Consumed (14 page)

Arosteguy rose and leaned over Naomi to pour her more tea. Her teacup was still almost full. Was it a threatening, a challenging move? Reflexively, she shrank back ever so slightly. “Maybe you'd like to take some pictures of me now? Our first meeting? Historic. You said you brought your flash units. I don't like bright light in my house. I can't think in bright light. But a flash of inspiration is always good.”

NAOMI HAD SET UP
her three wireless Speedlight flash units with the chunky black wireless SU-800 Commander, which controlled and triggered the flashes using infrared pulses, locked in her D300s's hot shoe, and was snapping away as Arosteguy sat and posed, drinking tea and smoking, effortlessly playing the role of rumpled sage. The lighting setup, for now, was simple and unadventurous: one flash lighting the background, splashing the walls and the narrow wooden staircase behind the couch; one above right, sitting on the radio's speaker—there seemed to be only one—giving her the key light on Arosteguy's face; and one directly off to the left, sitting on a pile of books, which provided the fill light. Naomi's Nagra recorder—a model ML, one generation behind Nathan's Nagra SD—was working on the side table next to Arosteguy's couch. So smooth was the philosopher that he timed his sentences to her flashes, never once being caught with his mouth half open or his eyes half closed. In this, he reminded her of Hervé. Had one of them schooled the other?

“That's a very big camera you have. Very professional. Of course, that's to be expected. I myself also use a digital camera, but a small one, a ‘consumer camera,' they call them. I would like very much for you to teach me professional photographic methods. That's one of the reasons I insisted
that you live here with me for the few days that you do your interview. At least I will gain something.”

Naomi constantly checked her shots as they popped up on the camera's rear LCD screen, something the pros derided as “chimping” but all did obsessively anyway. So accurate had the screens become in terms of both resolution and color that you really knew exactly what you were getting. She knew nobody who was nostalgic enough for the days of film to actually shoot with it other than as a masochistic retro-gesture. “Monsieur Arosteguy, you know I haven't agreed to stay here. But do you really think photo tutorials are all you have to gain? I thought you wanted to tell your story. I thought it had never been told.”

“Ari. You must call me Ari if you are to stay with me. But I am working on a book that will tell my story. I don't expect you to be that objective, or rather that subjective.”

“In my experience, a good journalist can tell a subject things about himself that he never knew.”

“Really?” said Arosteguy. “That would be interesting. Very interesting.”

NOT TOO MANY HOURS LATER,
Naomi took over Yukie's spindly metal kitchen table to assemble all her electronics in preparation for taking them to Arosteguy's house. Yukie leaned against the front door, watching Naomi while of course texting, Facebooking, Twittering, Instagramming, playing video games, and watching cartoons using a massive clamshell phone of a type unknown to Naomi which was covered with cute/sinister anime/ manga stickers.

“You know, I think you're crazy,” said Yukie. “Maybe suicidal.”

Naomi liked all her cables, connectors, and adapters packed away in old padded mailing envelopes, and each time she packed, she was presented with a new puzzle: which things went where. She stood over the table, hands on hips, watching the spread-out tangle of devices and envelopes, waiting for clarity. At random moments, she would attack one or another set of devices, like a cormorant diving into the sea for eels, and stuff it into its mysteriously appropriate sleeve, then pull back and wait for the next illumination.

“It's just an overnighter. I'm leaving most of my stuff here, if that's okay. He says he wants me to teach him photography.”

“Honey, it's either sex or murder he wants. Probably both. At the same time.”

“Nice,” said Naomi, diving in once more. “I'll make sure to send you photos.”

“And speaking of sex, you haven't told me how it went at the Ladies Clinic. Did you find the English-speaking gyno?”

“I ended up with a French-speaking gyno. At first he wanted to give me the Blue Lotus Course.”

“Sure. That's for women who work. I mean, in offices and stuff. Was he okay? I should have gone with you.”

“He was okay. I found the career-women thing kinda odd. I had to convince him I was only interested in STDs. I think I shocked him a bit.”

“The Germanium Course. I know it well.”

“Do you? Really? Yukie?”

“I've had some bad boyfriends. Nothing at the level of your philosopher, though.”

“Please. Don't gross me out. But why Germanium? Why is a Japanese examination for sexually transmitted diseases named after a weird metalloid discovered by a German? Blue Lotus is a lot sexier.”

“Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic. You should have just asked the doctor.”

“I didn't want to distract him. He correctly diagnosed Roiphe's—with a bit of help—and gave me this script.” Naomi dug the prescription form out of her jacket pocket and handed it to Yukie, who barely glanced at it.

“Sasagaki. I didn't know he spoke French. Garden-variety antibiotic. We can get this filled for you at the pharmacy down the street. You'll have to come with me. It looks like about two months' worth. Are you planning to have sex with Monsieur Arosteguy? You might have to wait a bit. Or do condoms work well enough with this STD?”

“Thanks for the lovely stream of consciousness, Yukie. It really clarifies things for me.”

“No problem.”

AROSTEGUY HAD TO MAKE
two trips to carry Naomi's camera roller and her duffel up the cramped stairs of his house. There wasn't really much of a hall upstairs, just two bedrooms and a bathroom jammed together. Arosteguy opened the door to one of the rooms, so small he could drop the duffel on the narrow wooden bed from the doorway, and turned to Naomi as she followed him. “I decided to give you the room right next to mine. You'll want to know my every move, of course. From here, you'll know each time I get up to urinate in the night. I do that very often now. Man's fate.”

Naomi squeezed past him—he actually inhaled his belly so that she could get past—and unslung her bag onto a small table near a window that looked out over a metal-strip balcony. There seemed to be no way to get onto that balcony except by crawling through the aluminum-framed sliding window. “Thank you. This is great.”

“There's power there, see, just on the wall there, and also a telephone jack. I do not yet have a wireless network in this house. I assume you have a laptop and chargers for your camera batteries.”

“Yes, I do. Thank you.”

“I have learned the password of two of my neighbors' wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like. I'm not worried.” Arosteguy ran his hand through his hair, which had flopped over his right eye when he was dealing with her luggage. He smiled a tight, wincing smile, as though something had just hurt him. “And also, please keep in mind that sex between us is very possible, if you like it.” Naomi let her face register exactly nothing. Had he been talking to Yukie? For a moment she thought it was plausible and was overwhelmed by dark, sticky paranoia. Let's see: she had first contacted Arosteguy through Hervé Blomqvist, who was able to give her only the name of Professor Matsuda, but then Yukie had actually ferreted out Professor Matsuda, who had given her Arosteguy's address … Naomi had wanted to avoid giving Arosteguy's address or any other contact data to Yukie because Yukie was a public relations flack with a journalist's instincts. Naomi hated to admit it, but on a certain level she didn't trust Yukie. Yukie was trying too hard to hide her excitement at the Arosteguyscandal connection—she was playing it a little too cool—and though Arosteguy was a
gaijin
, it would be a stunning coup for her to bring him in to her demanding boss at Monogatari PR as a client looking for a public Tokyo makeover.

The Japanese vegetable scent—water lilies? ginkgo leaves?—that Naomi had caught her first day with Arosteguy now flooded over her as he called back on his way down the staircase. “Perhaps you would like to go out for a late dinner. Perhaps not. Let me know. We can eat here as well. I cook.”
Later, Naomi had her laptop and cameras set up on the bedroom table and was sitting on the bed—there was no room for a chair—working over her first Arosteguy photos, cropping and color grading them in Adobe Lightroom, then Dropboxing them to her editor at
Notorious
. The photos she had created were very moody and dramatic, and showed that beneath the current shabbiness, Arosteguy was a refined and handsome man.

She dabbed at the trackpad, hitting the Upload button as though the Air might explode in her face, but it all seemed to work smoothly. She'd had to let Arosteguy mess with her computer, switching the keyboard to Japanese in order to type in the neighbor's network password, and it felt like a violation, not the less disturbing because it was a consensual one. As the photos churned away into the ether, her email chime went off. It was from Nathan, and it said, “Naomi, I need to talk to you about Arosteguy and Roiphe. Odd things, funny parallels. You told me your cell phone wouldn't work in Japan and it doesn't. You must have gotten a Japanese phone by now. Call me. Nathan.” Naomi immediately replied, “Send me pictures of you and Roiphe fucking each other. I'll call you to comment.” She was surprised by the spontaneous depths of her own vindictiveness, but rather pleased by them as well.

In the bathroom, she checked herself out in the plastic-framed mirror, leaning close to finesse the subtle eye makeup, the just-perceptible lipstick. She had put on the sexiest outfit she had that you could still do physical work in—formfitting beige light wool sweater, tight black cotton pants—without allowing herself to wonder why she bothered. She had started her course of antibiotics.

NAOMI HAD HER SPEEDLIGHTS
and her Nagra set up in Arosteguy's tiny galley kitchen and was shooting him as he cooked. She had made a fetish of
culinary ignorance, part of her integrity as a media professional somehow, and so she could only see that he was manipulating a lot of tiny shrimp and clumps of what looked like seaweed with a delicate knife. A small jug of warm sake and two mismatched cylindrical ceramic cups sat beside the sink. They both drank randomly.

Arosteguy too had cleaned up a bit: he was shaven now, and had washed, or at least brushed, his hair, though she hadn't heard him in the bathroom. He had also changed his clothes, looking very professorial in a thick sweater and corduroy pants. Zooming in on her D300s's LCD screen to check her focus, Naomi could see thin, transparent wires trailing from his hairline down into his ears. “Are those hearing aids in your ears,” she asked, “or are you listening to music?”

“Bionic enhancements. And through them, I am in constant contact with certain satellites.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“I have no sense of humor. But my Greek father, a violinist, and my French mother, a pianist, were both quite deaf before the age of fifty, and they both wore hearing aids. Of course, they were analogue then, and very primitive, but now they're digital. I like the French word,
numérique
, better. It's more descriptive, and it doesn't confuse with the reference to human fingers, to the digits.” He turned and waggled his fingers at Naomi. They were short and powerful, and with them he pulled a hearing aid from his left ear and let it dangle in front of his face so that she could shoot it. A rather shapely silver capsule—to match his hair—fitted behind his ear, and a transparent plastic lead containing the thinnest of wires fed into a translucent twin-domed bud—it looked like a tiny jellyfish—that plugged into his earhole. “It's made by Siemens. German, of course. They're not as good as real ears, but they're good.” He gently coaxed it back into his ear and turned again to his cooking. “This moment reminds me of a famous family moment in Paris when my mother was cooking and somehow,
adjusting the clip that held her hair back from her face, she popped her hearing aid out of her ear and into her bouillabaisse without realizing it. And I was the one who ate it.” Arosteguy began to heave with laughter at the memory. “The toxicity of the battery was of some concern, as you can imagine. They were much bigger then. But they couldn't imagine how to get it out of me at that time in French medical history without the possibility of doing terrible damage to my young stomach and intestines, so we just waited for the inevitable. My mother found it quite annoying to be unbalanced in her hearing for all that time, and ultimately they gave her a new pair, even better than what she had.”

Naomi was zoomed in on a shot she had just taken of his cheekbone, which was very shapely but smeared with a light discoloration that reminded her of her grandfather, a dermatologist, who had told her that the skin became a garden of weird life-forms when you aged. “Cover it with makeup when it happens,” he had said. “You can't fight 'em. Too damn many of 'em.”

“Do you always shave at night?” said Naomi. She asked questions partly to get Arosteguy to turn towards her so that she could find new angles on his face, which was beginning to seem endlessly interesting to her.

“I hadn't spoken to anyone for a week before you. I realized with a shock that I did not look very civilized.”

“You look like a three-star French chef at home now.”

“That alarms me. I don't cook French anymore. I cook Japanese. Well, I'm trying. My friend Matsuda-san is actually a wonderful cook. He's teaching me. I can only do the simplest things. So subtle, so subtle and complex what he can do.”