Consumed (19 page)

When some time later Roiphe drove up in his 1990s-vintage Cadillac Seville, parked in his driveway, and got out with tennis racket in hand, he
found Nathan sitting on the steps of his house. “Lock yourself out, did you?” he said, crossing the lawn with a boisterous chuckle. His trim blue Puma tracksuit made the scrawny doctor look lithe and athletic.

“I was never in.”

Having mounted the portico, Roiphe showed off his backhand, the racket breezing cheekily close to Nathan's face. “Lady of the house didn't answer the doorbell?”

“I made the mistake of speaking French to her and she slammed the door on me.”

The doctor's face clouded over for just an instant. “Well, that's clever of you. Why would you do that, of all things?”

“She told me about studying at the Sorbonne. Said she had a complex about speaking French. Thought I'd take her by surprise, shake her up a bit. Guess I did. Was that a mistake?”

“Ah, well, French is part of her past, and at the moment the past is not part of her therapy. No Freudians allowed inside here!” Roiphe slapped Nathan on the back, swapping his Prince EXO3 to his left hand to do so.

Nathan stood up and shrugged. “Have I blown it? Am I banned from the ranch?”

“Far from it. We're gonna get you your own key. Now, how's that for a journalist's wet dream? The keys to the kingdom! You wouldn't abuse that privilege, would you? I know how you boys like to root around in the drawers and the underwear.”

NAOMI HAD FALLEN ASLEEP
after her call with Nathan. She had used Arosteguy's curiously long and slender Japanese LG flip phone to make things simpler; he had himself fallen asleep downstairs on the couch and she had gone up to her room to make the call. She had the sense that
Nathan could smell Arosteguy on her voice, and that pleased her and helped ease her into a very creamy sleep space. But now her iPad chimed the receipt of some email, and she was acutely sensitized to that sound; she could not sleep through it or wrap a protective coating around it. The iPad was on the table and she could reach it without getting out of bed or even wriggling to the edge of the bed. She lay back and held the glowing screen over her head, a hovering, benign presence, reassuring in a way that she needed. She could see from the Notifications panel that it was the photos Nathan had promised to send, the subject line “Shocking Non-Reality Photos … and more!”

When she opened the photos in Preview, she was puzzled, and she sat up so she could cradle the device in her lap and manipulate the images. Who was this very pretty young woman caught naked on her knees in front of a child's table strewn with child's teaware? (All the teaware, Naomi couldn't help noting, was very North American, or pseudo-British at best; her growing ease with restricted Japanese space, and the novel strangeness of non-Japanese teaware, pleased her; it felt like the stirrings of a profound cultural change
à l'Arosteguyenne
.) But what was the woman in the photos doing? Pretending to be a child? The photos came in three medium-resolution batches, and these were followed by a separate explanatory note: “This is Chase Roiphe, Dr. Roiphe's daughter. She says she studied at the Sorbonne with the Arosteguys as recently as a year ago. She might have neat things to tell you. Wanna show some of these to your new pal? Maybe he'll recognize her. I get the sense she would've made an impression. Otherwise, your beautiful eyes only!!”

The mechanism of vengeance and love being what it is, Naomi was immediately panicked and hurt by that penultimate line. Apparently Chase Roiphe had made an impression on Nathan, and, given her beauty and her nakedness and—she had to be honest—her freakishness, which Nathan had always been a sucker for, especially if it proved to be not
too self-destructive, she doubted it was entirely intellectual. A biochemical impression, then, the worst kind. But what kind of freakishness was it?

All of Naomi's sharpest analytical instruments immediately came into play, and the resulting dissections were unnerving. She could feel the camera in Nathan's hands as if it were in her own hands, and she could feel his accumulating attraction to this woman, this Chase Roiphe, as the camera moved from short-lens wide-angle and distant, to wide-angle and close, to long-lens intimate close-up; these corresponded to documentary objectivity morphing into evidence of love, or at least sexual attraction, if not obsession. The angles themselves told their own story: I am interested in you in a perfunctory way, but now I'm kind of intrigued by you even as I begin to fear you, and now, though I'm nervous about getting close (my shooting is very messy and ill-framed), at least you're letting me get close without reacting negatively, and now I feel that you're inviting me into your face and your body, and now I'm confidently finding the optical perspectives that show off your fearsome beauty and your provocative weirdness to their best advantage. By the end of the hellish portfolio, he was crawling all over her face and body—that sensational athletic body covered with what? Eczema? Mosquito bites? Blackfly bites? Had she been swimming nude on the Canadian Shield? And what was that she was eating? Bizarre macroscopic grazing with Nathan wanting to follow her fingers into her mouth, she could just tell.

Naomi tossed the iPad onto the bed. She was sure that Nathan would be fucking Chase in no time, and maybe he'd call it another mercy fuck. Or maybe this time it represented the new standard: embedded research. To her own surprise, Naomi started to laugh. She was sure that Nathan knew she was fucking Arosteguy, and that meant they had emerged into a new and exciting level of game play, one which braided their new lovers into each other's lives. And look how majestically it was playing out: for all she knew, Chase had fucked Arosteguy—and Célestine!—and what Nathan learned
from Chase would illuminate the Arosteguy saga for her. He was obviously primed to share the Roiphes with her, and it could all lead to a tingling and dangerous place. She stretched out on the bed, arms and legs thrown wide, welcoming the vulnerability, the transparency, exquisitely aware of the old flimsy cotton happi coat she was now wearing, which Ari had found for her. It had a crazy-making indigo lattice pattern and was fraying around the edges, and, feeling the graze on her skin of its opaque history, she fantasized that it was something that Samuel Beckett would have worn in his last days in that depressing municipal old people's refuge called Le Tiers Temps (the Third Stage)—he called it “an old crock's home,” his breathing machine wheezing in the corner—something that said despair and poverty to her, which translated into Japanese became joy and freedom. It had come with the place, Ari had said, stuffed into a window frame to keep out the winter cold. The image of Beckett brought Naomi directly back to Nathan, who was her only conduit to the playwright. He had begged her to read his article called “Beckett's Last Tape”—a meditation on Beckett's last year on earth—after sitting with her through a DVD of the Gate Theatre's production in Dublin of
Krapp's Last Tape
starring John Hurt, and she had liked the interplay between the tape recorder and Krapp's memory, linking it even then to her fascination with photography and its inexorable manipulation of memory. For her, Beckett was primarily that hair, that nose, those cheekbones, those brows—those ears!—a stunning photographic thing. She sat up and snatched the iPad, poised to reply to Nathan with everything she had just been thinking—let him feel the sinister electricity across an ocean and a continent, let him be jolted and insecure and frightened—but instead she found herself importing the photos into her Photosmith app for better image handling and then, once they had loaded, getting up and going downstairs in stealth mode, iPad in hand like a charged pistol.

The futon had been unfolded on its low wooden frame to form a platform specifically for sex, and Arosteguy, wearing only a French marine
shirt, royal-blue-and-white stripes à la Picasso, was lying on his side, close enough to the fetal position that it choked Naomi with potent visions of her father in his last days in Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, shriveled and jaundiced and twitching towards death. At the same time, she was amused at how un-Japanese he looked in that compressed space, a big white spreading European man with thick hairy thighs and broad thick chest. He had shown her some Japanese porn on a fourteen-inch Sanyo tube TV playing through a chunky silver no-name VCR. It featured a seventy-three-year-old porn star named Shigeo Tokuda who had sweetly protruding teeth and a few wisps of hair, and a touchingly crumpled old body with a penis you could barely perceive through the pulsing, Mondrian-like censor's blur effect which was quite hypnotizing when that penis was moving in and out of the mouth or vagina of a large-breasted twenty-something girl. The video was called
Prohibited Elderly Care: Volume 17
and, as promised, presented sex in a nursing home for the elderly. He said that he had bought the video in order to segue gracefully into sex of the aged Japanese flavor, happily certain that he would never fuck a Caucasian woman again. The subtext of their CRT screening event was that Naomi was interfering with his desire to cast off as much of his Frenchness as possible in exchange for Asianness, and was meant as a compliment, but the sub-subtext was that old men were sexually viable,
n'est-ce pas
? Having found him overwhelmingly attractive from the first YouTube video she had seen of him, she really needed no convincing; Shigeo Tokuda, on the other hand, she found only comically congenial. She began to take photos with her iPad of Ari sleeping, the shutter sound effect turned off, worrying on some level that the very functioning of her brain would wake him in anger. She feared his anger. As she got close to him, she realized that he was gently snoring in a variegated and random way that was oddly expressive, as though he were talking through his nasal cavities. She briefly flirted with the idea of shooting video but didn't dare, though the thought of a documentary
rather than an article or a book did cross her mind. She could almost feel his nasal septum quivering like the reed of a clarinet or a heart valve during a bout of atrial fibrillation, another oblique connection with her father's last days. She covered his entire body in loose frames and then tight ones. When she came around to the front of the futon to take a close-up of his face, she saw that his eyes were open and watching her.

He yawned and stretched and half sat up. “I suppose a photo of the deflated, semen-encrusted penis of the notorious French philosophy cannibal could be of interest, even if taken with an iPad.”

“Only five megapixels, but a nice documentary quality. Probably all you need for a book.” He pulled in his legs to make room for her and she sat next to him. “And speaking of documenting, there's something on this”—she waggled the iPad—“I want to show you. Or do you want me to make you some tea first? I think I've mastered those two crummy little rusty burners.”

“I was endlessly fucking you in my sleep.”

“Your snoring was very sexy.”

“Snoring?”

She did her best to replicate his snoring, not sure if he simply didn't know the English word or was surprised to hear that he had been snoring. It came off sounding a bit like one of the mocking green pigs from Angry Birds, a free HD copy of which she had on that very iPad.

Arosteguy laughed. “You must do sound effects for me more often. You have a great talent there. But show me what you want to show me. I usually wake up with clarity that rapidly fades, so maybe now is the best time.” He put his arm around her and pulled her close with a deep grunt in a way that she found disturbing, neither very French nor very Japanese, and perhaps quietly desperate; it didn't feel like part of whatever their relationship was, felt more like the incestuous embrace of a father and daughter (was this what Nathan meant when he talked about “theme sex”?),
Arosteguy sitting there with his exposed thighs and penis and balls, she naked under her skimpy, threadbare happi coat, and it gave what she was about to do—show him Nathan's photos knowing that they had explosive potential (though she wasn't sure what that would be)—an ultra-perverse sheen.

She unlocked the screen and angled it towards Arosteguy. “These are photos my friend Nathan took. He's working on a piece in Toronto.”

“I know the city. Very nice. Friendly. I was there in 1996 for a Third World energy symposium. What are these photos? Who is that girl? Nice haunches. What is she doing?”

Naomi paged rhythmically through the photos, Arosteguy reacting with little grunts and exhales as though still asleep, until she paused at the first shot showing Chase in close-up. “Ari, do you recognize her?”

Arosteguy cantilevered his head forward and squinted at the screen. Naomi spread her fingers over the shot as though stretching out a membrane, enlarging it until Chase's enraptured, openmouthed face filled the viewer window. Arosteguy jolted back as though struck in the head, his right hand violently clenching Naomi's shoulder. He stood up, roughly raking his arm across Naomi's shoulders as he pulled away from her, backing away from the futon, eyes blazing with anger. Naomi felt herself shriveling up like a spider touched by a lit cigarette, but still had the presence of mind to activate the iPad's Voice Memos app, and this had a soothing, distancing effect, allowing her to float into that protected space which is
professional observer
, safely placing Arosteguy on that rotating specimen platform under the magnifying glass. He paced back and forth, muttering to himself, then snatched his tight-fitting navy corduroy pants off the floor and struggled his way into them without underpants, which he seemed never to wear. Thus armored, he sat back against the front windowsill, pushed his lips out into a flexing pout as though silently rehearsing his next sentence, and then said, “Who is your friend who sent these photographs?”

“His name is Nathan Math. He's a journalist. Lives in New York.” Arosteguy nodded. “Boyfriend?”