Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  When certain Monika had the opportunity to spot me, I asked the receptionist a final question—the location of the men’s room—and followed her directions to the ubiquitous symbol of a boy pissing into a pot. I hadn’t planned on a repeat performance of the night at Hotel Paříž, but if the inspiration moved her I wouldn’t object; indeed I found myself painfully prepared the moment I stepped to the sink to inspect collar, teeth, and hair. After several minutes had passed, the door swinging open to series of cramped male faces, paranoia proved a more powerful detumescent than anticipation a stimulant. I had clearly instructed her to knock on the door to the men’s room within five minutes of seeing me at the front desk, when she was to whisper the room number of her new friend. A half-dozen explanations for her tardiness raced through my mind: she had not seen me at the front desk, she had misheard and waited in the women’s room, she couldn’t pry the room number from the Texan, she had unexpectedly improvised or even decided to leave me witlessly behind while she humped him beyond any one of two hundred hotel room doors.

  Paranoia escalated to panic when I hurried to view the bar and discovered them conspicuously absent. Straining against the urge to sprint, I approached the receptionist to pry from her the direction they had disappeared. A quick scan of the lobby in passing caught Monika holding the hand of her Texan at the elevator. Their body language—he stiffly anxious and her leaning loose-limbed against his shoulder—spoke clearly of her control. I wondered if she had disobeyed instructions to test or merely gall me. To jump into the elevator with them would destroy the situation. When the bell sounded the arrival of a free car, I charged across the lobby, determined to end it rather than allow Monika free expression of her duplicitous promiscuity, but noticed that she flourished behind her back a slip of paper, which, with quick dip of knee she dropped atop an ashtray stand. When the doors slid shut I hurried to pluck the note from the sand, and anticipating that she had fooled me with a blank cocktail napkin, silently blessed her in reading the number 451.

  I gave her no more than five minutes, fearing what she might accomplish even in that brief span of time. Images of a pink-skinned, knobby-kneed longhorn in boxer shorts, T-shirt, cowboy boots, and hat engaging in THE ACT with a passionately compliant Monika inspired titters of disbelief and, moments later, anxious concern. Hadn’t she said that it was often better to have sex with strangers than with someone known? Long ago I had given up trying to understand the mysterious process of sexual attraction, and how perfectly sane women were drawn to the worst sort of men, myself included. And Monika was not precisely sane. She might have chosen the Texan not because of his supposed wealth but from perverse sexual attraction. I jammed my finger repeatedly into the call button and impatiently watched the floor lights above each elevator door, my stomach rising and sinking as the cars plunged, stopped, and plunged again. When the elevator arrived I pressed the floor number and waved off a late arrival, fooling him just long enough to allow the doors to close unhindered. I remembered the brevity of sex with Monika, how in the men’s room at the Hotel Paříž she had initiated the act and finished it within five minutes. As with any love relationship, I had no choice but to trust her at the same time I knew it was foolish to do so.

  Room 451 was conveniently located at the end of the corridor, where the noise of an altercation would not be as readily heard. I paused outside the door to press my ear to the paint. No clanging bedsprings, thumps of wallboard, Texan yeehaws or Danish shrieks, but the absence of voices might also be construed as equally alarming. I would play it restrained, the well-bred husband—the image of Dirk Bogarde sprang to mind—sniffing out an attempt to cuckold him. After deep breathing to focus the mind I raised my hand and delivered six sharp knocks to the door. When that went unanswered I hammered on wood until I heard the latch click below.

  Contrary to my fears, the Texan hadn’t come to the door in his underwear. Lipstick at the corners of his confused smile proved that some physical contact had been made, and I suspected that at the first sound of my knock he had scrambled back into whatever Monika had taken him out of. I visibly sniffed and remarked, “I don’t actually smell sex. Hasn’t there been any?”

  He stared at me as though surprised I spoke English.

  “I believe you were about to have sexual intercourse with a woman who happens to be my wife,” I clarified.

  The Texan blanched. He said, “You must be making a mistake, this is room four-five-one.”

  His accent threw me off my rhythm. The closest he’d ever come to a cow was a steak house in Jersey. I shouted “Kristina!” and pushed past him into the room. The Texan blathered indignantly at my back. I glanced around to a conspicuously closed bathroom door. He tried to cut me off when I reached for the knob. I pushed him off balance and flung open the door.

  “Come on out, Kristina,” I sternly said.

  A picture of contriteness stepped out of the bathroom, head hung low, lips pouted, eyes mournfully round. She said, “Nicholas, you found me.” In the palm of her hand she clandestinely flashed a hundred-dollar bill.

  The Texan picked up the receiver by the side of the bed. His hands visibly trembled and his eyes blanked in terror. The intensity of his fear shocked and excited me. I took two threatening steps forward and pointed my finger at him like a gun.

  “In this country, a man is perfectly within his rights to kill an errant wife and her lover, so if you don’t want that phone cord wrapped around your neck, I suggest you hang up the phone now.”

  He set the receiver back onto its cradle and stammered, “I didn’t know, you gotta believe me, I was drinking in the bar when she came up to me—”

  “You’re calling my wife a whore?” I demanded, and brandished a chair over my head, reveling in the moment the fool cringed to the carpet.

  “Nicholas, please don’t, it was all my fault.” Monika snatched the cowboy hat from the foot of the bed and clutched it to her chest. She spoke in the tone of a little girl caught sneaking sweets. “Nothing happened, I swear. I just wanted him to give me his hat.”

  “You were going to fuck him just to get his cowboy hat?” The notion enraged me. Monika was capable of anything.

  “You want the hat, lady, it’s yours,” the Texan squeaked from the floor.

  Without thinking, I kicked him in the head.

  “We’re both Americans here,” he pleaded.

  What next? The character I played squirmed and eluded the grasp of my talents. I thought about what he had planned to do with Monika. I should break his neck. One clean blow of the chair back would do it. Monika tugged on my arm. I dropped the chair and raised my hand to strike her. She flinched, eyes shining with excitement. Perfect! I tossed a handful of loose forints onto the bed, said, “That’s for the hat,” and pushed her out the door.

  I bit my tongue to keep from squealing with laughter as we raced arm in arm down the hall to the elevators. Monika cocked the hat on her head and modeled before the polished aluminum doors. The elevator chimed and swished open. The moment we jumped inside she locked her fingers around my neck and straddled my waist. The hat tumbled to the floor. I jerked the hem of her dress to her belly and wondered at what moment she had relieved herself of undergarments—alone in the Texan’s bathroom or before? The question both disturbed and excited me. She tossed back her head, exposing a delicate line of neck. Though we were veritable scouts in our readiness to perform, I doubted we could but begin before the sharp drop of four floors opened the elevator to our compromised position. Her sighs when I traced with flicking tongue the line from ear to shoulder quivered through my bones. With practiced fingertips Monika threaded me through my barriers of cloth and flicked a red switch on the control panel. The elevator shuddered to rest between floors.

  “Look at me,” she commanded.

  When I obeyed, I found her eyes not on me, but on our mirrored image at the opposite wall. She wanted to watch me watching her.

  “Am I a bad girl?” she asked the image on the wall.

 
; I said, “Yes.”

  “Then teach me a lesson,” she said. “Punish me.”

  It astonished me that scenarios which would normally trouble even my shriveled conscience excited me beyond reason when performed under her command. Though I did nothing more than what she encouraged, the idea that I punished her brought to physical focus all the slights, hurts, and jealousies of our time together and urged me forward with a brutal vigor. A series of sharp, short cries signaled that in the genus loci of guilt and desire she found momentary release from both. We untangled ourselves, straightened our clothing, and as the elevator descended and the doors opened to the ground floor she so distanced herself that we might have been strangers.

  In the back of the taxi leaving the hotel, Monika looked at the floor, her purse, the scenery flitting out the window, everywhere but at me. She said, “It was a porno film.”

  I thought she had made a comparison to the torrid scene we had just enacted in the hotel elevator, but the remoteness of her voice and the lack of any comparative adjective prodded me to ask, “What?”

  “Henrík,” she answered. Her voice was small and weary. She stared out the window again. “That was the film he was making. Did you know Budapest is now the capital of the European pornography business?”

  “No,” I said, cautiously.

  She asked the driver if she could smoke. He shrugged. The wind when she inched down the window drew out the smoke and whipped her hair into an angry black swarm. “He had me in a bathing suit, like before, reading lines from a script. Then he asked if I minded doing a love scene first, and introduced me to my costar. My costar was completely naked. He was pulling his thing with one hand and wanted to shake my hand with the other.” She drew deep breaths of smoke with resignation rather than her usual nervous energy. “Henrík locked me in a closet when I wouldn’t go along with it. That was why I was so late. He told me he could make it a rape scene if I didn’t cooperate. I threw a bottle at his head. Finally, he gave up and let me go.”

  I bit the insides of my cheeks to keep from laughing in relief. Five days of jealousy, terror, and depression over nothing more than a deceitful pornographer! Images of Monika and me adventuring through the cities of Central and Eastern Europe fast-forwarded through my imagination. Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Talinn, Kraków—any city where the happy confluence of primitive banking and corrupted order gave an enterprising young couple the advantage. The elevator would be only one memorable scene in a compilation of erotic escapades in public locations. We would make love above the heads and under the noses of the unsuspecting, on rooftops, balconies, and stairways, in trains, trams, and funiculars, amid toilet stalls or statuary, any nearest place when our courage and wits combined to complete a situation. And fresh from a string of victories through Europe, we’d attack Cannes the following spring to pitch our life story to the chief of Paramount Pictures, who would be so charmed he’d hire me to produce and Monika to star!

  “It’s nothing to smile about,” Monika acidly commented.

  “Of course it isn’t,” I protested. She must not see me smiling. She must not think I’m happy. “It must have been absolutely awful for you. And I won’t say I didn’t have my suspicions about Henrík from the very start. I smiled because I was thinking how pleasurable it would be to kill him.”

  “You’re such a bullshitter at times I can’t help but laugh,” she said, with surprising fondness.

  “I’m serious. I’ll kill him if you want,” I insisted.

  She dismissed me with a flick of her hand.

  “I’ve killed before,” I asserted.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Some guy came at me with a knife.”

  “And where did this happen?” she asked, in tones of a humoring disbelief.

  “Right here in Budapest.”

  She looked at me sharply, sniffing something I should have been careful to leave buried. “When was this?”

  “Before I met you.” Vanity had played me for a fool. I could have said anywhere but Budapest. “When I first came to Europe. This February. I hadn’t intended to kill him. But he attacked me, and I reacted.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Some skinhead. You know the type. Maybe I didn’t really kill him. I mean I didn’t take his pulse or anything.”

  “I’m sure you got him.” She sighed, losing interest. “You’re a real killer.” She lit another cigarette and stared out the window. “I feel like shit,” she confessed. “I want another situation.”

  “It’s late,” I objected.

  “It’s never too late when I want one.”

  “Don’t you think we’re a little tired?”

  Monika bolted forward and shouted at the driver, “Stop the cab! Right here.”

  The driver swerved sharply to the curb in a squeal of brakes. I peeled myself off the back of the front seat. Monika clawed at the door handle. I should have known better than to patronize her.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “It’s very simple. I get what I want. When I don’t get what I want, I go elsewhere.”

  She opened the door and put one foot out. I pulled her back. To the driver, I said, “Hotel Inter-Continental.”

  27

  Most addictions are safe and controllable at the start and only become dangerous when the desire for gratification escalates to absurd proportions. Monika terrified me because she was uncontrollable. I would reach a depth of perception from which I hoped to influence the course of her behavior, only to discover ignorance had acted as a drag, and my new understanding allowed me to be pulled along more readily in her wake. Her thrill of speed could be sated only with greater speed. I couldn’t brake her and I couldn’t trust her instincts of self-preservation to check the velocity. Nor, because of my own addiction, could I peel myself away. The prospect of mutual immolation at the terminus of such a lifestyle was an event not to dread but to celebrate as a final consummation, a vindication of my feelings since meeting her of the rightness of our union.

  With greater recklessness we began our second situation of the night, seeking in audacious risk the jolt to satisfy our addictions. The Inter-Continental was a modern concrete and glass hotel situated just off the Danube, charging top rates and attracting an exclusively Western clientele. The bar, located in a cozy corner of the lobby, had been charmingly named the Gipsy Bar, though any Gypsies plying their trades within a hundred yards would have been hustled into the Danube.

  As midnight approaches in almost any bar, restiveness hits that percentage of the clientele which, no matter what the avowed reason for spending such a disproportionate amount of time in low surroundings, either consciously or subconsciously is looking to spend a few hours in the embrace of a stranger. The solitary arrival of a beautiful woman in a provocative black cocktail dress radically shifts the focus of the room, as single men pretend glances in her direction are truly idle, and male friends with slipping concentration try to maintain a grasp on the threads of conversation.

  Showing a long stretch of leg as she sidesaddled a chair at the bar, Monika played to the room like an actress plays to a camera, allowing herself to be watched seemingly unaware she was the focus of attention. The tapping of a pack of cigarettes against her thigh signaled she knew too well the symbolism of lighting a cigarette to risk it until she had made her decision. A few of the more alert men scrambled to palm incendiary devices should she glance around for a light. When she slipped a cigarette from the pack she turned in an unexpected direction, toward the only male pair of eyes to remain aloof, which belonged to a trimly dressed man whose reserve marked him as a Japanese businessman even at my distance of observation. He seemed surprised at her attention and visibly started when she spoke. I feared she had been too forward, but a smile broke his stern countenance, and he readily lit her cigarette, even taking one that she—with lowered eyes and demure smile—offered to him. Silently, I approved her choice of targets; Japanese men are relatively wealthy, polite, fearful
of foreigners yet notorious suckers for Western women. An enraged gaijin bursting into his room would terrify him into easy submission.

  Monika worked the Japanese with admirable economy; by a suggestive glance here and a curl of lip there, she communicated between the lines of their dialogue a seductiveness coolly arousing. Once her choice had been made clear, the focus of the bar dissipated. Some still watched with determined fascination, ready to move forward with their own ploys should the Japanese prove inadequate or unwilling. Others marked her as a professional and, though undeniably beautiful, less interesting. The Japanese warmed from initial reserve to gregariousness with surprising speed, laughing frequently and talking with great animation. The artfulness of her approach made it impossible to judge from whom first came the suggestion to leave the bar for more intimate surroundings. They simultaneously began the ritual bill paying and collection of personal effects, and moved toward the elevators across the lobby as though they headed to bed for the hundredth and not the first time.

  As before, she casually dipped at the ashtray stand, and even turned a dazzling smile over her shoulder meant for me. When the elevator doors safely enclosed them, I hurried to retrieve the scrap of paper she had dropped in the sand and watched their progress by floor in the lights above. The note, when I unwrapped it, was alarmingly incomplete, containing just the numbers 2 and 2, preceded and followed by question marks. The number 22 never stands alone in a multilevel hotel, so 22 what? Or what 22? I calculated sixteen possibilities in an eight-floor hotel. The lights marked the elevator’s progress, pausing at the second floor and continuing uninterrupted to the eighth. I couldn’t escape the dread that she had planned this careful obfuscation because we had already made love this evening and she needed someone new to satisfy her ever more jaded erotic tastes. That the elevator had stopped on the second floor was the worst possible luck, with nine rooms bearing the numbers 2 and 2. Only with fortunate guesswork and frenzied effort could I prevent a deceitful consummation. As I raced up the stairs I could hear her protest with self-righteous innocence that it was my fault she had fucked him; my failure to appear as scheduled had left her no choice but to continue to play the scene to its implied conclusion.