“Nathan,” she said, “will this be the first time you’ve made love to a dead woman?”
Nathan fumbled for his own glass, which he had not yet touched. “You mean you?” he said, taking a sip. The wine was very rough. Not good. “You’re not dead. I can personally confirm that.”
“No, but I mean, after I die, you’ll have memories of sex with a woman who’s now dead.” She smiled a dangerously innocent smile. “Will that be a first for you?”
“Except for my mother, yes. She died when I was fourteen.”
“Different kind of sex, then. The Freudian kind. Doesn’t count.” She paused. He sipped again to fill in the gap—nervously, he was surprised to note. Weirdly giddy. “While I was waiting for you in my hotel room,” she said, “I watched a nature show. A young deer fell into a deep snowbank and couldn’t get out. A grizzly bear found it and jumped on it from behind. The deer tried to look around. Its eyes were wild and excited. The bear gently grabbed the deer’s muzzle in its mouth. It was so sexual. Sex from behind. The bear loved the deer, it was obvious. It ripped the deer’s throat out, and then licked the dying deer with the most passionate affection. I thought of you and me.”
DR. TRINH KEPT BECOMING Japanese. It was Hervé’s fault, of course. The possibility of meeting Aristide Arosteguy in Tokyo had enormous gravitational density, enough to warp every nuance of Naomi’s day. And here, in Dr. Trinh’s perfectly elegant office on the medically chic Rue Jacob in the Sixième, this warping manifested itself in a subtle shifting of the doctor’s delicate Vietnamese features and her complexly accented English towards the rougher features and Japanese schoolgirl diction of Yukie Oshima, Naomi’s old Tokyo friend. Naomi had already calculated that Yukie would have to be a major ally in any Tokyo/Arosteguy initiative she might undertake and was finding it hard not to think of the constantly morphing Dr. Trinh as, well, Yukie in Paris. But Dr. Trinh was not an ally.
“Please put away your camera,” she said, as Naomi set her Nikon on her lap. “I regret every moment that I allowed myself to be recorded or photographed. I am talking to you only to undo the damage which that demented cleaning lady has done by talking about Célestine Arosteguy. I will probably regret this too.”
Naomi gently caressed her camera as though demonstrating its innate harmlessness. “It’s really just proof that I actually spoke to you. You’d be surprised how many interviews are just patched together from things on the internet and presented as face-to-face conversations.” Naomi imagined Nathan chuckling and shaking his head over her shoulder as she said this. Somehow, Naomi was of another, newer, generation than Nathan, despite the fact that they were the same age. Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling and scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. She knew she was being disingenuous with Dr. Trinh as she talked to her about proof, but the only effect her awareness of this had on Naomi was to make her feel more completely professional. It was the way of the net, and it was liberating.
Dr. Trinh was tougher than she looked. “Even photographs and recordings can be easily tricked these days, so what you say makes no sense here in my office. Put your camera and voice recording device away, that little thing hanging around your neck which I see advertised in all the chic fashion magazines, or you can leave right now.” Her face and tone were absolutely neutral as she said this, and Naomi could feel her own face start to burn, her skin telling her that she had been deeply, instantly unnerved before her brain or gut knew it.
“Well, off the record is certainly one way to do it, if that’s what makes you feel comfortable,” said Naomi, unclipping her rarely used Olympus micro-recorder, glossy black like a little piano and reserved for stealth recording, and packing it and the camera into her camera bag with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She hated her own volatility, the cycling so easily between manic confidence and crushed, hopeless insecurity. Maybe drugs would help. Probably not. Naomi had a sudden suicidal urge to ask the doctor if she had any bipolar patients, but Dr. Trinh was not designed to be natively helpful, at least not to Naomi.
“There’s nothing about this situation or about you that makes me feel comfortable. Let’s talk about that cleaning lady, that Madame Tretikov, the Russian.”
“Yes, yes. That maintenance woman … she seemed certain that Célestine Arosteguy had brain cancer.” And now Naomi could look up from fussing with her camera bag and jab back, however delicately. “Now, Dr. Trinh—I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly—Dr. Trinh, you’re not a cancer specialist, not an oncologist, for example, are you?”
The doctor took a deep breath. “What’s that pin you’re wearing? What does that designate?”
Naomi was completely thrown. Pin? Oh, yes. “This pin?” She unclipped the gold Crillon pin she had been given by her hotel contact and tossed it onto the leather writing pad on the doctor’s desk. “It’s the symbol of the Hôtel de Crillon. I’ve been staying there. It’s held on by this big round magnet. You see? They’re very nice at that hotel. Not snobbish at all.” Dr. Trinh picked it up and examined it with weird intensity. The doctor’s paranoia was suddenly exciting to Naomi, comforting rather than insulting, helping her to cycle back up. It meant that the doctor had something to hide, or at least to protect. “Were you … were you thinking it might be a microphone?”
Dr. Trinh tossed the pin back on the pad and immediately forgot it existed. “There was nothing medically wrong with Célestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age. I was her personal physician. I was the one who sent her to specialists when she needed them. Something like cancer … I would have known.”
Naomi desperately wanted to pull her notepad out of her bag, the one that was spiral-bound at the top, had a montage of newspaper pages decorating its cardboard cover and labelled itself “Reporter’s Notebook/Bloc de Journaliste”—naturally, Nathan had given it to her—but she could feel the fragility of the situation through her skin and didn’t dare. “What would you consider the normal complaints of a woman of her age?”
Dr. Trinh actually smiled, though there seemed to be some pain involved in the act. “Perhaps you will simply look up menopause on the internet and your question will be answered.”
A small, intimate explosion went off in Naomi’s brain, triggered by the unexpected mental juxtaposition of “menopause” and “crime,” two things she had never remotely linked before. She needed to remember this tiny epiphany somehow, and she needed to delve into the most heavy realities of menopause and womanness, a place she had never thought to go before. She generated a marker in her mind, one that would pop up whenever Célestine’s age was mentioned. “Why do you think the Arosteguys’ landlady thought that Célestine had a brain tumor? Isn’t that an odd thing for an ordinary person to just invent?”
“Have you ever met this woman, this Tretikov?”
“I’ve seen an interview with her.”
“Yes, of course.” Dr. Trinh stood up, brushing the front of her suit with her tiny hands as she did so, as though Madame Tretikov had covered her with breadcrumbs. “Yes, she’s an ordinary person who has unconsciously used the power of the internet to create a new reality concerning Madame Arosteguy. And it has caused me and my medical colleagues a lot of anguish, I can tell you.” A contemptuous snicker. “She’s the kind of superstitious old woman who believes that thinking too much, or even thinking certain thoughts, can give you brain cancer. And I want you to correct that. That is why I agreed to talk to you.” Having made her statement, this figurine of a woman sat back down and resumed exactly her former position. “The media have now accused us of negligence in our treatment of a woman who was considered a national jewel. They talk of misdiagnosis, of carelessness, of political pressure on us
that forced us to ignore her deadly condition, and so on.”
“And none of that is true?”
“None of it.”
“And Célestine didn’t tell her husband that she had brain cancer, and she didn’t ask him to kill her?”
At this, Dr. Trinh produced a sad smile, and it struck Naomi as a genuine smile at last, one which illuminated the doctor’s eyes and altered her breathing, which summoned the earthy presence of Célestine Arosteguy into her fussy, controlled office. “Célestine always used to say that she was doomed and that she had a terminal illness. She said that to her students, to me, to everyone. It was not a complaint, you see. It was almost a promise. But then, anyone who read her writings deeply would know she didn’t mean anything medical.”
The smile was still on Dr. Trinh’s face as she looked down at her doll-like hands, lost in secret memories of the doomed, womanly Célestine, and Naomi found herself wanting to destroy it, to punish her for it. In particular, Naomi was annoyed with herself for not having read even a précis of the Arosteguy oeuvre and could not therefore call the doctor on this evasion. The necessary weapons, however, were close at hand. “And would she ask just anyone to kill her?” It occurred to Naomi that she had very recently fallen back on the expression “just kill me” in a conversation with Nathan in which he had again carped about his missing macro/portrait lens—the lens on her camera right now, sitting in the bag at her feet—but she doubted it would be part of Célestine’s lexicon.
“Of course not.”
“But someone did kill her. Who do you think it was?”
“I have no idea. She had many friends.”
“That surprises me. You think a friend killed her?”
“She knew many people.”
“You don’t think a stranger killed her.”
“These are things I know nothing about.”
“She would say to you, her personal physician, that she had a terminal illness, and you felt that she was being philosophical? You didn’t take it seriously?”
Dr. Trinh had been talking to her hands, but now she raised her eyes to Naomi, searching as she spoke for verifying signs of Naomi’s stupidity, her profound American ignorance. “It was an existential statement,” said Dr. Trinh, “about the death sentence we all live under. She had an affection for Schopenhauer, which led her at times into a kind of fatalistic romanticism. I tried to get her to revisit Heidegger, not so different in some ways, the Germanic ways, but at least a shift away from that sickly Asian taste for cosmic despair.” As if summoned from the ether by that last phrase, a tiny silver crucifix hanging from a bracelet around the doctor’s left wrist caught the raw daylight bouncing onto the desk from a corner mirror and caught Naomi’s eye. Naomi’s friend Yukie was also a Christian, an anomaly that was somehow a disappointment to Naomi. Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, perhaps. So much more interesting. What bracelets would they wear then? Dr. Trinh continued: “But she couldn’t get past the man’s politics, the Nazi associations, the anti-Semitism. We disagreed on that point, that a man’s politics should negate the value of his philosophy. She could not see how a separation of that kind was possible. A perfectly French attitude, of course.”
Naomi met the doctor’s eyes and her inwardly directed smile with a smile of her own, but she had no confidence that she could disguise the evidence of her immediate downward spiraling, brought about by her intense regret that she had initiated talking to another human being, live. If she had been in front of her laptop, she could google these two Germanics, get a feel for them, but in a strictly oral context she had no idea how to even spell their names, much less respond intelligently to Dr. Trinh. It was one thing to toy with Hervé, bright though he was. Nathan was the one with the classical education, or whatever you called it. He was the reader. Where was he? Naomi was struggling to keep her head above water with the doctor. A street brawl was the only way out.
“Has anyone done an autopsy on Célestine’s brain to see if she had a tumor?”
“Based on the diagnosis of a cleaning lady? I doubt it.”
“Are you aware of the report that Célestine’s severed head was cut open and that her brain was removed by her murderer or murderers? Why do you think they did that?”
A smile was still there on Dr. Trinh’s face, but it was no longer the same smile. It had become a smile that said, “I knew you were my enemy when you walked in here, and now here is the proof, and it makes me happy to see how right I was.” Dr. Trinh stood up and with special force brushed some more crumbs from the front of her suit, this time very dirty, greasy, ugly crumbs that had been sprinkled by Naomi herself. The little silver crucifix—had Vietnam been converted by French Catholic missionaries?—bounced at the end of its chain like a freshly hanged man. And still Naomi couldn’t help herself. “Dr. Trinh, off the record, did Célestine ask you to kill her and then eat her? As a kind of womanly, compassionate sacrament, perhaps?”
Dr. Trinh came out from behind her desk for the first time and walked to the door. She opened it for Naomi without a word. Naomi noticed the doctor’s shoes. They were stilettos with an ankle-strapped bondage component, very severe in their stitching and their shape, but shockingly colorful—red, yellow, blue, green, black—like rare Australian parakeets. As Naomi left the office, she could not help thinking that Dr. Trinh’s shoes were somehow significant.
3
DR. MOLNÁR HAD ARRANGED for him to be upgraded to elite business class—the Duna Club Lounge!—on his Malév flight to Amsterdam. Even so, Nathan found himself wandering restlessly through the generic steel and glass of Terminal 2A at Ferihegy Airport. Unlike Naomi, who would immediately bury herself in her laptop the instant she arrived, Nathan considered airport downtime an opportunity for people-watching; but today, a drizzly, chilly summer day whose gloom seemed to have seeped into the airport, the only person Nathan was watching was Dunja, who was playing continuously on a screen in his mind. Trailing his roll-on camera bag behind him like a little red wagon, Nathan heard her say the terrifying, outrageous things she said she couldn’t help thinking but had no one to say them to until she met Nathan.
“What will I do when you leave me? Who will want me?”
“I’m not so special. If I want you … You’re gorgeous. You’ll have as many lovers as you want.”
“So many women have cancer now. Do you think a new esthetic can develop? Cancer beauty? I mean, if there could be heroin chic, the esthetic of the death-wishing drug addict? Will non-cancerous women be begging their cosmetic surgeons to give them fake node implants under their chins and around their necks? Under their arms? In their groins? So sexy, that fullness. And it works so well as an anti-aging technique, to fill out that sagging turkey neck. Who wouldn’t want it? And the jewelry, the titanium pellets piercing those tits. So S&M/bondage.” Dunja kept talking in Nathan’s head as he segued into a parallel inner dialogue with her about health and evolution, about the theory that concepts of beauty were not just concepts, but perceptions of indicators of reproductive potential and therefore of youth, about selfish genes using our bodies as vehicles only to perpetuate themselves, about how perhaps cancer genes could begin to make their own case for reproductive immortality as well, and so they too would put immense pressure on cultural acceptance of formerly taboo concepts of beauty, concepts which used to indicate disease and nearness to death but now mesmerized and seduced and mimicked youth and ripeness and health, and so her little fantasy of a culture forming around her own dire straits could theoretically … It wasn’t a conversation they actually had, but if he were Naomi, he’d probably be texting or emailing or instant-messaging Dunja right now using that Naomiesque stream-ofsemi-consciousness that had flowed over him so often in the four years they had been together.
Naomi never let anybody go, and she used her unique, potent mixture of technology and witchiness to do it, whereas Nathan was only too happy to disconnect, to remove you from his Friends list and leave you dangling in the ether of cyberspace.
Naomi thought that Nathan was ruthless with his friends; Nathan thought Naomi was compulsively, obsessively possessive. But what was Dunja? Despite the sex and the intimacy, she was the subject of a piece, and his subjects often tried to keep up a correspondence with him, sometimes clinging, with an unhealthy, creepy desperation, to that special moment in their lives; they couldn’t accept that their time was up, that the piece about their arcane, provocative medical condition had been published, and that Nathan was now permanently out of their lives. Naomi’s subjects usually ended up behind bars or executed, and that neatly limited flowback, as Nathan called it. Of course, Dunja was certain she would be dead in a few months, and that would neatly limit flowback as well.
Their last conversation had taken place in the Molnár Clinic’s horrid recovery room, after her breasts had been duly cut open and many small tumors had been removed under the cold blue surgery lights that transformed her flesh into silicone and her blood into magenta paste. He sat on the same plastic chair, although this time she was in the bed by the door and there were three other patients rustling and moaning in the room.
“Did you enjoy that?” she asked. “It made it easier knowing that I had an appreciative audience.”
“Molnár seemed confident of success. I enjoyed that part of it,” said Nathan.
Dunja laughed. “Molnár is just talking about the mechanics of tumor removal. That’s his success. He knows I’m not going to last long, but he doesn’t really consider it to be his problem.”
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