Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is

by Michael Langan

He knew Marius was channelling his nerves into this dark hypothesis of blackmail and forced revelation because of anxieties about his ability — though he wouldn’t openly admit it — to play Cézanne. They had talked sporadically over the last eighteen months about Marius’ other role — that of film-star-teen-straight-heartthrob — which came relatively easy to him even though it was demanding and constant outside the realms of the darkened trailer, the adjoining hotel suites, his house in Bel Air or J-P’s rented apartment in L.A. Marius played it all extremely well, and there’d never been any speculation or gossip that they knew of — not in newspapers, magazines, or even on those bitchy websites.

  J-P needed to eat something. He took a quartered melon from a shelf in the fridge and the prosciutto that was neatly wrapped in greaseproof paper. Maria must have put them there this morning. God, she was great. He’d mentioned that it was what he and Marius had eaten on the night they got together, not making it past the entrées before feasting on each other. He’d wait a few minutes before assembling the plate. Neither of them liked it too cold.

  He flopped into his Barcelona chair, facing Marius who had stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes. They’d go back on set when they were ready, not before. Like Maria, Marius had also asked about meeting his dad — “Don’t you think it’s about time?” — while they were here. J-P had similarly stonewalled and Marius was similarly unconvinced, but didn’t push it. They’d talked enough about their personal histories in the last two years together to gauge that any pressure on the matter of family would be resisted.

  When they’d first been introduced, at Cannes it was, J-P had vaguely recognised Marius, made some stupid remark about how they must have already met because his face seemed familiar, before Marius grinned and J-P reddened as the big screen image of him being chased through some trees by a psycho in a ski-mask flashed into his head. He’d thought the film they’d just sat through so generic, so derivative, had been totally contemptuous of its too-gorgeous-to-be-real leading man who, unusually, was slaughtered two-thirds of the way through (the audience had cheered!) before the female-sidekick-love-interest he’d sacrificed himself to save took charge of eliminating the serial killer stalking the university campus. He’d offered a flustered apology but Marius had just laughed easily and said, “No problem, I can barely remember where I last saw myself either.”

  Also, Marius had looked quite different in person. He was still beautiful, more so, in fact, than he had appeared on screen because there was more, more humanness to him, somehow. His angular features were extreme — that was the word that sprung to J-P’s mind — to the extent that one millimetre’s difference in the length of his nose, the sharpness of his chin, the planes of his cheekbones, or the width of his mouth, could have been disastrous. As it was, he was… beyond. That was the other word.

  They’d chatted and laughed about the circus that was the Festival, their predictions for the prizes that year, the frocks and photo-ops and general mayhem of it all, and J-P had felt pretty certain that Marius was flirting with him, though couldn’t imagine why on earth he would, when Marius suddenly drooped with jet lag, shook J-P’s hand with a fixed gaze, and then dematerialised it seemed, leaving J-P feeling he’d witnessed some holy visitation.

  Later that same evening, J-P Google image searched Marius Woolf and, after a moment’s thought, added the word ‘shirtless’. The very first result was the now iconic David LaChapelle shoot for Interview; Marius as a cage-fighting-kick-boxer type, his lean, gym-toned muscles glittering with grimy sweat, a mesmerising dick print visible at the front of his red satin shorts.

  In one vividly coloured, hyperreal image, his companion throughout this scenario — a cross-dressing giantess in full-length fur coat and gold high heels who was paying to have him trained and kept like some exotic animal — watched him shower, sitting cross-legged on a changing room bench as Marius soaped his perfectly sculpted arse, the hair covering it slicked into dark, inviting swirls.

  The final shot in the sequence was Marius handcuffed to a heart-shaped bed in some Vegas palace hotel, it looked like, resplendent in crystal-studded jockstrap, his feet squeezed into the gold high heels, waiting to be straddled.

  J-P saved these images in a desktop folder, then added some others he gathered over the next few days; publicity stills, paparazzi shots (some clearly staged, others perhaps not) and, most particularly, some photos of a different kind taken for Cosmopolitan’s monthly centrefold.

  There was Marius, lounging on a very different bed — tasteful, Victorian-looking, with an ornate metal frame — the corner of a luxurious white cotton sheet tucked between his legs. His furry backside, edged and highlighted by the tan line across his lower back, shone creamy beige in the glow of early morning, his amber eyes sparkling. Round his neck he wore a thin, silver chain from which, resting between the ledges of his pectorals, hung an animal’s tooth. J-P decided it was a wolf’s tooth, probably a play on his name, and there was something wolfish about Marius — the rangy, sinewy limbs, his lean and hairy musculature, intense gaze and sly grin. Of all the sub-categories of queer objectified desire, wolf was the one that Marius Woolf fitted the most. He was not like J-P who was bear cub through and through. This was something else that threw people off their scent. Boyfriend twins they most definitely weren’t.

  If J-P hadn’t known that Woolf was Marius’ real surname, he’d have thought it was made up to take advantage of those looks, but Wikipedia reliably informed J-P that Marius was born twenty-eight years earlier in São Paulo’s well-to-do Jewish neighbourhood of Consolação to commercial lawyer parents who’d sent him off to study acting in New York as soon as he’d expressed an interest in it.

  “They never refused me anything,” Marius told him. “I’m their golden boy, born after my four sisters and totally spoiled. But they didn’t want me to get sucked into the Brazilian TV industry — all those telenovelas and melodramatic period shit. If I was going to act I had to do it seriously,” — he rolled his eyes — “whatever that means.”

  They couldn’t have known how Marius’ career was going to pan out, what kind of material he’d be offered and accept; it was a major source of tension between them. But they’d been right, hadn’t they, Marius’ parents? Or at least Marius must have taken on board their complaints. It was how they ended up here, together, making Astonishing Paris.

  One month after they’d first met, and totally out of the blue, Marius had called him up, having got J-P’s number from a friend of his agent, he explained: “I meant to get in touch sooner but — well, premieres and shit all over the place, you know.”

  J-P had strained to hear him, through the noise of the blood rushing round his head.

  “Will you have dinner tonight?” Marius asked him, “at my place? I could really use your advice on a script I’ve been sent. I don’t feel like eating out. I’ve barely been at home the last six months.”

  Since that Cannes party, J-P had put the notion of Marius having come on to him right out of his head. This wouldn’t be anything more than an evening spent talking about some no doubt trashy piece of crap. But four weeks of gazing at, and fantasising about, the digital details of Marius’ body meant he’d become unreal and strangely frightening to J-P. He needed to break the spell.

  J-P almost said, ‘No,’ with a tinge of anger that was inexplicable then but which he later realised was self-defensive. He almost said, ‘Look, the industry’s full of cock-teasing bros who just want something from you and I’m not some shameless desperate queen who’ll do anything to bask in your glow, or for the slightest chance of a blow job,’ but he didn’t. He said, “Yeah, sure, sounds good.”

  What J-P had told himself was that this was a potential in, access to an area of the movie business he’d wanted since forever, if only to find out if it was truly as hideous as he imagined it to be. He was the one who’d be using Marius who was, after all, sending a car to collect him.

  As soon as he arrived at the modest but actually stunn
ing Modernist house bought with the millions earned from the half dozen schlocky movies on Marius’ resumé so far, those thoughts went straight out the floor to ceiling windows, impaled on the ornamental cactuses in the courtyard beyond. Marius was so utterly charming, so vulnerable, funny, and gorgeous, certainly, but not at all vain, that J-P was instantly bewitched. And he came out within the first five minutes — “You know I’m a faggot, right?” — with a disarmingly unaffected smile, different from the sly, wolfish grin that leered out from J-P’s desktop. He felt ashamed of his own cynical intentions.

  Five minutes more and Marius confessed, “There is no script, by the way.” Well, there was a script, but he’d already turned it down that afternoon, much to his agent’s chagrin, which Marius pronounced in the French way while raising his glass of wine and sticking out his pinky. He was camping it up, unashamedly, and J-P fancied him all the more for it. “I was just using that,” Marius said into his wine, fogging the glass, “as bait.”

  In the end, J-P didn’t need to work hard to push those photographic portraits of Marius from his mind, though he had examined them closely almost every morning as a preface to his working day, enlarging them, scouring the landscape of Marius’ torso, tracing the peppering of hair on his chest and stomach, zooming in to count and map the dark constellations of his shoulder freckles.

  He liked the Cosmo ones the most because, with their use of natural light and minimal set up, they felt like drawings, more intimate and direct than the overblown, lurid murals from Interview and when, in the kitchen Marius had pulled off his t-shirt, J-P recognised his body immediately, though there was more hair, dark and slightly curly in places — he must clipper for photos, J-P had thought — and his torso was even narrower and shorter than he remembered. As if to compensate, Marius’ slouchy jeans, cinched with a broad brown leather belt, were studiously positioned just below the Adonis girdle outlining his hips, revealing the spread of his pubes and the top of his arse cheeks, pale against the very same tan line J-P had already committed to memory.

  The ease with which their bodies slotted into each other that night was a wonder to them both, There had been mornings when, sitting at his desk, J-P would unbutton his jeans and stroke his dick as he visualised burrowing into the deep wells of Marius’ armpits, imagined smelling and tasting the sweat there, so that actually doing this, in reality, lifting Marius’ arms to sniff deeply at his pits, even more magnificent, the scent even more delicious, in reality, licking them hungrily with an appetite he felt might never be sated, one built over many hours and days, as too when, later on, he inhaled the earthy musk of Marius’ arse hole before putting his tongue there, had felt like the most natural activities conceivable, these first times practised mentally so many times that J-P needed no direction.

  Replaying this, J-P’s hunger grew more urgent. He got up, took the knife and chopping board, began to slice and peel the melon, then cut it into chunks. He pressed his groin against the edge of the work surface to ease the weight of the semi in his pants. He had to focus on their work right now, could not, would not, half-undress Marius in the dim light of the trailer and suck him off. He placed pale, juice-sodden pieces of melon onto a plate, piled translucent slices of prosciutto in collapsed heaps on top of the fruit and carried it to the table.

  Marius opened his eyes, and when he saw what was in front of him, attacked it immediately, scooping up melon and ham together between his fingers and tipped his head back to gobble them down. Melon juice glistened on his moustache and he hummed with appreciation.

  As well as reading that melon and prosciutto was Marius’ favourite snack — even before they’d fed it to each other on that first night at his house — J-P had also read lists of what Marius listened to on his iPod, the novels and poetry he downloaded, and an interview in which he was surprisingly articulate about the War on Terror. He knew that Marius drove an electric car because he was concerned about the environment and he was still searching for that ‘someone special’ and, even when this information, so readily available, was wrong (technically, the car was a hybrid), or false (he was about to marry a daytime soap actress who was having his baby), it didn’t matter; it all served to create separate portraits of Marius, variations on the subject of who he was, to offer different perspectives on the game they played.

  And there had been some initial excitement in keeping their relationship under wraps, but it meant they spent all their time together like today; in locked trailers with the blinds shut, or adjoining hotel suites where they ordered in separate room service and wheeled their trolleys through connecting doors, in Marius’s Bel Air home that was shielded from the road by tall pines, or J-P’s apartment where no one in his building expected to see a movie star, so didn’t.

  Marius was convinced that it wouldn’t be good for him to be out, not at this stage in his career anyway, and J-P went along with it, though he didn’t agree. Marius, given his following and precisely because he was a bankable, commercial, bona fide star, could come through it, and his career wouldn’t suffer, or not much given the new direction he wanted to take.

  “It could be good for you,” J-P had said, the first time they spoke about it. “Mark a definite break with the past.”

  “Name me one,” was Marius’ response. “Name me one out actor who gets leading roles, not just quirky friends and sidekicks, or weirdos.”

  And J-P couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t like lying to everyone when he told them he was single, too focused on his career to have any kind of relationship. The notion of living a double life didn’t adequately express for J-P the level of detachment it necessitated and he was concerned how easily he fell into it. Marius seemed to cope with the lies much better, but that was because he was already an actor.

  It also meant that, even when sitting next to each other in front of the TV, bowls of pasta on their laps, J-P still couldn’t completely forget the images of Marius on his computer so that, when he watched him deftly twist spaghetti onto his fork, the light from the screen transformed him and his face was bathed in that golden angel Cosmo glow, or, when Marius was bent shirtless over the bathroom sink cleaning his teeth, J-P saw the same curve of his spine and tensed back muscles as when LaChapelle had him kick-boxing in a cage.

  Thinking about it now, it put him in mind of when, after his mum died, it was just him and his dad, and they too would sit in front of the telly with food on their laps. J-P was allowed to stay up later than any of his friends from school and him and his dad watched repeats of the American cop shows they both enjoyed; Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, The Streets of San Francisco, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, Magnum P.I., Vegas. Neither of them wanted to be on their own, and neither of them acknowledged that. They’d both stay awake as long as possible, asking each other questions about plot points, narrative twists, surprise endings and character development until, finally, one or the other would drop off. He thinks it was then that his desire to make films was born, as were his other desires.

  Even as a very young boy, J-P was aware of wanting to be in the presence of those on-screen men, see a bare chest occasionally, or a brief scene of romance into which he could project himself. During these moments — sometimes only seconds long — he’d scrutinise their chests, arms, backs, legs, trying to imagine them fully naked by filling in the missing parts. But he was also afraid of his dad seeing J-P looking. They bonded through these TV shows, but it created a barrier between them too. Sometimes, J-P’s heart beat so fast at the sight of one of these half-naked men, his breath coming so short and loud, that he thought his dad must have noticed and would be angry with him. He’d try to hold himself in but… eventually, he began to look forward to his dad falling asleep so he could look freely.

  When he’d told Marius about that mix of desire and fear he’d experienced when watching those TV shows, he said he thought these mixed sensations remained a part of his sexuality. He’d not said, ‘It’s very similar to what I feel when I look through the pictures of you I’
ve got saved on my laptop.’ Those words were never going to come out of his mouth, and there was no reason for Marius to ever know about them.

  There was more to be found. Someone posted screengrabs from the scene in Fraternity of Death when Marius was being chased naked through the campus, the chase that ended in the shock of his decapitation. There were dim flashes of his cock, glimpsed between the trees, in deep shadow and barely perceptible but nevertheless there, if you looked hard, which would be enough to entice people, J-P was certain, because it enticed him even now, though he knew Marius’ lovely cock intimately.

  In an attempted corrective to the dominance of these images in his mind, J-P encouraged Marius to cultivate and intensify his bodily reality, urged him not to wear deodorant, to shampoo his hair only occasionally, instructed him to come to bed straight after a run, so that the sex of him, the dirt of him — the dried flake of earwax, the salty mucus, his foot-stink and spicy arsehole musk, the damp putty smell of his cum — compensated for the digital images J-P had stored and which enhanced the Marius he had access to.

  J-P looked at Marius Woolf now, sitting there sipping coffee, staring into space. He was augmented reality, an immersive, virtual experience, a 3-D, high-definition, work of fucking art.

  Walter, Hong Kong — 2013

  When the next wave of nausea hits, Walter takes deep, even breaths. He likes to think he has bested something at least once a day and, given the way his party game went, his body mustn’t defeat him this evening. This will not be one of those days when he curls into a ball on the bathroom floor wishing for release. No, he will not succumb. Will not be lifted into bed by the doctor, which has lately made him think of his own father carrying him, and of himself, in turn, cradling his own children. The doctor is the closest he has to a son these days. He will be generously rewarded, when the time comes.

  He focuses on the wall in front of him, concentrates on the picture hanging there. If anything enables Walter to direct his will these days, it is this modest canvas in its elaborate, dark-gilt frame. Smudged at first by his dizziness, then obscured behind sparkles of white light, it emerges eventually to float across his vision and solidify into a clear image, just as he solidifies when the heaving in his stomach sinks and dissipates.