I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  I found the menu and brought it over to her. “Whatever you want.”

  From room service we ordered hamburgers and ice cream and we emptied the minibar, one sweet little bottle at a time. I tried to not think about the bill, which I most certainly would not be able to present to the museum for reimbursement. We began talking about subjects beyond my brother, which surprised me, since he was the only thing we’d ever had in common. Karolina told me about what she had learned in recent months: the art of sneaking into a movie theater in the afternoon lull, how to sleep so your pack won’t get stolen in the night, how to not sleep at all, how to bathe like a large bird in a fountain. I told her I was getting a divorce and that I was in love with my friend from the National Museum of Anthropology, and Karolina, her eyes glazed, gripped my arm and told me that life was short and uncertain and that I should tell him how I felt. I relayed that I had tried, with my unwelcome phone calls, and she shrugged and said, “Love is suffering.” I asked Karolina what she was going to do, how she was going to survive, and she hung her head and told me that she truly did not know. When I resolved to help her however I could, she looked up at me and said, “We’ll see.” At a certain point I pulled back the drapes, expecting a twilight scene, and was startled to find pitch dark.

  A little while later we were crawling around on the carpet, and Karolina went over to the room service plates, stacked high on a tray, and started dipping her fingertips in the little silver tins of ketchup. She held her hands up, so that I could see what she had done, then sucked the red from her skin, one finger at a time. I watched from the floor, mesmerized, and then Karolina was beside me, guiding my shoulders to the ground. She pressed her hands over my eyes, a blindfold made of hot skin. She pushed down hard, driving the heels of her hands into my cheekbones. Her fingers were sticky and smelled of sugar and tomatoes. I felt an immense pressure in my eye sockets.

  “What are you doing?” I said, trying to squirm away.

  “Goddamn,” Karolina said, pressing harder.

  This went on for another minute or so and then her hands flew back from my face and I was blinking up at the white ceiling, my mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow.

  “I’m tired,” Karolina said. I sat up and watched her shake out her hands.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We can sleep.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to sleep.”

  We collapsed back onto the beds, and I started babbling about the first time I ever flew on a plane. I was with my brother and my mother and we were going out to Arizona, to see my grandmother, whom I had never met and who was dying. This was when there used to be phones in the backs of the seats and, during the flight, our mother let us call from the air, even though it was very expensive, just in case we didn’t make it to Arizona in time. “Oh, my children!” my grandmother exclaimed when she answered, her voice small-sounding. When we told her where we were calling from—an airplane! forty thousand feet above the ground!—our grandmother made a whimpering noise and the line went silent. It wasn’t until we arrived at her home that we learned that she had died in the middle of the call. Her sister rushed out of the house in a fury and told us that our grandmother was a rural woman and a religious woman and she had thought it was the devil on the other end, filling her head with lies.

  I must have fallen asleep in the middle of telling the story or right after I finished. When I woke again, it was three in the morning and Karolina was leaning over me, shaking my arm and asking whether I could get her some toiletries from the front desk. The sash on her bathrobe had come loose and I could see the freckled tops of her breasts.

  I sat up slowly. I felt like I was still in a dream. “Toiletries?”

  “Some of those little toothpastes, those little soaps. Mouthwash would be good too. A hairbrush. A razor.”

  “Right now?” I squinted at the bedside clock and then at Karolina. My head was still clotted with booze, but her gaze was steady.

  “They won’t look at you the way they look at me. They know you belong here and they’ll give you whatever you want.”

  It was that last sentence that drove me from bed. I padded down the hallway and into the elevator, the dream state slowly lifting. I told the man behind the front desk that I had forgotten my toiletry bag at home, and Karolina was right: he gave me what I asked for and more. I carried a plastic sack of toiletries into the elevator and when I got to our room, I found the door ajar, Karolina gone.

  * * *

  My mother has been dead for almost ten years. Once her children were safely launched onto the shores of adulthood, she seemed to age in rapid motion. I don’t know much about my father; he left before I was born. As a young woman, I used to entertain fantasies of stumbling upon him somewhere—a teller at a bank, the man taking my order from behind a bar. My brother has always claimed he doesn’t remember our father either, that he was too young, though recently I’ve started to wonder whether he remembers more than he is willing to admit.

  At the age of sixteen, my brother entered into a yearlong phase where he recited monologues, ones he told me he had learned from dreams. He would stand before me in the living room, already tall for his age, and I would sit on the floor and listen. The weather of his monologues made it understood that I should not interrupt him or leave the room until he was finished, but sometimes I felt surly and bored. If I wandered away to pee or to seek out a different form of entertainment, my brother would follow me from room to room. He would barge in and if I locked him out, he would bellow through the door.

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

  They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore.

  I bet that’s how God hears the world: millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us!

  Our mother was a lapsed Catholic and sometimes spoke in vague terms about angels and demons—I’d thought that maybe my brother, at sixteen, had become possessed. It would take me years to realize his monologues had all come from movies, memorized in secret, a pastime he had kept hidden from me.

  Out of all the things I could tell you about my brother, this was the memory that surfaced as I walked the streets of Mexico City, looking for Karolina.

  * * *

  I wish I could say my search was born purely of altruism, but as it happened Karolina had stolen my wallet. When we entered the hotel room together, at an hour that felt impossibly far from where I now stood, I had placed it carefully in a bedside drawer. Once I realized she was gone, I opened that drawer right away—shamed to be driven by my worst suspicions, but driven all the same—and found the wallet missing.

  I cut across quiet streets. I detected none of the usual sounds—the sweeping, the roaring motorbikes, the canine toenails scratching at the concrete. I checked the benches, the bus stops. As I walked, I tried calling my husband, even though it was very late. What would he say if I told him I had found Karolina in Mexico City and we had spent the better part of a night together? He would be glad she was all right, I think—if sleeping on the streets could count as all right.

  He did not answer. I wondered whether he was alone or with someone else.

  I passed a small mountain of rubble, glinting under a streetlight. I passed a building missing its face.

  I ended up back in Parque México, on those serpentine paths. Now that I was paying attention I saw many other homeless people—people lying on benches under heavy, soiled quilts; under garbage bags and plastic rain ponchos. No Karolina. As I approached the bench where I had found her sleeping, I spotted a wallet on the lip of the seat. I ran over and snatched it up: the wallet was mine and it was empty. Cash, cards, driver’s license—all gone.

  I caught my breath outside the dirt ring of the dog park, my hands resting on the cool metal gate. At first, I thought the run was vacant, but then a German shepherd with a tennis ball in his mouth shot out from behind a tree, a young man in sunglasses chasing after h
im. The dog ran circles around the park and then raced back to his owner, reared up, and slapped his heavy paws onto the young man’s shoulders. They began to sway back and forth. What a pair! From the edge of the park, watching through a veil of shadow, it looked as though they were dancing.

  * * *

  I kept walking. I ended up in Hipódromo, on Calle Saltillo, which happened to be my friend’s street. I had been there once before, for lunch, the last time I was in town for a conference—and perhaps I had walked by his address several times on this trip, hoping for a glimpse of his wife.

  They lived in a two-story villa, painted blue with green trim, flowering vines curving over the doorway. I wasn’t far from the building that had collapsed and killed thirty-two people, but their street was quiet and pristine. I wondered why earthquakes, unlike most other natural disasters, weren’t given names. The villa was gated, with four tall windows facing the street, two on the first floor and two on the second. From the sidewalk I could see that the room I knew to be the bedroom was dark, but the second upstairs room, the one my friend used as an office, was, despite the late hour, still alight.

  I stooped down and gathered a handful of tiny pebbles. I pelted them at the lit-up window, one by one. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t want to scream for my friend like a madwoman.

  When my hand emptied, a woman in a white nightgown appeared in the window, spectral in the light’s warm glow. She was very thin, with long hair that flowed down her shoulders, and there was something odd about her posture. For a moment, I thought she was standing with the support of a cane, but then I realized she was connected to a portable oxygen tank, the translucent tubes snaking across her face and down the front of her body. The picture came into swift and terrible focus: my friend’s wife was very ill, likely awake because she was in too much pain to sleep. She had taken to roaming the house—slowly, dragging her oxygen tank behind her—to pass the hours.

  I heard voices. The light in the bedroom flashed on. It would have been in the best interest of my dignity for me to steal away from the scene like a thief, but I could not. The whole situation felt like a thing I needed to face. When my friend came to the window, he put his arms around his wife and both of them stared down at me. While I can only imagine they were looking out in horror, from where I stood they appeared serene and beatific, like something out of a Renaissance painting, so lovely I could almost forget that my friend’s wife might be dying and that he would probably never speak to me again. After a moment, they pulled shut the curtains and the room went dark, as they retreated deeper into their home, away from the fearsome thing that had emerged unbidden from the night.

  YOUR SECOND WIFE

  GIG ECONOMY

  The photograph arrives in a padded manila envelope, pressed between two sheets of cardboard. The picture is a headshot, with the blue-nothing background of a corporate portrait. The dead wife wears a starched white blouse and a black jacket. Gray irises like slivers of ice; a modest, toothless smile; tasteful gold studs in her earlobes. Her name is—was—Beth Butler, and she was killed in a hiking accident five weeks ago.

  As a grief freelancer, this is not the first time I have received such a photo, nor is it the first time the photo has been mailed with such care. The husbands (I have yet to be hired by a wife) contact me at a designated e-mail. I send them an online questionnaire and request a photograph be mailed to a P.O. box because I like to be able to hold the wives in my hands and, as my sister has pointed out many times before, I can’t be giving these grieving husbands my home address. Next I require three videos of the wives in their natural environments: delivering a work presentation or jogging along a river or carrying a birthday cake into a crowded, singing room. Then I need a week to prepare and then we meet. Between impersonating dead wives, I work as a part-time dog walker and a part-time landscaper and a part-time food delivery courier. What an unbelievably exhausting moment to be alive, in this era of the gig economy.

  THE OVERCOAT

  I never meant to get into this line of work, though I cannot deny that I have always enjoyed being other people. In college, I interviewed to be a wealthy woman’s personal assistant. Over lunch, she asked me if I knew the difference between tortuous and torturous, between adverse and averse. Once it was apparent that I did not, she told me that the ability to make these fine distinctions was a critical skill in a personal assistant and that I should not bother ordering dessert. It was late fall and the wealthy woman arrived wearing a magnificent fur coat, quarter-length and dyed lavender. When the woman went to the bathroom, she left her coat slung over the back of her chair and I walked out with it. I wore the lavender fur all through the winter and was transformed from a student who slept in the backs of lecture halls to one who made the dean’s list. Every time I took a test, I imagined being a young woman of great means, of waking each morning to find my future rolled out before me, free of obstacle and horizon.

  OLD PAL

  I discovered my gift for impersonating dead wives quite by accident. It was the year after college and I dreamed of attending architecture school because I wanted to build skyscrapers. Then my best friend’s wife died of a brain aneurysm and he did not leave his bed for a month. I was working part-time for a theater makeup artist and I brought in a photo of my best friend’s dead wife and asked for her help. Three hours later, I turned up at his front door in a frosted-blond wig and tinted contacts and a prosthetic chin. I had even broken into his garage and gotten some of her clothes out of storage: a linen dress, strappy sandals, a black cross-body purse.

  “Let’s get going,” I said when he answered the door. His clothes were rumpled, his breath rank. He was barefoot and his toenails had grown into small talons. “Or we’ll miss the movie.”

  We strolled arm in arm to the theater, as I knew he and his wife used to do every Sunday. After the matinee, we had a drink on the patio of a nearby restaurant, as was their custom, and I ordered her drink, an Old Pal, even though I can’t stand rye whiskey and so considered this flourish to be nothing less than an act of love.

  “Forget about skyscrapers,” my best friend said as I walked him home. “This right here is your calling.”

  Later, he told his grieving colleague about what I had done and then that colleague told a neighbor and then I had word of mouth and then I had cards for a business called YOUR SECOND WIFE. More photographs of dead wives came in the mail and suddenly I had four part-time jobs instead of three and was too busy to apply to architecture school; on the city streets I would gaze up at skyscrapers and wonder what had ever happened to the person who had wanted to build such great and terrible things.

  MARCO POLO

  Your Second Wife is two years old and my sister still thinks I’m a part-time prostitute. She lives in Australia and we communicate primarily through an app called Marco Polo. Most mornings, I wake to find a new video, usually filmed in her kitchen or in her bathroom, as she holds her toothbrush up like a saber. I hope you’re being careful, she tells me. I hope you’re using protection. Again and again I tell her: NO SEX OF ANY KIND is the first item on my contract and I only meet grieving husbands in public spaces. I once had to turn down a job because the husband told me his dead wife was agoraphobic and never left the house. I have binge-watched all the seasons of Law & Order: SVU, so I know what’s out there. I’ll give my sister this much, though: while I am not exchanging sex for money, my most lucrative asset has still turned out to be my body. After Your Second Wife hit the six-month mark, I felt awash in cash and treated myself to overdue dental work.

  AUSTRALIA

  Not long before I started Your Second Wife I visited my sister and her husband in Australia and had jet lag for twenty-seven days. One evening, I was sitting at their kitchen table reading Pawsitive, a book I had been directed to study if I wanted to continue my part-time job as a dog walker, while my sister and her husband cooked dinner. I kept getting distracted and looking out the window, to see if anything was happening in the alleyway be
low. I smelled chicken fat and balsamic. The clock ticked on the wall. The minute hand was five past the hour when I briefly became invisible. The window no longer held my reflection; I could not make out a body filling the chair. I picked up Pawsitive; in the glass pane the book levitated. I watched my sister and her husband stuff butter pats and rosemary twigs under the chicken skin, oblivious to the metaphysical marvel occurring in their home. I wondered if my condition was permanent and if so, if it could somehow become profitable. I was almost disappointed when the spell passed in less than a minute, like a fleeting headache, my reflection a pale flame in the window once more. My sister will tell you that this episode was merely a jet-lag-induced hallucination, but I believe it was a premonition, a sign.

  THE CLAREMONT KILLER

  On this morning’s video, my sister says that the police have finally apprehended the Claremont Killer, who stalked the streets of Perth in the nineties. The police have released footage that shows one of the victims outside a hotel, waiting for a taxi. She nods at a man lurking on the edge of the frame; the camera changes its view and when it switches back to the hotel entrance the young woman is gone. My sister says that if you freeze the video, you can see the profile of the killer’s face, sharp and bright, like the fin of a shark hunting a night ocean. Until his arrest, he was the president of the Perth Junior Athletics Club. Today is the day I am scheduled to meet Beth Butler’s husband and I know this is my sister’s way of telling me to be careful.

  PART 3

  Parts 1 and 2 of the online questionnaire are similar to what a person would find in an application for a mortgage, that is if lenders accepted applications from the deceased. Part 3 is where the husbands run into trouble. At this stage, sometimes one will tell me he can’t complete part 3 and the job is canceled. This is because part 3 forces the husbands to get into what they would have rather not known about their wives or to confront how little they understood their private worlds. What is the worst thing you ever suspected her of? When was the last time she burst into tears without explanation? What was her kink? Name all the ways she ever betrayed you. Comb through her remaining toiletries and send an itemized list. Did she use pads or tampons or a menstrual cup? What brand? How long did her cycles last? Did she ever bleed on the sheets? Experience has taught me that nothing makes the husbands more uneasy than being interrogated about the menstrual cycles of their wives.