Naomi shook her head under her arms. “So weird that you say that. So weird.”
“Because?”
“Because there is a Vietnamese gynecologist in my life. Or almost.” Naomi unfolded and rolled back over to face Nathan, lips still sticky. “Célestine’s GP. Dr. Phan Trinh. She definitely had an intimate knowledge of her patient’s vagina.”
“And a Marxist? A criminal?”
“Dr. Trinh? No, I was thinking about Aristide when I said that.”
“A Marxist and a criminal?”
Naomi rolled off her side of the bed and squatted beside her camera roller. She dripped a few drops of lazy viscous fluid into the carpeting as she unzipped the bag and groped its innards. “I was thinking more like a Marxist and therefore a criminal. I mean, the way he—they—wrote made me dizzy-crazy, made me feel intelligent and deep, and you know how seductive that is for me, you used it yourself to get me into bed that first time.” And now she flopped back onto the bed, a white-and-silver iPhone 5s in her hand. “Lemme take a shot of you cleaning your cock.”
Nathan stared at her in disbelief. “You have a bag full of the highest of high-tech photographic shit that you’ve lugged all over the globe, and you’re shooting my manhood with a cell phone? And since when do you have an iPhone?”
“Since Charles de Gaulle. It’s a natural segue from my well-documented-by-you desire for disembodiment. I want to junk the camera roller bag and travel with only this, this implement. It shoots HD video too. And you can edit it on the phone, while flying. Touch focus. Dual LED flash. Fingerprint security. Great macro. Look.” And she swooped down to within centimeters of his cock-head and started snapping, the phone making an absolutely delectable shutter sound, reminding Nathan of the Australian lyrebird that would replicate the shutter sounds of forest paparazzi to seduce a mate. Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it? “And now mit Blitzlicht.” The LEDs embedded in the glass back of the phone blasted the tip of his cock with 5,400 Kelvin degrees of cool-blue daylight. He thought he could feel it. She held the phone up to his face. “You see how the flash throttles down for the macro shot. Perfectly exposed, matches ambient color temperature, doesn’t blow out your cock, as it were.” She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.
Nathan rolled over on top of her and looked over her shoulder at the photo. He thought fleetingly of that shot of Galapagos lizards mating on a sun-drenched rock. Naomi flicked Camera Roll back and forth with her index finger, nail strangely not clacking, sorting through the varieties of flash and flashless, macro and micro, a shockingly quick dozen of them, some mit scrotal views as well.
“This is making me very nervous, Omi. Kind of existentially unstable.”
She began to edit the photos in a cute retro app, making his cock look like it was shot with an Instamatic in the sixties, and then a Polaroid in the eighties. “You talk pretty, Nathan. But what do you mean? It’s all good. I’m going to give you back your big mother macro lens. I won’t need it anymore.”
“Those are the most terrifying words you’ve ever uttered.” He buried his head in her neck under her hair, nuzzling in a pathetic and desperate way. He spoke to the pungent nape of her neck. “You’re giving me back my big mother cock. You won’t need it anymore.”
Naomi tossed her phone onto a pillow and twisted around under him until they were belly to belly. He thought fleetingly of that fifties French movie featuring Saint-Tropéziens mating on the beach. “You’re very anxious. You don’t have to be anxious.”
“You just spoke German. Since when?”
“The Arosteguys. Reading them.”
“Why not French?”
“Marx was German. Das Kapital. They quote him. They translate.”
“Marx talked about Blitzlicht? He was into flash photography?”
“He was an all-rounder. A lateral thinker.”
“So Marx. The guy who forced your French guy to murder and eat his wife.”
“Maybe not forced. Induced. Inspired. That’s the way I read it.”
“That’s the other thing. You’re the one who doesn’t read. Not books.” Naomi tried to shrug him off, but he let his muscles go limp, made himself as heavy as that iguana. She had to breathe when he breathed. “Where’s your BlackBerry?”
“I’m suffocating.”
“Me too. Where?” Naomi grabbed his hair and pulled his head back and he spun off her. “Because—and I’ll tell you before you ask me—because you’ve abandoned your faithful BlackBerry, your old friend and lover, the one that was cool with long fingernails, left him, now that you’ve got a new exotic toy to play with.” Nathan pounced on Naomi’s left hand and splayed her fingers, stroking their tips along the edges of her fingernails. “Yeah, right, and you’ve cut your fingernails for the first time since we’ve been together, and it’s not for Last Tango in Schiphol reasons either. It’s for iPhone touchscreen sex.” He dropped her hand and she protectively hid it under her hip. “And I know you’re serious about the Nikon withdrawal too. Nikon, that was our defiant consumerist thing, no Sony, no Canon, our badge of professionalism, our shared sex-tech. So now you’ll go with cool eight-megapixel Jello-cam rolling shutter no-bounce-flash iPhone hipness. And you’ll leave me, you’ll fly to Tokyo to have an affair with the French-Greek philosopher guy, who will then kill you and eat your breasts. And photograph your corpse with your iPhone.”
“That’s really fucking horrible, to say all that. Wow.” Naomi kicked at him with both feet in unison, like a cat on its back. “That’s probably the meanest you’ve ever been to me.” She jumped off the bed, grabbed the iPhone from the pillow, and began to delete the Nathan’s cock portrait photos, one by one, with violent, short-nailed jabs at the trash-can icon while singsonging, “Nathan’s penis: delete, delete, delete …”
BUT OF COURSE a penis is not so easy to delete, and before long, Nathan’s was happily ensconced inside Naomi. It had amused Nathan the first time he noticed it—what he later thought of as “theme sex.” It was dizzy and dreamlike, like a Las Vegas sex room (or at least his imagining of that chimeric thing), and it had come after watching Mutiny on the Bounty, the Brando version, and his sex partner was Sheila Dahms, who was just dark enough of eye and hair to support the Tahitian-themed rec room sex, the drums, the waves, the grass-covered thighs and musky breasts. He felt he was underwater with her, it was so hot and humid, and there was a breeze, the drums, the first sigh of the East on his naked buttocks … And afterwards, after she had jumped up and gone to the bathroom to pee and maybe douche out, as they then did, she came back luminous and said, for a second there I thought you were Brando, and you were still wearing those white breeches and those shoes with the buckles, and we were underwater. It was never like that with Naomi. She didn’t seem to have theme sex, ever. She admitted to distracted sex, thinking about arguments she’d had with her mother or her sister, even ratcheting up the anger and intensity to the point of orgasm. Nathan could not imagine that such a thing could be true, but she swore it was. Was she covering up her own version of theme sex? Maybe it was fantasy/celebrity sex and she was fucking some prepubescent rock star, male or female, and wouldn’t cop to it. Once in a while she’d play and try to guess his theme of the moment, but mostly he stopped mentioning it, holding it back, keeping it private the way she felt that some of her sex things were too private, though he hated that, he wanted to violate every part of her, dirty it up and make it part of him too. And this time, of course, since the