NEXT COMES a three-day weekend in Syracuse with my acutely alert but failing mom. Somehow her fantasies about me seem more desperate and romantic than mine about Romulus. And of course, they’re as narcissistic as those of Queen Marie for her son. It’s no accident that both he and I became libidinists. As a shield, I bring my opiates with me.
She’s been ill, another bout of pneumonia. My older brother came up a few days ago to watch over her in the hospital. Now that she’s home, he’s left and I’ve come to take my turn.
Just as I sometimes do, my brother has left angry. Nearing sixty, with huge responsibility in a government executive job, he can still become the target of Mom’s reformative criticisms. This time the argument was about his weight. But unlike me, my brother finds the autonomy to leave the house when he’s up there, abandoning her for an afternoon, in the midst of grumpy judgments, to visit old friends.
Even a recent hospital stay hasn’t kept Mom from having her pure-white hair arranged into a stiff artichoke at her weekly hairdresser appointment, or instructing her home companion—a warm, affectionate gay guy who lives next door—to help her into her girdle (so rare these days that she had to replace it by mail order), hose, pressed gray slacks and spotless royal-blue blouse, which enlivens the color of her glittering, inquisitive china-blue eyes. Without his help, she’s covered her pallor with the usual liberal doses of powder and rouge and brightened her mouth with red lipstick. Now she stands stiffly, as straight as she can despite her arthritic hump, with one hand grasping the back of a chair, and minutely surveys my clothes, skin and hair, searching my eyes a little anxiously for inattention or irony as her gnarled hand adjusts the collar of my shirt. Her eyes well with disappointment as she checks out my pants, which have lost their crease and wrinkled in the train ride up.
The phone rings and Mom hobbles to it, then bellows, “Who is it?” several times until the caller is shouting loud enough for me to hear every word. It’s someone from the Housing Authority, on which, at ninety-six, she still holds a seat, calling to ask if she’ll be attending the meeting. “Of course!” she booms into the receiver, with the voice of a young cheerleader, a voice temporarily infused with an astounding force. It’s a fresh, energetic soprano she can still muster, to the extent that friends who call often ask me who the young girl was who answered the phone.
Even at this stage of her life, she treasures her resolve and community involvement and is fixated on her social status. These values stem from immigrant girlhood in a tiny town in upstate New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, when her poor family, who spoke only Yiddish, was also the only Jewish family in town. Her parents didn’t learn English until my mother entered kindergarten, picked it up herself and came home to teach it to them. During years of exclusion and loneliness and anti-Semitic gibes, my mother struggled to prove her worth to this provincial, bigoted Anglo-Saxon community. She became the highest achiever in school and then entered Syracuse University for a degree in library science. Her vow, which she fulfilled, was to make a name for herself; and as she was appointed to more and more county offices or offered directorships of more and more women’s groups and charities, I spent more and more time wilting at the big picture-window in anticipation of the crunch of her tires on the graveled drive.
After digging out details about my last trip to Budapest, Mom settles down to read, borrowing one of the books from my suitcase—Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair. Always a voracious reader, she takes easily to this tale of intrigue in early-twentieth-century Romania. She’s quick to condemn the Jewish mistress Lupescu as a tramp and a home-wrecker, and she sides immediately with Queen Marie, that establishment figure who suffered at the hands of her disobeying, philandering son. I divert Mom’s swift progress toward yet another discussion of my own misbehavior and a mother’s suffering by claiming that she’s partial to Marie because Marie was a relative of the Romanovs (her mother was a Russian grand duchess). It’s a joke we’ve been sharing for years: the idea that Russian-born Mom might really be Anastasia. True, Anastasia was born in 1901 and Mom claims to have been born at the end of 1903, but she’s the first to admit that the year may be off, since at the time there were no birth records. Then there’s the similarity between my mother’s married name—Ida Benderson—and that of the woman—Anna Anderson—who claimed to be Anastasia. And finally, there’s that picture of Anastasia as a child, who had the same light-colored eyes and dirty-blond hair as Mom’s, arranged in the same sausage curls Mom wore as a child. It’s one of our timeworn routines based partly on my childhood fascination for the hilarious absurdity of Mom’s immigrant name change, from the Russian Itke Mariashka Olshansky to the anglicized-Norwegian Ida Mae Olsen, both of which, I teasingly maintain, are actually aliases of Anastasia.
As usual, Mom plays along, averting her eyes, pasting a mysterious, regal look on her face and vowing, “I’ll never tell. I can’t reveal this.” She’s always been a good sport. A year ago, I convinced her to pretend to be a still-surviving silent film star, whom my friends at an Oscar party heard on speakerphone being interviewed about D. W. Griffith and the pink Surrealist-inspired Schiaparelli gown she once wore to an Oscar ceremony. If I brought up this episode, she could recall every syllable of it. My mother has a photographic memory.
Our moment of hilarity is enough to exhaust her, so she trudges to bed, using the wall of the hallway to correct her teetering, and continues to read, but just for a moment, until she’s fallen into a labored snooze. I tiptoe into the other bedroom to check my e-mail but become fixated on a favorite photo of Romulus I took and uploaded to the Internet, in which he’s wearing the brief blue bikini I bought for him and doing push-ups on the floor of our room at the Gellért, his spare, muscled body straight as a blade, parallel to the carpet, his cheekbones casting sculpting shadows into the hollow of his cheeks.
My trance is broken as I feel Mom’s stiff arthritic fingers on my shoulder. Tortured by the fact that my consciousness may have wandered into some sphere beyond her conventional grasp, she has awoken and come to hunt me out, like an officer doing a surprise barracks inspection. Squinting with troubled eyes at the image on the screen, she asks in a dead, cynical, almost accusatory tone if that could be the reason for all my traveling.
Her acceptance of homosexuality has come a long way in the years since she learned about mine, in contrast to my now deceased father, who could never overcome his disgust at the thought of two male bodies in clumsy postures of coupling. Mom’s love, on the other hand, caused her to work hard to dredge up memories of old-maid librarians living together in the 1920s, and she was able to come to the sentimental conclusion that love can exist between any two people. Even so, no amount of biographies of Rock Hudson or Liberace, nor any Christopher Isherwood novel or gossip about Garbo, can enlighten her about my kinds of obsessions. Confused by what appears to her as pure perversity, she pleadingly and repeatedly demands an explanation of why I choose such objects of affection, why my affairs can’t be more like those of the charismatic middle-aged gay couple who live next door, with their decent professional income and well-appointed living room. Despite her knowledge of Rock Hudson’s preference for blonds half his age or Liberace’s suing chauffeur, she’s at a loss as to my interest in younger bodies from coarser backgrounds.
Her words sting me, and my harangued mind flees to the equally painful story of opinion-fearing Queen Marie meeting her son on a train in 1918 at Creţeşti-Ungheni, as he’s being shipped to imprisonment, after deserting an army post to run away and marry a commoner named Zizi Lambrino. “Is it possible that you should have lost to such a degree your sense of honor and duty,” she rants. “Wouldn’t it be better for you to die, a bullet in your head, and be buried in good Romanian ground . . . ?”
There are women like her and my mother who spend most of their lives hoping that a miracle will inject the beloved with their image of decency. That’s the reason why my mother keeps my serious fiction, written under my real name and so
unpalatable to her, out of view, proudly displaying the coffee-table books that I cynically wrote under a pseudonym for quick bucks. This deeply intelligent, somewhat intellectual woman pretends to be perplexed by the fact that I wouldn’t put my birth name on those wholesome books and use a pen name for the others.
Every five months, in fact, in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia, she takes a copy of my novel User, about old Times Square, down from the shelf, having conveniently forgotten what it’s about. After reading until dawn about the junkies, hustlers and transvestite prostitutes memorialized in its pages, she telephones me in helpless alarm, wanting to know how I could possibly have garnered such information. Then, magically, the subject is forgotten until the next bout of insomnia and rereading several months later.
VIII
MOM’S UNYIELDING INTENTIONS bring up the question of magical thinking and make me question my own impulses. Can vivid wish-fulfillment fantasies of the beloved, motivated even by compassion, produce a miracle and ever change him? The question occurred to me that morning, at the breakfast table with Mom, in the midst of an opiate-withdrawal headache. Would all my longing for Romulus, my good intentions, my fantasies, have the same lack of effect on him that my mother’s have had on me?
I worried about this as I lay against the seat that afternoon on the train to Manhattan, in a mood of paranoid yearning, two big tablespoons of hydrocodone flaring into imagined scenarios of Romulus’s betrayal. Like a sponge polluted by unclean water, I soaked up pathetic notions that seemed to replay endlessly.
From my mother’s I’d used a calling card to telephone him in Sibiu, and he’d mentioned that he was planning to strip for the girls at the club where his brother was a bouncer. It sounded like a harmless idea at first, but snagged my attention, the way a piece of yarn from a sweater catches on a casement nail and has to be worked off slowly in order not to unravel the whole thing. And that afternoon, before the five-and-a-half-hour train ride to New York, I kept trying to clear my throat and couldn’t. I remember supposing that a couple spoonfuls of the hydrocodone would relieve it as well as that armored stiffness in my body that came from my mother’s expectations.
Slowly, the opiates lulled me into hypnogogic snatches. Made-up stories came into my mind, based on my insecurity about Romulus. Then I’d wake with a start, before sinking back in and finding the same scenarios gone no further in time, waiting to torment me. Romulus was leaning over the balcony of a formerly Communist high-rise in the city of Sibiu to the soft explosions of a beaten rug. It was a few weeks before Easter, so the beaters in this Eastern country, like the ones I’d seen in Arad, were at it probably from morning until dusk. Standing next to him on the balcony was a new blonde. Her blue-veined skin seemed infused with the lead-ridden air, a condition I’d read sometimes occurs in Eastern Europe’s overindustrialized cities; from the look of her skin-tight jeans and impossibly clumsy platform heels, she and Romulus were about to go to the club for the striptease he’d mentioned, which suddenly began to overlap . . . that meaningless noise of a beaten rug becoming a musical beat charged with aggressive sex, as brazenly parted legs lowered jeans to reveal pubic hair inches from leering female faces. . . .
The images flared up in a white-hot kiln, then wilted into something taunting and sticky in the mildewed corner of a bedroom—my idea of the bedroom of his apartment in a concrete ex-Communist block. Romulus was gyrating on a bed the way he did during the best times his cock was in my mouth, and into the bedroom came that same mercury-skinned blonde, her rubbery breasts bouncing gently in a harsh shaft of light.
I flailed away from the image and tried to stand, but couldn’t unstick myself. Now the dank bedroom featured a nest of undulating hips and slapping thighs, until the train finally pulled into that satanic, rubbery smell of rot that greets you each time you come back to New York, and jerked to a stop.
LITTLE BY LITTLE I would become amazed at the accuracy of my fantasies as I learned about Romulus’s real life in Sibiu, the city to which his family had moved after a decade in the town of Râmnicul-Vîlcea. There really is a mildewed bedroom, similar to the one I imagined. And there really is a bouncer brother, named Bogdan, two years younger than Romulus, who’s full of bombast and bullish good humor. He’s a big, meaty fellow with a generous, confrontational grin. Then there’s the next-younger brother, Vlad, who’s blond and tubular as a Russian doll, has a dazed grin, a low IQ and a narcissistic habit of pulling a pocket mirror out of his pants every few steps to examine his hair. Finally, there’s sloe-eyed brother Renei, the insular genius of the family, just seventeen, who’s discreet and cagey but sweet and depressed. And as for the dilapidated Communist high-rise with the rug beaters, that’s pretty much what I found when I actually did visit Sibiu.
Romulus is the darkest and smallest of the children, the oldest, his father an unknown quantity who disappeared into the army after getting Romulus’s mother pregnant. Her real fiancé, the father of Romulus’s brothers, was himself in the army when the infidelity transpired. When he came home, he found his bride-to-be with a swollen belly. The only way he’d have her was childless, so Romulus was shunted to his maternal grandmother in Sibiu, while the young married couple escaped to the nearby town of Vîlcea.
So Romulus began life thinking that his grandmother was his mother and his mother his sister. All he knew of his real mother, whom he rarely saw, was based on a few of his grandmother’s bitter comments about her daughter, “that bitch from Vîlcea.” It wasn’t until his little body and judgment had grown capable enough, at, let’s say, seven, that his mother realized he had some potential as a babysitter for his three younger half brothers, while she went to her factory job and his stepfather to his construction job. Romulus was shipped from his grandmother’s to their home and informed, to his shock, that he was going to live with his real mother.
It was like a fairy tale come to life, when the boy was suddenly banished by a doting grandmother to a strange town to work for a beleaguered woman whom he had heard called a villain for the last seven years. Here in Râmnicul-Vîlcea, he had his first practice as a fugitive, an émigré, slipping out of windows while the family slept (he couldn’t walk past the kitchen, where his stepfather lay in bed next to the gas stove) and sneaking onto the train back to Sibiu. Then the child’s ability to play became an ability to plot, for he had to play at playing, skipping from train car to train car until he found a couple who looked like they could be respectable parents, and loitering near them with the false expression of a normal boy having fun, until the conductor was out of the way. This sham of normalcy would soon develop into a major conning skill, but it didn’t keep them from sending him back to his mother again and again, until he got used to it and learned to see life through that veil of blood that some call family and that ties one abject relative, or hostage of a situation, to another, encouraging him to view the rest of the world in a pitiless or predatory way.
All of which must have somehow struck me as we said good-bye at the Gellért, and I watched him walk farther and farther away, his back slightly stooped, carrying the five hundred dollars I’d given him, which was more than five times the average monthly salary for a Romanian. From my departing taxi I watched his rather bow-legged stride across the bridge toward a bus that would take him back to the place of his old confinement—his mother’s house. Like many people of his ilk, he would spend most of his time merely waiting, his coiled muscles set at bay in front of a TV, smoking cigarette after cigarette, eyes ringed with boredom and insulted sensitivity. Waiting and always waiting, that’s how it was. Waiting for the time with me to be over so he could see a girl, waiting for the girl to be over so that he could start waiting for me all over again and get some money. It certainly was one more aspect of him that excited me: his talent for submission. Perhaps I should have remembered that he was also known for bolting, onto trains and across borders.
Given his background, he may have been prone to plotting. Even out of idleness. Several ti
mes I put myself in his situation, trying to see myself through his eyes as someone who could never be kind enough no matter what I did, unless I were to relinquish all my power—in the form of money and freedom. I saw him crouched before the TV in the living room of his mother (who had now moved back to Sibiu), predatorily questioned by the whole family. What, really, did this educated American who was twice his age and had so much more money want from him? I saw them drilling like miners toward the mother lode of our sex acts, and his embarrassment and swift realization when they hit a vein, so that it was more than easy to draft him into their plan of exploitative outrage, their fraudulent project to right the corruption that had been visited on their son, by setting up some kind of sting.
Homosexuality is no longer illegal in Romania per se. In 1996, under pressure from the then forty-nation Council of Europe, the country amended the language of its sodomy law, known as Article 200. Formerly, the law forbade homosexuality in all situations; but at the time of my most intense involvement with Romulus it still called for prosecution in cases of a “public scandal.” Because the term “public scandal” is so vague, it can mean anything from having sex in a public toilet to forgetting to close the curtains as you kiss your partner good morning. And because the law explicitly condemns proselytizing for the legitimacy of homosexuality, it could undoubtedly be brought to bear on anyone thought to have corrupted another into a homosexual relationship.
In the mid-nineties, the prosecution of the homosexual lifestyle in Romania was grisly. Police in towns and small cities sometimes offered the most flagrant queen amnesty in exchange for helping them hunt out more closety homosexuals. Or else the information came from a family member. A well-known case is one from 1992 involving Ciprian Cucu, who was in his last year of high school, and Marian Mutascu, who was twenty-two. 1 The young men, who met through a coded newspaper ad published in Timişoara, lived in the town of Sînnicolau Mare, with Cucu’s family. Their love affair was intense and secret. But Cucu’s sister and her husband began to suspect, and when the sister discovered Cucu’s revealing diary, she went for the only help she could think of—the police. During the interrogation, Cucu denied everything, but Mutascu confessed. The police confronted the “whore Cucu,” as they termed him, with the diary, and he, too, broke down.
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