Saint Peter’s Wolf (15 page)

This was a gush of volubility from Laurel, caused by Johanna's presence. Johanna was without question both attractive and not my wife. Mr. Laurel took off his cap for a moment at the sight of her, and then looked away like a peasant before a czarina.

“It is so beautiful here,” said Johanna, her accent seeming suddenly exotic. She meant to compliment Mr. Laurel, whom I had introduced as “the man in charge here,” but it must have sounded to him as though she were pretending that the sugar pines and the black lake were all his doing. He grinned, but looked away both charmed and embarrassed, although I knew that in a few minutes his embarrassment would turn to injured dignity. He would assume, quite incorrectly, that she was making fun of him. I had to think of some way to ease him, and so I asked him, “Do we still have that problem with mice?”

“No more,” he said. “I put out poison.”

I felt the pleasant expression freeze on my face. I cleared my throat. “Mr. Laurel is a master of such matters. Mice, raccoons, snakes. He fished a bat out of the water tank here when I was a boy.”

Mr. Laurel liked this—a man who could kill. Yes, he allowed, we had this old disused cistern. “Kept it full in the summers against fire danger, don't you know. And one day little Ben came running all the way to my cabin—it's four miles—to say a huge bat was drowning in the water.”

I chuckled, too, and Johanna wore just the right expression, smiling, curious, polite, her cheeks flushed with the chill. I had discovered the bat the day before, and had reported it at my leisure the next day, at my father's suggestion. Bats did not interest my father. I had ridden my bicycle, and if I had seemed out of breath it was the same high altitude that now made my pulse hammer and made Mr. Laurel, friendly, avuncular, hard-working man that he was, seem like a yellow-toothed killer.

“Come on inside,” I said. “Have a cup of coffee.”

I wanted to think that it was like old times, having Mr. Laurel here drinking out of a big mug, stirring yet another spoonful of sugar into his coffee. Stored sugar turned to stone here, and required stirring before its pebbles dissolved. But Mr. Laurel, who had always seemed sure-handed and gentle, looked evil to me now. He was not a different man, I told myself. I was the one who had changed. Surely Johanna was enjoying her conversation with him.

“They found it in the midst of Desolation Wilderness, a hike of an hour or two from Fallen Leaf Lake. A bloody mountain of skin and guts.” He laughed. “Alive with flies.”

I had not been listening. I dug a gravel of sugar from the bowl.

“A bear.” Mr. Laurel smiled. “A rogue male black bear.”

“I feel so sorry for a bear like that. They have a right to live here,” said Johanna. “We are the trespassers. Listen to me. I sound so shrill. But I believe this. We have too much contempt for animals.”

She had that way of being serious, tremendously serious, and yet so gentle it was like music. Even Laurel, who would have fried a squashed squirrel from the road, had to agree. “You got that right. We sure are the trespassers,” he said.

When he was gone she took my hand and asked me if the lake was too cold for swimming even in the summer. I acknowledged that it was always cold. “You can feel your bones ache after five minutes,” I said.

Only later did I begin to consider that she was creating small talk, idle conversation, to avoid sharing something she felt she had to tell me. It was a secret, I sensed. Something about her past. At last I was going to begin to know her well.

That night, before the fire, a fire so bright and hot we had to lie down in a distant part of the room, we made love, and I saw how all art was nothing compared with this sort of beauty. Her pubic hair was soft, and so fair it was like spun silk, pale, nearly colorless, her labia so pink I could see how she was all one creature, tongue, palate, and her other, nether lips, all interconnected, a person more entire and self-possessed than any I had ever known.

When she spoke my name it was like being blessed, praised, forgiven.

Seventeen

The next morning I half woke and felt the space in the bed beside me. Then I sat up, wide-eyed.

She was gone.

There was the great breathy hush of pines from the outside. The massive, spacious timber retreat was suddenly too empty. The cold was biting, my bare feet slapping the timber floor.

I dragged on the heavy wool bathrobe that I always left hanging in the closet here, its collar permanently deformed by the hook. My thoughts were a tangle of I-told-you-so's. I had no reason to expect a woman like that to be interested in me for any length of time.

She had better things to do than to spend a weekend in this bunker of nostalgia. She had gone for a walk, or, more likely borrowed the car to drive to Tahoe City, Truckee, home. She had fled.

I could not even lift my voice to call out. She was not here.

Perhaps—but surely this was impossible—I had experienced one of my dreams. Was it possible? I could not conceive the thought.

Had I hurt her? I clung to the bar, surrounded by the stools and martini glasses of a well-kept but abandoned men's club. The bar had a view of the deck, and of the lake. I gathered the bathrobe around me, shivering.

And then I saw her.

She was kneeling on the redwood planks of the deck, feeding Fritos to a chipmunk. Another chipmunk joined her, a flick of tail, a bright eye. Yet a third joined them. Her voice just reached me, a soft clucking of encouragement.

The lake was always too big. It was a photograph of the universe. It wrinkled, stilled, shirred, darkened, seethed, the center of everything, and at the same time apart from everything, always nearly ice and never freezing.

Now the lake was gray, like the sky. A pine needle spun down in the light wind. It was nearly warm outside. Johanna looked up.

“I thought you'd gone away.”

She laughed. “Where would I go? Look at you—you'll freeze.”

I watched the chipmunks for a moment. They had not bothered to glance at me.

“I feel so sorry for them,” she said. “All the long winter coming. And who will look after them?”

I was so relieved to see her that I wanted to argue. Perhaps I resented her for making me feel so deeply about her. Some people think it teaches them to live on handouts, I nearly said. Maybe it makes them suffer all the more when no one shows up to feed them. My heart wasn't in it, though, and I rested my hand on her bright hair. She was right. The animals were hungry. I knelt and held out one of the golden crisps, but they ignored me.

We had coffee and toast. She didn't mind such a spare breakfast, perhaps accustomed to the continental tidbit to begin the day, and my own appetite was strangely lax. Food meant nothing to me at all.

We bundled into our goose down and wool, hiking boots and mufflers, and the air made her nose pink. It was on a walk along Sugar Pine Point, the coarse granite sand of the lake crisp beneath our feet, that she held my hand and began to tell me how she saw her future. I believe that our futures-the futures we imagine—are our true stories. Our memories lie; only our hopes are honest.

“I can never marry,” she said.

It was like the shocking snap of something solid, a rib. We had been walking in silence, enjoying, I thought, the red-trunked pines. I stopped walking for a heartbeat or two, but she tugged me along. We strolled together, and at last she continued, “There is a terrible history in my family.”

Most people believe that families are safe cottages of flesh and blood, but, in truth, most families have a terrible history of some sort. She was about to tell me something secret and painful, and I squeezed her hand. “You must tell me.”

“It is a history of madness.”

I knew enough to say nothing, our unmittened hands tight together.

“I suppose you might think that this means simply that I cannot have children.”

This had not been my thought.

“But it is deeper than a genetic predisposition to depression or epilepsy. It is a rupture of life that I could not ask any other human being to share.”

I am not one of those psychologists who balk at using words like “mad.” Mental illness is profound and usually cruel. We need simple words for it, however inaccurate we might feel them to be. “I want to help, if I can,” I said.

“It's easy to tell, agonizing to recall.” She stared at the sand in front of us, rough grains sprinkled with pine needles. “My father was shot by police in Zurich, in what you would call the red light district. He was running along a roof after raping and killing a teenage prostitute.”

She paused, hoping she had not shocked me, but I was saddened more than surprised. “It must have been very painful for you.”

“I was a girl at the time, and there had been a series of such murders, but I never imagined it had anything to do with my family. In fact, I had only the vaguest, although painful, sense of what rape was. My mother, in turn, went mad ten months later. She threw herself under a petrol truck.”

The lake's waves were barely waves at all, absent-mindedly stroking the sand from time to time.

“And then my brother. By the time I was seventeen I was living with my aunt, while my brother was hunted all over Europe. I lived in Saint Johann, in the Thur Valley east of Zurich. In the late spring, during hay cutting, the air is so rich with the smell of it you think you could eat handfuls of the sunlight.

“My brother found me one night. He was wet from a walk up the stream so that the hounds, he said, could not find him. What hounds? I found myself wondering. There was no sound, only the chatter of the stream. I was so happy to see him, and so grieved to see how gaunt he was. He said only that I didn't have to worry, that I was free. And he told me something that to this day makes no sense to me at all.” She could not speak, biting a knuckle. “I cannot tell you what he said.

“He shot himself. My aunt identified the body.” Johanna was silent, then the sorrow passed, as it will when the soul is accustomed to it as an old burden. “This is a secret I carry everywhere I go. The truth about my family.”

“It doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does,” I suggested gently. “It might not be genetic at all. And there is no actual reason to believe you would pass it on to children.”

“But you don't know the entire truth. You can't possibly imagine it. I really can hardly utter it.”

I put my arms around her as she wept. “It was terrible,” she said when she could talk. “They were such good people, strong and loving life. You would have liked them, Ben, and they would have liked you. Each of them, my father, and then my mother, and finally my brother, experienced a kind of madness in which they thought they were no longer human. It was a syndrome in which a person thinks he is an animal.”

I did not want to know anymore. The lake was a mat of shifting, intricate wrinkles. The wind seemed to blow, briefly, upward from the ground.

“There is, isn't there,” she asked, “a mental illness in which a human being thinks he is a wolf?”

I cleared my throat. “Lycanthropy isn't that common.”

“But it does happen.”

I wanted to tell her that there are more people in mental hospitals who think they killed Kennedy, or who think they are secretly married to the president, or are in hiding from the CIA, which is trying to get them to stop making hit records or television shows. Show business delusions are fairly common. As delusions go, I've met more people who have talked to beings from other galaxies than people who think they are animals.

But I agreed that of course it happened. All the while not wanting to think what I was thinking, a thought too cold: that something was hunting us through the landscape of years, that disembodied smile, that hungry set of fangs, trailing us and knowing our every moment, from the day of our birth.

I told myself that I should share my own secret, my dream, with her, and tell her about the fangs. But I did not, telling myself that I would only burden her with my own concerns.

I tried to console her. I told her the truth: that she seemed quite mentally healthy to me, and that her sorrow should be for her lost loved ones, and not confused with fear about herself. I don't usually deal advice, but I did not want to consider what she had said. Besides, I did want to ease her grief. I was sorry to see her so shaken.

It seemed like an abrupt change of subject when she said, “That man came back to see. Karl Gneiss. He is some sort of investigator—”

“I know.” I told her, briefly, of our meeting.

“He made me remember my past, with all his questions. I must confess to you that I told him lies, whole fabrications, although nothing that he can discover. I lied by leaving out the truth.”

“He is hard to figure out,” I offered.

“No, not at all, Benjamin. I think he is quite simple. I think he is a very dangerous man.”

“Do you mean … disturbed, mentally?”

“Perhaps. And perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps he is simply another attentive policeman trained to protect us.”

I had to wonder, as we continued our walk and she cheered up at the sight of a seaplane taking off far across the lake, if the rest of our separate lives had ever really existed, but had been like the pages of a book, closed shut and dark and never really alive at all, never even read. We had thought they had substance, and believed that the course of hours was, in truth, about to arrive somewhere. But nothing had been real until we had met each other, when Belinda nearly died.

I thought of Johanna as I thought of my own body. But I did not like this new possibility, like the collapse of land one had always considered a solid plateau. We had been predestined to an end we could not change. This thought chilled every hope in me, and so I employed my new skill in denying to myself what was happening. Fate was a human misperception of random or purely human blunders. Life is accident, comforting, or, at worst, impersonal chaos.