David Cronenberg - Consumed

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 as 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.