Consumed (20 page)

Naomi, shrugging with an insouciance she did not feel, said, “Sometimes.”

“So, your boyfriend and you. A classic American journalistic conspiracy.”

“Ari—”

“Why have you done this? How do you know Chase? What are you two trying to do to me?” He pronounced her name “Shass,” which almost tilted the whole melodrama into farce for Naomi.

“I don't know her. And I wasn't sure that you did either. She's back home in Toronto with her father, a doctor, Barry Roiphe. She's in some kind of weird therapy with him, and Nathan is in their house to write a medical article about them. And she told him that she had studied at the Sorbonne with you and Célestine. That's all. A coincidence, not a conspiracy.”

Arosteguy barked out a harsh, phlegmy laugh, and the phlegm seemed to remind him that he needed a cigarette. He roamed around the periphery of the room until he found the pale yellow flip-top pack with the bold red Japanese character crowning the letters
RIN,
and was soon inhaling deeply. Naomi was surprised that he smoked cigarettes with cork-tipped filters, her surprise a matter of style rather than smoking arcana (she had never smoked); she felt he should be a Gauloises man, just like Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Breathless
, Gauloises Caporal without filter in the classic soft French-blue pack with the machinelike winged-helmet logo; but of course he was resolutely turning Japanese. She had a very strong impulse to photograph his pack of cigarettes, could see even across the room that the same red Japanese character on the pack was printed on each cigarette just below the filter. Given the importance that consumerist impulse, passion, and identity had in the social philosophy of the Arosteguys, it seemed imperative that she eventually apply to the couple themselves their own approach to psychology: consumer choices and allegiances were the key to character
and to all social interactions. She was sure Arosteguy was conscious of that as he struggled—how serious was he? was it merely ironic?—to become Japanese by consuming Japanese items. She could see the conundrum exemplified by Western versus traditional Japanese clothing; he was too proud, too aware, to allow himself to become a caricature of a Japanese man who clings to tradition—if he were to become Japanese, it would be a current and forward-looking variant of the same—and so it was left to minor items like cigarettes and food to carry the transformation.

“No, but really, I admire you and your boyfriend Nathan. A new and modern version of
Les Liaisons dangereuses
. A very compelling partnership for the Information Age. It should make for a very nice entertainment.”

“Ari, I don't know what you're talking about.” The smoke in his lungs really did seem to relax him, modulate his rage into sarcasm, a relief for Naomi. “I know it seems ridiculous, but it really is a complete coincidence. Nathan is with the Roiphes because of Roiphe's disease. I told you, he gave it to me and then decided to research it. That's how it all happened.”

“An unexpected coincidence, then. Okay. And then some unexpected consequences?”

“What would those be?”

Arosteguy stubbed his cigarette out on the sill, folded his arms for a meditative moment, then walked back to the futon and sat down beside Naomi. He gently took the iPad from her lap and held it up in one hand. “May I play with these? The photos of Chase, taken by Naomi's good friend Nathan?” Naomi gave a shuddering, terse little nod, eyes wide, nervous, excited. He hunched over and began to examine the images, scrolling through them and expanding them with forensic intensity.

“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 admitted 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.”