Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  *

  They had moved into the kitchen. On the crystal shelves were pieces from a porcelain collection, deluxe electric appliances, an Italian-designed espresso maker, and a vase of orchids. Shafts of light filtered down from the ceiling, as all-enveloping as liquid spotlights. The girl was sitting under one of those lights. She was wearing no clothes. She seemed pretty comfortable, perched on a stool, under that light and under Bruce’s gaze. She was broad-shouldered, slender though she was. Tapered arms, small erect breasts that remained motionless, like a buoy in the waves, as her breathing raised and lowered her chest. “The thing I like best about your place,” she said, in a tone that seemed to seek forgiveness for having annoyed Bruce a short while earlier, “is definitely the light.”

  “The light?” Bruce said, feigning surprise.

  “It’s a light that has a certain…” The girl shifted slightly on the stool: “…warmth,” she concluded. She had a taut abdomen. A hint of light-coloured hair on her pudendum. Her legs were tapered too, and smooth as a piece of flint.

  Bruce moved closer. “They say seduction starts with the lighting,” he said, pleased with the timbre of his voice. “A body glistens in the right light. Bodies are like planets, they know how to glisten in the depth of darkness.”

  “Oh,” she said politely.

  Bruce walked around the stool and stopped behind the girl. Raising both arms, he formed a shape with his hands so that they cast a shadow onto the floor. It was the silhouette of a bat, or perhaps a vampire, fluttering as it dropped down towards the girl’s head. The girl laughed. He smiled. He separated his hands and the bat vanished, leaving only their two shadows, drawing closer and closer. Bruce grazed the nape of her neck. He distinctly saw a shiver run down from her neck and spread across her back. So he stopped grazing her with his fingertips and asked: “Are you hungry?”

  “What?” she asked, in a baffled voice.

  “Hungry?” Bruce asked again, stepping away from her, satisfied that he’d undermined her confidence. “My housekeeper left us a first-rate dinner,” he went on, pulling from the fridge a bowl of salad of bitter lettuce and fruit, and a plate of cold meats garnished with fresh coriander. He set the delicacies on the worktop.

  “They look wonderful,” she said, somewhat listlessly. “Even though I have to confess… I’m afraid I’m not very hungry.”

  “I want to watch you eat,” Bruce replied in a courteous and inflexible manner. “And get to know you a little better,” he added, as he started making up a plate for her.

  “You’re not going to have anything?”

  “Oh no. I’ll keep myself free,” he smiled, handing her the plate.

  The girl seemed about to object, then she accepted the plate. A shadow of resignation passed over her face for an instant, making her even more attractive.

  “Get to know me better…” she echoed, crossing her naked legs on the stool.

  “Of course.” Bruce took a seat on the stool across from her. “Do you think that getting you naked is enough for me?” He smiled indulgently, either at her or at himself, before going on: “For instance, let me see… That thing we were talking about.”

  “What thing?”

  “What you said about what you did today. You went to the park to read a book.”

  “Oh,” she said, poking at the salad on the plate with her fork. “At the park, that’s right.”

  Bruce poured himself a glassful from a pitcher of iced water. He took a sip with a studied gesture. “Tell me more,” he prodded. “Tell me about the book you read.”

  “The book…” The girl stalled for time by taking a few bites of salad, then smiled: “It’s almost like you’re testing me.”

  Bruce smiled in turn, aroused by the minor skirmish. Aroused by the way she perched nude on the stool, in that light, by the way she ate and how her hand gripped the fork, calmly spearing one piece of fruit after another. Once again, he felt seduced by the girl’s poise and mystery. “I’m just curious,” he said. “Tell me about the book you were reading.”

  “Foucault,” she sighed. “I was reading Michel Foucault.”

  “Foucault?!” Bruce exclaimed. “That’s surprising,” he admitted. “I didn’t think you young people read that stuff.”

  “I don’t know what young people read,” she said dryly. “It’s what I’m reading.”

  “I understand,” he observed, increasingly delighted. Now the girl’s skin seemed tense, as delicate as rice paper. “I’m afraid I’ve never been able to make it through that kind of stuff,” he declared. “French philosophy. Verbose French theorising. Verbose pompous French meditations.”

  “Foucault isn’t verbose,” she objected.

  “Isn’t he the one that they say was into S&M?” A provocative spark glinted in his eyes. “I’m not sure that I could take a philosopher seriously if I knew he was into S&M,” he said, dismissing the topic with calculated arrogance.

  The girl couldn’t stop a doubtful expression from crossing her face. She looked at her own naked body and then looked at Bruce, sitting in the middle of this luxurious kitchen. The circumstances hardly seemed appropriate, after all, for criticising someone else’s sexual conduct.

  He burst out laughing. “You have a point,” he said, and dropped the subject. He wanted to go back to grazing her skin. He could still feel, like a soft trace, the warmth from the nape of her neck. He felt like touching her and being touched, and felt something expanding, like a bubble of anticipation, in the depths of his body. “Don’t take it the wrong way,” he whispered. “I’m just teasing you.”

  He took a coriander leaf from her plate and held it in his fingers: “Coriander has always aroused me. It has such a physical scent. It seems like the scent of another person.” In the warm light, the girl’s face had started to fade into a nuanced, arcane shape—practically perfect. Bruce placed the leaf between her lips. He waited for her to chew and swallow. He moved his face closer and finally kissed her.

  *

  The sentiments he felt for Robin after his death were the same as he had felt for Robin when he was alive. A blend of tenderness, remorse, and annoyance. Robin had died with his indestructible, irritating faithfulness, before being forced to admit that it was all over: the world of the superheroes, the relationship between the two of them. He’d died just as stubbornly as he’d lived. That poor boy. That damned boy. For a while, after the murder, Bruce had feared that Robin would become a martyr, one of those figures that turn into legends, unexpectedly, just because they died young. He couldn’t have taken that burden. The last thing he wanted was for the world to see him, from that day on, as nothing more than a bereft widower.

  What happened, instead, was that although the news of his murder had had a certain impact, the newspapers soon tired of the case, and Robin was denied admittance to the capricious Olympus of contemporary mythology. When he was alive, he’d been too even-tempered, too predictable, too discreet. Outside his relationship with Batman, he’d never been the topic of gossip, never made a strong impression on the public, except for a small group of underground fans, obscure folk musicians and people of that sort. Who now wrote to Bruce letters of support, letters for which he felt no particular need.

  He’d spent the very night of the funeral with a boy. His body had sucked in the boy’s hand with the greed of a carnivorous plant. He’d sweated so much that the linen on his bed was drenched. Later, a procession of other young men followed, and after them an array of young women, and he’d never stopped sweating, begging, and drenching his sheets.

  After each encounter, he woke up the following morning in his damp sheets, ravenous, in a state of dazed disturbing lucidity. Each time, he found himself breakfasting on his beloved organic cereals, or showering in his luxurious stall with hydro-massage jets, mulling over the events of the night before. Even though they were recent memories, they always struck him as profoundly alien: Was that me? That man who was sweating, moaning, lost in pleasure? Was that really me—that gruntin
g, drooling, begging man?

  He was aware, in a confused fashion, that a gap was opening up inside him, something that made him feel remote, more and more separate from himself. He could sense his emotions echoing in the distance as if down the corridors of a labyrinth. He watched himself live as if at the centre of a spectacle: having sex with new people, going to the gym, having his hair done, lying on tanning beds, buying the perfect creams for his skin. He was a man with a lot on his hands. He had things to do. He had an old family corporation to run, interviews to give, a body to keep fit. He had sessions with his personal trainer, appointments with his dietician, social events where he needed to be seen. He needed to stay at the centre of the world. At the centre of some world, any world.

  And he needed to see his doctor, of course, and have himself checked out. With the things he did in bed, it was a good idea to have himself monitored. Doctor Szepanski asked him lots of questions. He’d always asked him questions, especially about his sexual predilections, but after Robin’s death the questions increased. Bruce didn’t have much to answer. What could he add to the simple fact that he loved young people? The way he loved them seemed to him eminently natural, inexorable like a destiny. He loved their intensity, their detachment, the luminosity of their skin, and the secret in their eyes.

  From a certain point, it had even ceased to matter that they were males. It had been a gradual discovery. What he loved most was an incorporeal, not individual, principle, which by now he was able to recognise equally in males or females. It was a sort of spirit. That is what he loved. The elusive spirit that certain young people seemed to possess, a spirit that lived in them for a handful of years. Bruce loved that spirit, he loved that sort of soul that seemed to look out at him, always the same, ancient and fleeting, through the eyes of any boy or girl.

  “So since when do you like girls?” Doctor Szepanski had asked him one day. Bruce didn’t know what to tell him. He’d always known he liked girls; that he liked them even more than boys was something he’d discovered with the passage of time. He couldn’t have said how much Robin’s death had influenced that change, or how much of a role had been played by the fact that, as he aged, he’d started to hate the comparison between his own and other men’s bodies. He’d stopped feeling enthusiasm for powerful young men. He’d even stopped going to his health club, bothered by the sight of all those youthful muscles, those carefree bodies. Young males seemed capable of staying fit with the slightest effort. To hell with them. He worked out for real. He exercised for two hours a day, he paid hundreds-of-dollars-an-hour masseurs, and stuck to rigorous diets. The bodies of young males filled him with a vague resentment. The bodies of young women never demanded a comparison.

  Girls knew how to be even more ambiguous, more elusive and yet, at the same time, more compliant. A girl seemed to promise something more, access to a subtler, moister, more brilliant plane of reality. A girl seemed never to allow herself to be entirely possessed, and yet was able to enter wholly into Bruce’s fantasies, into his idea of seduction. Seducing a girl was more fluid, almost choreographic. It was a scene from a perfect film. Whatever words he might say, whatever gestures he might make, they echoed better around a girl’s body. They slid more easily over her fine skin.

  The world, for its part, went on taking for granted that he liked men. Gay associations invited him to their events, the press listed him among the most influential gays on the planet. For a while Bruce had let things run their course. One evening he had even found himself as a guest of honour at a gala charity banquet, in London, sitting next to Elton John. The dinner had a theme: the rainbow. Every dish had been prepared so that it contained the six colours of the rainbow flag. Purple cabbage leaves, which Bruce detested, had been added everywhere as garnish to ensure the presence of that colour. Elton John wore a suit custom-made for the occasion, clearly inspired by a wild chromatic fantasia, and glasses adorned with multicoloured sequins. Bruce had watched him out of the corner of his eye all through the evening, as though he were observing a rare tropical parrot. My God, he had said to himself. What am I doing here? He liked dark clothes. He liked sexy young girls. He didn’t have many topics of conversation with Elton John, and the smell of cabbage made him sick to his stomach.

  He had tried to shed his image as a gay icon by telling a couple of interviewers the way things were. But the myth persisted. To the eyes of most people he was still the king of homoeroticism, a sexual beacon for homo males of half the planet. Men of all ages came on to him in the most unlikely situations: in an airport lounge. In the changing booths of a boutique. In a dentist’s waiting room.

  On another public occasion, during a speech he gave in Texas for the inauguration of a museum, a group of anti-gay activists had protested against him with whistles and catcalls, holding up signs:

  SUPERGAY, SUPERSHAMEFUL

  DOWN WITH GAY BATS

  LEAVE OUR YOUTHS ALONE

  Bruce had kept his cool, flashing a scornful smile and continuing his speech, until he spotted another sign:

  YOUR BOYFRIEND TOOK IT UP THE ASS IN CENTRAL PARK

  At that point he walked off the stage. Until then, he hadn’t realised there were people like that, men and women who ran internet sites with Nazi overtones, who signed petitions demanding the incarceration of homosexuals in concentration camps, who chartered buses and clocked up hundreds of miles to protest against homosexual, or supposed homosexual, public figures. The gay associations responded by bringing lawsuits. To all appearances, there was a war being waged. But what did it have to do with him?

  The investigation into Robin’s murder, in the meanwhile, had pursued that very lead. The police were considering the theory of a homophobic murder. The theory had awakened a new fireball of media interest, then everything had gone cold again. The investigation never made any real progress. Bruce didn’t think much of the homophobic lead. He didn’t put a lot of credence in other leads, either. When it came to Robin’s murder, any ability he might have to imagine a logic, a truth that might exist beyond the veil of the facts, came to a halt. That death appeared to him as mysterious and natural as a trail designed by the wind. He had the impression that he could do nothing but contemplate what had happened. His whole life he had always reacted to events. Now he could only observe them as they emerged, around him, like statues in an expanse of fog.

  He was sixty years old. Sometimes the thought filled him with astonishment. Astonishment in his throat, on the tip of his tongue. Astonishment at the thought of the things that were happening, the things that had happened once and for all: the years, the boys, the girls, the rainbow flag, the Batman costume, the scent of the vials of amyl nitrate, his own face reflected in the eyes of a corpse, the frozen puddle of blood on the dirt of Central Park. All those things. All those events. And the nameless criminals. The ones who had murdered Robin, leaving Bruce free, and abysmally alone.

  *

  The girl was a bad kisser. She kissed like a girl. Bruce shoved his tongue in deeper, further back, into the soft regions of her mouth, seeking out the flavour of the coriander and of the salad she had just eaten. That was one of the disadvantages. Young people didn’t know how to kiss.

  Of course, that wasn’t the only disadvantage. Young people, to tell the whole truth, tended to be passive. Pretty passive. Young people didn’t know how to carry on a lively conversation. Young people appeared to understand everything, because they were trained to put on that air of cool knowingness, but then they’d come out with some nonsensical or banal point of view. Young people were insubstantial. They seemed always on the verge of evaporating. Young people were people you’d be well advised to get rid of as quickly as possible, because over time they took more than they could ever give back. Young people only knew how to say one word—me, me, me—and Bruce wasn’t that inclined to talk about the me of other people. That’s what young people were like. Still, he couldn’t stop loving them. As for tonight’s girl, there was no denying that she seemed better than most pe
ople her age. He grazed her petite breasts with his fingers, cupping them for a minute in his hands. “Little one,” he whispered. “I think it’s time to go to the last room.”

  Bruce had tried, in the past, going out with women closer to his own age. He’d experienced the complicity of two mature bodies. He’d enjoyed the pleasure of conversing with someone who didn’t constantly demand blandishment, stimulation and teasing, someone with whom it was possible to speak as equals. He remembered taking a bath with one of those women. He remembered mirroring himself in her eyes. At the decisive moment, he’d been incapable of carrying on further. He couldn’t fall in love with the hands of a mature person. Young people could be inept in a thousand ways, boring and irritating in a thousand ways, and yet there was always that precious spark in them. There was something about young people. In some of them, there was that incorporeal hint, that sort of spirit that Bruce was searching for.

  They entered the bedroom. During the previous tour of the house, Bruce had skipped that room to preserve the surprise. Here too the lighting was well designed. An amber-coloured light, whose source was impossible to locate, filled the room. The girl took a few steps, naked, exquisite, into that dreamlike light. The floor was made of a russet wood, with a strip of black wood that led, like a trail, to the large bed floating in mid-air. “A magnetic bed,” she observed. “So there’s still a little love of technology in you.”

  “Oh, this isn’t technology,” he said, as he began to strip. He braced himself against the bed and took off his shoes. “It’s just a magnetic field, nothing could be more natural.”