Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  The story “Painted Skin” comes from a collection called Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by Songling Pu. It’s a story of secret monsters. In it, a man named Wang meets a beautiful young runaway on the street and brings her home. By accident one evening, he returns home, to his library, and sees a monster spreading out human skin on the bed, painting it. The monster throws on the skin like a cloak and becomes the girl. Shocked, Wang runs to tell his wife and a Taoist priest. The priest tells him to hang a flybrush on the library door so that the monster won’t be able to escape. The monster bursts past the door and rips out Wang’s heart anyway. The priest pursues and manages to kill the monster with a wooden sword, but he cannot raise the dead man. Only a filthy and destitute maniac raving by the side of the road has that power, the priest says. So Wang’s wife begs the madman, who beats and curses her. Finally, when she refuses to leave without the cure for death, he spits and tells her to swallow his spit if she wants her husband back. She finally chokes it down and later that night, as she’s preparing her husband’s body, a lump rises in her throat. She throws up a heart, which falls into her husband’s chest cavity. Her husband revives, with no more harm done to him than a little scar on his chest.

  I’m unable to shake the thought that Pi-Lin meant something by quoting this story. Had Pi-Lin seen? Had he somehow known about our monstrosity? If he knew, why didn’t he say? Or was it all coincidence, misunderstanding, overthink? This is hard to explain, Ben, but part of having a deep, unbelievable secret is the sense that everybody knows but isn’t talking about your deep, unbelievable secret. That’s one of the hardest fantasies to lose, the selfish idea that everybody is thinking about you.

  I set up a paper mill in Shenzhen, shipping timber from Oregon and British Columbia to be processed into glossy paper and shipped back, and it did turn out to be significantly profitable, I must say, but I was doing it as an excuse to have contact with the Party, and that was a failure. The economic future of China was obvious by then. The port at Shenzhen was like seeing a wonder of the world come into existence, larger than dreams. They won’t be giving away their daughters anymore, I thought the first time I saw it. I told the series of apologetic officials that I wanted to deal with Pi-Lin. They claimed that no one of that name had ever existed. I insisted he did. They blamed the destruction of records during the Cultural Revolution. After much pressing, they admitted that there may have been an official by that name who may have been reeducated. The problem was how thoroughly he had been reeducated. They probably really didn’t know. At the end, I again found only a blank.

  That’s all I have. I’ve written all my disappointments down in the hopes that you won’t have to repeat them. I believe that every person is a creature of inheritance. Life happens between what we’ve been given and what we leave behind. It’s true for everybody but it’s doubly true for us. I think I’ve done my duty. I think my old dad would think I’ve carried the bucket without spilling too much. But I hoped that I could give you an answer about who you are, who we are, and maybe even why we are. I can’t.

  At least I can offer you this. Don’t fear our nature. That’s what it’s so necessary for you to know. What it takes some time to understand is that being a wolf is better than being a man. Wolves don’t kill things for no reason. Wolves are loyal or they go alone. Wolves don’t hide from themselves. I’m not sure that helps. I’m coming up short on wisdom. Maybe this: When you’re a man, be a man. When you’re a beast, be a beast. Find a woman who can live with both.

  Your loving father

  As Ben read, his heart fluttered up to his tonsils. A joke? No, he didn’t know his father well enough. And besides, it was too detailed, the weird old poems and the medical records. As he read, Ben found himself remembering the time his sister had run away. Before they had sent her to boarding school in Switzerland. The servants had been zigzagging like pinballs through the house, weeping for their jobs, and for the lost child. The police came to the door, knowing nothing, taking statements, asking questions. Nobody asked Ben, but Ben knew that his sister loved to play along the abandoned train tracks. So that is where he went. The fierce beams of his flashlight had arrowed intermittently through the forest, through the swallowing blackness. Just as he expected, she was sitting under pine branches by the abandoned tracks, and had brought with her a small group of her stuffed animals. She whispered to him when he arrived. She said she wanted to see if the stuffed animals spoke to each other at night. He had lain down beside her. Stuffed tigers and dogs and bears and parrots and wolves. When he had brought his sister back in the morning, the blubbering, grateful servants all looked like they wanted to smack him in the mouth.

  The last page fell accidentally from Ben’s tingling fingers. The surprise was not nearly so rough as it should have been. He had always suspected. Not a wolf. Not a wolf exactly. But he had always known. There are worse secrets.

  His parents were waiting in the garden for his reaction. The bone moon, near-full, a faint watermark in the vast longing it overlooked, posed like a beacon over them.

  “Are you done looking?” Ben asked.

  “We’ll be here, my dear,” his mother said.

  “We’ll have every weekend,” George added quickly, quickly understanding.

  Ben shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to know what’s in our basement.”

  *

  Ben’s material introduction to lycanthropy followed two nights later. The basement, with its labyrinth of cages and restraint devices, was more horrible than the cartoonish reality of his father’s transformation. His mother calmed the beast, the prelude to civilization.

  The next month, George and Ben shared the cage. At first, wolf-George was leashed to the wall out of reach of his son, but within a few hours Ben understood that his father knew him for his own even as wolf. They brooded together in the night, the wolf’s head on Ben’s lap, joint musk and warmth. George’s howl reverberated shockingly in the echo chambers of the concrete cellar. Ben came to love the sound.

  Month after month, Ben waited in the cage. Each moon began with the exciting possibility—today I may be transformed—then, after his father’s appalling agonies, there was only the dreariness, the dirt floor, the leashes, three whole days with nothing to do. Terror and love sloped into boredom. In his disappointment, Ben began sketching in notebooks he carried down to the cage with him. He began sketching the wolf, its suppleness, its power, and its strangeness. He drew the wolf’s head on his lap. The bars, the leashes, the restraints. He took to studying the momentary agony of his father’s transformation, attempting to put that fury onto paper, to convert the memory of the sudden fluidity into an image. Drawing was a distraction from the question that swelled with each passing month. Why wasn’t he turning into a wolf? With the lowering of the moon, his father’s eyes would look up from his rehumanized face with a mangled hope: This time? No. Then they would dress and leap up to the kitchen, where Lavinia would soothe their disappointment with bacon and oatmeal.

  *

  His mother liberated Ben after two years. In the middle of the full moon, the George-wolf sleeping, she led her confused son out of the basement cage.

  “I think we should take this as a blessing,” she said, as she held her son in the moonlight, sobbing in his absence of beastliness.

  “Is Dad angry about it?” Ben asked.

  “He’s more confused than upset. He traveled everywhere to learn about a condition he thought you would suffer from, and then you escaped. You cured yourself.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Nobody knows what they’re doing,” she answered softly. His mother guided him inside, around and up the marble staircase, to the parental bedroom, where a large red-and-white abstract painting filled a wall. The canvas was clawed on, scarred with impression. “T.T. painted this for me,” she said. “He wrote the duet for lovebirds for me and then he painted this for me. When I left my family to tour the first time, when I left Quebec and never wanted to return but st
ill carried that smell of Quebec in my hair.” Her loitering gaze hinted at the mélange of what that fragrance must have been: the smoke from maple fires and whore perfume and the slime of salmon skin and mossy stones and sweaty sheets and old piano music and Cathedral incense …

  “Was T.T. a wolf?”

  “No, but he wanted to be. I realized this much later. He wanted to be what your father was. He wanted to be magic.” Her eyes were saucers of black water. “I always wondered if I should have explained to him all that I saw, if I should have said, ‘The magic is a curse.’ He thought that George was a stupid Anglo businessman. Imagine.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She was now enmeshed in the million dewy spiderwebs of her own memories and looked up with a slow and luscious blink. “I don’t think either of them would understand. The magic is the curse and the curse is the magic. Can I make you understand that, Ben? Do you understand?”

  Ben failed to understand anything. “Yes, Mother, I understand.”

  She unlocked a cabinet and handed over a raft of Ben’s smeared drawings, ragged from the cage. Between their hands, a mille-feuille of paint and shit instead of the inexpressible, the inconsolable.

  “Your father has not seen a full moon since he turned fourteen,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

  The moon nestled like a stone in the tall grasses by the ravine where Larchmount Crescent sloped down to the wilderness. Ben wandered down, as lonely as any merely human soul, to crouch like a stone, like the moon, in the tall grasses. He began to weep. He wept the way only teenage boys weep, from the floor. Eventually he heard rustling from the house. He sucked himself up, for his mother, for his father? It was only Poppy. His kid sister back from school for Christmas. She said nothing. She stood beside him, a little above him, and then began to comb his hair with her fingers. Into the sudden pause of her tenderness, Ben Wylie unleashed the howl he so wished could be real.

  *

  That was the year old Jack Taggart died. The second stroke took him at a dog track in Sarasota, and the tragedy of his final moments was that he never saw Seeya Later romp home, paying handsomely at a hundred to eight.

  The whole flight to Sarasota, George and Lee had nothing to say, frozen by the death of a man neither had seen for almost a decade. The funeral had been arranged on the pink and floury sand of the Siesta Key beach, where Jack had lived his later years in a little mango-colored bungalow with a secretary named Tammy. Siesta Key was one of the peculiar paradises America has scattered over itself like glittering ashes. A grotesque highway spewed diesel fumes beside an eternal pillow of beach on which sea turtles dug egg holes by night, surrounded by piratical bars and old folks’ homes and crab restaurants and little stores selling garish sunglasses and key chains and local handmade pottery. Jack had died surrounded by life’s cheaper pleasures.

  “Do we have the wrong place?” George asked as they pulled up to the beach address. A party seemed to be under way. Several hundred men and women—buyers and sellers, lovers and gamblers, friends and enemies from the mad, capable, fanatic, gorgeous, moneyed world—had showed up in Technicolor finery: Hawaiian shirts and knee-length shorts, and fluorescent bikinis, and one man in an unforgettable suit of yellow linen, and another in open-necked teal. Stepping out in black from a blue Cadillac, George and Lee plopped like lumps of coal into fruit salad.

  “It looks like Dad’s people,” Lee said.

  George waded through the jocular mourners to the rosewood casket, luscious and antiquated, and there he was: Jack. George’s memories of the whole rough world of joking, smoking, farting, flesh-squeezing men with their tumblers of iced whisky and their smokes and their dumb puns and their communities of winks and their pockets jangling with change lay dead in the casket with him.

  “It’s him,” George said.

  “And I don’t know a man or woman here,” Lee said.

  Eventually, the crowd, exuding tutti-frutti skin cream and tacky cheerfulness, settled into the sand and a buffoonishly drunk obese man in a purple suit took the microphone beside the casket. He was holding on to a fistful of rum in ice with mint like a speaking stick. “My favorite Jack Taggart story,” he announced. When a semblance of silence breached, he ran into it shouting: “My favorite Jack Taggart story happened at the track. If ever the track had a saint, it was Jack Taggart. And every saint has his miracle, right? We were driving, I remember, upstate New York, and he asks, ‘Want to go to the track?’ and I say, ‘Sure,’ and we’re driving and, bam, a white squirrel runs out onto the road. Albino. Nearly killed us. ‘Wasn’t that a bit lucky,’ said Jack.

  “So we’re at the track that afternoon, it’s the seventh race and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a horse called Whitetail. And Jack comes to me, he says, ‘Look at this, it’s a horse called Whitetail, just like we saw on the road.’ Sure enough and I know what’s coming next. Horse is running at a hundred to three.

  “So Jack figures this out, and he figures that out, he borrows from this guy, he scrapes from that guy, stuff he shouldn’t, rent, kids’ money, wives’ money, money he has that belongs to other people. Everything and more. On a hunch. You understand? Just on some stirring in that gut of his.

  “And sure enough, Whitetail wins and he had to carry the money out in a bag. He had to buy a bag from the gift shop to carry it out. We had to go somewhere, too. Business deal. Now, I know that he lost it all, and I know he made a lot of dumb bets that didn’t pay off, but that’s how I’ll always remember him. Laughing his ass off, rich with the track’s money, on the road to a deal.”

  The next woman in line took the mic. She looked like Teri Garr. She spoke like Teri Garr. She may well have been Teri Garr. “I just want to say that I was with him when he went broke after two days in an underground Chinese casino in New York and I saw him give the last five dollars he had in the world to a rummy off the street and he laughed about it. He laughed just as much as he must have laughed in that car.”

  A whole line of men and women told their favorite Jack Taggart stories, grasping at his amusing and infuriating brilliance, his unique capacity for incomplete collapse and partial recovery, his fleshy hope. Some laughed. Some wept. Some railed. Some boasted. Some worked themselves into rages and had to be shushed to mollifying grumbles. Like water running through the earth, money had coursed through Jack Taggart in rivulets and mighty floods, in underground rivers and vast sucking tides, and pillars of clouds that drenched down, and mile-thick glaciers. Like water leaves stories on the earth, money left stories on Jack Taggart. The man that money poured through.

  Until the light began to fall, Lee and George listened to the stories money had wrought. Then they drove in silence to the jet. They didn’t speak till they were at twenty thousand feet.

  “Maybe I should have told a story,” Lee said.

  “What story would you have told?” George asked.

  Lee ran the talons of his hands over his skull, and then folded them virtuously on his lap. “I suppose I have no story.”

  George understood, as he always seemed to understand with Lee. Their lives ran parallel through a diabolical, inevitable magnetism that imitated friendship at least.

  “He was a true American,” George said.

  “That’s fair.”

  “I wish my father had a funeral like that.”

  “I wish my mother had.”

  *

  Ben sucked the thumb of his own contempt, peered down the row of girls leaning against the wall of the gym, and thought: You could never be with me. I’m so much richer than you. I’m just so much richer than you. So so much richer than you.

  The annual Orange Blossom Ball between the Amherst School for Girls and Hamilton College was held at the beginning of spring. Ben stood apart. Ben was happiest standing apart, least vulnerable. Over twelve years of coexistence, the boys of Hamilton College had learned to hate Ben Wylie, and he had learned to hate them back. Class warfare is more acute between the rich and the megarich than between th
e rich and the poor. Moneyed people cannot stand the eccentricities of those with more than them and the richer find the slightly less rich intolerably money-grubbing. There is a world of difference between being born on third, thinking you’ve hit a stand-up triple, and being born on home plate.

  Ben insisted on knotting his school tie as he entered the school and unknotting his school tie when he left, as if the uniform was a tangled net he was caught in every morning and struggled to escape every afternoon. He scowled. He carried a heavy book of Caravaggio reproductions in his satchel. He hated the thumping stadium rock that everybody else liked. He knew he was easy to despise.

  So he was standing apart when Anna Savarin came for him. Through the darkened gym, clanging with a brittle “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah),” across the space whose edges were arranged with clusters of boys ignoring girls and girls fascinated with the clusters of boys ignoring them, her eyes came first. Green auras with gray centers. Then her breasts. Anna Savarin cut like cruel fate wearing a delicately patterned pink floral dress. Ben watched the distances between them narrowing helplessly.

  “I believe we’re supposed to dance,” she said on arrival.

  “I’m sorry?” muttered Ben.

  “It’s tradition for the head girl at Amherst and the prefect of Hamilton College to dance at the Orange Blossom ball.”

  She pulled him out onto the floor. “The Lady in Red” drifted overhead, while Ben’s hand on her waist waited, the faint moisture of his palm softening the starch of her dress. Aware of his own smell, the odor of fumbling and indelicacy, aware that he was supposed to say something, aware that he should say only the perfect thing, he shifted his weight left to right, right to left, left to right. “Ever feel like you’re being watched?” he asked, nodding his head to the suppressed gazes on the edge of the dance floor.

  “They should watch us,” Anna replied. “We’re role models.”