“Did you go, then? Did you do it? Study with the Arosteguys at the Sorbonne?”
“Oh, yes, I did. I spent two years there with them. I took a lot of other courses as well, but mainly it was them. The Arosteguys.”
“And your French? Were you humiliated? Can you speak Parisian French now?”
Chase let her hands drop into her lap with an expressive exhalation, and then, in counterpoint, a giggle. “I can’t speak any French now. Either brand of. None.”
“Really? How come?”
“I guess I just forgot it all. It’s been a whole year since Paris.” Chase stood up, brushed at her dress, then sank gracefully to the floor and began picking at the carpet as though grooming it for lice. “I dropped some nail bits when I showed you how the catcher works. My father notices those things. I call him Laser Eye. He doesn’t miss a trick. Gotta watch it with Dad.” By the end of her little speech she was doing a good comic impression of Roiphe, verbally and physically, mimicking exactly his loose-limbed unsteadiness and affected vulgarity. She crawled to her feet using the coffee table for support and stood over him, cradling the invisible clippings in her hand and bouncing them gently up and down as if testing their weight.
“Did you get them all?” said Nathan. He could think of no other strategy than to play the Roiphe game as it unfolded.
“I think so,” said Chase, with exaggerated musicality. “I do think so.”
“Chase, have you been following the story about the Arosteguys?” “How would I do that?”
“Well, probably on the internet.”
“I’ve found the internet to be a very dangerous place. Especially for children. I don’t go there anymore.”
“But you’re not a child.”
She laughed. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re an adult. Hey, have you heard of 3D printing?”
“I have, yes. Why?”
“Have you heard of 3D philosophical tissue printing?”
“No, that I haven’t heard of.”
“It’s not even on the internet. Know why?”
“Why?”
She was still in jaunty Dr. Roiphe street mode. “Because some friends and me invented it, and we don’t talk. Someday I’ll maybe let you play with it.” She turned away from him and disappeared up the stairs.
8
NAOMI SAT ON THE COUCH, Air opened on her lap, flickering Nagra and solemn camera (with soy-sauce-smeared LCD) restored to the tabletop, professionalism re-established. Arosteguy squatted on the other side of the table blotting up the spilled sake with a spice-plant-themed kitchen towel. “I need to tell what happened when Célestine was diagnosed. It destroyed the present tense for us, because it destroyed the future. It poisoned us. And it secretly destroyed our relationship with everyone we knew. Every laugh was a lie, every smile was a betrayal. Because we decided not to tell them. We knew it would destroy their present tense with us as well, and we couldn’t bear it. It drew us closer together, but in a melancholy, sick way, and it compressed our existing isolation almost to the point of madness.”
He balled up the wet towel, tossed it in the general direction of the kitchen, and segued into scraping up with a bamboo-handled spatula the remains of the meal he had scattered, carefully arranging the scraps of noodle, shrimp, seaweed, and tofu in a perforated red plastic shopping basket lined with newspaper. “We couldn’t take photos after the diagnosis. Every photo displayed the lie. Every photo was already a memento of a life that was gone, a photograph of death. Compared with those innocent early family photos, the pictures I finally took of Célestine … afterwards … they were honest, they contained no betrayals, no lies, no deceit. So they were horrible, but they were pure.”
“Ari, what doctor was it who did the diagnosing? You know that some people say there never was a diagnosis. That you invented it to justify the murder of your wife …”
He examined a shrimp on the blade of the spatula, then plucked it off and popped it into his mouth. “Who said this exactly? Dr. Trinh?”
“Dr. Trinh among others.”
“Others on the internet? The Twitterverse? There were blogs established to promote exactly that view.”
“Yes.”
“The internet is now a forum for public prosecution. But you ask me who diagnosed Célestine,” said Arosteguy. “The doctor who told her she had acute lymphocytic leukemia was Anatole Grünberg, a Nobel laureate for his work in hematological oncology. Who would doubt him?” A reflective pause. “They had been lovers when he was still in medical school at Paris Descartes, of course. They would meet, on and off. She liked to connect our work, so abstract, so interior, to the work of the human body. That is how she grounded our writing. Politics, the normal French mode of grounding, she found even more abstract and disconnected than philosophy. It never attracted her.”
Fingers flying, Naomi was already checking out Grünberg on Wikipedia. The featured portrait depicted a man with wild, protruding eyes, fleshy lips, and thinning, muddled hair. “Of course, I’ve heard of Grünberg from the boating accident scandal. But he was still practicing medicine? Like a regular doctor?” Grünberg had narrowly avoided conviction on charges of homicide involontaire—manslaughter—in a tragicomic drunken boating accident on the Marne River in which two of his three illegitimate children had been decapitated, after which had followed much sour public discussion of the value of genius in the real world.
“That was the basis of all his revolutionary research. Patients like Célestine.”
“You discussed that diagnosis with him?” asked Naomi.
“No. We knew each other socially, but he and I were cool to each other. Probably just primitive jealousy. We’re not immune. But Célestine reported everything back to me. Medical diagnoses, obscure medical websites, this was our daily bread.”
Naomi was incredulous. “He said nothing to you?”
“He was acting here as her doctor, her specialist. He had a professional rigor. He wouldn’t discuss it like café gossip.”
“You saw test results? Blood tests? Bone scans? CAT scans? MRIs? X-rays? Anything?”
Arosteguy shook his head at all of these—short, angry, contemptuous head shakes.
“Could Dr. Grünberg have been lying?” said Naomi. “Could Célestine have lied to you? Could she have not been sick?”
“I told you about the changes in her body. Those were real.”
“Maybe they were caused by something else.”
He snorted disdainfully. “A woman’s natural aging? It’s amazing what people will attribute to that. How they refuse to see things they are terrified to see.”
“Dr. Trinh told me that there was nothing medically wrong with Célestine.”
“Dr. Trinh was infatuated with Célestine. She adored her, worshiped her, could barely look at her without falling on her knees. It was embarrassing. She was pathetic. Célestine never went back to her after Anatole’s diagnosis. And why would Célestine lie to me, tell me she was dying when she wasn’t?”
“To induce you to kill her,” said Naomi triumphantly. “A mercy killing, but not for the reasons you thought.”
“A perversion beyond perversity! What a wonderful invention on your part. You are a dangerous writer after all.”
Soon Naomi was curled up on the couch with Arosteguy, who had his arms around her and was caressing her throat. For both of them, the resonances of philosophical wife-strangling that were undeniably in the air were comforting, not disturbing, offering a linkage to richly textured past dramas full of meaning. Her eyes were half closed and her voice was drowsy.
“But it was hideous, wasn’t it? The actual act itself—the eating, I mean? It was a horror show. Butchery. Those pictures. I’ve never seen anything so horrible. And Sagawa, he was eating a healthy young body. It’s sick of me to say this. I’m shocking myself for even thinking it. But somehow, because Célestine’s body was so ravaged by disease, it makes it more horrible. I can’t believe I said that.”
Arosteguy laughed a
short laugh that quickly shaded into a husky whisper, a theatrical technique, thought Naomi, which was probably effective when he was lecturing; she liked it herself, and felt for the moment like a student with cozily limited responsibilities. “Healthy sick thoughts,” he said. “Honest ones. But you are able to say that because you didn’t know her. You didn’t know her body with the intimacy that I did. You see a corpse, a dead, mutilated, anonymous—yes, diseased—body. But not me. I lived in the landscape of that body for so many years. As that landscape changed, my living changed with it. She never stopped being my Célestine. Never.”
Arosteguy kissed Naomi with passion and hunger. She kissed him back with the same. Soon they were naked, half on the couch, half on the floor. “Are you going to bite me?” said Naomi. He did. And she bit him back, on the shoulder, the biceps, the neck. “And then, are you going to eat me?” And he did—breasts, thighs, and then down to her pussy. She stopped him, grabbing his head, holding on to his hair.
“Oh, no, Ari. I forgot. My old boyfriend …”
“Your boyfriend, yes?”
“No, it’s … he just told me that he has Roiphe’s disease. You know. That venereal disease. I mean, I might not have it, Roiphe’s, but I have something …”
Arosteguy snorted. “Do you know my age?”
“Wikipedia says you’re sixty-seven.”
“Wikipedia is correct. And what a force for global harmony that creation is!”
Naomi detected no irony. “What has your age got to do with my disease?”
“Well, we are both diseased, aren’t we? For example, I no longer spurt. I just ooze, in a sinister way, like a popped pustule. For me, those come shots in porn videos, like cake-icing guns going off, they’re pure sci-fi, they’re CGI VFX only.”
Naomi snorted back in deliberate imitation. “What else? Do I get the whole list now, or do I get a chance to make some exciting monstrous discoveries?”
“Over time, with these sexual disabilities emerging gradually, old couples gradually accommodate them, and they don’t embarrass each other, they become part of the domestic seniors comedy you promise to write together, but your memories are thankfully not too good and you forget to do it. But for a youngster to be thrown into the den of the aging lion … I’ve experienced some difficult moments.”
“With your students.”
“The youngsters with enthusiasm and defiance, yes, which protects them from revulsion for a little while, but then …”
“You’re lucky nobody’s blown the political correctness whistle on you. I think those days are long over, even in France.”
“There have been dramas behind the scenes. The French press has had a tendency to be a bit more discreet than the rest of the world, but with competition from Facebook and Twitter … All sexual adventurism is lethal now.”
“Didn’t some of your youngsters have sexual insecurities?”
“Oh, yes, all of them. Célestine and I took full advantage of them in the name of therapy and philosophy.”
“And me? I have a few of those myself. Do you want my list, or do you want to make your own discoveries?”
“Honestly, I think a list would be charming. We can exchange them, and then see if reality matches.”
“I’ll start working on mine right away. But meanwhile, I’m serious about having my own oozing down there. You might catch something nasty. Do you have a pack of cute Japanese condoms lying around somewhere? There must be Hello Kitty condoms. Translated as Hello Pussy.”
“I’m so tempted to say something that sounds like it came from a poorly translated Punjabi erotic tale, something like ‘A cook must have a taste for sauces, no?’ and then go down on you.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“And please don’t do that?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“BUT WHERE ARE YOU GOING? You booked a hotel? How can you afford that? And I thought you needed to hide out in Tokyo.”
“I’m going to hide out even more,” said Naomi, hustling her remaining gear and clothes into her bags.
Yukie watched her, shaking her head. “From me? You don’t trust me?” Naomi turned away from the bed—she had colonized it and the kitchen table and a few other surfaces to organize her packing—and held Yukie by the shoulders. Yukie rolled her eyes up to her, and Naomi was surprised by the emotion she could read in them.
“Yukie, no, no. It’s not like that at all. It’s not.” She hugged Yukie, who let her body stay limp, unresponsive, a full-body pout.
“Then what is it? I don’t like the look in your eyes. I remember how wild you got that time in Santa Monica …” and just her own mention of the Santa Monica incident, which was a cornerstone of their mutual history and mythology, triggered an understanding in Yukie, hit her physically so that she flinched in Naomi’s embrace and then pulled away, drifting to the end of the kitchen to get an objective look at her friend. “Not still that French guy,” she said, shaking her head again. “Not the professor cannibal killer guy.” Yukie started to pick nervously at one of her fingernails, each coated in pearlescent white and sporting a tiny black ceramic rose glued to it. One of the roses had partially broken off and Yukie was trying to scrape the rest of it away. Naomi had noted how delicate an operation it was for Yukie to pull on the tight gloves she was so fond of.
“A few days with him isn’t enough to get the whole story.”
“The whole intimate fucking story! You’re as insane as he is!”
Naomi had wanted Yukie to be emotionally invested in her project, needed her to be at first, but now she felt the blowback of that setup, how it gave Yukie the right to be judgmental even in her genuine fear for her friend, though as always with Yukie there was that competitive thing, that career jealousy that surged to the surface and took a quick bite before you realized what hit you.
Naomi turned away and continued packing. “He’s an incredible man. Very sweet, very sensitive.”
Yukie began pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Omigod. They won’t even be able to bring you back to me in a body bag. It’ll be two dozen freezer-quality Ziplocs.”
“Don’t get melodramatic on me, Yukie. He’s not some dark force. He’s just a man, a man who did something extreme, out of love and passion and obsession, did it once.”
Yukie stopped pacing. She felt she could read the whole story from Naomi’s body language, the whole story including the ending. “You fucked him already, didn’t you? Your first night with him, and you fucked him. I can’t believe it.”
Naomi didn’t turn around. “No, you can’t understand it. That’s what you can’t. And I don’t expect you to until you read what I write about it. That’s really what it’s all about, and you’ve lost sight of that. It’s the writing. It’s the story. It’s fantastic and it’s all mine.”
“Wow. I’m shocked,” said Yukie. “Does Nathan do this too? You compare notes? You torment each other’s interviewees? You have some laughs about it?”
Naomi did laugh, her back still towards Yukie. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. I’m going to give him a call.”
NATHAN WALKED IN THE LEAFY, lush streets of Forest Hill, talking, improbably, to Naomi. The sun was hot, the light dappled. “I’m walking in the streets. I needed to get out of that house.”
“I know the feeling,” said Naomi. “Problem with me is, when I do that, I’m in Tokyo.” She sounded relaxed—too relaxed for Nathan’s comfort. It was the kind of relaxed you sounded when you’d had a lot of sex. The thought was floating at a subliminal level, and Nathan wasn’t going to address it, but it was there, gnawing. Well, let it gnaw away, with its ferocious little yellow teeth. How could he address it? It was Naomi who had finally broken the airphone-call-debacle deadlock after Nathan had spent fruitless hours emailing, texting, SMSing, phoning, social-networking.
The shape of it was this: she hated his fucking pusillanimous guts and would never forgive him. He had mortally wounded and mutilated and deformed her love for him, not
to mention the STD aspect. He was saved, she told him, only by the use to which she intended to put the whole sorry incident and, yes, their entire relationship. He should think of himself as about to embark on a particularly hideous hors catégorie mountain stage of the Tour de France, perhaps Mont Ventoux, or the Col du Tourmalet, jammed with scary, jeering, bizarrely costumed fans coming much too close, and he was going to suffer, suffer, and suffer more. Of course, she was thinking of Hervé and his carbon-fiber bicycle and his bib-style compression cycling shorts with their elaborate vented crotch pad and his Peyronie’s penis when she said it—she should have just fucked him, what a mistake—since all her understanding of bicycle racing came from him.
And there was that one final element, which was Nathan’s last email promising the revelation of a weird and unlikely connection between Roiphe and Arosteguy, which, Naomi had to admit to herself, might actually have tipped the thing over into reconciliation; there had to be something delicious and nutritious there, because Nathan just didn’t have the devious creativity required to invent something like that. And so she was talking to him again.
“The irony of the whole thing is, you tell me that your murderer cannibal guy, Arosteguy, is saner than you ever imagined,” said Nathan, “and now I have to tell you that my respectable old doctor guy is a complete fucking lunatic.”
“You’re kidding,” said Naomi, stretching languorously, with kittenish sexuality. Or so Nathan imagined. “That sounds fantastic. I was afraid for you.”
“Really? Afraid?”
“Afraid that your whole Roiphe thing would turn out to be boring. But no. Fantastic.”
“I’m not so sure. I think the man is delusional. I’m finding it hard to believe that he was ever a real doctor. Maybe he has Alzheimer’s.”
“What is it that he’s doing, exactly, that’s so loony?” said Naomi, and then she said some more words, but they were digitally garbled.
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