The Better to Hold You (12 page)

I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw the restaurant. It was the kind of place where one person fills your water glass and another removes your used dishes, and neither is the waiter. The hostess who showed me to my table was slight and gamine in a black evening dress with no bra. She gave Hunter a sympathetic smile as she gestured to my chair with one elegant little hand.

“Hunter,” I said, “you didn’t warn me that we were going somewhere this nice.” I’d thought we’d have my deferred birthday dinner at one of those casually trendy West Side places where it’s chic to be underdressed. Instead, Hunter had managed to book us at one of those East Side places where terrifyingly thin women make a career out of eating squab. My husband, who had dressed up in a pale pink, button-down shirt and black jeans, was the only man not wearing a tie, but on him it looked deliberate and stylish. The other male diners were florid-faced and stout, drinking scotch and lecturing their ash blond, stiletto-shod companions.

I, on the other hand, was trying to remember not to touch my hair, which was on that knife’s edge between passably clean and suspiciously shiny. I was wearing Lilliana’s too-small spare black sweater because a terrified Lhasa apso had defecated on my lavender cardigan right before lunchtime. I’d also borrowed some lipstick, but it hadn’t helped matters much. Fatigue was making my contact lenses feel like scouring pads and I was getting a nervous rash on the right side of my forehead, near the scalp. All in all, I wished I were at home, eating tomato soup out of a can. But my husband and I had a date, so there I was, like a boxer struggling to stay in the fight.

“You look great.”

I raised one eyebrow.

“Mm. Just like a Victorian nanny.” Hunter pulled out my chair for me, beating the waiter to the job. Or was it the busboy? Whoever the man was, I thought he glared at us as Hunter sat back down. “Ah, there you are. Gin and tonic for me, champagne cocktail for the lady.” The mystery server gave a polite nod, possibly recognizing Hunter as one of those rare diners who immediately assumes the dominant role.

“I look like a Victorian nanny? How is that?”

Hunter grinned at me. “The hank of hair barely restrained by a tortoiseshell spear. The flare of nostril. The haughty arch of unplucked eyebrows.”

“The furry legs?”

“Thankfully, you are not Victorian in all respects.”

I put my hand to my chest. “Stop, I’m getting a swelled head.”

“Don’t fish for it—you know you’re beautiful. And, as I was going to say before you interrupted me, it’s the air you have of something deliciously repressed.” You know you’re beautiful, he’d said, so matter-of-fact. I inhaled a deep lungful of happiness, the inverse of a sigh. The real waiter came with our menus, and Hunter thanked him.

“My name is Pascal, and I’ll be your server to night.” I noticed that Pascal seemed to approve of Hunter more than he did of me. I couldn’t really argue with the guy: Hunter had recently gotten a haircut and it fell in smooth waves around his high cheekbones. He looked expensive and dangerous, like he could drive a Porsche while dismantling a bomb barehanded. Barehanded, as in missing the thin silver wedding ring he usually wore when he wasn’t out in the wilderness courting disaster.

“You’re not wearing your ring.” I’d bought it as a joke at a flea market, sure Hunter would refuse to wear anything other than a watch. To my surprise, he’d taken to it, saying he liked the idea of being branded.

“What? Oh, that. Must’ve got out of the habit of wearing it. I’ll put it on when we get back home.” Hunter reached for my hand across the table, but just as I placed my palm over his, Pascal returned with the drinks.

“Monsieur. Madame.” My hand was released so abruptly it just sat there for a moment on the table like a dead fish. “I’ll be back to tell you the specials.”

I sipped my champagne and looked at the menu, which was printed on parchment and vellum, like a wedding announcement. To my surprise, there seemed to be nothing offered that did not contain some dead thing in its ingredients. Salad of fresh greens with goat cheese and crisp apple-cured bacon. Duck and mushroom ravioli. Even the vegetable soup had pork won-tons in it.

“Hunter,” I said, “there’s nothing I can eat here.”

“Hmm.” Hunter looked up at me. “There’s salad and stuff. Cheese.”

“It all has meat in it.”

“For God’s sake, Abra, we’re not in college anymore. You don’t have to be such a purist. Just pick the bits you don’t want out.”

I stared at him, thinking of the Dalmatian. Drop eye contact now, I thought, to avoid the lunge. But instead I attacked. “I don’t think it’s very considerate of you to pick a restaurant that doesn’t have any vegetarian dishes, Hunter. Especially when you’re supposed to be taking me out for my birthday.”

There was a pause, and then Hunter reached over the table for my hand. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Abs. I just heard about this place from a friend at Vanity Fair, and I thought … But, you’re right. Do you want to leave?”

Unfair, I thought. He knows how I hate making a scene. And leaving here would entail a little drama worthy of my mother. “No,” I said. Grudgingly.

Hunter scanned the menu. “Here, what about the sautéed mixed vegetables and some, ah, julienned potatoes?”

Two side dishes. “Fine.”

Pascal returned to recite, in a bored, distracted voice, the roasted duck and turnips, parsleyed veal, and braised rabbit with mustard and calvados. He said all the names in French, slowly, and gazed at us challengingly, as if daring us to request a translation.

I gestured for Hunter to go first. He considered things for a moment. “Is the Ragout de Lapin good?”

“Excellent.”

“I’ll have it.”

“Very good, sir. And for Madame?”

I examined my limited options one last time. “I suppose … I guess … I think I’ll start with the cream of sorrel soup, and then when my husband is having his main course”—I couldn’t bring myself to say “rabbit”—“you can bring me the, um, sautéed baby artichokes.” I closed my menu and handed it to Pascal.

“And that will be all, madame?”

I met his gaze. “That will be all.”

“Perhaps, if I may suggest, the shrimp and eggplant tart?” In case I had been intimidated by the lack of English translation, I suppose.

“No.”

“The mushroom and prosciutto toast?”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“Ah. Aha. I understand.” His tone implied that, in his opinion, I was suffering from a self-inflicted disease. “Do you wish the soufflé for dessert?”

I wished to leave as quickly as possible. “No, thanks.” Pascal looked at me as if he were planning to spit in my soup. Then he gave Hunter a sympathetic little nod, and went off to tell the chef to stick a little bunny corpse in the skillet.

And then we were alone together, Hunter and I, and I realized that the evening had acquired a kind of portentous heaviness. The low murmur of the other diners seemed to fade away. The clink and chime of glasses and cutlery was replaced with the pounding of my heart.

“Abra,” Hunter said, making a helpless little gesture with his hands. A how-can-I-put-this gesture.

I wanted to stop this. What ever this was. “You’re not going to propose, are you?”

Hunter dipped his head and then looked up at me, a rueful light in his dark eyes. “In a manner of speaking, yes. Propose something. Ah, Christ, Abs.” Hunter took a swallow of his gin and tonic. “You must have noticed I’m not very happy.”

Striving for composure, I found my professional you-have-several-treatment-options voice. “Is it the writing?”

“It’s work, in part. I haven’t figured out the exact story I’m going to do, but Christ, Abs, I found something back there, in the Transylvanian Alps.”

“Not a werewolf, I assume.” Ha, ha.

Hunter did not smile. “If you feel you have to make a joke out of everything—”

“No, no, I was just teasing. Start again. You said you found something …”

“Well, you know the woman I was working with, Magdalena Ionescu. The wolf researcher. Born right near the forest, totally untraveled outside of Eastern Europe, but so smart about the wolves—Abs, the time I spent tracking with her was like nothing I’ve known. She was like—she was almost animal in her instincts. Uncanny.”

My mouth went dry. Why had I thought Magda too old to interest Hunter? “She’s the one. Oh, God, why are you telling me this here? So I won’t make a scene?”

Hunter took in the look on my face. “Oh, Christ, Abs, it’s not that. Yes, I slept with her. Yes, she made a big impression on me. Changed me. But I’m married to you. I love you.”

“Tell me what you have to say.” I was holding on to my diamond wedding band as if it might be pulled off by a sudden howling tornado. By what ever Hunter would say next.

Hunter leaned forward. “Abra, when I say she changed me … Christ, I don’t know how to explain this so it doesn’t sound like I’m mad.”

“It’s the lycanthropy virus, isn’t it? She infected you.”

I’d surprised him. Maybe even shocked him. “How did you—”

“Malachy Knox. My former teacher. He was doing research, and he knew about your trip. But Hunter, I’m not sure I really understand what this means.”

Hunter was silent for a moment, as if mentally rewriting a prepared speech. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and a little urgent. “Here’s the thing. You have to have a genetic marker, passed down on your mother’s side. There’s no reliable test, but one thing Magda said was a likely indicator was schizophrenia in the mother’s line. When the virus is introduced into an individual with the right genetic makeup, it can create a complete realignment on the cellular level.” Hunter gripped my hands. “Do you understand what that means, Abs? I don’t have to worry about developing my mother’s illness anymore.” He took a breath. “I don’t have to worry about going mad.”

The mitochondrial DNA, I thought, passed down the mother’s line. But Malachy hadn’t suggested that inoculation with the lycanthropy virus might be a cure for anything, let alone schizophrenia. Striving for composure, I extracted my hands from his and took a sip of my champagne cocktail. “So what happens now?”

Hunter tossed back the rest of his drink, then signaled the waiter to bring another. “I don’t know yet. It varies from individual to individual. Most people just develop a few lupine characteristics—improved hearing, a keener sense of smell, some muscular and skeletal rearrangement.”

“Copious body hair?”

Hunter ignored my feeble attempt at humor. “Magda says that full body morphing is very rare. In her family, she’s the only one who can do it. But I can already feel the difference in me, Abs.” He leaned backward, his arms along the back of the chair. I could see a businessman staring, and I thought: I can see the difference, too. You’ve lost your mind.

“So you think there’s a possibility that you’ll be able to change into another shape?” I used my best professional voice, the one that revealed absolutely nothing of what I was thinking or feeling. “A wolf shape?”

Hunter seemed so excited I half-expected him to jump out of his seat. “It’s a slim chance, but yes, that’s what I think—hope—might be happening to me.”

I drank down the rest of my champagne cocktail too quickly, swallowed the wrong way, and started coughing.

“You all right, Abs?”

I nodded, still coughing. As I used the corner of my linen napkin to wipe my streaming eyes, I sorted through possible responses to Hunter’s pronouncement. My first instinct was to find a politic way to suggest seeing a psychiatrist. Assuming that there was a politic way to suggest seeing a psychiatrist. Maybe I could ask Lilliana for a referral. But then I thought about what Malachy had told me in his lab. I wasn’t going to buy the idea that a human could shapeshift until I’d observed it in a controlled experiment, and then had someone else repeat the experiment to verify results. But still, the whole idea of recombinant DNA had sounded pretty far-fetched until someone had succeeded in getting human genes into bacteria and producing insulin in a petri dish. What ever else might prove to be true, I had to accept that my husband had caught a rare virus, and that its effects were not fully understood.

And then another, more disturbing possibility intruded.

“Can I catch it? What happens if you don’t have the right genetic makeup and you’re exposed?”

“Oh, baby.” Hunter reached out and took my hand in his. “Nothing happens. Nothing happens to ninety-nine percent of the people who are exposed to the virus. And it’s not contagious unless it’s active in your system, and you’re in wolf form. I don’t even know yet if anything will happen to me.”

The waiter brought Hunter’s second drink, and Hunter gulped it down as if it were water. “Ah, Abs, I wish you could have seen the Carpathian Mountains. But I don’t have the words. Here, it sounds ridiculous. Too sentimental. There, it seemed—it was all right to use words like ‘timeless’ and ‘primal.’ It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t false. There was a beauty to the landscape that made the heart lift. There was something almost supernatural about it—a magic of place. I would walk up a rise and see the world falling away. I would put my hand on a tree so old it felt like it had a soul.”

“It sounds wonderful.” To my credit, my voice didn’t crack.

“It was.”

There was a lull in the conversation, one big enough to drown in. I said nothing. Fear returned, raising the small hairs on the back of my neck. Someone, not Pascal the waiter, brought me a tray with my soup on it.

“Hey. Wait! Bring us this wine, will you?” Hunter pointed to a selection from the wine list. He’d already finished his second gin and tonic, and I thought: He’s not just charged up. He’s manic.

“So you want to go right back there? Is that it?”

Hunter tore off a piece of bread. I thought of that ridiculous commercial for a candy bar that suggested sticking the chocolate in your mouth whenever you needed time to come up with a story. Hunter crammed the bread in his mouth but spoke anyway. “I want to be in a place where I can fulfill what ever potential there is in me.”

I cleared my throat. “And exactly where do you find this kind of a place?”

“Magda says that wherever there are remnants of old forests, wherever there are still legends of beast men and magic, that’s where I will have the best chance of becoming … complete. It has to be an old forest, and there has to have been a long history of humans interacting with the wild. She calls them borderline places … crossroads between more than one reality.”