The Romanian (7 page)

Oedipal vectors shoot from the pages of
The Playboy King
and
Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair,
revealing Marie as a doting, overinvolved mother at a loss when confronted with her grown son's sulking bids for independence; and Carol, her son, as an obsessively womanizing “priapist,” destroyed by tortured love and hate for a mother who hopes to rule Romania through him.

 

 

I'M SO IMMERSED in the gossip about the allegedly enormous size of Carol's member that I don't even notice the sullen look my own charge has pasted on his face. Ever since he discouraged his girlfriend from annoying his “uncle” with constant calls, our relationship has settled into a narrow routine. We've even reached the point of talking about ways to be together permanently. Before me I can see an entire half-life forming around the dynamic of his boredom and whoredom and my money and desire. He's declared his intention to abandon Budapest and hustling and, as if it were an afterthought, the
girl.
When I leave, he'll take the money I give him and go back to Sibiu, where he'll wait for our next opportunity to be together. The rules of the game are to allow heterosexual dabbling as long as the primary relationship remains us.

I agree to all of this enthusiastically, hiding a certain misgiving. No one has to explain to me that the forces we depleted bourgeois intellectuals sometimes borrow for our transgressive narratives never free themselves from their unstable sources. That entity of teeming street energy, that exotic sociological specimen or puzzle of your own past you think you've captured, even reformed, is continually being lured back into those landscapes of risk he came from. And so, after a week in the lap of luxury, after several sumptuous meals and several bottles of wine from our suddenly accommodating hotel restaurant, as well as countless sex acts in front of the piped-in porno until his nipples grow increasingly carmine from my deep-pressure kisses, Romulus gets bored. He begins yearning for a shady Romanian bar in the Pest section of the city.

One rare day we bother to leave our fantasy chamber on a long trip along the river and up the funicular to the castle district. His lips shrivel with contempt when he sees the refurbished luxury apartments, picturesque church and sterile-looking café in that exclusive neighborhood. Even so, he obliges me by stopping for a drink. When a bevy of black-clad bourgeois Hungarian girls, holding shopping bags from an expensive boutique, glance at us through the window of the café, he makes a remark about wanting to fuck one of them. Perhaps it's with bitter pleasure that I explain to him that such a woman has to be courted more gradually, become convinced that you're mirroring her self-worth before you can have her pussy. When I do, he snarls that such tactics make the conquest not worth the trouble at all. And that is the night he begins wanting to go to the Romanian bar.

It is, as he describes it, a picaresque cellar in the Pest section of the city, where pickpockets, passport forgers, counterfeiters and smugglers meet to the tune of house mixes of horas, illicit traffic in boosted electronic equipment, frequent fistfights and occasional knifings. I tell him that I want to go to the place, too, but he answers that he's afraid to take me. He fears blowing his cover and compromising his machismo, and we may run into violence. So I hatch a defiant plan. I'll enter the bar alone twenty minutes before he does and take my chances. It's my choice, isn't it? Then he can enter and, only if it feels right, casually greet me, probably not even sit that near.

At the Romanian bar, those few liverish-colored patrons, who look like Andre the Giant hulks in black silk shirts and black suits, seem too simmered in depression to offer more than an apathetic glance. I've seen those expressions before in more appealing form in Hamburg, at the train station and in the bars of the St. Pauli district, where I first encountered teenaged Romanian hustlers. Now I'm learning that most of the more unfortunate Romanian males of the diaspora are masters of this melancholic pose. Here in this hole-in-the-wall in Budapest, all the men have a version of it.

The music is deafening. It sounds part Hungarian, part Roma, part Turk, full of accordions and synthesizers and reedy things. There are rousing folk elements that sound shrill in their electronic form, frantic and hysterically Byzantine. The hyper-detailed, obsessively repetitive melodies spill into space, swirling into a kind of epilepsy. Thus I sit trying not to look at the large, black-suited men frozen in tango-inspired seizures of depression, as the music discombobulates my nervous system. But each twitch I make is greeted with a stony lack of reaction on their part.

Romulus arrives as promised, greets me in an exaggeratedly offhand manner. He takes a seat close enough for us to talk and whispers a few explanations. Across from us, the handsome, moonfaced, sloe-eyed but acne-pitted adolescent with the pompadour; the stocky man in black; and the skinny dark-haired girl, whose prominently veined hands stick like spiders from a black parka, are work partners. On late-night subways, the two younger people will begin to kiss, his hand will slip inside the girl's parka, moving toward her breast; and as people gape at this distraction, the older man will go about his job of pickpocketing. Then there is the tall, drawn man, also with a wolfish haircut, and sad, ringed intellectual's eyes. He's a master passport forger. An American passport, Romulus informs me, can be sold quite quickly for several thousand dollars, after being doctored by the forger genius with a new photo. Mine, however, is next to valueless because of my birth date. The people who buy these hot passports have a future.

Just a few doors from the Romanian bar is the Old Man Club, which has one of the most eclectic young crowds in Budapest. Romulus credits himself with opening it to Romanians. It's a new club in a post-Communist New World, crowded and bursting with energy and noise. Americans and Africans, Poles, Germans and Romanians gulp whiskey and beer along with the Hungarians, dance alone or in groups. Romulus is sure that the waitress is overcharging us. Each time she brings a drink, he quizzes her about the prices of comparable brands. House music and '80s New Wave pump through the smoke-filled air.

Slightly heady with my risk-free visit to the Romanian bar, I careen through this new place, losing sight of Romulus. The two young men he shows up with a few minutes later have the hangdog look of people adrift; there's something greenhorn about them; maybe it's their clumsy, stale clothing or their eyes projecting a desensitized stubbornness that expects little. One is swarthy and slender, mute and shiny-lashed. The other is fair and meaty and Slavic-looking, with the oval, dull face of a butcher. Between them is Romulus, who now seems different. His grim, determined look borders on cockiness, or sadism. He shoos all of us to the same table, and I buy everyone a drink. Then he begins to speak as if he were holding forth at a board meeting:

“These are Marius,” he says, pointing at the butcher boy, “and Francisc,” pointing at the dark, slim one. “One of them will sleep with you.”

I keep a steady tone, with a touch of haughtiness. “Excuse me, but I think it's up to me who I sleep with.”

“Yes, as you wish. It's only that I must see the girl tomorrow night. When you go in the Romanian bar, and I am waiting to go in, you see, I see her. I did not plan this. Because she needs me so, I say yes.”

“Go ahead.”

“But you see,” he explains, “if I think of you alone, I will not be able to enjoy.”

I glance at Marius and Francisc, trying to determine how much English they understand. It's obvious that the details of this transaction are beyond them, but they get the gist of it.

“That's your problem,” I spit, “just don't ever tell me who to sleep with. Would you,” I say to the two boys, a note of impudence and superiority in my voice, “be my guests for dinner tomorrow night? Romulus, I assume your date will be after dinner. So the four of us will eat at the hotel. The Gellért at seven.” Marius, the dulled butcher, nods eagerly and winks. The darker one agrees resignedly, letting his eyes go blank, looking at the hands in his lap. Probably my strategy is blatant: the invitation is meant to make Romulus seem cheap for offering fresh meat and also to make him worry that I may be taking the offer seriously.

“Bruce,” says Romulus, with cold irony. “Is not necessary. You just have to give to them a little money after sex. A very little.”

“I don't remember anyone mentioning money, Romulus, or sex, except you.”

Slightly humiliated by the remark, he savors its motive: his decision to see the girl has obviously wounded me. “As you wish,” he says conceitedly.

 

 

I'M SWITCHING from the porn channel to the French-language channel with one hand, while the other wipes my come off with a towel. Romulus is staring at the television with weary though glinting eyes, the hint of a rictus smile creasing his lips.

“You know, Romulus, I kind of regret inviting those Romanian guys to dinner. I think I'd rather be on my own tomorrow night, go to a bar. You never know who I'll meet. I want to be free.”

“Oh, then you don't want Marius?”

“No, if I had to pick, which I'm not saying I would, I'd pick the dark guy, Francisc.”

“The Gypsy?” His nose crinkles with distaste.

“Is that what he is? It's more respectful to call them Roma.”

“We get rid of Marius.”

“Wait a minute, I didn't say I wanted either of them.”

He blows a smoke ring toward the ceiling. “Then we get rid of both.”

“And how will we do that? They're coming to the hotel.”

“Easy as a pie. We just don't go downstairs at seven.”

I realize then that, of course, just like Romulus, neither Romanian boy would dare enter the hotel on his own and approach the desk and ask them to call our room.

“We can't just leave them there waiting.”

“Fine. I go downstairs and tell them go away.”

“No. I mean, they don't have any money or anything. Aren't they counting on it? Won't they be hungry?”

“All right, I go down and give four dollars and say go away.”

“Four dollars, for both?”

“Is that too much?”

“I just can't do that to them.”

“As you wish.” He crushes out the cigarette, amused. Takes the remote out of my hand and searches for a sports channel.

By four in the morning he's asleep and I, despite the codeine I've been taking, am wide awake. Night cradles us like black cotton wool. The air is lazy with cigarette smoke nudged by gusts of river wind rattling the French windows at the balcony. This is not the vibrating black of that room in Syracuse, but something stiller and more perfect. Certainly things are tinged with doom, even if night makes a false promise of permanence. His leg on mine feels light as a wing, but when he moves away just an inch, it's like watching his body through the wrong end of a telescope. Slowly the vulgarity of our twin states of desperation dissolves, and temporary security washes over me. We're nothing but statues in some utopian tableau. Once again we've escaped the premises of our respective cultures, for the time being. I plunge into unconsciousness: that sweet prelude to betrayal.

V

BUDAPEST'S NEWLY TOLERANT atmosphere makes Romulus cringe. We've decided to hit the baths in the basement of the Gellért, famous in Budapest and populous, but like several other ancient baths in this old city, frequented by homosexuals. They're looking at him and can't help it, despite the fact that he's relatively clothed. Though most—me included—wear only the muslin loincloth provided by the management and made translucent by hot water, Romulus is wearing his blue bikini, which I've just bought for him.

Flat and straight as a blade, buttocks steely, he rises from the scalding waters, colored pallid green by the skylights in the high vaulted ceiling. Desire glimmers, or should I say glowers, in the eyes of some lumpy older men. I do believe that when one sex desires its own, there's always a touch of envy.

All the frills of the out gay life cherished by today's contemporary Western gays leave Romulus in a kind of frozen repulsion. As much as he enjoys the wit, warmth and attentions of some gay males, he has no desire for, or conception of, a community in which groups of men who happen to sleep with other men eat together in restaurants, cruise each other in baths or dance in clubs devoid of women. Fine with me. I find life with him outside gay group culture curiously refreshing—as if I and my desire for him had been placed back inside the whole world.

Four hours later, the river and the cable-car stop below our hotel window are awash with golden light. Night and the “dates” I arranged at the Old Man Club are coming. With sardonic coolness, Romulus has made some well-timed, seemingly offhand comments to make me afraid of the supposed treacherousness of the Romani boy. Pancake-faced as the other one, Marius, is, I've decided to keep only him on the “payroll.” While Romulus is on his date with the girl, I'll use Marius as my guide, hopefully penetrating some underworld sites to which Romulus is afraid to take me. But I don't tell Romulus exactly what my intentions are. A mild spitefulness is welling up in me as his “night off” gets nearer.

On the balcony, the gusts of wind are surprisingly balmy. It's only the end of February and the river is still partly frozen, but there's the feeling of an early spring. I lean over the railing, trying to pick out the two boys from the clusters of people at the tram stop and in front of the hotel. Twilight is so very luminous that white shirts under jackets glimmering against the black water look like blossoms in liquid tar. I can see Marius and Francisc hurrying across the bridge with exalted, confused faces. Then they hover uncertainly in front of our mammoth pseudo-gothic hotel like mechanical toys suddenly winding down. Their faces scan up the building without noticing me. In a moment, I see Romulus burst through the door of the hotel and stride toward them with that no-nonsense bow-legged walk, stiff with authority and efficiency. In the clandestine gesture of a drug dealer, he yanks the five or so dollars out of his pocket and presses them into the hands of Francisc, the Gypsy boy. Marius's face lights up, while the other's stays blank and he pockets the money. Looking as withdrawn as he did the night before, he heads back across the bridge.