*
In March, regular classes were suspended for spring break. For a few days, the campus emptied out. Alyson went home to see her folks, and I finally had to admit that I couldn’t come up with any more excuses. One afternoon I caught a bus from the Port Authority terminal. I remember that the feminine sexy scent of some previous passenger hovered over my seat. I remember sucking in that smell as if it were an anaesthetic, and allowing myself to be transported out of the city.
Leaving New York made me feel like a space colonist who was venturing, at his own risk, outside the protective confines of the colony. Like many provincials, I had developed an overblown pride in the metropolis to which I’d escaped. It hadn’t taken long for me to acquire the sort of mistrust and hazy resentment that many New Yorkers seem to harbour towards everything that has the unforgivable defect of, quite simply, not being New York.
Sunlight shimmered on the road. Outside the bus window, other vehicles were nothing but incandescent fragments. The New Jersey landscape lay before my eyes with its blend of green and residential areas, highway interchanges, gas stations. From the roof of a McDonald’s, the silhouette of their clown mascot seemed to scan the traffic on the road like a sentinel. As the bus drove into Clifton, it passed the library I went to as a kid, and I wondered what had become of the librarian, the girl who chewed cinnamon gum. I wondered whether the old archives of news magazines were still stashed away in there. Who could say. I thought about all the time I’d spent hunting through those magazines for the subject that obsessed me, hundreds of magazines with torn-out pages, pages filled with holes, snipped and clipped, like they’d been subjected to some maniacal form of censorship.
It was incredible to find everything exactly where it always had been. Even my folks’ little house was right there, with its motionless appearance and the back door ajar.
As I walked in, I found a dense penumbra. I came to a halt, disorientated. A sense of alarm came towards me from within the house, making me wobble in the dark hallway. When I tried to swallow, my throat produced something like a crackle.
I stuck my head into the kitchen. My mother was staring towards the door, as if expecting me, an unmissable look of fear on her face. That look. That ashen face. I had a sense of déjà vu. The air in the room seemed to freeze, to become as solid as glass. We stayed there, staring at each other, paralysed, while from overhead came the sound of footsteps. It was all the same as that other time. All just like that afternoon, years ago, and I hoped that once again she would thrust a couple of dollars into my hand and send me to the store to get a bag of sugar.
My mother didn’t move. I was eighteen, old enough not to run away, old enough to remain motionless, this time, as the footsteps descended the stairs.
A man walked through the other door of the kitchen. I wouldn’t know how else to describe him. A man. Middle-aged, unremarkable face. The kind of man who might have stood in line next to me at the checkout of a supermarket. The kind of man who might have been in a car stopped at a red light while I was crossing the street, the kind of man I could have passed any day on the sidewalk. A walk-on part, an anonymous shred of humanity. I could have run into him anywhere, no question, but now he was in the house where I’d grown up, standing in front of me in my mother’s kitchen. The intruder touched his tie. He gave me a look and seemed to wonder who the hell I might be. He turned to my mother and in the tone of a teacher evaluating an exercise: “Not bad at all. As usual. Could you tell her to smile every once in a while? That’d be nice.” He nodded goodbye and left.
We remained there alone. My mother picked up a dish towel and dried her hands. She threw open the window to let in a breath of air. “Stay here,” she said, without looking me in the eye.
I heard her climb the stairs. I heard her footsteps, lighter than the man’s, as she moved towards the bedroom. There was a silence. A shiver ran up my spine. It was a deep, unnatural silence that lasted about a minute. I had no idea what was happening, nor what was the meaning of the man’s words. I imagined myself walking straight out of the house, without leaving a trace, pretending I’d never witnessed that scene.
My mother’s footsteps came down the stairs. She reappeared with a weary smile, pulled out a chair, and collapsed onto it. I collapsed onto a chair myself, exhausted, weakened by the thought that a man like that, nondescript and without a past, should have anything to do with my mother’s life.
“I thought you said you were coming tomorrow,” she sighed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I really was sorry. About getting the day wrong, about the situation I’d witnessed. “A misunderstanding,” I whispered, astonished that it should all come down to such a trivial thing. A misunderstanding. I’d said I would be there one day, she had meant a different day. It was so easy not to understand one another. Misunderstandings hide everywhere, like so many bacteria.
“Don’t ask me for an explanation,” she implored.
“I didn’t intend to.”
She ran her fingers through her thick, fine hair. She did it carefully as though afraid she might make a noise. “Your brother will be home in half an hour.”
“I’ll wait for him,” I replied.
“We’ve missed you. I imagine it’s nice, down there in New York,” she said, continuing to caress her hair. She seemed determined to pretend that everything was normal. “One of these days,” she added, “you could bring your girlfriend to visit.”
I laid my arms on the table, even more exhausted, as the light of afternoon waned outside the windows. “Sure. One of these days.”
*
“And why on earth should I do such a thing?” Alyson looked at me squarely, with a baffled expression. We were walking along the river not far from the Christopher Street piers. Night had just fallen and a variegated lazy crowd was milling around along the Hudson.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s not that complicated.” A few yards from the river’s edge, the pilings of ancient wharfs broke the water’s surface like the heads of silent alligators. I contemplated the motion of the water against the pilings and then cast my gaze, like a fishing net, out towards the night-time panorama of New Jersey on the far side of the river. I cleared my throat and tried to give Alyson some contrived explanation for the reason I was asking her to call my mother, and specifically why I was asking her to do it on a certain day, at a certain time.
Alyson continued to seem doubtful. With a typical gesture, she took off her glasses as if to eliminate all barriers between us, and waited for me to offer a more convincing explanation. When it became clear that I wasn’t about to add anything more, she put her glasses back on and shook her head. “All right. I know a place not far from here. At least buy me a drink,” she sighed, and continued to walk along next to me.
A few days later, I boarded a bus for Clifton. Another bus, another seat to sink into. This time, no scent of a girl. Nothing but the neutral odour of the bus itself, and perhaps the smell of the sweat that clung to me. I felt hot and uneasy. I certainly questioned the wisdom of what I was about to do, and yet I didn’t see any way to avoid doing it. The need to know had been building up inside me for years. It was a Friday afternoon, one week exactly after my last visit. The same time of day. Whatever had been going on last time, I guessed the same thing was going on now.
I got to the house and stood in silence outside the back door, breathing softly, until I heard the phone ring inside. Five on the dot. I let a few more seconds go by, calculating how long it would take for my mother to reach the phone. Then I slipped inside. It all seemed simple, almost too perfect. I could hear my mother’s voice: “Alyson? Bruce’s girlfriend?”
From the corner of the kitchen where she kept the phone, my mother would be unable to see me as I crept towards the stairs. She wouldn’t see me start up the steps, nor would she hear me, focused as she was on the conversation, as I cautiously headed upstairs.
“I told Bruce to bring you here sometime. It would be nice to meet you. What?” An
incredulous pause. “He told you to call me and get a recipe?”
I set my foot on the top step. For a moment I swayed, as dizziness swept over me. Until then, it had been simple, a harmless, almost petty adventure, little more than foolish bravado. I could have turned around with a victorious smile, without venturing any further, happy just to have come this far, like in one of those kids’ games where you have to capture the adversary’s flag. I’d done it. I’d slipped unobserved upstairs.
My heartbeat pounding in my head. A choking sensation in my throat. I kept going, down the hall, to the end where a zone of darkness stagnated, motionless, like the water in the loop of a river. I reached my parents’ bedroom door, behind which I could hear the sound of breathing. There. If I close my eyes I can see myself. I see myself at the threshold of that door. I’m about to discover something, something I don’t want to discover, and I wish that someone would come and grab me, at that precise moment, and drag me away from the half-light of the hallway.
I barely pushed the door. The chilly door handle. Through the crack I saw the scene. I saw a man on the bed, a stranger, another unremarkable man, different from the man who was here the week before. I saw his naked body. The off-white flesh, a few hairs on his back. I saw the woman underneath him, also naked. I saw that it was my mother. My eyes were burning but I kept them open. It really was my mother, on that bed, her hair scattered across the pillow, with an indecipherable expression on her face, neither disgust nor pleasure, as the man grunted on top of her.
I could still hear the voice, my mother’s voice, talking on the phone downstairs. My mother was in the kitchen. My mother was on that bed. As the man began speeding up his pace, she turned her head, and her eyes met mine. I took a step backwards. Something in my chest seemed to swell up, burning like an ember caressed by the breeze. I’d figured it out. Perhaps I let out a moan, but it merged with the moans of the man as he came.
When I got downstairs, my mother had finished the phone call and was waiting for me. She’d heard my footsteps. She’d guessed everything. There were two cups of tea on the table. By now, not many explanations were necessary. After all, I’d spent years reading about people with strange powers.
I sat across from her. The tea was piping hot, it tasted of sugar and infinite misery.
The man came downstairs and made his appearance in the kitchen, fully dressed, his face still sweaty. His fat neck was red and mottled. He seemed to have a more cordial personality than the guy from last week: mistaking me for the next client, he gave me a pat on the back. “Enjoy her, young man. She’s hot and wet.”
I shut my eyes, gripping the tea cup, resisting the temptation to smash it into his face. It wasn’t hard to imagine blood all over that unremarkable face. His face lacerated by the shards of my cup.
When I opened my eyes again, the man had gone. My mother was standing in front of me, trembling. Before going upstairs, she took a deep breath. “Bruce,” she whispered. She bit her lip until tears came to her eyes. “This will be our secret,” she said. “You’re the only one who can understand. Neither your father nor your brother can ever know about this. Our secret, Bruce.”
*
To a certain extent, I think she was relieved that I had found out. She’d kept her secret for too many years now. She refused to tell me how long she’d been receiving clients in the house, but I had to guess that it was since Dennis and I were children. It must have been since then. Maybe it had been since my father first got his job. I still remembered the day when, as a child, I had seen my father’s boss at the slaughterhouse leave our place. It wasn’t hard to guess in retrospect who had persuaded him not to fire my father, and how he had been persuaded. Not hard at all. It all fitted together. The history of my family emerged, before my eyes, like an ancient inscription from under a layer of sand.
From the few things she told me, and from what I was able to guess, I reconstructed the story of her power. She had discovered it immediately after her arrival in America. It consisted of the ability to double her body for short periods of time. To create a double. Another body identical to her own, a perfect twin. At first, it happened rarely, on occasional afternoons when she was alone at home. She would lock herself in the bathroom, take off her clothes, and extract that second body from her own. It demanded a level of concentration and a physical effort that was impossible to define, something that made her sweat and tremble.
She and her double. My mother’s second body never spoke, it just looked out on the world wide-eyed. She gave it baths in the tub. She washed its hair. She cared for that frightened second body. Once she had kissed it on the lips. She hugged it for hours at a time, to protect it, to feel protected, and sometimes, after reabsorbing it into herself, she felt an urge to weep, a remorse not unlike what a murderer must feel.
She was careful not to mention her secret to anyone. And she had no fantasies about becoming famous. She wasn’t interested in fame, even supposing her power could bring her some fame. At times, I have wondered whether things might have gone differently, and whether she could have used her powers in another way. Would I have preferred to see her working in television? Would I have wanted to see her make a stab at a career as an old-school superhero, like the ones I loved so passionately as a boy: fighting evil and all those dusty illusions from the old days?
I doubt that she felt sufficiently heroic, or that she felt a sufficient hunger for attention. She wanted her children to have a normal mother. Not that she worshipped normality or anything like that, it was just that she wanted to protect them. Fame and television struck her as dank things, as toxic as black mould. She felt the urge to shelter her sons. In America you could never be sheltered enough. She had a family, and that was the only thing that mattered.
The business with the clients began during one of those money crunches she and my father fell into every few months. Gas bills and late notices on various loans piled up on the refrigerator door, stuck there with little magnets. Money crunches were like seasons. They came back cyclically, they came back always. There hadn’t been much of a choice. There were a thousand ways to make use of a body, and she’d made her tortured decision. She’d decided how to use her second body. Her double had screamed with the first man. Then it stopped.
No one had ever bothered to notice the comings and goings of strange men. We didn’t interact much with our neighbours. Her clients assumed she had a twin sister, a mental defective or something of the sort, a poor brainless unfortunate who was kept hidden in the house like a family secret, a sort of trained animal who had been taught, over time, to spread her legs wide.
I think that in the beginning it was once a month, just to meet some unexpected expense. Twice a month. Three times a month. The more we boys grew, the more extra expenses there were.
My brother Dennis and I had to go to the dentist. If we got sick, we were taken to see a good paediatrician. We ate good food, no frozen TV dinners or any of that garbage. We never felt poor, we grew up without luxuries, but also without privations. It was my college education, I think, that threw things into turmoil. Once I left for New York, my mother’s second body had to come into existence much more often. Like a creature forced to experience a repeated rebirth, it had opened its eyes to the world at a steadily more frequent pace.
That body had stopped screaming years ago. In a certain sense, cruel as the thought might be, I suppose she really resembled a trained animal. At first, all this overwhelmed me, but not as much as it should have. It’s not her, I said to myself. It’s another body, another flesh.
Whether my mother still felt that urge to weep every time she reabsorbed her second body was something that I chose not to ask. That wasn’t her. I wasn’t me. No one was anyone, just shadows, characters in a dream, in a bizarre spectacle.
*
We went to the movies, one of those evenings, to see a screening of a restored copy of The Mark of Zorro. Knowing that that old movie was one of my favourites, Alyson had bought tickets. I’d s
een it dozens of times. We sat there, in the darkened theatre, watching while Tyrone Power made fools of the baddies, serving justice and winning love. As always, the moment when Zorro removes his mask touched me and filled me with a vague sense of regret. Then I was surprised. I’d seen it dozens of times but for the first time I thought I understood. Here’s who that character was. Zorro. I really felt I had figured out what he was. A wealthy heir who played at being a hero. Even back in the days of the black-clad swordsman, I thought to myself, being a hero was a luxury strictly for the wealthy.
There was a guest of honour in the movie theatre. It was well known that this was Bruce Wayne’s favourite movie. I managed to catch a glimpse of my childhood hero, through the crowd, at the end of the screening. It was him. People were crowding around him, asking for autographs. He had a youthful appearance, and in my opinion he was a little too perfectly groomed. He looked like he was about forty although by then he must already have been about fifty. “Hey!” Alyson exclaimed. “There’s Batman. Let’s go get a closer look.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said. Batman couldn’t do anything for me. Not for me, not for anybody. It had been ten days or so since I’d found out about the thing with my mother. This new awareness was still sinking down into me, deeper and deeper, into the damper layers of my consciousness. Sinking ever deeper. Perhaps there was no bottom. Perhaps that heavy secret was tearing through each layer, lacerating all resistance, and it would go on descending into me forever. I took Alyson’s hand. She didn’t know anything and maybe, by holding her hand, I might regain a state of blissful ignorance myself. We headed for the exit. “Why don’t we just go get a hamburger,” I smiled, prodding her.
Erotic Lives of the Superheroes Page 29