Elaine started ever so slightly, rubbing her pelvis against his. “Reed, stop talking… Let’s make love.”
Reed lay on top of her. He absorbed her warmth, he recognised her scent. He couldn’t seem to concentrate. A layer of moisture was forming between them, a patina that kept their bodies from adhering one to the other. He wanted there to be nothing between them, no perspiration, almost no layers of skin. He wanted her to open her eyes and tell him that she had come back to stay with him for good.
Elaine only moaned. Instinctively he hugged her tighter, then something happened. He did what he’d never done before. He elongated his arms like a pair of cables, wrapping them around her, to imprison her, to squeeze her tighter, to hold her motionless as though in an interrogation. Reed’s arms entwined around her body, arms around her torso, arms around her arms, and Elaine struggled for an instant, perhaps trying to break free, and then surrendered. She started moaning again.
Reed moved slightly away, overwhelmed, but didn’t release her. He didn’t really know what he was doing any more. He wanted to fully understand her, he wanted to take her prisoner. He turned her around, with a sigh. As she wriggled and twisted, he rubbed his penis between the cheeks of her bottom, staring at the constellation of freckles and moles on her back. Her hair had fallen to either side of her face, laying bare the nape of her neck and her shoulders, and Reed gazed lost in reverie at that starry sky. Elaine’s voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Reed, harder… Squeeze me harder.”
He held her locked in a vice-like embrace. She was his. He could do what he wished with that body. Then why didn’t he feel more satisfied? He felt his arms begin to burn, and he didn’t know how far he’d extended them, wrapping them around Elaine’s body over and over again. He felt a wave of alienation sweep through him, furious, as he entered her, and everything seemed to become automatic: his penis plunging deep, time after time, the moans from both their mouths. This isn’t me. This isn’t how I make love, this isn’t my kind of sex.
And yet there in the scene was a Reed, panting, gripping Elaine’s body, almost suffocating her, fucking her, expanding his penis inside her. His penis, his unknowable penis, the least spontaneous part of his entire body, the part he had no control over, whose original size he couldn’t even remember. The only part of him whose true length he couldn’t distinguish: impossible to tell its natural state from the lengthening due to his superpowers. His penis swollen inside her. He couldn’t stop it, not now, not any more, he could feel it grow, with terror, panting more intensely. Elaine screamed, twisting, panting like him, while Reed lost himself in the starry sky, the sky on her back, a constellation, a horoscope on her white flesh, in which he once again tried to divine the answer: why did you come back?
They froze. Reed felt the pain surge upwards, without warning, from his arms, his penis, and his whole body burning as though a new, devastating fever were rushing through it. He shouted. He was coming, spurting dense drops into Elaine’s body, as his vision blurred and he lost himself, once again, in the milky sky of her back.
*
Everything started again. Nothing had changed. Elaine frequented the space centre in New Jersey, flew to Houston with Bernard every other week, often had her phone off, and showed up, spectacularly beautiful, to spend the night with Reed a couple of times a week. Theirs was a low-frequency relationship. They saw each other often enough to maintain a relationship, without letting it cut into the rest of their lives. Often, they said goodbye without any clear idea of when they’d next see each other. Exactly opposite to the way Reed would have liked it. He hadn’t tamed Elaine; she had finally forced him to accept the kind of relationship she wanted.
At first Reed adapted. He was dazed that she had come back and he was convinced that, all things considered, a little independence was probably good for him, too. He wanted to stay trained in detachment. He wanted to have her and at the same time be ready not to have her at a moment’s notice. He could do that. He thought that if he’d let her go once, he could let her go again.
Most of all, he wanted to know why she had come back, and why she had appeared that evening, unexpected, mysterious as a comet, allowing him to embrace her and adore her and fuck her. But maybe there was no reason to waste time thinking about it. There’s not always an explanation when someone comes back. Sometimes a person returns like the tide. Like seasons change and animals migrate.
Was it conceivable that she had come back for the sex? Elaine let herself go so completely, every time they had sex. She screamed. She pleaded. Reed was almost afraid of her. And yet he was the one who fucked her, who expanded inside her, who wrapped her in the arms that he stretched out for yards and yards. It had become their usual way. Elaine liked it when he tied her up with his arms. She liked to pretend that she was surrendering to him, even though she was always ready to dart away.
Every time, Reed felt his body burn, and came in a rush of pain: as he collapsed onto Elaine’s body, he cursed himself for having done it. He couldn’t survive that pain. He couldn’t ever do it again. He couldn’t afford to have sex like that. For every dose of wonder, his body set aside at least twice as much pain, punctual and unappealable.
Then he would open his eyes again, and she was next to him, naked, white, and an uncontrollable surge of love gushed out of him. It was practically a chemical reaction. The particles of pain were transformed into love. He knew that he would do it again. He knew that he would push his body to its extreme limits, that he’d wrap her in his arms again, that he’d spurt out his sperm shouting with pain. He knew that the desire would come back. It always came back. It all came back, whether or not there was a reason.
Other things came back too, more and more often. The sensation in his hip, for instance. Not exactly pain, but something closer to a trace, like a memory his body preserved, a sediment of the first time that Elaine had put her hand there, her intensely hot hand, leaving a scalding trail forever. That’s when the sensation had begun. It seemed like a fissure. A sort of internal tear that Reed could feel whenever he moved, in the uniform elastic tissue of his body. In a body made of rubber, there could be no lacerations. I should mention this to my trainers at the gym. Or even better, to Doctor Szepanski. I should tell somebody about the sensations I’ve felt for months now, about the constant feeling of being poised between a delightful pleasure and an infinite pain. I should talk about it. There was a time when I talked constantly about my body. I subjected it to thousands of examinations and tests and talked about it objectively with other scientists, as if it belonged equally to them and to me. My body was a subject of study. It was something to conduct experiments upon. But now that my body is only mine, I don’t know what to do with it. I’m like an inexperienced parent with a newborn baby. What can I do with this body to make it happy?
*
Work had always been an article of faith with him, and not because he was in search of something to fill his life, or to distract him from the loneliness of his apartment, but rather because he loved logic. His work was a field where logic had some chance of reigning supreme, where there seemed to be a relationship between cause and effect, and where he could count on the fact that, the more demanding the work, the more significant the results. Work seemed like a safe investment. It was the best place to put his time, the least risky shelter against the waste of oneself. Of course, it wasn’t the same as catching dangerous supercriminals, or thwarting conspiracies by corrupt industrialists, or hurtling headlong into an alley to rescue a girl from imminent rape. Not any more. Still, even now, as he was asking for new funds for research, or focusing on the first draft of a scientific paper, or delivering a lecture in a conference centre, or just asking Annabel to deal with some piece of business… Even now, Reed could still enjoy the logical order underlying his actions, the way each step determined the following step, and he could surrender to this flow of events, finding himself tired but satisfied at the end of the day. That’s the way things had been progressing for
years. Or at least up until now.
Outside, the winter advanced. On many days, you could barely make out the sun, no more than the glow of a distant explosion. Reed would sometimes sit there, dazed, in the middle of a pale morning or a chilly afternoon, and suddenly snap to, realising that he’d been at his desk and staring into the void, for a minute or two.
He realised that he wasn’t himself any more. He noticed the number of unread emails clogging his inbox, how slowly the writing of his articles proceeded, how often his attention veered away, like a spur line from the main track, from whatever someone was saying to him on the phone. He realised that his efficiency had declined. Some part of his capacity for concentration seemed to be dwindling away. There was a leak in his energy system. Maybe it was right there, in his hip, where he still felt a sort of laceration, or in some other hidden part of his body. Maybe it was wherever Elaine had pressed her lips. Or maybe wherever she hadn’t.
He had stopped googling Bernard’s name, resigned to the idea that he’d never know the truth about that man, but he still frequently googled her name, sometimes every day, as if the search engine could supply him with an updated daily index of how much Elaine did or didn’t love him. Actually, though, he found nothing. A few dozen pages, just like for Bernard. Reed wound up googling his own name, occasionally, imagining that it was Elaine doing the search, so that he could see what would scroll past her eyes. Perhaps he was no longer a star of the first magnitude, but there were still hundreds of thousands of pages containing his name.
Reed had a hard time recognising himself in what he read online. It all smacked of idle gossip, vague, remote, something that resembled the narrative of a narrative. Is that me? Who are all these people talking about, on their websites, in their blogs, in the entries in their digital encyclopedias?
It was during one of these moments that Annabel came into his office, wobbling on her high heels, to have him sign a couple of papers. A Google page was open on Reed’s computer, and he noticed that she shot a worried glance at the screen as she walked past his desk.
They exchanged a long look heavy with meaning, and that was when Reed understood. Annabel knew. She knew he was wasting time on the web, and that he wasn’t focusing on his work, his precious work, the work that was an article of faith with him. She knew he wasn’t answering all his emails, that he was turning his articles in late, that he was forgetting to make certain phone calls. She knew that something was draining his energy and she knew what that was. She knew all these things because she was his assistant, she worked with him day after day, with unflagging devotion, and Reed both loved and hated her for that.
In the following days he did his best to appear the same as ever. Reliable, productive. He felt like an alien who had taken possession of someone’s body and needed to allay the suspicions of those around him. He was Reed Richards. The man who’d had white hair ever since he was young, almost as a sign of some inborn wisdom. The man with an elastic body and brain, capable of containing anything and everything without contradictions. The authoritative man who could still call the editor of the New York Times and have an editorial published on any topic he wanted. That’s who Reed Richards was.
All the same, sooner or later Reed Richards was forced to go to his secretary and ask her, with feigned nonchalance, to reserve a table for him in a restaurant, or to take care of buying a present. For Elaine. For the woman who had punched the leak into his life. For the woman who had insinuated herself into his days, until she had saturated them.
Annabel implemented his instructions without a word. There was no mistaking what she thought. It was by her glances that Reed began to realise something had happened, something grave and irreversible. Annabel doesn’t recognise me any more. I don’t recognise myself either. I’m losing all sense of order. I’m abandoning the realm of logic.
When Elaine came back, he’d fooled himself into believing that everything was the same as before, but now he understood that it was all much worse. The obsession was far more intense. The insecurity much more destructive. When a fever returns, it’s a thousand times more lethal. The winter had scarcely begun, but the season of suffering was at its peak.
*
By now it was almost Christmas, and once again Reed had been lulled by the illusion that he could take Elaine away somewhere, to Europe, for a short vacation. Elaine had smiled, the way you smile at a child with an overactive imagination, and told him that leaving was unthinkable for her. “Why don’t you go on your own?” she’d said with sadistic aplomb.
Reed didn’t go anywhere. All he did was attend a few Christmas parties, shaking hands, raising glasses of champagne in toasts, applauding chamber music concertos. If there was an alien inside him, if Reed Richards really had been replaced by some restless, irrational creature, it was certainly a creature that knew how to camouflage itself. Reed chatted with elderly ladies of the wealthier classes, indulged the insipid gossip of the wives of the foundation’s financiers and sipped brandy with potential new financiers. Only occasionally did he feel obliged to retreat to a corner, or lock himself into a bathroom to see whether Elaine had tried to call him, or if she’d left him a message, or else to try to call her himself.
On December 20th a car came to pick him up and drive him to New Jersey; for the first time since Elaine entered his life, the car conveyed him to the eye-shaped space centre, along a road lined with marshlands. The snow in the woods had already vanished, melted by a wave of warmer weather, a bubble of heat in the midst of winter. It would be a suffocating Christmas.
The sight of the space centre stirred a mixture of sarcasm and discomfort in him. A shaft of reddish light illuminated the building from inside, making him think of a gigantic, terrible case of conjunctivitis, spreading through the plate glass windows of the lobby out onto the puddles dotting the lawn, like a slow-welling haemorrhage. A number of parked cars lined the access road, suggesting that the party was already in full swing, and Reed felt a stab—practically a flash of premonitory embarrassment—as he thought of all the heads that would swivel in his direction when he entered the room, the too many eyes that would size him up.
He got out of the car and headed for the side entrance, cutting across the lawn, which had been reduced almost to a swamp by the radical shifts in climate. He wound up getting his shoes all muddied. His footsteps produced a squishy sound. The evening wind blew around him, warm and lonely, as a muffled sound came from within: music, voices. I don’t want to attract attention. I want to appear from out of nowhere, as though I’d been there all along. But once he reached the side entrance he found a pair of guards, who looked at him curiously and told him, in the tone of someone speaking to a cantankerous old eccentric, that the guest entrance was on the other side of the building.
“I know that,” said Reed. “It’s just that I parked close to this entrance and you understand, I don’t want to have to walk back through the mud…” He gazed down at his feet, hoping the two guards would take pity on his poor muddy shoes.
“You should take the path, sir. That way you won’t get your shoes dirty. You can take the path and go in through the guest entrance.”
Young Americans, thought Reed, looking the two young security men up and down. So polite and such assholes. “Of course,” he replied. “But guys, let me explain… I’m Reed Richards. I’m a member of the scientific board of advisers here. What do you say you just let me in through this entrance?”
The two men at the door exchanged a glance, then looked back at Reed. “Did you say Richards?” the younger of the pair asked. They finally waved him through, although still with a dubious expression on their faces.
Inside, he rubbed his shoes clean on a mat. He reached the lobby, where he was pleased to discover that a musical performance was under way, attracting the interest of the crowd. Behind the solid wall of partygoers, someone with an androgynous voice was at the piano, accompanying themselves in a ballad. Reed had time to leave his overcoat in the cloakroom, grab a glass
from a passing tray, and look around to get a sense of the situation. The room was full of men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns. The average age was pretty old. As far as he could see, the astronauts attending sessions at the space centre either hadn’t been invited or were celebrating elsewhere. As for Elaine, he knew she was still in Houston. Obviously, with Bernard.
Not a sign of Mrs. Glasseye. In the middle of the room was a large Christmas tree, its decorations glittering in the reddish light. The resinous odour of the fir tree filled the room, and Reed walked closer to it, glass in hand, to get a better whiff of the scent. That was when he took a look at the ornaments. Little glass balls dangling from the branches. To be accurate, little glass eyes. Reed emitted a groan, horrified, and then took a look around him, incredulous that the rest of the crowd was placidly watching the show and sipping from their glasses. The Christmas ornaments on the tree are glass eyes. Good God, am I the only one here that finds that embarrassing?!
“A bit much, isn’t it?” said a deep voice behind him.
Reed turned around and found himself looking at a half-naked man, dressed in nothing but a pair of emerald-green briefs. “Namor,” he said, without much joy in his voice. When he met other former superheroes he rarely reacted with real enthusiasm. Especially when they were Namor. “What are you doing here?”
Namor shrugged with his usual scornful air. “Getting drunk,” he said, raising the glass he held in his hand, “and just like you, taking a look at these lovely ornaments. Our hostess enjoys the occasional self-referential bit of irony, have you noticed?” He shot Reed a penetrating look, as if he could read his thoughts. “But more than anything else,” he added, “she enjoys putting gentlemen like you in awkward situations.” He burst into arrogant laughter, underscoring how superior he felt to all this, and gulped down a hefty swig of wine.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 8