Consumed

4

NATHAN GOT OUT OF A pumpkin-and-mint-green Beck cab in Toronto’s Forest Hill Village in front of the Coach Restaurant, a faded greasy spoon with the graphic of a silhouetted coach-and-four hanging over the door. Seniors leaning on walkers shuffled, a few girls in gray-and-burgundy uniforms from nearby Bishop Cornwall School drifted in and out. Carrying no camera, no visible recording device of any kind, he walked in through two sets of doors and stood by the vintage National cash register—embossed brass, color-coded glass keys, marble and wooden base.

A man who could be one of his own senior customers came slowly up some back stairs and approached him. “Can I help you?” he said, dropping a pad of order forms behind the ornate machine and punching the orange No Sale key. The National’s cash drawer slid open and a bell chimed.

“Is Dr. Roiphe here?”

The man—manager? owner?—smiled a wry, snorty smile without looking up and lifted a hinged lead-weighted bill holder so that he could riffle through the banknotes in one of the drawer’s cubbies. “You think this is a doctor’s office?”

Nathan played it straight. “I’m supposed to meet him here, but I don’t see him. Dr. Barry Roiphe.”

“If you don’t see him, then you’re blind,” said the man, not looking up but sticking an index finger into the air.

“I think I see one finger,” said Nathan.

The man lowered his finger and pointed to an obscure booth in the back. In it sat a gangly gray-haired man wearing big non-chic plastic glasses. Cardigan and flannels. Straw hat. “I was wrong. You can see after all.”

“Thank you.”

Nathan walked over to Roiphe’s booth and stood for a moment while the doctor tried to saw through one of his three pork chops, face low to the plate, oblivious. Nathan subtly swayed on his feet, studying the man. He had by now of course watched lectures, interviews, and news footage of Roiphe, and had read his learned papers—no trace of humor there—which often included photos of the man going back to his graduation from the University of Toronto medical school, class of 1957. But he had not recognized him: the collapsed posture, the big glasses with those distorting bifocal blobs, the weird hat. Roiphe’s head eventually came up, the eyes smeared behind the lenses, the glasses crooked on the notched, reddened nose. The doctor looked puzzled. Why was this young man just standing there? Was he a waiter?

“Dr. Roiphe? Nathan Math. Thank you for agreeing to meet me.”

A hint of a delay, like an old transatlantic phone call, and then a thin-lipped smile. “Oh, yes. Sit down, sit down. Just having a couple of pork chops. They’re tough, but I need the exercise.” Roiphe worked his jaw comically; the effect was grotesque. Nathan slid into the narrow booth and felt the rough texture of the scarred seat through his jeans. “You want anything?”

“No, no thanks,” said Nathan. “Hope I’m not taking you away from your patients.”

“Oh, no. Man’s gotta eat, doesn’t he? And, too, I’m pretty much retired. Well, I still practice a bit. Just to keep my hand in. I’ve become a bit of a tinkerer, though. A bit of an experimenter. So, tell me again. What’s this all about?”

From his research, Nathan had calculated that Roiphe would respond to a fairly melodramatic pitch about his life and his work; he came across as a failed but still eager self-promoter. “For one shining moment, you were the king of fear,” he said.

Roiphe’s eyes managed to startle into sharpness behind the bifocals. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Roiphe’s. Roiphe’s disease. You made the cover of Time magazine.”

Irritated, Roiphe went back to his pork chops. The way he chewed suggested false teeth, but Nathan couldn’t be sure. The doctor’s jaw sawed sideways; maybe it was an eating style. Still chewing, Roiphe came up for air, blinked, spoke. “Not me, for god’s sake. The disease. Surely you don’t equate the two. And the politics surrounding the disease. All sex, all hysteria, very American.” He wiped his mouth with a thin paper napkin. The stubble on one side of his poorly shaven chin shredded it, so that in effect he wiped his mouth with his fingers. He sucked those fingers as he squinted suspiciously, as though trying to focus on an especially noxious varmint. “Why is it, exactly, you wanted to talk to me?”

Nathan figured he had to scale back the drama. “I’m writing a piece about medical fame. The scary kind. You know—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. Names that people are terrified to hear. Afraid that their doctors will speak those names to them.”

The doctor burst out laughing, a short, liquid bark that spewed shreds of chop across the table. “Roiphe’s disease was a leaky pecker or a mucky twat. Hardly in the same league.”

“But Roiphe’s could be lethal if it was left untreated. I mean, Wayne Pardeau died of Roiphe’s.”

“Who?”

“Wayne Pardeau,” said Nathan. “A famous country-and-western singer.”

“Never heard of him. But it was probably drugs that killed him. Usually is.”

“Do you have an inferiority complex about Roiphe’s? Was it not a potent enough disease to bear your name?”

“What an odd young man you are. You sound like a headline in a Victorian yellow newspaper. I suppose you’ve heard of yellow journalism? Sounds like you practice it.”

“Did it ever bother you that it seemed at one point to have been cured? Wiped off the face of the earth? Did that not consign you to some kind of medical oblivion? Of historical interest only?”

Roiphe fastidiously scraped the apple sauce off his remaining chop with the butter knife, wrapped the chop up in a napkin, and stuffed it into his pocket. Nathan was sure the grease was already weeping into his cardigan. Rising with some difficulty, Roiphe said, “Maybe you should be talking to Dr. Alzheimer while the talkin’s good. I assume that you’re getting the check.”

Nathan twisted himself out of the booth and without being too obvious about it blocked the cramped aisle. He pulled out a neatly folded pink diagnostic report and held it out to Roiphe. “Doctor, please take a look at this.”

Out of some ancient reflex, Roiphe snatched the report, unfolded it, and began to read, face close to the paper and head twitching from side to side, as though he were smelling it rather than reading it. Nathan had spent a week getting to know Toronto in preparation for Roiphe, and that had included a visit to a walk-in clinic for STDs on Queen Street West; he could look forward to twenty-eight days of Ciprofloxacin, mild diarrhea, genital irritation, and the possible but unlikely advent of ruptured tendons, psychotic reactions, and confusional states. “Looks like you have a hefty dose of Roiphe’s. Makin’ a comeback, I guess. Your triglycerides aren’t that great either.” He looked up and shook the paper before handing it back, as though to purge it of dust or mites. “Does that mean I owe you something, or do you owe me?”

Nathan tried to peer around the reading blobs in the doctor’s glasses to get at the real eyes. It then occurred to him that at this close distance, which didn’t seem to unnerve the doctor at all, it might be preferable to look through those blobs for better eye contact. The result was a palsied head movement that suggested extreme shiftiness on Nathan’s part. “I would like to discuss the narrative of my infection with you,” he said breathlessly, his chest tight.

Roiphe barked out another laugh, sounding particularly like a Jack Russell. “The narrative of my…” He shook his head. “Look, son. I long ago left the field of venereal pathology, if that’s your hook. I’m just not very interesting. That’s the real problem. Now Parkinson, there was an interesting man.”

“Why don’t you let me decide that? What kind of patients do you have now? What are you experimenting with?”

Roiphe studied Nathan for a beat, jaw thrust forward, lips pursed, then took his glasses off. His eyes were large and smeary even without the bifocal blobs, but they were also the most amazing, unnatural turquoise, and they shocked Nathan. He was sure those eyes could see things that normal eyes couldn’t.

“You could come by the house tomorrow, if you’d like. Just around the corner. My office is in the house. Tomorrow. Not too early. I’ve never been a morning person, believe it or not. Just show up.”

SURROUNDED BY MARBLE in the bathroom of her suite in the Crillon, Naomi sat having a pee, and it was hurting. She watched herself in the door mirror howling in pain like a child. “Ow, ow, ow! That hurts!” She looked down at her white cotton panties—a little threadbare around the elastic, she noticed—and saw what looked like a mayonnaise stain in the crotch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Sitting on her bed with the Air on her lap, new panties on, travel yoga pants on, diagnostic wad of Kleenex in panties providing reassuring pressure, Naomi watched another downloaded clip of Arosteguy lecturing, this time with the tinny Air sound turned off. She gazed intently at Arosteguy’s image, then, provoked by that image, bounced off the bed and started to set up an image-making session of her own.

She wasn’t sure she was ever serious about giving her Nikon gear to Nathan and riding off into the sunset with only her BlackBerry and her iPhone and her iPad and her laptop as image-making devices—was there anything now that did not take pictures and video?—and when it came to rolling out the door of their room at Schiphol, she didn’t hesitate to take it with her. She would not feel like a pro without the Nikon gear. And she would not have been able to do what she was doing now: placing two wireless Speedlight flash units—diffusers for softer lighting clipped over the flash heads—on a chair and a dresser, then the camera on a tripod next to the laptop, then setting the timer, then beginning to take portraits of herself artfully lit by the flashes and the soft window light.

Later, back on the bed, sorting through the shots with Photo Mechanic, her favorite fast photo browser, she began to settle on a few that presented her as beautiful but moody, intelligent and intense. She laughed at her topless variants, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to delete them; the light on her breasts was so soft and voluptuous, they might never look that good again, though what was that mole doing on the left underside? Was it bigger than the last time she looked? Was it redder? Pinker? Less symmetrical? She zoomed in on the mole, put a window around it large enough to encompass the slighter paler circle that surrounded it, dated the window, and saved it as a TIFF to her “Body Horror” file, the one that stored images of every scary part of her body, the iffy, unstable, volatile parts. Now kill the ADHD. Focus. Back to that email.

“Dear M. Aristide Arosteguy, I’m writing you this email and attaching several photos of myself that I’ve just taken with the very object you discuss in your wonderful and inspiring online essay ‘The Anatomy of a Perfect Object.’ My purpose is simple, though the results might well be complex: I want to fly to wherever you are and interview and photograph you.”

Naomi reread her email a few more times, leaning forward on the bed to add to it, finesse, backtrack, elaborate. The Arosteguy essay concerned consumer objects and the possibility of beauty that could equal or exceed natural beauty, given the industrial/technological new state of man. Natural beauty became atavistic, nostalgic. Real objects of the innate lust for beauty were now commodities, industrial products. She was not sure that photos of herself posed with some of her nest objects really said anything at all about the anatomy of a perfect object, but she was confident enough in her own beauty to feel that Arosteguy, who was, after all, both French and Greek, would want to meet her in Tokyo. She added two of the best topless photos to the “attached” list and hit Send.

NATHAN STOOD IN FRONT of what Naomi had mocked as a faux chateau in the heart of Toronto’s Forest Hill. A quick swivel to right and left confirmed what Nathan had seen from the taxi. Roiphe’s castle was not alone; the street was aswarm with synthetic stone facing, copper-trimmed turrets, and authentic-looking slate roofs, though it had to be said that a kind of neo-Victorian mausoleum variant was also well represented. Nathan shouldered his tripod case and pulled his reluctant camera roller up the cobblestoned pathway to the front door. The stone porch was shaded by a fan-shaped, art-nouveauish tinted glass canopy. The front door was huge, exotic wood and pebbled glass. Nathan was searching for a doorbell button when the door opened with a vacuum-lock whoosh. A beautiful willowy woman wearing a disturbingly clinical white cotton dress with long sleeves and a high collar stood in the doorway. She seemed to be about thirty.

“Hi,” said Nathan. “I’m Nathan Math.” The woman just looked at him, no affect whatsoever. An awkward pause. “I, uh, I have an appointment with Dr. Roiphe.” No reaction. “An appointment with the doctor?”

Her eyes were so large that they narrowed suspiciously without seeming to get smaller. “You don’t have an appointment with the doctor.”

“I don’t?”

“The doctor doesn’t take new patients. You are new. You would be a new patient.”

“Oh, right, no,” said Nathan, exhaling in slightly exaggerated self-directed mirth. The woman had rattled him without actually doing anything. “I’m not a patient. I’m a journalist. I write on medical/social issues. I’m interviewing him. Dr. Roiphe. About his career.”

“What’s wrong with me?” she said, brushing her blond hair back, her voice unaccountably hard.

“What?”

“Diagnose me. You do have some medical training, don’t you? How could you write meaningfully about the doctor if you had no medical training?”

“Some medical training. Some. Is there something wrong with you?”

“Well, yes, of course. I wouldn’t be a patient if there weren’t something wrong with me.”

“You’re a patient? Of Dr. Roiphe?”

It seemed to Nathan that the woman was on the verge of slamming the door in his face, and he was calculating his response to that when a crusty voice reverberated from deep within the house. Nathan could practically hear all of the house’s marble floors in the acoustics of that bellow. “Chase?” called Dr. Roiphe. “Is that our own private paparazzo? Bring him on in!”

“Welcome, Mr. Math. Please, do come right in,” said Chase, suddenly genial. She swung the door open wide and curtsied an ironic curtsy as he sidled by her, his tripod case thumping the door frame, his roller bumping and twisting over the raised granite sill. She bent towards him and whispered, “Consumption. That would be my guess.”

Her face was uncomfortably close to his. “Consumption? You mean tuberculosis?”

Still whispering, still too close. “No. I mean consumption.” She straightened up, smiled, and said, “Follow me!” in quite a different tone, too loud and too declamatory, then turned and marched off into the house leaving Nathan struggling to follow her. Center-hall plan, polished wood staircase, black-and-white-streaked marble floors everywhere. Chase veered off to the right and stood just inside the living room, waiting with exaggerated patience for Nathan to pull his roller up to her. The room was furnished in a very traditional way, as befitted a Victorian fantasy of a French chateau, and this was yet another level of fakery because it looked as though the house had been bought complete with the real-estate agent’s staging furniture and never touched again. She gestured to a plump brocaded wingback chair. “That’s where you’ll be.”

“And where will you be?” said Nathan, fussing the tripod case off his shoulder, trying not to swipe the pottery animals off the side table by the sofa, which matched his assigned chair.

“I’ll be in limbo, Nathan. Come see me there when you have the will.”

By the time Nathan could lift his eyes from the gear he’d just settled on the floor, Chase was gone, leaving him to imagine the set of her face, and to wonder whether she could possibly be coming on to him. As he sat in the indicated chair, he felt rather upbeat about the demeanor of this young woman, whose strangeness immediately suggested that he was on to something with this Roiphe thing, this Roiphe who was not as interesting as Parkinson.

Roiphe entered through a set of French doors which led onto a small flagstone patio. He turned and closed the doors, a bit shaky with the latches, and met the rising Nathan with an outstretched hand. They shook and sat down, Roiphe on the matching sofa.

“Nathan.”

“Dr. Roiphe.”

“Please, please call me Barry. I’ve always found it bizarre that the Americans call their ex-presidents ‘Mr. President’ for life. I am retired, you know.”

“Except for… Chase, was it?”

Roiphe looked puzzled. “Chase?”

“The young woman who assigned me this chair. She said she was your patient.”

Roiphe doubled over until his chest touched his knees. Nathan, startled, thought he was having a heart attack until the doctor straightened back up, his face crumpled with silent laughter. It took a moment or two for the sound to come, a good, hearty, roaring laugh flecked with phlegmy wheezes. “Well, yes,” he said, still heaving, “that’s one way of looking at it.”

“She’s not your patient.”

“Whatever she is, she’s sure darn full of surprises. I haven’t heard that one before. But no.” He leaned forward, pulling on his knees to enable him to slide his torso closer to Nathan. “She’s my daughter, Nathan. Now, there’s a sense in which all children are constantly being diagnosed by their parents, wouldn’t you say? So, I guess that’s fair of her to say, metaphorically, I guess. But like I say, never heard that one before.”

“Does she live here with you?” Nathan felt that the general strangeness of the situation allowed him to ask that question.

Roiphe let go of his knees and relaxed back into the pillows of the sofa. “I guess this is the beginning of the interview, is it? The new art form. The art of the interview.” He flicked a hand towards the roller. “And is that your camera? You said you were a photojournalist. I love that word. Photojournalist.”

Nathan tipped over his roller and unzipped it, revealing a tightly packed group of lenses, flashes, spiraled flash cords, and cleaning tools. He slid the big Nikon out of its padded cubicle, the rhino-like 24–70mm lens attached, and hefted it in his hand. “It’s a digital SLR, if that means anything to you. Digital single-lens reflex camera. It means you can see exactly what the lens is seeing when you look through the viewfinder. They’ve been around for a long time, film first, of course, and now digital, but this is the latest incarnation. Well, almost the latest. It’s hard to keep up with the technology when you’re on a budget. It’s heavy, and it’s probably obsolete already. It just doesn’t know it. Is this too much information?”

“Hell, no,” said Roiphe, holding out his hand, wanting the camera. “I was a passionate amateur nature photographer in my time. Haven’t come to grips with the digital thing yet, though.” Nathan suppressed his urge to deny Roiphe his camera and handed it over. “Maybe this is something you can teach me. We’ll be quid pro quo-ing all over the place here.” Nathan countered his equipment anxiety by busying himself setting up the Swiss Nagra Kudelski SD audio recorder on the glass coffee table in front of Roiphe. The insanely expensive radio-quality recorder was overkill for a print journalist—though these days there was no such thing in the purest sense—but Nathan had spotted it at an electronics booth in the Zurich Airport and couldn’t resist. He and Naomi both used technology to enhance their credibility as professionals, and he knew that she would never really give up her Nikons for an iPhone until it was an acknowledged cool-but-pro way to go. Too much insecurity involved, always the sense of being a poseur. While he was deciding which Nagra plug-on microphone to use—the stereo cardioid was good for ambiance plus voice, which could be interesting when Chase was around, but the mono was best for focused, undisturbed voice recording—Nathan watched Roiphe out of the corner of his eye as the doctor dug around clumsily in the sunshade of the zoom lens, trying to pry off the lens cap.

“Are you trying to get the lens cap off ? Just squeeze it in the center. It’s spring-loaded.”

Roiphe chuckled and popped the cap off. Nathan slid the Automatic Gain Control switch on the side of the Nagra to On, figuring that manually riding the recording levels would be a distraction. Roiphe in turn managed, after a quick survey of the many buttons, dials, and switches on the Nikon, to turn the camera on, and in no time was snapping photos of Nathan, happily cranking the zoom in and out like a delirious child.

“Well,” said Roiphe, after the mirror had clacked up and down about thirty times, “that seems to work. I guess a camera is a camera. Oh, look at that. There’s you, right there on that little TV in the back. Hmm. Somehow makes you look kinda sinister. See? Something in the eyes.” Roiphe handed the camera over to Nathan, who felt he had to assess his own image to be polite. Roiphe was right. Nathan looked nasty and untrustworthy—though in a darkly handsome way.

“Good shooting,” said Nathan. “Very good.”

The last photo Roiphe had taken was a zoomed-in close-up of the Nagra, and he now pointed to it with a twitching index finger. “You haven’t turned that on yet, have you?”

“No. May I?”

“Not yet,” said Roiphe, and he held his knees and pulled himself forward to his confidential position. “We need to make our deal.”

“Our deal?”

“Yeah,” said Roiphe, drawing out the word to give it a slightly comical street feel. “Innarested?”

Nathan leaned forward to match the intimacy, clasping his hands like a choirboy. “I… sure.”

Roiphe laughed a small dry laugh. “You’re not too sure, are you? But you will be. Listen. I’ve tried writing a book, you’ll be surprised to hear. I’m no good at it. Not on my own, I’m not. Chase researched you on the internet—she’s so clever, that kid. She’s already read half of what you’ve written. And we came up with something, she and I. You know the work of Oliver Sacks? The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? Awakenings? That was made into a great movie with De Niro. An Anthropologist on Mars?”

“I know his work and I’ve met him a few times.”

“Oh, really?” Roiphe’s tangled eyebrows shot up in challenge.

Nathan had to respond, to authenticate. “Yeah. He’s got this weird thermostat problem. He’s always too hot. He’s always leaving the restaurant to stand outside. That’s why he loves to swim in those cold mountain lakes. I’ve got an interview with him in the works. And he wears weird shoes.” Nathan was immediately ashamed of throwing in the data about the thermostat. It was true, as far as he knew, but mentioning it smacked of desperation to impress.

Roiphe was very excited. “That’s super! That’s titanic! Oliver Sacks is a doctor, a neurologist, and also a brilliant writer. I’m a doctor, you’re a writer. Math plus Roiphe equals Sacks. Get it? I was a neurologist first, you know, not a urologist the way people think. I specialized in genital pain, and ouch, there was Roiphe’s waiting for me.”

“Things I didn’t know.” Relieved, Nathan conjured up the enthusiasm to say, as though with enlightenment dawning, “So, we collaborate on a book!” but then was immediately uneasy as the possible implications sank in.

“Medical fame,” said Roiphe. “Your subject. You want to get to the marrow of it? This is your big chance.”

“But a book about your life? Your work? Your retirement years?”

Roiphe sank back heavily into the brocaded pillows. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“I’m being nervous. I’m worried about being co-opted by my subject. They warn you about that in journalism school.” Nathan released a pathetic chuckle which was meant to show that he knew he was being superficial and paranoid. “This could be a classic case.”

“Not a co-opting. A real collaboration. I don’t censor you. You don’t pass judgment on me.”

“Okay,” said Nathan. “Okay. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it’s interesting. I’m loose, god knows. I’m flexible. But you have a subject in mind, don’t you? Something very specific.”

“My experiments. My recent work. With my most recent subject.”

“Who is?”

“My daughter, of course,” said Roiphe. “Chase. But you. Good instincts. We’re gonna need ’em for what comes next.”