Consumed by David Cronenberg Read Free Book Online

the chaise longue with Naomi’s old MacBook Pro on his lap. He was wearing his white shirt and loosened tie and his Calvins. On the bed, Naomi used her BlackBerry to email a certain Dr. Phan Trinh, Célestine’s personal physician, whose address had just been given to her by Hervé. The boy was proving useful beyond her wildest imaginings. She was beginning to suspect that he was some kind of police asset at the Sorbonne, and that he had been informing on the Arosteguys, who were, along with everything else, contrarian political activists. “Dear Dr. Trinh,” she tapped. “I wonder if you would agree to speak to me in confidence about the medical condition of Célestine Arosteguy. I believe that many destructive rumors have tended to damage the reputation of this wonderful woman, and I, a woman myself …”
    Hervé jumped up unexpectedly from the chaise and started fanning his crotch with a copy of Les Inrockuptibles , an amusingly unruly French movie/culture mag he had brought with him in his brother’s valise. He was very proud of a short movie review he had written for the magazine, his first ever published, and had read it out loud, very slowly, to Naomi, cracking up at every delicious instance of his own insolence. “Shit. Something in your computer just tried to grab my balls.”
    Without looking up from her screen, she—mother Naomi—said, “I told you not to sit that way. I always feel some weird magnetic-field hottingling when I have it on my lap and the hard drive’s spinning, and I don’t even have balls. If you thought your Peyronie’s was bad, wait until you try testicular cancer.”
    â€œIf it was good enough for Lance Armstrong, it’s good enough for me. A lot of people in France believe that his cancer treatment turned him into a sci-fi monster super-racer, even before the normal sports drugs.”
    â€œIf you say so.” All Naomi could do was shake her head. Lance and cycling had loomed large in Hervé’s failed attempt to seduce her. It turned out that his secret sex weapon was Peyronie’s disease, which he believed he had acquired by riding his carbon-fiber Colnago bicycle along the entire arduous route of the Tour de France two summers ago. Certainly, for a skinny kid, he had amazing quad muscles; they were so out of proportion to the rest of him that they looked like implants, or maybe CGI sweetening. They were a pleasant shock to Naomi when his trousers came off, but really not enough of a novelty to get her into bed. Nor was his mildly bizarre penis.
    Hervé had already researched his condition, could at least name it—François de Lapeyronie had been surgeon to King Louis XV (what resonance!)—but Naomi found him to be very selective in what he retained, more romantic than medically astute. She did her own quick web search, which revealed that Peyronie’s involved the mysterious growth of a hard, inelastic fibrous plaque along one side of the penis just under the skin, causing it to bend alarmingly when erect. Hervé’s particular version of the condition had his long, thin, uncircumcised organ making an almost full right turn of ninety degrees two-thirds of the way up from its root, its tip thus looking at his right hip. Was it scar tissue caused by trauma? The idea of a scarred penis, that it had been through the wars of sex, had its rough charm. Was it an autoimmune system assault? Not so appealing.
    Hervé felt it was a cycling problem. He had first asked to use her laptop because he wanted to show her his bicycle, whose photos were posted onone of his many websites. Still naked, he turned the screen towards her to show a loving shot of an ornately painted racing bicycle hanging from rubber-coated hooks screwed into the living room wall of his flat. “This is the machine that did it. It’s so beautiful, it’s hard to believe it would do that to me.” He flicked