Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  She seemed to clear her head, recall vaguely that there was a question and a questioner.

  “You’re right,” she said. “The men are all buried out there in the north with nothing above them but sky.”

  “They buried Ben up there, too, didn’t they?”

  She rambled like a scattered animal. “Mama brought me down to the cage but I could never stand the smell. For her, everything about the wolf was pleasure. ‘The smell of the naked earth,’ she called it. It smelled like shit to me.” Her eyes met mine, concentrated as diamond. “You want to know about his body in the snow, don’t you?”

  I started to answer but caught my breath in my throat, terrified that a word would thwart her answer.

  “It was an act of love,” she said. “He was born to go naked into the wild. I let him go. I let him out of the cage. That was my job. It wasn’t my mother’s. When I found him in the cage, how could I not let him be the wolf?”

  She had released him into the wild and he had run all the way to his death—becoming the beast he had longed to be. I had misunderstood. The story of men who died was the story of women who lived. The Wylies are not men who come out of Abermarley, out of the broken-down stones and trees to find a land of opportunity. They are the women in quiet villages, the women looking up from their kitchen tables, their beaded prayers, to the dark fields on the edge of town. They won’t be married properly by the church door. Instead, they run through the narrow, cruel forest, momentarily free. Then they wake up in a silent mansion where not even the servants gossip. The men remain in the basement, howling into themselves. The women are in the empty upstairs, silent, scrutinizing their own desperations.

  “I can’t stand to talk about this anymore,” she said, and walked away as she had always walked away before, the way she would eventually walk away from Leo, I knew. In the inconclusive life of Poppy Wylie, nobody lasted long.

  She turned back for me. “I’m going to let you keep that,” she said, nodding to the painting.

  Generosity is what I never could have expected. Mercy. Or was it carelessness? The allure of Poppy’s floating world, her easy life, her sumptuous declining beauty was that it could cancel little lives like mine, that it didn’t need to bother with the mere stuff of the world anymore. Money is everything now. Poppy had been to the end of money and human wildness. She wandered the exhaustion of all possible desire.

  I was so lost in my relieved and greedy reveries that I didn’t even notice Leo leave the house. I just saw his Prada suit entering the car, then the car pulling away. Kate was standing beside me and I hadn’t noticed her either. I wasn’t noticing much apparently. “He’s gone,” she said.

  “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to feel guilty.”

  She knew her man. Leo’s guilt was friction to grit himself against the grease of all the money. With his guilt emblazoned on his secret heart, he could betray his wife and abandon his child and catapult himself into the stratosphere. So long as he felt bad about it.

  Sigma joined us, her eyes heavy with suppression. She wanted to watch a Star Wars movie with me, she muttered. I asked her if we could see The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite, and she agreed, and then I knew she must be really down, so we put on The Phantom Menace, her favorite, and cuddled.

  *

  Things were starting to look up. The graphs were growing pleased with their human subjects once again. The stock market soared above its pre-crash mark, the unemployment rate tripped below eight percent, and even median incomes inflated the slightest little puff. Therefore restaurant front offices again giggled dismissively at apologetic requests for Friday night tables, glossy magazines thickened tumescently on the newsstand shelves, and I heard stories of friends leaving jobs of their own volition—exhausted Americans at least imitating hope. The delirious music that had stopped was starting up again, not quite out on the street but in small rooms off the alleys. The ancient dreads continued to rumble underneath it all: inequalities widening, food prices spiking, the natural world more threadbare with each season. But the apocalyptic mode has always nestled comfortably at the heart of American prosperity. The world has always been about to fall apart, which is fine so long as I can make a living.

  There was more action, more fun, more stuff, more chances to get lucky. And nothing can compare with the blessed state of getting lucky. A big score succors the soul more than God or heroin or justice. One night at the party for a book about the crash on the rooftop of the Chamberlain, high above the city, I theorized to myself that the species was gathering money into fewer and neater piles so we could burn it in bigger and brighter conflagrations. The potlatch of the earth had begun. And there, in the crowd swaying without dancing, the tight suits in dark colors, the loose drapes of rich textured fabrics, lamés and laces, gold hoop earrings and sculpted bodies, I saw Jorn Pelledeau again. He had left Vice by then. He was with MSNBC, I think. Our gazes crossed each other’s, recognition immediately swallowed by our mutual acknowledgment that we didn’t matter to each other. I had won. I didn’t need stories anymore. I already had the girl and the money. Media, in its petty Götterdämmerung, was of the least possible concern to me anymore. I loved the times I had been given to live in. I wanted to gamble more.

  That night I learned about Lee Taggart’s death in the poker room of the Borgata, where a bank of distracting screens conveniently flashed financial news alongside horse and dog races. He died in chains, lashed to a cage in 15 Central Park West. Apparently at Taggart’s request, a rent boy had beat and choked him to unconsciousness, and then accidentally to death.

  The police never even charged the hustler. After all, the victim owned the cages.

  *

  I was given my last look at the Wylies the day after Halloween. They were in the crowd I was struggling against on my way to the subway. A few stores were putting up Christmas decorations, and Christmas in SoHo is the ultimate proof, if proof were necessary, that love is not enough. There must be spending money, too. Anna Savarin, in the frosty glory of an ivory cashmere coat, radiated. Beside her, a bounding bright boy ran from window to window. She tried to rein him in as he scampered from her grip for glimpses of the world’s magnificent stuff. His eyes glimmered with curiosity and defiance, his messy hair and his face dusty from already forgotten adventures—a fighter, a boy after my own heart, with a soul for any fate. I thought of my father as a boy. I thought of myself as a boy. If we could scrape away what time does to men, we would love every boy. If we could wash away the grime, the boy would be waiting at the beginning, full of greed indistinguishable from hope. Max’s mother watched the tender futility of his animal self with sorrowful eyes. She knew: We get what we want and then it destroys us.

  All in a moment, mother and son drifted into the keen consuming crowd. Their vision passed from me. I’m no Communist: It seemed perfectly logical that the profit from the labor of tens of thousands would fall to them.

  *

  It hadn’t yet snowed by mid-November, so I flew up to visit my mother again. Who could say when a sudden storm would render the road from Edmonton impassable?

  On the way up I stopped at the Legislature Building in Edmonton to see the floors my great-grandfather laid. The Cabots were originally the Cabottos, until Ellis Island, and Cabottos were marble workers for generations before my grandfather insisted his sons graduate from high school. They came from Lucca, a miraculously unbombed Italian town whose cathedral floors are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, today covered in Plexiglas for the tourists’ inspection, far too beautiful to be walked on. I suppose I should be proud of this heritage. In the 1990s, while all my friends were discovering their ethnicities—the Jews upping their quotient of Yiddishisms, the Irish tattooing shamrocks on their asses—I could never be bothered with my Italianness. I figured that my ancestors came to the New World for good jobs and a chance at a family and an old age in which they could drink themselves comfortably to death, not so I could be proud of some shitheel village they’d
abandoned. Patriotism is not a family trait: Our true tribe is the human dust blown from every continent—the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Greeks, the peripatetic Russians and Indians. We belong to that mongrel messiness that has no name and no flag.

  Perhaps the men and women who know how to make things are obsolete. Perhaps the whirlwind of numbers will sweep their skills away. Nonetheless, I was proud of the floor of the Legislature. If there had not been a janitor mopping, wondering what the hell I was looking at, I might well have lain down on its simple pattern of black-and-white squares, spread myself like some initiate.

  When I drove out of Edmonton the fall light was distant and intense, the sun farther away yet its heat somehow closer, less muted. The air is so crisp in an Alberta autumn that to pass from light to shadow is to skip from midsummer to midwinter in an instant. Northern Alberta is my country but it is not my home. It is nobody’s home. The original tribe that lived in this place was the Beaver. Before conquest, somewhere around two thousand of them hunted and fished the whole of the Peace River basin, and even they stuck to the water, hardly ever venturing onto the hard lands beyond. When the paleo-people arrived in the new world, a world new thirty thousand years ago, their hunger poured down the continent, past vista after vista of infinite dangerous promise, but they looked at this country and passed by. They knew that humanity would find no welcome here. What I see and what the Beaver saw are the same: A place of no habitation and no name. Two hours outside of town, I pulled up on a pair of black wolves as they feasted on the carcass of a roadkill doe. They looked up as I rolled down the window, kept feasting, but after a few minutes of glut, they jogged away, looking back and then running, looking back and then running. Wolves are wilder than other wild things. They have refused civilization. I remembered my father. His smiling assurance: Fathers shepherd their children away from the pointlessness, the basic irrelevance of life, and then they die, leaving their sons shivering in the emptiness, just when we most need the warm cover of their deceit.

  Only when dinner was on the table—crispy lake trout and wild rice with sweet crusty black bread—did I remember the anniversary. My father had died in late November. We were eating his favorite meal. From the steam-cleaned earthiness of the smell, I was carried back to eating with my father at nine-thirty at night fresh from shooting a fourteen-point buck in Stellerton; I was once again at Nobu eating grilled maitake and a raft of tuna with an editor from the Times, bread and butter in a market in Berlin, and then back again at the orderly table of my mother.

  “A simple meal feeds simple people,” she said.

  “I’m not sure how simple I am anymore, Mom. My divorce went through last week.”

  I hadn’t told her about Kate and Sigma. I wasn’t sure what I had to tell. She forked an asparagus tip with a few grains of rice and a bit of fish. She always ate things mushed together. “Where do you think you’ll go now?” she asked. The pleasant thought that I was going nowhere suffused me. Before I could answer, the arrow of her gaze straightened to the window. For a moment I saw my mother the way she must have looked as a small child, my mother before duty. “The snow,” she said.

  Outside very fine, very small flakes were beginning to sweep grandly down through the orange cone of the front porch light. She stood up from the table and shuffled in her sock feet to the window.

  “It’s always like this at first,” she said, wondering. “A few big flakes but when I see them I can already see the snow covering everything, can’t you?”

  “The snow’s well overdue,” I said.

  She stared awhile, then looked away, which always meant more than anything she said. “It’s a new start for everybody.”

  *

  The wispy clouds, vague as suspicion, interrupted the huge silver moon that rose like a fin-de-siècle postcard as I strolled after dinner into its bland glare. Now that I was certain I wouldn’t have to leave New York, I could cherish the childhood fear that the dark wild creates. There were still anxieties about the situation. I had seen in Kate’s eyes before I left, the fluttering of a doubt, though about what I couldn’t say. I was confident I could deal with the situation. Even if Kate turned against me, her daughter loved me too much. I was part of the family now. I belonged.

  The Wylie cottage was neat, and the first sight of its massy stones lingered in the smooth vapor of evening. The stars were rising. I sat on a boulder near the edge of one of the Wylies’ lakes. The cold was settling in, drifting from the north. Happiness, surprising and urgent, rose to my throat. Was it the certainty about New York? Was it the moon? My father’s black bread? My mother’s sighting of the first snow? Say I was happy by constellation. A constellation is the light of stars removed by hundreds of millions of light-years striking the eye at the same instant.

  Beyond the Wylie’s cottage, the wilderness sloped away in the darkness like mist.

  If I were stronger, I would have headed out into that infinite cold, into the vastness where a man can howl properly. Instead I turned back to the quiet, well-lit house of my mother.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jofie Ferrari-Adler delivered this book to the world with Jonathan Karp and PJ Mark and Jennifer Lambert beside him, and I am grateful to all of them for their care and their concern and their intelligence and their skill and their judgment and their ability to deal with money. For other kinds of help: Julian Porter, Bob Fulford, John Honderich, James Frey, David Granger. For all of the above and everything else: Sarah Fulford.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © DAVE GILLESPIE

  Stephen Marche is a novelist and culture writer. For the past five years he has written a monthly column for Esquire magazine, “A Thousand Words About Our Culture,” which in 2011 was a finalist for the ASME National Magazine Award for Commentary. He also writes regular features and opinion pieces for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and elsewhere. His books include two novels, Raymond + Hannah and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as a work of nonfiction, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

  StephenMarche.com | @StephenMarche | Stephen.Marche

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  ALSO BY STEPHEN MARCHE

  Love and the Mess We’re In

  How Shakespeare Changed Everything

  Shining at the Bottom of the Sea

  Raymond + Hannah

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Stephen Marche

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  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2015

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  ISBN 978-1-4767-3081-3

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3083-7 (ebook)