didn’t care. A kid brother’s refusal doesn’t count.

  “Some of us have real jobs, Max, and we have to work our way through the day. We make real money,” Dale insisted.

  Max was flush from six months in the northwest country. He pulled out a wad of bills. “This isn’t real money?”

  “That’s wild money,” Dale replied.

  “Money’s money.”

  “The idea that you think money’s just money shows that you don’t know the first thing about money. Like saying women are just women.”

  “You make my point for me, brother.”

  “There’s won money, money you can’t lose, money for jam, money for bread …”

  “Enough.”

  “Borrowed money, earned money. Stolen money, money that’s due soon, insurance money …”

  “Why don’t we go out and find out how many different kinds of women and money there are.”

  Dale was as helpless as anybody with Max. The man’s body rolled with the strength of a boy who knows he’s nothing but a boy. Dale threw an arm around the shoulder of the rollicking world and strolled into the night. He could enjoy the faces for one night, couldn’t he? He could pretend to be one of them, laughing when they laughed, angering to their anger, galumphing along with the booze and the show they were all pretending to enjoy in the name of a kind of mischievous fellowship that was actually hiding in plain sight.

  *

  Following the next full moon, Dale woke sick in the cage as usual except that Kitty was staring back at him through the bars. She was silent. Her eyes were black. This was no dream.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  Life fell over Dale in delicate nets, nets by the thousands, secret nets, invisible nets. He let them fall. He had seen what escape meant. The mangled throats of colored girls. Blood pooling in the corners of their lovely ears like the blood on the dinner plate, her skin the shade of marzipan, the judgment of whatever justice the world could dream. No, no, much better to let the million nets descend like veils and hide from mirrors. Cage yourself so that you need not be caged. One final lesson: Everything that happens in life means you have to make more money.

  He crept to the basement for a snort of the bad rum he kept in a wedge of the colliery, and found his brother, oddly anxious, already drinking the stuff out of a teacup with no handle. He ought to have been shocked but he wasn’t. Naturally he wouldn’t be granted even the moderate pleasure of rotten solitude to nurse his grievances. The bitterness wou
ld not allow him even to slink away.

  “Look at us,” Max said, grinning wide. “We’re just like Dad. Anything but that, am I right?”

  Dale took the dishandled cup from his brother like a morose chalice. “I wish we were like Dad.”

  “You want to be a barber?”

  Dale drank the sick-at-heart rum. “He was a better man than you or me. He helped with a mortgage. He left a house half paid for. What are we going to leave? You’re going to leave your raggedy-ass bones on some slab of forgotten prairie.”

  “Speak for yourself.” Max took back the teacup.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?”

  “What have I got to say for myself?”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  Before Max could speak, overhead, the laughter of Kitty and Marie like a limping, outstretching siren healed back to silence. Max grinned stupidly, hurled back his head, and howled.

  TWO

  *

  The party smelled of cocaine farts. Leo had to explain it to me: When the middle-aged rich kids gather to huff cocaine at a time in their lives when they are no longer restrained by thousand-dollar-a-night limits, their nascent paunches relax, their relaxed anuses open, their opened inhibitions dissipate, and their dissipated shame dissolves. The lamb with peapods and seaweed salad, the ironic caviar and blinis, the pork four ways, dandelion salad, and terrine de lapin with heritage parsnips, the deconstructed carrot cake with superchilled powdered walnuts and root vegetable purée, all drowned in white burgundies and sassicaia and delicate little sherries, rumble through their aging bellies and out into delicate poofs of cocaine farts. The smell of worldliness. The perfume of the time I’ve been given to live in.

  Leo wore a $3,500 suit, a washed-out blue affair with an Orange Julius–colored shirt, Frenched with archaic pearl cufflinks. I wore the gray I was married in. We were stalking different animals. Leo had heard that Colin Farrell was showing up. I was there for Poppy Wylie. Leo knew her in that distantly familial way rich people know each other and had promised to introduce us so I could try for an interview. I needed an interview, a high place in the realm of reality from which to overlook the family’s monumental delusion. Poppy had the narrative advantage of being alive. To the breed of oldtimer who still read print, her name would register. She had been adopted from China in the sixties, when foreign adoption was novel, ahead of the trends even in her origins. Her elegant shape mistily haunted the long-distance photographs of celebrity yachts in fashion spreads in the 1990s, when her beauty had been an overwhelming but removed force, like an aircraft carrier known to be patrolling the Persian Gulf. Her beauty now was as forlorn and ravaged as an aircraft carrier being carved up in a Third World naval yard.

  My old boss Mort Wilner, mostly out of pity, had commissioned a four-thousand-word Sunday spread about her. I also put a call in to Jorn Pelledeau and pitched him a story about the “original poor little rich girl.”

  He texted back: Don’t usually do history but WAS superhot.

  I texted: She invented exultation through degradation.

  Jorn texted a one-word contract: Xactly.

  So I had options. My plan was to write the piece and try to sell it to Vanity Fair on spec, having Mort in one back pocket and Jorn in the other.

  The rumors I had collected about Poppy resisted coagulating into any coherent story. She had dated a string of famous men in famous situations. Lou Reed was her lover just after Berlin. He wrote “Sick of You” for her, apparently. The Brazilian racecar driver Senna tried to call her the morning he died. She had an affair with the head of the IMF, too—“daddy issues.” Poppy Wylie had been a minor celebrity, one of the world’s vaguer apparitions. A celebrity is a party that is happening in the bigger house across the lake, the one you can’t quite see from where you’re living, and in the evening music and laughter thrill over the water, but the next morning there is silence, a still and crumpled silence that is somehow more intoxicating than the music or the laughter.

  *

  The party we were at was rich people waiting around for famous people. To me, the conversations of the peripatetic rich always have an unreal flavor, like the taste of paper clips. Their cosmopolitanism is shopping, and wherever they go, they encounter only their same smooth selves, whether it’s in Scandinavian furniture or the hilarious foam of avant-garde restaurants or the newfound extremities of prostitutes in Saint Petersburg or Santiago, in the Maldives, or Milan. The true cosmopolitans, the world-embracers, are the servants who tidy up the wake of their parties and their wombs, the Senegalese women, the Polish men, the Filipinos, fleeing the antique brutalities en masse, microwaving the same meals in Saudi Arabian villas or in northern Ontario cottages for the vacuous riders of fortune who skim the world like petrels, and whose children are archipelagoes of physical reality in the ocean of their unconcern.

  At least they were a break from myself and from the basement, that miserable repository where I pored over the unbelievable evidence, and filled the rest of the time garnering scraps of work to pay the rent, blowing delicately but furiously on the embers of the financial hope a big story might bring. The contrast maintained my wonder at New York at least. Thirty minutes by train from my squalid little room, the bar served free bourbon over roughly shaved ice and a jumbled double helix of orange peel. Leo brought us a pair without asking what I wanted, fearful that I might request beer in a bottle or a cosmopolitan or, much worse, what I actually wanted, a rum and coke. “You going to kill the sister, too?” he asked.

  “Whose sister?” I mistakenly believed that he was speaking about the one black woman in the room, the bronze-tinged Nigerian wife of an IMF banker.

  “Poppy Wylie. Ben died how long after he met you at Sigma’s party? If this one dies, we’ll have to involve the police.”

  “The police didn’t seem to care much about Ben,” I said.

  An unexpected gust of bitterness floated out of Leo’s chest. “Those are Canadian police. Besides, they’re right not to care.”

  Leo shouldn’t have come with me; my presence ramped up his latent contempt and the cynicism could be exhausting. As if he were not so perfectly fluid in the world of free stuff and debt, utterly of his time. Waiting for rich and famous people to show up, we lapsed into a dubious silence, unclear whether its source was that we had known each other forever or that we barely knew each other at all.

  *

  Leonidas Alexander Kaffavy Stathopolous. I am a fossil for him, a relic from the time when he still dwelled among the people with mortgages, the great middle tribe who look at restaurant bills before they pay them, the hordes from which he is now as removed as I am from the 700 million subsistence-level farmers in Central Asia.

  Leo shows me the folly of my virtues. Maybe that is why I love him. All my struggles, all my preparations, my elaborately planned and fulsome battles to escape North Lake, to blast beyond the gravity horizon of the dying planet, the hometown—Leo makes me realize that in all the ways that matter I remain the hick Canadian boy I have tried to erase. I believe in hard work and responsibility, even in duty, and he just rides the world on an easy entitlement that he has no right to expect. His first job after graduation was achieved through an epic schmooze. The best ad firm in the city had turned him down for an internship, so he booked a meeting with the vice president of something and just talked until the company created another job for him. His current gig, PR for British films, was the perfect sinecure. Since nobody expected British films to receive any publicity, he couldn’t possibly fail. He needed to appear as though he were close to the possibility of publicity. He was literally paid to be seen at the right parties.

  Leo finding and then marrying Kate was like a conquistador stumbling into the country of perpetual spring, because she was the kind of rich who could never become unrich. Descended from American revolutionary fathers, the owners of fundamental patents, the people who make money every time papers are stapled or snow is shoveled or buttons broken, she was a poor
little rich girl of the classic type, with a distant, alcoholic, gigolo-prone mother and a father who died, aged seventy-nine, when she was three, leaving her a variety of trusts whose geometries neither she, nor the advisors, nor Leo, could pilot or wreck. She told good stories: drinking rosé in the Swiss Alps with African chiefs, drifting through Japan with rock bands, little embarrassments with lesser branches of the Dutch royal family in Macau. Through these screens and trapdoors, shallow glories and glittering horrors, she had tumbled and somersaulted, an unguided and blindfolded saltimbanco, unfurling at the end with a warm educated laugh. Money only counts for so much, even now. My mother would like Kate. She is kind and generous and real.

  And Leo’s luck was ridiculous enough that he knocked up a woman like Kate on their fifth date. Both of them had just turned thirty, and neither wanted to try the odds on having kids later. She even seemed to love him. She had taken on his ludicrous Greek name anyway. Poor Sigma had taken on his ludicrous Greek nose as well, no doubt to be scalpeled to propriety later.

  *

  I wish there were better fairy tales about envy. In fairy tales, envy is always confused with anger, with hate—the ugly sisters shredding Cinderella’s dress, the Wicked Queen commanding the huntsman to carve out Snow White’s heart, the concoction of poison apples. Fairy tales are usually so accurate, too, the wisdom deepened by the love of a million mothers over a thousand years. The search for love is like licking frogs; a father’s abandonment has the taste of bread crumbs in the darkness of a forest; the world’s towers must be climbed by pulling yourself up the hair of princesses. But the black hearts stewing in their blackness are so crude and unrealistic.

  I could have used the insight of a fairy tale that night. Envy was everywhere. The glad rags had never seemed gladder, never sadder.