Consumed (6 page)

Molnár had not been there when they arrived. The maître d' could not give them the corner table and had no record of special treatment to be accorded them, no reservation in fact. It was a relief—even to be forced to leave for some other restaurant would have been better—but there was a table, or at least two chairs side by side along a run of small square tables pushed together. Dunja and Nathan were on the outside, facing a framed mirror and a pair of solitary eaters who paid no attention to each other. The mirror made it possible for them to eat and talk and watch each other's responses as though they were characters in a charming Czechoslovakian movie from the sixties. The seating lottery also absolved them of any need to study Molnár's wretched and scandalous photographs—the opposite wall was blocked from view by a thick stuccoed pillar—which were all portraits of his patients shown in the most vulnerable, if not drugged, circumstances, with a clinically salacious eye for nakedness, both emotional and physical. Nathan had to reluctantly flash Dr. Molnár's card at the
maître d' to get permission to use his camera in the dumpy restaurant, which was inexplicably called La Bretonne. His first attempts to document the good doctor's artwork were intercepted by two waiters and a busboy, certain, no doubt, that the photographs were a rich treasure in danger of illicit duplication and dissemination. As he framed the Molnár photos in his viewfinder, Nathan was disturbed to find himself responding to them with a profound and hopeless sadness. One or two of the shots he had taken of Dunja could have fit seamlessly among those of the women—all women—nailed to the rough-hewn dark wood of the walls, and it allied him with Dr. Molnár in a way that made him queasy. The large black-and-white prints, Nathan had to admit, were gorgeous; the fine grain of medium-format film, with its deep contrast and subtle shadows conveyed by silver gelatin on rag paper, produced a startling hyperreal effect.

Nathan made his way back to Dunja from the far end of the restaurant. She was cradling a glass of red wine in her beautiful long-fingered hands—bigger than his own, he had noted; he felt the oddness when they held hands. He immediately swung the Nikon around on its strap and fired off a few shots, the crack of the shutter easily swallowed by the surrounding boisterous murmur and cutlery clatter. But Dunja snapped her eyes up at him in anger, and it surprised him. Thus chastised, he sat beside her and stuffed the camera into its bag, which he jammed between his feet on the floor, not trusting the raucous flow of patrons and waiters behind him. And it would be those snaps, taken solely by the light of the candles on the table and the warm incandescent sconce lights on the wall in front of her, that revealed a pain and despair that Nathan had not seen in photos of her taken in much more vulnerable circumstances. She was going to die soon; she knew it in a profound way, and now that awareness had been reignited by the camera and was hot in her mind.

“Nathan,” she said, “will this be the first time you've made love to a dead woman?”

Nathan fumbled for his own glass, which he had not yet touched. “You mean you?” he said, taking a sip. The wine was very rough. Not good. “You're not dead. I can personally confirm that.”

“No, but I mean, after I die, you'll have memories of sex with a woman who's now dead.” She smiled a dangerously innocent smile. “Will that be a first for you?”

“Except for my mother, yes. She died when I was fourteen.”

“Different kind of sex, then. The Freudian kind. Doesn't count.” She paused. He sipped again to fill in the gap—nervously, he was surprised to note. Weirdly giddy. “While I was waiting for you in my hotel room,” she said, “I watched a nature show. A young deer fell into a deep snowbank and couldn't get out. A grizzly bear found it and jumped on it from behind. The deer tried to look around. Its eyes were wild and excited. The bear gently grabbed the deer's muzzle in its mouth. It was so sexual. Sex from behind. The bear loved the deer, it was obvious. It ripped the deer's throat out, and then licked the dying deer with the most passionate affection. I thought of you and me.”

DR. TRINH KEPT BECOMING
Japanese. It was Hervé's fault, of course. The possibility of meeting Aristide Arosteguy in Tokyo had enormous gravitational density, enough to warp every nuance of Naomi's day. And here, in Dr. Trinh's perfectly elegant office on the medically chic Rue Jacob in the Sixième, this warping manifested itself in a subtle shifting of the doctor's delicate Vietnamese features and her complexly accented English towards the rougher features and Japanese schoolgirl diction of Yukie Oshima, Naomi's old Tokyo friend. Naomi had already calculated that Yukie would have to be a major ally in any Tokyo/Arosteguy initiative she might undertake and was finding it hard not to think of the constantly morphing
Dr. Trinh as, well, Yukie in Paris. But Dr. Trinh was not an ally.

“Please put away your camera,” she said, as Naomi set her Nikon on her lap. “I regret every moment that I allowed myself to be recorded or photographed. I am talking to you only to undo the damage which that demented cleaning lady has done by talking about Célestine Arosteguy. I will probably regret this too.”

Naomi gently caressed her camera as though demonstrating its innate harmlessness. “It's really just proof that I actually spoke to you. You'd be surprised how many interviews are just patched together from things on the internet and presented as face-to-face conversations.” Naomi imagined Nathan chuckling and shaking his head over her shoulder as she said this. Somehow, Naomi was of another, newer, generation than Nathan, despite the fact that they were the same age. Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling and scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. She knew she was being disingenuous with Dr. Trinh as she talked to her about proof, but the only effect her awareness of this had on Naomi was to make her feel more completely professional. It was the way of the net, and it was liberating.

Dr. Trinh was tougher than she looked. “Even photographs and recordings can be easily tricked these days, so what you say makes no sense here in my office. Put your camera and voice recording device away, that little thing hanging around your neck which I see advertised in all the chic fashion magazines, or you can leave right now.” Her face and tone were absolutely neutral as she said this, and Naomi could feel her own face start to burn, her skin telling her that she had been deeply, instantly unnerved before her brain or gut knew it.

“Well, off the record is certainly one way to do it, if that's what makes you feel comfortable,” said Naomi, unclipping her rarely used Olympus micro-recorder, glossy black like a little piano and reserved for stealth recording, and packing it and the camera into her camera bag with as much nonchalance as she could muster. She hated her own volatility, the cycling so easily between manic confidence and crushed, hopeless insecurity. Maybe drugs would help. Probably not. Naomi had a sudden suicidal urge to ask the doctor if she had any bipolar patients, but Dr. Trinh was not designed to be natively helpful, at least not to Naomi.

“There's nothing about this situation or about you that makes me feel comfortable. Let's talk about that cleaning lady, that Madame Tretikov, the Russian.”

“Yes, yes. That maintenance woman … she seemed certain that Célestine Arosteguy had brain cancer.” And now Naomi could look up from fussing with her camera bag and jab back, however delicately. “Now, Dr. Trinh—I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly—Dr. Trinh, you're not a cancer specialist, not an oncologist, for example, are you?”

The doctor took a deep breath. “What's that pin you're wearing? What does that designate?”

Naomi was completely thrown. Pin? Oh, yes. “This pin?” She unclipped the gold Crillon pin she had been given by her hotel contact and tossed it onto the leather writing pad on the doctor's desk. “It's the symbol of the Hôtel de Crillon. I've been staying there. It's held on by this big round magnet. You see? They're very nice at that hotel. Not snobbish at all.” Dr. Trinh picked it up and examined it with weird intensity. The doctor's paranoia was suddenly exciting to Naomi, comforting rather than insulting, helping her to cycle back up. It meant that the doctor had something to hide, or at least to protect. “Were you … were you thinking it might be a microphone?”

Dr. Trinh tossed the pin back on the pad and immediately forgot it
existed. “There was nothing medically wrong with Célestine Arosteguy. Nothing beyond the normal complaints of a woman of her age. I was her personal physician. I was the one who sent her to specialists when she needed them. Something like cancer … I would have known.”

Naomi desperately wanted to pull her notepad out of her bag, the one that was spiral-bound at the top, had a montage of newspaper pages decorating its cardboard cover and labelled itself “Reporter's Notebook/Bloc de Journaliste”—naturally, Nathan had given it to her—but she could feel the fragility of the situation through her skin and didn't dare. “What would you consider the normal complaints of a woman of her age?”

Dr. Trinh actually smiled, though there seemed to be some pain involved in the act. “Perhaps you will simply look up menopause on the internet and your question will be answered.”

A small, intimate explosion went off in Naomi's brain, triggered by the unexpected mental juxtaposition of “menopause” and “crime,” two things she had never remotely linked before. She needed to remember this tiny epiphany somehow, and she needed to delve into the most heavy realities of menopause and womanness, a place she had never thought to go before. She generated a marker in her mind, one that would pop up whenever Célestine's age was mentioned. “Why do you think the Arosteguys' landlady thought that Célestine had a brain tumor? Isn't that an odd thing for an ordinary person to just invent?”

“Have you ever met this woman, this Tretikov?”

“I've seen an interview with her.”

“Yes, of course.” Dr. Trinh stood up, brushing the front of her suit with her tiny hands as she did so, as though Madame Tretikov had covered her with breadcrumbs. “Yes, she's an ordinary person who has unconsciously used the power of the internet to create a new reality concerning Madame Arosteguy. And it has caused me and my medical colleagues a
lot of anguish, I can tell you.” A contemptuous snicker. “She's the kind of superstitious old woman who believes that thinking too much, or even thinking certain thoughts, can give you brain cancer. And I want you to correct that. That is why I agreed to talk to you.” Having made her statement, this figurine of a woman sat back down and resumed exactly her former position. “The media have now accused us of negligence in our treatment of a woman who was considered a national jewel. They talk of misdiagnosis, of carelessness, of political pressure on us that forced us to ignore her deadly condition, and so on.”

“And none of that is true?”

“None of it.”

“And Célestine didn't tell her husband that she had brain cancer, and she didn't ask him to kill her?”

At this, Dr. Trinh produced a sad smile, and it struck Naomi as a genuine smile at last, one which illuminated the doctor's eyes and altered her breathing, which summoned the earthy presence of Célestine Arosteguy into her fussy, controlled office. “Célestine always used to say that she was doomed and that she had a terminal illness. She said that to her students, to me, to everyone. It was not a complaint, you see. It was almost a promise. But then, anyone who read her writings deeply would know she didn't mean anything medical.”

The smile was still on Dr. Trinh's face as she looked down at her doll-like hands, lost in secret memories of the doomed, womanly Célestine, and Naomi found herself wanting to destroy it, to punish her for it. In particular, Naomi was annoyed with herself for not having read even a précis of the Arosteguy oeuvre and could not therefore call the doctor on this evasion. The necessary weapons, however, were close at hand. “And would she ask just anyone to kill her?” It occurred to Naomi that she had very recently fallen back on the expression “just kill me”
in a conversation with Nathan in which he had again carped about his missing macro/portrait lens—the lens on her camera right now, sitting in the bag at her feet—but she doubted it would be part of Célestine's lexicon.

“Of course not.”

“But someone did kill her. Who do you think it was?”

“I have no idea. She had many friends.”

“That surprises me. You think a friend killed her?”

“She knew many people.”

“You don't think a stranger killed her.”

“These are things I know nothing about.”

“She would say to you, her personal physician, that she had a terminal illness, and you felt that she was being philosophical? You didn't take it seriously?”

Dr. Trinh had been talking to her hands, but now she raised her eyes to Naomi, searching as she spoke for verifying signs of Naomi's stupidity, her profound American ignorance. “It was an existential statement,” said Dr. Trinh, “about the death sentence we all live under. She had an affection for Schopenhauer, which led her at times into a kind of fatalistic romanticism. I tried to get her to revisit Heidegger, not so different in some ways, the Germanic ways, but at least a shift away from that sickly Asian taste for cosmic despair.” As if summoned from the ether by that last phrase, a tiny silver crucifix hanging from a bracelet around the doctor's left wrist caught the raw daylight bouncing onto the desk from a corner mirror and caught Naomi's eye. Naomi's friend Yukie was also a Christian, an anomaly that was somehow a disappointment to Naomi. Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, perhaps. So much more interesting. What bracelets would they wear then? Dr. Trinh continued: “But she couldn't get past the man's politics, the Nazi associations, the anti-Semitism. We disagreed on that point, that a man's politics should negate the value of his philosophy.
She could not see how a separation of that kind was possible. A perfectly French attitude, of course.”