He is completely unaware and does not expect to be photographed at all – Charlie Marseiiles
There’s this game Charlie likes to play. I blame the streak of melodramatic French in him — he can’t help speculating about everyone. We ducked into a bright little coffee shop to escape the damp, heavy air outside. Amid the hiss of the coffee machine, steamy windows, damp clothes and the sweet smell of pastries, Charlie zeroed in on a guy sitting alone, scrolling on his phone, blissfully unaware he’d become the latest target of Charlie’s imagination.
“What is he looking at? Who is he messaging?” Charlie whispered while we waited for our takeaway. I’d heard these questions a hundred times, and I hardly had the energy to answer anymore. His curiosity could tip into something nosy, even a bit rude, and I’d told him more than once that it bordered on prying. Still… I had to admit, despite my protests, it was often weirdly entertaining.
And he was already off. “It’s all very mysterious, but I’ve got a theory,” he said, eyes locked on the boy with the coffee. “He is telling someone he woke up without a care in the world… until a man in the street annoyed him. So he punched him — once — and killed him. And now that boy over there is a murderer.”
Sometimes I wondered whether he was just trying to make me laugh, or if there was something darker in the way he saw people. I glanced at the poor guy and found myself, just for a moment, considering whether Charlie’s wild theory wasn’t entirely impossible.
The room where I try to write has slowly become the room where Charlie paints – always in nothing but his underwear, as though bare skin loosens his imagination. He fills his canvases with young men borrowed from Pinterest photographs, embellishing them with his own wild inventions. His pace is relentless; one wall is already crowded with finished works, while the others gleam with fresh white paint, waiting their turn.
I, by contrast, sit fully clothed at my desk opposite him, my screen a blank page that refuses to yield. His half-naked body distracts me more than the silence we share – a silence that can stretch for hours. My sentences falter, my fingers hover above the keys, while my gaze strays repeatedly to the slope of his shoulder, the subtle shifting of muscle beneath skin. When our eyes do meet, the faintest smile flickers between us, and in that moment, it feels as though the room itself has been written.
Our different pursuits seem to mirror our temperaments: Charlie paints with fearless exposure, while I write with restraint, dressed in caution. Yet the tension coils tighter. My prose begins to echo the shapes of his body, the rhythm of his movements, until the line between art and desire starts to blur.
At times I tell myself I am only imagining it – that Charlie is merely eccentric, his near-nudity no more than a quirk. But each page proves otherwise. It is littered with involuntary admissions: the shadows along his collarbone, the hush of his breath when he leans too close, the bare expanse of thigh against the studio chair. These confessions rise from me slowly, as though I am being coaxed – cornered – into acknowledging what I cannot claim.
Tonight, the silence shatters. My phone vibrates, abrupt as a stone cast into still water. Charlie turns at once, alert, the brush slipping from his hand. “I need a rest from painting,” he announces lightly. “Let me see what you’ve written.” He springs up, knowing I will resist, his request merely a pretext to draw near, to glimpse what has intruded into our silence.
It is from Bianchi in Verona. A thrill runs through me, but I dare not open it – Charlie would notice too much. “Who is Bianchi?” he asks, now beside me, his voice soft but insistent.
“A friend of Cola,” I murmur, unwilling to elaborate. The words hang in the air, evasive, unsatisfying, already unravelling.
“Shameless. He floats naked in the water, the light rippling over chest and stomach. His lips, as if caught between a breath and a moan, his hand loose at his side like he’s waiting to be grabbed. There’s nothing soft about it – just flesh, need, and the unspoken dare in his stillness. Every line built for touch, for heat, waiting to be claimed. The invitation to take what you want. The sight is blunt, undeniable: he wants to be used.”
Charlie had taken his art in a new direction. He was bored, disillusioned with paintings of landscapes, objects and street scenes. A flirtation with what he called ‘art contemporain’ had ended in frustration. “Circles, squares, solid colours, lines, zig-zags … they mean nothing to me!”
The first that I knew about this new path was when I returned home to find Levi, our former lodger, sprawled on the sofa in just his underwear. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he flushed. ”I’m only doing it as a favour.”
Charlie shouted from the bathroom. “I am ready now. The bathtub is full and my camera is ready.” I was bemused to say the least.
Charlie wandered into the room. “Ah, you are home, mon ami. I need the bathroom for thirty minutes while I photograph Levi.”
The Polish boy with the Yorkshire accent followed him along the corridor and into the brightly lit bathroom. With a certain amount of embarrassment he stepped into the bath. “Lay down, Levi, and put your head underwater. I am going to stand on both sides of the bath and take photos from above.”
I watched from the doorway and listened while Levi was told to take deep breaths and submerge himself. Then he had to raise his right arm, then his left, and then both of them together. All the time, Charlie was precariously balancing, taking shot after shot.
When they had finished, Levi stood up, looking satisfyingly toned, and dripping from head to toe. Charlie looked him up and down. “As I suspected, you have a little dick, but we cannot all be lucky. You can get dry now.”
“I feel stupid,” Levi told him, “and I haven’t brought any dry boxer shorts.” Charlie flicked through the images and appeared not to have heard him, so I went to a bedroom drawer and gave him a pair of mine to change into.
That night Charlie spent hours searching for the right photo. The next morning he visited a local print shop and had it blown up to the size of a small poster. He placed it on an artist’s easel and studied it. “I am going to use this photo to create my next painting,” he announced. “If it is successful then I am going to start painting beautiful men from now onwards.”
I reminded him that there had been a time when he would have considered Levi anything but beautiful. “That was the case,” he replied, “but I needed somebody that I knew who was willing to model for me, and when I have finished, I will make him appear extremely homoerotic which is something he is definitely not.”
Charlie was enthusiastic about going hiking in the countryside. I hadn’t realised the motive behind this sudden urge to get into the wild.
Our progress was slow. Every few minutes Charlie would stop, hand me his mobile phone, and ask me to take a video. Charlie walking up a hill towards the camera, Charlie opening a gate and closing it behind him. Charlie pretending to climb a rock face (he was only a few feet from the ground). Charlie walking into the distance. Charlie eating a sandwich. Charlie admiring the valley below.
Each time he said, “Just one more video, and that will be it.” But it never was. He tutted if he wasn’t happy with the results. “You will never make a great director,” he told me, and I was inclined to agree.
We walked ten miles and it took us six hours. Later, as we drank coffee in the late afternoon sun, he informed me that his ‘reel’ had been edited and posted, and that he was getting hundreds of likes. But there was no mention of the unfortunate guy who shot the videos.
“We were brought up as good Catholic boys,” Charlie confided. “But there is no such thing as a good Catholic boy. I am living proof of that.”
Charlie and his brother went to a Catholic school on the outskirts of Paris. He loved it, whereas Thomas hated it, and was expelled for accidentally setting fire to the priest’s Renault Clio.
“But Catholic school turned me into a homosexual, and that makes me sad.” He rolled with laughter. “I fooled you! I have such happy memories. I was a prince amongst pigs.” Was this a French expression that was lost in translation?
The conversation happened before we watched Au revoir les enfants (on DVD, no less). The film is set in a French Catholic school in 1944. A boy – Julien – becomes friendly with a new boy – Jean – who turns out to be a Jew in hiding. Throw in the Germans, and you can guess the rest.
Charlie’s school hadn’t been a boarding school, but he probably wished it had been. Living and sleeping amongst dozens of hormonal schoolboys would have suited him wonderfully.
The film’s end scenes were traumatic. Julien, a precocious boy, nervously glances at his friend, tipping off the Gestapo official and, seemingly, causing Jean’s arrest. Later, as he is being led away, he walks over to shake Julien’s hand, but just as their fingers touch, Jean is snatched away. And when the headmaster, Père Jean, also arrested for harbouring Jews, and utters the line – “Au revoir, les enfants!” – the tears rolled down Charlie’s cheeks.
Louis Malle directed the film and provided the closing voiceover:
“More than forty years have passed, but I will remember every second of that January morning until I die.” (He would depart this world eight years later).
It was based on Malle’s experiences of World War Two when he attended Petit-Collège d’Avon at Fontainebleau. Three Jewish students and a teacher were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz while the school’s headmaster, Père Jacques, would die in the concentration camp at Mauthausen. The memory of his lost friend, and that broken handshake, kept bobbing to the surface, but it took Malle 43 years to make the film.
As the credits rolled, Charlie was in a sombre mood and scanned the back of the empty DVD case. “It was made in 1987, and I cannot believe that I have never seen or heard of this movie before… and it was French too.” He used the fingers of both hands to help him with a calculation. “Do you realise that it has been 38 years since this movie was made? Think about it. Those boy actors will now be old men.”
A second-hand record store. Old French chansons played over the speakers. “Très bien,” Charlie beamed, because it made him feel at home. But this wasn’t France, it was an English suburb on a quiet Saturday afternoon. I Shazamed a song on my phone. It was Jeanne Moreau singing Les Voyages.
Charlie rummaged through a cardboard box of old cassette tapes and I pointed out that had he found something interesting, then he wouldn’t be able to listen to it, because we didn’t have anything to play it on.
And besides, I told him, I was surprised that he even knew what they were because they were obsolete before he’d been born. “That is not the point,” said the Millennium Child. “I have a good reason for looking.”
At last, he found something that pleased him. “This is what I want,” and he held up the soundtrack album to Betty Blue, or 37°2 le matin, if we want to give it the proper title. (I later discovered that it was released in 1986).
“But how are you going to play it?”
“I am not going to listen to it. If I wanted to do that I would listen to the music on Spotify. I have something else in mind.” With that, he borrowed a pound coin with which to buy it.
The apartment. The office (which used to be Levi’s bedroom). The cassette tape is stood upright on a shelf alongside vintage postcards, pebbles and shells collected from beaches, and a wooden model of the Arc de Triomphe. “It is simply for show,” said Charlie.
A few weeks ago, Charlie introduced me to the works of Jacques Tati. We started with Jour de fête (1949) and over a week watched his Monsieur Hulot, featured in Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and Trafic (1971). I’m late to Tati’s work, but it wasn’t hard to catch up, because he made so few films, and the ones that he did were genius.
Charlie knew I would like Tati’s humour but confessed to knowing little about him. Intrigued to find out more, I bought one of the many biographies and spent warm evenings on the terrace absorbed in the life of this French legend.
Tati had a gentle spirit, and a quiet dignity, but behind the camera he could be elusive, stubborn and emotionally distant. This was easily confused with arrogance and I was left with the impression that he wasn’t a nice person. It troubled me because I discovered too many similarities with the person I lived with. I thought, ‘Fuck me! Is Charlie a reincarnation of Jacques Tati?’
Charlie, who tries hard to be good at everything, but doesn’t really know what it is he is best at. Painting? Photography? Modelling? He’s a complex person, committed to artistic vision – sometimes to the point of obsession – and to an outsider he can seem a bit of a shit.
He’s quite the opposite really, but his devotion to art can seem almost monastic. He pushes for the purity of his vision, as though wanting to leave behind something beautiful, and that pursuit can sometimes be baffling.
I explained this to Charlie, and as the English like to say, he got ‘the face on’. “You do not understand my ache of misunderstood devotion,” he replied. “But I appreciate your concern, because it is mine also, and I need to decide what it is that I am going to be brilliant at.”
A hillside in the remote countryside. Serge Gainsbourg sang Black Trombone on the iPhone. Charlie danced in his underwear. His hair formed a question mark on his head. He looked cute. I grabbed him from behind and he reached over and patted me on the head like a dog. Then he pissed into the wind and I got covered from behind.
The day started with a mystery that caused a problem. Charlie had done the laundry and I had been angry. It doesn’t matter how many times that you tell him to separate whites and colours, he refuses to do so. The result was that my white t-shirts came out pink yet again. When I challenged him about it, he sulked, and put the rest of the clothes away in silence.
And then we came to the black Calvin Klein briefs.
Charlie was putting them in my drawer and I pointed out that they didn’t belong to me. He held them between his fingers and examined them. “They are not mine either,” he decided. “They must be yours,” I replied. “They are definitely not mine.”
We stared at the underwear and waited for the other person to admit to owning them. But neither of us coughed up.
Charlie tossed them onto the bed.
“This poses a significant problem,” I decided. “If they don’t belong to either one of us, then whom do they belong to?”
“That is a very good question. Do they belong to someone who you have been sleeping with?”
“In your dreams,” I responded, but there was hesitancy in my voice. Charlie had the ability of making you feel guilty even when you were innocent, and this was one of those occasions. He pounced upon my uncertainty and decided that I had been sleeping with someone who had forgotten to take their underwear home with them.
“I can assure you that I haven’t slept with anyone. The only person that I’ve slept with is you, but even that’s debatable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just a bit upset because I know that they are not mine, nor are they anybody else’s that I know of, so the finger of suspicion points squarely at you. Have you been sleeping with somebody behind my back?”
Charlie rubbed his hands through his hair in desperation. “Do not be disgusting. I have not been sleeping with anybody.”
“Was it one of those American Mormon boys who came knocking at the door? Did one of them come back when I was out?” It was a cheap shot. But a few days before, they had come bright-eyed and eager to save our souls. I’d politely turned them down and said to Charlie that it was inconceivable that every Mormon boy appeared to be cute.
When Charlie was hurt, his French accent became more pronounced. “I believe it when you say that you know nothing about them, but you must also understand that I have nothing to do with them either.”
“But whose are they?”
“I have no idea. But maybe they belonged to Levi who left them behind when he moved out.”
“But that was weeks ago,” I said.
“I guess that there is no other explanation.”
And that was where we left it. Black Calvin Klein underwear unclaimed.
Charlie stands in the glow that surrounds him. He is a dark silhouette bathed in the yellowish hue of an afternoon sun. He is unrecognisable and might be anybody. I hear strange voices that are drowned by the cries of seagulls. I help him down from the harbour wall and he smells of wood sage and sea salt.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 