Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  Pi-Lin, scrupulously suppressing his obvious pleasure at having orchestrated the awkwardness, offered introductions.

  “Miss Thibodeau, welcome. This gentleman has traveled a great distance to see you perform. We are truly honored to be able to have two such luminaries from the West together with us.”

  “The honor is ours,” Lavinia said.

  “A pleasure,” George said, stupidly, to Lavinia.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  He leaned in, his words flustering around her almost tangible odor of lavender. “I want you to know that I had no part in organizing this. It’s as much a surprise to me that you’re here as it is to me.”

  “It’s no surprise to me,” she said. “You seem to show up wherever I go.”

  That was all the conversation they were allowed, being displayed like fragile white trophies at opposite ends of the banquet table. The distance between them, George thought, was roughly the same as the distance between his seat in the front row and Lavinia onstage, a narrow abyss. The journalists swooped up dozens and dozens of delicacies, then a Communist Party delegate gave a thirty-minute speech about how the printing press had been invented in China. Before they left, Pi-Lin presented the guests with fountain pens decorated with Chairman Mao’s face set against a rising sun. Then they rose, and Lavinia left, turning to the back of the room without even a gesture his way. He had missed some kind of chance. The last rustle of her red dress out the doorway was like watching a species go extinct.

  George and Pi-Lin drove back through the dimly lit streets crowded with evening loungers squatting against the walls or around lamplit mahjong conversations.

  “How powerful are you?” George asked his quiet host.

  Pi-Lin pondered the question like a fable. “It is impossible for anyone in China to answer that question precisely.”

  “I want to know who I owe. Was meeting Miss Thibodeau your idea or the party’s?”

  Pi-Lin nodded, paused before he spoke. “There are certain elements within China, even within the party, that imagine that someday there will be a connection.”

  “A connection between what?”

  “That is exactly the question. Between systems? Between continents?”

  Out the window, a seven-year-old girl was selling red peonies from a steel bucket. “Stop the car,” George ordered. Pi-Lin barked at the driver, and before he could be stopped, George leaped out, bought the whole bucket with a roll of bills, and brought them back to the car. “I must support any capitalist in China on principle,” George explained.

  At the hotel, George handed Pi-Lin a business card. A name on a piece of luxury paper. A vaguely defeated smile passed over Pi-Lin’s gaze as he held the card, then a restored determination visibly thickened in him. “If there’s anything I can do for you,” George said. His host bowed.

  *

  After Peking, the Thibodeau entourage never looked George’s way again, not in Singapore, not in Honolulu, not in Sydney. He followed the music all the way to Quebec City, the final stop on the world tour. Lavinia played the “Duet for Piano and Lovebirds” for the last time, and all the old fans, who remembered her as a young girl wrapped in the azurine blue of her father’s politics and the farmers’ sky and the Church’s heaven, booed her as she began to play. They had come for order. She gave them the beginning of their revolution. They spat, stomped out the door hurling insults and their Playbills, hurling seat cushions, ripping the fine netting, spuming rampant sugar water and bird shit. The tune of accidental beauty dissolved into riot. The birds flew away, perching in the rafters and then escaping through the high windows into the winter air, into the freedom that would surely kill them.

  George sat in the wreckage, smiling mildly. There was nobody else but him. After the sixty-three epiphanies, after so many concert halls in their antique frosty glamour, the shuddering taxicabs, George’s mission had its satisfaction. Through the torn netting, her eyes mascara-soaked, Lavinia Thibodeau floated to the seat beside him, and into his ear whispered the words: “I suppose we should eat something.”

  *

  WylieCorp had barely noticed the absence of George. Lee was running North America just fine and Dale was in the middle of buying the two largest media companies in England, becoming, in the process, one of the most powerful men in the country almost accidentally.

  His first big purchase was NWM. North West Media was a bankrupt mess. The conglomerate of international investors that controlled the license for television in England’s northwest, particularly for Manchester, were willing to sell NWM for the price of its debt, 3.56 million pounds. Dale Wylie sent letters personally to all the executives of WylieCorp, which included the editors of the newspapers, offering to let them in on the stock he was raising for the purchase. Nobody could understand what Dale understood: NWM couldn’t win at virtue. They had been trying to compete with the BBC, producing worthy news programming along with expensive dramas. They were fighting for the wrong territory. While the company drifted in the limbo between fire sale and bankruptcy, Dale cannily rounded up the syndication rights to dozens of American shows. The costs for these shows—shows like Gunsmoke, McHale’s Navy, Combat!, The Jetsons, The Lucy Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Virginian—were almost nothing. NWM held the only license for the region. Dale paid a few hundred thousand pounds, on extended contracts, for the lot. Local shows, required for a broadcast license, were produced on the cheap—documentary programs that spun single news stories into hour-long discussion panels and rock-and-roll variety acts. Essentially for no outlay in risk, Dale Wylie controlled a fifth of English television.

  On the day of purchase, Dale imported a cost-cutting army from the American branch of the company. He himself immediately fired one-third of the staff. Within three months, the profits had already paid off the syndication rights, and Dale announced himself by purchasing a house in Kensington Palace Gardens. The rising property values meant that he could mortgage the property immediately after the purchase, several times, for a much higher price than he paid for it. The NWM deal made him an unignorable sum of money, and so easily that not even Lord Fallis’s influence could exclude him any longer.

  A letter from this period of conquest survived at North Lake:

  13 November 1963

  The Countess of Strathmore

  Haverford House

  Dear Mr. Wylie,

  As you may well guess, the purchase in Kensington Palace Gardens, much more even than the annual report on North West Media, for which success let me congratulate you, has provoked an intense groundswell of gossip. I’m afraid that it will not all be to your liking. However, since you’ve requested all pertinent information, I will record it here.

  I received a letter from my cousin, Georgette de Villiers, in which she guardedly enquired as to your situation, both financial and matrimonial. I responded with caution. To be specific, she asked about “the recent American émigré, who is I believe some kind of an oil baron.” She attached a well-circulated letter from Baron Whitefield, which contains a description, which he claims he received from the Waburtons of Pennsylvania: “He is, whatever he may claim about Scottish origins, a filthy Jew and everybody knows it.” Baron Whitefield goes on to describe, in his inimitably crass style, that “all the bitches are in heat for his money.” I feel confident in assuming, from this comments, that the prospects of your marrying are much discussed in London society.

  The purchase of such a magnificent domicile is deeply resented. The previous owner is claiming openly that the price was too high not to sell, but that he regrets the sale already. He reportedly told Lady Asquith who told Mr. Fey that “he pities the old place,” presumably for whatever improvements you are planning to make.

  So these two subjects are the dominant motifs, your plans to marry and your plans to renovate. You may, of course, provide me with any information about your intentions which you wish me to disseminate. If I might add my own gloss of the above remarks, they are nothing to trouble you,
Mr. Wylie. They are the typical assessments that any new entrant into society must face.

  I will send you any new information as it arrives.

  Yours truly,

  C. S.

  The house in Kensington Palace Gardens was chaperoned by embassies, a squat and unloved princess of property maintained by a caretaker as lonely and devoted as a lighthouse keeper. Dale was never there. He was never in Abermarley either. He lived with the money as the money rolled drunkenly into the offices of NWM, which were grubby even by the standards of Wylie buildings, scratched out of repurposed factories on the outskirts of Manchester. There, in the pulsing twilight of that harbinger city, Dale made the deal that established him as one of the most powerful men in the world.

  Lord Fallis sold him The Record of London. Dale had never fantasized such a possibility. He had hoped to buy the string of rural papers and possibly the handful of radio stations that the Fallis holdings controlled in the southeastern counties. But never the Record. Lord Fallis was a friend of Prince Philip, and he ran the Record much the way the British aristocratic families had been running their declining estates. Every morning, at around ten, a chauffeur brought him to the Fleet Street offices, where the elevator was held (while his employees took the stairs) so he could whisk himself directly to the top floor. He kept his four moronic sons on the board. They all arrived by chauffeur, too. Lord Fallis’s workday consisted of reading the other newspapers, lickspittle conversations with the sitting prime minister, and the occasional disemboweling of an editor. Long lunches, good sherry, and a hearty measure of influence—why would anyone cede such a life to another? In an interview a decade earlier, Lord Fallis himself had bristled at the notion of abandoning his duties: “Offering to sell The Record of London would be like offering one’s wife to a houseguest,” he had said.

  The influence of the paper made such minor considerations as its profitability seem ludicrous. The Record selected who was going to be the leader of the Conservative Party in England. The Record on Sunday, its sister publication, doled out definitive theater and restaurant reviews—the terror of the city. What was the profitability of the Church of England? Or of the royal family? Or of the cliffs of Dover? The paper had been losing money steadily for decades, but it was impossible to change its financial structure, given its social position and the strong union that controlled every aspect of the printing shop and the newsroom. Dale speculated that Lord Fallis was just tired of losing money. His friends thought that money was not so much the problem as his waning interest in the cause of Conservative politics and his waxing interest in a twenty-four-year-old Argentine masseuse. Editors at the Record believed a distaste for his sons was the secret motive. He knew his four boys were all disasters-in-waiting, this line of argument went, so he ensured that they would destroy only the family fortune and not his beloved Record—a flattering attribution of motive. Whatever Lord Fallis’s reasons for selling, Dale was the only obvious buyer. With the NWM profits cresting over several hundred thousand pounds a week, and looking to rise, he was the only man with the resources to broker a deal.

  Pausing in Monaco just long enough to lose his life’s savings at baccarat, Jack Taggart proceeded, as ordered, to London. Dale showed him the books: The money flowing in from NWM serviced debt on an undeferrable schedule. The North American property had soaked up the oil funds. Lee had imposed strict internal controls to prevent leveraging the information management divisions. They had bought too much too recently and had no obvious institution from whom to borrow.

  “Fallis doesn’t know we’re gambled out,” Jack said.

  “He thinks we’re buying things with our own money. That’s my guess.”

  Jack snorted. “Couldn’t get laid in a bucket of dicks,” he said, a nostalgic turn of rudeness. “How much do we need?”

  “Eighteen million pounds and change.”

  For a week, Jack and Dale retreated to Abermarley, to the old stone cottage on the edge of town, where they stalked the antique forests of Lord Fallis’s grounds and concocted what would turn out to be their contribution to the history of money: the interior bid. The idea was to combine stock with debt obligations. Instead of cash, the parties would be sold second-class nonvoting stock that could be purchased back by the first-class stockholder if the terms of debt repayment were completed. The sale of dreams: Jack and Dale found a way to buy a company with the idea of its own future profits.

  The rest was patience and secrecy. Any hint of the coming bid, any suspicion of its mechanism, and stock market speculators would instantly rip the throat out of the deal, feast on the exposed entrails. The bid had to be negotiated with the Record’s board of directors, and their offices were all on Fleet Street. Fortunately, nobody knew Jack Taggart, the emissary. Dale, like an Egyptian deity embraced by the impenetrable darkness of a granite naos, waited in his Abermarley cottage. Six weeks he waited, drugged by television, waiting for day. Then the light broke. Jack called. The Wylies owned The Record of London.

  London took a sudden and appalled intake of breath. Instantly, Dale Wylie was the foremost newspaper proprietor in the country. A cheapskate American upstart had bought off Lord Fallis himself. The British press understood Dale Wylie so little that on the day of the transfer of ownership photographers bunched at the front doors expecting a triumphal procession. The day before, Lord Fallis hadn’t shirked providing the tabloids with a bit of drama when he had personally supervised the removal of his desk, a nineteenth-century oak battleship of furniture. As he was overseeing the grand decline into a moving van, he declared: “The oak heart has been in my family for two hundred years. No one will ever convince me that I’ve sold it.” The reporters didn’t notice Dale arriving because the bus stop outside the offices of the Record dispensed passengers on the other side of Fleet Street. Only one photographer, a refugee from the first round of firing at The Abermarley Gazette, recognized the man stooping to pick up a happy jagged silver moon in the street, a crooked sixpence—the image that defined the Wylies ever after.

  Through the back door, held open for him, into the private elevator, held open for him, into his office doors, held open for him, Dale found Jack Taggart sitting on the floor, because there was no desk, examining the books.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Jack said as Dale entered. “All four kids have cars and drivers.”

  “I believe it.” He turned to his secretary. “Fire all the drivers on staff. Fire everyone who held a door open for me. Fire the other secretary.”

  Dale and Jack had passed so much time guessing at the rot in the Record’s systems, but they had guessed wrong. “Look at this. They have a bureau in the Ukraine. Can you imagine? You have three reporters living off your fat in Kiev. It’s a hell of a world. You have work to do here, buddy,” Jack said.

  “I think you mean that you have work to do.”

  “I don’t think so, Dale. It’s going to be tricky. You won’t be able to run it like The Atkinson Register.”

  “Nonsense. Everything I’ve ever bought runs like the Register.”

  “Not by me, sunshine.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I’ll catch you at your funeral,” Jack said quickly.

  Dale called back his secretary. “Bring me a desk the newsroom has thrown out.”

  *

  In New York, George showed Lavinia his true nature in a cage in the Presidential Suite of the Plaza. Three days later, he woke up in Lavinia’s arms. She had crawled into the cage with him, and he could half remember, in potent unconsciousness, a woman smoothing his flanks.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She eventually answered, “It’s like a fairy tale.” The smooth post-bestial satisfaction, aglow with its new relaxation and the city light and a woman he loved who knew his nature, may have been the happiest morning of George’s life.

  New York in 1964 was the city at the end of metaphysics. Nobody questioned the eccentric beautiful foreign woman who led a quite wolf
like dog on a stout chain out of the hotel into the park in the evenings. She took him into the bank when she needed money, and into Macy’s when she needed shoes, and into a chophouse, where the animal gnawed rare steak and bloody bones at her feet. For the rest of the time, George and Lavinia walked together as people, as lovers, drifting and roaming, allowing surprises to surprise them, boredoms to bore them, fears to frighten them. “I can’t tell,” she said one morning, when they were snaking through Sheep Meadow, among the lounging picnickers in the bright day of all possibility.

  “What can’t you tell?”

  “I can’t tell whether I prefer to walk with you as a man or a wolf. Right now, I think I’d rather you were a wolf. I could let you off the leash to run through all these picnickers.”

  “Don’t ever let me off the leash.”

  Love turned the beast into a game. They could pretend, for a while, that even monsters are put on this earth to be happy.

  *

  George and Lavinia stayed in New York until Lavinia became pregnant, then moved to Pennsylvania. Lavinia adored the house in Champlain even though the roof was dripping and the rooms were barren and dust-clotted and the wallpaper had begun to peel from the corners.

  George resumed his tour of the family companies that fall. The executives found his blandness terrifying, provoking furies of cost-cutting. Once he accidentally showed up to tour a cardboard box plant he no longer owned. Lee had sold it and George hadn’t noticed. The mistake added to his legend. The Wylies owned more than they themselves could remember.

  And every month the wolf brought George home. The rise of the beast was almost a pleasure. Lavinia would bring down flesh and water. She would wait until he turned, and three days later he would wake up naked in her arms. Six months after they moved back to Champlain, however, George woke up alone. The house was silent and a terror flushed over his cold flesh. He pulled on clothes and stumbled up the stairs to find her waiting on their bed, holding an infant. “He came early,” she said. She was apologetic even though he was the one who couldn’t be there for the birth.