Consumed (17 page)

The mention of Sagawa, whom Naomi had initially thought might be a clever stepping-off platform for her piece, now filled her with horror. It was obvious and vulgar and revolting, and it was making it hard for her to physically see Arosteguy. The way he held his face, he was starting to actually look Japanese. “Ari, I … I can't do that, what you ask,” she said quietly, projecting, she hoped, thoughtful consideration, though there was nothing to consider. “I can't.”

Arosteguy launched himself unsteadily upwards and stood over her, towering over the low table and filling the room with his anger. He screamed at her. “Then get out! Get out, get out!” He kicked at the table, lifting it a foot or so before it came crashing back down, scattering the food, the camera, the dishes, then stormed up the stairs, leaving Naomi shaking, her eyes wide and swelling with tears.

She flew out of the house dragging her roller with her, its contents hastily stashed, its exterior compartments bulging pathologically, cables hanging and jouncing out of the improperly zipped pocket mouths. Her momentum carried her into the middle of the street, which was dark, dingy, and completely deserted. Scared, stalled, and now acutely alerted to her drunken state by her inability to perceive depth, she pivoted on the spot like a pinball flipper, looking for a cab. There was nothing except Arosteguy, strolling casually out of the house and walking up to her, coming very close to her as though nothing had happened, speaking as though continuing an understood subliminal conversation that had to be finished. He took her arm gently, just holding it, not pulling her.

“We made love frantically, desperately, as though I could possess her
and keep her from death,” he said quietly. “But I couldn't, of course. She was going to die. Her body was changing. She had swellings and nodes and lumps and rashes. I had to forcibly change my sense of sexual esthetics to accommodate her new body. I needed it to still be beautiful for me, though it was changing every day, every hour. And finally, when the changes were all coming to an end, we wanted her to die while making love to me, not fucked by a dozen plastic tubes in a hospital. So we devised a plan, and we carried it out.”

He bent down and picked up the roller, still holding her arm, and led her back towards his house, its door wide open, the pale fluid of its light washing the plant rags of the garden. She let him take her with him. “I strangled her while we made love. The swollen lymph nodes in her neck made it difficult, but more exotic. You know that in French an orgasm is
la petite mort
, the small death. And for the English metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘to die' meant ‘to come,' to have an orgasm. It was the most intense, exquisite moment in my life. It was a moment you never recover from. I kissed her while she died. Her eyes were full of love and gratitude. Her last breath came into my lungs like a hot tropical breeze.”

Naomi stopped just outside the door, shrugging off Arosteguy's hand. Her voice was quiet and small. “I'm afraid of you, Ari. I thought I wouldn't be, but I am.”

“And now she was dead, and I was alone. And what was I to do? Wave goodbye like a good bourgeois and soldier on with my life? Plead madness like the good Marxist professor Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife of thirty years in their special permanent apartment in the infirmary of the École Normale Supérieure, no less, and claimed he thought he was just massaging her neck? A few years in the asylum and then a comfortable exile to the provinces?”

He took her by the arm again and began to walk her into the house. He was giving her things, terrible, precious things. She didn't resist. “No.

I wanted to embody her, to incorporate her. I would have had to commit suicide if I had not been able to do that terrible, monstrous, beautiful thing.”

He slid the door closed behind them.

“THEY SENT ME TO PARIS.
I was afraid to go.”

“Why afraid?”

“French.”

“French the people or French the language?”

“The language of the French.”

They were sitting in the living room replaying Nathan's first conversation with Roiphe there, Chase sitting on the sofa, Nathan in the wingback chair with the Nagra running on the glass coffee table. He was extremely uncomfortable, but it was an exciting discomfort; there was so much strangeness about the situation. If she really had been in some kind of trance, a fugue state, she would not know that Nathan could see right through her soft dress and sweater and striped knee socks to her ravaged skin. But did she really not know? Would she care if she did know? How could he find out? How direct could he be? Could her trance really be some species of bizarre performance art? If it was, was it designed for her father alone, or was Nathan's presence part of what induced it? And the project, the pretense for their current interview? Chase had suggested a half-truth: Nathan was there to do a book about her father, and that book would include a bit of family history as background—nothing too deep, nothing sensational, and all subject to review by the subjects. No photos, she had said. She didn't accept Nathan's line about using the photos only as a memory aid, to make sure he got his descriptions right; it wasn't going to be a picture book. She would perhaps do a photo shoot with him under controlled circumstances some other time, but
she couldn't talk while being photographed. Something had happened in Paris that had changed her attitude to being photographed, and it was no longer something to be taken lightly, girlishly, playfully; too bad, but things changed, didn't they?

“What was it about the French language that scared you?”

“I learned my French in Quebec, while I was at McGill University in Montreal. I was passionate to learn the Quebec language, to acquire that strange, wonderful, ancient accent that got trapped in Quebec after the French Revolution. But McGill is an English-language university, and I learned my Quebec in the streets. Actually, worse than the streets, because I spent my summers in small towns where they spoke hard-core Quebec worse than anywhere in Montreal. I wanted my French to be rough, and it was.”

“Why did you want that? I wonder.”

Chase giggled and then, to Nathan's astonishment, dug into the green leather pouch tucked in beside her, pulled out a high-tech nail clipper, and began to trim her fingernails. The clipper had a matte titanium finish, a dimpled and contoured lever, and a pivoting plastic clippings catcher that reminded him of an old steam locomotive's cowcatcher apron. He was fairly certain it was the same clipper he had seen her using in her bedroom, though he had never gotten a clear shot of it. She worked the clipper at eye level and glanced mischievously over it. “Youthful rebellion expressed through the politics of language, mostly directed at my father. And then he twisted it back on me by suggesting that I use my hard-earned French to study at the Sorbonne. He used to joke that the Quebec language was not really French at all, and that I could prove he was wrong by speaking it in Paris. I would be studying with the most sophisticated writers of French you could imagine, and I was afraid. I would be Anglo Jewish from Toronto speaking bad street Quebec.”

“What would you be studying? Who were those writers?”

“The Philosophy of Consumerism. The kids called it PhiloCon, which, I think I recall, can sound a bit naughty in French if you want it to. Do you speak French?”

“Not really. I can read a bit. If we took a second language it was usually Spanish. And those writers who were supposed to teach your PhiloCon course?”

“Aristide and Célestine Arosteguy. You've heard of them? A married couple. They were kind of controversial in the academic world. Ow!” Chase flapped her hand and then sucked a finger. “That hurt.”

“What happened?”

“Nipped a bit of finger. I suppose it'll be trapped in this little clipping-catcher thing. See? You just flip it down when you want to toss the nail clippings. It stops it from popping the clippings all over the place, the way the old clippers do. It's a Sally Hansen. Stainless steel. Oh, there's some blood …” There was some blood, winding its way down her ring finger. She smeared it against her middle finger then sucked them both, watching him.

It had to be an elaborate construct by Chase, if not by Chase and Roiphe. They must have researched him on the net, somehow linking him with Naomi and her Arosteguy project. Naomi could be so cavalier about the net when she was in that mood, even though she knew all about lawsuits against Tweeters and mob actions against Facebookers. And the clippers, the blood … it was a brilliant miniature piece of theater and almost unthinkable that it was really an unconscious acknowledgment of a psychopathological state. But did he have a role in this drama, or was he just a recruited audience?

“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.