The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [44]
B. Beauty is the lodestar—a cure must be beautiful
The following day, after some faxing and photocopying, Noel went to see Dr. Vorta. For some advice, and some under-the-counter drugs.
“Einen Moment, bitte,” said the doctor, while pressing buttons on a spectrophotometer.
“Did you get my fax? Can you get them for me?”
After glancing at his Swiss watch, which rivalled Greenwich in exactitude, Dr. Vorta noted the readout on the display. “Noel, they’ll put me in jail if I get you all those drugs on your list. Just be patient, will you? Have you brought your journal? And your mother’s? Danke schön.”
“Bitte sehr.”
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a very interesting patient—”
“Look what I found. Some of my father’s notes. On aldehydes. And Pick bodies. He may have been on to something big.”
Dr. Vorta froze for two seconds before turning round, his eyes trained on the notebook. He had a cataract in one of them. “You found your father’s … Right, leave it with me.” He took the book from Noel’s hand, opened it up. “Your father was a brilliant neuropharmacologist, Noel. But remember, near the end, your father was not … a well man.” He perused the bleeding letters. “I’ll take a look, but these are probably just mad ravings …”
After wincing at that last phrase, Noel slumped out of the office, mutely and meekly.
In ten minutes he returned. “I can’t wait any longer!” he screamed at Dr. Vorta, barging in on his synaesthesia tests with a young patient. “I can’t wait for the approval of new drugs, I can’t wait for the clinical trials! My mother is dying! Don’t you understand that? I can’t be patient, I’m looking at infinity. This is not supposed to happen at her age. Soon she’ll forget who I am. Then she’ll forget to eat, to swallow, to breathe. She’s fifty-six and she’s sinking into a black freaking pit! She’s no longer the same person—she’s not a person at all! You’re her doctor and you’ve done nothing. The only thing you’ve ever done is write about her and put her in ‘promising’ drug experiments. But you put her in the placebo group! You wasted a year of her life!” Noel punctuated this last phrase by picking up a laurel-wreathed bust of Wagner and smashing it on the floor, which caused macaque monkeys in hidden cages to scurry and scream. He then began sweeping things off the doctor’s desk, looking for his father’s notes. “And don’t you ever call my father mad, do you hear me?”
“Noel, do not touch anything on that desk. I’m warning you, you little …” He picked up the phone. “Madame Prévert? W4. Oui, c’est ça …”
“And if this is a Farnsworth Musell test, what was that girl doing with her top off?”
Dr. Vorta, after hanging up the phone and nervously stroking his chemically whitened beard, closed the curtain and informed his patient the test was over. He then instructed Noel to get out of his office and stay out, that if he ever came back there’d be a straitjacket and van waiting for him.16
Chapter 9
Norval & Samira
Norval Blaquière lived in a converted millinery factory on rue de la Commune in Old Montreal, which he had turned into a kind of nineteenth-century salon. There were framed reproductions of Thomas Cooper Gotch’s Death the Bride, with a woman in a field of poppies; Henry A. Payne’s The Enchanted Sea, with drowned and drowning women; Rochegrosse’s Les Derniers jours de Babylone; Félicien Rops’ vampish Woman on a Rocking Horse. Others reflected Norval’s penchant for long-haired women: Millais’ liquid-locked Ophelia; Stanhope’s orange-haired prostitute in Thoughts of the Past; Henner’s La Lectrice, in which a naked Mary Magdalene reads from a book encircled by her flame-red curls; Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, the Keats heroine who holds a knight captive in her long tresses.
“Why do you have these morbid pictures of women all over the place?” Samira asked, on her third day at the loft. “And what is it about women’s hair? A fetish?”
“Long and loosened tresses are a symbol of a woman reverting to a state of nature. Like an animal’s mane …”
“Oh, please …”
“ … It was a powerful symbol in