The Romanian (14 page)

XI

IN SYRACUSE, I grow closer to another body that has, sad to say, surpassed the probable. It's almost as if Mom's entire biology had been reduced to her enormous will. She's thinner than when I last saw her, a month ago, with nearly skeletal arms and legs, swollen ankles and a drooping belly. Miraculously she keeps running on empty, struggling in a chirping voice to the kitchen with her walker, looking determined, then bitter and disappointed, when she can't lift a half-gallon of orange juice by herself.

A few days after I got back from Bucharest, she fell and broke a hip; or rather, her porous hip may have crumbled, sending her to the floor. My brother flew up immediately for the surgery, and it went unbelievably well; but her recovery became a purgatory, truly an infelicitous term for the effects the morphine had on her.

She'd ended up by chance in a Catholic hospital. After each morphine injection, which sent her into delirium, she became convinced that the crucifix her bed faced had been put there by the nurses to mock her, in a kind of teasing crucifixion of a Jew. This was obviously a resurgence of her childhood agonies as the only Jew in her tiny village in upstate New York, when she bit her tongue in a red, humiliated face, as the Gentile English teacher harped on the despicable personality of Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice.
Luckily, Mom's regression was temporary, a common reaction of the aged to opiates.

Strange that the very substances that stretch my thoughts into vaulting ecstasies should plunge her into doubt and grotesque imaginings. But then Mom has always looked askance at painkillers. She feels they interfere with the exercise of the will. I remember how astonished I was as a teenager when I found out she had refused Novocain when she visited the dentist for a tooth-pulling.

After just a few weeks in physical rehab with either my brother or me by her bed, Mom regained her ability to walk and all her critical faculties. She learned to laugh at the experience. Now her mind is little changed, but her body, with its replaced hip, arthritis-twisted hands and bowed spine, looks years away from how it looked when I last saw her. It doesn't prevent being near it from filling me with waves of painful sweetness. To me her ravaged flesh is . . . desirable. It's still the body that wore the bright scarves and the pearl-gray cinched-waist suits, bouncing me on her lap and letting me play with her costume jewelry.

We haven't had a very pleasant business. Mom's nearness to the end has only made me yearn more intensely for approval. And she's become even more relentlessly determined to know and correct every detail of my life. I've tried to ease her into the story of my attachment for Romulus, leaving out the underclass details and portraying him as a toiling but disadvantaged working-class boy who sincerely cares for me. Impishly, she keeps forgetting his name every time she mentions him, calling him instead Chaim Yankel, the comic Yiddish pejorative for “village idiot.” This causes me to bristle and sends her into peals of naughty laughter. Her gibes wound me and make me redouble my efforts to get her to like him. How long will the child keep crawling back to the mother's breast? Until he's crawling back to her grave? Seeking solace on a carcass so close to the time when flies will come buzzing has a certain value. In some strange way you're approaching the ultimate meaning of generation as well as your own death.

My first futile attempt to escape her control is also the content of my first memory, just before I turned two. The sun is blazing and the sand near the green water is burning the soles of my feet. I'm walking in my tiny bathing trunks between my mother and father, each hand in one of theirs. Mom offers to pick me up off the hot sand, and I exultantly say, “No!” It's that delicious moment when the living being experiences its first sense of autonomy. The sand bakes the soles of my feet to an unbearable intensity, and flashes of white light turn my “No!” into something dangerous and metallic, an addictive adventure, one that will be squelched until adolescence, when it flares up again in contempt for her values and a compulsion for sexual adventure.

After our conversation, her many heart pills aren't functioning at peak. Her chest is tight with angina, her head reeling with fatigue. We're sitting on the bed and she's clinging to me in fear, her brittle white hair crushed against my chest. Is there anything sweeter, more oppressive than this painful intimacy? My own helplessness invades me, sickens me, as death invades her. But I deserve this. I'm swallowed up by it. I savor our moment of closeness, which, abruptly, is broken when she takes my chin rudely between thumb and forefinger. “I can still see traces of your former good looks as a child,” she says.

In truth, Mom's imminent passing is merely giving birth to another mother. That fleshly, nearly obscene bond between me and Romulus has the fatuousness of the infant's dependence. That's why, sitting at the kitchen table with Mom, I can think only of Romulus instead of her, only of my corruption, my infatuation with a prostitute.

The codeine I brought back from Romania relieves my longing for him and takes away some of the anxiety generated by Mom. I can rub her back for her as I feel my own muscles letting go, getting more elastic. The armored tension in my body eases, and Mom hums with relief. Later, if I swallow enough pills, Romulus will even materialize—sometimes becoming the way I want him to be, but other times animated by my fears. Too bad that she doesn't have a similar device to rely on. Instead she has only her memory. She stays relaxed for a moment after I've massaged her, then once more comes out with the same story of my birth. I've heard it this way a thousand times. “When they brought you into the delivery room, I asked, ‘Whose beautiful baby is that?' You were so gorgeous.” The implied question being, “What happened?”

A chance occurrence has made a long cohabitation with Romulus more likely. The Centre Pompidou in Paris has invited me to have a public discussion with the French writer Guillaume Dustan, all expenses paid. The offer comes by e-mail while I'm still in Syracuse. Mom is delighted but can't understand why they would be interested in someone like me. Ignoring the slight, I dash off an e-mail to Marianne Alphant at the Centre Pompidou, accepting the offer, then claiming that a certain Romulus T. is essential to my literary project. My presentation, I say, will make no sense without him. Immersion in my love affair has made me foolhardy. True to my derangement, I'm actually fantasizing giving a talk to the museumgoers with giant pornographic images of Romulus projected on the wall behind me, as if everyone else would automatically find him compelling enough to enter my world of significations. Without telling Mom any details, I claim that Romulus has been invited to the symposium with me. She looks at me oddly, then returns to
King Carol, Hitler and Lupescu,
which I've lent her. As she always does, she's taking a crash course on the subject of my latest obsession. But when she goes to the bathroom, I glance at the page and see that she's rereading some of the same material she read on my last visit. The reason is painfully apparent: Carol and Marie's oedipal trajectory is identical to our own. It begins with a utopian childhood and a joyously encompassing mother, only to swerve into perverse rebellion and sexual adventurism and the defeat of the more conservative, female figure. In Mom's eyes, the story is about a mother's tragedy, the irrevocable loss of a love defined by complete control over a submissive charge.

Two days after I write her, Alphant sends back a polite e-mail inviting Romulus to attend the symposium as well. But sensibly, she doesn't offer any help with a ticket or a visitor's visa. Next I write to Elein Fleiss, the publisher of
Purple
magazine, for which I'm doing a column, and ask her to invite Romulus to the magazine's presentation at the Centre Pompidou. It's a pushy, inappropriate request. Even so, she answers warmly, without asking too many questions. She sends me another carefully worded, noncommittal letter, at which the French, a rhetorical people, are so gifted.

According to my Parisian strategy, Romulus will come to meet me in Paris after I fly there for free. We'll live there together for several months with the help of friends. He'll stay on illegally past his visa, supported by me, while I do translations and writing to earn our living. While Mom and I are eating dinner, which she stubbornly prepares despite her reduced mobility, I offer her a more bourgeois version of the plan, complete with Romulus looking for a job in Paris. The fact that I'll be in Paris instead of Romania soothes her, but she can't resist pointedly admitting that she was hoping for something better, a nice middle-aged professional, perhaps. With a 401(k)? I shoot back. Then I can't resist reminding her of the only rebellious act of her conventional, law-abiding life: defying her mother and marrying my smolderingly handsome father, who came from a family beset with mental illness and poverty. The very same year they decided to marry, his sister was accused of embezzling. My mother's mother tried desperately to stop the marriage. Well, that was different, Mom says. Once again I lure her into discussing a facet of my father's childhood that fascinates me. I'd always been stymied when trying to decode his sweet, rather passive personality, so often dominated by hers. It seems that at the age of twelve he fled his turbulent home with a younger brother, and they survived for a while on their own like vagrants—like a near-homeless Romulus in Budapest—in an abandoned house. As always, dwelling on the incident makes Mom anxious. So I leave her and go to the mantel to stare at a picture of Dad's face at twenty-one. Sultry, with hypnotic eyes and full lips, he had a shy, shady appeal, like the best of the
beaux ténébreux.
With his slicked-back hair, he had a Valentino look, and the photo dates from the same period.

As a backup to the European plan there's an American one. Unbeknownst to Mom, I've convinced P, a flamboyant, resourceful Russian-émigré poet and male prostitute living in New York, to reveal all his information about asylum, which he's about to be granted on the basis of sexual orientation. It's a long shot, but it just might be a way of getting Romulus into the country. However, as his bow-legged swagger fills my mind, I admit to myself that never in a million years would Romulus publicly label himself a homosexual, regardless of the benefits.

His immigration has become a new obsession, fraught with longing, then fear. On the one hand, having him here in the States seems like the simplest solution. On the other, I can foresee all the potential painful complications. I'm kneeling to pull Mom's shoes off her swollen feet as my thoughts careen toward Romulus and me having a vicious argument in my apartment after he's emigrated here. He storms out, and I have to run into him night after night at New York's one remaining hustler bar, which will be his only means of support. Later he's rail-thin and unwashed and cursing at me on the street, threatening to blackmail me, reminding me of my illegal role in helping him lie to obtain a visa. The fear gains momentum when I remember the gossip about a certain restaurateur in Manhattan's Greenwich Village who imported an impossibly attractive Pole, only to have him fly off eventually with his cash and credit card, until, some time later, the restaurateur, still deeply in love, actually went back to Poland and unraveled the legal mess of charges he himself had brought against the Pole, and then re-invited him to New York.

More blasts of desire erase these qualms as I help Mom pull her blouse off her arms and shoulders. Overwhelming as the problem of loving someone in the former Eastern bloc may be, I'm convinced that my desire can exterminate every obstacle. During a short trip to Montreal, I met a Panamanian dancer who'd just smuggled his sister to Texas in a gas truck. It cost him only $2,000. At the moment it seems like a viable option. Then there's that Moldovan actor who told me about the people his troupe had transported to the United States by letting them pose as members of the company. Finally, there's that sympathetic Lithuanian gay professor from a certain university who's willing to write a letter inviting Romulus to a Slavic symposium. By the time Mom's in her nightgown, I'm reaching to take her hearing aids out of her ears and cockily grinning with confidence. What are you smiling about? she grumpily demands.

Potential cons are swarming through my mind at the very moment that—in all probability—Romulus is taking my love in vain. I'm assuming she's blonde, his preference, and that he's spending every penny I've given him on her. Sometimes I imagine her as that watery-haired teenager whose existence I found so annoying in Budapest, or that other blonde with the lead-infused skin I've concocted.

Here I am, peeling off my mother's old nitroglycerin patches, which have a gunpowdery odor, from the right side of her chest, and pasting new ones on the left, while in Sibiu, where it's five in the morning, Romulus is likely to have just spent some of the money I gave him on a last couple of liters of beer and those sunflower seeds he eats incessantly, like a parrot. He's going to share them with the buxom blonde waiting patiently outside the grocery kiosk. Isn't it probable that his girlfriend was never Hungarian but a Romanian immigrant living in Budapest, say, a refugee from that polluted glass-factory town known as Turda? And that she followed him back to Sibiu? For some reason an image of Turda's lead-ridden air stuck with me after I read about it in a travel guide. Smile fading from my face while Mom scrutinizes me, I nimbly construct a paranoid imaginary biography for this new character. On a daily basis—since the age of six—her drunken father has driven her out of the house to make money for the family. She probably sold some of those used anti-Semitic books like the ones I saw in Bucharest, from a table on the street in the icy snow; or she sat all day in the hot sun with an old bathroom scale, like that old man I saw on a Bucharest boulevard, hoping to convince passersby to weigh themselves for the price of a penny. Then she quickly figured out selling herself was a lot more profitable. That's how she met Romulus, while plying her trade in Budapest right about the time he met me.