a magazine from the waiting room open on her desk but had barely glanced at it; so lost was she in a fairyland—that consisted solely of Friday night, Sergei Korolyov, and Magdalena Otero—she didn’t notice that Norman had come out of the swami room and was within six feet of her desk.
“Must be a great magazine,” he said.
Magdalena looked up, flustered, as if she had been caught out. “Oh, no,” she said. “I was sitting here thinking—about something else.” She quickly dropped that subject and opened her daybook and said, “Your next appointment is fifteen minutes from now, at eleven, with a new patient, Stanley Roth. I made the appointment myself, but I’ve got no idea what he does.”
“He’s a trader for some new hedge fund called Vacuum,” said Norman. He smiled. He found “Vacuum” amusing. “I talked to him on the phone.”
“Vacuum?” said Magdalena. “Like a vacuum cleaner?”
“Oh, yeah,” Norman said with a chortle. “A bunch of young guys. You’re gonna laugh when I tell you Mr. Roth’s little problem—” He broke off that thought. “What is that magazine?”
“It’s called—” She had to give it a close inspection herself. “La Hom?… Loam?”
Norman picked it up and inspected it. “It’s Lom,” he said, pointing at the name at the bottom of a page, L’Homme. “It’s French. ‘The Man.’ Take a look at these guys,” he said, holding up one of the pages. “All the male models these days are like these two. They’re all skinny. They look like they have a serious protein deficiency. They have these sunken cheeks and a six-or-seven-day growth of beard and this gloomy, hangdog look, as if they’ve just been released after five years of hard time, during which they contracted AIDS from getting buggered so much by other prisoners. I don’t get it. This is going to make young men want to buy the clothes these lulus are modeling? Or maybe these days looking like a gay AIDS blade is fashhhhionableahhHHHHock hock hock hock… They look like these emaciated young men Egon Schiele used to paint. They have this look like they’re all so weak and sickly, they’re going to pass out and collapse and die in a pile of bones right in your face.”
Magdalena said, “Who? Did you say Sheila?”
“It’s German,” said Norman, “S-c-h-i-e-l-e. Egon Schiele. He was from Austria.”
“And he’s famous?” said Magdalena… glumly… All this art stuff the americanos thought was so important…
“Oh, sure,” said Norman. “I mean I guess he’s famous if you’re into early-twentieth-century Austrian art, the way I am. I really consider—” He abruptly broke off whatever he was about to say and averted his eyes. His face fell. He looked sad in a way Magdalena had never seen before.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m ‘into’ early-twentieth-century Austrian art, all right. I’m ‘into’ it in those seventy-five-dollar picture books, that’s how far I’m ‘into’ it. It was twenty years ago when I first discovered Schiele and Gustav Klimt and, oh, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka and that whole bunch. I could have bought this terrific Schiele for twenty-five thousand at auction. But I was in medical school, and I didn’t even come close to having twenty-five thousand dollars to spend on some ‘artwork.’ I was living practically hand-to-mouth. Same thing for another eight years as an intern and a resident. Finally I open my own practice and start making some money and I come up for air, and those Austrians—I look up, and they’re in earth orbit! A couple of years ago, that same painting sold for twenty-five million. It had increased in price a thousand times while I wasn’t looking.”
He paused… He looked at Magdalena in a wary, tentative way that seemed to say I don’t know whether I should be getting into all this stuff with you or not. He must have decided, Oh, what the hell, because he proceeded to get into it.
“You know,” he said, “people used to think doctors were rich. If you lived out where the doctors lived, you knew you were in the best neighborhood in town. That’s not true anymore. You can’t make any real money if you’re working for fees. Doctors, lawyers—we get fees for the time we spend on a case, so much per hour. So do violin teachers and carpenters. You go on vacation, you go hunting, you go to sleep—you get no fee. Now, just compare that with someone like Maurice. It doesn’t matter if he’s asleep, daydreaming, playing tennis, off on a cruise, or, for that matter,