Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  He’d had to live into his sixties, with white hair and a less omnipotent body, before falling in love like this. He’d had to stop being a superhero, lose part of his superpowers, accept that he had limits, before experiencing unlimited desire for another person. All his life, he’d been able to reach out his arm and take whatever he wanted. And now there was so little he could do, he had such poor resources to make this woman his own.

  Elaine was near, Elaine was far. It was a state of peace and eternal conflict. Elaine would take a shower, emerge with a cascade of wet hair, grab a quick bite with him, seize her bag, and then she’d be gone. She’d run far away. Reed would walk her to the elevator. Usually there was a kiss, or perhaps an embrace, and sometimes the fleshy rose that Reed would form, as a joke, out of his hand, pretending to extend it shyly to her. She would smile, pretending to sniff it, unaware of the intermittent stabs of pain that simple rose would cost Reed, in his hand and his whole arm, for the rest of the morning.

  Once she was gone, Reed had nothing left to do but go back to his usual pursuits. Sit at his desk and prepare for another productive day. No one would be able to detect the obsession that was seething inside him. Not the people who were calling to invite him to attend a conference at some university, not a member of the board of advisers of the Richards Foundation who had come in to discuss some administrative matter, not even Annabel who was handing him the paper bag of cinnamon bagels, the way she did every morning, with her skeletal hands. No one. Reed appeared the same as always: affable, productive, courteously ironic.

  What a tremendous strain! The inhuman effort of mastering an obsession, and keeping in equilibrium his external normality and his internal disquiet. As soon as the day was over, and he found himself alone, a destructive weariness settled down on him.

  In the silent evening, he might chance to catch a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and recognise that there was something odd about his appearance. Feverish eyes, ringed with exhaustion. He looked like one of those old lunatics who used to show up occasionally for his lectures, submitting evidence about their alleged discoveries concerning extraterrestrial life forms or molecular energy. Someone possessed by an implacable anxiety. Someone who would never find whatever it was they were looking for. Reed didn’t want to have that glint in his eyes. You’ve got to have style even when you’re feeling lonely. I don’t want to look like an unhappy old man.

  He couldn’t believe he’d come to this point, much less that he’d got there so quickly, in the space of just a few weeks. He, Reed Richards, the man whose exploits had saved thousands of lives, the man who once issued orders to police chiefs and army colonels, a member of the international scientific community. I’ve been a rubber man for my whole life, now I want to be inflexible. I don’t want to wriggle into the fissures of her life. I want something more. I want everything. I want to enter into her and stay there for hours. I want to get to know her the way you know the air around you. I want to force her to take a weekend off, I want us to go somewhere together. I want to be the king of her days, I want her to be the queen of mine, and the rest of the world to be nothing more than a detail.

  *

  It was a wet day. A pounding rain was beating down on the city, outside, falling for hours now. Rain on the apartment buildings, rain on the streets. Rain on the roofs of cabs and on the backs of city buses. Rain on the umbrellas of hurrying pedestrians, of tourists struggling to consult their guidebooks. Rain on the picture windows of Starbucks where people who had momentarily given up the effort to explore the city, or even just cross it, were nursing cups of expensive coffee, contemplating the world outside or their own reflection in the glass. Rain. At the height of the afternoon, water streamed along the gutters, bathing sidewalks, the traffic was hopelessly snarled, and people hurried along, overcoats sodden, nerves shot. In the rain, New York went into a state of suspended animation. An enormous short circuit seemed about to jolt through it. The smell of wet asphalt mixed with the aroma of food outside restaurants in Chinatown, outside Mexican restaurants and pizzerias, outside kosher and Russian restaurants, an odour reminiscent of saliva that seemed to make the city resemble a moist, enormous mouth. Raindrops drummed on office windows, laying siege to those working inside.

  Reed worked until dark. He had spent the morning at a seminar for university professors, spending two-thirds of the session setting forth some of the current issues of astrophysics, and devoting the last third to stories about his past career as a superhero, at the request of the attendees. It often happened, at the end of a lecture, that the questions he was asked slipped into the realm of the personal. His life. His memories. Normally, Reed was capable of fighting against that drift, and could steer the topic back to the theme of the lecture, but sometimes he wound up giving in. When he was tired, for instance, or when he lacked concentration. Reed didn’t think of himself as nostalgic in the least, and he was well aware that there was only one right attitude to adopt in the case of time—not to regret it, but to avoid wasting it. Still, sometimes it was easier to pretend he longed for the past. The past was always an excellent topic, and it satisfied any audience.

  He went back to the office in the driving rain, and there he bided his time, ignoring his impatience, by working on an academic article, and with a long telephone conversation with a Washington bigwig who wanted him to be a member of the scientific advisory committee for a new, important government project. Apparently, they needed him. That ought to have pleased him. But all he felt was a pang of anxiety. The idea of making commitments of any kind tormented him, and what he wanted most, all of a sudden, was a little room, a little freedom. A little emptiness.

  He wound up treating Annabel badly, because she had scheduled two of his meetings the next day too close together.

  “You always like to save time in that kind of meeting,” she said, in an attempt to justify what she had done, which made Reed even more furious.

  “Do you think you have the right to decide what I like and what I don’t like? Do you think that you can make decisions for me to cut short my meetings? And come to think of it, why are you still in the office? Do you really have no personal life at all?”

  Annabel left the office in tears. Rain outside, tears inside, Reed thought with detachment. A perfect equilibrium of liquids.

  It was six o’clock, and he could stop working. He shut his eyes and tried to stop thinking. To empty his mind. A Tibetan lama had taught him a few basic meditation techniques. He could not now recall any of them. His mind kept wandering in a thousand different directions, restlessly; each idea was an incandescent surface, upon which it was impossible to stay still. Washington. Annabel. Appointments. A yearning for sex. A yearning for a vacation…

  Elaine hadn’t called him once in the past week. Nor had he called her. Dignity, the important thing was to preserve his dignity. At last, she had got in touch that morning, with a message suggesting they get together that evening.

  Reed took a sharp breath. Elaine was the most incandescent thought of all, the surface his mind kept bumping up against, without ever being able to touch it. Impossible to touch it. She was a glowing ember in his head.

  He went back to his private suite, where he took a shower and picked out a dark shirt. There was still time. He turned on the TV, something he hadn’t done in months, and that show appeared on the screen. The female mutant who assumed the bodies of celebrities. One of the most famous superwomen in America. I could have recycled myself that way, I guess. I could have had a television comedy, or I could have been the regular host of some talk show or something like that.

  Still, he enjoyed the show. It helped him to clear his head for a while and kill time until Elaine was due to be there. He heard the doorbell. Reed stood up with a poker face. He was never just happy when she came to see him. It was more like a sense of restlessness, almost a sense of disturbance, like when one radio frequency comes into contact with another frequency.

  He had sent a car to pick her up. Elaine wal
ked in, complaining about the traffic. “It took forever!” she said. They exchanged a glancing kiss. Under her coat she was wearing a tight black dress. Short, with a low neckline. The most feminine astronaut Reed had ever seen. There they both were, elegantly garbed, standing in Reed’s living room. Annabel, as far as he could remember, must have reserved a table for them in a Cambodian restaurant. Or was it Laotian?

  In fact, he didn’t feel like going out. He didn’t feel like worrying about whether someone had recognised him, or if someone was wondering how old the woman he was with might happen to be. “I was thinking,” he said, “maybe tonight we could just eat in. What do you say to some takeout?”

  “That would be great,” Elaine replied, without a flicker of surprise. “This evening I’m completely beat.”

  Forty minutes later, they were sitting on the carpet, eating from takeout boxes. Thai food. Classical music in the background, mixed with the sound of the rain drumming down outside. The most informal dinner they’d ever had together.

  They could have been comfortable and happy, in the warmth, in the dim light. They’d both taken off their shoes, and Reed’s eyes kept sliding down, to their extremities, the feet of a man and the feet of a woman, and everything seemed pleasantly intimate, suffused with a warm erotic promise.

  But the conversation was languishing. Reed could feel an unease between them. Later, he couldn’t have said exactly what started the argument. There are certain conversations, as he well knew, that can lead only in one direction. No matter where they start, the end point is inevitable. The point of friction. The open wound. “In fact,” Reed found himself saying, “I’ll admit that there’s a problem.” He took a sip of white wine from his glass, to show just how unruffled he was. “The problem,” he resumed, “is that I can’t seem to understand your, how to put this… your nonchalance. Showing up so nonchalantly when it’s been days since you last called me.”

  Elaine also took a sip from her glass. She watched the wine forming tiny golden ripples as she swirled it ever so slightly. “Reed, you know perfectly well where I was. And in any case, you could have called me yourself.”

  Reed maintained an even tone, so that everything would continue to seem innocuous. “Certainly,” he said. “I knew where you were. Your training and all that. I can imagine it was tough to find a few minutes, maybe late in the evening. Yes, I can imagine how busy you were, what with your training, and what with your colleagues, and what with Bernard…”

  Elaine put down her glass. “My God,” she groaned.

  Reed pretended he hadn’t heard her, aware that he was irritating her, and that the intimacy of the scene was beginning to wither. The enchantment of the low lighting and the music by Schubert, their bare feet, and everything else.

  “I can’t believe it,” Elaine said. “Again with Bernard?! Can I ask you why you’re so obsessed with him?”

  Reed decided to get up, and started collecting the empty takeout boxes. “I’m not obsessed in the slightest,” he replied, continuing to put on an impassive tone of voice. “You told me that he’s gay, right? Why should I worry about him?”

  “He’s not gay,” Elaine sighed. “He’s a homosexual. Those are two somewhat different things.”

  Reed froze for a second, trying to grasp the difference. Then he went back to collecting the boxes. “Great,” he said, with angry sarcasm. “Now that I know it, I’ll stop worrying.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Elaine said again, in a harsh voice, shaking her head. She got up too, and started gathering the remains from their dinner.

  “You have such an evasive way of dismissing things,” he accused her.

  “Reed, I’m not being evasive. You’re the one who wants too much. You want to occupy every part of my life. You behave as if we were married.”

  Reed was suffocating. The air had turned hard. He could feel something unpleasant about to happen, increasingly ineluctable, but he couldn’t help asking: “What are you saying?”

  Now they were in the kitchen, where they set down their empty trays and boxes and glasses on the table, and then stood there, facing each other. Without the protection of the carpet, the chilly floor was painful against Reed’s bare feet.

  “Meeting you was a wonderful surprise,” Elaine said in a gentler tone of voice. “You were a childhood legend to me, and that day at the space centre you materialised, in the flesh, and there was a spark between us. Between your eyes and mine.” She looked around uneasily: “Isn’t there any light around here?”

  Reed remained motionless. There was plenty of light available. There were halogen lamps in all sizes, ready to light up the room at the touch of a button. A world-renowned lighting designer had worked on the apartment a few decades ago, along with carpenters and electricians, many of them long since retired. There were yards and yards of fibre optics and electric wiring, and dozens of light bulbs that had been replaced over the course of time, and all of this had been done expressly to create the powerful lighting resources that waited, latent, around them. But Reed chose not to use them. He allowed the kitchen to remain illuminated by nothing other than the glow from the adjoining room, so that Elaine’s face would be left as it was, before his eyes, carved out of the uncertain light. “Go on,” was all he said.

  Elaine forgot about the light and went on delivering a speech that, it dawned on Reed, she must have rehearsed long before: “You’re an important man,” she said. “You’re respected, attractive, and you haven’t become ridiculous the way other superheroes have. It was incredible to find that you liked me. It was incredible to start dating you, and be able to get to know you, and those other things I wasn’t used to, I mean, being courted the old-fashioned way, with a car coming to pick me up, a different restaurant every time, and waiting such a long time before going to bed together…”

  “Wait a minute,” Reed broke in. He had expected her to slip in a mortal blow at some point, but not that little revelation. “Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that’s not how it usually went? That you didn’t wait so long with other men?”

  The question seemed to surprise her. She ventured a smile in the half-light. “Reed,” she whispered. She spread her arms: “I’m a big-city woman, I’m twenty-seven years old, I’m in training sixty hours a week, I live for my work. I take sex when it comes around.”

  Reed nodded, without quite knowing why. Words were beginning to elude him. “And with me?” he asked.

  Elaine seemed to think it over. “With you… I couldn’t say. I just thought that was the style of a man your age.”

  Reed felt scalded. His face, in particular, but also down on a line with his hip, where lately all his emotions had been concentrated, and where there seemed to be a very sensitive fissure. “A man my age,” he echoed. He stood there, gazing at Elaine’s face, or maybe just imagining it, in the scant light. That face. It seemed as hard as a diamond. That face, so intense, so determined. The kind of face that would remain unchanged as it aged, with perhaps a few lines here and there. Just like Sue’s face. Like my wife’s face, he thought, almost grateful to be able to make that comparison, to be able to draw a line between his own past life and this uncertain, prickly instant.

  “Reed?” Elaine called to him.

  He came to with a start. There was complete silence. The music had ended some time ago, and even the sound of falling rain had stopped. Now there was a sense of nudity in the air. “Go on,” he said.

  “There’s not much more,” Elaine sighed. “I was intrigued by the situation. They’ve been wonderful months for me. But you seem to expect too much from this, Reed. I don’t think…” She seemed to experience a last instant of embarrassment. “I don’t think the two of us have the same perception of the importance of this relationship.”

  Reed nodded again.

  “I think we’d better stop seeing each other, Reed.”

  “You’re right,” he answered, in the most neutral voice he could muster.

  *

  His life belonged
to him again. No more obsession, no more stupid waits, no more dreary insomnia before dawn. Or at least that’s what he promised himself. Reed wanted to become himself again. The eternal, original, incorruptible Reed. There were moments when this objective seemed to loom close, be attainable, when everything that had happened over the past few months turned into a mirage, nothing more than a momentary blur. He went out clothes shopping. Simple, elegant suits, designed by a well-known Italian designer, the kind of suits he’d always worn but which only now, in the last few years, seemed to fit him to a T. Look at me now, he said to himself in front of the mirror, in the shop, as a chubby sales assistant looked on approvingly. Here I am. I am what I want to be. Elegant and solitary. He also bought some flowers as an apology to Annabel. At first he’d thought of a box of chocolates, but then chose to spare her sensibilities.

  And there were other moments… As he was collecting his clothes to send them to the laundry, or when he was reading the Sunday sections of the New York Times, or while carefully fishing the anti-theft strip out of a book he’d purchased at Barnes & Noble… When he was touching his body, his immutable body, under the spray of a warm shower, or while performing his stretching exercises, in a special gymnasium, under the watchful eyes of his trainers… As he was doing the things he’d always done, the usual everyday actions, and the air had that unmistakable colour of absence… At any given instant, he might be struck by the perception that Elaine was out there, in the city, in the vastness of the world at large. Elaine was the wind that buffeted the windows. She was the spirit that pervaded the entire outside world. And he could lay no claim to her.

  It was during one of those moments, as he sat at his desk trying to regain possession of his thoughts, that an email arrived from Franklin. Reed looked at the name of the sender, almost stunned to remember that someone out there in the world carried the same last name as him. Franklin Richards. His son. Reed hadn’t communicated with him for the past few weeks, and he didn’t even know whether he was in New York. I keep forgetting to tell you about that guy from the George Hotel, what’s his name?, the one that everyone says wears a ball-crushing cilice, you know the one I mean… Anyway, he sent me a Cartier watch, the package reached me while I was still in Baghdad, you can imagine for yourself what it was like to find myself holding a Cartier over there. Of course, the first thing I did was to put it up for auction on eBay. More than anything else, I was curious to know how he found out my address, but I guess he must have spoken with you.