Free Hunger of the Wolf by Stephen Marche Page B

and seaweed salad, the ironic caviar and blinis, the pork four ways, dandelion salad, and terrine de lapin with heritage parsnips, the deconstructed carrot cake with superchilled powdered walnuts and root vegetable purée, all drowned in white burgundies and sassicaia and delicate little sherries, rumble through their aging bellies and out into delicate poofs of cocaine farts. The smell of worldliness. The perfume of the time I’ve been given to live in.
    Leo wore a $3,500 suit, a washed-out blue affair with an Orange Julius–colored shirt, Frenched with archaic pearl cufflinks. I wore the gray I was married in. We were stalking different animals. Leo had heard that Colin Farrell was showing up. I was there for Poppy Wylie.Leo knew her in that distantly familial way rich people know each other and had promised to introduce us so I could try for an interview. I needed an interview, a high place in the realm of reality from which to overlook the family’s monumental delusion. Poppy had the narrative advantage of being alive. To the breed of old-timer who still read print, her name would register. She had been adopted from China in the sixties, when foreign adoption was novel, ahead of the trends even in her origins. Her elegant shape mistily haunted the long-distance photographs of celebrity yachts in fashion spreads in the 1990s, when her beauty had been an overwhelming but removed force, like an aircraft carrier known to be patrolling the Persian Gulf. Her beauty now was as forlorn and ravaged as an aircraft carrier being carved up in a Third World naval yard.
    My old boss Mort Wilner, mostly out of pity, had commissioned a four-thousand-word Sunday spread about her. I also put a call in to Jorn Pelledeau and pitched him a story about the “original poor little rich girl.”
    He texted back: Don’t usually do history but WAS superhot.
    I texted: She invented exultation through degradation.
    Jorn texted a one-word contract: Xactly.
    So I had options. My plan was to write the piece and try to sell it to Vanity Fair on spec, having Mort in one back pocket and Jorn in the other.
    The rumors I had collected about Poppy resisted coagulating into any coherent story. She had dated a string of famous men in famous situations. Lou Reed was her lover just after Berlin . He wrote “Sick of You” for her, apparently. The Brazilian racecar driver Senna tried to call her the morning he died. She had an affair with the head of the IMF, too—“daddy issues.” Poppy Wylie had been a minor celebrity,one of the world’s vaguer apparitions. A celebrity is a party that is happening in the bigger house across the lake, the one you can’t quite see from where you’re living, and in the evening music and laughter thrill over the water, but the next morning there is silence, a still and crumpled silence that is somehow more intoxicating than the music or the laughter.
    *  *  *
    The party we were at was rich people waiting around for famous people. To me, the conversations of the peripatetic rich always have an unreal flavor, like the taste of paper clips. Their cosmopolitanism is shopping, and wherever they go, they encounter only their same smooth selves, whether it’s in Scandinavian furniture or the hilarious foam of avant-garde restaurants or the newfound extremities of prostitutes in Saint Petersburg or Santiago, in the Maldives, or Milan. The true cosmopolitans, the world-embracers, are the servants who tidy up the wake of their parties and their wombs, the Senegalese women, the Polish men, the Filipinos, fleeing the antique brutalities en masse, microwaving the same meals in Saudi Arabian villas or in northern Ontario cottages for the vacuous riders of fortune who skim the world like petrels, and whose children are archipelagoes of physical reality in the ocean of their unconcern.
    At least they were a break from myself and from the basement, that miserable repository where