Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  “Touch it,” Bruce urged her.

  She reached out a hand. She slipped her fingers under the nylon slipcase and touched the fabric of a sleeve. “Oh,” she repeated. “I like it,” as she began caressing the costume, sliding her hand towards the shoulders and chest.

  Bruce watched her hand slide over the black cloth. “It’s a special fabric,” he breathed. “As a matter of fact, it’s not really a fabric. It’s a kind of latex. Can you feel how moist it is, almost tepid? It absorbs your body heat. It reacts to the touch of your fingertips,” he said, taking a deeper breath, drawing a little closer, pulling together the threads of that improvised threesome: him, the girl, and the old superhero costume.

  She nodded with a conspiratorial air. She didn’t seem too surprised. “I can feel it,” she said, looking deep into his eyes.

  Bruce avoided telling her that she actually couldn’t feel a thing, because the properties that he had just described belonged to the original costume, while this was a far less sophisticated reproduction. The original costume had been stolen years ago. He spared her the details of the troublesome aftermath of that theft. He spared her the story of how he’d tried to get the stolen costume back by going to a club for fetishists near Chelsea Park, where he’d heard that stolen costumes often wound up, and how he’d wandered through a crowd of people dressed up as superheroes, reeking with the scents of leather and rubber, sweat, and amyl nitrate, including a number of men dressed as Batman. He spared her the information that none of those people were wearing the original costume, and that at that point he had given up all hope of getting the costume back, but to make up for it he’d spent a very agreeable evening, in a small dimly lit room with a number of nice young people whose acquaintance he had made in the club. He spared her all that knowledge. All he did instead was to draw a little closer. Breathing hard, he whispered: “Try slipping your other hand in.”

  The girl put her other hand into the nylon slipcase. She resumed caressing the costume with sweeping circular gestures, breathing hard too. She seemed to get the game. She ran her fingertips over the ribbed shell, over the curves designed to adhere to the chest, the folds of the abdominal muscles. She let her hands drift downwards, caressing the rubbery fabric.

  “That’s enough,” Bruce said all of a sudden. He could feel the blood flowing in dense, vigorous surges inside him, a warm erection pressing against his trousers. He didn’t want to push the game too far. Too early, there was still plenty of time. “The night is long,” he declared. “I still have to show you the rest of the place.”

  *

  In the Madison Avenue boutique, that afternoon, after retreating into his fitting room, his mind made up to put on his clothes and leave, he’d glimpsed something on the floor. It was a sheet of paper. He couldn’t have said how long that sheet of paper had been there. Maybe someone had slipped it under the door just a few seconds ago, who knows, or maybe it had already been there when he stepped out of the booth for a moment, or maybe it had been there for a while. He was too involved in trying on his shirts with their mother-of-pearly fabric and with the comings and goings of the sales assistants to pay any attention to the floor of the fitting room.

  A white sheet of paper. Folded in half. Bruce bent to pick it up and sensed with his fingertips the texture of the paper, smooth, fine, as though that very same paper had been a fabric, a scrap of clothing, the hem of a garment that he could try on and wear. Of course. The whole world was a garment that he wanted to wear. A part of his brain thought back to the guy he’d just seen in front of the fitting area mirror, the one who might have shot him an allusive glance. Bruce was seized by a mixture of irritation and flattered enjoyment at the thought that the guy had been so bold as to slip a note under the door of his fitting room, maybe a note with a phone number or an admiring phrase, or perhaps a crude proposition, a proposition that would have left Bruce cold since the guy wasn’t young enough for him, and he was a male, and he wasn’t his type. He’d smiled a vain, slightly contemptuous smile, then he’d unfolded the note and felt only disappointment when he read:

  SO LONG, MY BATMAN

  That wasn’t what he’d expected. It really wasn’t. He’d turned the note over in his hands. What the hell did that message mean and who the hell… All right. He guessed that the right thing to do now was to try to find out what was going on here. He’d swung open the fitting room door and slowly poked his head out. The guy from before was still there, involved in consultation with one of the sales assistants about the cut of a jacket, and when the two men noticed Bruce they both stopped talking and stared at him.

  Bruce had pulled his head back in, with the movement of a very proud turtle. He had heard them resume their discussion on the strategic importance of a jacket’s rear vent. Once again, Bruce stuck his head out to spy on them, and once again they had stopped talking, staring at him in bewilderment.

  There’d been a moment of thorny awkwardness. The guy no longer had a smile of pleased recognition on his face. If anything, he seemed to be baffled by Bruce’s behaviour. “Is something wrong, sir?” the sales assistant was asking. “Should I have some other shirts brought for you to try? Let me call my colleague.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Bruce had grimaced in disappointment. At first glance, the guy had nothing to do with the message and neither did the sales assistant. Then who could it be? The other sales assistant? Some other customer? He had asked whether anyone had passed by the fitting booths in the past few minutes and the sales assistant had replied with a glassy look: “I don’t think so, sir. What do you mean by anyone? Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Bruce had slammed the fitting room door and stayed there, mulling over his doubts. He had no idea what this whole thing meant, but he was determined not to worry about it. It was Friday, he was planning to see a girl that night, and he didn’t need some absurd prank putting him off track. Every night with a girl demands my utmost concentration. Every encounter demands exclusive attention. No need to be distracted by a sheet of paper that had somehow materialised beneath his feet, or by the phrase written on it, a phrase that—come to think of it—he’d seen before. This wasn’t the first time. Not at all. A couple of identical notes had been delivered in the mail in the past few weeks.

  SO LONG, MY BATMAN

  Given the tone of the message, he half-suspected that some disappointed lover from his past might be behind the notes. Why not? It was plausible. Maybe one of the many girls he’d seen just once and immediately dropped. Wasn’t it the most obvious solution to a mystery of that kind? Bruce’s past was punctuated with broken hearts, the way a city street was littered with broken glass the morning after a riot. He sniggered with pride and a vague sadness. Of course, the idea that some nameless broken heart might be so audacious as to follow him into a boutique to slip him yet another farewell note struck him as odd and slightly disconcerting. In any case, he decided to overlook it for the moment.

  The night, the night awaited him! A night in the company of a new girl. The night, with its rituals, its sublime promises. The night demanded his undivided attention.

  *

  After the little game with the latex costume, he and the girl walked into the next room, still breathing hard, each of them deeply aware of the other. They advanced with silent footsteps. It was quite a large room, with a wooden floor. A couple of thousand-dollar lamps cast a creamy light, almost painted, creating a succession of patches of brightness and shadow. The girl swayed over to the middle of the room, looking around her quizzically.

  “This is my study,” Bruce explained.

  She smiled and seemed to relax. “Actually, I was wondering what your place would look like,” she admitted as she looked around again. “Whether it would be full of electronic equipment, or strange devices you invented when you were still a superhero.”

  “A lot of that stuff is still in storage in the old mansion,” Bruce breathed, coming to a halt at a spot in the room where he knew, with great precision, that th
e lighting would strike him in an evocative manner. He rolled out one of his best smiles. “The rest of it I donated to museums. By now, it’s just ludicrous junk. Technology ages so quickly. I don’t like things that get old,” he said with a wave of his hand, taking in the timeless, exquisitely classical style in which his study had been furnished: red leather armchairs, a black wooden desk, a crystal-fronted bookcase. A paperweight glittered on the desktop. It was also made of crystal, shaped like a turtle, the shell faceted like an enormous diamond. Bruce’s smile was increasingly confident. “I was told that you grew up on the Upper East Side. I imagine your home was similar to this.”

  The girl nodded. “Similar,” she limited herself to saying, resuming her cautious attitude. “So, no strange gadgets. No complicated closed-circuit video surveillance systems, no environmental sensor apparatus, no central computer running the place…”

  Bruce burst out laughing. “None of those things. I used to have fun with gadgets. But even back then, believe me, they weren’t such special things.” He hesitated, afraid of looking too modest, before adding: “I have something better to show you. Something more interesting than an old electronic device.”

  The girl did nothing more than gaze at him, expectant, pale, and magnificent. She was standing in a dimly lit corner and her face seemed to fade, now, as in a strange video effect. Bruce looked at her, hypnotised. Then he came to, and drew closer to her. He touched one of her hands, carefully, as if he were afraid of receiving an electric shock.

  The girl seemed to be tangled in confusion. At last, her face softened. Bruce kept looking in the half-light at that face; it struck him as blurred, elusive, and arcane. That’s odd, he mused. Certain faces seem to transform themselves in dim light, suddenly reminiscent of a thousand other faces, or perhaps they’re just revealing their unique, eternal appearance, capable of emerging from beneath the semblance of any and all faces. The faces he liked best, in the final analysis, were all the same. That’s how it had always been, even back when he preferred boys. Bruce had always liked young people with regular features, light-coloured eyes, blond hair with that exact honeyed shade, a faint dusting of freckles, that same shape to the mouth, that particular expression, at once angelic and remote. Male or female, they were all incarnations of a single type, like different faces of a single person.

  “Your face…” Bruce breathed. Again, he came to and recovered his affable tone. “You have a nice face. And nice hands,” he added, looking down at the hand that she was now holding out to him like a delicate offering. Bruce seized that hand. He considered its texture, its dewy warmth. “Come with me,” he said, pulling her towards a door on the far side of his study.

  The girl followed him obediently. They walked into a small gymnasium. There was a scent in the air of cast iron weights. “Is this what you wanted to show me?” she asked, looking at the equipment in the room: a weight bench upholstered in leather, sparkling weights arranged in order of size, a couple of multifunctional machines.

  Bruce dropped the girl’s hand. “We’re in one of my favourite rooms,” he preened, standing for a moment in a pose, muscles contracted, so that she’d notice them bulging under his shirt. “But this isn’t where I wanted to bring you.” He walked across the gym and approached another door. After pushing it open with the merest touch, he gestured for the girl to follow him.

  It was a small display room.

  In the middle of the room, illuminated by a couple of white spotlights, another Bruce Wayne stood before them, legs spread slightly, a shameless expression on its face. The sculpture was life-size, and made of black resin. It portrayed Batman in his costume, with the top part of the suit partially open. A sort of tear separated the costume at the chest as if there were an invisible zipper. Bruce was pulling the left side open with one hand, offering to the sight of the audience his shapely pectoral muscle, like a woman producing her breast to nurse an infant. There was a challenging look on his face. His eyes stared straight ahead, and his mouth was twisted in a vaguely obscene grimace.

  They both looked at the statue without speaking. Bruce waited for the girl to ask a question so that he could explain the history behind this work of art, the creation of Nathan Quirst, the famous hyperrealist, who had attained stardom years ago with a life-size sculpture, disturbingly realistic, of a nude woman down on all fours, giving a blow job to Hitler while being sodomised from behind by Stalin. Bruce had seen that sculpture at the opening of a controversial art show. He’d looked at it with mixed emotions, something midway between annoyance and admiration. A few weeks later, he’d attended a magazine party, where he happened to be introduced to the artist. Nathan Quirst was drinking cherry-flavoured vodka and was surrounded by an entourage of art students, all eagerly awaiting another of his outrageous comments. Rumours were circulating that he was at work on a new statue of the pope. It took only minutes for the two men to establish a certain rapport, and for the artist to start getting a cunning appreciation of the ex-superhero’s physique. The encounter had flattered Bruce’s ego. The next day, Quirst gave him a call, with the voice of someone who’d just woken up with a bad hangover, and asked Bruce to pose for him.

  “It’s by Nathan Quirst,” Bruce said, after waiting in vain for the girl to react in some way. He said it in a quiet voice, as though providing an obvious piece of information.

  “I see,” she replied. The name didn’t seem to mean a thing to her.

  Bruce found it remarkable. Remarkable that she would know nothing about the artist who scandalised half the world, who had been banished from the museums of at least four conservative states, who sold his artworks at prices that would easily purchase a penthouse overlooking Central Park, who had left a statue of the pope unfinished to start work on a portrait of him—the statue of Batman showing off his pecs. “Nathan Quirst!” he reiterated.

  “I see,” she said again, in a tone that, to Bruce’s ear, smacked vaguely of irony.

  That really was something. Damn. Not to know who one of the highest-priced artists on earth was, the artist who had become famous by depicting Hitler and Stalin banging the same woman. Come to think of it, though, he had to wonder if the girl even knew who Hitler and Stalin were. These days, kids knew nothing. They seemed to have just landed from a different planet. “He’s a rather well-known artist,” he explained.

  Disappointed at how little impression the statue had made, Bruce kept staring at that reproduction of himself. For the most part, his visitors were dazzled at the sight of the thing. Even Bruce still was. The artwork was charged with an ambiguous, almost violent power, and radiated the subtle aura that the most expensive artworks, often, tend to possess. He’d spent a fortune to acquire it. After Quirst finished working on it, Bruce had been the first to see it. At the beginning, he was thrilled with the way it portrayed his body, with how the costume highlighted his musculature, at how the cape seemed to flow fluidly behind him, like some membranous element of his body. What a magnificent reproduction. Quirst had grasped the force of his body. But there was more than that in the sculpture. There was something stripped bare. It wasn’t just the way Bruce bared his chest. There was something in the pose, in the face, something that triggered excitement and unease. There was something excessive about it, some deep absence of innocence. Looking at that sculpture, it seemed to Bruce he was looking in the mirror, and recognised what he’d become: an ageing satyr. A lascivious demon busy trying to seduce the world, offering up a glimpse of his still-youthful body. He remembered that Quirst was smiling triumphantly, while he was unsure whether he should be furious, upset, or overjoyed. He’d offered at once to buy the piece of art. He doubted that other viewers would see in it the same things that he recognised, at least not in such explicit terms, and yet the idea that it might wind up in an art exhibition somewhere frightened him.

  The girl had walked a short distance away. She was devoting her attention to the other artworks hanging on the wall, a half-dozen canvases and assorted portraits by big-name photograp
hers. She stopped to study a photographic portrait. “Robin?” she asked, with distinct interest.

  Bruce caught up with her reluctantly, annoyed that she should turn up her nose at the sculpture, his contradictory sculpture, his extraordinary sculpture, the sculpture that had immortalised his strength, his sensuality, his disconcerting shadow. Annoyed that she should have chosen to focus instead on that portrait. It was an original photograph by Richard Avedon, dating back to the period when the photographer devoted himself to portraits of superheroes. It showed a young man in his superhero costume, or rather, in his sidekick costume. The young man was looking into the lens with a trusting gaze. Light enveloped him, giving him an angelic appearance. “Robin,” Bruce confirmed.

  “How long has he been dead?” the girl enquired.

  “Years. I can’t remember,” was the response.

  “He had nice eyes.”

  “Maybe he did,” Bruce replied, without much enthusiasm.

  “He was very important to you, wasn’t he?” she asked, continuing to study the portrait.

  Bruce snorted. “Maybe. I don’t remember. Why are you young people always so interested in dead heroes?”

  The girl seemed to snap out of a trance and smiled apologetically. “Don’t be angry.” She reached out one hand towards Bruce’s chest and put the other hand on her own. She remained in that pose for several seconds, as though waiting to synchronise their hearts. When she was sure she had won him back, her eyes shone. Her gaze was a frighteningly deep grey.

  “All right,” Bruce conceded. He took a long breath and, following a sudden impulse, he decreed: “It’s time for you to do something for me. A nice little something.”

  *

  A long time ago. It was the early Eighties. Robin was almost eighteen when he came into his life, and even though by then Bruce had already had several young men, he’d never had one that was quite so young. Until that day, he’d never even identified his type. Robin appeared one night with his dirty-blond hair, the freckles on his nose, so completely in line with Bruce’s subconscious tastes that he seemed to have been designed, like a prototype, by the benevolent god of perfect love affairs.