I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  “You cunt,” she says to the bankomat.

  She tries to call Louise once more, standing out in the cold as her sister’s phone rings and rings. This time, she does not leave a message.

  On her way back to the hotel, she happens upon the Galileo Foundation for Scientific Culture. The foundation catches her attention at first because it is one of the few places in the village that appears to be open: a gold cone of light beams down on the heavy doorway, the wood studded with brass nubs, and the oval sign hanging over it. From the shadows, she watches the door swing open; a man in a dark suit and glasses steps into the gold cone. He ushers a couple in from the streets, speaking to them warmly in Italian. Margot glimpses people milling around in an illuminated room, open-mouthed and lifting glasses of wine. She smooths her hair, her dress, and approaches the man. She looks very much like her sister—the same height, the same wavy nut-colored hair, the same pointed chin—even as they are not identical (Margot has bigger feet, a tiny bump on the bridge of her nose). She will carry forward the plan that sprung upon her a moment ago and if he has met Louise before, if he refuses her claim, she will simply disappear into the night.

  She extends her hand toward him and offers her sister’s name.

  “Professor Allaway.” He clasps her hand. His skin is soft and warm. “Piacere.”

  Inside she finds a table with laminated name tags. She picks up her sister’s and pins it to her sweater. She imagines Louise wandering the streets of Rome, no idea that Margot is currently roaming this reception under her good name. She eats fat green olives and salty cubes of cheese. She drinks three glasses of wine—even though, on the tarmac in Minneapolis, she promised herself she would not have more than two a night. Two and she is still herself. Two is civilized.

  When she notices a man in a navy blue jacket staring at her from across the room, she hurries down a long hallway, vaguely in search of a bathroom. She makes a left, dead-ending into a dim corridor with an oil painting of green hillsides dotted with white sheep. There are other figures—a shepherd, an angel, she isn’t quite sure—in the background, but not enough light to see the entire scene clearly.

  She hears footsteps racing up behind her and then a thick, starched cloth is bound around her eyes.

  “Louise,” a man’s voice says. He has an American accent. He pulls the cloth tighter. He presses her to a wall. Her lips touch the cold stone. The man’s voice is right in her ear, his breath a blaze on her neck. “I’ve been trying to find you all night.”

  The cloth falls away and she spins around. She can see the painting, the grazing sheep, over the man’s shoulder. He is holding a white linen napkin. He squints at her face and then at her name tag. His eyes are bloodshot, watering. He is very drunk.

  “Louise,” he says again, as though he is trying to convince himself.

  He slumps against her. She feels his erection through his dress pants. She has been celibate for the last six months, as part of an attempt to bring about a sense of spiritual well-being. This attempt followed a string of unfortunate one-night stands, culminating in a tryst with a man who worked for the Minneapolis chapter of the Sierra Club; she woke to him urinating in her potted philodendron and thought, I have got to change my life. She planned to quit drinking and dairy too, but had only managed to stay away from alcohol for two weeks, cheese for a month. She even went to a few meetings for the former and found herself disgusted by all that open, ravenous seeking, by the woman who stood up and spoke about how she believed in the basic goodness of human beings before going on to share that she had been raped while in rehab and that her ex-husband used to beat her with a tire iron. All those awful speeches, it was like watching a person who had been buried alive thinking they could talk or pray their way out. Optimism had never felt more deranged. We’re disgusting and stupid and weak, Margot had thought more than once, as she looked around that badly lit room. Let us suffocate under the earth. Let us all go extinct.

  “Louise,” the man breathes into her hair, a little more sure this time, wanting to be. He begins to kiss her neck and she lets a hand drift across the back of his head. Her tongue is a stone in her mouth. Her arms feel heavy.

  “Here?” he says, and she moves her head, not quite a nod but a gesture he takes as acquiescence. She tells herself that this is not her body but her sister’s, that she can be Louise for a little while longer.

  The man unzips his pants. His hand dives under her linen dress, she feels his heavy fingers shoving aside her underwear, and then it is happening and then it is over.

  After he zips up, he blots her forehead with the white linen napkin, which he has held on to the entire time. He says her sister’s name again, slurring the s, and then he takes a step back.

  “Hey,” he says. “Wait.”

  Without a word Margot gathers herself and slips down the hallway and out a back exit, the illuminated red sign a jolt of modernness in the otherwise archaic-seeming foundation. She emerges into a shadowed street, lights made milky by fog. She discards her sister’s name tag into a trash bin.

  This is part of Margot’s problem, the way she can roll along for months and then be party to something so wholly fucked-up her sense of self is unsettled for a long time after, leaving her afraid of her own company, her own thoughts. Last winter, she went out walking in the middle of the night, for no reason that she could recall, and when the world came back into focus she was standing on the Stone Arch Bridge at sunrise, in a freezing wind, her lip split from the cold, her hands gloveless, knuckles skinned. She seemed to remember talking to people all through the night, there were so many people, but she had no recollection of whom she had spoken to or what had been said. And later, even though she had bathed and put on clean clothes and eaten a shriveled orange, her colleagues at the environmental nonprofit appeared vaguely alarmed by her presence when she reported to work. She kept thinking that she must have had some kind of look in her eye.

  At the hotel, Filippo is still at the front desk, playing a game on his cell phone. The lights are bright in the lobby and she can see the bruised skin under his eyes, the tiny broken blood vessels around his nose. He looks very tried. She explains about the bankomat and her lost debit card—does he have any idea what she should do?

  “Your card made a tasty meal,” Filippo says without glancing up from his phone.

  “I’m sorry?” It occurs to Margot right then that she has yet to cross paths with another guest in the hotel. “Did you just say tasty?”

  “Call your bank tomorrow.” He yawns wide. “They will figure you out.”

  * * *

  That summer, Minneapolis was haunted by a man who slapped women in the face in public. He did it outside the Franklin Ave. light-rail station and the Walker and the Soap Factory. Two women on Hennepin, less than a week between them. He would rush up to a woman, slap her with an open hand, and then run away. It took the police six weeks to find him. The fact that he did not stick to one neighborhood made it harder, they said; also he dressed like a jogger to make his running less conspicuous. For a time it felt to Margot like the slapper owned the city.

  At the environmental nonprofit, some of Margot’s coworkers felt the fact of the slap made the situation worse.

  “It’s humiliating to be slapped,” said Kiara, one afternoon in the break room. “Just fucking punch me in the face already.”

  Emma, meanwhile, had enrolled in self-defense classes. Bianca had taken up with a neighborhood watch group comprised entirely of women.

  “I dare him to come to our street,” Bianca said.

  Two weeks later, the slapper would get Emma outside a bus stop. She’d planned to poke him in the eyes and then palm strike his nose, but when she saw that wide, flat hand take flight her arms stayed stuck to her sides. On the news, Margot would hear another terrible story about a woman who, as the image of a charging man swelled in her periphery, shoved her girlfriend into his path. It wouldn’t be enough for the slapper to terrorize women; he would make them turn on eac
h other too.

  On Margot’s walk to work, a route that left her feeling alone and vulnerable, she passed a sports store. Whenever she saw the window display with the blank-faced male mannequins in running clothes, her pulse surged.

  “They should take those mannequins down,” she announced to the break room. “At least until this is all over.”

  When the other women turned to her, brows scrunched, she realized her mistake: she’d spoken about the mannequins as though her coworkers had been privy to her thoughts. She was pretty sure they included her in these conversations only because she was a woman, and therefore a prospective victim of the slapper, even as they suspected she was somehow not quite on their side.

  When Margot called Louise to tell her about the slapper, her sister advised her to spend more time at the public library. “All those things he doesn’t know,” she said, after Margot asked why this asshole would show any respect for the public library. “I bet he finds libraries very intimidating.”

  Margot was standing in her tiny backyard, struggling to remember the last time she got a decent night’s sleep. “Don’t you ever want vigilante justice?”

  “Vigilante justice is rarely as satisfying as people think. Auribus teneo lupum and all that.”

  Louise paused and then added, “The last bit was Latin.”

  “I gathered,” Margot said, and then told her sister that she needed to go.

  She hadn’t asked her sister to explain the Latin because that was where Louise was most at home, explaining complicated and arcane things to other people. When she looked up a translation online, she remembered that Louise had answered with the very same phrase when her twin daughters were newborns and Margot had asked how motherhood was going. I hold a wolf by the ears. She’d understood the phrase to mean something along the lines of—there is no easy way out.

  * * *

  Margot falls asleep with the balcony door open, to the sound of dogs barking and motorbikes stalking the night, and wakes at noon to find the hotel wrapped in the densest fog she’s ever seen. She can’t make out the hillsides or the sea and the land has been overtaken by a terrible buzzing. Through the glass panes of the balcony door, she watches the wind blow the fog around like smoke. The road race has begun.

  She tries Louise again. Her voicemail is full. Five minutes away from calling Sam, she texts, and then phones her bank’s twenty-four-hour helpline. According to customer service, there is nothing to do but cancel her ATM card and have a new one mailed to her in Minneapolis.

  It’s early in Boston. Her sister’s husband, Sam, has moved into his own apartment in Cambridge, near the river. Her nieces like the place because he has rooftop access. They can watch the rowers practice; they can see the Prudential. Sam is a trained historian who has never finished a book. He hails from New England money and is the kind of person who looks good in gym clothes. Margot suspects Sam has never understood her chronic unease, her relationship to difficulty—he who can drink all night with louche grace and never wind up sobbing at the dinner table or vomiting in the guest bed. He who thinks changing your life is as simple as, well, changing your life.

  He doesn’t answer and to his voicemail she begins articulating a plan that she has not, in any way, rehearsed. She says that Louise is missing and she is going to Rome to find her. She mentions a friend of Louise’s who lives in Monti; she tells Sam this friend has offered to help and so at this stage she does not require anything from him, nothing at all. She is just doing him the courtesy of letting him know that his wife has gone missing in a foreign country and that the whole situation will soon be under control. As she talks, she imagines tracking her sister through grand Roman piazzas, down winding streets, and over stately bridges. She longs to feel capable.

  The friend in Monti is real. Margot remembers this person from Sam and Louise’s wedding, a decade ago—a tall woman with heavy eyebrows and an emerald brooch pinned to her black dress. Oh, Margot thinks. What was her name?

  She opens the balcony door, to let in some air. The hillsides are white and shapeless in the fog, the roads still buzzing. A siren breaks through the race cars and then a powerful wind slams the door shut. She surveys the clothes strewn around her room. The bra splashed across the tile floor, the sandal at rest on the nightstand.

  “Today I’ll go to Rome,” she says before hanging up. “I’m nearly packed.”

  * * *

  “I’m afraid your passport has been misplaced,” Filippo tells her in the lobby, after she informs him that she’ll soon be checking out. He appears to be wearing the exact same clothes as yesterday. The red collar of his polo is crinkled, the back tail untucked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he adds.

  “It doesn’t matter that you lost my passport?” Margot is incredulous.

  “You can’t leave today.” He points at the road race sign.

  “I’m taking the cable car.”

  “The funicular is closed, due to high winds and fog.”

  “I think I’d like to speak to a manager,” she says.

  “Why! I am the manager.” Filippo claps and laughs, as though she’s just told a very funny joke.

  Nothing she is saying seems to be imparting a sense of urgency.

  “My sister is missing,” she tries. “My sister has gone missing in Rome.”

  Filippo frowns. “You told me she was delayed.”

  “That was before I knew she was missing!”

  “Did you hear that one of the cars went over a cliff?” Filippo rubs the face of his silver watch. “The car was demolished, of course. The driver was thrown through the windshield and landed in the arms of a tree. He broke seventeen bones but stands an excellent chance at staying alive.”

  “My sister’s husband just left her.” Margot feels like getting on her knees. She feels like a stiff drink. “She could be having a nervous breakdown. She could be suicidal.”

  “A miracle,” Filippo says, smiling.

  * * *

  That afternoon, Margot rushes out into the sloped streets, the cobblestones slick with condensation. She wants to see for herself that the funicular is closed. In the village center, she smells ginger and almond before she spots the bakery sign. She peers in the window and discovers an elaborate display of marzipan: ducklings, baskets of pears, round red apples. The centerpiece is a marzipan lamb, remarkably lifelike and reclining on a bed of fake grass.

  She crosses the village, passes through a tall iron gate, and takes a dusty path down to the funicular station: shuttered, just as Filippo said it would be. She watches empty black cars bounce on a still cable; even from the cliffside the roaring race drowns out all other sound. In the distance, she notices a red blossoming in the hillsides, almost like a chain of explosions; the wind ferries over the scent of smoke. Something is on fire.

  She climbs back up to the central piazza, with the card-swallowing bankomat and the marzipan-crazed bakery, and follows the sound of the engines down a hooked street, past young men in black aprons offering menus outside vacant restaurants, even though it’s late in the day for lunch. At the base of the village, a flat stretch of asphalt has been transformed into a parking lot for Italian race cars. Large black numbers are pasted across the passenger doors. Men in satiny racing costumes lounge by their cars, or stand together in small clusters, talking and smoking cigarettes. Some of the cars are so small it’s hard to imagine a grown man folding his body inside. Margot sits on the edge of a low stone wall. The fog is gossamer-thin down here, and she feels exposed.

  The wind lifts a red scarf from one driver’s neck, a man with a small paunch and a silver beard, and sends it down the road; he chases after it, hands outstretched, a bit awkward in his racing costume. A man in street clothes bends down and intercepts the scarf. He holds on to the scarf for a moment before returning it to the driver and then, perhaps as a gesture of gratitude, the driver gives this man a tour of his car. He lets him sit in the driver’s seat. He shows what’s under the hood.

  It takes
Margot several minutes to realize that she’s watching the man from the foundation, the man who mistook her for her sister in the corridor and pinned her to the wall, who never let go of that white linen napkin. She watches him grip the car’s small black wheel. She watches him crawl out and shake the driver’s hand. He looks around and around, surveying the landscape, and then his attention snaps back in her direction and sticks. She stands slowly from the wall, her palms scraping the stone, and the moment she rises, the moment her knees straighten and her lungs expand, he dashes away into the fog and she chases after him.

  She scurries up a stone walkway, her back to the racing cars. The path is very steep; it is leading her to something. Through the gusting fog she sees the man slip into a squat marble castle. The structure resembles a chess piece, a rook. Margot shoves open a glass door and flies past a woman in black jeans and a white T-shirt, holding out a brochure for a tour.

  “Venus bathed in milk,” the woman calls out. “I can show you where.”

  Margot leaps up a short flight of steps and into a courtyard, the soil lumpy with rock. At first she thinks she’s stumbled into an ancient graveyard, with all the stone fragments, some marbled with orange lichen, jutting from the earth—and in a way she’s not wrong, given that the courtyard is filled with ruins. Just ahead she spots the man weaving through the fog. She has no idea what she will do when she reaches him, what she will say.

  She corners him by a well, marked by a shallow impression in the earth.

  “Who are you?” He’s wearing slacks and a houndstooth sports coat. He grabs himself by the lapels. “What have you done with Louise?”

  “Who am I?” Margot says, her heart aflame. Her mind flashes back to those faceless mannequins in the sports store window and to Emma dutifully practicing her choke holds and palm strikes, nurtured by the belief that preparation could save her.