Annabel came into the office around eight o’clock. Reed heard her in the room next door, turning on the computers and listening to the messages on the answering machine, and then walking over to the door between their two offices. He called to her to come in before she could knock. He’d been at work for an hour and he was starving. She called out an excessively cheery good morning, handing him the newspapers and the paper bag with a couple of cinnamon bagels that, like every morning, she’d stopped to buy for him on her way in. Reed opened the bag and inhaled in delight.
As she moved off to make the coffee, Annabel announced that the morning outside was, to say the least, completely heavenly.
Reed watched her go. In too-skinny women, he mused, there was at times something out of place, an overblown vivaciousness, a kind of pained, fake nonchalance. Not that it constituted a problem. Annabel was a capable assistant. And however disturbing the thought might be, he had to admit it: it was strangely satisfying to eat the food that a skeletal woman, almost surely anorexic, brought him every morning. Certain contrasts gave him that kind of feeling. A perverse feeling of being alive. He pulled out a bagel and bit into it. He loved the taste of cinnamon.
After breakfast, the morning flew by. It was just before lunchtime that the aftermath of his unsettled night began to emerge, making him feel momentarily dazed, as if a sudden, tiny breach had opened up between him and the surrounding world. He took a breath. He stared at the telephone on his desk. That whole morning he’d been putting off a certain phone call, but now the time had come. He had to call. He had to confirm or reject that request for an extra lesson at the space centre. Just then, as if obeying a telepathic impulse, the phone rang.
Reed lifted the receiver. When Annabel said that Raymond Minetta was on the line, it took Reed a few seconds to realise who that was. It had been just twenty-four hours since the last time he’d visited the George Hotel, and yet it seemed a distant memory. As little as he felt like it, he told Annabel to put the call through. “Raymond,” he spoke into the receiver, with the courteous yet detached tone he always used with his financiers.
“My dear friend,” Raymond breathed into the phone, with an unctuous voice that penetrated into Reed’s ear. How he hated that kind of voice. How he hated that person. Not so much for his way of talking, or his manners, or even for his political views. It was the fact that he was such a walking talking stereotype, such an obvious personality type, as uninteresting and unappetising as a bad hamburger. Raymond Minetta, the owner of a luxury hotel, an evident case of a repressed homosexual, an ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist. For reasons that Reed had never quite understood, that man was one of the financiers of the Richards Foundation. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Minetta cooed.
Reed avoided telling him that he’d been in the sauna at his hotel just the day before. Probably, Minetta already knew that. He also avoided telling him about the strange message he’d found in the locker, though for an instant the idea had occurred to him.
“The reason I’m disturbing you,” Minetta went on, “and you know how sorry I am when I have to disturb other people, well, the reason is that this morning…” The voice faded away briefly, with a vague moan, perhaps a stifled sneeze or a stab of pain. Who knows. Reed thought of the piece of gossip he’d once heard, namely that Minetta, under his thousand-dollar Italian suit, in fact wore a cilice, or something of the sort. Reed kept from laughing. Self-inflicted pain had always struck him as something ridiculous, absurd, and obscene. Here I am on the phone with a millionaire who wears a cilice under his trousers.
His impatience mounted. Now that he was holding the receiver in his hand, he felt the urgent need to make that other call, the one to the space centre, the one he’d been thinking about all morning. He had to make that call. Give that answer.
“This morning,” Minetta’s voice resumed. “The thing is this morning, actually, I read something about Franklin.”
“Franklin?” Reed asked, with a fleeting hint of interest.
“In the Daily News,” came the answer. “That interview where they ask Franklin what health club he attends…”
Reed pulled the Daily News out of the pile of newspapers Annabel had brought in. He hadn’t even leafed through it yet. He started turning the pages, with the receiver wedged between his ear and his shoulder, the kind of uncomfortable position that he might once have resolved by deforming a part of his body, say, by reshaping his shoulder into a rudimentary third hand, but which he now chose to accept like this, the way anyone else would. He kept the phone clamped between shoulder and ear. He found the article and the photograph that illustrated it. There was Franklin Richards, the Prince Charming of the morning tabloids, America’s most beloved son. His son. A stab of love surged through his chest.
Time was running short. He needed to make the other phone call, the real one, the important one, the call that was becoming more urgent second by second. Minetta wasn’t about to hang up: “You can imagine,” he was saying, “my bafflement when I saw that Franklin told the interviewer, of all things, that he had a membership in a health club at another hotel. I mean to say, as you know very well, for years he’s been our guest, as welcome as can be, as are you for that matter, and our hotel’s health club…”
Reed’s anxiety intensified. What did Minetta want? Had he taken him for Franklin’s publicist? He ran his gaze around the office, exasperated, until it came to rest on the object he was searching for: the book. His biography. He had set it on a shelf at the far side of the office, ready to be signed with a brilliant dedication. He thought back to the young female astronaut. The extra lesson. He restrained the impulse to reach out his arm to grab the book, as well as to put a brusque end to the conversation.
“What I’m trying to say,” Minetta said, “is that it would be a pleasure for me to have a chance to express to Franklin my undiminished esteem, perhaps by sending him, that is, in a gesture of friendship…” Reed ran his gaze repeatedly from the book at the other end of the office, to the picture of Franklin in the newspaper, as if there were some link between the two things. Some relationship. His son was smiling in the picture, young and perfect, and a strange sense of melancholy swept over Reed.
“You’re right,” he said, taking advantage of a new ambiguous pause on Minetta’s end of the line. Another stifled sneeze? A spasm of pain as the cilice penetrated into his buttery flesh? Whatever the motive that had triggered the pause, Reed took advantage of it. “It can be tough to get in touch with Franklin. He doesn’t even have a secretary. He’s what people call an indie star, but that’s why America loves him, right?” Without giving Minetta the time to break in, he went on: “Which means that now I’m going to transfer you back to my secretary, who will be more than happy, I feel sure, to give you her advice about when and how you can best get in touch with Franklin, so that you can renew your invitations and send him your gestures of friendship. All the gestures you like. It’s been a pleasure, Raymond.” Without waiting for an answer, he transferred the call to Annabel.
He rested the receiver against his ear, relieved, listening to the perfect silence of the telephone.
That silence. That instant. If only it had gone on forever. If only he hadn’t heaved a sigh, just then, and started punching buttons. If only he’d never done it. Afterwards, more than once, he would wonder whether that had been the point of no return, the irreparable turning point. He would ask himself exactly where the line fell, the moment after which his life no longer belonged to him, the portal that led him onto a different plane of existence, the plane of obsession and need, the plane from which it was not possible to escape, not now, any more than from the orbit of a black hole. The turning point. The threshold.
He listened to the series of rings. Reed waited until he heard the receiver being picked up at the other end, and finally the voice, slightly mannish but nonetheless silky, of Mrs. Glasseye.
She didn’t seem very surprised to hear his voice. After all, she’d been expecting
his call. She’d been expecting his answer.
Reed took a deep breath, and as the sunlight of Manhattan came in through the window, and lunchtime drew near, and an army of impatient bodies poured out once again into the streets, in search of the perfect meal… As his anorexic secretary in the next room was politely answering the questions of a millionaire who wore a cilice, and everything seemed to be suddenly linked together in Reed’s brain, in one last fleeting unified vision: eyes, erotic dreams, mysterious notes, cilices cutting into the flesh, smiling blond sons, biographies rediscovered, arms extending outwards, unhappy drivers, hungry bodies… He gave his answer. He’d be glad to go to the space centre for the extra lesson. “It’ll be a pleasure,” he said. “A real pleasure to be there again.”
*
A week later, he was in a car again, heading back from the space centre, after teaching his extra lesson. A different chauffeur was driving this time, steering quietly through the New Jersey sunset.
Reed felt exhausted, afraid, and triumphant. He’d spent a week practically without anxiety, thinking at times of the space centre and the young female astronaut, and then that day he had appeared to teach his lesson, just as punctual as ever, dressed as neatly as ever, feeling a sort of childish satisfaction at the simple fact that he was there, and she was there too. He’d experienced a sort of primordial wonder: two people, both there, at the same time, in the same place on the face of the planet. More than once his glance had met hers and had rested on her eyes for a moment, like someone peering through a door left half-open.
Otherwise, he’d done a fine job. He’d taught the lesson with confidence. He’d made them laugh and made them reflect. He’d held them in the palm of his hand, those six young astronauts. When the lesson was over, he’d lingered, organising his papers, the way he normally did, so that his audience would leave the room with this perfect image in their minds, an older former hero putting his lecture notes in order.
She had come up to him. Reed had smiled, vaguely, pretending not to remember, then he’d pulled the autographed biography out of his stack of files. “Thanks,” she had said, lifting the cover ever so slightly to peek at the dedication. To Elaine Ryan, who’ll fly high.
She had touched her hair, tucking a lock behind one ear, a gesture that might mean anything, and which Reed had taken for shyness. There wasn’t a lot left to say, after all, and everything could have come to an end right there, on an afternoon in May, as the sun sank behind the trees of the grounds outside. Reed had nothing to ask, nothing to add, just a pure and mechanical sense of attraction. Not exactly a sexual attraction, rather something like the pull of gravity, one body sucked into the orbit of another body.
And so in the end he made his proposal. It wasn’t a proposal he’d thought out in advance, nor was it entirely innocent. He’d done his homework and learned that she lived in Brooklyn. He’d offered her a ride back to the city in his car… The car slowed down as it approached an intersection. “It’s nice to travel in comfort for once,” Elaine commented, sitting next to him in the back seat. She smiled and looked calmly at the sunset outside the window.
Reed followed her gaze, losing himself in turn in the vision of the fiery horizon. “I imagine,” he said, “that you usually go back to the city with that classmate of yours.” He was referring to the young man with rimless glasses, who had waited at the door for Elaine, and who Reed had at first assumed was her boyfriend.
Elaine turned to look at him. “That’s right, with Bernard. He has an old beat-up Volvo, without air conditioning, and almost without brakes.” She smiled: “Every time I ride with him, it’s quite an adventure.”
Reed nodded. His brain registered every detail. Words, expressions, the slightest moves. It recorded Elaine’s well shaped nose, dusted with freckles like the face of a young urchin, her eyelashes, thick and not too long. The triangle of flesh left naked at the top button of her blouse. The way her wrists emerged from her sleeves. He glanced at each of these details with an astonishment that verged on the scientific, regretting that he was unable to study them openly. Oh, he almost wished she would fall asleep in the back seat next to him so that he could observe her at his leisure. He and she, sitting side by side, in the car flooded with scarlet sunlight. Reed realised that the conversation was languishing. “So, I hope your friend didn’t mind having to make the drive all alone in his Volvo, for one evening,” he said, returning to the topic of conversation.
“Bernard?!” She seemed to find the idea quite amusing. “I doubt it,” she said. “Knowing him, the minute I get home I’ll find a dozen messages from him on my voicemail, asking me to call and tell him in detail how this ride back went.”
Reed frowned.
“He’s a curious friend,” Elaine explained. “And you…” she seemed to be searching for the words. “Well, you must know. You tickle people’s curiosity. You’re a living legend.”
Reed had a technique he’d developed for reacting to compliments, or at least to phrases that sounded like compliments. A technique that involved a mixture of more-or-less sincere modesty, self-deprecating irony, and a coolness that sometimes verged on annoyance. In this case, he limited himself to batting his eyelids. He felt her words spreading in his stomach, like a mouthful of scalding-hot food, with their electrifying taste. He tried to play it down: “A legend that’s a little rough at the edges, I’m afraid. A legend that’s become a little dull,” he added, waving his hand at the pile of papers and files that he’d set on the seat, between them, attesting to what he’d become over the years: an ageing professor. Something of an intellectual.
“Don’t make fun,” Elaine said, placing a hand, with sudden recklessness, on the stack of paper. The outline of a vein ran over the back of her hand like an underground river, and the skin of her knuckles was faceted into minuscule triangles. “A personality like yours,” Elaine was saying, “can play an important role these days. I mean, after that horrible murder. Who would have guessed that a legend in his own time, like Batman… We’re living in strange times, don’t you think?”
Reed wasn’t thinking. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to talk about the recent murder of Batman or about the times they were living in or any other grim topics. He was determined to avoid the morass of depressing subjects. Dreariness just tended to engender more dreariness. Instinct told him to move on to other subjects, in order to show Elaine that he knew how to kid around, how to keep it light, and that he didn’t always have to carry with him the burden of all his past experience. “Watch this,” he said, placing one hand next to Elaine’s and starting to model it, shaping it with the dedication of a sculptor, so that the two hands were soon identical. Perfectly identical.
She opened her eyes wide. “But what the…” Then it dawned on her and, enchanted by that little trick, she exclaimed: “My hand!”
“Strange tricks for strange times,” Reed commented, restoring his hand to its normal shape, dispelling the illusion. Within seconds, a piercing shock ran through him. The shock he felt every time he used his superpowers without proper preparation. He concealed it and smiled, with satisfaction, at Elaine’s laughter in response to his witticism.
He went on making jokes. She went on laughing. He realised, of course, what was happening. He was toying with a woman thirty-five years his junior, using every stratagem to make her laugh like a little girl. He was playing the clown for her, in a way he hadn’t done for anyone else in years now, not for any other woman, not for anyone at all, and he still didn’t know why.
Elaine was laughing. The green flash of her eyes rose up, from time to time, to seek out Reed’s eyes. She seemed far too intelligent to keep on laughing at a succession of stupid wisecracks. If she was doing it, Reed understood, it meant that a ritual was under way between the two of them. A form of role-playing, a coded exchange. Reed felt a jolt, a discharge of gratitude and alarm at the idea that it was all spelled out, explicit by now: I’m courting her. I’m coming on to a woman who’s younger than my so
n. She knows it and she’s playing along.
They were in the city. The car was moving through Manhattan. Reed felt something come straight at him, a sort of wave, the vibration of the city, and he wanted Elaine to touch him, right away, so that she too could feel that tension quiver, on his elastic body, like a sensitive cord.
He looked over at her. He wanted to touch her as the night-time lights of the city filled the interior of the car, so that she seemed to gleam in the dim half-light. Her ivory skin. Her legs, encased in tight-fitting jeans. The car headed south, following the stream of traffic, and when the giant bridge loomed up before them, Reed could almost hear the ocean, finally, surge towards them with its insistent hum, murmuring into his ears that time was running out. Time really was running out. He had to seize this opportunity. And so he cleared his throat, as the car was hurtling towards Brooklyn, and with the greatest nonchalance he could muster, asked her whether some evening soon, maybe, he could take her out to dinner.
*
Red wine. White wine. Italian wine, French wine, California wine. Reed hadn’t expected that selecting a wine in a restaurant in the presence of a woman, or really he should say, for a woman, would ever become a pleasure for him again. Choosing a bottle meant impressing a taste, a colour to the evening. The hue of the evening was determined by the wine, by the place where they ate, by the dress Elaine wore, by the unpredictable tone their conversation took on, and by a thousand other factors. Light, glances, the clink of a glass. Reed also hadn’t expected that a sense of astonishment could come back into his life, certainly not this intense, not this pure. Still, every evening he spent with her left him amazed, floating in a dense layer of wonder: Is this happening because of me? Is it possible that I’m making all this happen? They were drawing closer, evening after evening, like planets on the verge of touching.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 3