Hunger of the Wolf Read Online Free

out, a great beauty—a great indifference would be a more precise term. I did not know then about her time on all the covers of the magazines, her celebrity, her reputed string of lovers, Lou Reed and Ayrton Senna and the others, but I knew, even before then, that she was the real world of which my own experience was only a dappled, incomplete reflection.
    â€œI hope you have good lawyers,” I said.
    Leo’s hand imbuedmy shoulder with mock gravitas. “At least the kid is meeting the right sort of people.” He needed my approval again. Leo was always in need of something. In need of a cigarette to smoke or a golf club to swing. In need of a helping hand. Probably in need of a good talking-to. Possibly in need of money. Just generally in need, though the man had everything that a reasonable person could desire.
    Kate joined us, miming exhaustion with a droop of her shoulders, hugging Leo loosely around the belly. “Sigma’s napping,” she said dreamily.
    â€œWe all should be so lucky,” Leo said, kissing the part in her hair with the tenderness of a salesman before a negotiation.
    Kate’s good fortune radiated. The handsome husband. The beautiful daughter. The house in SoHo. The wealthy friends (Ben Wylie) and the interesting friends (me). Now I can see, looking back on my sole encounter at Leo and Kate’s house, that one of the reasons I didn’t recognize Ben was my incredulity that a Wylie would be out eating Moshi Monster birthday cake, looking at paintings, scolding children. In the recesses of my imagination, the Wylies dwell far, far from children’s birthday parties in the shivering wasteland of their utterly banal mystery.
    *  *  *
    It took my father’s death to bring me back to Alberta. A pulmonary embolism blew his brains out in the breakfast cereal aisle at the local Safeway. He died at the age of sixty-one, before he had a chance to grow old. A guy I went to high school with, a Mountie, informed me over the phone while I was on the Q train returning from Coney Island. Three Russian women inspected my pain with a reserved fatalistic air I appreciated as I began openly sobbing.
    I hadn’t seen North Lake in ten years. My parents had always visitedme, traveling to wherever I happened to be. The funeral for my father was in the school gym where I had received my high school diploma and accidentally cut Jimmy Prescott’s eye playing ball hockey in the third grade, and where I had, one glorious April morning, skipping biology, fingerfucked curious, fervid Mellissa Leung in the darkest corner we could find. Everyone in town came for Dad. The managers from the pulp and paper mill where he had worked as an accountant, the farmers and ranchers, the townies who worked the resorts. My father had helped them all with money. He had been that guy. He had explained the difference between appreciating and depreciating assets, the connections between retirement savings and the tax code, the power of compound interest. All those rough men who wanted to shake my soft hand, all their wives who pressed against my too-crisp suit, their mourning was genuine, not sentimental. The world had lost a useful man. Are you useful? Am I? I tried to be that afternoon. I held my mother’s hand as a half dozen North Lakers spoke halting words over his manicured corpse.
    After the funeral, while my mother napped, I stared numbly out the front window; the Wylies’ lawn was ragged. So I found myself at the age of thirty-five mowing Ben Wylie’s grass. Then I found myself slipping inside the old cottage to smell the disintegrating country album smell, to stare upon the ridiculous paintings on nautical themes crowding the walls, to inhale the residue of my teenage naïveté, my teenage longing. To remember life before my firing, before my separation, before my father’s death. The slightly sweating walls were still sweating slightly. The thick white shag