The Romanian (40 page)

Then, as I watched him sleep, a new fear overtook me. This was the first time I'd given him an excuse to hate me. The punch had flown at my face with such competence that I knew he was comfortable and capable when it came to violence. I remembered an experience I had had six or seven years before, during my Times Square period, when I'd indulged in a sort of fetish for some members of the Latin Kings gang who were hustling at a particular bar. One of them, a seasoned ex-con in his late twenties, had developed an attachment to me. We were spending virtually every weekend holed up in my apartment. His tales of gunfights and jail violence began to serve as a kind of foreplay. After conversations of this ilk, we generally watched heterosexual porn. Then I'd enjoy the thrill of his touch as we had sex in front of the screen. After several months of this, a genuine bond had flourished. But one afternoon my doorbell rang and I received a surprise visit. He'd probably been smoking crack—his pupils were pinpoints, his nostrils flared, and his jaw looked locked. I could hear him grinding his teeth. When I told him I was working, he pushed into the apartment anyway. Rage rushed out of him unprovoked, and it seemed to have nothing, or everything, to do with me. As we talked, even a small gesture on my part, like standing up or moving a finger, produced a blood-curdling paranoia in him, a violent reaction.

I was careful not to show fear and to appear understanding. At one point, I somehow managed to walk casually into the kitchen and hide the knives. Then I convinced him that he was hungry and that we should go to the diner up the block to get something to eat. As he walked ahead of me and opened the door to the building, I saw a chance for escape. I let him pass through and then slammed the door shut, staying inside. I'll never forget the childlike look of dejection he gave me through the window of the door, before continuing down the steps. He must have gotten into some bad trouble later that day, because I never saw him again on the streets around Times Square.

The point is that I'd enjoyed similar rowdy tales from Romulus. It was the stories of car thievery, border gunfire and knife fights that had worked to attract me in the first place. Obviously, I was partly in love with his rage. Could it have been a simulacrum of emotions I didn't know I had? I'd always been half aware of this, but I'd never tried to sort it out. It was just too exciting, producing a sense of compassion in me, but also something more vicarious, something darker. All I knew was that the scars on his nose and neck from a knife fight had appealed to me, as did the stories of the brawls he'd gotten into when he was younger. Certainly he was no murderer, but tonight had shown that a large part of his rage had been in hiding. Now I wondered whether he'd ever be capable of taking all of it out on me. This was a line that I didn't want to see crossed.

Those were the thoughts that rushed through my mind as I wrestled with the choices, trying to decide whether I had the nerve to risk another scene in the morning by telling him to leave. As dawn crept into the room, I lay sleepless in confusion. Romulus's potential had been partly colored with the violence of my old Times Square buddy. Obviously, I wasn't thinking clearly, but this first sign of his hostility had opened a door of fear.

The phone rang, startling me but not even waking Romulus. I rose to answer it—maybe something was amiss with Céline Dion. Although the caller spoke French, it took me a moment to realize it was the taxi driver. I hadn't told him my last name, but he'd evidently made note of the room number. “I'm afraid the chauffeured trip is off,” I told him in French.

“That's not what I was calling about,” he said in a hushed, sinister voice. “It is very important that I see you immediately. I'm coming now.”

“No, no, someone's here. What do you want?”

“I must speak to you,” was all he would say.

“About what? I can't.”

“You must. So I will come later, when you are alone.” He hung up.

As I've mentioned before, homosexual importuning was illegal at that time in Romania. And Tristan had eyed the objects in the room with a strangely greedy look. I counted out approximately eighty dollars onto the desk for Romulus. Then I threw my clothes into my bag and grabbed my computer. To avoid the clerk in the lobby, I sneaked out by way of the pool into the dawn light.

XXVIII

THE TAXI DRIVER who picked me up near the top of the driveway leading from the Panoramic wasn't Tristan, though I'd had an irrational fear it might be. I was in a sinister panic—afraid of a confrontation with Romulus when he woke up, but much more terrified of Tristan, who I assumed was coming to blackmail me. Somehow the two fears intermingled, one augmenting the other. I'd hightailed it up the gravel driveway at dawn with my bags swinging, my heart exploding with anxiety each time I saw a parked vehicle I thought might be Tristan's cab. Almost immediately, I found a taxi speeding by the entrance to the driveway and flagged it down with both hands.

This time I sat in the backseat rather than the front and told the driver to take me to the train station in Constanţa. As we drove along, he kept examining my face in the mirror. It was pinched from fatigue, and my eyes were burning with my rushing thoughts. To avoid him, I glued my gaze to the blur of sunlit forest speeding by and thought of the rushing waters of the Danube, which we'd crossed twice on our way here, or the rich wine country near Medgidia, and Maramureş's vast stores of timber. All of these treasures and more had gotten Romania into trouble, time after time. One hostile power after another had tried to control the country's access to the Danube, its minerals, oil and wheat.

For the first time in my stay here, I felt part of this turbulent history. Gone was the romantic exoticism that had allowed me to play out fantasies of passion surrounded by foreign ways. Gone was the delicious electric charge that surrounded Romulus's body. In its place was a creepy urgency, probably closer to the true feelings of those historical and literary figures whom I'd drafted as part of my adventure. I was having the experience of anyone who stays too long, when the mundane ugliness of anyplace at all suddenly becomes too apparent.

This must have been why my tortured mind wandered. I found myself thinking of a depressing night of drizzle in Bucharest in September 1940, just a day after the cries of an armed and violent Iron Guard, Romania's Fascist militia, had echoed toward the royal square. Hidden in the palace on Victoriei were two white-faced virtual prisoners, Carol and Lupescu. The Iron Guardists were calling for the “she-wolf's” head. “Down with the Jew!” they roared. And they wanted the head of the king, too, for touching the flesh of a Jew.

In the middle of the night of September 7, the king and his mistress sneaked out of the back of the palace like hunted animals and dove into a waiting car. Along with about ten others, they were taken to three special railway cars prepared for their flight. It was, as they say, the end of an era. Carol's ten-year rule, which began when he returned to Romania in June 1930 to reclaim the kingship he'd renounced a few years before, was definitively over.

It looked like my romance with Romania, as well, was dead. When we pulled into the station at Constanţa, I scanned the street nervously for signs of the possibly treacherous Tristan. He'd told me he worked here, and that may very well have been where he'd called me from. Glancing in both directions, I got out and paid the driver. I climbed the steps to the platform, but when I reached it, a train was rushing by.

“Train! Where is it going?” I ask a plump, perplexed-looking woman, probably a maid in one of the hotels.

“Bucharest! Bucharest!” she calls out over the clanging of the wheels. Frantically, I run down from the platform and survey the street again. The taxi I've just ridden in is pulling away, so I run toward it and pound on the window. The driver rolls it down and gazes at me incredulously.

“Please. Bucharest. How much?”

His eyes take on that knowing gleam I've seen so often in this country. What is it—a cynical familiarity with the suffering of others? At the same time I can feel him using this insight to double the price.

“Two million lei.” About sixty dollars.

Opening the back door, I jump in. “Sit in front, if you wish,” he says. I shake my head. Once we start up, I reach over with half the money. He seems relieved, and I take in the back of his neck, not so much out of any particular interest but from a new sense of caution. It's creased and sunburned, over tired shoulders. He looks about fifty.

Our car speeds rapidly out of Constanţa and then gains the highway. He's one of those Romanian drivers I never got used to on the road. We lurch into and bump out of potholes, pass slower cars on a dime or careen around tight curves, nearly on two wheels. Obviously, time is money; and although he's probably getting more than three weeks' salary in less than a day, he's planning to press his good luck and make the most of it.

Slowly Romulus's anger and Tristan's possible blackmail recede. I settle into a listless mood that is part shock and part sullenness. I have a lot of reordering ahead of me. I had sublet my apartment in New York at least until October, but now I can't see myself sticking it out in Bucharest. Also, I don't want to be in the apartment like a sitting duck if Romulus decides to come back. Soon I'll need to find some work as well.

The uncertainties are so overwhelming that my mind drains. If only I could put my head back on the seat and sleep for an hour, things might get a little clearer; but I can't. Instead my thoughts focus dully on my recent existence and all the stories, characters and fantasies with which I've wallpapered it. I turn them over in my mind the way Tristan had insistently turned the tape over in his hands. I keep trying to solve the mystery of their lost allure. All of them have shrunk to distressingly human proportions.

It's said that Carol was blind to Lupescu's failings. He was so gaga for her that he was bowled over by her most banal remarks. If she told an off-color joke in the presence of someone who'd come from a higher level of society, Carol slapped his knees and howled so that the august visitor was doubly grossed out. Each time Lupescu fabricated a tale about a nonexistent noble relative, Carol listened with rapt attention. It was as if the image of her he'd imprinted on himself was permanent. He didn't need more input.

What is the great draw of the little man who has told me I disgust him? Pinning him under my scrutiny, like a frog to a lab board, I begin to subject his qualities to a merciless inquiry. I can't deny that the scars from knifings or border crossings struck me as badges of courage. And the uncommunicative eyes were dark ponds in which swam mysterious sufferings. They were enough, it appears, to silence judgments about banal underclass tastes, the fancy cars he wanted, a life full of soccer games.

If truth be told, the royal couple themselves led a ludicrously common lifestyle. During their years in exile and even when Carol ruled Romania, bridge games, boiled beef and mystery novels seemed to have been their daily fare. Lupescu was no intellectual, and even the gowns I've raved about turned out to be copies. The bric-a-brac they crammed onto their end tables was inexpensive faux Second Empire. She and Carol were scrooges, more interested in accumulating funds than in a glittering life. To top if off, the glamorous-looking Lupescu put on quite a few pounds by the midlife of her love affair. As Carol's face filled out, it joined his neck for lack of chin. It's the face I now imagine bent over a boring book on British military maneuvers or nodding out at the cinema in front of a mindless thirties melodrama to which Lupescu has dragged him. The opera of their love affair itself now seems like a trite women's picture.

These were the thoughts that assailed me as we sped through the countryside, punctuated now and then by the faces of impoverished rural laborers. It might have been the difference in region, but they lacked the magical focus of the faces of the peasants I'd seen in Maramureş. My eyes fastened to the deadened eyes of a group of fruit-pickers by the road. All I could see was their poverty, written on their bodies like a life sentence.

The driver asks permission to stop at a roadside stand to buy some water. He comes back with a piece of pastry and holds it toward me smiling, a look of sympathy for my drawn face. Although it's almost ten and I haven't eaten or slept, I decline it politely. We start back up, and I notice he's examining me again in the rearview mirror. Aware that something is very wrong, he delicately tries to start a conversation. To discourage him, I tell him that something terrible has happened that I don't feel like revealing. The remark embarrasses him as I'd hoped, and he moves his eyes away from the mirror.

A new notion has begun to absorb me. One of subtle but tantalizing proportions. It's occurred to me that passion itself is little more than a disorder. Stricken by obsessive thoughts of my life during the last few years, I begin to see all my treasured impulses as merely pathological. In the process, Romulus's importance shrinks to that of an incidental extra in the drama. The struggles I thought were directed at him were narcissistic flailings in a mirror. If he played any part at all in this complicated projection, it was only because he happened to have the correct proportions of an actor.

As the light of the projection dims, the shoddy theater that I've been sitting in and its all-too-human audience become apparent. The mystery of why the character of the beloved has so few lines is answered by the fact that the movie was never about him. This was, instead, a chaotic melodrama of non-Aristotelian proportions. No need to spell out the dreary plot—a petty tantrum against an overcontrolling mother, a fear of my encroaching age and her death, a feeling of low self-worth leading to a flirtation with my own demise—the synopsis isn't even worth mentioning.