Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  That night began with a Keith Haring yo-yo. Ben had brought colleagues from Morgan Stanley Sovereign Wealth—Fred Corbach, Marty Shragge, and Eduardo Albano—to watch him make the purchase. They disapproved. That’s why he brought them.

  If you worked in banking, you were supposed to buy Picassos and Cézannes. For the rich, the art market was merely another market in which to prove themselves, a purer one insofar as it was as unregulated as drugs. Ben’s taste was idiosyncratic and superb. Ben’s first purchase when he arrived at Morgan Stanley had been a Francis Bacon triptych called Rage, a series of human figures scarred and scraped by the paintbrush. He bought Basquiats and Chuck Closes. The Basquiats that he preferred were painted on objects found on the street: pens, Coke cans, the bottoms of shattered vases. The Keith Haring yo-yo would find a place among them. Haring had painted the yo-yo black, with cartoon figures crawling out of yellow labyrinths.

  At the Fundamentum Gallery, narcissism was leaking into the street in small puddles of flauntery. Corbach and Shragge wore navy and burgundy Gucci, respectively. Albano had changed, after work, into white linen, tieless. He never could remember that he wasn’t in Buenos Aires anymore. Corbach was recommending a prostitute to Shragge—the ownership of people was the foremost imitation of joy they could manage. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune is in want of a prostitute.

  “You’ll come on her neck, of course.”

  “What do you mean?” Shragge asked.

  “Buddy, that’s common courtesy. I don’t know if you’ve slept with this level of ass before. This is not one of the heifers you’re used to, straight out of Juarez.”

  “She’s a hooker, right? You pay her to have sex.”

  Corbach sneered. “You’ve understood that much, yes.”

  “I though the whole point of a hooker was that you could do what you want.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? When you’re paying three hundred dollars an hour, you’re in the territory of a sexual actress.”

  “An aristocrat.” Shragge sneered, schmeering the words like a Jew in a German Christmas play. So much realer was he than all these goyim.

  “Fucking right. And when I go to the ballet, I wouldn’t crack peanuts or shit in the corner. This is a sexual performer, I’m sending you. You come on her neck. Not on her face or on her tits or in her mouth. And if you come on her hair, I personally will beat the living shit out of you. On her neck.”

  “Is that a pearl necklace?” Albano asked. Albano was attached to a brick-sized cell phone, on hold. Before his companions could answer, a voice on the other end picked up and he turned, receiving a proposition. “What if I were to promise a G on the wine,” Albano whispered into the machine. “A G, a thousand,” he whispered lower. He looked up, all eyes, asking for approval.

  The others colluded with nods.

  Albano perked up, hung up, rejoined his party. “Dinner for four at Bouley. No reservation. Ten o’clock Saturday night. I want the love.”

  Everybody but Albano knew that it’s not a get if you have to pay for it. Ben dug in his pocket for the latest treasure, the Keith Haring yo-yo. Spun, the thing was whirling circles within circles.

  “This guy owns the most expensive yo-yo in the world,” Corbach said.

  Shragge was moderately interested. “How much did you pay for it in the end?”

  “Thirteen thousand,” Ben said.

  “You’re buying dinner,” Albano said, meekly joking but not. Shragge and Corbach laughed at the transparence of the remark, and of everyone, including themselves. Why am I with these people if I have all the money? Ben asked himself. I am with these people because I have all the money, he answered himself.

  Trader aggression was roidishly oozing out of Shragge. “I just bought a fucking Warhol of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.”

  Ben’s turn to sneer. “Of course you did.”

  “I hang it beside my fucking rose-period Picasso. Wylie, can I ask you something?”

  “Shraggie, don’t,” Corbach warned.

  “Why are you so bloody weird and cheap?”

  “Shraggie …”

  “No, it’s just a question. He can answer. He’s a big boy. What’s the point? That’s what I have to ask. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You’re good at your job. Not that you have to be. But what the fuck, man. Why do you wear such shitty clothes?”

  The question turned the night into a tournament. For Shragge, every night was a tournament. But the coked-up bluster was contorted by genuine curiosity, Ben could see. He was a mystery to his colleagues. There were things that were supposed to be done. The Connecticut Yankees exchanged high-performance Eastern European women. Old Jews bought boats or farms to show how not Jewish they were. Albano, like the other Argentine traders, played polo in Jersey. Everybody bought Gucci loafers. But Ben was so rich he wore hundred-dollar suits. Ben wore canvas sneakers. He cut his own hair. He owned no business cards. If you didn’t know him, he didn’t want you to know him. His money was a cloak of invisibility cast over everybody else.

  “The reason I don’t spend money is because I could buy you all fifty times over,” he answered.

  The meal Ben proceeded to order was another kind of answer. The Château d’Yquem was an amber abyss of sweetness with hints of the tsar spreading marmalade on buttered toast. Bouley was at its early peak—famous but not yet profitably famous. Teams of serious servers carried out perfect plates: creamy raw salmon rolled around seagod pops of briny roe, almond-smooth yellowfin tuna brightened with rough-cut chives, then sea scallops blessed with slivers of white truffle. After those dillydallying dishes came an earthen striped bass bolstered by a hearty tomato water, skate homaged with humble artichoke and capers, an extravagance of lobster tail simmered in paprika and port, foie gras befuddled on a bed of pureed quince. Then a shoulder of lamb with parsnips served the way a shepherd in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons might eat it. Petrus was ordered, thick as blood, with tinges of mulberry, pipe smoke. A bowl of melon soup the color of a ski jacket, to be finished by the tender something-nothing of a verbena soufflé.

  After the feast of conspicuous distinctions, Ben excused himself without excuse and took the town car. He prowled bank to bank, emptying every ATM on the Upper East Side until a nice neat brick worth fifteen thousand dollars crouched in his hand. Up to the West Bronx, a neighborhood where you could open up a Kalishnakov and nobody would notice, and where, under the D-train rumble, the hookers paraded, a preview of tortured ghosts. He sought out the youngest. Butt cheeks like ham hocks under silver sequins. Thirteen? Fourteen? Her eyes reflected the neon. He held the money out the window. The girl looked disbelieving at the hallucinatory pile. How much fucking is that? What weird shit is that shit? He threw the cash and she caught it, nestled in her elbow crook like a wide receiver. A brother or a father or a molesting uncle must have played football.

  “Change your life,” Ben said.

  She slunk away, first at a stumbling perplexed walk, then a heel-brokered trot, then a terrified outright run on her tippy-toes. Ben Wylie, weeping with impotence, remembered his great-uncle Max running into the deep forest.

  As the driver turned the town car back downtown, the windows rolled by, liquid with the city. One final prophecy from the poor whom you will always have with you—a woman hollering at a bank of busted pay phones, cracked and frazzled and addled and sorrowing and murderous. Her eyes rolling at the spectral town car, she ran up, panting, pounding the bullet-resistant glass, screaming either a plea or a curse. The driver smoothly accelerated away into interstitial New York, the valleys between the mountains.

  The thrill of the gift and the panic of the chase ebbed, and then the inertia resumed. He was once again the eighth-richest man in the world being driven home in a town car after some typical rich-guy eccentricity.

  How far would he have to drive to hear the howl of a wolf?

  *

  George watched the numbers roll in: 16.68 billion, 17.83
billion, 19.64 billion, 22.31 billion. Numbers grew into other numbers, their meanings compounding into incomprehensibility. What can you buy with 22 billion dollars? What do you own?

  As his wealth launched beyond the meaning of wealth, cheapness gripped the heart of George Wylie as never before. In 1994 he owned two suits, one a slate gray and the other navy blue. He saw no reason for new clothes when his billions blossomed; rather the opposite. Who did he need to impress? When his briefcase, which he had carried with him to Hamilton College eons before, disintegrated in his hands, he started taking his papers around in the thick plastic bags given for free from the local grocery store in Champlain. Polish luggage, he called it.

  To the wider world, the Wylie men were as mysterious as ever, impervious to the scrutiny of even their employees. Their highest-level managers saw Ben and George only once a year. They arrived by subway, wandered in like citizens, George in his slate gray and Ben in ragged khakis. They rode to the top floor. They entered Lee Taggart’s office. They spoke for about an hour. They left. Rumors about the content of these meetings ran the gutters of WylieCorp and splashed onto Wall Street. Some said they were little more than presentations of numbers, a personal investment statement. Others believed that George arrived every year with a single guiding business idea. “Information cannot be taxed” or “Improbability is the river in which we fish” or some other gnomic pronouncement. One year, the rumors ran, George uttered a single word: “China.”

  Their absence made the Wylies into Wall Street myth, icons of the cold indifference of the marketplace, the irrelevance of wealth’s trappings to the mechanics of capital, the unfathomability of money. They were as plainly mysterious as how the world works.

  *

  Ben agreed to meet Anna Saravin in a diner on Eighth Avenue, a place with a grill and a stream of lottery numbers flowing in from a screen in the corner. This wasn’t one of the clean fancified retro weren’t-things-easier-when-there-weren’t-any-restaurants-except-diners diners. This was one of the grimy run-down I-buy-eggs-for-five-cents-and-I-fry-them-and-I-sell-them-for-ten-cents-so-don’t-ask-me-to-pretend-to-be-happy-about-it diners, risen from the ground like a primordial link between mud and the future, embossing a gray-green film over the eyes of the customers.

  Anna arrived with a six-foot-seven black man who bristled with glossy bubblegum-colored shopping bags outside the window. She kissed his leaned-down cheek, explained something indisputable, and then dipped inside the diner, gingerly, careful not to dirty herself by brushing against the zinc counter or the coiled mushroom-colored vinyl stools. Her presence dragged Ben down by his lapels into a mortal exhaustion.

  “I can only stay for five minutes,” she said after ordering a coffee.

  “Who’s your friend?” Ben nodded to the man on the other side of the window.

  “He plays for the Knicks.” He was watching. She waved three fingers of her hand as she held the spoon. “You’re not doing a very good job,” she added.

  “Of what?”

  “Of living up to your potential. You’re going to have to run the business when we’re married. You’re going to have to understand how WylieCorp works eventually.” She sipped her coffee. “You think I don’t understand what’s going on here? With your poor-person clothes? With your cheapness? Insulting all the other Morgan Stanleys.” She was gorgeous with her cruel raw-meat mouth. “Pathetic bluff. Eventually someone is going to call you on it.”

  Ben shrugged. “I do what I like now.”

  She looked at him with pity. “You know, I believe that you believe that. Inviting me here to this dive. Let me evaluate your choices. You could have rented a room at the Plaza and fucked me. You could have flown me to Paris. You could have not met me at all. Instead you brought me here.” She smiled. “I’ve met guys like you. You are the crime and you are the punishment. You don’t know what money’s for.”

  The basketball player knocked on the window. “Your dog is barking,” Ben said.

  “Your wolf is howling,” she answered, leaning in to kiss his cheek, leaving the soft ephemeral dollop of her ownership. Marked territory.

  Ben lowered his gaze while she stalked back into the city. The coffee was chalky, the cream had congealed like wrung linen in a polluted river. The liquid was cold on his lips. Sure she must have gone, he looked up. The Eighth Avenue crowd, the flowing hustle of grit and determination, flustered past the window. A city of soma. A city of addiction and starvation. And there, in the middle of the tumble and roll, Ben saw his mother, wandering among them like an exiled prophetess. Ben believed that he was seeing a ghost. Only supernatural explanations would suffice. To Ben, his mother was a creature of Larchmount Crescent, a goddess who belongs in a temple in a grotto, the grotto of a small Pennsylvania town.

  She proceeded into the diner, somehow knowing his precise location. Mother’s instinct? Anna Savarin?

  “My son,” she announced, sitting.

  “What are you doing here, Mom?”

  “My daughter,” she answered. Her distress reared up in her inflection. What had Poppy done? “She won’t speak to me.” Lavinia looked at her son, with the calm of true need. “How I wish I was embarrassing you with a wedding.”

  *

  Poppy needed, at last, to be taken away. The experiments in rock and powder, with smoke and needle, had concluded with the expected results; Poppy had worked out their various refinements with extraordinary thoroughness. The typical addict is limited by cash flow. Poppy received two hundred thousand dollars a day from her portion of the trust. She tried to huff every penny.

  She had reached bottom near the top of the world on Central Park West. Ben opened the elevator into her private suite, into a mess. Paintings in crates. Clothes in silver and gold torn and strewn on the living room floor and over a zebra-skin sectional and Lucite coffee table. Books of photography, ripped. An avant-garde menorah. A rust-needled pine tree from Christmas past, nearly bare. The main window was smashed, cracked as if someone had thrown furniture from the forty-first floor. The apartment was naked to the sky. A pair of pigeons cooed and strutted over a row of three television sets. The window must have been broken for a while because pigeon shit was spackled over the crack pipes and the gear and a bowl of rot-excruciated tangerines and little green apples and a limp leek, and the stacked catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. A Penguin edition of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio lay on top. Poppy was splayed out in new gym wear on the sofa in front of the smashed window, her eyes bruised, her skin flaky.

  “Honey, you’re home,” she said, looking up lizardly.

  “It doesn’t much look like anybody’s home.”

  “Why is it, you think,” Poppy wondered, “that Mother thinks I’ll go with you?”

  Ben sat beside her. If she decided to jump through the window he could grab her. “I think she thinks we’re the only people on earth we can trust.”

  Poppy fingered a small gold and ruby device hanging from a chain around her neck—it looked like a cigarette lighter—and took two automatic sniffs.

  “We’ve let everything fall apart, haven’t we,” he said.

  She was high but spoke correctly. “It’s amazing how it doesn’t fall apart no matter what we do.” Then she stood up, tottering. “It’s all just painted skin, whatever that means.”

  *

  After dropping his sister at the self-esteem factory in Connecticut—it was called Beginnings, an all-purpose rehab clinic that offered equine therapy and Japanese massage within the secure confines of a barbed wire fence—Ben left his job and his collection and New York and his family. If I have to be an experiment, he thought, at least I can decide what the experiment is.

  So he experimented: He purchased a motorcycle and drove around Normandy, then flew the company Gulfstream to Cairo for kushari, then to Rome, where he bought a bronze Christ that had once hung in Bernini’s studio for 30 million dollars and gave it to the University Art Gallery in Harvard for the tax credit. Then to Kiev, where he bou
ght the Ukraine’s largest steel factory, to Hong Kong, where he pissed in a glass urinal in a restaurant that served red panda meat, to Bangkok, to Mumbai, to Rome again, to Tokyo. He would buy all the Rothkos at an auction or an entire Chuck Close show, sight unseen, and bury them in the family vault in Kensington Palace Gardens.

  To see, through the transcendent window of the Maybach, the scenes of everyday life—the homeless man outside the liquor store in New Orleans glugging electric pink wine, the Queen of England inspecting the horseflesh at the races, the gaggle of laughing girls on their way to a twelve-hour shift in a pharmaceutical factory in Shenzhen, a solitary boy climbing the hills of Kenya with fly-fishing equipment, the Saudis in their tasteless stupidity buying platinum toilets. Always the background rumble: Am I living now? Is this all there is? The present, to Ben, unrolled like a painting spilling to the floor in a burning museum.

  In the Imperial Suite at the Ritz, at the fons et origo of luxury, Ben ordered a hot dog and ate it in the bathroom overlooking the Place Vendôme. The room cost $12,389 dollars a night. In Los Angeles, Ben purchased a Lamborghini Countach, purple as grape soda and equally tasteful, crazy as a fatherless teenager. He thrust the mad machine up the Pacific Coast Highway, through green and blue and gold and white to San Francisco, and thought what a good road it would be to die on. The past fumed away like applewood smoke. All that was solid was melting into air, and the air was heating up. The world was beginning to break up, to shift. Mere geography, mere material, mere human beings—properties to be assumed into the one invisible, indivisible city of money, the one true universal brotherhood all men and women were hustling to join. He saw China rising in furious glory, the ancient civilization back for the most curious revenge in history. Ten thousand souls in a single factory made umbrellas and the imperial nations trembled, forecasting rain.