“What are you seeing?” said Naomi.
Without looking up, he said, “I am seeing that Aristide Arosteguy will soon be caught in a lie, and so he might as well tell everything to his priestess confessor.”
“What was the lie?”
“That is exactly what a priestess would want to know. But isn’t she curious about the mechanism of revelation? The priest of my childhood, for example, Reverend Father Drossos, a terrifying man, was obsessively, perhaps unnaturally, concerned with the mechanism of revelation. Of course, there were sinister and familiar reasons for that.”
“Well, your former student Chase Roiphe will eventually tell Nathan some secrets about you, and Nathan will tell me, and I’ll tell the world.”
Arosteguy looked up at her now with an appreciative smile. “Very good, and no less than I would expect from Priestess Naomi.” He offered the iPad back with a slight bow, holding it with both hands flat underneath it, palms up, like a sacramental plate—or a Japanese business card. “But the secrets have already been told without a word being spoken, and they are all right in here.”
“GONNA HAVE KIDS someday, Nate?”
They sat side by side on the rough-cut stone patio overlooking the narrow lap pool and the fussy, overgrown rock pond harboring some very butch koi. Beyond that there was a slate-roofed coach house which looked original—that is, about a hundred years old—overlooked by a bland institutional apartment block. Nathan idly wondered how many tenants were watching them through binoculars and urban telescopes. He could hear the trickle of a small artificial stream or waterfall but couldn’t see it from where he was sitting under the vast canvas teak-strutted garden umbrella that sprouted from a gasketed hole in the center of their table, also vast, also teak. A small, anxious Asian woman had brought them coffee and nuts and berries in bowls.
“I have no idea, Barry.”
“You’ve probably got a steady girl somewhere, though, haven’t you?”
The sun was high and hot and Roiphe had polarized sunglass clip-ons over his glasses that were even bigger than the glasses themselves; the chromed lower edges of the clip-ons dug into the doctor’s flaccid cheeks.
“I sort of do, I guess.”
Roiphe was playing with a khaki mesh-vented Tilley hat, twisting the brim, crushing the crown and re-blocking it, putting it on and off his head. “Do I detect some sexual ambivalence there? You know, there was a big vogue a while back where GPs dabbled in sex therapy. I’m not sure how healthy that really was, but it was pretty darned common. You can see the psychopathology right there. I refused to get into it. A lot of my colleagues got into big trouble with it. Busted up a lot of marriages.”
“Ambivalence, I guess. I wouldn’t say sexual.” The blueberries were especially good, but the raspberries had gone soft, mushy, and sour. “Just the commitment problem, I would say. Not just committing to a particular woman, but committing to a particular future. Kinda banal and ordinary.” He rotated his Nagra so that he could be sure it was recording at a decent level given the heavy ambient noon traffic noise. “But speaking of psychopathology, I have to wonder about the deal here, you playing the role of shrink to your own daughter.”
Roiphe chuckled and poured himself more coffee with a shaky hand, spilling a bit onto the brim of the hat that now rested next to his cup. “Aren’t you the cheeky one. Well, to begin with, that’s how I always approached being a parent. I’m naturally analytical. I’m clinical. I can’t fight it. That doesn’t mean I’m cold, although maybe my poor dead wife would’ve disputed that. But goddammit, what would you be doing? We sent her off to France, Rose and I, with the best of intentions—as you can imagine, given the expense. She was such a bright girl, Chase, and kinda European in her outlook. She didn’t look to the States for excitement or inspiration.
Partially it was the language thing. Of course there’s a lot of Spanish going on in the US, but she wanted the whole deal, a country where English was basically not spoken, and the culture was based around that language. And then, of course, there was the Quebec thing. She told you about that?”
“She did, yes.”
“Okay, so anyways, we pack her off to France, she gradually stops phoning, then stops emailing, and then we just don’t hear from her. Not a word. And then Rose dies, a big fat horrible surprise. She was in great shape for an old babe—we can get into that sometime, if you think it’s relevant to the book, but it might not be, depending. So Rose dies, and I can’t find a way to let Chase know about it, and so I get in touch with this Arosteguy guy, and I get a really weird vibe from him. So I fly over to Paris looking for her, and eventually I find her with the help of this kid, a student, Hervé Blomqvist—what a name; I can barely get my mouth around it—a colleague of hers. It seems she was living with him. Something traumatic happened to her, and she left that great little apartment on the Left Bank that we found for her and moved in with this Blomqvist. I guess that’s a Norwegian or maybe Swedish name, but he seemed totally French to me. You know, kinda saucy and arrogant, but in the end really helpful and okay. You’d have to say that ultimately he was an okay kid. I think she would have been in terrible trouble without him. You might eventually want to look him up to get his take on the whole Sorbonne thing. For the book.”
“I might,” said Nathan, thumbing exactly that note into his iPhone’s Notes app. “How do you spell that name, exactly?”
“I’ll give you all the particulars when we get back inside. Never was much of a speller myself. I’ve got it lying around somewhere. And an address and a phone number. They’re a year old now, but you never know. And now, speaking of the French language, when I got Chase back she was a helluva basket case, and it all seemed to do with speaking, or not speaking, French, and that the Arosteguys—turns out there were two of them, a man and a woman, married professors—said such terrible things to her in French that she was traumatized. And when I asked her what they could possibly have said that could do that, she said she couldn’t recall it because they spoke the words in French, and French was gone from her brain—exiled was the word she used, exiled from her brain—as was French in general, and so she couldn’t remember anything. And then she started doing these weird ritualistic things and eating bits of her own skin, stuff that you’ve seen, all in a trance, and I can’t for the life of me see what that has to do with the terrible French words being spoken thing. And that’s basically where we are. The old mystery wrapped in an enigma, or whatever the hell that was. And so that’s having kids too. It’s rougher than you can imagine. That’s why I asked you.”
“Barry, you mentioned ‘experiments’ in connection with Chase’s condition. I wonder what you meant. What exactly is your course of therapy for her?”
“I’m attacking on all fronts, boy. And some of those fronts are weird, lemme tell you.”
“For instance.”
“For instance, up in that third-floor attic space that’s all hers. I bought this house for her, really, you know. Rose never lived here. We’ve only been here a year. I bought it with all the furniture and lights and stuff that they put in to show off the house—what do they call it, staging, home staging. I just wanted a big space of our own when I saw what shape she was in, and that condo downtown on the waterfront that Rose and I had was just too small, too introverted. They couldn’t believe I was serious, but I told them I had no taste and that everything they had done looked fine to me. The woman fought me on that, said the stuff was rented and it was deliberately bland so as not to distract from the house, the property, the space itself. Anyhow, I rolled right on over her and her bosses, and they made it work because it’d been sitting around unsold for over a year.” Roiphe stopped and took a tentative sip of his lukewarm coffee, lost in a sudden reverie. Nathan waited for him to continue but he seemed to think he had answered the question. “Barry, you were saying. Your weird course of therapy.”
“Oh, yeah, yes. So I collaborated in a way with Chase on a solution to her distress, which she never really ad
mitted to, and she said, ‘There’s a thing called a 3D printer, and I want one to play with, I think it might relax me.’ That’s the term she used, relax me, and it became our code for cure me, or maybe heal me a little bit.”
“She mentioned the 3D printer to me. Said she’d show it to me.” “Really? Well, that would be rare. She’s sure never let me see her using it, I can tell you that. And hell, you should see the damned thing. Not cheap! She insisted on the best, and then, like I said, after setting up and outfitting the whole third-floor suite for her, three rooms and a bathroom, she won’t let me see what she’s actually doing with it in what she calls her workroom. Actually locks the door on me. I could break in, of course, but I’m scared to. Might set her back into that catatonia she was enveloped in when I brought her back from France. You should’ve seen her, stiff as a board and all bundled up with blankets even though it was as hot a summer as today. So she said she’d show you? Well, there you are, you’re a part of my course of therapy. We collaborate on Chase as well as the book, and that gets her over some of her father issues too.”
Nathan wasn’t ready to delve into the father issues, but he suspected that they would have deep and tormented roots. “Wow. That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? I’m just a journalist.”
“These are radical times, boy. Can’t you feel it? You need to stretch with the times, stretch to the breaking point. I sensed the second I saw you that you were ready for a life breakthrough, and this is it. No telling where it’ll lead.”
“I’m not sure how much she’ll want to collaborate after the door slam.”
“Just don’t speak French to her again. I’m sure it’ll be all right. She’s kinda intrigued by you. She’s been pretty reclusive since I brought her back.”
“Have you ever heard of the book Le Schizo et les langues? Written in French by an American, Louis Wolfson, a schizophrenic who couldn’t bear to speak English, or even to hear it spoken, and retreated completely into other languages, but mainly French. In his case, it was mother issues.”
“Well, there you are, you see? Destiny has called in a specialist for me, and it’s you, boy.”
“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.”
The futon had been folded back into its couch configuration, and Naomi, now in yoga pants and gray fleece Roots zip-up hoodie, had taken possession of it, spreading all her electronic paraphernalia protectively around her: MacBook Air on lap with shield-like lid open, glowing Apple logo a talisman against Arosteguy, who sat on the other side of the low table, slumped in the segmented brown velveteen beanbag chair. She had originally recorded him using the Nagra’s uncompressed WAV files, which were huge but so beautifully detailed; the lossy MP3s would have been more than adequate for transcription, but she wanted the full quality of Arosteguy’s smoky voice, anticipating at least a radio program if not a video documentary. For the moment, though, she had been playing back a key passage of Arosteguy’s Célestine testimony through her Air’s tinny speakers—not resonant, but clear enough for condemnation. The Nagra sat on the table close to Arosteguy, its blue LED modulometer twitching in sync with the distant street sounds, waiting for him to speak. Naturally, he had tea and an RIN cigarette to play with while he generated a response, and he sipped and inhaled and exhaled with exquisite cogitation. Finally, he glanced up at her with calculated, sheepish charm and smiled.
“I apologize to my priestess. I underestimated her. I equated her with the global media, which is where I found those easily digestible raw materials for my banal and bourgeois account of My Life with Poor Terminal Célestine. There are so many blogs and articles in the ‘Living’ sections of online newspapers pouring out the synthetic emotions and the mundane details and the shocking bodily consequences of any disease you can think of or even invent. Honestly, Célestine and I felt we had to fully understand the phenomenon of the internet, because consumerism and the internet had fused, they had become one thing, even though on a certain level it was anathema to us, noxious to the strange, introverted, and, yes, relentlessly snob personal culture we had spent years developing together. But also we realized we needed the net in order to understand what was the basic human condition, what a current human being really was, because we had lost touch with that, our students made that clear to us, and so we were also using the internet to research our roles playing normal human beings.”
He took an intense drag on his cigarette that was rich with unspoken, ironic drama, or at least Naomi interpreted it that way. She felt humiliated to have been deluded, suckered into a sympathy fuck, and at the same time triumphant and eager for a scoop that was beyond the internet’s reach. Undeniably, it was Nathan’s photos—their full meaning still cloudy—that had brought Arosteguy to heel, and it meant that she and Nathan were still some kind of team, perhaps not on the scale of the Arosteguys but pleasingly outlandish in its own way, and maybe she would encourage Nathan to fuck Chase Roiphe if he hadn’t already, just to sharpen the parallels. The thought made her giddy, and some juices began to flow.
Arosteguy seemed to be fading away into his own head now, and Naomi reflexively became the interrogator. “Ari, let’s start with the basics. Was Dr. Trinh telling the truth? Célestine did not have brain cancer or any other kind of cancer?”
Still pacing the inner landscape of his own skull, Arosteguy answered without looking up, as though Naomi were inside that skull with him. “Dr. Trinh, yes, she was telling the truth about that.”
“And so … why is she dead? What killed Célestine Arosteguy?”
“Célestine woke up in the middle of the night. She shook me to wake me up. When she could see the light swell back into my eyes, my consciousness, she said, with great, husky gravity, ‘We must destroy the insect religion.’” He raised his head and looked at Naomi, but she felt, with a deep visceral chill, that he was looking at Célestine. “That was a pulled trigger, it was a terrifying shot fired into my brain directly from her mouth.”
“I don’t understand the reference.”
Aristide laughed; he was now looking at Naomi. “No trigger for you, then. Because obviously you’ve never read the famous essay.”
For Naomi, this was the pulled trigger, the terrifying shot fired into her brain directly from his mouth: her ignorance, her lack of depth. Yukie was able to flaunt this thinness, could flip the veneer into the structure, the wood-grain paneling becoming the table itself, just like all her social contemporaries; if you knew too much, if you were too aware or too educated, you were vulnerable to special varieties of pain and anxiety, and, worse, you were not cool. But Naomi was not Yukie. It caused her anguish that she had not read the famous essay, had not known it existed. But strangely, given any kind of handle at all, she could imagine it, and this had always been her quick, saving grace: not knowledge, exactly, but intuitive invention. “I’m sure I can find it on the net. Title?”
Arosteguy stubbed out his dying RIN and quickly lit another one. “The essay was called ‘The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion.’”
Yes, thought Naomi as she netted madly, here it is: Weber. Capitalism. Vatican. Luther. Entomology. Sartre. Consumerism. Beckett. North Korea. Apocalypse. Oblivion.
9
THE TRIGGER WAS THE RELIGION of the breast, of the fluid of the flesh which is there to nourish, to create more flesh. And then there was an actual breast, Célestine’s wonderful left breast, which was full, not of milk and milk glands, but a buzzing, bristling hodgepodge of insects of every shape and configuration. Yes. “My left breast is a bag full of insects. I don’t know why it’s attached to me, and I would like very much to … disconnect it. You can have it afterwards, if you like. I know you’re fond of it.�
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We were on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, the only two members who were not moviemaking professionals. The year before, it had been an American opera singer and a computer-game designer. Sequestered in a deluxe villa in the hills overlooking Cannes, we were to discuss in the most leisurely and free-form manner all questions of cinema and society with our nine jury colleagues—including our president, the Serbian actor Dragan Štimac—while eating the most exquisite meals and wandering the most Arcadian gardens. Eventually, we would sit around the grand table in the impressive ballroom and vote for the various awards. There were twenty-two films in the competition for the Palme d’Or and several other intensely anticipated and analyzed prizes.
The villa was said to belong to a ninety-three-year-old Russian countess, a former beauty who was actually lurking somewhere on the premises, hidden from view, not wanting to be seen but thrilling to the excitement of judgment on art that thronged her halls. It was in the grotesquely Russianate pool anteroom, in a changing room tiled like the Hermitage, that Célestine pulled my face to her naked left breast and said, in a voice shivering with horror, “Listen!”
I listened. I heard her heart, trip-hammering. “Your tachycardia,” I said. “Can you control it? Do you need your pills?” Her face was disfigured by fear; it was, I confess, a face I despised, a rare face. She squeezed her breast, jounced it like a bag of cherries. “Entomology,” she said. “Bag of bugs. Listen to them in there. They would like to come out. Especially the Hymenoptera. They tend to be claustrophobic. Which is strange, of course, because my breast is very much like a wasp nest, and you’d think they’d be comfortable in there.” She was really crushing and kneading her breast in her hands, and I gently pulled them away and held her wrists down on her thighs. She sighed, her face relaxed, and she laughed a small laugh.
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