She had already spoken with Leo?
“Leo would know,” I said.
“He told me you’re old friends.”
The phrase was quaint, but it would have to do until a more accurate one came along. “I’ve known Leo forever, or since I moved to the city anyway. I knew him before his accidental marriage.”
“He’s not married by choice?”
Mort Wilner taught me that you have to give confidences in order to receive them and therefore I dished about the shotgun wedding, the confusion of class, the difficulties of marrying when you’re still infatuated. I contributed to the economy of pretended intimacy and she matched my contribution.
“There’s no right journey, is there?” She was leaning over her legs, stroking their sheer surfaces, then sat up straight, with her hands on her lap.
“Tell me about your journey,” I said. Her hands had stopped wringing. Her shoulders had relaxed. I had her.
*
I knew I would have to wait for material about Ben. Poppy had fifteen minutes of prepared material, which she repeated on a half-varied loop. It was HELLO! magazine stuff mostly, with a whiff of Oprah, about the horror of addiction, about how she had loved modeling but how there was a price to all that superficiality. I shouldn’t dismiss her telling completely. She put the old story rather well. When your profession is having your photograph taken, you become a surface, she said. Her journey had been falling through surface after surface. That’s how she put it. I let her ramble, nodding and feigning concentration, waiting for her to exhaust the topic. Then I could move in on what I really wanted to know: Why her brother had been lying naked in the Alberta snow. What she had known. The beastliness of her family.
Marcus and a fleet of servants entered and performed various rituals almost as though we weren’t there. At promptly 10:30 a.m., a half glass of champagne and a carved half grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar appeared at Poppy’s side. At 10:45, Marcus pulled the blinds down to exactly three-quarters height, and I noticed he had taken off his shoes. All the staff had. The rule for midmorning was everybody barefoot, apparently.
After she had said the line about falling through surfaces for the third or possibly fourth time I began to edge, gingerly, toward the question I cared about. “And your family? How did they deal with your drug use?”
She sniffed and lit a cigarette, an aquamarine Sobranie just to add to the absurdity.
“My family were very loving, but they had no experience with secrets. And I kept everything from them. My family is close but I’ve always been different.”
“You’re adopted, aren’t you?”
“My adoption doesn’t matter as much as it does to some people.”
I paused some more and her eyes flickered through the creamy smoke, seeking reprieve from the awkwardness. “I don’t want to paint myself as a victim, as a poor little rich girl, but I will say that money creates problems in families and when that money grows to be billions, the problems that follow …” She drifted into a glazed reverie. “And it’s not as if my parents were the kind of people who went to therapy. When you combine an addiction with unlimited resources …” She shrugged.
“It’s harder than you think being a billionaire,” I declared.
She squirmed. “I am responsible for my journey. I alone am responsible for my journey. It’s just that when you belong to a public family, one of the deepest cravings you can have is the craving for privacy. Heroin is the ultimate privacy. You have no name to live up to. You have no name.”
“Did your brother find it hard to be so wealthy?”
“Yes, I think he did,” she said cautiously, then quietened. She was not so desperate for celebrity that there were not some doors she was willing to slam shut. I kept mum in hope, but then her eyes drifted to a distant horizon and her voice turned tour guide, as it had at the party in the Four Seasons. “I never met my grandmother or my great-grandmother. My own mother never met them either because they died before my parents met. The men were making the fortune and the women waited at home in Champlain.”
“The men were in Alberta …” I suggested.
“Yes, and the women were in Champlain. I hated Champlain. Too small. They make you work all of that out in rehab. What are you running from? I knew right away when they asked that question. Champlain. My mother always cherished the memory of George’s mother and grandmother. Kitty and Marie. They never went anywhere. Not me.”
Maybe I should have declared to her openly: Your family are animals. I’m just not that good an interviewer. I’m still a polite boy from Alberta and I have little truck with the impossible. “Do you think that need for privacy is part of why your brother died the way he did?” I asked instead.
The smoke drifted over her like a city.
“I sometimes think that if I understood my brother’s death, I could understand the whole history of my family.”
I could think of nothing to say.
“If I could understand why he was out there naked in the snow. Do you know why?” she asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
She shrugged and smiled softly and I shrugged back. Our one moment of genuine connection was a profound ignorance.
Poppy put out her cigarette abruptly, then distracted me again. “How well do you know Anna Savarin? Do you go to each other’s houses?” Poppy asked like we were old friends gossiping.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“I thought you knew Ben. You don’t know Ben’s wife?”
“Oh, Anna. I know Anna as Anna Wylie,” I covered. “I did meet Max, the boy. At Sigma’s birthday party.”
“WylieCorp now technically belongs to Max, and through Max to Anna Savarin. Savvy Anna Savarin.”
“I never managed to meet Anna,” I said.
“Anna hunted Ben. People believe it was a sweet story, that they met at the Orange Blossom Ball at Hamilton College, and they did. They did. She hunted him there. That was the first place she hunted him.” A tangent whisked her elsewhere. “Anyway, I think my journey is about leaving all that behind. And I think that what I have to share with the world is bigger than that. Every family has its secrets, its past.”
With that question, our interview turned away from the chance of Ben, and I had no choice but to watch it go, at least for the moment. She had danced me around the edges of the room in which her brother’s body lay and out the door again. I would have to think of another way in while she went through Part Two of her prepared material. I knew I was about to hear about The Cause. I had been expecting it. In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell said that every waiter in Paris had to dream of opening his own restaurant. Not because the waiters were ever going to open restaurants but because the fantasy of opening a restaurant was necessary to endure the state of being a French waiter. Rich people are the same with their causes. Poppy needed to believe in something larger than herself to survive her narcissism. She lit another Sobranie, while I waited for her to unleash her justification for her own deification, the reason she deserved to be larger than ordinary people, a figure of public consciousness.
*
Zinc. Zinc was her cause. Zinc would cure everything. She explained: Countries with higher levels of zinc consumption are more peaceful and prosperous than countries with lower levels of zinc. Yeast has zinc. Countries that eat flatbreads are more violent and poorer than countries that eat leavened bread. Children with low levels of zinc perform at lower levels in schools. She supported charities that provided zinc supplements to poor countries. She wanted to raise awareness. She wanted the world to be aware of zinc.
About ten minutes into this simple explanation for all the world’s problems—as I searched for ways back to her life, to her family, to the world of subjects people might conceivably care about, to the secrets I cared about—Marcus approached her the way a priest in Babylon must have approached the stone idol in the temple. She excused herself as if she were going to the next
room for a pen.
Only Marcus returned. A sudden panic fluttered to my throat: What about all my questions? What about Senna? And Lou Reed? And her brother’s body in the snow? Then admiration waked in the surge of regret. These rich people always manage to finagle the best of the situation.
“The media availability is closed,” Marcus intoned.
“Just like that,” I said.
Marcus returned my devastated smile with what amounted to fellow feeling. We were both creatures of her whim, lifted and dropped. “That’s how she works,” he whispered. “She goes.” He said it with an almost Buddhist compassion, the way another might say “youth goes” or “the world goes.”
*
I wandered into the park. All celebrity interviews end in disappointment, of course. You’re supposed to encounter a person; instead you strike a deal, both sides making various arrangements with competing vanities. I had asked her about Ben and she had told me about the women around him. I had asked her about Alberta and she had given me Champlain. In my manifold failure, I sat beside Shakespeare’s statue and tried to draw a connection—any connection—between the properties of zinc and a family of wolves.
No connection came. My interview with Poppy, my growing sense of the Wylies as a whole, had been, from the beginning, a movement backward, and not in the revelatory sense of heading upstream toward some mysterious source at whose origin all would be explained. They put me back in my childhood bed and covered me in heavier and thicker and darker blankets. Poppy was the living flesh of the men whose dusty papers I shoveled and sifted, and from her I had learned nothing. But that nothingness, I came to realize as I looked up at Shakespeare’s bird-shit-streaked forehead, contained the most vital lesson of all. The Wylies didn’t understand themselves. They knew no more about the meaning of their story than I did, probably less. They were not in possession of a secret that I could take from them. We shivered together in the same mystery—the wilderness that extended infinitely within them.
The contours of my obsession changed after the Poppy interview but its force remained. I had rung the tuning fork but couldn’t find the spot to hold its meaningful vibration against: To North Lake or Champlain? To Dale or George or Ben or Poppy? To New York or China? To the moon? Anyway, I still had a story to write, and my interview with Poppy would serve that function well enough: I had my two quotes and a description at least. I could say that she had “deflected my questions about her brother’s death.” I sussed out a few other grains of mild significance as well. I remembered Poppy had said that her parents were not “the kind for therapy.” A subsequent afternoon at the library coughed up the Winter 1958 issue of The Journal of Pastoral Psychology. George would have been twenty-four in 1955, living in Boston.
A Report of Lycanthropy as a Narcissistic Delusion:
The Case of G
By Roman Blom
Initiation of the Case
In 1955, during the course of ordinary practice, a quiet, respectable young man approached my office without referral. Having no familiarity with the psychoanalytic process, he initially had great difficulty expressing his reasons for seeking treatment. Following standard practice, I refrained from offering G any means of flight through social pleasantries, although his patience was immense, a fact which I interpreted as a sign of the strength and profundity of his psychopathology. Toward the end of our seventh session, he overcame his embarrassment and confessed to me the reason for his visits. He suffered the delusion of lycanthropy. At the time of the full moon, he tied himself in the basement of his house with a stout leash and brayed at the moon. These episodes typically lasted three days and three nights.
The delusion was not limited to himself or his own ego-creation. He believed that his father was a werewolf and his grandfather and his uncle had also been werewolves. His family had controlled their condition, over the course of generations, by means of physical restraints and occasional “holidays” in a family cottage in the woods of Canada, where their lupine nature was permitted wider scope. The reason G had sought treatment was in hope of a cure for his “condition.”
The patient proposed a course of hypnotic suggestion. For obvious reasons, I considered the treatment a null option. I mooted behavioral treatment, a common approach for severe psychosis, in which category lycanthropy typically falls. G’s lycanthropy was quite circumscribed, however, and the harm therefore more limited, opening more traditional avenues of the “talking cure.” The patient complained that his condition required isolation three days a month. He complained also that the transformation into the wolf was painful, often leading to blackouts. His secret wolfishness was the source of a deeper malaise and alienation, too; he worried that he could never be understood because of his condition. Despite the normalcy of lycanthropy in his own house, he was worried about how it might affect his capacity to have a relationship with a woman. He confessed that, at the time of our interview, he remained a virgin, and his primary reason for seeking counsel was that he doubted he could be intimate with a woman, either physically or emotionally, until he understood and conquered his “beast.” I suggested to him that maybe he should find a woman who enjoyed his beastliness. He doubted such a woman existed. I assured him they did. He admitted that he probably would not want a woman who wanted him as a wolf.
The Patient’s Milieu and Childhood
The patient developed within a mostly normal family environment and had revealed no tendencies toward psychotic manifestations, either in school or at home. He was born in a well-to-do family in the environs of Pittsburgh and had no criminal past. His father traveled on business frequently. The primary family unit included a grandmother and a great-aunt who aided the mother. No servants were ever hired even though the family could easily afford them. His explanation, which he clearly believed, was the need for secrecy about the wolf. The women of the household almost never vacated the family mansion, either, not even for shopping. This self-sequestration sprung from the same source, according to G: the family’s lycanthropy. When I asked if they had left their house before his father had made a fortune, he acknowledged that they had. “That’s what money is for,” he told me. “So you don’t have to deal with a lot of people.”
As a boy, G was educated at an all-boys’ school in the city during the week. He spent the weekend at home. This bifurcated status of home life and school life, in which the former was exclusively feminine while the latter was exclusively masculine, led me to a conjectured diagnosis of lycanthropy as a repressed expression of the fear of castration, as found in Freud’s famous Wolfman case:
It would seem therefore that he had identified himself with his castrated mother during the dream, and was now fighting against that fact. “If you want to be sexually satisfied by Father,” we may perhaps represent him as saying to himself, “you must allow yourself to be castrated like Mother; but I won’t have that.”
Following this line of inquiry, I concentrated in our biweekly sessions on his relationships with his mother and his grandmother. They were stern but loving women. G’s father was “a visitor in the home,” returning to be locked up during the nights of the full moon.
Around this stage of our therapeutic process, the patient described a repetitive dream which became very useful in our analysis. In his dream, which had begun in childhood, he was a wolf, exactly as in his monthly delusion, a red-tinged brown timber wolf. He runs across a field of snow, looking backward and forward, and as he runs he cannot tell whether he is chasing or being chased. When he realizes that he cannot tell whether he is chased or chasing, the patient wakes. This dream was the clearest initial sign that the patient’s condition had more than one cause. The dream implies a fear and a wish simultaneously, a wishful fear and a fearful wish, embodied in the doubled desire of the wolf.
I then began to investigate the milieu of the patient’s relationship to his father, who was for the most part a ubiquitous absence in G’s young life. His father was a successful self-made millionaire who suffered m
any years of hardship and “life on the road” before his years of triumph. This led me to the diagnosis of lycanthropic expression as a way of reasserting a bond by mechanism of fantasy. I enquired with the patient if his lycanthropic incidents were completely regular, to which he replied that they were, although, on reconsideration, he believed that his uncle and his father had experienced a period of prolonged wolfishness during a stay in the wilds of Canada. This period in family lore was vague, almost never discussed, as it represented a financial and personal failure for the brothers. It was also revealed during our discussions that the brothers, the patient’s father and uncle, shared a bed as children. The uncle was also a murderer. He had killed a man in a dispute over a dog.
My suggestion of possible incest and the repression of incest were treated as entirely risible, which I noted as a possible instance of repression. In a different session, the patient’s tongue had slipped in the classic sense when he incorrectly called his uncle by a similar-sounding name belonging to a famous homosexual actor. When I noted the parapraxis, the patient merely shrugged, claiming that he had not heard the rumor about that actor, which was nearly impossible as G’s business involved a familiarity with current events.
For the father, for his uncle, and for the patient, the onset of lycanthropic incidents occurred simultaneously with the onset of puberty and therefore must be related to the release of sexual life in the genital zone. Other signs pointed to the repression of illicit sexuality as a root case in the cathexis of G’s delusional lycanthropy. The patient, on following the practice of dream recovery, noted that his recurring dream of being a wolf had begun at his private school. This school is notorious in the Pittsburgh area for its various pedophilia scandals.
Hunger of the Wolf Page 11