Erotic Lives of the Superheroes

by Marco Mancassola

  The sweat on Susie’s body had a faint, elusive scent. She kept locking eyes unintentionally with the passersby. The gazes of passersby in the streets of New York could be broken into two categories. Mystique had given this some thought. There was the category of closed, hostile glances, glances that seemed to express nothing more than the eternal, obvious question: what the hell are you looking at?

  Then there was another category of glances. Glances that expressed something softer, something much more alluring. At certain times of day, in certain parts of the city, it seemed everyone was flirting with everyone. Men, women, everyone with everyone, without expecting consequences of any kind. No one was serious about it. Flirting in New York was a pleasurable neurosis, an almost compulsive reflex, a cheap form of gratification.

  Paranoia and flirtation. Those were the two complementary modes in which people interacted on the streets of New York.

  Mystique-Susie went on walking, wishing she could just close her eyes and avoid both kinds of glances. She stepped off the sidewalk and crossed yet another junction. The fumes from a hot dog stand wafted over her. She didn’t stop, fleeing straight ahead, with a needlessly hasty gait, her skin red from sunlight and air, moving down the streets of that city, the paranoid city, the alluring city, and not until another jam clogged the sidewalk, forcing her to a halt, leaving her out of breath and almost staggering, did she realise that it had been a mistake to come into town. Where was she running? What was she looking for?

  *

  Dennis De Villa was standing in front of the full-length mirror. Daylight poured through the window, liquid, white, illuminating the outlines of his naked body, creating a fine luminous layer sheathing the protruding relief of his muscles.

  He was well-built. More so than he looked with his clothes on. His shoulders were sculpted and his chest was broad. These weren’t the pectoral muscles of someone who had spent time bulking up in a gym somewhere, these were real muscles, real-life muscles, squared off and welcoming. Some curly hair on his upper chest. His nipples were dark and shrunk so tight that they looked like two nodes, two clumps of hard sensitive flesh. Dennis curled up the fingers of one of his hands and ran his knuckles over his chest repeatedly, as if he were polishing them.

  His skin was a pale olive hue. It was hard to tell whether that was his body’s natural colour or the result of a couple of afternoons’ sunbathing. If that’s what it was, the absence of any tan lines meant the detective did his sunbathing naked, showing he was less inhibited than Mystique might have expected.

  The legs were the part that she liked best. Dennis’ legs were solid, well-shaped, slightly arched like the legs of certain athletes, and covered with a light fuzz of hair. Muscular calves. His feet looked nicely proportioned, not too long, in the sunlight that poured through the window and lit up the floor of Mystique’s bedroom.

  Taken as a whole, Dennis’ legs seemed to contain a sort of quiet, unexpressed strength, a strength that resided there, in the lower portions of his body, where the blood was furthest from the heart, coursing through long solitary veins. As for the deep flavour of Dennis’ body, the one that lay in the most hidden folds of his flesh, it was a fairly dense flavour. An almost sandy flavour. Dennis’ body reminded her of the flesh of a fruit that was capable of concealing, within it, hard and inaccessible zones.

  Mystique-Dennis caressed her-his thighs. She stared at his penis in the mirror, and it jerked erect in a few fast moves, as though reawakened by the simple perception of that gaze. It was straight in an almost geometric way, and just now was pointing, vibrant, nearly threatening, the tip already moist, at its own image in the mirror.

  Mystique-Dennis shivered, touched her thighs again, tossed her head back, and regained her original shape. Mystique’s bluish body took the place of the man’s body. The tips of her nipples were just as tight as his, and now the moisture was inside her, between her legs, in the fleshy fissure that was starting to pulsate.

  *

  Later, in the same position, in front of the same mirror, she inhaled deeply and tried to transform herself into another man. Even though she had made up her mind not to practise on the notorious doctor that Saturday and give herself a rest, she decided to give it a try at least. In the mirror, she studied the white hairs on the chest and belly, the withered legs, and the small shrivelled penis. There was no doubt that the spectacle was quite different from that offered by Dennis De Villa.

  And yet taking on an aged body didn’t upset her. That wasn’t the problem. To some extent, she’d always managed to find a certain beauty in all the bodies she transformed herself into, even the oldest ones, the most ridiculous ones. But Szepanski’s body remained alien to her. Szepanski’s body was too difficult. Mystique-Szepanski studied that body in the mirror and noted the usual problems. The lines on the face appeared blurry, the eyelids and cheekbones not taut enough. I promised everyone that I would pull this off. I can’t understand why it’s so hard to do.

  She felt like telling herself that it wasn’t important after all, that it was just a stupid routine on television, about a stupid doctor or former doctor who had betrayed his patients by writing a stupid bestseller. She looked at herself, incredulous, lost in the feeling that she was no longer herself, nor had she entirely become someone else, lost in the feeling that she was in the middle, in a vague and fleshy limbo.

  She resumed her own shape, took a shower, and headed for the kitchen.

  The refrigerator offered the habitual containers from Whole Foods. Yogurt. Prewashed fruit. Green-leaf vegetables in a transparent plastic bag, whose interior was dotted with tiny drops of condensation. Force myself to take a day off. Now that’s an exploit I find daunting. She spent the rest of that Saturday trying to read, taking catnaps, smoking a little grass, and exchanging bored text messages with Chad.

  This weekend Chad was out of town, visiting his parents somewhere in Connecticut, which meant that he had gone to Connecticut to do what he usually did at home: watch TV and consume bacon-flavoured crisps. Can I ask you what you’re doing closed up in your apartment? Chad wrote from on high, from the vantage of his incredible dynamism. Are you waiting for a man to fall down your chimney? Get moving! Wasn’t there a gallery opening in Chelsea tonight?

  It wasn’t the messages from Chad. It wasn’t the sense of claustrophobia, nor was it the hot breeze that was blowing on the street door of her apartment, like the moan of some enormous mysterious beast. Instead, it was a form of ultimate pride, a sense almost of challenge, that persuaded her to do something she hadn’t done in a long time. Socialise. Leave the apartment with her own appearance. She didn’t care what was waiting out there: the overheated chaos of the city, the usual foolish and gossipy people, or perhaps even a gang of fanatics determined to cause her harm. She decided it didn’t matter any more. Whatever the danger out there, she decided she would face the challenge and leave the apartment with her actual appearance. She got ready at her leisure and called a taxi.

  The afternoon was starting to decline slowly.

  The opening was being held in one of the main galleries in Chelsea, an ex-warehouse or ex-something, a huge basement a couple of steps down from street level.

  At the front door there was a crowd. Plenty of photographers’ flashes went off in her direction, as Mystique made her way into the place, putting on a feigned air of distraction, tossing greetings here and there. The artist whose exhibition was opening was well known. Personalities from the world of show business and the world of superheroes were wandering around, with a glass of iced wine in hand, surrounded by the typical fauna of reporters, art critics, rubberneckers, young Williamsburg hipsters, all of them with highly contrived looks.

  This wasn’t a situation that Mystique found particularly congenial, but as far as that went, she was here and she should at the very least take a look at the exhibition, and say hello to the artist. She got through a wall of people and emerged in the next room, illuminated by a couple of peach-coloured neon lights, where ins
tead of finding the artist she found herself face to face with Dennis De Villa.

  It was a funny thing. She didn’t feel surprised. After all, the artist had some connection with the world of the superheroes, so it was natural enough that the detective should have come to take a look. Now that she saw him, Mystique had the sensation, in a way, that she’d always known she would run into him. She’d always known it, perhaps she’d even hoped it, and that sensation made her lurch, almost, as from a small internal short circuit.

  *

  Nathan Quirst was a successful artist. He’d had various golden periods. The first had been back in the Eighties, at the beginning of his career, when he first thought of dissolving a black dye in a tub of water, turning the water into something like ink, and lying naked on the bottom of the tub with scuba gear and two small tubes in his nostrils to run off the air he was exhaling. Unsuspecting visitors were ushered into the room and invited by a couple of assistants to immerse an arm in the mysterious black liquid. It took considerable courage to stick your arm into that tub without knowing what might be there, unseen, at the bottom. It took just as much courage to lie immersed in that blackness, motionless, without being able to see what was happening outside the tub, as hesitant, curious hands passed over his body, all of his body, until they figured out what was down there. A living man. The artist Nathan Quirst. One critic had loved the performance so much that he wrote about it in glowing terms for The Guardian.

  His second golden period had come in the Nineties, when Quirst had embraced hyperrealism and had done a series of controversial life-size sculptures, whose details invariably wound up becoming the subject of lengthy and exhausting analyses by the high priests of British art criticism. For instance, the sculpture of Monica Lewinski kneeling in front of Bill Clinton: the luminous look that the two were exchanging, Bill’s hand on the nape of Monica’s neck, the fatherly smile stamped on his face.

  Next came the sculptural portrait of the woman on all fours having sex with Hitler and Stalin at the same time, a work that was exhibited in London and New York, prompting vicious debates in both cases, where the realistic depiction of sex organs was more of an issue than the political message of the artwork. Such controversy had ultimately consecrated him as one of the most talked-about artists on earth, as well as putting an end to his marriage. After posing for the statue of the woman on all fours, Nathan’s wife got sick of seeing herself depicted on the covers of dozens of art magazines with the penis of the worst dictator in history in her mouth.

  At that point, Nathan Quirst moved to New York, where he relished his fame and began selling artworks at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the skyrocketing art market in the first years of the new millennium. He had done a few portraits of superheroes, like the one of Captain America pissing into his overturned shield, or the one of Batman flashing his pectorals, and it was this last portrait that won him yet another golden moment because of the publicity that came with the infamous murder. In fact, Batman apparently had shown the provocative artwork to the murderess just minutes before she killed him.

  None of the better known artworks were on display at the exhibition in Chelsea.

  On the other hand, a few of his latest creations were there, including Meet Nathan Quirst. This was an overpowering photographic installation that occupied an entire wall many yards high: dozens of giant prints of close-ups of girls, side by side, forming an enormous mosaic of faces. It appeared that in the New York years following his divorce, Quirst had photographed every girl he’d had sex with, taking each picture just as the girl attained orgasm. The result was a mosaic of orgasms. Intense, contracted expressions, expressions of abandonment, eyes closed or wide open, screaming mouths or lips barely parted.

  But what was particularly striking about the artwork was the variety of girls. Quirst seemed to have a preference for dazzling ethnic diversity. He’d photographed girls of every imaginable or unimaginable race. Asian girls, white girls, black girls, Hispanic girls, Native American girls, girls who looked like they were European, Slavic, Russian, black girls with green eyes, girls with Asian features and freckles, girls who seemed to be the product of indeterminate mixes, girls who seemed to have the chromosomes of every possible people, and girls who were simply of indefinable origins. Possibly Martian.

  Standing before the artwork, Mystique contemplated that assortment of faces as if she were in the presence of a minor revelation. She felt a little shocked. She couldn’t deny feeling amused as well, that kind of guilty amusement that artists like Nathan Quirst, in all their deplorable taste, seemed to know how to inspire. Artists who were evil geniuses. Artists who were sly and spectacular. Who knew how to transform every aspect of reality into a crude, exciting, morbid object to put on display.

  And last of all, she felt embarrassed. Her embarrassment had little to do with the piece of art in front of her, and much to do with the man standing at her side. Dennis De Villa. After running into each other, they had exchanged a few standard convivialities, both feigning surprise at their meeting, even though it was obvious there was nothing surprising about it. Deep inside, I knew I’d run into him here. And I bet he knew it too.

  After the formal exchanges, they remained in silence staring at the mosaic of faces and orgasms. The awkwardness between them was a dense, sticky layer, an awkwardness that kept them divided and united at the same time, paralysed under the peach-coloured neon light.

  Then the artist plummeted into their midst.

  Nathan Quirst was dressed in vintage safari garb, in a beige collarless safari jacket and with a pith helmet on his head. He trailed an entourage of journalists and admirers behind him, and held a small glass of cherry vodka in his hand. “Darling,” he said to Mystique in a confidential tone, although they had barely met more than once. “So happy to see you. They say that you never show up anywhere. Aren’t you drinking anything? We have a first-class bar,” he declared, pointing to the far end of the room.

  The people in his entourage started sniggering, perhaps expecting some instant witty retort from her. The peach-coloured light was spreading over their faces, over their fashionable haircuts, their posing stances, their clothes and exquisite shoes, conferring a dainty, caramelised nuance on every detail. Rock music poured from one of the interior rooms. For an instant, Mystique perceived this scene as if it were footage for a movie, footage that one day other human beings would examine, centuries later, millennia later, in an attempt to understand the remote, paradoxical inebriation of western life.

  Quirst was speaking to De Villa. He narrowed his penetrating eyes and placed one hand on his forehead as though to concentrate: “Have we met? I have the impression… You’re that detective! You’re investigating Batman’s murder! Franklin Richards’ murder! Now I remember. Now I remember,” he kept saying, his hand still pressed to his forehead, shooting a lightning glance from De Villa to Mystique and back again.

  She stiffened. She could read the conjecture in the eyes of Quirst and his entourage. The enigmatic television hostess and the police detective who specialised in superhero murders. They must assume that she was under his protection, or that they were dating, or perhaps both at the same time. What a magnificent couple. Who’d have ever thought it?

  Mystique exchanged a look with De Villa, whose baffled smile seemed to express both amusement at the situation and discomfort at being under Quirst’s cunning, delighted eyes.

  In a way, they had become one of the attractions of the evening, the two of them, along with the artworks on display around them. They had become an artwork themselves, unwillingly, in the sticky atmosphere of Nathan Quirst’s exhibition. Mystique squirmed, and flashed a smile of polite reserve: “Congratulations on your exhibition,” she said to the artist. “You certainly never do things by halves.”

  *

  At the bar, Dennis De Villa got a couple of glasses of white wine and handed one to her. Although her embarrassment at being in his company had not vanished, Mystique had agreed to head over
to the bar with him. She wanted something to drink and making off now wouldn’t do any good. I’ve already met him. Everyone’s already seen the two of us together.

  “Do you like the exhibition?” De Villa asked, as he swirled the ice in his glass so it tinkled. “I find it amusing,” she replied, judiciously. She took a sip and savoured the sensation of the sparkling, ice-cold liquid. “You like it?”

  “I don’t know much about art,” he said with a reticent smile. “Most of the artworks on display here just make me feel a little awkward.” The detective gave her a look over the rim of his glass, then in turn took a sip.

  Mystique watched his throat contract, and imagined the liquid making its way, like a tiny flood, through the internal canals of his body. She went on studying the detective with a blend of curiosity and ostentatious detachment. “Nathan Quirst is a cunning artist,” she said, to break the silence. “An artist with a clear idea of where to strike home. I suppose that’s his real work. To provoke. To entrap.”

  “So that’s what artists do?” he honed in.

  “I don’t know what artists do.” She paused, satisfied with the sufficiently nonchalant tone she was using: “I suppose Nathan Quirst is good at stimulating the system. He knows how to touch the right spots.”

  “Oh,” said the detective, with an almost imperceptible start. He frowned and stared at Nathan Quirst, standing some yards away, busy with other guests. “That man’s eyes… They drill into you. He looked at me like he was X-raying me.”