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 ince
ssantly, 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.
For the first time her face shifts into clear focus in my imagination, plain and oval, an oatmeal complexion with steel-blue eyes and a slightly bulbous nose, the kind of potato-faced girl who looks like a chambermaid until she’s lightened her hair and painted her lips a glistening pink to become a disco queen, a flashy trophy with long, lithesome legs, pert breasts and a high ass.
Four days ago, from Syracuse, I’d overnighted letters of invitation from the Lithuanian professor and Moldovan actor, with instructions for Romulus to go to the American embassy in Bucharest to apply for a visa. Now I call his cell phone and he answers distractedly, with a television baying annoyingly in the background. He’s in Bucharest, he claims, as I instructed, staying at a cheap hotel near the embassy. But something about the incessant puffing of his cigarette, interrupting our conversation, hints of disconnection and disappointment. The embassy is demanding papers to prove his residence and his income, he tells me sadly. Is he really there? I squelch the doubt. Don’t worry, I tell him, we’ll find another way. What astonishes me is the tone of his soft, caring voice, his obvious comfort in hearing mine. It washes away all the paranoia, until Mom’s abrasive voice barges in on the conversation, demanding to know immediately where I am and what I’m doing.
Instead of anger, a tenderness for her, overlaid on a sweet, sentimental need for him, washes over me and floats me into her bedroom. Her cool, waxy hand grasps my arm weakly, and she whispers into my ear that she approves of him if that is what will make me happy. But her voice can’t lead me into the world into which she’s rapidly sinking. Perhaps not so strangely, her failing is intensifying my Romulus fantasies. I seem to be substituting some harder, crueler comfort for what was once so soft and protective. All my life, from infancy to now, bodies have been my most cathectic points of signification. I never believed that the mind was any more important. Now I feel my own body calmed by fantasy, floating on Mom’s touch, the conversation I’ve just had with Romulus and the white codeine pills I brought back from Romania.
Later, an unspecific distrust and fears about my exploits return, bringing back, for some reason, a memory of that last day in Bucharest. I’d awoken with him in my arms and that splitting headache that comes from a codeine hangover, feeling sudden regret about having neglected the city in favor of his body. As he lounged in front of the television with the curtains drawn against the afternoon light, I decided to separate from him for the first time, even though our nights had been saturated with more and more intimacy and physical pleasure. What cinched it as far as I was concerned was that I couldn’t take the sound of another day’s soccer marathon on TV.
Having become as accustomed to my constant touch as I was to his, he was startled at my decision to venture out alone; he sat up in bed and insisted on going with me as guardian. But separation seemed the healthy thing to do, so I left alone, ignoring his worried face and assuring him I could take care of myself.
Guidebook in hand, I headed for Bucharest’s Village Museum, an outdoor exhibition of rural architecture that features thatched roofs, wooden houses, woven-twig fences and other authentic peasant productions. The feel of Romulus’s embraces still hovered around me, like an article of clothing that has just been shed. The headache had dissipated, and I felt deeply relaxed. At the museum, as I neared a romantic clay cottage painted in vivid blue-wash, I heard devilish giggling coming from inside. This confused me, because the building was surrounded by a rope fence with clear indications forbidding trespassing. Out of it stumbled a gorgeous teenaged couple, an elfin girl in tight pink pedal pushers whose waistband she struggled to button, and an almond-eyed boy in tank top and too-large red athletic pants, the fly of which gaped open. Still giggling, they glanced at me in humorous complicity, then leaped over the roped fence and ran away. They were a far cry from Carol in his natty English suits or his mistress Lupescu in her black silk Chanel dresses, yet somehow they recalled the thrill of those illicit trysts I’d been reading about. A happy excitement shot through me like an injection, as I realized that the world was full of spontaneous sensuality always in reach if you had the courage to spit in the face of convention. Or at least that’s what I thought. Months later I would read in a newspaper that guards were arrested for taking up to three dollars in bribes from such lovers and letting them use the cottages in the museum to shack up, but on that day the scene had the aura of a romantic comedy.
It was sunny and breezy as I strolled down Bulevardul Kiseleff, among stately lime trees, wisteria vines and dilapidated mansions, full of hope and excitement about my future with Romulus; then, out of curiosity, I turned into a tiny street with brown gabled houses and prim little gardens. Almost immediately, a sunken-eyed man appeared from nowhere. There was a sensual, almost desperate tension in his piercing expression that at first I took as sexual. He asked me where the InterContinental was, which is an inane question, since you can see this high-rise hotel from practically anywhere in central Bucharest. He wanted to change money, he claimed. Did I have any dollars he could buy?
Before I could refuse, two burly plainclothesmen in black suits had surrounded us. They flashed badges and meaty arms and began accusing us of buying and selling money on the black market. When I tried to protest, they raised their fists toward my face. They roughed the man up and tore his shirt a bit, while explaining to me that they were sure he was the instigator but that I was implicated as well. When they demanded my passport, some instinct told me to keep a grip on it as I showed it to them. What resulted was a tugging match worthy of the Three Stooges—to which they finally succumbed. Then one grabbed my nearly empty wallet and began sniffing in the tiny recesses, supposedly for drugs. I thought of explaining that I was just an innocent American fag here to pleasure one of their country-men, but fortunately, kept my lip buttoned.
After I returned to the hotel, Romulus’s face was swept with relief about the fact that I hadn’t disappeared. Then his attention was again glued to the soccer game; however, my story about what had happened became the first ever to distract him from it, perhaps only because the story was connected to soccer in his mind. It turns out that the whole plainclothes routine was a con well known in the streets of Bucharest. Two guys pose as cops and another as a perpetrator. The object of the game is to nab the tourist’s passport and then, as he pleads, sell it back to him. “It’s a trick we call a ‘Maradona maneuver’ ”—Romulus chuckled—“after Diego Maradona, the ace Argentine soccer player.” His eyes filled with comic irony. I could tell he admired the subtlety of the ruse.
XII
THE CONTINENTAL SUN is mocking my folly through a hole in the ozone layer, beating me down in my jet lag. It’s the middle of May. This marks the sixth month of my relationship with Romulus. I’m waiting desperately for him in front of the InterContinental in Bucharest. I’m fresh from Paris but I haven’t given my Beaubourg presentation yet—it’s a month away. After our failure in getting an American visa, I’ve deemed
it best to bring Romulus to France myself for the Beaubourg appearance. I have, luckily, come to my senses about the idea of projecting nude images of him on the wall behind me, but I still want him to be there. Then and hopefully, we’ll stay together in Paris for a few months. So I’ve flown to Bucharest to try to take care of the French visa. The only trouble is, he isn’t showing up.
Three hours later, when the sun is lower but just as scorching, when anger and humiliation are leaking through all my pores with the perspiration, he arrives with his gym bag, grimy from an interminable, local-stop bus ride from Sibiu. The bus took nine hours to get to Bucharest, delayed by a flat tire, a lazy driver who took hourly breaks and an unbudging Gypsy caravan on the road. But as usual, Romulus’s manner is composed and uncomplaining, too dignified and soldierly to express any frustration. Because we have nowhere to stay, he persuades one of the many idle cabdrivers to take us on an exhausting trek through the city in search of a hotel room. After one night in a moldy hotel near the post office, we discover Hanul Manuc, a country-style Romanian inn built in the early nineteenth century by an Armenian merchant, Manuc Bey. It sits like an anachronistic hallucination across from the ruins of the royal court in a corner of the old quarter. Our cab bounces across the uneven road into a large, tree-lined space surrounded by intricate wooden balustrades. A couple of homeless dogs are prowling around the straw-filled covered wagon in the immense cobblestone courtyard. Romulus extends his hand to one of them, who lunges to bite it.
The place is magical, full of scalloped Moorish arches over wooden galleries, reminiscent of the rural Romanian world in Panaït Istrati’s novels, two of which are in my suitcase. Our spacious suite has two rooms, a bedroom and a Romanian-style sitting room, with a Deco-ish dresser, high-backed wooden chairs and a wrought-iron candlestick with electric bulbs. We eat an enormous, tasty meal under the roofed gallery, with all the traditional dishes: sarmale, stuffed cabbage; cascaval, a kind of hardened cottage cheese; ciorba de burta, the tripe soup that Romulus chokes with sour cream; and mititei, an oblong meatball, which, despite its lamb and pork content, is served rare. Lackadaisical, overdressed waiters with very little to do hover over us, then lose attention and don’t come when they’re called—to Romulus’s great displeasure.
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