Consumed (18 page)

“That was the basis of all his revolutionary research. Patients like Célestine.”

“You discussed that diagnosis with him?” asked Naomi.

“No. We knew each other socially, but he and I were cool to each other. Probably just primitive jealousy. We're not immune. But Célestine reported everything back to me. Medical diagnoses, obscure medical websites, this was our daily bread.”

Naomi was incredulous. “He said nothing to you?”

“He was acting here as her doctor, her specialist. He had a professional rigor. He wouldn't discuss it like café gossip.”

“You saw test results? Blood tests? Bone scans? CAT scans? MRIs? X-rays? Anything?”

Arosteguy shook his head at all of these—short, angry, contemptuous head shakes.

“Could Dr. Grünberg have been lying?” said Naomi. “Could Célestine have lied to you? Could she have not been sick?”

“I told you about the changes in her body. Those were real.”

“Maybe they were caused by something else.”

He snorted disdainfully. “A woman's natural aging? It's amazing what people will attribute to that. How they refuse to see things they are terrified to see.”

“Dr. Trinh told me that there was nothing medically wrong with Célestine.”

“Dr. Trinh was infatuated with Célestine. She adored her, worshiped her, could barely look at her without falling on her knees. It was embarrassing. She was pathetic. Célestine never went back to her after Anatole's diagnosis. And why would Célestine lie to me, tell me she was dying when she wasn't?”

“To induce you to kill her,” said Naomi triumphantly. “A mercy killing, but not for the reasons you thought.”

“A perversion beyond perversity! What a wonderful invention on your part. You are a dangerous writer after all.”

Soon Naomi was curled up on the couch with Arosteguy, who had his arms around her and was caressing her throat. For both of them, the resonances of philosophical wife-strangling that were undeniably in the air were comforting, not disturbing, offering a linkage to richly textured past dramas full of meaning. Her eyes were half closed and her voice was drowsy.

“But it was hideous, wasn't it? The actual act itself—the eating, I mean? It was a horror show. Butchery. Those pictures. I've never seen anything so horrible. And Sagawa, he was eating a healthy young body. It's sick of me to say this. I'm shocking myself for even thinking it. But somehow, because Célestine's body was so ravaged by disease, it makes it more horrible. I can't believe I said that.”

Arosteguy laughed a short laugh that quickly shaded into a husky whisper, a theatrical technique, thought Naomi, which was probably effective when he was lecturing; she liked it herself, and felt for the moment like a student with cozily limited responsibilities. “Healthy sick thoughts,” he said. “Honest ones. But you are able to say that because you didn't know her. You didn't know her body with the intimacy that I did. You see a corpse, a dead, mutilated, anonymous—yes, diseased—body. But not me. I lived in the landscape of that body for so many years. As that landscape changed, my living changed with it. She never stopped being my Célestine. Never.”

Arosteguy kissed Naomi with passion and hunger. She kissed him back with the same. Soon they were naked, half on the couch, half on the floor. “Are you going to bite me?” said Naomi. He did. And she bit him back, on the shoulder, the biceps, the neck. “And then, are you going to eat me?”
And he did—breasts, thighs, and then down to her pussy. She stopped him, grabbing his head, holding on to his hair.

“Oh, no, Ari. I forgot. My old boyfriend …”

“Your boyfriend, yes?”

“No, it's … he just told me that he has Roiphe's disease. You know. That venereal disease. I mean, I might not have it, Roiphe's, but I have something …”

Arosteguy snorted. “Do you know my age?”

“Wikipedia says you're sixty-seven.”

“Wikipedia is correct. And what a force for global harmony that creation is!”

Naomi detected no irony. “What has your age got to do with my disease?”

“Well, we are both diseased, aren't we? For example, I no longer spurt. I just ooze, in a sinister way, like a popped pustule. For me, those come shots in porn videos, like cake-icing guns going off, they're pure sci-fi, they're CGI VFX only.”

Naomi snorted back in deliberate imitation. “What else? Do I get the whole list now, or do I get a chance to make some exciting monstrous discoveries?”

“Over time, with these sexual disabilities emerging gradually, old couples gradually accommodate them, and they don't embarrass each other, they become part of the domestic seniors comedy you promise to write together, but your memories are thankfully not too good and you forget to do it. But for a youngster to be thrown into the den of the aging lion … I've experienced some difficult moments.”

“With your students.”

“The youngsters with enthusiasm and defiance, yes, which protects them from revulsion for a little while, but then …”

“You're lucky nobody's blown the political correctness whistle on you. I think those days are long over, even in France.”

“There have been dramas behind the scenes. The French press has had a tendency to be a bit more discreet than the rest of the world, but with competition from Facebook and Twitter … All sexual adventurism is lethal now.”

“Didn't some of your youngsters have sexual insecurities?”

“Oh, yes, all of them. Célestine and I took full advantage of them in the name of therapy and philosophy.”

“And me? I have a few of those myself. Do you want my list, or do you want to make your own discoveries?”

“Honestly, I think a list would be charming. We can exchange them, and then see if reality matches.”

“I'll start working on mine right away. But meanwhile, I'm serious about having my own oozing down there. You might catch something nasty. Do you have a pack of cute Japanese condoms lying around somewhere? There must be Hello Kitty condoms. Translated as Hello Pussy.”

“I'm so tempted to say something that sounds like it came from a poorly translated Punjabi erotic tale, something like ‘A cook must have a taste for sauces, no?' and then go down on you.”

“Please don't say that.”

“And please don't do that?”

“I didn't say that.”

“BUT WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
You booked a hotel? How can you afford that? And I thought you needed to hide out in Tokyo.”

“I'm going to hide out even more,” said Naomi, hustling her remaining gear and clothes into her bags.

Yukie watched her, shaking her head. “From me? You don't trust me?” Naomi turned away from the bed—she had colonized it and the kitchen table and a few other surfaces to organize her packing—and held Yukie by the shoulders. Yukie rolled her eyes up to her, and Naomi was surprised by the emotion she could read in them.

“Yukie, no, no. It's not like that at all. It's not.” She hugged Yukie, who let her body stay limp, unresponsive, a full-body pout.

“Then what is it? I don't like the look in your eyes. I remember how wild you got that time in Santa Monica …” and just her own mention of the Santa Monica incident, which was a cornerstone of their mutual history and mythology, triggered an understanding in Yukie, hit her physically so that she flinched in Naomi's embrace and then pulled away, drifting to the end of the kitchen to get an objective look at her friend. “Not still that French guy,” she said, shaking her head again. “Not the professor cannibal killer guy.” Yukie started to pick nervously at one of her fingernails, each coated in pearlescent white and sporting a tiny black ceramic rose glued to it. One of the roses had partially broken off and Yukie was trying to scrape the rest of it away. Naomi had noted how delicate an operation it was for Yukie to pull on the tight gloves she was so fond of.

“A few days with him isn't enough to get the whole story.”

“The whole
intimate
fucking story! You're as insane as he is!”

Naomi had wanted Yukie to be emotionally invested in her project, needed her to be at first, but now she felt the blowback of that setup, how it gave Yukie the right to be judgmental even in her genuine fear for her friend, though as always with Yukie there was that competitive thing, that career jealousy that surged to the surface and took a quick bite before you realized what hit you.

Naomi turned away and continued packing. “He's an incredible man. Very sweet, very sensitive.”

Yukie began pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Omigod. They
won't even be able to bring you back to me in a body bag. It'll be two dozen freezer-quality Ziplocs.”

“Don't get melodramatic on me, Yukie. He's not some dark force. He's just a man, a man who did something extreme, out of love and passion and obsession, did it once.”

Yukie stopped pacing. She felt she could read the whole story from Naomi's body language, the whole story including the ending. “You fucked him already, didn't you? Your first night with him, and you fucked him. I can't believe it.”

Naomi didn't turn around. “No, you can't understand it. That's what you can't. And I don't expect you to until you read what I write about it. That's really what it's all about, and you've lost sight of that. It's the writing. It's the story. It's fantastic and it's all mine.”

“Wow. I'm shocked,” said Yukie. “Does Nathan do this too? You compare notes? You torment each other's interviewees? You have some laughs about it?”

Naomi did laugh, her back still towards Yukie. “You know, that's not a bad idea. I'm going to give him a call.”

NATHAN WALKED IN THE LEAFY,
lush streets of Forest Hill, talking, improbably, to Naomi. The sun was hot, the light dappled. “I'm walking in the streets. I needed to get out of that house.”

“I know the feeling,” said Naomi. “Problem with me is, when I do that, I'm in Tokyo.” She sounded relaxed—too relaxed for Nathan's comfort. It was the kind of relaxed you sounded when you'd had a lot of sex. The thought was floating at a subliminal level, and Nathan wasn't going to address it, but it was there, gnawing. Well, let it gnaw away, with its ferocious little yellow teeth. How
could
he address it? It was Naomi who had
finally broken the airphone-call-debacle deadlock after Nathan had spent fruitless hours emailing, texting, SMSing, phoning, social-networking.

The shape of it was this: she hated his fucking pusillanimous guts and would never forgive him. He had mortally wounded and mutilated and deformed her love for him, not to mention the STD aspect. He was saved, she told him, only by the use to which she intended to put the whole sorry incident and, yes, their entire relationship. He should think of himself as about to embark on a particularly hideous
hors catégorie
mountain stage of the Tour de France, perhaps Mont Ventoux, or the Col du Tourmalet, jammed with scary, jeering, bizarrely costumed fans coming much too close, and he was going to suffer, suffer, and suffer more. Of course, she was thinking of Hervé and his carbon-fiber bicycle and his bib-style compression cycling shorts with their elaborate vented crotch pad and his Peyronie's penis when she said it—she should have just fucked him, what a mistake—since all her understanding of bicycle racing came from him.

And there was that one final element, which was Nathan's last email promising the revelation of a weird and unlikely connection between Roiphe and Arosteguy, which, Naomi had to admit to herself, might actually have tipped the thing over into reconciliation; there had to be something delicious and nutritious there, because Nathan just didn't have the devious creativity required to invent something like that. And so she was talking to him again.

“The irony of the whole thing is, you tell me that your murderer cannibal guy, Arosteguy, is saner than you ever imagined,” said Nathan, “and now I have to tell you that my respectable old doctor guy is a complete fucking lunatic.”

“You're kidding,” said Naomi, stretching languorously, with kittenish sexuality. Or so Nathan imagined. “That sounds fantastic. I was afraid for you.”

“Really? Afraid?”

“Afraid that your whole Roiphe thing would turn out to be boring. But no. Fantastic.”

“I'm not so sure. I think the man is delusional. I'm finding it hard to believe that he was ever a real doctor. Maybe he has Alzheimer's.”

“What is it that he's doing, exactly, that's so loony?” said Naomi, and then she said some more words, but they were digitally garbled.

“You're breaking up,” said Nathan. “Can you hear me? I'll send you some photos. I'll send you some photos.” But she was gone, Call Ended.

Nathan walked up to the front door of Roiphe's house and rang the incongruously plain doorbell, just a cube of black plastic with a white button, hidden away on the faux-stone doorjamb. The button lit up when he pressed it, but Nathan could hear no sound from inside the sealed mausoleum of a house. Eventually, Chase opened the door.

“Hello, Nathan. Forgot your key?”

“Um, I don't have a key.”

“If you're going to live here, you should have a key.” As always, Chase had almost every part of her body covered: suede boots, flared silk pants, and a long-sleeved blouse with a mandarin collar. He wondered when she would start wearing gauntlets.

“That would be … that would be nice.” An awkward pause. Chase smiled but didn't move, deliberately blocking the doorway. “To have my own key,” he said. Pause. “To your house.” No reaction. Was this Chase's standard front-door mode? He decided to take a radical tack. “Want to go for a walk with me?”

“Oh, no, I couldn't,” she said airily. “I'm in quarantine.”

“Vraiment? Il s'agit d'une maladie sérieuse?”

Chase's smile disappeared into zero affect and she slammed the door in Nathan's face.