David Cronenberg - Consumed

“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.

When some time later Roiphe drove up in his 1990s-vintage Cadillac Seville, parked in his driveway, and got out with tennis racket in hand, he found Nathan sitting on the steps of his house. “Lock yourself out, did you?” he said, crossing the lawn with a boisterous chuckle. His trim blue Puma tracksuit made the scrawny doctor look lithe and athletic.

“I was never in.”

Having mounted the portico, Roiphe showed off his backhand, the racket breezing cheekily close to Nathan’s face. “Lady of the house didn’t answer the doorbell?”

“I made the mistake of speaking French to her and she slammed the door on me.”

The doctor’s face clouded over for just an instant. “Well, that’s clever of you. Why would you do that, of all things?”