Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 6
He was afraid.
That night I had the dream again.
The path was empty, and I turned at the sound of steps padding in the darkness behind me.
When I turned the moonlight glittered off eyes, off fangs. And I was not afraid of the beast. I waited as though for an old friend.
I held out my hand and called to it, called with the voice of a man, my own adult voice. Come. Come soon. I have waited so long.
When I woke I stared into the dark. Cherry had moved to one of the guest bedrooms and so I was entirely alone. I sat up and gathered the blankets around me.
The dream had changed since my childhood. It was no longer a nightmare.
Now, the beast was nearly here, and I was glad.
Part Two
Nine
Stan Houseman could not hide or disguise a feeling. His freckled complexion turned deep red with any emotion whatsoever, and his red hair seemed to expand around his head with happiness, anger, or any of the emotional notes and quarter notes in between.
When he saw me step into his office with a book in a plastic ziplock bag he went pale.
“What happened now?” he groaned.
“A little damage to one of my books.”
“Jesus, Ben, I don’t even know if I can stand to see it.” It was as though he were about to have a wound stitched without anesthesia. “I can’t even bear to look. The Rubens was bad enough.…”
I unfastened the bag, and coaxed the leather volume onto the work table.
He groaned. “Oh no. What a crime. What a terrible crime.”
“Can you fix it?”
“It’s blood. You don’t have to tell me. I can tell. It hurts my gut to see this. What a mess.”
“But you can fix it?”
“Sooner or later you’re going to come in with a bucket of ashes and charred goop and expect me to turn it into a da Vinci. This I can fix, barely.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’ll do a dry mechanical cleaning. Some of it will come off then—it’s still new. Then we’ll give it an ammoniacal cleaning, reduce the stain with a little C-ten. And look here—someone used an acid paper bookmark and left in there for ten or twenty years. See how it burned the page? I’ll use a magnesium solution to deacidify the page, dry it between blotters. It’ll look good. Better than before, actually.”
“It’s a relief to hear you say it. And I think Carliss’ll be relieved, too.”
“I had a feeling this was his work. I recognized his brushstroke.”
“You’ll never guess what he did.”
“You sound almost proud.”
“Hardly.”
Stan bent to the page. I offered him my jeweler’s loupe, the small, powerful magnifying glass I often carried. Stan reached to adjust a lamp. “Some sort of animal. Not Grendel’s mother—the blood’s not green. Don’t laugh. I’ll start real general first. A hairy animal. I see a hair. A gray hair. A rat. A small rat. One of the Pacific Heights rats. Not the superheavyweights we have down in the Mission.”
“It took you about ten seconds. I’ll buy you lunch.”
“I have a million things to do,” said Stan, but he came with me. His fourth-floor lab, among the galleries of Sutter Street, was established as the best art-restoration center on the west coast. Stan’s lab could also establish the provenance of an unfamiliar item, anything from a fossil shark’s tooth to a Singapore opium pipe. They were careful and shrewd, but most important, for me, they cared deeply about what they did, as though the works of paper and linen were living, injured creatures.
Stan was full of life, and I don’t mean that in the sense that he was lively. He was. But he was a giver and maintainer of energy, like a flourishing tree that sustained not only branches and apricots but also jays and sparrows, mice and even ants, all without losing a leaf.
He had three children with his wife, Lana, who was finishing up a law degree. They also had an adopted child, and were buying land in Mendocino where they could all, as he put it, “play in the dirt.” They owned a large ugly rambling house in the Mission which was always sprouting a new skylight or an extra workroom. Photos of his children spilled onto the table as we talked. A smiling preteenager with red hair, a dark-haired boy in glasses, Lana, grinning, a good-sized woman with a pair of gardening shears. His days creaked healthily with a bumper crop of life, as though Stan and Lana were in the process of peopling the world with a brighter, more energetic sort of human.
He had spent all day the day before looking for paper to match a hole in a drawing by an obscure New England artist, a wealthy amateur who had upon his death become famous, leading many art owners to regret their neglect of his work. “This one not only had foxing all over it, so it had more freckles than I do, it also had a nice hole about the size of a navel right underneath the three fishing boats. It looked suspiciously like a bullet hole, but I was afraid to ask.
“So I needed a span of paper about the diameter of an olive. I looked at hundreds of books from fine presses, and turned thousands of pages of fine paper. At last, in that rare books place on Franklin, I found a three-hundred-dollar book of poems printed on laid paper. I bought the book, and made a paring of one page, and now we have an only very slightly wounded book, and a graft for my “Harbor with Three Boats.”
Stan, like many craftsmen, liked to brag about his work, in a subtle way, with a light touch. He wanted to be appreciated. In the early years of our relationship I had misunderstood, thinking he wanted to show how difficult his job was, or to justify his fees. But I knew better now. He worked largely alone, with a handful of assistants laboring in workrooms and answering his phone. It was quiet work, in solitude, and he wanted a little applause now and then.
I was about to say something admiring, but Stan bent over his cup of coffee and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Is it so obvious?”
“There’s something wrong. I can tell.”
“I can’t keep a secret from you.”
“Domestic problems,” he said. “Because little Carliss has been revising your collection.”
“Partly that. Cherry’s leaving me.”
I regretted telling him, his expression was so pained. He cared so much about people, about life, that it was easy to hurt him. “That’s awful, Ben. I’m sorry.”
We were silent then, staring away from each other, each absorbing what I had said. Then I leaned forward. “But that’s not really why I came to see you. And not only because of the encyclopedia, either. There’s something else. A treasure.”
Curiosity made him glow. “Tell me about it.”
“Something I brought with me. I want you to look at it.”
He rubbed his hands together. I always brought him something a little bit unusual, a Syrian vase, a Holbein autograph. “I can hardly wait. Where is it?”
“I have it here, with me.” I touched my jacket pocket where it hid, heavy as a gun.
I was reluctant to bring it into this healthy light, men and women eating salads, stirring sugar into their coffee. I would have mentioned it upstairs, but as I began to do so I had found myself reluctant to talk about it. Even now I wanted to change the subject, to put off showing it to Stan. I could not entirely understand why.
“What is it? Where did you get it?”
“It’s not like anything else I’ve ever shown you. I need you to do some work on its background. I need more information.” I was stalling now. “I got it from Zinser.”
“No kidding! It must be very interesting. Tell me.”
It wasn’t like me to drop a name, and we both knew that I had never dealt with the famous collector before. I put my hand to the coat pocket, and it could not take the box from its hiding place. It wanted to stay where it was.
Stan thought he understood. “Okay, we’ll go up to my office.” He nearly winked. He thought I had an artifact of unusual value and that I didn’t want to expose it here before all these lunch-eating potential thieves.
I welcome
d Stan’s discretion, but I felt that I was deceiving him. We chatted about mutual acquaintances in the elevator, and paused to admire the work an assistant had begun on the rat blood, and then Stan ushered me into his office, and shut the door.
He tugged down a hinged lamp, and snapped it on. He cleared a few invoices from his otherwise empty desk. “So let’s see what you have.”
My hand would not move. I forced it this time, and withdrew the heavy, dark box, feeling the vibration from within the box, from the inner life of the darkness where the thing reflected nothing, only the dark around it. When I tilted the box, setting it down on the bare desktop, it felt as though there were a gyroscope inside it. Humming, and keeping the box oriented toward some unguessable pole.
Stan’s eyebrows lifted for a moment as he observed my caution, my reluctance to open the box. His lips were parted. He focused on nothing but the dark cube, and my trembling fingers.
I worked the hasp, and the box sprang open.
Stan took a step back. “Jesus!”
The bright light sang off the silverwork, and shone from the fangs themselves. Again, I had not been able to anticipate how magnificent they were. The full set of teeth, taken from some tremendous animal, gleamed under the light.
“What are they?” I asked hoarsely.
Stan would not take the step that would bring him back to the desk. “Where on earth did you get those?”
“I told you. I got them from Zinser.”
He made a gesture. “Close it. Please.”
I was shocked at his reaction, but I reached into the warm pool of illumination and closed the box. Immediately a constellation of light I had barely noticed, a reflection on the wall, vanished.
Stan seemed to be trembling. He stepped toward the light, now, and leaned on his desk. “What did Zinser say about them?”
“Not much. He’s having his people find out more about them.”
Stan nodded. “I bet he was glad to get rid of them.”
“Why? What are they?”
“You tell me.”
“You’re usually more forthcoming than this, Stan.”
“They are some kind of teeth.”
“In some kind of silver. I see that. But what are they, more specifically?” I plucked the box from the desk, and returned it to my pocket, where the humming seemed to settle into my ribs, into my heart.
Stan was relieved to have them completely out of his sight. He shook his head and leaned against a filing cabinet. “The teeth of some kind of carnivore,” he said.
“A dog.”
He shook off the suggestion. “A dog’s teeth aren’t that big.”
I remembered Belinda’s bared fangs. “A dog’s teeth can be pretty impressive.”
He ran a finger over his lips.
“I have a better guess,” I said.
The word I had in mind had a good ring to it. I had a deep vision, for a heartbeat or two, of night, of dark, of the cool ground beneath my feet.
“It could be,” I said quietly, “a wolf.”
The word was a musical note in my bones. Wolf. I waited for his response, but he said nothing at all, and simply avoided my eyes.
“At least we’re both guessing that they belong to some member of the canine family, right?”
“Some very large member,” he said. Then he ran his hand through his shaggy hair and laughed. It was not a hearty laugh. “Get them out of here, Ben. Please. Take them away.”
“I was hoping you could give me some sort of help in finding out.…”
“I’ll do some digging. Let me think for a while. I’ll come up with something.”
“Don’t you want to take a photograph, or have someone do a sketch, or measure or weigh them?” I was a little miffed. I was willing to pay for his professional services. What was wrong with him?
“I don’t have to. I won’t forget what they look like.”
“Stan, for all I know they aren’t real teeth at all.”
“They’re real.”
“You know something you aren’t telling me.”
“No, I don’t, Ben. Honestly. It’s just a gut feeling I have. If I were you, I’d get rid of them.”
“Take a picture of them, Stan. Weigh them. Test them. I want to know what they are, what they’re made of, everything you can tell me. I don’t want your first impressions, off the top of your head. I want information. Facts.”
Stan tried to laugh. “I’ll take some pictures, then, and run a few tests, get out the calipers, that sort of thing.”
“Good.”
“You stay around, though. It’ll just take a few minutes. I can work off the pix and the measurements. I really don’t want to be responsible for them if you leave them here.”
I smiled, partly to Stan, partly to myself. So Stan did not want to be alone with them. That was fine with me. I did not want to leave them.
I wanted them with me, always.
Ten
One of the things Carliss had slipped into the trash can was a yellow plastic baseball bat. The sight of that bat, which was split and permanently bent from a trauma at some point in its history—perhaps an encounter with a real baseball—touched me deeply. Carliss was about to leave my life.
I found him on the floor of his closet, gathering small plastic figures. They were soldiers, I thought, although outfitted in what looked like spacesuits. I helped him drop these warriors into a grocery bag, and said, “I’ll miss you.”
His reaction to this was solemn. He did not meet my eyes, but he said, “I know.”
His words stopped me. When I could speak, I continued, “I’ll come see you some time.” I meant this to be true, and yet I knew that Carliss would quite possibly find a visit from me troublesome. He would suppose that I was trying to win Cherry back by attracting his affection.
“Okay,” he said, diplomatically.
“We never got to know each other.”
A shrug, but not a dismissive shrug. He managed to make it kind: these things happen.
I put my hand on his shoulder, and felt how small he still was, how slight his skeleton, how far from being adult. A child, I realized, is a treasure. I had missed my chance to know him. His boyhood would be finished, soon. He was already on his way to becoming a consumer, which is what most adults gradually become. He would be another human being with a bank account and favorite products. He would think of happiness as the power to make unlimited purchases. He was slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.
These plastic figures were not human, I saw, but fantasy creatures, warrior animals of some sort. “You’re a great kid,” I said, and found myself so moved I was unable to say anything more. What a fool I had been. I should have shared my life with this boy.
When the change comes, it can come very quickly.
Our life had become a list, and the list was now all checked off. Only once was there a sign of emotion from Cherry, when the pen she was using to add and subtract things from the list was, for a moment, lost.
Cherry and Carliss left me on a Saturday morning. A Bekins van rumbled up to the curb, and Cherry watched them load her boxes into the great, dark emptiness. We did not bicker over what she would take because, realizing how unfair and irrational she had always been, she was careful to be unnaturally civilized.
I was even proud of this. We are being entirely rational, I thought. I would, I believed, always like something about Cherry. She baffled me, troubled me, and even still delighted me as she marched from room to room directing the two overweight men to take up boxes which they could easily have discovered for themselves. But my affection now had a frame around it, a certain detachment. She would no longer partake of my daily life. I was like someone who had given up drinking Scotch—the pleasure now was a part of the past.
Besides, now I had Johanna. This was the thought I allowed myself to articulate to myself. There was another thought that moved me as well, but which I kept half-secret from my consciousness: now I had the fangs.
But I didn’t. I was surprised at the pain I felt as they drove away in Cherry’s Mercedes, following the van that would take them to Orr’s house in the Marina, where they would all embark on their new lives, like handsome, healthy pilgrims with too much money.
Carliss had the sense—or the courage—to look back at me. He lifted his hand, his fingers spread, a gesture that meant, universally, both hail and farewell.
My own arm lifted, and then dropped. I took a deep breath. Here he is, I thought, the rational man, about to continue his upward climb through life.
I had taken to phoning Johanna in the evenings. The stated purpose was always to ask after Belinda’s health. Belinda was something of a medical wonder, and a mere three weeks after the accident she was limping about, and even managing to chew a tossed tennis ball or two. She no longer needed the chalky yellow pills, and as Belinda’s health increased so did Johanna’s apparent confidence in me, as though she began to associate me not with the accident, but with the recovery.
The evening after Cherry left me I went to a book signing on Polk Street. The gathering celebrated the publication of a book of French criticism which Johanna had translated. There was the essayist, a beaky man with tufts of black hair in ears and nostrils, and an elegant raw silk suit. I was jealous of him at once, and let his bubbling French run through me half-understood, while I gripped my plastic glass of Chardonnay and tried to make out what Johanna’s French ripostes to him might mean.
My college French could not keep up with her, and whenever she laughed I was so dazzled by the sound that even my English vocabulary evaporated. But as the crowd thinned, and the bookstore reversed its OPEN sign, the silken Frenchman pecked her on the cheek, held both her hands like someone about to begin a childish dance, and then vanished with a tumble of French people who had been lingering near the cinema shelves.