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.
Bold knocking on the door. Marius bolts into the room with an eager, avid look, followed by a contemptuous Romulus. Marius has probably never been in a hotel room like this before. Now he’s hit the jackpot! He strides about with the troglodyte stare of a proprietor. He grabs a bottle of scotch as if it’s part of the booty and hoists it above his head like a prize. I take a photo.
We make our way toward the wood-paneled hotel restaurant in a triumphant procession, past the desk clerk who once locked up Romulus’s passport, whose mouth gapes in disbelief at the fact of my now trailing not one but two hustlers. Certainly Marius has never sat down to such a menu, either. His eyes bug in disbelief. If I intend to spend this much on dinner, how much will I give him to suck his dick? Romulus merely tilts back his chair and enjoys the farce. He’s seen money wasted on fancy cuisine and fantasized its paying for a leather jacket or a new pair of shoes many times before.
There are wines and meats, salads and cheeses. Romulus keeps consulting his watch anxiously. Marius’s glow over his supposed good luck hasn’t diminished. It’s time to get down to specifics.
“I’m wondering,” I tell him, “if you’d agree.”
“Yes, yes,” he answers eagerly.
“But you don’t know what I’m asking.” It’s obvious that he’s expecting a sexual proposition, the chance of gleefully fucking my head like some stuffed dummy’s while cash oozes from my pockets like sawdust. That’s how he sees me: a pudgy gold mine, something squishy and exploitable. Who knows what the night will bring, if he’s really eager enough to win my attention that way. . . . But for now, “I’m looking for a bodyguard,” I blurt.
Romulus sneers in amusement at the absurdity of it. “I want to go to some places that Romulus won’t take me,” I add pointedly. His sneer freezes on his face, unyielding, stoic.
“Me strong. Good bodyguard,” growls Marius.
“Really? Let’s see.” I put one elbow on the table in an arm-wrestling challenge. Marius grasps my hand. After an initial pause motivated by politeness, he flattens me. The silverware and dishes rattle. The waiter, in red jacket and black tie, watches in panicked disbelief. Marius guffaws with pride.
“You’ll do, I suppose,” I remark, my eyebrows arching campily. “And for your services, Marius, you will now be paid thirty American dollars in advance. Is that okay?”
His eyes are bright with elation. “Yes, yes.” I take the bills out and push them across the table. “Now remember,” I say, “I expect full protection.”
I turn toward Romulus, and in an acidic tone, “Well, then, I won’t be needing you anymore. You may leave.”
Romulus ignores my comic impertinence and answers with an Old World sense of decorum. “Yes, yes, I am late. No dessert for me, thank you. She waiting for me. You excuse me, yes?”
“With pleasure.”
He looks at me in bored disbelief, shakes his head bemusedly. “See you tomorrow. . . .”
THE PAIN OF BEING SEPARATED from my obsession is searing, but it’s a pain I embrace with grim pleasure. Wanting him is the only feeling of being alive, and at moments, having him isn’t wanting him. It’s unlikely, of course, that Marius can imagine any complicated level of attachment. We’re in a taxi on our way to the Romanian bar, but even such a simple operation takes on awkwardness the way he handles it. He’s sprawled in the front seat like a bumpkin who’s won a buggy ride at a county fair. He’s telling the driver, who glances at him with annoyance and then ignores him, to step on it.
The Romanian bar doesn’t feel dangerous or forbidden to me anymore. Is it the absence of Romulus’s squeamishness about my safety? The shrieking, serpentine music coils through me in an Asiatic intestinal pattern, flattening and twisting my thoughts into Francis Bacon-style distortions. Marius is slurping up the drinks as if it were his last night alive. I’m high on a weird sense of widowhood, the feeling of being cut loose and perfectly free to destroy myself. I look avidly at any gnarly wrist, jutting Adam’s apple or tree-limb neck that promises a hard time, an onslaught of energy and resistance and force. Still, I feel there’s something about my physical bulk and emotional gravity that protects me. Incredibly, this brings me into good rapport with the clientele. Among the severely deprived, my bizarre sacrificial state is interpreted as genuine confidence, even a type of paternalism.
Before long, a smooth-skinned, wiry man with reptilian lids is basking under my attention. He’s got a bony, angry body, dry, dirty hands and bulging, meditative eyes. Marius comes back only on those frequent occasions when he wants another drink, for which I flamboyantly hand over more money.
English is limited between me and the Romanian with bulging eyes, but liberal Latin codes of male bonding allow for starkly sensual innuendoes. As long as body poses follow that impudent etiquette of the confident male, the face, I’ve found, can express many playful messages that we Anglos might interpret as flirtation but that these Latins call solidarity. At one point, I take his hand in mine, supposedly to compare its roughness with my smoothness. It’s an old trick I learned with rough trade—a coded confession of femininity safeguarded by that thrilling message of class superiority: my hand is smooth not just because I’m a fag but also because it hasn’t done any manual labor; it’s the hand of a writer, which I explain by pantomiming the act of typing for him, watching his eyes light up at the novelty of it. Yet for me, sitting broad and sturdy with my knees wide apart, my grasped hand feels as thrilled as a young maiden’s; and on the sur
face, no one will be the wiser.
From what I can tell from his quirky utterances and pantomimes, he’s from the city of Cluj, the twenty-three-year-old son of displaced peasants whose village thirty miles to the northwest was razed by Ceauşescu so that they could be moved into Communist high-rise housing and work in a new factory. It was a common-enough occurrence in the last decade of the leader’s rule, an attempt to sever Romania from its rural past and fast-forward the country’s industrialization. But now, with the hundreds of lay-offs in the soon-to-be-privatized factory, the deterioration of the housing project, his forty-three-year-old father’s poorly treated heart condition, there seems to be no reason for anything but dazed wandering, a canine life motivated by following scents, vague leads about work, from one capitalist subsistence subculture to the next.
It’s hard to judge people like me, I assume he’s thinking. The way I’m dressed looks confusingly awkward, but he’s seen Americans like that. How can somebody with all that money for drinks be wearing such unfashionable, dirty shoes, so broad and dusty? Even so, my face with its clean skin and wide, candid eyes reminds him of something positive. He’s got nothing better to do than sit here and bask in those eyes, pouring out more approval than most eyes he’s looked into for a very long time. Yet what, really, do they want?
Abruptly I’ve stood and announced that we’re going to the Old Man Club. As we get up to leave, Marius runs after us. He’s very drunk now, playing a bad Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote, trying to pump up his bodyguard role by walking like a soldier, albeit a drunken one.
The other Romanian isn’t very comfortable in the Old Man Club, opened to Romanians by Romulus a short time ago. The tables are packed, the customers talkative and intense. On the dance floor, there’s everything from Portuguese to African-Americans. Burning with excruciating freedom, or loss, I begin dancing, disintegrating. The pain of separation from Romulus is ecstatic and full of new possibilities, including doom. It doesn’t matter that I outrank most of those on the dance floor in age. I weave through the spaces talking to anyone who interests me, oozing energy and generosity, buying drinks wherever I can. The other Romanian is watching from a distance with a patient poker face. He’s seeing this peculiar dancing American in his clumsy shoes and boxy shirt throw money around, and something’s starting to dawn on him; he probably can’t quite put it together yet, but there’s something—exploitable?—about this Westerner of ambiguous age, his balding baby face and chubby, nearly feminized paternalism, his sloppy openness and precise eyes and words.
The Romanian is used to associating an open friendly façade and precise eyes with artful fraud; and come to think of it, he’s run into quite a few Gypsies who’ve used variations of that combination—with their loose casualness and sharp eyes—but this is different. Unless it’s a genius version of the same kind of fraud, somebody who brings down all your defenses by appearing to be oddball and infantile, generous, careless, but whose substantial brain is calculating every moment to find your weakest.
On the other hand, what could the American want from somebody like him? . . . and then the thought occurs to him, just for a moment in passing, that it could be sex he wants; but the thought of it is like the thought of the weather, or more like the thought you have when watching another species eating or mating or preening, and you think, how curious, and then, as a momentary afterthought, what does it have to do with me, that living thing and its strange habits, could I eat it, or make use of its fur or feathers or bones?
In this case, though, the possibility of this clumsy, warm, stupidly generous American’s wanting sex lingers in his mind a bit longer, probably he considers it, wonders how much money it might bring. Except that the American seems to be focused everywhere now, talking in that same intrusive yet merry way with anyone who comes across his path, but never forgetting to fill your glass again and then dancing away; but isn’t he swaying a little now? Isn’t he drunk? Your eyes can’t help focusing on the bulge in his side pocket that’s the wallet he’s been taking out, over and over; you can’t help wondering how much is left in it; you try not to stare at it; and now all you can think of is the sex he might want and the money he might pay for it, or other ways to get that money. . . .
I do remember his glances at my wallet, but by then I was too caught up in the trance of the night, too excited by the absurdly small possibility that all at once a new Romulus would be created who was just like the original but more fascinated by me—until I reached into my pocket for the wallet and discovered that there was practically no money left. I’d spent most of it. Marius had disappeared, I could see the other Romanian far across the room, staring at me in an unsettling, unblinking way with those shiny, bulging eyes. Something told me to slip out, head for a cash machine and then hop a cab back to the hotel. But after the cash machine, I thought I heard someone calling. As I was turning away from the machine and stuffing the money into my pocket, I noticed the Romanian getting closer and waving frantically at me to wait, and I panicked and jumped into a passing taxi.
An abject elation over the risk I’d taken and the danger escaped held me in a kind of endorphinic paralysis. But when we got to the colossus of the Gellért, the fact that I was about to enter it alone penetrated the barrier of endorphins as if the entire building were crashing through them. I couldn’t breathe, just stood staring at the dark gray surface, on which the long tresses of female Art Nouveau figures entwined over a side entrance to the baths. Then I walked drunkenly toward the Danube, remembering a comment in the István Szabó film Sunshine about all the Jews who’d been slaughtered on its banks. I climbed down the stairs near the foot of the bridge to watch two men in rubber boots and slickers, who’d cut a hole in the ice to fish; and I stared at the black meanderings of the water, until I thought I saw a flicker of light that suggested a glimmer of young legs twining.
I hadn’t given Romulus enough money for a hotel, so there was a possibility they’d found a street-level window open in the basement of one of those buildings across the river and slipped inside, where there was probably at least a damp mattress and a broken chair. The mattress would have looked horrible even in the dark with its huge stains, so he probably took off his jacket and her coat and made a mat out of them; and then he took off his sweater and covered her with it. His small, strong hands began to wander over her body; they cupped her breasts as if they were made to fit them, while she kept complaining about his week of absence, that uncle who refused to meet her. And in fact, she felt so deprived about being excluded by that uncle that she greedily sucked the lips of the hawkish face, like a bird hungry for food.
On the mattress, the zipper of his jacket cut into her buttocks. All his hardness pushing against her, like metal the temperature of a body, crushed out the week of loneliness. He kissed her and nipped at her tongue. She sucked the nicotine off his. The sting of cold air on body parts felt as if the cold were mocking her, or fucking her, so she climbed on top of him because it made her feel safer. She straddled his narrow hips with her thighs, and her breasts swung above him as he lay underneath, lean and pale. She touched her clitoris with her fingertips and then took hold of that sharp weapon and pierced herself with it fast enough to hurt. And after its first stinging insult, she knew whose it was. Hers.
VI
WE’RE A MILE from the Romanian border in a rented car because Romulus has to leave Hungary to renew his visa. The road is narrow, and there are potholes.
Gnarled, nearly branchless oak trees. Amputated, scarred. Why do they look the way they do? I’ll learn later that they’re cut back again and again for firewood, or to stimulate growth. But over decades these oaks have become monstrosities, their trunks covered with humps from which sprout tiny misplaced buds. Romania is a country of wood, where woodenness is inspiring enough to create an artist like Brancusi; for now, though, the woodenness of these deformed oaks plunges me into a grim fairy tale.
We’re entering the country the way Queen Marie entered it, from Budapest.
The asphalt looks darker than I’m used to—liquid and black like oil. So do the tree trunks, smudges in the failing light. The grass of the fields looks greasy, coarse and swollen, a species I’ve never seen. There are big blotches of black in front of my eyes, and the feeling of being in a black-and-white movie.
Inside this movie, he’s changed. Friendly and familial, he studies the map, patiently encouraging me when I grind the gears of our standard shift or, astonishingly, gently clasping the back of my neck or shoulder while I drive, as if we’re a real couple. He’s grateful that I’ve decided to take him to Romania to renew his visa. He keeps repeating it.
The buses crowded with the poor, their gigantic cloth-wrapped bundles and rolled rugs clot the entrance to the border crossing. We inch forward. The Romanian immigration officer in his gray uniform, in his glass cabin above the car, bends forward to study us. His glance is deadened yet full of queer complexities. It’s obvious that his boredom has achieved an imperturbable contempt, but I can tell that he’s proud of his imagined Byzantine cleverness, whether or not this really exists.
It’s not that he has any respect for law or order. He merely wants to protect his position, project an identity. If we’re drug dealers or holders of false passports, it might behoove him to unveil us; yet the possibility of his having to account for it even if we are seems unlikely, so he’s filled with an unbudging laziness, civil-servant style. He’s made up a game for himself with at least a minimum of amusement, supposedly in the name of doing his duty. It involves harassing those who look used to being interrogated.
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