The Romanian (43 page)

She and Elena overlapped. And she visited him in Sibiu several times after he and I met, before Elena came to live there. I was paying for it, I see now, making a quick calculation of dates. In fact, during our entire relationship, he's always had a girl. Or should I say we have? Now, with nothing to lose, he lets all his heterosexual affect out, as if I were a friend, a confidant. He believes, he admits, that for the first time in his life he was truly in love with that girl who ended up in the Chinese brothel. It was ruined, he thinks, by jealousy and possessiveness. Neither was willing to trust the other.

What's more, the relationship ended just as ours began. The dark, secretive eyes, swimming with mysterious suffering, that had attracted me so much, were really little more than mirrors of this secret of love and hurt, something I never considered.
I was in love, it turns out, with his loss of love.
Budapest, he makes clear, is excruciating now, just an empty stage set for an irreclaimable drama. He knows he's a permanent exile from love, and these buildings have become an unbearable representation of his loss.

Against my will, my mind accompanies this tale in narcissistic counterpoint. So, as I worked in New York to earn money for us, to get him a visa, to plan a life in Costa Rica, similar energies were radiating from him toward a girl whose life had been ruined by prostitution. And when I twisted and turned with codeine intoxication in the low-ceilinged bedroom in Syracuse, he, too, was twisting and turning in that Austrian jail cell, thinking and thinking of her. And when I called his cell phone from my mother's house, thinking I was reaching him in Bucharest, where I assumed he'd gone to apply for a tourist visa for the United States, he may have not been there at all. He may have still been in Sibiu, in bed with a soon-to-be lost love. She could have been lying right next to him as we spoke, listening to my voice coming over the phone.

As he speaks, my mind embellishes every episode from the past with paranoid flourishes. It sets up a scene with him and Bogdan in some club, laughing together at my naiveté as I come home from my job at the financial printing house in New York, eyes glazed from staring at the computer screen and mind in thrall to passion. It watches him in a lazy last embrace with a tearful young lover as I sit in a plane bound for Bucharest, trying to control the delicious shivers of anticipation. But does it matter anymore?

Abruptly the conversation changes to Olimp-Neptun. He still claims complete amnesia about our vicious argument. I describe my flight from the blackmailer in a taxi. It would have made a magnificent montage if only I'd known what was happening to him at nearly the same time. On the first day of our arrival in Olimp-Neptun, shortly after he left for the beach in the revealing blue bathing suit, he met a girl, just as I'd suspected. It wasn't the little blonde with whom he'd been sitting at a café table, whom he never met again, but another, whom I never saw. But he'd spent most of his time with her during the days he was there. She was a prostitute of seventeen, on her very first travel assignment, and every night her pimps from Bucharest would come to her room to put her to work, moments after Romulus had left her for the evening.

In fact, I'd had a glance of them, late that last night at the disco on the beach. One of them was wearing dark glasses even though it was night. They observed Romulus dancing alone for a while. After he came to me for money, they pounced, one of them sticking a raised index finger in his face, warning him to stay away from their property if he valued his life.

“You mean those weren't just two guys you'd borrowed money from?”

“No, money is so I can get away from them, go someplace else to drink.”

It was twenty-four hours after my flight to Bucharest, almost to the minute, that he began a similar flight to Sibiu with the fledgling prostitute. And just as I'd crept out of our hotel room toward the edge of the pool and traced my way around it to the beach, then up the long driveway to the highway, he and the girl had done the same. They made an early-morning escape in defiance of her brutal pimps. He was saving her. Even though the plan was to return to Sibiu, where she would continue life as a prostitute, but now managed by Romulus.

The girl and her bewildered voice on the phone reappear. The eerie tenderness surges up, becoming more and more poignant. Romulus sees it in my eyes.

“What?” he says, startled.

There's no way to express the strange transformation that's occurring: my eyes becoming mysterious pools hiding dark excitements and inarticulate losses, just as his once were; and Romulus studying them in tantalized confusion.

 

 

THE HOTEL ROOM IS LARGER than we're used to sharing, but it feels claustrophobic. It's as if the rhythm of our cohabitation has become lost. Romulus is expecting to perform the duties he imagines I'm paying for. But first he stakes out the twin bed nearer the television and sets up his measly corner in that way that the kept try to establish something of their own—despite the impossibility of fortifying its boundaries.

As he moves the ashtray closer to his side of the table and bunches up the pillow, my mind locks to a lost little girl waiting in Sibiu. Maybe sitting at the dinner table at his mother's house. Or alone, in front of the television, in the bed she shares with him—suffering small bursts of resentment that well up in her mind over his sudden departure. Fretting over who this uncle or friend or trick is—whatever he told her. Calming herself with a stalwart acknowledgment of the reality of survival. I wish I could be there to touch her shoulder gently and say, See, there's really nothing to worry about, from me anyway.

Like an unwilling actor drafted into a play whose script is too well known to improvise, I undress. So does Romulus. And as the T-shirt rises from the lean waist past the dorsal flare, there's a shock. His skin is covered with the same rash.

“Your back!”

“Is nothing.”

I lower my pants and show him my upper thighs.

“Ah, you too.” He shrugs.

“What is it?”

He expels the air through pursed lips. “I don't know. Nothing.”

I describe how the rash looked at its worst, tell about my visits to the doctor and her theory that it was caused by the mosquito repellent. He listens to the tale with cynicism, and his reaction perfectly complements the Western European doctor's. “Always they thinking trouble comes from us,” he snorts. “Is not the cause. This I am sure.”

“But what are you doing about it?”

He frowns, as if to indicate that there are problems thousands of times more serious. I, however, have been wondering whether the disease is contagious throughout its entire course. I spent a fortune dry-cleaning Victoire's mother's bedspread before I left Paris. I'd even planned to keep the area of the rash away from Romulus when we had sex.

“Put all your clothes in that plastic bag over there.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Do it!” A fearful hysteria has seized me, but even more vividly, a sense of poetic justice, the notion that both of us are contaminated by the deadliest disease of all. It doesn't matter who the carrier was; as Codreanu was proof, it's a germ that spreads uncontrollably.

Thus do we spend the next twenty-four hours in the hysteria of a symbol, gestated by my guilt and shame for the excesses of the past nine months. Half believing I might be right and half capitulating, he lets me send out all his clothes to be dry-cleaned. Naked and chain-smoking, he obeys, and watches television while I read.

Above and beyond the absurdity of this symbolic behavior on my part is the real possibility that the unknown rash might be contagious. But even more important is the fact that sex had become a primary tool of my self-delusion. The impossibility of it, I think, will now reveal what there is of a real friendship between us.

I must have, on the other hand, underestimated the multiple vectors of contamination. For as we waited out the quarantine I'd imposed on physical contact, conversation deepened. The room lost its claustrophobia. A pleasant sense of companionship, which had grown up between us and seemed to have nothing to do with passion's fantasies, took hold. Romulus's brusque but graceful macho rhythms, the patience I so admired and that placid, animal manner of his, as comforting as the mute, sensual presence of a cat, began to flourish. Soft, unembellished stories of his sad childhood, tales of his dangerous travels and the thoughts and feelings he'd concealed from me while he'd had to masquerade as my lover, came out, bringing us closer. He revealed, albeit a little awkwardly, his shy respect for my intelligence and even some gratitude for the part of my behavior that he couldn't interpret as anything but generosity. He spoke, as well, of the miracle of trust that I'd provoked in him for the first time in his life. It was something he claimed he'd never experienced before. “You are only true friend ever in my life,” he said again. I took the compliments graciously. But the thought did come to me that Romulus was having a bourgeois experience for the first time. In the world in which we all live, the only dependable alternatives to the chaotic rhythms, elastic time and changing allegiances of underclass life are really nothing more than that.

The disease, though, had been given a port of entry. As Romulus became more candid and as what was good about our friendship took hold, I began to overinflate what was happening. A new fantasy of future purity took over. I was seized with the notion that I hadn't really lost Romulus. All I needed was a little forbearance, the disease urged me demonically, in the way that demons convince an alcoholic that it's possible to have just one or two drinks. I ended up telling him that we would see each other from time to time, perhaps on a regular but intermittent schedule. Every few months I'd come to Europe for, say, a week. Because I was aware of his ongoing financial problems, some money would be part of the package.

“Yes, yes, good idea is this. Except.”

“Except what, Romulus.”

“Maybe I begin to feel the claustrophobia.”

I couldn't deny that I knew what he meant. He was referring not just to his need for women but to that same feeling I'd experienced in the presence of my mother. The discomfort of a bond that felt incestuous. The tyrannical sense of another's physicality and need. But it wounded me.

“You'd rather me treat you like the other tricks you've had!” I sulked. “Pay you for a good dirty time and not give a fuck.”

“Yes. Then I go and come when I want.”

“As long as you get me off first, right?”

“Hmm, hmm.”

“Do you know what you're telling me? That you don't want me to care about you.”

“Yes.” The answer, of course, went through me like a knife.

When the dry-cleaned clothes were returned the next morning, I asked him to leave. Gravely he agreed. “Is better this way. And you know, in Sibiu things are complicated.”

“How so?”

“The girl think she is pregnant.”

I was standing by the window with its sweeping view of the street. On the sidewalk was a Hasidic family on their way to the nearby synagogue. The father's wide-brimmed hat looked like a black hole in the strong sunlight, as did the mouse-brown wig of his wife. But their child, a toddler who kept lingering behind them as the wife gestured at her to advance, was wearing bright pink socks that drew the eye like a target.

“Maybe you find another Romulus on Corso,” I heard him say. The notion of interchangeability irked me, and I didn't answer as he walked out the door.

BY THAT AFTERNOON, I was back working on the Lamaze translation. I had six days left in Budapest. The rental I'd arranged in New York was supposed to last through the month of September, but near the middle of the week, I called my tenants and concocted a terrible emergency about illness in the family. To my surprise, they were relieved. They were running out of money and had the chance of staying for free in a smaller apartment belonging to a friend. A refund of one month's rent would make that even more attractive.

With a dull feeling of finality, I slipped into a routine for the remaining days. I'd rise about ten o'clock and work on the translation with the television bellowing in the background. Punctuate the day with hourly doses of codeine. Each evening, about an hour and a half before sundown, I'd stroll to the river, cruise the hustlers like an automaton running on an outmoded program. As I'd suspected, most were Romanian. One, blond and practically preppy in attire, lured me to an expensive café. His annoying routine was marked by self-satisfied claims of upward mobility and contempt for his roots. He didn't associate with or speak to the other Romanian hustlers, he assured me conceitedly. He only pitied their ghetto mentality and their lack of honesty. It was he who told me about one of their tactics, conning a sentimental client by saying their father worked for the railroad and had just lost both legs. As was typical of his ilk, he tried to up the price when we were already climbing the stairs to my room. He saw no discrepancy between such a maneuver and his claims of bourgeois respectability. I left him standing on the stairs, after handing him the original fee, and went back to my room alone. In fact, despite my lab-rat repetitions of learned behavior, I never touched another body during that entire week.

On the second-to-last evening, I was mesmerized by a poignant and ominous image. Standing at the edge of the river in the ghastly pink glow of a particularly spectacular sunset was a man of about thirty-five. His scraggly reddish hair was matted over a pasty forehead. The cheeks of his once handsome face were hollow. As his head turned, he made a point of looking at me with blue eyes that bulged eerily from their orbits. His thinned lips over damaged teeth creased into a vulnerable, boyish smile.