And I always wondered, why does she get special treatment.
So, one day, I ask her.
‘Marcus and I have an arrangement,’ Anna says. ‘I do something for him and he does it for me.’
This is how we bond, Anna and I, over Marcus. Our mutual obsession. My secret. Her lover.
What kind of arrangement, I say.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘let me put it this way. Marcus has special needs… ’
I’m wondering what those special needs could be.
Does Marcus ask Anna to lick his balls while he deconstructs The 400 Blows. Or fuck her from behind as he recites quotes from What is Cinema? by André Bazin. Does he like Anna to stick her pinky in his stinky as he debates the ins and outs of abjection theory?
I can’t wait for her to tell me. There are so many details I want to square with my fantasies of what turns Marcus on and how he fucks. And I can only think the reality is so much better than I could ever imagine.
So, after class, we grab some coffee and go sit outside on a bench, as students rush back and forth around us trying to get to their next lesson. We sit under a tree, shielded from the mid-morning sun already high in the sky, because Anna’s skin is pale and she prefers it to stay that way. ‘I burn easily,’ she says.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘tell me. I have to know, because it’s been driving me crazy, what is Marcus’ special kink?’
‘He likes to do it in the dark.’
My heart sinks. Marcus sounds so depressingly normal.
‘I thought you said he was a freak. That doesn’t sound very freaky.’
‘Wait, let me finish,’ she says. ‘In a closet. He likes to do it in a closet.’
I’m still not convinced and frown slightly.
‘He’s really shy, you know,’ Anna says, sensing my disappointment. ‘He has this large closet in his apartment and it’s an old worn and wooden antique. There’s nothing of any comfort in his apartment, no couches, no pillows, no throw cushions, no carpet, not even curtains on the windows.’
‘Not even a bed?’ I ask.
‘He sleeps on a mattress on the floor, but we’ve never fucked on it,’ says Anna. ‘And I opened his refrigerator once,’ she continues, ‘and it was almost empty. The only thing inside was tea. Not tea leaves, tea bags. A box of value-pack tea bags. No milk.’
While Marcus’ apartment is lacking furniture and sustenance, Anna tells me, there’s one thing it’s not short of: books and papers.
‘There are books crammed into every inch of these floor-to-ceiling bookcases that line the walls,’ she says. ‘They’re all meticulously arranged by subject: film and sex, art and religion, psychology and medicine. And when he ran out of space on the shelves, he started piling them up on the floor, on tables, chairs, the way a hoarder uses up every available bit of space at his disposal.
‘Plus, where the bookcases aren’t, the walls are covered in art. Erotic art. Nothing very pornographic,’ Anna says, ‘just strange dirty pictures.’
Anna tells me about the blurry photographs of couples fucking that look like paintings by Francis Bacon. Street scenes of prostitutes. Salacious cartoons. Things that don’t even look like erotic art at all – dense, sprawling collages of clippings from newspapers and magazines of faces, places and objects – but which clearly serve some erotic purpose for Marcus. And things that can’t be mistaken for anything else.
Anna says that there are two paintings in particular that have captured her interest more than any of the others. They’re hung side by side in a little alcove off the entrance hallway, right when you come through the front door, and whenever she goes to visit Marcus, she’ll just stand there and stare at them for a while.
One is of two women, the curvature of their prone bodies lying side by side, forming a pair of lips. They both wear suspenders and stockings and have pert orb-like breasts with cherry red nipples.
‘One of the women looks like you,’ Anna tells me. ‘A brunette, with a sweet, sexy smile, who wears a lace bridal veil. But the other one, you can’t see her head. Where the head should be are two arms that emerge from the inky background of the painting like crabs’ legs and hold her nipples like pincers.’
She tells me that the other painting is so odd that it’s difficult to describe. At first, it looks like three female bodies in fishnet stockings engaged in a ménage à trois. But when you look closer there are male body parts mixed up with the female ones. Sex organs and limbs sprouting where they really shouldn’t be. Phantom hands that seem to push and pull and grope. It’s all confused and a little disturbing. She’s decided that what she’s looking at is one body made up of many, a creature of indeterminate sex.