"What were her symptoms?" I said.
"Joint pain, headaches, skin sensitivity, fatigue. It started out as fatigue. She'd always been a ball of energy. Five-two, a hundred and ten pounds. She used to dance, play tennis, powerwalk. The change was gradual-at first I figured a flu, or one of those crazy viruses that's going around. I figured the best thing was stay out of her face, give her time to rest. By the time I realized something serious was going on, she was hard to reach. On another planet." He hooked a finger under the gold chain. "Joanne's parents didn't live long, maybe her constitution… She'd always been into the mom thing, that went, too. I suppose that was her main symptom. Disengagement. From me, the kids, everything."
"Judy told me she was a microbiologist. What kinds of things did she work on?"
He shook his head. "You're hypothesizing the obvious: she was infected by some pathogen from her lab. Logical but wrong. That was looked into right away, from every angle-some sort of rogue microbe, allergies, hypersensitivity to a chemical. She worked with germs, all right, but they were plant germs-vegetable pathogens-molds and funguses that affect food crops. Broccoli, specifically. She had a USDA grant to study broccoli. Do you like broccoli?"
"Sure."
"I don't. As it turns out, there are cross-sensitivities between plants and animals, but nothing Joanne worked with fit that category-her equipment, her reagents. She went through every blood test known to medicine." He thumbed his black silk cuff. His watch was black-faced with a gold band, so skinny it looked like a tattoo.
"Let's not get distracted," he said. "The precise reason for what happened to Joanne will never be known. Back to the core issue: her disengagement. The first thing to go was entertaining and socializing. She refused to go out with anyone. No more business dinners-too tired, not hungry. Even though all she did in bed was eat. We're members of the Cliffside Country Club and she'd played tennis and a little golf, used the gym. No more. Soon, she was going to bed earlier and rising later. Eventually, she started spending all her time in bed, saying the pain had gotten worse. I told her she might be aching because of inactivity-her muscles were contracting, stiffening up. She didn't answer me. That's when I started taking her to doctors."
He recrossed his legs. "Then there was the weight gain. The only thing she didn't withdraw from was food. Cookies, cake, potato chips, anything sweet or greasy." His lips curled, as if he'd tasted something bad. "By the end she weighed two hundred ten pounds. Had more than doubled her weight in less than a year. A hundred and ten extra pounds of pure fat-isn't that incredible, Doctor? It was hard to keep seeing her as the girl I married. She used to be lithe. Athletic. All of a sudden I was married to a stranger-some asexual alien. You're with someone for twenty-five years you just don't stop liking them, but I won't deny it, my feelings for her changed- for all practical purposes she was no longer my wife. I tried to help her with the food. Suggesting maybe she'd be just as satisfied with fruit as with Oreos. But she wouldn't hear of it and she arranged the grocery deliveries when I was at work. I suppose I could've taken drastic measures-gotten her on fen-phen, bolted the refrigerator, but food seemed to be the only thing that kept her going. I felt it was cruel to withdraw it from her."
"I assume every metabolic link was checked out."
"Thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, you name it. I know enough to be an endocrinologist. The weight gain was simply Joanne drowning herself in food. When I made suggestions about cutting back, she responded the same way she did to any opinion I offered. By turning off completely-here, look."
Out of the purse came a pair of plastic-encased snapshots. He made no effort to hand them to me, merely stretched out his arm so I had to get up from my chair to retrieve them.
"Before and after," he said.
The left photo was a color shot of a young couple. Green lawn, big trees, imposing beige buildings. I'd collaborated with a Stanford professor on a research project years ago, recognized the campus.
"I was a senior, she was a sophomore," said Doss. "That was taken right after we got engaged."
For many students, the seventies had meant long coifs, facial hair, torn jeans and sandals. Counterculture giving way to Brooks Brothers only when the realities of making a living sank in.
It was as if Richard Doss had reversed the process. His college 'do had been a dense black crew cut. In the picture he wore a white shirt, pressed gray slacks, hornrimmed glasses. And here were the shiny black wing-tips. Study-pallor on the elfin face, no tan.
Youthful progenitor of the corporate type I'd expected him to be.
Distracted expression. No celebration of the engagement that I could detect.
The girl under his arm was smiling. Joanne Heckler, petite as described, had been pretty in a well-scrubbed way. Fair-skinned and narrow-faced, she wore her brown hair long and straight, topped by a white band. Glasses for her, too. Smaller than Richard's, and gold-framed. A diamond glinted on her ring finger. Her sleeveless dress was bright blue, modest for that era.
Another elf. Marriage of the leprechauns.
They say couples who live together long enough start to look like each other. Richard and Joanne had begun that way but diverged.
I turned to the second photo, a washed-out Polaroid. A subject who resembled no one.
Long-view of a king-size bed, shot from the foot. Rumpled gold comforter strewn across a tapestry-covered bed bench. High mound of beige pillows propped against the headboard. In their midst, a head floated.
White face. Round. So porcine and bloated the features were compressed to a smear. Bladder-cheeks. Eyes buried in folds. Just a hint of brown hair tied back tight from a pasty forehead. Pucker-mouth devoid of expression.
Below the head, beige sheets rose like a bell-curved, tented bulk. To the right was an elegant carved night-stand in some kind of dark, glossy wood, with gold pulls. Behind the headboard was peach wallpaper printed with teal flowers. A length of gilded frame and linen mat hinted at artwork cropped out of the photo.
For one shocking moment, I wondered if Richard Doss had a postmortem shot. But no, the eyes were open… something in them… despair? No, worse. A living death.
"Eric took it," said Doss. "My son. He wanted a record."
"Of his mom?" I said. Hoarse, I cleared my throat.
"Of what had happened to his mom. Frankly put, it pissed him off."
"He was angry at her?"
"No," he said, as if I were an idiot. "At the situation. That's how my son deals with his anger."
"By documenting?"
"By organizing. Putting things in their place. Personally, I think it's a great way to handle stress. Lets you wade through the emotional garbage, analyze the factual content of events, get in touch with how you feel, then move on. Because what choice is there? Wallow in other people's misery? Allow yourself to be destroyed?"
He pointed a finger at me, as if I'd accused him of something.
"If that sounds callous," he said, "so be it, Doctor. You haven't lived in my house, never went through what I did. Joanne took over a year to leave us. We had time to figure things out. Eric's a brilliant boy-the smartest person I've ever met. Even so, it affected him. He was in his second semester at Stanford, came home to be with Joanne. He devoted himself to her, so if taking that picture seems callous, bear that in mind. And it's not as if his mother minded. She just lay there-that picture captures exactly what she was like at the end. How she ever mobilized the energy to contact the sonofabitch who killed her I'll never know."
"Dr. Mate."
He ignored me, fingered the silver phone. Finally our eyes met. I smiled, trying to let him know I wasn't judging. His lids were slightly lowered. Beneath them, dark eyes shone like nuggets of coal.