He wasn’t used to it. For the last several years he’d only gone out with prostitutes. Beautiful, enjoyable, predictable prostitutes. When he was with them, he knew from the very outset exactly where things would wind up. An evening with a prostitute was always the same colour. No surprises lurking around the corner. For years, that is, ever since he and his wife had divorced, Reed’s only experience of the world of women was through the reassuring, discreet, honest, functional world of high-end prostitution.
Not that he lacked female admirers, or opportunities to have sex free of charge. There were plenty of women interested in seeing what a rubber man had between his legs. When he was younger, he’d found himself fighting off a continuous barrage of offers, intrusive introductions, and more-or-less explicit come-ons. Back then, women sent him letters which practically singed the envelope. They sent him curly hairs of the intimate kind. He was one of the most prominent superheroes in America, a man with a flexible, stretchable body, and all women wanted was to touch him. But he was untouchable. He had a wife. And by the time he no longer had a wife, he was still untouchable, because now he was a man past the prime of his life, a respected scientist, and his idea of maturity involved dignity, discretion, and self-control, rather than a quest for sex.
He couldn’t throw himself into the arms of women who were too explicit. Women of that kind, anyway, had stopped writing to him once he retired as a superhero, and these days they were probably sending emails to his son, although Reed didn’t know much about that. He’d always promised himself to ask Franklin about his personal life, but the opportunity never seemed to arise.
At the same time, after the failure of his marriage, he was in no state of mind to court women who might play hard-to-get. That took too much energy. By now, he was devoting all his energies to science, to his foundation, to the challenging task of protecting the meaning of his own life after spending decades trying to protect the world. Sex threatened to become a stumbling block. That’s when the carefree era of prostitutes began. Beautiful women who never caused trouble. Young too, but professionally young, an ageless youth that was not a complication. No matter what, they were all older than Franklin: that was the boundary, the psychological barrier that Reed had never crossed.
A high-end prostitute had style, a neutral style without sharp edges, like a black suit or a dark sedan car. Reed Richards was an ex-hero. He was terrified of looking ridiculous. Style was all-important, even in sex.
What he’d lost, he now realised, was the ability to court a woman. Really court her. Bend the edges of the world towards another person in such a way that everything would appear easy and perfect to her. Courting someone meant making it possible for her to live in a movie, where everything worked as if by magic: the restaurant, the table, the wine, the timing, the after-dinner drink. No awkwardness, no hesitation between one thing and the next. Enchantment isn’t something you can create with a snap of the fingers. That was why Reed felt a sort of disbelief at the thought that this enchantment was still in place, and had been for evening after evening, and that a woman who was far too young, beautiful, and unpaid, was at the centre of it alongside him.
The restaurants where he took Elaine were in fact selected by Annabel. His secretary was the mastermind of their evenings together. They had to be charming places, of course, where there was no danger of Reed being recognised, and ideally where he had never gone in the past with his wife, or with some paid girlfriend. They had to be intimate but also fashionable, the right kind of place for a man to take a woman, to court a woman, to make her feel she was at the centre of something. Sometimes it seemed impossible to Reed that the city could have enough restaurants, and he thought miserably of the day when he would no longer know where to take Elaine.
Annabel reassured him. The restaurants of New York are endless. She seemed to know them all, and each time she managed to choose the right one, thanks to her extensive reading of the restaurant columns in the press.
Reed smiled uneasily at the thought of his anorexic secretary busy reading restaurant reviews in Time Out. Still, he knew he could rely on her. Annabel’s selections were always spot-on.
What’s more, she had suggested he skip the usual bouquet of flowers after the first dinner, and instead send Elaine an expensive bonsai. Brooklyn girls love bonsai plants—she’d uttered the phrase with an aura of mystery, and to judge from Elaine’s reaction, when Reed called her later, this piece of advice had been sound as well.
The bonsai. The restaurants. The density of a wine. The colour of a sunset while he was speeding south in a car to pick her up. The way that she’d looked up at the sky on a summer night. The odour of a freshly cleaned street. Elaine’s slightly damp hair, perhaps after a hasty shower. Lipstick traces on the edge of a glass. It was a time made up of details. A series of fragments and images that engraved themselves into Reed’s memory, like an alphabet on a wax tablet. In that earliest period, the only way he had of getting to know Elaine and what Elaine represented was this chain of fragments, this collection of microscopic, separate, unexpected facts.
Reed wanted to put Elaine in focus in the most complete way possible. He listened as she spoke about her family, the Staten Island area where she had grown up, how she had seen the ocean every day of her childhood, and the time she decided she wanted to travel, maybe by sea. Then one night she had watched as a ferry boat burned offshore, and the glow of that fire had made her raise her head to the sky. The stars. It was as if she had seen them for the first time, barely distinguishable beyond the light of the fire. Her father had been a fireman, her mother was a nurse, and her sister wanted to study medicine, so the whole family was baffled—if not horrified—when at sixteen she announced that she wanted to be an astronaut. It meant she would have to join the air force, and take on the challenge of years of studying space engineering, and even though no one doubted her determination in the slightest, it still seemed like an unheard-of choice for a sixteen-year-old girl. No one had tried to block her way. Everyone assumed she would change her mind on her own.
He listened as Elaine talked about it, how with each year her ambition only strengthened, and how she felt sure that she would be able to touch the comet’s tail, just as Reed had said during one of his lectures. He listened to her. He listened, peeking at her lips, her mobile mouth, the opening through which phrases and breath issued, the fissure that sometimes seemed as hard as a blade, and at other times deeply and movingly soft.
Reed sought the form of that mouth, the form of that woman, because he had spent his life betraying his own form, elongating and altering it until he had almost forgotten it, but he knew that to love someone, on the other hand, meant first and foremost having a form, and loving another form. Two mouths, two bodies.
He should have kissed her, so that he could know once and for all the outlines of that mouth. He hadn’t done it yet. Maybe he was afraid of the way those lips shone at times, in the candlelight of some restaurant, or in the dim light of an exclusive cocktail bar. Sometimes, out of the corner of his eye, for a fragment of a second, he saw those lips twist in a smile that was too hard, too knowing, too lacking in innocence. But those were shadows. Nothing but shadows, or at least that’s what he thought.
Later, he would think of that period as their chaste phase, weeks of reciprocal study and indecision, desire, fear, and enthusiasm, weeks that—as he later understood—were the only time they’d been truly happy.
*
Reed pushed open the door. The cool air of the meeting room poured out towards them, pleasant, welcoming. For the past few evenings, he’d asked Annabel to leave the air conditioning on, knowing that the time had almost come: the time to give Elaine a tour of the foundation’s offices. Show her where he worked and lived. “This is the conference room,” he told Elaine, who followed him with a look of wonderment.
“It’s immense,” she said. “Much bigger than I would have expected.”
They wandered around the room in silence, like children who
had sneaked into an amusement park at night. They walked around the large conference table made of highly polished wood. “To be honest,” Reed felt duty-bound to point out, “we barely use this room any more, maybe twice a year. The library and the laboratory are hardly ever used either. The foundation is really just Annabel and me, these days.”
“Oh, stop joking,” Elaine protested with an enchanting smile. She was wearing a dark-green dress, more or less the shade of her eyes, and her shoulders were bare. “Everyone knows,” she went on, “that this conference room is frequented by the biggest names in world science.”
“A couple of Nobel laureates,” Reed admitted. “But we don’t see them much… When the board of advisers meets it’s usually just to make routine decisions. Whether to reassign funding or publish a new issue of our scientific journal. And of course to enjoy a good lunch.”
Elaine laughed. They moved on. Annabel’s office was cool, and the air retained a hint of the dry, almost aseptic scent of his secretary. Her desk was in impeccable order, as though Annabel had known that on this very evening two people would be there, looking at her things, the receiver of her phone, the keyboard of her computer, the blank surface of her sleeping screen. Reed felt an unexpected surge of fondness for his faithful secretary. He was confused for a moment, in the cool air of the office, while outside the summer impregnated the streets.
He thought he saw Elaine shiver. Maybe the air conditioning was set too low. “Come this way,” he said, and they walked to the last office. “There was a time,” he said, just to continue the conversation, and to conceal his embarrassment as Elaine walked into his personal office… “There was a time when we occupied the whole building. Now we just have two floors.”
“I know,” Elaine answered, lightly touching the surface of his desk. “I read it in your biography.” She ran her hand over the desktop, spreading her fingers as if to test its substance. “A whole building,” she mused. “It seems incredible to think of it today.”
“That’s the way things were back then,” Reed smiled. “It was the Seventies. We had lots of different projects under way. Laboratories, a hangar full of aircraft of all kinds, even a small special prison for supercriminals. It was all here, including the residences of the other members of the group.”
“The most famous group of superheroes on earth,” she mused, in a neutral tone, continuing her exploration.
The comment hung in the air. Reed was touched by the doubt that she might have ventured that statement purely out of courtesy. As she walked over to the framed photographs lining one wall, she looked like a child visiting a grown-up’s office. With her hair pulled back, tucked behind her ears, and her luminous skin, and the mantle of freckles dusting her shoulders. For an excruciating instant, Reed perceived the depth of her loveliness. Elaine turned towards him, with a start, and with an eager smile she exclaimed: “I don’t believe it… I know this picture!”
Reed moved closer. It was the picture that Richard Avedon had taken of him, twenty or so years ago, in the aftermath of a particularly famous exploit.
“He took that picture after the rescue in Florida,” Elaine said with a gleam in her eyes. “I remember it perfectly. You stretched your body for miles in the middle of a hurricane, to grab hold of a boat that had been swept out to sea by the storm. There were children on the boat. The whole world was astounded at what you’d done. Nobody thought you could stretch so far.”
“Neither did I,” Reed said with a smile, pleased that she remembered the case. He looked at her eyes, with a pleasurable sensation of personal contact. “My body was different back then,” he added, almost as an apology: that had been his last great exploit.
“The newspapers talked about it for weeks,” Elaine went on dreamily. “When you came back to New York, Avedon came to see you and took your picture. That portrait wound up on the cover of Time. I remember when our elementary school teacher brought a copy of the magazine into class. She showed it to us, and asked us each to draw our own portrait of you. My drawing turned out to be something awful!” Elaine shook her head. “There were precocious little girls in my class who giggled as they whispered comments about you, things they’d probably heard their mothers say. You were the man of the hour. Women spoke your name. I remember that I was just small, and I thought to myself how wonderful it would have been to be on that boat, in the middle of a hurricane, and to be rescued by you.”
Silence filled the room.
Elaine shivered again. She clutched herself without losing her smile.
Reed wished he could warm her up. He wished he could drape himself around her, be a piece of clothing covering her skin. Maybe long ago, with a tremendous effort, he might have managed to stretch his body to the thickness of fabric. Not any more. He would be happy enough just to hand all his own clothes to Elaine, to strip naked and stand there, in front of her, nude, innocent. He wished he could embrace her and tell her that he’d done it, somehow he’d done it: that day he had saved all the children on earth. Including her.
He reached out a hand and brushed her cheek. An immensely long second went by. Then she too lifted an arm, slowly, and they stood there, touching one another.
Reed was often afraid of other people’s hands. Other people’s hands were too intrusive, too morbidly curious. They tried to touch him at the drop of a hat. Any excuse would do. Other people’s hands gripped his hand too tightly, they rested on his shoulder as though by accident, in an attempt to test his consistency, to feel his rubbery texture. I shook hands with Reed Richards today. It was like shaking hands with a giant piece of chewing gum.
Other people’s hands were a source of embarrassment, mistrust, and weariness, but her hands… Elaine’s hands were sliding over his body, over his neck, his arms, sliding under his shirt to follow the outline of his torso, leaving long burning trails behind them. Their passage seemed to leave a hot fissure, like a crevice on the surface of his body. The biggest fissure gaped open vertically, from his chest down to his hip, and from it there seemed to pour forth a torrent of heat, of gratitude, and some pure and invisible energy.
They embraced. They went on talking as if what their bodies were doing had nothing to do with them, as if it were a detail, something their bodies were doing of their own volition, playing together, unencumbered, innocuously, while Reed and Elaine chattered on imperturbably about old memories, about Florida, about things long lost. They could have gone on talking for hours. At last, the distance between their mouths narrowed, inch by inch, until they were too close, and there was no longer room for a single word, and then they kissed, in the rediscovered silence.
*
He took off her shoes. He tasted with the tip of his tongue the soft flesh of her feet. He caressed her ankles. He gazed in rapt adoration at her extremities, almost afraid to venture towards the centre of that body, until she took it upon herself to slip out of her dress, with nothing left on but a pair of skimpy panties. Lying on the bed in the dim light, Elaine’s body seemed devoid of obstacles, smooth and warm. Reed gazed down at her before lowering himself closer to her. In Reed’s mouth, her breast had the flavour of a dream.
He continued downwards, tracing a solitary path with his lips towards the little oasis of her belly button. Elaine’s belly moved ever so slightly, like a sand dune changing shape, as Reed moved past it. He brushed the strings of her panties. He breathed in her scent through the fabric. It smelt of whiteness, like everything else about her. With his hands he slid the strip of fabric down, along the legs that she lifted, docilely, into the air. Reed wished he could repeat that act, doing it over and over again in an endless replay, the strip of fabric sliding down the smooth legs, frictionless, nothing more than a vague rustling sound.
He traced the reddish fuzz with his lips, an almost respectful gesture, until she sighed. Reed felt a sudden sense of reality rise within him, from his limbs, from his whole body, an intense awareness, a sensation that made him perceive everything, with tremendous clarity: himself. His own
sweaty body. His bedroom. The lamp shining out a golden light. The clean sheets. She seized his head and forced him to look her in the eye. “Reed,” she sighed.
Until then, he’d kept his clothes on. Now he started undressing. He slipped off his shirt and trousers, with help from Elaine, reassured by the fit look of his abdomen. Not bad for a man my age. He kept his underwear on. He went back to playing with her body, again, putting off the moment, even though he could feel the tension dropping, dragged down by that missing step. The tacit schedule of sex. Rhythm had to be maintained. I can’t wait. He made up his mind to slip off his boxer shorts, a quick, offhand gesture, letting his penis swing free, damp, unhindered.
He closed his eyes when he felt Elaine’s hand. His penis was pulsating against her palm. For a moment, Reed was afraid he’d lose his erection, while she went on holding it. Don’t scrutinise it. Don’t heft it. My penis. The only part of my body that it’s impossible for me to control. The part of my body that tends to modify itself beyond my will, unconsciously obeying what seem to be, in each case, the desires of my partner.
A spark glinted in Elaine’s gaze, perhaps a gleam of understanding. She lay back, relaxed, arms behind her head, in a gesture of complete surrender. Once again, for what seemed like the thousandth time, Reed was astonished by the abyss he’d glimpsed in her eyes. There was something in those depths, far down, and Reed lowered himself towards her, to get a better look… Body on body. Gaze in gaze. Elaine’s eyes glowed like the entrance to a secret passageway. In the half-light, her face looked different, bonier, timeless, an arcane face that had waited all this time to reveal itself to him. “Elaine,” he whispered, guessing in an instant the history of that face and that body. An ancient story of greatness, of horrifying poverty, of men and women who set out from another continent a century and a half earlier. They had loved and dreamed and wished, they’d made love, panted one above another, venerating the memory of their verdant Ireland, and perhaps they’d killed, and generated new life, one generation after another, following one after another, layer upon layer of humanity, building up over time until, at last, they’d produced the body he was now holding, the mouth he was kissing, the gaze into which he was tumbling. Through the eyes of a single person, it was possible to reconnect with the entire human race.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 4