1.20 Sunshine and Micronutrients
1.20.1 Alenby and Ada Take Lunch
On the Terrace at Château Mourey
12:30 pm Thursday 3 April 1987
The raised terrace abutted the south side of the building, a trap of spring sunshine. A table was set for a lunch for two--set in a traditional manner, Alenby was pleased to notice: dazzling white napery, sparkling silverware and crystal goblets, a vase loaded with fresh-cut flowers. On a side-table, serving equipment, flûtes, and an ice bucket containing two bottles of Champagne. Here and there on the terrace were white wicker chairs casually arranged, their cushions vivid splotches of green, vermillion, ocher.
Ada sprang up the steps, alighted on the nearest chair and allowed her limbs to fall into a sprawling attitude to receive the sun.
Alenby followed. He mounted the steps gingerly, bracing at each for the inevitable forked lightning of pain at left knee to lower back. Arthritis—no escaping it, his doctor assured him. A natural result of aging, nothing to worry about. In any case, easily controlled by taking a couple of tablets Ipüpoften an hour and a half ahead of the planned physical activity (although the occasionally associated continuous-flow diarrhea proved a trifle inconvenient) and if by some chance they don't work, easily fixed by artificial knees, hips and so on and so forth....
Why didn’t Ada have arthritis? The question crossed his mind, but he didn’t dwell on it. He merely marveled that the feminine arrangement of legs and hips, seemingly awkwardly constructed for locomotion, should in her case work so freely. He subsided on to a chair across the table from her and watched her luxuriating in the heat and light of the sun—twisting upstretched arms back and forth as if to expose her body to the sun to the extent possible, and in so doing bringing into relief the distinct corrugations of her rib cage….
He’d been startled, at first, to see her tossing off all her clothes. After a moment, though, nudity seemed a perfectly natural state in this sun-drenched courtyard. Perfectly natural—for her, at least. And now she wanted him to do so as well. He had plenty of reasons not to. Respectable reasons, like skin cancer and so on and so forth.
And the real reason—dirty underclothes.
In Alenby's case, this was the result of his rectal leakage problem. Between bouts of constipation, his hyperactive colon kept shunting half-digested food through his intestines until none of it was left. But even after its job was done, his colon kept right on working—trying to expel itself, in effect. Result: that familiar sensation of a snake writhing around in there, anal itching, an occasional sharp pain in that area like a jab with a needle. And most embarrassing at those times, a slight but persistent oozing from his rectum. He wasn’t leaking at that very moment, but the chances were that telltale stain would be there....
"No, I am not about to disrobe, and that's final!"
Ada received this declaration with head tilted back, one hand shading her eyes. "I think I hear a PROFATPOL helicopter out there somewhere," she said. "Snooping about looking for us. Alenby—still, I do wish you would take your clothes off!"
"Snooping helicopters are all the more reason to keep our clothes on," he said. "Surely it attracts unwanted attention, I mean—people lolling about in the nude?"
"Not as much attention as people lolling about not in the nude. Wearing clothes while sunbathing or swimming is so eccentric, any judge would accept it as ground for a search warrant. And remember, fifteen minutes' exposure to sunlight is sufficient to top up your reserves of vitamin D at a safe level. So please be sensible, for safety….
"Or if not for safety," she went on after a pause, "then for nothing more than to savor the moment. As our little friend is doing," she added, gesturing towards a corner of the courtyard, to a cage whose external shape resembled that of an igloo, in the domed part of which Georges was rolling about with every sign of pleasure in a shallow pool of greenish-gray mud. "It's called a Piggy-Spa," she explained, "a piglet’s retreat, with mud bath and automatic exit wash…."
Alenby saw the logic in her mention of a search warrant. Nothing motivated him like the fear of a brush with the law--so unsafe in the absence of competent legal representation. He had to disrobe for safety’s sake. Thinking fast, he conceived a plan to avoid embarrassment—undress slowly until getting to his unsightly underpants, then while she wasn't looking, whip them off, quickly roll them up to hide that telltale stain—
When she happened to absent herself, he carried out his plan—and found that so doing was supererogatory! There was no stain. He wasn’t leaking, and he now realized, hadn’t been leaking at any time that day. Evidently Crudulax or R-solace or plain old Paxitin or some lucky combination of them had somehow worked to defeat that inner reptile. It had never happened before….
And she was right all along, he inwardly acknowledged—in the circumstances, wearing clothes was indeed eccentric. He quickly removed the rest of his things, sank down on to his chair and closed his eyes. He felt the smooth warm pavement of the terrace under the soles of his feet, the rough fabric of the cushion under his buttocks, and the air, warm but with an edgy hint of chill, eddying about his torso…. Yes, indeed a moment to savor.
He heard the subdued pop of a Champagne cork expertly pulled, the gush of bubbly into a glass. At his side he sensed Ada, smelling lightly toasted like a part-done gratin dauphinois. He opened his eyes, and yes it was a glass—not a flûte—two glasses, actually, of Lafayette Blanc de Blanc.
"Surprise!" Ada said, laughing, "I knew you didn’t care for our u-flûtes, so while you weren't looking I went in and switched them for standard wine glasses. You’re right, our standard flûtes are too small—you can’t get your nose into them. I like to get my nose in and nuzzle, you know, the subsiding foam, and feel the prickle of tiny bubbles and roll my tongue around inside and lick up the froth—for that you have to have a regular glass."
"More clinkable, too," Alenby said, also laughing. Generally he didn’t care for levity where wine was concerned, but today he made an exception for Champagne.
They raised their glasses, clinked, and toasted the moment.
After a while, their glasses drained, Ada announced that she was about to serve the lunch that Professor Ducru had prepared for them. She donned the essentials of a serious waitress' attire--frilly white cap and apron—and proceeded to read out the menu:
Blueberry & Orange Smoothie
Chilled Green Pea & Lettuce Purée
Champagne Lafayette Rosé NV
Chocolate, Spinach & Blueberry Sorbet
She cleared her throat, and: "Perhaps a few words of explanation are in order. I shall use the abbreviation DC to refer to the author, Professor Ducru."
A certain PhD thesis-like note in her voice caused Alenby’s mind to drop into a standby mode between sleeping and waking, so that her words seemed to come to him from a great distance.
"The menu illustrates DC’s current interest in food preparations whose ingredients are readily available, and that are both tasty and highly nutritious. A high-speed blender is required for each preparation.
"The entrée, Blueberry and Orange Smoothie, is a blend of the named ingredients together with a banana.
"The plat de résistance, Green Pea and Lettuce Purée, is a blend of peas fresh-picked 24 hours before anticipated maturity, freshly shelled and briefly steamed for optimal flavor, with juice of cold-pressed Bibb lettuce.
"The dessert, Chocolate, Spinach and Blueberry Sorbet, is a frozen blend of fresh-picked young spinach leaves with raw chocolate, blueberries, dried dates, émulsion de soja and ground flax seed.
"Now--are there any questions or comments?"
"Yes," said Alenby, snapping fully awake. "Is not the repeated inclusion of one major ingredient in a menu--in this case, blueberry--a breach of decorum, utterly outside the norms of civilized culinary practice?"
After a pause for thought, Ada answered the question with regard to decorum and culinary practice by saying these were mere matters of convention that could well vary from one universe to the next and had no discernable bearing on basic human dietary or gastronomical needs. She acknowledged the need and desire for variety in diet, but suggested that sufficient variety can be achieved on a day to day or even a week to week basis, not necessarily within each menu.
"No," she went on, gathering didactic momentum, "the important desideratum in a menu is not variety, but nutrition, and DC's menu is in line with that. His choices of ingredients, including in this case the particularly nutritious blueberry, are circumscribed by the requirement of a sufficiently large value of their aggregate nutrient-density index H as defined in the equation
H = N/C
where N and C denote quantitative representations, N of their micronutrient content and C of their caloric content."
Alenby's mind had by this time relapsed again into its idling mode. Interesting, he mused, that the part of her person hidden by the apron had vastly greater prurient interest for him than when it was in full view. If his erectile dysfunction remedies was ever going to work, now was the time. But no, not a flicker….
"For quantitative applications," Ada continued, "N is evaluated in a defined manner taking account of the foods' micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber, carotenoids, and glucosinolate, and of their ORAC score, which is a measure of their oxygen-radical absorbance capacity--"
Radical moonbat nonsense, that was Alenby’s opinion of loopy liberal left-wing attention-getting intellectual-fringe preoccupations like micronutrients and carotenoids. He shifted his thoughts to a more substantial matter: saying grace. The chances were she was going to ask him to say something, and the question was, what? Something on a health theme....
The point uppermost in his mind was that while neither Upcoxx nor Prixaloft had done anything to erase the dys in front of his function penile, nevertheless it was not out of line to pay tribute to the meds that had worked as nationally advertised….
"Are there any more question?" Ada asked. "If not," she said, unsuccessfully stifling a tone of regret that her time in the limelight had run out, "I will serve the first course, Blueberry and Orange Smoothie."
She rolled out a stainless steel serving bench, ladled the smoothie--brilliantly colored, of a thickness to coat a silver spoon lightly--into chilled bowls and set the bowls on the table.
"Alenby, would you care to say grace?"
Protests and disclaimers duly registered, Alenby cleared his throat successfully despite lack of a suitable medication close at hand to assist that process, and recited:
Blessed be the art of cuisine and those who deploy it
And all health-care providers who help us enjoy it.
Blessed also the big pharmaceuts and their flacks
For R-solace, Paxitin and Crudulax
All new, improved, safe and effective
Gentle-acting colo-rectal ills' correctives
Risking naught but dizziness, vomiting, shortness of breath
Impotence, incontinence and, now and then, death.
Blessed be all yeas to pleasure and nays to torment
So we can live well and savor the...morment.
Blessed, however, by which deity—God or Gaea?
The answer to which remains unclear.
Ada seemed to be on the point of asking for clarifications, but contented herself with a simple "Less is less"
"Bon appétit," they said in unison, and set to.