As I remained unresponsive, she suddenly went limp. “My husband says I’m not attractive. Do you think he’s right?”
“Nonsense.” I began to kiss and undress her. “Nonsense.”
She led me into a small room right beside the kitchen. “There’s only a single bed here, but it’s farthest from the children’s room. We won’t have to worry about them hearing us.”
Standing in the narrow space between the wall and the bed, we were pressed against each other as we took off our clothes. “I’ve been married for eighteen years,” she whispered, “but you’re only my fourth lover.”
“You’re still one ahead of me.” I reached to bury myself in her large body.
“You don’t have to lie to please me. I know how many women you must have had! But I’m not jealous.”
We lay down on the narrow bed, my back against the ice-cold wall. But as I moved above her, her soft warm flesh surrounded me like a cozy blanket and I began kissing her breasts.
“I knew,” she exclaimed with delighted surprise, “I knew you were a nibbler!” Then, for no reason I could think of, she tried to push me away from her and began to fret.
“I don’t think I should let you. You don’t really want me.”
“You seem to know everything about me,” I snapped at her, “so you should know how I feel.”
Zsuzsa’s mood changed again, and just as quickly. “I guess,” she said, opening her thighs confidently, “you want what you can get.”
Ten
On Taking It Easy
Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
— Friedrich Engels
My affair with Zsuzsa didn’t last through the winter. Her husband didn’t care for her as a woman, but he was jealous, and we had few opportunities to meet. Although she could have come to my place in the early afternoons, while my mother was at work and her children were out, we had to meet at her house so that she could answer the phone if he called. She always settled us in the former maid’s room beside the kitchen. I was glad I hadn’t been able to see it in the dark the first night we were together. With its high but closely pressing whitewashed walls, bare wooden floor and one small square window near the ceiling, this cell was an architectural reminder of the servant’s lot in prewar Hungary. Nor was it improved as a guest room. There were no curtains or carpets, and the only decoration was a vulgar landscape in oils, the type of green mess which pedlars used to sell from door to door. There wasn’t even enough space for a chair: the entire furnishings consisted of a chest of drawers and the narrow bed. Since no one else was in the apartment at the time of our meetings, I wondered why we had to make love in this uninspiring place.
“You certainly don’t want your guests to stay long” I once remarked to Zsuzsa.
“Here it’s simple for me to tidy things up after you,” she answered.
At least, I thought, she could have said “after us.”
For a while, none of this affected us in our moments of bliss. Zsuzsa may have had fat on her body, but that fat was burning. I could assure her with sincere enthusiasm that she had no reason to feel inferior to any other woman. However, I wasn’t speaking the whole truth. Her popular husband seemed to have done a thorough job of destroying her self-confidence, and brief rendezvous with a nineteen-year-old boy could do little to restore it. Zsuzsa’s grace and fire were gifts of an unusual moment. Under normal circumstances she looked always pale and apprehensive, as if she had just missed a train. She would enjoy herself passionately until she had her orgasm — and immediately afterward would turn into an unhappy old maid. “If I hadn’t hurried you’d have left me behind,” she often complained, while still trembling. Either because she needed to slight others in order to feel sure of herself, or because she was anxious about losing me, she always managed a hostile parting remark. “Be sure you don’t brag about me to your friends!” or “You look so messy — why don’t you get yourself a haircut?” It began to irritate me.
“I don’t want to feel responsible for the emotional balance of a boy,” she told me the last time we were together in that bare cell. She was looking her best, as she had just put back on a dark blue velvet dress which shimmered against her pale skin and gave her a striking appearance against the white walls. “I don’t want you to grow too dependent on me,” she went on, and not for the first time. “You ought to get another girl friend besides me.”
“I already have,” I declared truthfully, taking this opportunity to break the news.
I made some new friends that winter. The students of the college of Theatre and Film Arts took their marxism-leninism course with us at the University of Budapest, and we struck up conversations during the dull lectures. The young actors and film-makers found us altogether too solemn, but they were nice about it, and often invited us to their parties. That was how I got to know one of their teachers, Imre Vadas, a sturdy cameraman who ate raw meat. He was a former farm boy and still seemed to smell of pigs, but he spoke exquisite French and the languages of all women. Imre’s life-motto was: “There’s nothing so easy as fast living.” We became good friends. When in the mood, he liked to tell me about his adventures, and one of them I found particularly fascinating.
A few months earlier, he had been sent to film a village wedding in colour for a theatrical short. At the wedding dance, he saw a pretty girl, who attracted him and who returned his dark glances. After the shooting, Imre danced with her; but there was nothing else he could do, for he was leaving the next morning. She was the teacher of the local one-room school, and any rash and direct proposal was out of the question. She might make a scene, and Imre wanted to leave that muddy, God-forsaken but God-fearing village in one piece. “I was stuck!” I remember him saying incredulously. “But I got an idea. The tables from the wedding feast were lined up around the walls, and each table had a vase with a huge bunch of roses — they were supposed to be presents for the newly-weds. Why not say it with flowers? I asked myself. It was corny, but it could work. Even if the girl was shocked by my proposal, that big bunch of flowers would distract her enough to keep her from protesting too loudly. So I stopped right in the middle of a dance — I wanted to confuse her — and walked over to one of the tables, snatched the roses from the vase, and went back. I held them out to her — still dripping, and they pricked me too — and I said: ‘I’ll give you these beautiful roses, if you’ll let me spend the night with you.”
“What happened?”
“She agreed. Blushing nicely, of course. Boy, I’m telling you, those roses were worth it.”
This story made a tremendous impression on me, and I decided to follow Imre’s example the next time there were any flowers within my reach. About a week later, I happened to stop by the Tulip Café late one evening. I saw there sitting by herself a happy blonde divorcée who, according to rumour, had recently separated from her lover. Now and then I had seen Boby, for that was her peculiar nickname, by the pool of the Lukács Bath, where I had so mistakenly fallen in love with Ilona. Boby was thirty-four and gorgeous, especially in her blue bikini; she had such striking breasts and such twisting buttocks that I felt like tearing them off and taking them home. She was always in the company of some dashing man who used to trail several steps behind her. She moved faster than most people. Once we were introduced at a party, and occasionally she tossed me a question when we met. She was a second-row violinist with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, a sensuous but independent-minded woman who made short work of men if they didn’t behave to her liking. A few days earlier she had thrown out the sculptor she’d been living with and was now — if my information wasn’t outdated — at liberty. At any rate, she was by herself at the coffee house, with her violin-case on the chair beside her. She must have come in after the concert to have her last cup of coffee for the day.
I greeted Boby with a reverent bow and she allowed me to join her. She may have been a fast walker but she was not the bouncy type — she had an air of heavy dignity, especially when sitting down.
I would have gone to prison to be torn apart by the Security Police if I could go to bed with her first, yet I was not anxious. After moping around Ilona without the slightest success for nearly two years, and then seducing Zsuzsa in one single evening, I was convinced that no woman would ever want me unless she needed a man and responded to me even before I opened my mouth. I remember reflecting happily and calmly upon the fact that only a few months earlier I would have sweated my brains out trying to find a way to attract her. Now that I knew the question was settled before it was asked, all I had to do was to find the answer.
Boby was wearing her black orchestra dress and her round blond face looked tired: her eyes expressed no other desire than the desire to sleep. Having no information from that deep-blue source, and remembering Imre’s story, I looked around for flowers. Although the coffee house was named Tulip, the worn-out old place offered no flowers of any kind. There weren’t even paper or plastic ornaments on the tables. I knew that at the corner there was a flower-shop which was still open; but it would have been rather awkward to rush out and buy a bunch of roses and then come back with it to ask my question. Besides, the whole point was in the spontaneity. I noticed that Boby drew her eyebrows together slightly as I looked around at the other tables: I’m sure she wasn’t used to young men being concerned with other sights while in her company. Turning to face her again, and glancing at the small cracked table-top between us, I wondered what I could offer her. I saw nothing but our cups, still half-filled with coffee, and a battered tin ashtray with a beer advertisement stamped on it — which meant it must have been manufactured under capitalism, before 1945. A seven-year-old tin ashtray, containing a cigarette butt from some former, guest. But wasn’t the issue already settled? I picked up the ashtray, emptied its contents on the floor, and held it out to her.
“I will give you this beautiful antique ashtray if you will be my lover,” I told her in a clear, firm voice.
We had just been discussing why we both thought that Kodály was a greater composer than Bartok, and she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to repeat my offer. “I will give you this genuine antique ashtray if you’ll be my lover.”
This time she understood: “I beg your pardon?” she asked.
Up to this point I’m sure our undemanding conversation had allowed Boby to keep on wondering about whatever was on her mind before I came to sit down at her table. She may have been thinking about the disorder in her apartment, the next morning’s rehearsal, or what to send to the laundry. Even a beautiful and popular woman of happy disposition must have had problems on her mind — after a gone-and-done-with marriage, after a fool of a sculptor whose belongings she was said to have flung downstairs, after a long concert — while sitting alone in a coffee house, at thirty-five, at well past eleven o’clock. Even so, Boby gave no sign of being distracted.
“I must say,” she said, glancing at the ashtray I held up for her, “that’s a proposal I’ve never heard before.”
“Then you ought to consider it.”
The neighbouring tables were unoccupied, and it was as if the empty space around us had become a desert: I had placed her in a position of instant intimacy. Women whose feelings are safely buried or extinct can easily cope with such a situation, one way or another. But Boby was one of those women whose thoughts involve their nerves. Things “got under her skin,” and when confronted with a sudden proposition, she couldn’t help but suffer an emotional change of shape. It’s not the man, but the thought itself that strips such women of their personalities, as they experience an X-ray image of themselves, an intensified but reduced sense of self-awareness. Hence their annoyance at a sudden pass — they are truly “put out.” It says a great deal for Boby’s character, her firm dignity under duress, that I couldn’t tell what she was feeling as I pointed that battered piece of tin at her. She found my offer wanting.
“The ashtray belongs to the management,” she said.
Content with having made my point, I put the thing back on the table. She reached for her cup to finish her coffee, and so did I — with a light heart, too. It crossed my mind to pay her soft compliments (they would have come easily) and I thought she was so close that my voice could touch her skin. I could talk my way around her tall neck, into her blonde hair, which was caught up in a loose knot; my voice could touch the tips of her ears below the black stone earrings. I could stroke her with sounds — and it wasn’t an entirely inappropriate idea, perhaps, considering that she was a violinist. But why should I waste time on superfluities? I was prepared to leave the place and be glad to have spent a few moments with an exciting woman and then forget her. I even turned away from Boby to observe the thinning crowd, and met the gaze of a distant waiter, a lean, bald man who was looking at me with a knowing grin.
“What do you think?” I asked Boby.
“All right,” she said. “But you must steal that ashtray for me.”
The strength in her voice should have warned me that the easy part of our affair was over.
This was the way to die, I often thought during the night, my heart beating happily in my skull. “Don’t leave!” she said when we first came, “I like to feel him small.” But soon she was moving her bottom again, while her face smiled at me serenely. Then we turned on our sides and she kept drawing far away so that I had to thrust fast not to lose her. “Now we should rest,” she said afterward contentedly, “let’s do it the French way.”
She was sitting up, stroking my leg with her toes and trying to feed me strawberries, when I fell into a deep sleep just after sunrise.
The alarm clock rang at nine. Boby had a rehearsal and I was already late for lectures. We left her apartment in a rush, without breakfast. “Let’s go for a swim at lunch-time,” she suggested as we were running down the stairs to go our separate ways. I slept through an introduction to Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre , bought a couple of stale sandwiches, which I devoured on the bus, and met Boby at the Lukács Bath at half-past one. She had arrived before me and stood by the pool in her blue bikini, her blonde hair brighter than the pale winter sun glittering through the frosted glass dome. Strangers stared at her and acquaintances greeted her with reverent hello’s. I wondered whether I’d only been dreaming about her, but my sore muscles were a blissful proof.
She proposed that we race up and down the length of the pool. When I finally pulled myself up from the water, gasping for breath, she was already drying her hair with a towel. Ignoring her appreciative audience, she gave me a long kiss.
“It’s thanks to you that I’m in such good form,” she declared.
“Why?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of Einstein’s Law? Pleasure turns into energy.”
I suggested that we lie down for a while. We stretched out on our bellies, with our arms folded and elbows touching. I don’t know how I’d missed it before: there was a long number tatooed on her lower arm. She must have seen my eyes widen, for she answered before I could ask any questions.
“Didn’t you know? I’m not an intellectual, so I guess it’s pretty difficult to tell that I’m a Jew.”
“I can’t imagine you ever being in a death camp.”
“Buchenwald — one hundred and twenty-seven days and four hours.”
Trying to imagine what she must have gone through during all that time, and seeing her stretched out beside me, exuding health and energy, I felt ashamed of myself for being tired.
When we left the Bath, Boby went home to practise and I went back to the university. She had given me a ticket for the evening concert, and afterward we went to have supper at the Tulip Café. I told her how I had come upon the idea of offering her the ashtray, and later that night, when I finally fell asleep, I was jolted awake by a nudge in the ribs. “I think I should meet that cameraman friend of yours,” Boby complained loudly. “You should introduce him to me sometime.”
I wasn’t sleepy any more after that, so we sat up and talked. By morning we had told each other our life stories, and I
asked her to marry me. She seemed to be delighted, but put me off. “You’re lucky I’m not a few years younger, I’d take you at your word. But I’ve no objection on principle. If we’re still together a year from now, we might as well get married.”
Boby gave me coffee and apples for breakfast, and at lunch-time we met again at the Lukács Bath. I was beginning to feel dizzy. “You look pale,” she observed with genuine concern, “you really need a swim.”
In the evening she took me to a party where I knew hardly anybody and she introduced me as her boy friend. “In case you’re wondering,” she added whenever anyone looked surprised, “I’m fifteen years older than András. But he makes up the difference with nerve.” In fact, I felt rather cowed. It was a stand-up party, and I was finding it difficult to stay on my feet.
One of the guests was a prominent music critic with wet eyes, a thick black goatee and a puffy little wife. At the sight of us this man jutted his chin ahead of his chest, unloaded his spouse on me and went off to follow Boby through the crowd. I tried to concentrate on the lady left in my care, but we were both keeping an eye on her despicable husband, who was talking fast to my mistress.
“Boby’s quite an unusual woman, isn’t she?” remarked the wife, lifting her balloon-body slightly with her voice.
“Yes, she is,” I replied, too tired to pretend. “I’m glad you share my anxiety.”
Then we heard Boby’s voice, rising above the din. She was able to speak in a normal, conversational tone which nonetheless stopped short everybody in the room.
“Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?” she asked the intent critic.
As the guests turned toward them, there was a sudden stereophonic silence — its range measured by scattered clinkings of ice-cubes in glasses. The critic grabbed his goatee in his embarrassment — or perhaps to protect it from the radioactive glare his wife was giving him.
“Why, of course not!” He laughed despairingly. “I’ve never been unfaithful to her.”
In Praise of Older Women Page 9
