Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (61 page)

     "Insulin," Dr. Steinberg said. "That's your problem."

     He was the fourth specialist Philippa had seen in as many years, and she hadn't expected any results. They always drew blood, ran tests, took an extensive history on her past and eating habits, and in the end, they shrugged, at a loss for an answer. So when Dr. Steinberg made his one-word pronouncement, she said, "I beg your pardon?"

     "You have a rare condition called hyperinsulinemia, Miss Roberts, which means you have too much insulin in your bloodstream. You have, in fact, the very opposite problem that diabetics have, who can't manufacture insulin at all. The symptoms mimic hypoglycemia, but your
problem isn't low blood sugar, it's high blood insulin. That's why you get the shakes so soon after eating something sweet. You ingest sugar, your body produces too much insulin, resulting in shakiness, light-headedness, and sweats."

     He waited for her to assimilate this new information, then continued. "People with hyperinsulinemia are frequently overweight because of the two main actions of insulin." He enumerated them on his right hand. "First, insulin speeds up the conversion of sugars into stored fat; second, insulin
slows
the breakdown of stored fat into energy. So you see, insulin is in fact fattening. I even have a diabetic patient who refuses to take her insulin because she says it makes her put on weight."

     All of a sudden, Philippa understood things that had once made no sense. Not being able to eat desserts; the sweet breakfasts at St. Bridget's that always made her feel faint by midmorning; Dr. Hehr's fruit-heavy diet that she could not tolerate, and on which she hadn't lost weight as fast as others did. And now, even something Dr. Hehr had once said to her came straight home: "It's not necessarily overeating that causes obesity, it's
incorrect
eating."

     "When you had that cold," Dr. Steinberg said, "you said you drank a lot of fruit juice and tea with honey. Fruit is high in sugar. Oh, I know it's so-called natural sugar, and not the refined white stuff, but fructose has the same effect on the pancreas. And as for the honey in the tea, people don't understand about honey. It's almost as bad for you as white sugar is, because in a way it's refined—by the bees—but all the same it's pure sugar. Which your body doesn't need."

     Philippa was suddenly excited. Here was the answer to a lifelong mystery. "What can I do, Doctor?"

     "Keep your insulin levels low by eating protein and complex carbohydrates, which take longer to digest than simple carbohydrates." He smiled. "But of course you know all of this. From our discussions I can see that you've done a lot of research in human nutrition. Also, when you feel shaky, don't eat something sweet. A diabetic who is having an insulin reaction can do that because the sugar will stabilize the insulin that he has injected. But for you, it will only stimulate your pancreas to
produce more insulin. When you feel shaky, eat protein—an egg or a piece of chicken."

     He came around the desk and, putting a fatherly arm around her shoulders, escorted her to the door. "Another thing you can do," he said, "is avoid eating large meals. You'd be surprised how many overweight people say they only eat one meal a day. Usually it's a doozy. But let's say you're on only fifteen hundred calories and you save them all up for one meal. A big meal triggers massive insulin output from the pancreas. Small meals don't. Take those fifteen hundred calories and spread them out—you'll actually produce
less
insulin during the day.

     "You'll keep your weight down," he said with a wink, "and you'll feel great. Trust me. I know what I'm talking about."

     Molly said, "It's here again, the mystery car!" And the other girls in the office clustered at the front window hoping for a glimpse of fame.

     "I'll bet it's Elizabeth Taylor," Mildred said. "I read where she put on a whole bunch of weight for her role in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
and now she's having a hard time getting it off."

     Philippa looked up from the
Los Angeles Times.
She had been trying to put together a small book tentatively titled
Hyperinsulinemia and How to Control It
, certain that there must be other people like herself who suffered from the condition but who had no idea what it was or how to handle it. But she had been unable to stick with it because the front page of the newspaper had distracted her with horror stories from Vietnam and photographs of children crying over dead parents. A massive antiwar rally was going to be held at Century City the coming weekend; she had asked Keith to go with her, but he had declined, saying that there was a one-day Bogart festival in Santa Barbara that he couldn't miss. So she and Charmie were going to go and add their voices to the protest.

     When she saw the dark silhouette of an automobile on the other side of her lace curtain, she folded her newspaper and set it aside. After a moment the driver came in. Exactly one week later to the minute. It occurred to her that such punctuality would impress Keith. The driver didn't sit down. He unfolded a sheet of paper and said, "We have some questions. The following items are not listed under any of the diet
exchanges. We would like to know how they might be incorporated into the diet, if at all."

     Philippa read the typed sheet: quail, pâté de fois gras, caviar, brandy, various breads. Not the groceries of a typical Starlite member.

     She wrote her answers on the sheet: "Quail may be roasted, boiled, or broiled
without the skin.
Avoid caviar—salt content too high. Same for the pâté. The bread allowance is increased by one exchange in week four, providing the initial weight-loss requirement has been met. If fruits are not available, or cannot be tolerated, each fruit exchange may be substituted with
two
vegetable exchanges. No alcohol permitted at all."

     She gave him the weekly letter, which was headed with "Believe in Yourself," the Starlite motto, and, in case the client was a woman, fashion and makeup tip sheets.

     After he left, Molly and the others crowded at the window trying to figure out who it was, not a few of them wondering if the driver was single.

     The Mercedes showed up with stupendous regularity after that—every Monday morning at exactly ten o'clock, always parking right out front, the driver always coming in with a typed list of unusual questions.

     On the fifth morning, Philippa said, "May I enquire how your employer is doing?"

     "The diet is having some success," was the limited reply.

     By the end of the second month, Charmie had started managing to be coincidentally in Philippa's office, mainly to scope out the hunky driver. She had gotten nowhere with Ivan Hendricks. After a few unsubtle flirtations—"I admire a man who appreciates a good potato chip"—she stopped trying. He revealed nothing of his private life, but he didn't nibble her bait, so she concluded he had a woman somewhere. But there had been times when she had caught him looking at her in a certain way, and he'd seemed about to say something...

     Although she was no longer married, having divorced Ron, she had kept her married name, liking the sound of Charmie Charmer—"Like an exotic dancer," she told people. She wondered what the no-neck driver with the pretty eyes did for kicks.

     When she read the latest list of questions, she said, "Long Island duck! Kiwifruit!" She looked at Philippa. "What the hell is kiwifruit?"

     "I think our secret client has expensive tastes." They both looked at the driver, but he wasn't telling.

     At the end of four months, the driver announced that goal weight had been successfully achieved. So Philippa handed him the maintenance diet and wished his employer good luck.

     "Do you suppose that's it?" said Charmie, a little disappointed. "Now we'll probably never know who it was."

     But when an MG sports car pulled up in front two weeks later and Charmie saw who was getting out, she came into Philippa's office and said breathlessly, "Philippa! You'll never guess who's here! Paul Marquette!
Senator
Paul Marquette!
That's
who our mystery member is! I saw him in person once. God, Philippa, you should see him! The man's a hot fudge sundae. I could eat him with a
spoon!
"

     "What makes you think he was our mystery member?"

     "Oh, come now. For sixteen weeks in a row a black Mercedes driven by Tobor the Great pulls up, gets a diet, and drives away. Then Tobor announces that the diet was a success, and now this, out of the blue? Senator Marquette, Philippa! A
United States
senator!"

     "But as far as I can recall, Senator Marquette wasn't overweight." Philippa tried to remember when she had last seen his picture in the news. He had been involved in a tragedy some time back—a son dying mysteriously, causing Marquette to drop out of a senatorial race.

     "Maybe his wife was fat," Charmie said, glancing out into the hall. "Here he comes!"

     A flustered Molly escorted the senator into Philippa's office.

     Philippa rose to greet him.

     He took her hand in a warm clasp and said, "I can't tell you how happy I am to meet you, Miss Roberts."

     Charmie had likened him to a hot fudge sundae. She was wrong. Paul Marquette didn't have the perfection of a sundae. Philippa realized now, seeing him in person, that he wasn't the perfectly handsome man the press photos showed. In real life, the perfection was flawed, the features not quite regular. The senator was more attractive than handsome, Philippa decided, Cary Grant's first cousin. She shook his hand and said, "This is an honor,
Senator. And I must say, quite a surprise."

     He wore white slacks and a white V-neck sweater over a blue shirt; his hair was tousled from driving the convertible, and he was carrying a bottle of wine. "The honor is all mine, Miss Roberts, I assure you," he said in a rich, cultured voice that sounded as if he belonged on the stage. "I hope I haven't come at an inconvenient time. I wanted to give you this, from our special reserve."

     She accepted the bottle and read the label: "Chardonnay, Chateau Marquette, 1953." A gold-embossed sticker had been added. "Winner: Prix d'Or, Paris, France, 1960."

     "I hardly know what to say, Senator," Philippa said. "Would this have something to do with a certain mysterious car that has been visiting us?"

     His smile broadened. "Yes. Those weekly visits were arranged by me. I wonder, might I have a word alone with you, Miss Roberts?"

     Charmie said, "I have to get going. Please excuse me," and she left, giving Philippa a significant look on her way out.

     As Paul Marquette took a seat, Philippa thought that he looked and acted every inch the polished politician, despite his casual attire. His black hair was silvering at the temples, and she recalled reading that he was in his early forties.

     "I hadn't realized that you were connected with the Marquette Wineries," Philippa said.

     "That's where my fortune comes from," he said with a smile. "That, and a mile of Wilshire Boulevard that my grandfather bought in exchange for a wagon and a mule." He laughed. "The typical L.A. story! How many times have you heard people say that their grandfather had the chance to buy the corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw for two dollars but passed it up? Well,
my
grandfather did it."

     He fell silent and seemed to assess her. His eyes were dark like Rhys's, she noticed, but not futureless like his had been; rather, Marquette's were full of warmth and life as if yearning to embrace that future. She wanted to know about the weekly visits of the Mercedes. Who had the Starlite diet been for? Not for himself; he was as tall and slender as he had appeared in the news.

     "Marquettes have always been doers," he said quietly. "Which was what your weekly letter reminded me of. That I am a man of action. But...I had forgotten that."

     He paused, as if he had rehearsed a difficult speech. "I don't know how much you know about me, Miss Roberts. During my last political campaign my son died. He was my only child, and I was too grief-stricken to go on, so I bowed out of the race."

     "Yes," she said, "I remember," wanting to add, I was going to vote for you.

     He continued: "I went into seclusion in which I consoled myself with alcohol and food. I ballooned up forty pounds. When I decided last year to go back into politics, I discovered that I couldn't get the weight off. I tried everything." He looked at her.

     And through her. No one had done that since Rhys.

     "I suppose you hear that a lot," he said. "I went to the best specialists, I had a gym built at the house, I even spent some time at a fat farm in Florida. Nothing worked. And then one night I saw you on television. You made me realize that I wasn't addressing the real problem—the fact that I was blaming myself for Todd's death. You see, Miss Roberts, what the media kept secret was that my son didn't die in an accident. He committed suicide."

     He held his words for a few minutes, during which Philippa saw the glint of a gold band on his left hand, and she recalled that he was married to a beautiful Washington socialite.

     "I was quite moved," Marquette said, "by how frankly you told Johnny Carson about your friend's suicide, how you blamed yourself, how you felt responsible for not having saved him. I knew at once that you understood exactly what I was going through. So I decided to try your program, and that was when I found the road back."

     He stood up and thrust his hands into his pockets—a man unused to personal confessions. "It wasn't so much the diet," he said, "as it was those weekly letters of inspiration. 'Think defeat and you will be defeated; think success and you will be successful.' Words that a politician could live by, or anyone who wanted to get ahead in the world. I started to take your advice to heart." He smiled. "Do you know my favorite? 'It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.'"

     "I'm afraid it's not original with me. President Eisenhower said it first, and I learned it from my father."