Consumed (4 page)

“Why do you think that?” Naomi was genuinely thrown by this, and Hervé could see it. “We went through all that on the net. I thought you understood me.”

“I understood you,” said Hervé. “But I never believed you. How
sympa
you were, how you loved them, how their philosophy and their love story so inspired you.”

“Then why are you here, drinking my espresso?”

A compact Gallic shrug. “I wanted to see what a room in the Hôtel de Crillon looked like.”

THEY ENDED UP
ordering room service. While they waited, Hervé agreed to pose for some stills, sitting on the chaise longue in the bedroom by the open balcony doors while Naomi squatted with the camera, shifting from side to side, trying to find the revealing angle. She was using the Nikon D300s, the cousin to Nathan's D3. It was more compact and lighter, and she prized unobtrusiveness and mobility above all things. The muted light was soft, diffused by the pigeon netting and the trapped bounce of the courtyard, and it brought out the femininity of the boy's face. He played the lens expertly, as Naomi expected he would, given his self-promotion on the Arosteguy forums, which involved endless videos and stills documenting the many moods and musings of Hervé Blomqvist. His general approach was coy/mysterioso, and Naomi knew just how to use the natural light and her angles, the brow, the dark, full eyebrows, the liquid brown eyes in the thin face, to make that pop.

“So, Naomi, what are you going to use these photos of me for?” He spoke between shots, timing her rhythm so that he wouldn't be caught in an ungainly mouth move. “Are you planning an Arosteguy picture book? Maybe for the coffee table?”

“I don't know what I'm doing, Hervé. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I do have a suggestion. I think you will be afraid of it.”

Naomi paused and rested her camera on her knees. She felt strange in her dress, but at least she was now in bare feet. She looked up at Hervé, who smiled down at her with benign, unfocused eyes, like a priest. Annoying.

“Go,” said Naomi. “Let's hear it.”

Hervé stood up and began undoing his tie. “I propose a book that shows every lover that the Arosteguys ever had, starting with me. And they will all be in the nude. And they will say what their experience in fucking them was. And they will talk about the influence that Célestine and Aristide had on their lives.”

Naomi sat on the floor, her back against the foot of the bed. “Are you taking your clothes off ?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Hervé.

“You want me to shoot pictures of you naked?”

“Yes.”

“I'm not going to have sex with you. Really. I'm not.”

Hervé had taken off his tie, jacket, and shirt, and was working on his belt, a fussy alligator-patterned thing with a dual-pronged buckle and a double row of holes which seemed to be giving him trouble. He was hairless and thin through the chest, just as Naomi thought he would be. All those New Wave movies. “If you have sex with me, I will show you something special that Célestine liked very much. It's unusual what she liked.”

Naomi lifted her camera and casually began to snap away.

“Oh, I like your camera,” said Hervé. “It looks like it's carbon fiber. Is it?”

“No. Magnesium body.” She stopped shooting, hefted her Nikon, juggled it from hand to hand. “I have a feeling carbon fiber is next, though. It would be nice if it were even lighter.” Then back up to her eye, shooting again. “And what about Aristide? Was there something special that he liked?”

Hervé finally got his belt undone and his trousers down. He was wearing black Calvin Klein bikini briefs. She had hoped for something more exotic. “Yes, certainly,” he said, stepping out of the trousers. “It will be a little more difficult, but I can show you that too.”

DUNJA LAY PROPPED UP
in a bed in the Molnár Clinic's basement recovery room. There were a dozen beds, skeletal and primitive, creepy, but she and Nathan were alone in the room. He sat in an unstable plastic chair beside her bed, his camera on his lap, his voice recorder still hanging from its lanyard around his neck, its jewel-like red power light staining Dunja's sheet, so dark was the room. Dunja was still dreamy, but Nathan suspected it was emotional exhaustion more than the effect of the anesthetic. She nodded towards him. “I didn't expect the camera. In the operating room. I thought you would just take notes on a notepad, like a proper journalist.”

“We're all photojournalists now. It's no longer enough just to write. We have to bring back images, sound, video. I hope you don't mind.”

Dunja stretched, and it was somehow voluptuous despite the depressing threadbare hospital gown and the shunt in her arm. “I don't mind. Soon, that'll be all that's left, so the more the merrier. Something to remember me by.”

“Why do you say that? Don't you have confidence in Dr. Molnár?”

Dunja laughed. “Look at this place. This is my strategy of last resort. No one else in the world would commit this operation on me. Only Dr. Molnár was arrogant enough. And you can quote me.”

“I
will
quote you.”

“And you? You were so impressed by Dr. Molnár you came from New York to write about him?”

Nathan's turn to laugh. “I saw him in a documentary about illegal organ transplants. He was very defiant and very engaging. I came to talk to him about the international organ trade and then discovered he was a practicing breast surgeon. I'm not sure yet what the piece I'm writing is really about, but that's not so unusual for me.” He lifted his camera. “May I take a picture?”

“Why not? Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”

Nathan checked the light metering through the viewfinder, then cranked the camera's ISO up to its maximum of 25,600. (The new D4s, the one he didn't have, could shoot at a surreal ISO 409,600—it could see in the dark—but that didn't bear thinking about.) The photos would be extremely noisy, grainy and splotchy, but would have a painterly quality, pointillist, perhaps, or impressionist. The camera somehow felt even more sensuous, more instrument-like, at that setting. He began to fire.

Dunja sighed. “Of course, for all eternity I won't look my best. Is there any pose you'd like from me? I'm not shy.”

Nathan thought of what Naomi would say to that. She was a fashion photographer at heart, maybe even a celebrity shooter—a paparazza?—and wouldn't be shy about directing a subject as pliant as Dunja. “I don't really want you to pose. We're pretending that you don't know I'm here.” Nathan stood up and moved around her, shooting with the lens wide open, with little depth of field, the floating images of her face driving right into his brain. Her eyes had a creamy darkness, and she seemed able to look into the lens without actually noticing it. Stunning.

Nathan paused and went back to his camera bag. He dug around in it for his flash. “Just to be on the safe side, I'll take a few with some bounced flash. There's not much light in here.” He slid the foot of the flash into the hot shoe and locked it. “We can just do the same thing you were doing.” He pulled up the flash's little plastic bounce card for eye light and began to fire.

“Oh, but now, with that flashing, I feel like a movie star,” she said. “And I want you to see the best part of me.” She pulled open her gown and presented her breasts, which were bruised and peppered with tiny swollen red dots. Nathan immediately stopped shooting. “What's wrong?” she said. “Too ugly? Too horrible?”

“No, on the contrary. It's, um, too sexy. In a fetishistic way. Or something. Maybe too Helmut Newton. I don't think I'd know how to use it for, you know, a medical article.”

“Then just take some for yourself,” said Dunja. “So that you remember me afterwards in a nicer way.” She smiled the warmest smile at him, and then tears began to seep from her eyes. She did not wipe them away. “And can that camera function under water?”

DUNJA SPLASHED WATER
at Nathan, targeting his camera but missing it, soaking the knees of his jeans. Somehow she still managed to look voluptuous in her clinical gray one-piece cotton bathing suit, in part because it was thin and unstructured, clinging. A white medicinal rubber bathing cap hid her hair completely. “I was sure they wouldn't allow you to take photos in here,” she laughed. “And you're wearing jeans!”

Nathan was squatting next to a stylized stone lion-head fountain that drooled complex mineral water into the pool. He stood up and followed her, warily snapping, as she waded along the edge of the shallow end of the pool. “I got Dr. Molnár to pull some strings. Getting me in with jeans was the hardest part, apparently. But what about you? Every other woman here is wearing one of those blue plastic shower cap things. You're not in regulation dress either.”

“The matron in the locker room is very strict, but she's also half Slovenian, from my father's town of Jesenice. I told her why I needed a special hat to keep the water out of my ears. I made her cry. I think she's in love with me now.”

They were in the main swimming pool room of the Hotel Gellért, on the hilly Buda side of the Danube. The room was vast, more like an opulent art nouveau ballroom than a pool, and was bordered by a series of twinned, intricately tooled marble columns, arcades, and ornate balconies bearing potted ferns that projected from the spacious upper gallery. Thin morning light drifted in through its arched yellow glass roof.

“And what about that bathing suit? Is that yours too?” asked Nathan.

“You don't like it? They rent them here. I think they were designed by Stalinists.”

Somewhere deep inside the pool's mosaic-tiled heart, motors fired up, and the entire pool became a frothing, sulfurous Jacuzzi. Dunja ducked under the effervescing water and disappeared, leaving Nathan to stalk along the edge of the pool, tracking her among the other swimmers as they churned out their slow, orderly laps or clung to one of the many pulsing jets on the pool's floor. He dodged the columns and the fan-backed plastic chairs strewn randomly along the arcaded hall. When she surfaced, laughing, the bathing suit a sexy-astringent commie second skin, he started shooting again, the shutter rattling like a submachine gun, ignoring the wary looks of swimmers who got in the line of fire. Playing the camera all the way, Dunja pulled herself out of the pool and sat in one of the chairs—
her
chair, evidently, because she pulled around her the towel that had been draped over its back. Nathan pulled up another chair and sat close to her.

“So, you're actually staying here, at this hotel?”

“Part of the Molnár Clinic package,” she said. “It included business-class tickets on Malév. Flying me right from my hometown deep in the wilds of Slovenia. Where are you staying?”

“Holiday Inn. My expense account is limited.”

“Is it nice?”

“Well,” said Nathan, “you can park a bus there. Great if you have a bus.”

Dunja peeled the bathing cap off her head. She let it flop into her lap like a jellyfish and combed her fingers through her black crop. “You really should stay here. Would you like at least to see my room? For your writing? And of course you could take pictures. It's very … proto-Hungarian.”

“Aren't you going to try the thermal baths? They're supposed to be very healing.”

“Oh, I did that when I first got here. I really don't think they'd be very good for me right now. Besides, Dr. Molnár forbids it. I think those little pellets will come popping out of my breasts like blackheads if I get all steamed up. He's seeing me again tomorrow. I wouldn't want to upset him. I won't even tell him I went swimming.”

DUNJA'S SUITE WAS A DISAPPOINTMENT.
It was large and blandly comfortable, with a nice partial view of the historically strategic Gellért Hill and the sinister, sprawling stone Citadel that topped it, but Nathan had been hoping for something more exotic than just bourgeois familiarity. He had, he realized, hoped for the swimming pool, the florid thermal baths, converted into a hotel suite.

But Dunja was not a disappointment. She was wearing a waffle-pattern bathrobe, looking at herself in the mirror over the writing table. The bathrobe was open, and she was holding her breasts, one in each hand, palpating them expertly, clinically, without sensuality. Nathan sat on the bed and took photos of her through the mirror.

“So? My breasts are now officially radioactive. I'm not allowed to hug pregnant women for at least three months. What do you think of that? Journalistically.”

“I don't know. Can you hug non-pregnant men?” Still firing. The constant clucking of the camera had become part of their repartee, Nathan rolling his firing finger over the shutter release as exclamation, as rimshot, as query.

Dunja turned to him, her bathrobe still fully open, hands still holding breasts. “Nathan, I'm a very sick woman. Does that turn you on?”

Still firing. “Well, I told you, I'm a failed medical student. Now I'm a medical journalist. So, yes, I guess sickness does turn me on in a way.”

She approached him and gently took the camera out of his hands and
placed it behind her on the writing table. “What about death? I could be dying. Is that exciting to you?” She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they've been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower. Look. Look at all those needle marks. I'm like some weird junkie, crazy for titanium.” She laughed. “Don't be shy. They feel better with some pressure on them.” He squeezed her breasts tentatively and kissed her.

After a beat, she pulled her mouth away. “I've discovered that most men are repulsed by disease, especially when it starts to be visible.” She took up his hands again and placed them on her groin. “You feel those lymph nodes, how big they are? My shape is changing. It's really starting to become a not-human shape. I had a boyfriend in Ljubljana, you know, for eight years. When he felt those, he told me it creeped him out, his exact words—well, the Slovenian equivalent. Then he noticed these.” She took his hands and placed them around her throat, then pushed them up under her jaw. “You feel those? They're hard, aren't they?”