Consumed

by David Cronenberg

  WE WERE IN THE HABIT of having our most intense, most abstract and intellectual conversations in bed, usually fully clothed but not always. Even if it began as something mundane, something merely functional, in the kitchen or in front of the Loewe, once it drifted into that territory that we subliminally recognized, we ourselves drifted, as if randomly, into our small bedroom and would lie down together without having missed a beat in the rhythm of our talking (the pillows occasionally making my Pures squeal petulantly with feedback), and with the conversation sometimes ending with a profound nap, or profound sex, both the nap and the sex infused with the thematics of our talk. There were pens and stubs of pencils strewn everywhere in the bedroom, evidence of our habit of scribbling notes for future papers, articles, letters to editors, at any moment of the day or night, during or following our bed sessions. We made sporadic forays into the world of voice-recognition spoken-note-taking using iPad or iPhone, but inevitably reverted to the handwritten word. We both had appalling handwriting that required considerable decipherment even by the writer, but the very act of decipherment was comforting, the contortions of the scrawls conveying emotion and nuance that no perfect pixels could embody. Speaking the words seemed to release them into a void in which they could evaporate unexpectedly; writing them seemed to encase them safely within our skulls, where they could leisurely ripen.

  Célestine headed for the bedroom first, tossing her keys into the wooden Chinese bowl we left on the glass half-moon table by the door, kicking off her shoes and flopping down on the bed with a long, slow sigh. As usual, I followed her, half-sitting rather than stretching full out, my shoes already off.

  It was apparent to both of us that we were going to talk about Romme Vertegaal, with no preliminaries, no banter about parking difficulties or what was missing in the refrigerator. Earlier in the day, she had been to the Entomological Society’s office again, hoping that her contacts there had some news of Romme’s whereabouts or latest projects. She had turned to them in desperation after our colleagues at the Cannes Film Festival were unable to provide any enlightenment. Judicious had been handled entirely by a North Korean government film and media agency, and they never had any interaction with the director of the movie himself. It had been hinted that he had somehow disgraced himself in Pyongyang and was lucky not to find himself in prison. There had never been any chance that he could accompany his movie to Cannes as most directors do; the festival had decided to accept this onerous condition in the hope that it would at least open the door to more interchange with North Korean artists. The executives of the festival would not accept Célestine’s contention that Jo Woon Gyu was not Korean, not Asian at all, but was a French national born in Holland. Disbelief and dismissal soon turned to irritation, and Célestine’s entreaties—phone calls, emails, street interventions outside the Paris offices of the festival—quickly became moments of embarrassment for everyone that were best forgotten. The pair of us were used to becoming embarrassments in political and social causes of all stripes—it was a badge of honor; you could not worry about dignity or reputation when it came to hot-button issues—so this in itself was not hard to take, but the emotional stakes in this instance were very high, and Célestine in bed next to me was enervated, dispirited.

  “Look at this,” I said, handing her my iPhone.

  She covered her eyes with her arm, flexing her fingers so that her forearm muscles bunched rhythmically, exuding anguish and aggravation. “I can’t look at your ironic little pictures right now. Please.” I was in the habit of bringing back cell-phone photos of things I encountered during the day, just like a dog with an amusing stick in its mouth. I believed I took these photos in innocent amazement at the richness of mundane reality, but Célestine, on the contrary, detected revulsion and existential dismay skulking under every shot. I no longer contradicted her on this point.

  I slid down on the bed until we were side by side. “This picture has a very special irony that you’ll want to experience. I promise.” She rolled over abruptly and grabbed me by the hair with both hands, inducing my Pures to complain bitterly. I used to pull them out of my ears and toss them onto the night table at such moments, fearing an interruption of intimacy, but we had gotten so used to their companionship that it never occurred to me to do that now. “A promise like that is a dangerous thing,” she said. “I’m in a perilous, slippery state of mind. One of your shots of inane parking signs could push me right over the edge. And I’d never come back.” She kissed me a full, openmouthed kiss, then pulled away as though shocked by what she had done, her own little act of irony. “Well, let’s see it. I’m not going to be easy to impress.”

  I recovered my iPhone from where it had hidden itself in the folds of the duvet and again conjured up the photo I had taken of the Listen to the Crickets album. With a flourish, I gave the iPhone to Célestine.

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIND Crisco in Paris, but not impossible. As well, friends visiting from America got in the habit of bringing us Crisco—not in the spray cans, but the preferred cardboard box containing the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-gram wax-paper-wrapped white block of vegetable shortening. Once we discovered the use of Crisco as a sexual lubricant and an antidote to vaginal atrophy, I could never again see the Crisco logo (the red letters over a white ellipse with a golden drop of oil serving as the dot over the letter i) without getting a melancholy erection. At the age of sixty-two, Célestine was still voluptuous and sensual, but of course well advanced in her postmenopausal life. It was typical of her to search for a metaphor, or perhaps an analogy, to help her absorb a change as fundamental as the transformation brought about by her menopause, particularly where sex was concerned. She found it when we participated in a panel, part of the Festival Lumière at the Grand Lyon Film Festival, whose subject was “Sex and the Disabled in the Cinema.” Our postmenopausal sex was immediately illuminated by the testimony of our fellow panelists, who were not specialists, but merely six aficionados of cinema who incarnated a spectrum of human disability from relatively minor (a non-functioning right arm owing to a childhood stroke) to major (motor neuron disease at the advanced Stephen Hawking level). A strong sense of invention, leavened by an even stronger sense of humor, and the suppression of embarrassment at the sometimes grotesque acrobatics required, seemed to be the key, spiced by the exhilaration of being forced to understand and, more, to graphically discuss, precisely what the purpose of the sex really was—a woefully ignored aspect of sex for most of the enabled.

  Secretly, I lusted after Célestine as I always had—secretly, because it was not allowed that I could somehow evade our synchronized aging by lusting now as I had always lusted. I was allowed to express my desire to her, but it was necessary for her to laugh it off in disbelief, the delusions of an old man, possibly the first signs of senility, if not dementia, in her own private senex. It was as though my unabated, youthful lust was by its very existence a reproach to her for her own brutally truncated lust, now feebly supported by the stratagems I’ve just described. I could not tell her how our past sex blended smoothly into our present sex for me, how her past body modified the reality of her present body. Even as anal sex was not possible for her now, still the old, vividly recalled anal sex was vitally alive and present for me, happening somehow concurrently with vaginal sex. And of course, my body was changing too, as I’m sure you’ve guessed even without reference to internet photos and videos, and I felt that her menopause was also mine. The transformation of our bodies was locked in a rigorous synchrony, and perhaps beyond synchrony: we were too close in all ways not to have affected each other causally. As her body changed (and that change, of course, is invisibly gradual until one of those startling moments of revelation, when the light slanting in from an oddly placed skylight rakes cruelly across the skin, the veins, the toenails, and changes forever your perception of what your lover is) I at first willed my esthetic for womanly beauty to change in order to accommodate her transformation, so that she remained as beautiful and as desirable a
s ever before, though she was different. And the difference itself became provocative and exciting, as though sex with her was also sex with a new, exotic person who demanded new sexual protocols and new perversities, until I didn’t have to will that change anymore because that esthetic had permanently changed; I was no longer attracted to the same women, and it was a blessing and a relief, and a curious thing. An unexpected corollary was the realignment of the esthetic concerning my own body, which could now absorb the stringy musculature, the mottled skin, the haggard cheekbones, the reptilian wrinkles, into its category of acceptable male beauty. Yes, we were both still wonderful.

  After I described my adventure in Vanves to Célestine in obsessive detail, all in explanation of the album cover photo, we made desperate, triumphant, celebratory love, inevitably embracing the theme of Romme Vertegaal and his odyssey as we imagined it. While we were on a trip to Mexico, whose purpose was an exploration of leftist politics and philosophy à la mexicaine, we discovered that our sex had independently segued into a meditation on Frida and Diego, with a flavoring of Trotsky (Célestine was always Frida, but I occasionally was Trotsky in that delirious country of sexual self-annihilation; later on, when we revisited the theme, I was sometimes Frida, Célestine sometimes Diego), and had distinctly Mexican surrealist folk-art overtones. From that point on, we would often consciously choose the themes of our sexual sessions as though collaborating on a collage or sculpture project, and would afterwards discuss their textures and sensory effects. We wrote a joint piece about it for the “Annals of Sexuality” section of The New Yorker, which caused some small controversy. Now, just post-Vanves, there emerged a new layer in our constantly evolving, composited sexual structure (which always reminded me of the use of layers in Photoshop): Célestine’s uncharacteristically desperate longing for Romme. I could be Romme in our fantasy—I certainly knew him better than I knew Diego Rivera—but the jealousy was there even though we allowed each other lacunate lovers, and the jealousy was dissolving the layers and producing a disharmonious mess. Is there anyone who has not felt jealousy over a lover’s past lovers, a jealousy made all the more ferocious the more it is unjustified, the more it is secured in the past, mockingly protected by the vault of memory? So yes, triumphant, celebratory, but anguished in its emotional complexity, at least for me, and made more agonizingly poignant by Célestine’s apparent serenity, her ease even with the by-now-inevitable pain that came with penetration. I hated allowing Célestine to fuck Romme using me as a Romme surrogate.

  We were both subdued by the end of it, Célestine holding my hand over her left breast and squeezing it with distracted cruelty. But then she startled me with a sudden, whimpered exhalation, followed by a terrified gasp. A shot of adrenaline projected brainward and flushed me with a familiar, unmoored anger. When I first got my hearing aids, which were primarily tuned to augment those higher frequencies which are usually the first to disappear with age, it is true that the world instantly became louder and more harsh; it was difficult for someone whose aural landscape had so gradually become more and more muted and dulled to believe that this was hearing as experienced by most people, that this harshness was just the restoration of higher sound frequencies that had been lost. But the most disorienting aspect of this new soundscape was that sounds now carried too much emotion, too much meaning, so that a single sneeze was an expression of rage, the closing of a bedroom door was a pointed separation that would need healing, the smacking of a pillow to reshape it in the middle of the night was an explosive assault that caused my heart to pound with reflexive anger. A recalibration of my reaction to the intensity of sounds was urgently demanded, and though I was constantly recalibrating, those unexpected shots of adrenaline still persisted and confused me. I wanted to jerk out of bed and slam the bedroom door and go for a petulant walk in the wet, dark streets, muttering to myself about spousal insult and betrayal. But I recalibrated.

  “Tina.”

  “You feel them, don’t you?” she said. “They’re going crazy in there. It’s not possible you can’t feel them.”

  “The insects.”

  An exhaled “yes!” like the report of a high-powered rifle. “Do you think it’s the Romme Vertegaal gestalt that’s animating them? The entomology, the North Korean connection …?”

  She twisted around to face me. On her face was a terrible, frantic joy. “Program 5,” she said. “Switch to that and you can hear them. That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? It’s obvious! Romme knew this moment would come!”

  “I don’t know what Program 5 is for. Even Elke couldn’t tell me precisely what it was for. I let her create it because of you, because of your North Korean obsession, and of course because I was curious, even about my hearing, what its potential might really be. We know that Romme was brilliant, so let his brilliance open up my head if it can. That’s what I was thinking. But honestly, I’ve been afraid to switch to it, partly because I think it’ll be disappointing, be just a bland expression of harmonic filtering, who knows what. Elke was very proud of her work with that difficult analoguevinyl-to-digital routine, and I hated to frustrate her by being so timid, but she let me go when I promised her that I would report back in detail after I’d had the courage to experiment with Program Vertegaal.”

  I could not tell Célestine that I had another motivation in letting Elke Jungebluth manipulate me: I had become terrified that Célestine would make good on her promise to travel to North Korea in order to seek out Romme, to reconnect with him and to give her insect problem to him, all within the context of a farcical political rapprochement with the North Korean dictatorship. On one level her stratagem was complete madness, a fantasy, and on another it confirmed—I felt this with crushing pain—that she still loved him, loved him in a way that she did not love me, and that I was trapped in a wretched telenovela I would never escape.

  Célestine cupped her left breast in both hands and offered it to me. “Switch it on and listen,” she said, with a breathless intensity whose hopefulness utterly deranged me. What husband has not avidly played the role of voyeur in his own house, watching the reflection of his wife in a window as she examines her vagina or anus with his chromed shaving mirror, one leg propped up on the white metal bathroom chair, searching for some real or feared lesion, polyp, secretion, or telltale discoloration? I would often catch Célestine examining her left breast in the most unconventional way: for sound, rather than sight. She would pull it up towards her left ear, her head cocked, manipulating it ruthlessly, as though it truly did not belong to her but was a ludicrously wrongheaded transplant or recent pathological growth, prodding it in order to provoke the insects into an aural frenzy loud enough to be recordable by the iPhone that sat propped up against a Kleenex box, the VU-meter of its Voice Memos app twitching with every rustle. Now it was my turn.

  I hesitated, paralyzed. Her hair was wet from our exertions, glistening black and gray strands striping her cheeks. One strand was caught in the corner of her mouth, and I hallucinated that it was the leg of an enormous black-and-gray spider inadvertently exposed, patiently waiting inside her mouth for the insects to emerge. I forced myself to gently pull the leg from between her lips, which parted slightly to aid me, and swept it back over her ear. “You know, you’ve always been able to hear things that I’ve never heard, even with my very sophisticated bionics,” I said. “And you’ve never been able to successfully record the sounds of your insects. You’ve admitted that.”

  “But this is Romme. This is Romme’s gift to both of us. It’s been created by his brilliance and by his understanding. This is a new thing.” She glowed as she said this, and the glow tormented me. She reached up with one hand, the other now palpating her breast, and touched the Pure module behind my ear. (I had chosen dark silver for its color, vain enough still to want it to disappear in my unruly nest of silver hair, which one of my students described as “confrontational philosophy hair, though not as intimidating as Schopenhauer’s hair.”) I took Célestine’s hand away from my e
ar, leaving it to hover uncertainly, and I reached up for the program switch behind my left ear and pressed it, methodically cycling through the programs from 1 to 5. Each cycle was accompanied by a unique sequence of musical tones cleverly designed to indicate which program one was entering, and because Célestine could hear those tones, when I arrived at Vertegaal her eyebrows immediately rose in bright, girlish expectation.