Free Consumed by David Cronenberg Page B

American, she’s not sure, and that you used shock tactics that reminded her of American military policies in Vietnam. I asked her if she would pose nude for me, for my book that you liked the idea of. She said that her culture forbids it. We had a nice discussion about cultural assimilation and the sensuality of the East. I do not think she will do it.”
    Naomi’s thumbs began to fly. “I’m very disappointed to hear about the doctor’s reaction to me. Did she really talk about the Vietnam War?”
    â€œHa ha, got you there. No, I made that up. She did say that she didn’t trust you, though, and that you deliberately left some pin or something inher office as a kind of symbolic marker or presence. Do you know what she’s talking about?”
    â€œDid you really ask her to pose nude for your book?”
    â€œYes. All that is true.”
    â€œDoes that mean that she was Célestine’s lover?”
    â€œYes. I was once in bed with both of them. One day I’ll tell you about that. It was very interesting. It made me think of Karl Marx.”
    â€œWas there anyone in the Arosteguys’ life together that they didn’t …”
    The corridor, which was lined with glass, had become unbearably hot as the sun edged over it, and the constant irritated nudging through the waiting crowd by passengers trying to get to their baggage or some other flight was ramping up the general hostility. Someone stubbed his foot on Naomi’s roll-on and rammed her with his shoulder so hard she could feel the density of his bone and muscle—it felt intentional, a punishment, and Naomi gasped—causing her to inadvertently hit the Send button on her phone. Now other people started to wedge their way through the gap that Naomi had left as she stepped forward under the blow, and she was separated from her camera bag. She rotated herself on the spot so she was confronting the surge and worked her way back to her roller. Facing that direction, she saw the marquee of an airport electronics chain, and with her bag safely back in hand, she plunged towards the oasis of the kiosk.
    IN THE CORNER of the room between the minibar and the TV dresser unit crouched two sets of unopened bags: two camera rollers, two backpacks, two small black Samsonite four-wheel Cruisair Spinner suitcases with faux carbon-fiber-weave finish (Naomi and Nathan aspired to Rimowa Topas, the sexy German dentable aluminum stuff, but that was, for the moment, out of their range). It was not so much that they had the same taste ingear, but rather that they collaborated on their consumerism; it was a consumerist dialectic that led to the same commodity. That’s what Naomi was thinking in the floating part of her mind as she sucked Nathan’s cock—so delightfully, boringly, not curved much at all, not a mutant organ in any way, but a classic, modern circumcised penis—in room 511 of the Hilton Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Hotel. And she was surprised to find herself thinking in Marxist terms, because up until that moment at the electronics kiosk, in which she discovered three books by the Arosteguys—cheap-looking rushed editions in American English pumped out to take advantage of the philosophy-cannibalism scandal—she had barely heard of Karl Marx or Das Kapital . And yet those books, small, with large, inviting typefaces, and so easy to read, like owner’s manuals for hitherto undiscovered parts of the brain, made her feel as though she had been born a Marxist economist. Not that Marxism was the subject of the books, but that the lexicon of Marx somehow underpinned the Arosteguys’ evidently profound understanding of contemporary consumerism—and of Naomi herself, as it turned out.
    The lack of an available direct flight, which would have been a short hour-plus hop from Paris to Amsterdam, meant a seven-hour ordeal involving a layover in Frankfurt. But the time dissolved in an odd way,