Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  One evening in London, Ben paid what was then the largest sum ever paid for a Rembrandt: £25,897,543 for Saint Francis and the Wolf. He laid the painting outside the cage in the house in Kensington Palace Gardens to receive the flat expanse of the moonlight through the window.

  *

  The butler had to bring the phone down to the cage. It was his sister. “Come home,” she said, and hung up.

  It had been seven years since Ben had returned to Champlain. The rot of the house on Larchmount Crescent was evident from the street, the margins frayed, the grass mopey, a house obviously in mourning and disrepair, although all of Champlain seemed to be permanently in mourning and disrepair. No butler to usher him in here. He knocked and entered to the flicker of women in the dark halls above, maybe Poppy, maybe his mother. He seemed to know where he was supposed to go by instinct.

  At the long oak table in the living room, ancient as winter, Lee Taggart waited. He had grayed. Even his graying was precise. The ghostly color of his hair matched the deferential steel of his eyes, the cut of his suit. Six piles of papers waited scrupulously on the table. As Ben entered, Lee moved as if he had been asleep until that moment, a robot switched suddenly on.

  “You need to sign all these,” he said, handing over a gold fountain pen.

  Ben endured the weight of the instrument in his fingers, dutifully leaning over, scrawling his name mechanically, in silence, over the rafts of English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, and Arabic papers.

  “I was called back for some signatures?” Ben asked.

  “I’m here for your father.”

  “As you always have been.”

  The old man’s knobbly finger divinely pointed to the dotted line, life’s fundamental truth. “I’m going to say it just like he asked me to, Ben. I owe him.”

  “What do you owe?”

  “Finish the signatures.” He waited on the completion of legal formalities. “What he wanted you to know is that his condition was just a lot more painful than it had ever been before.”

  “His condition?”

  “His condition, the spasms, were becoming agonies, real agonies, Ben. Your parents decided to go together. They didn’t want to stick around without each other. That’s how your dad wanted me to put it. Don’t decide to take it too hard. He wanted me to tell you this way. He wanted me to say it just like this.”

  “What’s going on, Lee?”

  Lee collected the papers into his briefcase, and then began to guide Ben by the elbow into the living room. “George was an amazing owner,” he said. “He knew exactly when to do nothing.” A coffin. A large and well-manufactured coffin, obviously from a well-reputed coffin company. From the edges of the universe, at the fastest speed there is, beams of pure darkness began their rush toward Ben. In the coffin lay his mother, and beside her the carcass of a wolf, smiling mildly.

  *

  As the sedation ebbed, Ben awoke with the refreshment of a great agony having passed. Slowly, by stages, his vision adjusted to the cage. The comfort of the familiar basement was smooth in the fresh ache. Lost, he forgot, and forgetting, he couldn’t say how long he sat in the cage or how long she was there.

  In the half dark, on the other side of the bars, utterly poised, Anna Savarin was patiently waiting.

  FIVE

  *

  The Wolf saved me. I took the Paul Klee from the Wylie cottage nook and drove it from Alberta to New York—across the thousand-cornered room of America, the fields of the megafarms swaying with genetically modified wheat, the small towns abandoned by their ambitious young people, the rusting derelict cities abandoned by themselves. The country was a highway strung with escape hatches. Every crossroads, every side road, was its own temptation. Who would notice my absence or the painting’s?

  “It’s beautiful,” Kate said dubiously when I hung it back over the desk in her study.

  “I thought it belonged here,” I said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said in a voice like moss. “It’s beautiful because you brought it back.”

  Then she kissed me. I wish there were some more cynical, more contemporary way for me to describe it, but kisses will always be antiquated. Surprised kisses are practically nineteenth century, like carnations pressed in leather-bound books, or four-poster oaken beds, or carved opaline silhouettes. She kissed me and I was surprised and it was as lovely as a watermark. Still, I had needed the painting. She could never have taken me without a gift and I could never have come without theft.

  *

  The following morning, I crept, shoes in hand, down the elegant stairs lined with Robert Frank photographs from his Mexican period and stumbled on Sigma perched at the granite-topped kitchen island, grumpily consuming an Eggo waffle that had been cut into stamp-sized squares by an absent nanny. She looked up with Leo’s suspicious Greek eyes through a tumble of gold ringlets.

  “I don’t want this,” she said, pointing to the waffle.

  I know nothing about children or their upbringing so I went simple. “What do you want?” I asked her.

  “Pizza,” she said, grinning.

  In the Miele fridge, a few slices of Hawaiian pizza limped forlornly over the edge of a plate. I passed the dish over cold, thereby earning eternal friendship through ham and pineapple. Kate came down a few minutes later to find me reading Garfield to her daughter from the back of a two-day-old Post. The easy beauty of her morning doziness was spine-softening. She tousled her hair silently, gorgeous in an entirely novel manner. She smiled the insider smile upon me, and I was redeemed by its ease.

  *

  So began my life in the money or beside it, rather. I still worked. I still kept my Portuguese basement. I still ran my freelancing gamble, just with lower stakes. At the dinners and parties and functions to which Kate brought me over the next months I remained a spectator to the frictionless young men with their puffy-faced arrogance who fawned over anyone with more money than them, then flashed a dead-eyed contempt on anyone with less. Their backstories were all the same. They had graduated with degrees in finance from Ivy League schools and worked in family holding companies, or circled the network collecting investors for one scheme or another, off of which they slivered livable commissions. The whiz kids, the math PhDs, and the rocket scientists were supposed to have ended this clubbiness, or so I’d read. As far as I could tell, the whiz kids were on salary. Money’s job was still to maintain the tribe, to give just enough money to other people’s idiot sons so that your own idiot sons would have just enough people to ask for money in their turn.

  I think that I offered Kate a kind of reprieve from the wealthy friends she neither wanted to know nor could bring herself to ignore. Plus I was helpful with Sigma. When Kate fell into a migraine, Sigma and I would skip her classes—integrated art or Talmudic math or Serbo-Guyanan dance or whatever it was—and drive Mommy’s Audi to the Six Flags in Jersey. Sigma was pure Viking at heart. She wanted to go on all the rides, in every sense of the phrase. At the end of our days out, I would carry her sleeping from the Audi up to her delicate pink room like the exhausted animal she was happy to be. Then Kate would make me the exhausted animal I was happy to be.

  One evening in late summer, the cool breeze wafting the faint odor of BBQ pork dumplings through the air, maybe six months after we had begun whatever we were beginning, Kate whispered in my ear the sum she had inherited from her grand old American forefathers: 47 million. That talismanic number, spilt like pomegranate seeds from her whispery lips, was more erotic than any other possible gesture of her tongue. I would not at first tell myself what it meant, but my easing spine, my relaxing muscles already knew. I would never have to leave New York.

  “Did you tell that number to Leo?” I asked.

  She sighed. “You’re not jealous of Leo, are you?”

  “No, I just want to know if he knew.”

  “You want to know whether you know what he knows?”

  “Maybe that’s it.” Actually I wanted to know how 47 mill
ion could be unsatisfying, how anyone could want more than that. Kate sat up into the cooling darkness, the moon through the window casting a glow like relevant history on her breasts.

  “Leo knew. But to him numbers never mattered. More and less mattered, but not numbers.”

  “Forty-seven million has to be enough,” I said, guffawing.

  She almost took offense, then registered that I meant it and forgave me for my ignorance. “You know why you still love Leo?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. “When Leo was about six his mother went to live on a lesbian commune in Colorado. His dad had no money. Sales assistant for dishwashers in the middle of nowhere. Leo is one those boys you see on the playground, looking out through the fence. ‘Do you love me? Do you love me?’ There’s no enough for him.”

  “You talk like he was born on the streets of Mumbai or something.”

  “You can be abandoned anywhere,” Kate insisted.

  Aren’t we all, I wanted to say. Aren’t we all the orphans at the beginning of a Charles Dickens novel? Aren’t we all Hansel and Gretel, lost in the deep dark woods, searching for the traces of the trail of bread crumbs?

  “What are you thinking now?” Kate asked, seeing the unasked questions pass over my face.

  “I’m wondering what my excuse will be,” I said.

  *

  Solzhenitsyn said that a man who is warm cannot understand the point of view of a man who is cold. I was the warm man with the cold man inside. When we snagged a table at Kajitsu, and the check came, Kate’s card snapped down neatly at the conclusion. My non-Platinum equivalent would have been embarrassing, I told myself. Her card was like a cleaver to hack through the gristle and bone of life’s little embarrassments.

  She paid for the trips. To London. To Paris. To Los Angeles and then Hawaii and then Cambodia because why not, we were practically there. I could never have afforded them. Sometimes neither could Kate. Sam and Ricky, a couple who had invested early in PayPal and whose daughter Sexton went to the same ballet class as Sigma, flew us in their private jet down to Saint Barths in May. I liked Sam and Ricky. Sam was a rotund ex-frat boy with a heart of molded plastic who spent his time waiting for what he called the “next perfect pitch,” whatever that meant. He was not instantly bored with me when he realized that I had no money. Ricky was a Long Island princess who had made a good match. She was impressed that I knew one of the wedding reporters from the Times, so she deigned to audition her version of a winning smile on me.

  The stay in Saint Barths was less exciting to me than the private jet, but good value. Uma Thurman was splashing around the beach with her kids, which is something, I guess. Her presence certainly justified any expense as far as Sam and Ricky were concerned. The horror began as we were leaving. Sam was late for takeoff. More than an hour late. Ricky was worried, though not for her husband or for our schedule. On a private jet, the fuel per hour costs about ten thousand dollars, and it was running the whole time we waited for him, to keep our spot on the tarmac. Sam eventually showed up with Chinese food. There was a chow mein place he loved on the island. Ricky was furious. “For Chinese food?” she shouted. “Are those noodles worth ten thousand dollars?” Sam looked surprised, genuinely. She was suddenly appalled at his taste for luxury? “Look where you are,” he shouted back, sweeping his arm around the jet cabin. “What more do you want?”

  That’s really the question, isn’t it? What more do you want? Sigma and Sexton wanted Archie comics that they consumed in studied silence in a pool of jet-window light after takeoff. I could not quite manage to hide my discomfort so casually. Kate noticed. After we landed, after we were alone in the cab on the way back to SoHo, she leaned over Sigma’s sleeping head and whispered, “We don’t have to be like that.”

  “We couldn’t possibly be like them,” I said.

  “I mean, the money doesn’t have to come between us. We can work something out. We don’t have to end up screaming at each other in a private jet.” It took a moment for me to realize what she meant. For Kate, money was a source of difficulty, of anger and loss. It was so ravishingly naïve I almost told her I loved her. But it was not that moment.

  “Don’t worry,” I said instead. “We’ll find some other reason to scream at each other.”

  Then Sigma roused herself. “Who’s screaming?” she asked dreamily.

  “Nobody’s screaming,” I said, kissing the top of her head as delicately as my rough lips could manage, which could never possibly be delicate enough. “Nobody will ever be screaming.”

  After Saint Barths, for a kind of vacation—a desperate pull for an ending perhaps—I visited Champlain. Number 17 Flora Avenue clung to elegance with an almost charming precariousness in a neighborhood that remains what it was in the early days of the Wylies, a repository of the recently arrived, upwardly mobile, lower middle class, though hardscrabble Sikhs had replaced hardscrabble Scots. The thick-matted dandelioned yard in front and the rusted-shut front gate marred an otherwise impeccable street, groomed by fiercely house-proud new owners.

  The property on Larchmount Crescent was rotting splendidly—the roof spider-veined with cracks, the windows boarded, the yellowish bricks crumbling in ever larger chunks from the Victorian façade. The inside of the house was a phantasmagoria of distressed gentility, like a melancholy dream of childhood. The old Edwardian carpets stank of their threadbare decline, the voluptuous wallpaper curling in defeated sheets off the rot-poxed walls, the brass lamps squatting forlornly, and the lovely ceiling moldings dripping small black stalactites. No one had touched the place since George and Lavinia’s death, obviously. One of the upstairs rooms must have been discovered by teenagers or drug addicts. The cream-colored wallpaper was scrawled with graffiti that had wept itself into indecipherability, cigarette butts and empties were disintegrating and, in the room’s center, I don’t know how, a maple sapling stirred out of the floor.

  I came back from my tour of the collapsing American dream to find that the money had called. “He’s coming,” Kate said.

  “Who?”

  “The gigolo.”

  Leo hadn’t seen Sigma for a year. Kate wanted me to be there when he came. I owed her.

  *

  The town car curled up to the curb. Leo emerged in a Prada suit, looking like a schoolboy lover. Prada has a gift: They make clothes that appear expensive in a way that implies the wearer never earned the money to buy them. They have mastered the look of otiose finance. Before the door closed, I caught a shard of Poppy Wylie in a black crepe cocktail dress. It was ten in the morning. A funeral or an all-hours party? Time itself seemed to have lost meaning in her impossible elegance.

  “She looks bored, Leo.”

  At the front door, Leo looked tougher than before, more of a hustler, the shiny suit up close like a leather jacket of a 1950s pimp. His smile stole over his face like a childhood memory but he betrayed no surprise at my presence. “You can’t still hate me.”

  “I think you’re confusing hate with contempt.”

  He looked quizzically up at the sky. “Your heart is full of something black, but not contempt. Envy?”

  “We all have to make a living,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said in the spirit of sympathetic benevolence that a corporate raider might demonstrate to an employee he’s just fired.

  “What do you understand?”

  “I understand everything. That’s why we shouldn’t hate each other. We do what we have to. Now let me see my daughter.”

  My heart was pumping with some thick, hateful sap. It could have been envy but I’m not sure. He was implying that I had brought Poppy to him so I could have Kate for myself, bumping him up so I could bump myself up. Was that what I had been doing? Was I a kept man? Had I done what I had to do?

  I was still in New York, after all.

  I went into the kitchen and poured myself a scotch—a seventeen-year-old Bowmore—and when I returned Poppy was sitting in the living room, her regal hands on the horseheads of my fa
vorite chair. She was staring into the distance. Hers was a dazed beauty. And then I realized she was staring at The Wolf, which hung in the next room, on the wall of the study. With a pang of terror I could see in her gaze that the painting was an answer to many questions she hadn’t thought to ask until then. We both knew that I was some kind of thief.

  “I remember you now,” she finally said. “North Lake. You’re from North Lake. You’re from Alberta, aren’t you?”

  I couldn’t deny it.

  “I can’t think of a better place to die,” she said.

  “I do everything backward,” I said. “I was born there.”

  “I remember you in the fields. You were standing in the weeds beside a rusty swing set. The caretaker’s son. You were husk brown. It reminded me, seeing you just there. You were a boy, so free, so wild.”

  The thought of my father sobbed to my throat. Her eyes had seen me when he was alive. And when had I been free? When?

  “My mother said to me when we were in North Lake, ‘You must never tell anyone, Poppy. You must never tell a living soul.’” She smiled at me. “But you already know. You probably knew all along. You must have understood that I couldn’t let you tell the world this. You must have known.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She seemed a little surprised but nodded.

  “Why are all the men buried in the north?”

  She wreathed herself in the meaning of her secrecy. She could talk as much as she wanted now. “My mother loved the wolves. They would have called her a witch a century ago. She loved her French-Canadian rituals. She loved Father being a wolf and rising up again as a man. Thought she was in some folktale of the loup-garou. For me, my papa was dying. For her, the meaning was going out of the world.”

  She teased out a cigarette from a pack of Sobranies, put it to her lips, then removed it, threaded it back into the pack. “You have no idea how I wish I’d met my grandmother, my great-grandmother. The wolf was nothing to them but a chore. They knew we should never have left the old house on Flora Avenue where they had been maitresses chez elles.”