Saint Peter’s Wolf Read online

  “You’re an interesting man, Dr. Byrd,” said Gneiss at last. “I’m glad we met.”

  It was that night, at Ocean Beach.

  Johanna and I took off our shoes, and tugged off our socks, alternately leaning on each other and hopping on one foot, laughing. Johanna’s stockings were diaphanous, nearly invisible oriflammes in the wind, mine black orlon flags the wind nearly tore from my hand. I was aware of our undressing, even in this undramatic, incomplete way. Her feet were slender in the light from the surf and from the stars, and I felt my own feet to be square, taking one lumbering step after another.

  I was becoming a master at forgetting what I did not want to consider. My conversation with Zinser that afternoon was forgotten. My interview with Gneiss was behind me. I was the most fortunate man in the world. And it was, in truth, fortune that I thanked, I who had never really believed in fate. It was Johanna who made it possible for me to forget. We had dined on ribs at Bull’s, but once again I did not have much of an appetite, and the merry crowd, beery tourists, well-tailored businessmen and politicians, had been too loud. Johanna and I had eyed each other happily, two people who felt they did not need the world.

  We carried our socks in our shoes, and this detail—that we carried our shoes in one hand, holding hands with the other—was important, as though we had unburdened ourselves of our lives and yet had to carry them with us. And when the surf broke around us we fled. Until at last it caught us. Or at least it caught me. At first only a sudsy burst, but then the foam soaked in, through my pants, and it was cold. A wave broke again, and there was the hiss and fizz of the foam around us, and that salt-and-iodine tang.

  I had brought Cherry here to Ocean Beach when we were dating, nearly three years past. I had even despised the word “dating,” but when I began to seriously court her I did not like the idea of myself as a “suitor” any better. It all sounded so outdated, so trite, so much what other men did, in other times. And yet here I was courting yet another woman, walking beside her, the surf shivering the air.

  When I kissed Johanna her lips were cold and salty. She had been that one woman whom I knew I would never hold in my arms, and yet we were lovers now. I felt cured of every bad thing that had ever happened.

  “It’s cold,” I said, holding her away from the wind. I did not mean to talk about the wind, but only to refer to the world. It was a way of saying: see how cold it is and how little we care?

  “It’s not so cold,” she said, because she understood me. It was windy, a chill, wet wind that soaked through us so that we would be wet simply by standing here much longer. But that was nothing.

  And then, I could not understand why, I said, “They are always finding bodies on the beach, washed up by the tide. Fishermen who got swept away near the Cliff House. People who fell in, or jumped, at Land’s End.” I imagined that she might think this the sort of creepy tale a man might tell a woman to make her snuggle closer. But my motive was more serious than that. I meant that we were on the very edge of a thrashing, thundering storm of water that took lives. And I meant that life was precious, and that we should not waste a single night.

  Again, she understood me. “Terrible things happen,” she said. “In my house,” she added, “we will build a fire.”

  I felt, as I put my arm around her, that I had known her a long time. She was like that woman men dream of sometimes, the woman they have never seen before, that nameless figure whom they love desperately. Upon waking they marvel that they have so much feeling for a person their dream life tricked into being for a few moments. I was set to guard myself, and her, against such an ill-considered infatuation, and yet with each step through the fine, cold sand I felt that it was hopeless. I was a man who had swallowed a drug and realized too late that it might kill him, or make him mad. I felt that strongly about her.

  I stopped her at the steps, just beyond the range of the streetlight. “Do you know how I feel?” I asked her.

  I thought, of course she could not know. And yet she looked up into my eyes and said, “Of course I do.”

  And I believe she did. I had lived long enough to learn doubt. People were difficult to trust. But I trusted her, and speaking in a broken voice as though making a confession, I said, “I’m not interested in eternity.” And added, “But there are little forevers—little, human-sized forevers.” I pictured them like baby clothes. We couldn’t wear the big clothes that the universe wore. We had to settle for something human, small, short-lived, like the tiny red overalls Stan bought for his children.

  “You think we could have a small forever.”

  “Like a child’s shoe.”

  We both laughed. But later, watching bubbles trail upward in a glass of champagne beside her fire, I nearly told her about my dream. When I parted my lips to tell her I could not speak. I sipped champagne, and did not bother to ask myself why it was so difficult to talk about a mere dream. I was not even puzzled by the flashing insistence in my mind that she must not, under any circumstances, know about the fangs.

  I wanted to tell her everything, every foolish thing about myself. And so I chattered. My life, though, seemed insipid to me, and I wanted her to tell me about her past, but as we talked I realized that Johanna’s reticence was more than simple reluctance to talk about herself. She was uncomfortable with something in her past.

  There were things I did not know about her.

  Belinda whined and yammered at the sliding door, and at last began to howl the way I had never heard a dog howl before. The sound broke upon me like sudden light, and I knocked over my champagne, the fizzy spill of it blotting into the carpet.

  “You silly dog,” said Johanna, letting her into the house. Belinda squirmed with pleasure, falling upon me, laving my face with her hot tongue.

  “Heavens!” said Johanna. “I’ve never seen her so happy!”

  At Butterfield’s the next afternoon, wandering the showroom, looking for something interesting in the auctioneer’s displays, I saw only chandeliers and the sort of sofa one’s mother never let one sit on while wearing tennis shoes. I was about to wander out again when I ran into an old psychiatrist friend, Dr. Page, and we chatted for a moment about the quantity of expensive junk glittering around us, and then he stepped forward to say in a low voice, “You have heard about Hewlett.”

  I knew at once that something bad had happened. No, I said, I had not heard.

  “A stroke. He’s still alive—” He stopped himself when he saw how hard the news had struck me. “He’s not in a hospital. He’s at home, in fact, looked after by his sister, but.…”

  Dr. Ashby! He had been my mentor, my teacher, my therapist—and he had nearly died, and was still near death. I could see it in Page’s eyes. He had that expression even psychiatrists reserve for discussing serious illness, a way of delivering the sad news and at the same time indicating that one is personally quite healthy.

  I was nearly too stunned to speak. “Can he see visitors?” I asked. The terra cotta floors, the showroom of prints, the elegant young men and women brushing by us with the sort of pleasant expressions assistants wear around the rich, all seemed suddenly vulgar.

  “Strokes are so hard to predict,” said Page, implying a world of mystery and also reminding me that he was, himself, a medical doctor.

  But, he added, he did think that Ashby was conscious.

  “Conscious! The wisest man I’ve ever met, and he’s left with—what? Does he know where he is? Can he talk?” I meant, perhaps selfishly, could he listen?

  The next morning I shifted and steered my way through the most grinding traffic, crossed the Bay Bridge, and when at last I reached Dr. Ashby’s house in Berkeley I ran to his front step. I should have bought flowers, but then Ashby had never entertained sentiment. Perhaps, though, this was a time for sentiment. I had simply called and his sister had said that I would be quite welcome, in a way that indicated that I would be barely welcome at all, and only for a few minutes.

  Eileen Ashby, Dr. Ashby’s sister, op
ened the door and smiled. She was a thin, quiet woman, just touched with gray. She wore an expression of such patience that she was unbeautiful. She had always attended her brother’s affairs, and I had never understood their relationship. He was several years older, and I saw, now, that she had always expected her brother to need her in this way, that she had always anticipated that her more robust and more gifted sibling would be leveled by illness. Perhaps her smile was the smile of a grieving victor.

  “For only a moment,” she said. She added, “He tires so.”

  I felt myself growing weak, following Eileen up the stairs. She slipped in ahead of me, and I stood on the carpeted landing, my hand on the oak banister, remembering how wise Dr. Ashby had always seemed, and how important he was to my way of looking at the world. I braced myself against the shock of seeing him stricken, and as I entered the room I was, indeed, shocked.

  The wiry, white-maned giant was a figure carved of soap, pale, unmoving. His eyes were closed, the lids like two bruises. He was an erased version of himself, and as if to compensate for his frailty I boomed, “I am so glad to see you, Dr. Ashby.” I nearly compounded my foolishness by telling him how well he looked, but he lifted a finger.

  “I am not deaf, Benjamin,” he said.

  I blinked tears of relief. Wise Dr. Ashby was still here, still himself. “I was so sorry when I heard,” I began, and stammered what one says at times like this, and meant every syllable. How I’d hurried to see him. How heartily I hoped for his recovery. At last Dr. Ashby lifted the same forefinger.

  He did not speak for a while, but his silence was commanding. At last he said, “One minute I was raking leaves. The next minute I was out.”

  His voice was thin, his face pinched, and I saw what a blow a stroke must be. Some essential girder of his mental and physical health had fallen away. It should not have shocked me so, but it did: he was mortal.

  I felt that I should say something healthful, even health-giving if I could, but to spare me he said, “I read your article before the stroke. Symbolic castration. It was very well done.”

  I was embarrassed. That he should have spent any of his health on something I wrote struck me as a waste. “I know you think castration as a primal fear is overrated.”

  The briefest wrinkle of a smile appeared, and for the first time he opened an eye and saw me. He closed it again, and said, “I think the penis is overrated. I am a pioneer in the field of sexual common sense.” We had argued happily over this. Freud’s Oedipal theory, Dr. Ashby had eloquently contended, was at heart a fear-of-castration theory. The boy did not want to commit the taboo not simply because it was forbidden, but because the father would cut off the offending member. The entire crux of psychoanalysis was, then, the meat cleaver, or its equivalent.

  Dr. Ashby had always explained, and lucidly, that castration could be survived, and that there were many losses—like the loss of a head—which were more severe. The penis was merely a symbolic self, and its loss was like the loss of a doll that was not merely a source of pleasure, but a magical representation of one’s ego. Dr. Ashby had always spoken in a cogent, involved way, so that one had never felt lost or found oneself thinking that the theories had little to do with the world of stock markets and freeways. His mind had been a wonder of life, like a favorite star.

  “I know,” I said, “that you don’t really agree with me.”

  The wrinkle again. “I’m proud of you.”

  I was so surprised at this, and so pleased, that I nearly wept. To keep from breaking completely I found myself looking around the room. There was a crucifix, dating, I guessed, from the sixteenth century, beside a Russian Orthodox Christ, perhaps nineteenth century, and a wooden Saint Peter, late medieval, and probably Florentine. It was perhaps a meter high, of worm-drilled oak. He shouldered his massive key like a gun.

  Another object caught me as I touched my sleeve to my eye, a small, dark figurine, a bronze perhaps a hand-width high. It was a female wolf, perhaps Sienese, probably fifteenth century, judging by the unnaturalistic snout, and the five stylized teats. I registered its characteristics as a mental habit. But I could not stop gazing at her.

  Look upon me, she seemed to say.

  You are one of mine.

  I stared as avidly as I had stood stunned as a teenager by a photograph of a naked woman. It was impossible, but she seemed to look into me, her lips curled back, her teats so full of milk they would have been agonizing.

  “One of my favorite pieces,” said Dr. Ashby, because, to my surprise, he had opened his eyes again.

  I felt that I had been discovered doing something nearly unholy; I could not guess why. I tried to explain away my interest, but Dr. Ashby was merely stimulated by my embarrassment. He had always had this power of guessing my obsessions. “The wolf is a worthy object of love,” he said.

  He closed his eyes, and spoke as though reading a faded text. “Rome was founded by wolfen sucklings.” He smiled, as though remembering the two babes. “And in Romania there is an interesting tradition. They say there that Saint Peter was jealous of God, and asked to have the power to create a beast of his own, one that was strong and wise as he was, although perhaps not as imbued with divinity as the other creatures, yet deserving the love of a saint. And so God decreed that Saint Peter could create an animal of his choosing, and Saint Peter created the wolf.”

  I could not respond.

  “I remember your dream, Benjamin. The dream you had as a child so many times. We never did quite get to the bottom of that, did we?”

  Tell him about the dream, I thought. Tell him that it has come back, and that it has changed. Tell him—he would find it fascinating, and you need to share it with someone.

  Even more, tell him about the fangs.

  As soon as I thought that I stood. Never. I must never tell anyone else about the fangs. Too many people knew already.

  I was amazed at myself. I was trembling, and I did not understand why.

  Dr. Ashby sensed my sudden movement, and found me with his eyes. He was about to speak when Eileen bustled into the room, adjusting the blanket that covered his lap. He lifted his hand to pat her arm and missed, and found it on a second try.

  “Thank you for visiting us,” she said.

  “Visit me again,” said Dr. Ashby, and his voice was even more dry than before. “And next time tell me what you’ve been doing.”

  I made myself chuckle. “Why? Does it look like I’ve been doing something peculiar?”

  Eileen took my arm, and her fingers were iron. “Please come again,” she said.

  Dr. Ashby could not manage even a faint smile. He waited for his strength to gather. Then he said, “There’s something different about you. Different, and very strange.”

  Fourteen

  Leaving Dr. Ashby, I was stung by both his poor health and what he had said. I let the car glide down Marin Avenue, the autumn-naked sycamores playing shadows over the car, and when I reached the traffic circle there was an accident.

  It was the sort of occurrence one would do anything to avoid seeing. A boy about Carliss’s age was crossing the street, carrying a pack in one hand, and he stopped to let a speeding pickup truck go by, and it all happened as though choreographed in exactly this way.

  The truck brushed him. Just that—a nudge as it went by, green and mud-spattered. And my first thought was: surely he’s not hurt. It had all looked so easy, so harmless. The boy turned in midstreet, gazing about him as though he had lost something essential, but still holding his pack in one hand. And nothing else seemed to move.

  There was nothing but the boy, and he was fine, turning back to see where he had come from. And then it was plain that he was swiveling on one leg, the single, riveted leg swiveling under him nauseatingly, planted in the asphalt. The boy danced around and around and the black puddle expanded around his foot.

  The boy collapsed, and through my rolled-up windows came his cry, like a thin, golden wire, a sound I could actually feel. I lurched my car to t
he curb, and flung myself toward him, but there was already a small crowd, and someone running for help.

  A fire truck rumbled, its siren swelling, but it did not seem to grow any closer. What had appeared black was, when I glanced down at it, impossible vermilion.

  Blood. So much of it, blue where it reflected the sky. I turned away. So many terrible things can happen, I told myself. Surely the boy would recover. The fire engine was so close that the grind of its engine was as loud as its siren.

  And then I crouched on the sidewalk, actually fell to my knees, and breathed deeply through my nostrils. I felt something that stunned me. A response that shocked me, and yet it was so vivid it captured me, and I could do nothing but what I did. For the first time in my life I actually smelled blood. I drank in the delicious fragrance.

  I must have noticed the smell before, but I had never savored it as I did now. It was a fragrance far more profound than the smell of the most delicious beef. It was the smell of food, this blood, and what made it hard for me to rise to my feet was the realization that my response to the accident, shock and compassion aside, was amazing and foreign to anything I had felt in such a circumstance before.

  I was suddenly hungry.

  Forget about it, I told myself. Forget about it, and make it through the afternoon.

  It was an elegant lounge on Van Ness, all ferns and polished brass. Stan and I had agreed on it, and then regretted our decision as soon as we sat down. Stan had wanted a beer, and I had wanted a soda of some kind. For some reason I did not feel like drinking alcohol these days. We had hoped for a simple bar. Instead we had a waiter in a tuxedo, made sporting with a bright red bowtie. Chamber music, a piece I recognized, a string quartet by Ravel, worked on our moods as we both picked up the napkins, read the matchbook, and generally doubted that we would be comfortable here. From the corner of my eye I saw the cellist’s elbow, sawing back and forth.