Hunger of the Wolf (21 page)

Past Niggonipa, Leo roused himself from his twisted car-nap for a Double-Double at Tim Hortons, which he sipped the way a tourist to Iran might sip sekanjabin, sampling local color.

“The Wylies drove up here every month?” he asked when we sat down in the car.

“They flew. And not every month.”

“There's an airport in North Lake?” He was just beginning to recognize the foreignness of his situation. Border control in Calgary had seemed to him like an amusing Old World ritual. Soon I would tell him that the print edition of
The New York Times
wasn't available here, and he wouldn't believe me.

“I remember their floatplane when I was a kid,” I answered.

“Your little town must mean a lot to them. It must have cost a fortune to get here. And those people are cheap.”

At that irrelevant moment, I remembered Leo's engagement party, half of our youth ago. At least I think it was his engagement party; there couldn't have been that many parties between the time he met Kate and the birth of Sigma. Leo had not yet acclimatized to the rarified air of big money then and, as soon as I arrived at the mansion in Connecticut that Kate's cousin had volunteered for the occasion, he steered me down to the cellar. The musty cavern was full of French
premier crus
from the sixties and seventies. Thousands of bottles, and many thousands of dollars a bottle, and all of it, every last dusty bottle, spoiled. The ignorant sons had forgotten about their father's burgundies and Bordeaux, hadn't regulated the temperature, so the wine had dissolved into itself. We picked out random bottles—a 1968 Margaux comes to mind—and the liquid only rolled to the three-quarter measure.

Leo and I must have stood in that amazing underworld of gorgeous detritus for fifteen minutes while the party above us fizzed.

*  *  *

North Lake will always be haunted to me, and not just by my father, who stares up from the skeletal October aspens, and not just by the Wylies either. North Lake is haunted by the former me, hick me. Leo could see as well as I could the cheap prettiness of the houses, the abandoned lumberyard with its dinosaur rust, the big lawns, scrupulously raked and edged, the swings in the antiquated schoolyard making forlorn perpetual pendulums. I remember, when I briefly studied aesthetic philosophy in school, wondering why the professors cared about the beautiful and the sublime. I grew up among the pretty and the cute. Porcelain angels behind parlor cabinet glass. Gilt chickadees suctioned to kitchen windows. Barbie dolls with knitted pink ball gowns to cover the spare toilet roll. For Leo, all this business was the surface of Mars.

My mother was standing at the door as we arrived. She suits the wilderness on the edge of town. With my father's pension and the few scraps of savings, she lives on next to nothing. She shovels her own roof. She makes stock from the saved bones of her dinners. She is a real person. I don't know if I've met another. She kissed Leo on both cheeks; she must have heard that they do it that way in New York.

“Dinner's ready,” she said as I lifted the bags out of the trunk. “And I've given your big-city friend the guest room.”

“It's beautiful here,” Leo said, ignoring the offhand remark about his urbanity.

My mother peered apologetically at the landscape, the sparse aspens
in the far and lonely fields darkening. “It's beautiful in the mornings in June,” she said.

In the kitchen of my claustrophobic youth, with its wildwood flower wallpaper and its photographs of a dozen ancestors I couldn't name standing stock upright in their oblivion, at the wooden table on which my father relished his final meals, we ate steak and potatoes the way I like them, with canned peas. The canned peas made Leo a true anthropologist. Greeks cannot eat tinned food. They can force it down their throats but they can't eat it. We talked about the drive up, and about Leo's job, and about the fishing around North Lake, and about Leo's family, and about Sigma, and about how profoundly men had changed in the arena of child-rearing over the past twenty years, and we didn't talk about my divorce or the absence of offspring. Leo and my mother together: It oddly worked, like a pale blue suit with an orange shirt. I interrupted their conversation about what constitutes a really good butcher. “Leo here knows the Wylies,” I said.

“A bit,” Leo demurred.

My mother smiled. The local connection. “They used to live over a little ways.”

“Did Poppy ever live there?” I asked. “She's the daughter.”

“The Oriental one,” my mother said. The word stung my twenty-first-century propriety like a hornet. “Never. I've never seen her. The ladies only stayed up here a few times. It was mostly the men.”

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Before you were born.”

“Mom,” I said. “We're gossiping here. We want to know the details.”

“I know, dear. That's why I'm holding back. Isn't that the secret of storytelling?”

My clever mother coaxed a tinfoil laugh out of Leo. Shared mockery was a bond he comprehended. “Let your mom tell the story in her own way.” At that moment, I realized Leo had also come to Alberta for the Wylies, not the fish, not for me. Why?

“It's not too much of a story,” said my mom. “It's more of a scenario. It was always the plane landing. Do you remember that, son?”

“I do. Circling down.” Like a maple seed, a half helix. I am from irrelevance.

“Nobody knew the Wylies,” she said. “They never brought friends with them. We could catch little hints, bits and pieces.”

“What did you see, Mom?”

“Me specifically? I went over one afternoon with your dad. He wanted to know if they still needed yard work. The men. It was Dale and George. They were half naked. Scared, too. Though how anyone could be scared of your father . . .”

“I guess they came here for the privacy,” Leo said. I noted that he had finished his canned peas, a gesture of true friendship.

“It must be more, I think. They're all buried here. All the men anyway. Always a hearse from Edmonton. All three of them. And Americans, too.”

“How odd,” Leo said. He was speaking differently around my mom, having already, in the course of an hour, adapted to a new social reality.

“We all thought so.”

Leo placed his knife and fork accurately on the plate. “I've been to the family tomb in Champlain. Looks like an oversized birthday cake. That's where all the women are buried.”

Why would he have ever visited Champlain? Why would anyone visit Champlain?

“And the men are all buried out back in the dirt without so much
as a marker,” my mother added, shoveling a mouthful of potatoes into her pursed mouth like the delicate peasant she is. Like I am.

For dessert, Saskatoon berry pie—a true prairie delicacy.

*  *  *

The next morning Leo and I fished one of the lakes of the Wylie property, right next to their cottage. The lake is small but livid with trout, currents of snapping flesh coursing and charging within the clarity of the water and the labyrinths of the low, mossy stones. Simple trout, to me, is the most delicious fish in the world—a flavor without ostentation or resistance.

Leo asked, “Are you taking me to where they found him?”

“That's about two hours north,” I said.

“You mean there's north of here?”

Leo did not know how to cast a line, so I had to teach him the rollicking roll, the release and fade, a gesture with its own countrified pimpish swagger. The half hour of fishing was ribald, ridiculous. We caught seven two-footers as easily as casting. Leo was cheerfully amazed by the sportingness but he left the scaling and gutting to me. Leo has not traveled among the wealthy long enough to realize that true aristocrats relish menial tasks so long as they're completed in the wild. Prince Harry scales and guts the trout he catches.

Even though the land is all regrowth, replanted from clear-cut, the Wylie territory is the only place in the world where I sense the original meaning of wilderness. The place is an affront to human dignity. The longer I spend away from Alberta, the more Albertan I feel myself becoming. It's as if I gather all the terrors and incomprehensions I can muster in the larger world, in the quiet unspoken corners of other people's observed lives, private and public, and carry them, in the buckets of
my eyes, to the terrors and incomprehensions of the trees and the rocks and the wolves and the eternal cold. I bring my own wilderness with me wherever I go. Like the Wylies.

While I was threading the fish by their gills through a branch I looked up and Leo was gone. Through the passage in the trees, I could see him sneaking into the Wylies' cottage. I found out later from my mother that they were no longer paying for its upkeep. I had broken in many times myself. Still, I raced to their door with outrage scouring my throat. By the time I arrived, panting, I could tell he had taken something. Later, I discovered it was a bird book from which I had already removed the important document. There is always the chance he filched something else, I suppose. Later, when I scoured the place myself, I found a trove of letters from the London years and Ben's diary from Hamilton College in a cardboard box under scattered tennis rackets.

“Why?” I asked him.

He smiled an art dealer smile. “Just wanted to see how the other half lives,” he said.

“You are the other half.”

He shrugged like a teenager caught smoking. “You're just as curious,” he said. “You've been asking about Poppy and Ben all weekend. You've been asking your mom for gossip.”

“There's a difference between gossip and breaking and entering,” I said.

“These are the Wylies,” he said. “What can you possibly take from them that would matter?”

He breezed past me. With a quick turn of my eyes, I checked. In the corner by the window, the Paul Klee received the declining light with grace. My heart full of blood cooled at its crimson squares, its blazing civilization. At least
The Wolf
was safe.

*  *  *

I was in bed with my ex-wife several weeks later when I learned that Leo had fled the groomed lawns and shoveled walks of provincial morality for the wide, empty beaches of limitless globalized cash. He had run off with Poppy.

My ex-wife and I often slept together after the catch-up lunches we insisted on putting ourselves through whenever she came to New York on business. I would order a salad to show I was taking care of myself. She would order chocolate mousse to demonstrate the daring will-to-pleasure in her new life, knowing that I knew that a woman in her late thirties who eats chocolate mousse in public at lunch is not lacking for the various intrusions of men. The loves and despairs and appeals and abjections in our conversations were a gooey palimpsest of crisscrossing questions: How did we ever get married? How did we ever separate? But we always followed the grotesque hour of mangled, throat-constricting chatter with a splurged hour of illicit and informed sex.

It was November. I remember the rotten cardboard gray of the city skies and the bare branches of the pear tree that girded the view from the hotel bed. The slope of her nudity brushed along me—the beauty of naked women after the business of copulation is lovely, like the smell of old paper, a loveliness to be inhaled, held in the lungs. She adjusted her duchess neck onto my shoulder.

“I'm only seeing guys in their fifties from here on,” she said blithely.

“Less demanding?” I guessed.

“They've given up. If you have an ass, and they can touch it, that's all they ask. Plus he's made partner. He just travels, collects art. African art, but still.”

My wife was cheating with me. Brilliant. The hard bridge of the
back of her head readjusted against my shoulder, and I knew she was comparing its comfort with the comfort of the partner's. By the weather passing across her face, lips curling, the moist front massing behind her eyes, I followed the pattern of her thought down to its source, the primordial sadness in her cosmopolitan eyes: poor young men or rich old men. She could have one or the other. Cake or its eating. Then her eyes bristled with a wave of cruelty and I no longer knew what she was thinking.

“You're lucky,” she said finally. “Being a single man in your late thirties is like being a woman in her early twenties. Everything's in your favor. For once, you're attractive because of your age.”

“Who wants to be attractive because of a number?” I asked.

“Who wants anything they have?”

She had always complained that I could never enjoy what I had, that once I possessed anything, the possession lost all value in my eyes, and the familiarity of the criticism diminished the ache in my heart.

Then she shattered the familiar with a dropped elbow.

“Your pal Leo didn't want what he had either,” she said. “He's following my general plan. You should join us. We'll all screw people twenty years older than us for the money, and then when we have the money we'll all screw people twenty years younger than us.”

“What do you mean about Leo?”

Then she told me. Her surprise was genuine. Putting the knives back into the drawer she had accidentally stuck a blade into my neck. As she left, her quick and angry kiss, a droplet condensed from the fine mist of our lust and self-loathing, sat on my cheek, an inconsolable tear-pearl. She left me in her hotel room with the flat gray fugitive sky cackling with black lightning branches. I lay there alone with all the times I've been abandoned running through my veins like a seventh
whisky, although Leo's departure from his wife, I knew even then, was by no means unfavorable to me.

I couldn't stop myself from imagining where Leo must be standing, in torpid privacy, on some lugubrious sheltered beach, inspecting the unowned stars winking over the fished-out sea, no doubt wondering with his unfathomable ambition where was higher, what was next. He had floated away, from me and from everyone. Leo had floated up among the careless gods.