Saint Peter’s Wolf

by Michael Cadnum

  I called him, and carefully steadied my voice as I asked him to meet me half an hour before our first appointments. “Sure, Ben. No problem.”

  He was panting into the phone, winded from a long jog or a workout with weights or even, I had to conjecture, gymnastic sex with a colleague’s wife. No problem: even his diction was idiomatic and athletic.

  “I’m running a little late, but I’ll be there.” Orr was always “running” late. I would have said that I was “falling behind schedule.”

  “Cherry and I just had a conversation. An important conversation,” I added.

  “Oh.” A volume of insight, understanding, manly confidence in one syllable. “I understand, Ben. I’ll skip my shower.”

  Homicide. That’s what he deserved. The ancient and notorious institution of human slaughter.

  I did blame Cherry in a way, but I knew Orr too well. Few women could withstand him. She had always been what I had to describe, nonprofessionally, as mixed up. I was her second husband. She had trouble making commitments. She was unsure of herself, and goodlooking. She had, I thought, been faithful for the two years of our marriage, and Orr was just the sort of circus stallion that would send nearly every woman on earth into one spasm or another.

  Perhaps it had been her needfulness, her asthma, her cramps, that had made me love her. Any woman who cared so passionately about whales must be full of life, I thought. Any woman who gets nauseated and has to throw up watching a CBS news report about elephant poaching must be full of life. It was true that Cherry was full of feeling, and that she tried to be fair. It’s just that she forgot, sometimes, in her whirl of emotions, that there were other people in the world.

  I was numb, stunned by my own feelings, as if afflicted with the deafness that lingers after an explosion. Hurt him, I kept thinking. Whatever you say, whatever you do—hurt Orr.

  It went wrong from the start. I stepped into Orr’s office and realized my mistake too late. We should have been meeting in my office, or walking the Marina and watching pelicans, some other neutral place. Any place but this teak and leather lair. Orr stood and adjusted the crease of his pants. He gave me the handshake of consolation, the one you reserve for funerals. A genuine handshake. Manly, and showing real feeling. That was the problem with Orr. If you caught him with his pants down with Porterman’s eleven-year-old daughter he would say, without hesitating, exactly the right thing. Not only the soft answer that would turn away wrath, but the words that would embarrass even the cuckolded husband as he glanced around, searching for any seat that was not the patient’s chair.

  Of course, there was no other chair. I remained standing rather than take the chair which was too plainly the seat of needfulness, the position of supplication.

  “I admire you for this,” he said. “It’s tough. Takes a lot of guts, Benjamin. I don’t think I could do what you’re doing. Facing me, eye to eye.” And he meant it! From anyone else it would be fake, pathetic, maddeningly phony. But Orr meant it. He was steady, his eyes downcast, then level. He squeezed my arm for a moment.

  “What you did,” I said, impressed with the civilized quality of my voice, “was wrong.”

  “It wasn’t just a momentary fling, Benjamin. I wouldn’t have done that to you. I love her.”

  I stared.

  “I want to marry her.”

  This was appalling, insufferable. And yet I felt that I had to suffer it. What could I say? The man managed—how, I could not imagine—to seem honorable. How did he do it? How could I be angry at this paragon? I was, naturally. But instead of a righteous wrath I felt a sour fury that was evaporating into a dismal sense that my life had never taken a single right move.

  “I can’t talk to you,” I said. This at least gave me a small pedestal of dignity.

  Orr misunderstood. “I know—you’re disgusted with me.”

  I had meant that I wanted to remember the feelings that had kept me awake all night, on the couch. The feelings I had experienced all the way up the stairs, eschewing the elevators because I was too mad. The feelings that Orr’s presence confused, warped, as the passing sun will bend the light from a star.

  “It’s a waste of time,” I said. Even though it was a slightly misleading statement, it did at least communicate strong feeling.

  The only truly correct thing would be to crush his skull with the Scandinavian chair I brushed against on my way out. He deserved it. A jury would be sympathetic.

  I shut his door hard. Should I cancel the few meager appointments I had for the day? I decided the question easily. My clients needed me. I did not want to hurt them. I wanted to heal them, make them whole. I would shoulder the day, and bear it.

  Tina carefully avoided glancing in my direction. She was good at what she did partly because she appeared never to notice a thing. She would have been seductive at a glance except for the cool, even supercilious expression she wore at all times. Her scarlet claws tickled the keyboard.

  Orr left his office, correspondence in hand. He had timed this so that I would have been able to reach my car by now had I not been so stunned. He smiled, communicating friendship, regret, a greater humanity than I would ever experience.

  He consulted with Tina over a letter. They had been lovers. I had never realized it before, but I could tell, now that I saw Orr plain, that he still felt some proprietary fondness for her. Look, I thought, at how he rests his hand on her shoulder.

  Orr must despise me. The thought was cold. He must have little more than contempt for me. I saw it clearly: his smile had always been false. Orr had always resented the money my family had left me, and my old-San Francisco background, my house, my collection. Orr was strictly State University, brains and good looks. I had assumed that this was the sort of rivalry that can add spark to a friendship. But now I saw that he despised me as a fatuous patrician. I believed that he would do anything to undermine me. Orr took what he wanted of the world. He had used my name, and my reputation among psychologists, as a support as long as he felt he needed it.

  Love! I wanted to laugh. But it was probably true. He probably did love Cherry. His qualities extended even to that honest emotion.

  My hands twitched, tingling. They wanted to strangle him.

  Tina handed me a pink telephone message. The name on the message made me close my eyes. A blessing, I thought.

  I hurried to the phone. I was nearly too excited, and I had to hang up and start over again.

  When I heard her voice I could not speak for a moment, and when I did speak at last, I could not ask the question.

  Fortunately, I did not have to ask. Belinda would recover, she said. She mentioned a pin in her hip, and how well the dog had tolerated the operation. “Clive was quite surprised,” she said.

  “I want to see her,” I said. I meant that I wanted to see Johanna herself, and there was some hesitation. Seeing me would simply remind her, and Belinda, of the accident. Wasn’t it better if went on with my life, sent them a check, if I wished to, to cover the surgery, and forgot all about them?

  I sensed her thoughts, and yet to my surprised she agreed, and said, “I will have you over as soon as she is home again.”

  This was vague enough that she might be able to put off the visit for days, or even weeks. But Johanna Fisher did not seem to be the sort of person who made empty promises. She struck me as someone who did what she said she would do. The best sort of person, I found myself thinking. Someone you can trust.

  Dr. Ashby, my therapist during my university years, had always cautioned me that I was out of touch with my deepest feelings. “You are afraid to feel, Ben. Afraid of your emotions. Afraid of your own soul.”

  In my youthful defensiveness I had quibbled over his use of the word “soul.”

  But as I strode from the office that day I had two feelings powerful enough to deserve my fear. One was a baffled anger against Orr, a man I knew I could never equal, a man I had to envy for his forthright grip on life.

  The other was a great passion, too strong
to be called love, for this strange woman, this woman I barely knew, whose name rippled in me like an answered prayer.

  Six

  It had been a long and silent week. Cherry had piled empty boxes in the living room, a small peak announcing that our marriage was about to be packed away. But dresser drawers were still full of lingerie, and Carliss’s closet was still a jumble of brutal comic books and plastic weapons.

  Mrs. Meridian, the housekeeper, was just leaving. She was a stout, red-haired woman with an accent that was hard to place. She had been born in Australia, worked in South Africa and England, and now kept a string of houses, as she would put it, “well sorted out.”

  “I’m off,” she announced. She put the vacuum into the hall closet. “Shall I be back next Tuesday, then?”

  It was always good to see Mrs. Meridian. She was one of those people who understand at a glance. What she meant was: will I continue to work here? The way she smiled told me that she would not miss Cherry very much.

  “Whatever your regular schedule has been.…”

  “Tuesday’s never been the easiest for me to work out, tell you the truth. It’s my busiest day. I don’t mind the Fridays so much, and you would think that Friday would be my hardest day, wouldn’t you?”

  “If you want to pick some other day, or two or three other days.…” It was painful to even remotely approach the subject of my collapsing household.

  “That’s right. I’ll let you know then. Maybe a flexible schedule of some sort.”

  “Flexible,” I said, realizing that she was trying, cheerfully, to take advantage of my confusion.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, with what I was surprised to see was the slightest wink. “These things pass, Mr. Byrd.”

  Cherry was in the kitchen, making a list. She was on the list’s second page. She glanced up, and said, as lightly as though she were preparing a trip to Safeway, “The moving men won’t come this week. Not enough advance notice.”

  This meant that there was hope. I could win her back. “I’m going to keep my promise to Carliss. I’m going to pay for his visits to Dr. Beecher.”

  She studied me, toying with the pen. “It won’t work, Ben.”

  “Beecher’s a good man.”

  “So are you. But paying for Carliss’s therapy won’t win me back.” Cherry was in her more-mature-than-thou mode. She even smiled.

  “I’m extremely fond of Carliss.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you for wringing his neck.”

  “I also have some professional interest in him, as a therapist. I want to see him grow up to be a whole—”

  “For God’s sake, Ben, all right. Pay for Beecher. You’re just so goddamned good I want to puke.” She did not say this nicely at all.

  She added, “I just have to stay here a few more days until things get settled. Please try to put up with us.”

  So it was only a temporary stay of execution. I would be alone here in this house again. There had never been a chance. Orr had defeated me.

  I sat in my study, my feet on a scatter of journals. I had considered myself a reasonably well-organized person, but things had changed. I sorted through the magazines, creating what I sensed was futile tidiness. The encyclopedia was sealed in plastic and locked in the safe. It needed my attention, but so did everything else. If I felt anything other than desolation it was because of my afternoon appointment.

  I found Johanna’s address in the Twin Peaks district without trouble, as though I had driven there many times before. She was dressed in blue, a soft blue cashmere sweater and a pleated blue skirt, vaguely Scottish, and she offered me a chair and suggested tea. I had remembered her as attractive but stricken, and now that I saw her calm, pouring tea, I could do little else but admire her, how she nudged the cup and saucer toward me as though to reassure it, how she tucked her hair back with a slim hand, and how she—I remembered this gesture—touched the hollow of her throat just once. She was comfortable with the world of men, I sensed, but still shy.

  “It was a miracle,” she said.

  I did not have to ask what she referred to, but she assumed that my expression meant that I was not following her.

  “Belinda’s recovery. We thought—we really did—that she might have to be put down.”

  Her eyes darkened with the last words. A euphemism can be ugly. “But we gambled on the surgery, even though most dogs don’t have the patience—the understanding, one might say—to endure the convalescence. It’s only been a week since the accident. Now I am a nurse, stroking pain pills down her throat. She’s so patient, although she has trouble understanding why I want to feed her these little pellets of yellow chalk.”

  “Can I see her?”

  She did not answer me, but instead said, “When Clive told me that you had paid the bill, I was very confused.” I knew she meant troubled. “But I knew you intended an act of kindness.”

  “It’s a kindness on your part to accept the money. I felt terrible.”

  I saw now that she had half hoped to return my money. She was not in need of financial help. I recognized some fine art on the walls. She was grateful for my concern, but she did not want to be under any obligation to a man she did not know.

  “I really don’t know how to thank you,” she said. “But I do remember your interest in collecting, and your interest in my friend Mr. Zinser.”

  I had not hoped for what she was about to say.

  “And so I have spoken to Mr. Zinser and he has agreed to see you.”

  A visit with Jacob Zinser! I leaned forward, my pulse quickening. I knew that Zinser was a man who never met with anyone, a recluse who did most of his work by telephone or computer hook-up. He was a kindly hermit. He donated money to local charities every holiday season and, I had heard, did much more that was never attributed to him. But his photograph in the newspapers over the announcement of a gift to Children’s Hospital was always ten or fifteen years out of date, and he was as much a legend as a presence.

  I sensed that she was merely discharging a debt to me, and having arranged this meeting hoped that I would take a place permanently outside of her life. She was not unfriendly. She was, in truth, kind. But this was an episode for her, not the beginning of a tale.

  Belinda lay under a large daphne. She looked up, and then really looked, a long alert stare, first out of curiosity and then out of a need to recognize, or understand, what she saw.

  Her eyes looked much darker, nearly black. Her nostrils opened and closed, her ears cupped forward as they had that first morning. She was alert to me, and she remembered me, and a cold door opened inside me. She knew I came from the accident, as though the accident were a countryside she had visited and hoped never to see again.

  Her evident intelligence struck me, and I knelt on one knee on the lawn.

  I made a mistake. I knew it even as I made it, but I could not help myself. I hesitated. I lifted my hand, and involuntarily my hand slowed and paused, offering itself for her inspection, but in a way that told her exactly what I expected.

  She peeled the skin away from her teeth, and hunched away from me, the hair along her spine looking darker, a ridge of erect hair like iron filings lifted by a magnet. Her growl chilled something in me.

  Back inside the house I could not sit down. My legs were weak. I had never seen such a display of threat from any animal, and Belinda was a large, powerfully built beast. But it was not the thought that she could have bitten me with her white teeth that shook me. I had hoped Belinda would like me, even forgive me. Still it was more than that—I liked Belinda, felt for her and the troubles she had endured so bravely. I surprised myself. I had never admired and wanted the friendship of an animal so much.

  “She has been through such a trauma,” Johanna offered. She did not continue. Why remind me that I had been, however innocently, a part of the force which had injured the dog?

  I told her that I understood entirely, that Belinda was a magnificent animal. “At least we know she’s strong enough to def
end herself. That’s some consolation.”

  Johanna smiled, the first real smile of our meeting.

  “I was encouraged after we met to reread a little Baudelaire.” This was true, but it made me sound so much more scholarly than I wanted to seem that I fell silent. “My French is terrible,” I offered. Now I felt ignorant. Stop talking, I ordered myself.

  “I don’t really care for Baudelaire,” she said. “All that sinuous evil. It seems to me ultimately childish. Although he is a magnificent poet.”

  “Perhaps evil is attractive to some people.”

  “Undoubtedly. But I think people are really quite ignorant of the nature of evil. It doesn’t attract me at all. I want to read the more.…”

  “Uplifting writers?”

  “Oh, you make them sound so lightweight. No, spare me the uplifting. But a poet like Rilke is so much more complete, it seems to me, than Baudelaire.” Then, at once, the current of the conversation switched. “I must confess something,” she said.

  She looked down, then away, gazing at a stalk of iris in a vase. “Jacob Zinser did not, at first, even remember who I was. I did not really expect him to. He is a very busy man, and I was barely an acquaintance. I did help him with some translation, but I worked almost entirely with his secretary.”

  I felt embarrassed for her. She had overextended herself.

  “In the rush of feeling during the time of the accident I felt that I should give you something—some good news.”

  “I don’t have to meet Zinser. Honestly. We can forget about him.”

  “No, it’s entirely arranged.”

  “I am honored enough to have met you, and to be able to speak to you about.…” About anything at all, I nearly said. Because I was blurting out the truth. I suddenly wanted to see no one in the world but her.

  “Mr. Zinser is such a kind man,” she said. “So generous. And besides, he said he has heard of you as a collector, and he looks forward to meeting you.”

  Was I wrong, or did she look at me with something of a smile in her eyes as I left? She did touch my hand, once, as she had on that first day. I sat in the car for a while, once again reluctant to leave her presence. I rested my other hand on the place she had touched, there, on my wrist.