“I don’t want to talk about her any more,” Reed rebelled. He felt his face burning, the corners of his mouth drying out. “I’m not ready, not yet.”
“You’re not ready?!” Ben seemed to be on the verge of breaking into laughter again. “I can’t say if all this is funny or tragic. If I compare the Reed I know with the Reed who’s spouting these idiotic replies…”
“Ben, please.”
“Man, just don’t tell me that you’re not ready,” Ben growled, making the phone vibrate again. “I’m pretty sure the two of you have been dating for a while.”
Reed made an effort at self-control. He didn’t want to fight with his old friend. “As far as that goes, we haven’t been seeing much of each other lately,” he let slip, as if it were the most uninteresting of facts. As though that break in his relationship with Elaine weren’t pushing him towards madness, as though he didn’t feel relegated to a terrible, obscene limbo, and as though he weren’t secretly scrambling to do anything he could to get out of his exile. To be redeemed from limbo. To see Elaine again. To have Elaine’s body, the real one, back in his arms.
“Listen, you old slab of gum, stop telling me things that I know already. The girl is in Houston. Everyone knows that. And everyone is wondering, by the way, just how you dared to show up for that committee in Washington.”
Reed closed his eyes. “Jesus,” he whispered. “Everyone who?”
“The thing is,” Ben kept going, without giving a sign that he’d heard what Reed said, “she’ll come back to New York sooner or later. And what will you do then?” He stopped, and a flash of suspicion entered his voice: “That is, of course, unless you show up in Houston in the meantime…”
Reed said nothing. Now he felt totally exposed. He shot a guilty glance at his computer screen, where the email waited, silently, for him to finish it. That email. Those words, so carefully chosen, those formal phrases. Reed stared at the letters on the screen, hypnotised, trying to find his next line in them like in the words of a script.
“Reed? You wouldn’t be thinking of…” Ben was talking softly, like to a child. “Don’t do it, Reed. Don’t make yourself ridiculous, that wouldn’t be like you. Listen to an old friend. You’ve fallen hard, that’s something that happens. But this is enough. Don’t scrape the bottom. There’s nothing romantic about hitting the bottom, however romantic it might look from a distance.” He took a deep breath, and continued: “When it’s all said and done, what is it you want to do with this girl? You want to have children? Do you want to marry her and introduce her as the new Mrs. Richards? You know that’s not possible, Reed. You know that perfectly well. You’ve got too much personal style to try pulling a prank like that. Even you have no idea what to do with this woman. You want to have her, but you don’t know why. I know you, believe me, I really know you. If you truly thought you could build something with her, you would have introduced her to the world. You would have brought her down here, to meet your friend, the old rock man, so I could give you my blessing. And you know I would have given it. I would have done it, Reed, if I’d seen that you believed in her. But you don’t. You’re just luxuriating in the role of the hopeless lover. You’ve decided to cause yourself some pain, to play the role of a martyr to love. It’s a dangerous game, Reed. New York is full of lunatics, you don’t want to be the king of the lunatics.”
Reed felt a twinge. He felt as soft as a piece of butter, while the words of his friend stabbed into him like a hot knife. He thought of his friend’s body, that body of massive rock. From that throat of rock, only words like those could have emerged. Gruff. Heavy. Reed recognised that it was true, it was the pure truth, he’d avoided introducing Elaine to anyone, he’d kept her a secret, she’s the one person who has caused the greatest turmoil in my life in the past several years, and no one I know has seen her but the doorman of my building. Not even Annabel had met her. Ben had seen a picture of her, and as for Franklin, the very thought pushed him to the brink of panic. He could never introduce Elaine to Franklin. He could never imagine them side by side. Maybe because if they were in the same place, it would become impossible to ignore that Elaine was a perfect girl for his son, certainly not for him. Or maybe it was because Elaine herself had never seemed very eager to be introduced to Franklin or to anyone else, and that fact had always stirred up a mixture of relief and bitterness in him. She doesn’t want to be acknowledged. She has no interest in having the world know about us.
“Reed?”
He had to say something. He had to reassure his friend, start talking again. He heaved a sigh, and did his best to soft-pedal: “Thanks, old rock. I’ll keep your words in mind.”
Ben didn’t seem reassured. “The time is past for falling in love like that, Reed. This is not the time to be distracted by things like that.”
“Now you too?!” Reed said. “I’ve already heard this lecture.”
“Then maybe it’s a good lecture.”
Outside it was evening, the room was dark.
The computer screen illuminated his desk, spreading a vague glow around his body, like luminescent plankton in the ocean depths. Reed continued to stare at the screen. He continued to stare at the half-written message. The message that he would soon send, that would travel through miles of wires, connections, and radio relays, broken down into elementary electric impulses, after which it would reach its destination, on another screen, and reassemble itself before the eyes of a stranger. The message that he had long imagined writing. The message in which he invented imaginary research requirements. The message in which he requested, with the deployment of some adroit diplomacy, the use of certain laboratories at the Johnson Space Centre, in Houston. The message with which, in practical terms, he was inviting himself to come to Houston.
*
New York was suffocating, and it wasn’t even April yet. A mantle of stunning heat descended upon the city. Reed would spend long minutes scrutinising the street, from his office window, as though he were waiting for a signal of some kind. Lost in a reverie, watching the numbered roofs of the buses going by below, the incessant movement of the swarms of taxis. For the first time, the idea of the work awaiting him failed to trigger a flow of energy in him; instead, it prompted a surge of nausea.
The last few days had been a sort of blurry patch. He’d taught a class at Columbia University, where he’d lost his temper with some of the students because, in his view, they were asking stupid questions. He’d eaten solitary meals in a restaurant where he’d once had dinner with Elaine. He’d missed a number of appointments without much remorse, he’d avoided answering a fair number of phone calls, and hadn’t even bothered to upbraid that foundation consultant when he was late turning in a report once again. He’d found a message from Franklin, saying that he would be coming to New York, and a couple of messages from Dennis De Villa, the police officer, who was apparently trying to get in touch with him. He’d sent a short reply to his son but had avoided answering the detective’s messages. He didn’t feel like dealing with the paranoid ideas of the police.
Even enjoyable things seemed to have become impossible. He had skipped several of his sessions at the gym and missed a sauna he’d reserved at the George Hotel. He could feel the days slip through his hands. He could feel time dripping through his fingers. All his life, he’d been able to impose order on the weeks, the days, he’d known how to govern the elusive material of the everyday. He’d been able to keep from squandering his energy. He’d focused, he’d imposed a form upon himself, and the last thing he’d have expected, now, was to lose that form. He’d tricked himself into believing that once he was past a certain age, order would become implicit, inseparable from his life itself.
The only thing he managed was to check the mail on his computer. He was waiting for an answer from Houston. In the meantime, he continued calling Elaine every other night or so, ignoring the weary, possibly bored tone of her voice when she answered. He avoided making any reference to his possible visit to Houston. He want
ed it to be a surprise. Whether a welcome or unwelcome one, a surprise nonetheless. He wanted to be the kind of man who was still capable of astonishing her. A man who was capable of showing up, without warning, and claiming his share of attention.
Elaine told him about her days. She told him about classes in meteorology, parachute training, zero-gravity simulations, lift-off and landing tests, complicated software for handling the spacecraft. She told him all these things as if she were talking about an enchanted world to which he would never have access. Reed felt like laughing at her stories. He felt like telling her that he knew every detail of that world backwards and forwards, and that a 300-million-dollar mission, organised on the fly for obscure reasons, didn’t impress him. He’d seen better than that in his career. But he couldn’t laugh. He could only grip the telephone, hang on to her accounts, and focus on her voice with a blend of wonderment, resentment, and adoration.
He pretended that everything was still the same. He pretended not to know that Elaine, by now, had got everything she could have wanted from him. She’s satisfied her curiosity. She’s had the experience of taking her old childhood hero as a lover and she even got a boost in getting selected for this mission. What else can I offer her now?
Night after night, her voice grew increasingly distant. “You’re already in outer space in your mind,” he said one evening, putting on a playful tone of voice.
“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” was her pragmatic reply.
Reed dreamed often. He dreamed about the colour of her flesh, like a magnolia petal, the curve of her smile when she came. He dreamed of scenes with embraces, rediscovered intimacy, that crystalline happiness that only revealed itself in dreams. Elaine welcoming him into her apartment in Brooklyn on an afternoon of bright sunlight. Elaine in the sauna with him, massaging him without haste. Reed woke up at dawn, sweaty, his penis pulsating, a stabbing pain in his hip and limbs. Since the evening of his collapse that pain had come back constantly. Dreams of idyllic scenes filled his nights, but it was pain that permeated every reawakening. The pain came in waves, not unlike Morse code, and seemed to herald an enigmatic announcement.
Maybe Ben was right. Maybe the Ecuadorian driver was too. That time had passed. You couldn’t live in that kind of exalted melancholy any more, not here, not now, it was an excessive luxury, something that belonged to bygone times. The heartbreaking yearning, the outsized passion: straight out of a nineteenth-century French novel. Strictly for mid-twentieth-century Hollywood studio movies. Reed had always been happy to live in his own time, and he didn’t care much for people who fantasised about living in other periods of history. Yet here he was, just like them, dreaming about living in other times. Oh, to fall in love the way people fell in love in the Twenties, in silent movies. To fall in love the way they did in Europe, during the war, with the sensation that the world was about to end, but that it would eventually rise from the ashes. To fall in love the way they did in the Fifties, the way an existentialist loved a woman in Paris, or the way a vagabond beat loved a girl in San Francisco. To fall in love like in the Sixties, when he met Sue for the first time, at college, and the air felt a thousand times less hard than it was now. To fall in love like in the Seventies, when in New York you could go out every night, to dance, to love, to fight, when the superheroes patrolled the neighbourhoods, drinking in the city’s bottomless energy. To fall in love like in the Eighties, when everyone wore a mask of cynicism as if they were going to a masquerade, without realising that they’d never be able to take off that mask again. Or like in the Nineties, when the internet promised to make everyone happy, or at least wealthy.
Or maybe to fall in love, who knows, the way people will fall in love in the future, in some as yet unknown manner. To fall in love like in the years to come, when people will look back on that horrible time, the early years of the millennium, a time when everyone lived in a state of panic, hurtling to and fro in the dark like inside an anthill, and every project appeared impossible, including the idea of an encounter, two people meeting, and actually recognising each other.
*
Ben popped up again a few days later, this time in person. He presented himself in Reed’s office dressed in an elegant custom-tailored suit which barely disguised his massive body. On his head he wore a panama hat that gave him a whimsical holiday look, and his leather shoes came in a size that, at a glance, must be half again as big as Reed’s shoes.
“Richards, what reason would you have to give me that look of amazement? I live just a three-hour drive from New York, not in some other universe.” Without a lot of ceremony, Ben added that he was hungry, that outside the sky was blue, and that he wanted to see the beaches of New York again. “So move your skinny rubber ass,” he said to Reed, sticking a large cigar into his mouth.
Reed shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t leave the office.”
“Who’s keeping you?” Ben asked, sitting in a chair that creaked ominously under his weight.
Reed didn’t know what to say. That day he had no appointments. The only work he would do, most likely, would be checking his emails a thousand times or so. He was speechless, still amazed at this visit from his friend, and overwhelmed by the sudden revelation: he could do it. In fact, no one would keep him from doing it. He could leave the office at 11:30 on a weekday morning.
Even Annabel was somewhat astonished. She sat there watching as the two of them left the office, possibly appalled at Ben’s orange rocky body and his five hundred pounds of sheer mass. Or perhaps just at the fact that Reed was leaving the office. “See you around, little darling,” Ben said, and her jaw dropped a little further.
Outside, the weather was balmy. Reed inhaled deeply, feeling a blend of remorse and a sense of freedom. Ben pointed him towards his pickup truck parked at an angle, wheels on the sidewalk. A young female traffic cop was writing out a ticket, but her face drained when she saw Ben coming. “My God, I know you… You were in that commercial… You’re…you…”
“Sweetheart, if you’re about to ask me whether I’m the Incredible Hulk, you’d do better to keep your mouth shut.” He smacked a kiss into the air with his rock lips, and climbed into the vehicle. The truck sank a good five inches. “Reed, are you going to get in, or do you want to roll up in a circle and act as my spare tyre?”
They headed south. Manhattan looked like an anthill that had been ripped open. Ben immediately started cursing the midday traffic that threatened to delay his lunchtime. “I know a fabulous Japanese place along the road to Jamaica Bay,” he announced.
“It’ll take at least an hour to get down there!” Reed objected. “Jesus, I ought to be in the office,” he added, even though he knew it was too late to change his mind. He settled back in his seat, suddenly relaxed, glancing over at his friend’s profile. His rough facial features, the familiar physiognomy. The passage of time had partly smoothed out Ben’s expression. But it was still Benjamin Grimm, the legendary rock man, a daunting colossus with a rocky body, his one-time adventure companion. Reed felt like reaching out and touching the rough, warm material that made up that body.
The sun went on shining along the road. They drove with the windows down. “I can’t believe you left your idyllic village on a day like this,” Reed resumed. “You must have had to give up a morning of great fishing.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Ben sneered. “I can see you don’t have a clue about fishing. Bright sunny days are no good for fishing.” Ben jammed his foot down on the gas pedal as they crossed the bridge over the East River, with the enthusiasm of a Renaissance paladin riding to conquer new realms. He was enjoying the excursion. Although he had chosen to live holed up like a bear, he still liked to get out and about now and then. Ten years ago, he’d received an offer to appear in a television commercial for an insurance company: your policy will be as solid as a rock. He hadn’t thought twice. He pocketed the money and fled north to New England, where he bought himself a house in a small coastal town and a pickup truck with th
e most spacious cab and the sturdiest seats available. For a while, after that commercial, he’d received other offers for television work. Are you kidding?! Only losers appear on TV. People who are no good to the world any more. I have plenty of things to do here, in my little house, paid for with your very nice money. He didn’t want to hear about it. He’d got everything he needed, enough to live untroubled, and from then on he had decided to leave well enough alone.
They stopped for lunch not far from the Brooklyn Museum, in a Japanese restaurant where Ben said he had eaten before, and where they served awesome nattō beans. “Oh, no,” Reed moaned. “Don’t tell me you still eat that stuff.”
“Of course I do. How do you think I stay in such fine shape?” Ben asked, launching into a rudimentary pirouette on the sidewalk, under the astonished eyes of the passersby.
At the restaurant, Ben ordered a double helping of soba noodles as well as various dishes of fried vegetables, along with his beloved nattō.
“Disgusting,” Reed sniffed, as he watched his friend scoop the slimy beans into his mouth. “Who would ever have thought that Ben Grimm, the stone colossus, would eat that stuff?”
“Hey. I know that Brooklyn makes you irritable. But leave off my food and keep your nose in your own plate of tasteless white rice.”
Half an hour later, they reached the ocean. Suddenly, the city fell away, and the glittering water advertised its presence as the truck hurtled across the steel bridge extending towards the strip of land of the Rockaways. They drove a couple of miles along the peninsula, until they decided to park the truck and walk, finally, on the sandy beach. “I can’t believe it,” said Reed, almost stunned to discover that here, an hour’s drive from his office, such a sense of peace could be found. A warm breeze was blowing off the ocean. The sky was bright as a pearl, streaked slightly to the north by planes taking off from JFK. A few surfers were bobbing erect in the waves, and strollers went by up and down the beach.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 14