As soon as I get to the curb, the bitch retreats, satisfied that she’s banished me from her territory. I can see her lumbering exhaustedly back to her pups, her back swayed, her tail dead-limp between her legs. I stand at the edge of the lot for a while, watching her exhausted gait under the blinding sun. Like her, Romulus was born in city squalor, with only a confused notion of who his parents were. And like her, he thinks that shows of bravado, pride are enough to fashion a life, to make a stab at dignity. With a surreal feeling, I imagine him coming from the outskirts of Bucharest into the city like some raw-boned animal, eyes blank and bewildered like hers, muscles twitching in exposure to want and danger.
By the time I get on the plane, he’s recomposed in my imagination. Now he’s coated with that charge of longing and excitement that makes me say yet again that I love him. This isn’t an illusion, I tell myself, merely the clearer vision of distance. As flawed as our relationship is, I’m living out a basic homosexual dream. Current gay politics have covered up the fact that homosexuality is submission to a constant dilemma. The maleness toward which our sexuality is directed is—culturally at least—defined by heterosexuality. No one admits it anymore, but successful gay couples often play a constant game of switching. Each takes turns at playing “the man,” while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity. Those who don’t do this seem to become denatured Bobbsey Twins, unmarried “sisters” living together. I’ve made a different choice, which some would call “unliberated.” Everything attractive about Romulus stems from his heterosexuality, and of course, that’s the very quality that prevents me from possessing him entirely. Well, maybe I’m on a more honest path of homosexual desire.
PARIS EXPLODES INTO SOMETHING alien and overcharged as soon as I get off the plane. Like a dog’s, my first experiences are fragrances carried by the milder, more humid air. It’s like being transported into another world where perfume is abundant enough to be wasted. As the taxi enters the city limits, I gaze dazedly at the parade of shop windows, cafés and hair salons. In Bucharest, at the store in Piaţa Unirii, Romulus and I had found only a small selection of poor-quality, low-cost merchandise. A certain prudishness on my part that astonishes me makes these Parisian sights seem overluxurious and unnecessary.
At the Centre Pompidou, I walk across the concrete terrace beneath the stairs with Marianne Alphant, the woman who invited me, and Bernard Blistène, a witty, bright bon vivant, who’s an official at the museum. In his unstructured, all-black Yamamoto suit he seems a mockery of the self-abnegating clergyman. I suppose he belongs to another order, art, but his appearance suggests a level of sophistication and irony that has no place in my new Romanian life, where somber, black-clad men are more likely to have long beards and faces preoccupied by the details of the liturgy.
Meeting us is my colleague for the presentation at the Centre Pompidou, which is supposed to treat the relationship among art, popular culture and homosexuality. He’s the novelist Guillaume Dustan, considered one of the most outspoken gay radicals in France today. I’ve already read his novels, Plus fort que moi and Je sors ce soir, which are obsessive, minimalist evocations of gay male promiscuity. They never leave the confines of gay culture but try to subvert culture in general with their aggressive excesses. He’s scowling and seems uninterested in me. It’s as if he leaked resentment from every pore. I’ve enjoyed his novels and tell him so, but this doesn’t penetrate his surly exterior, which I begin to realize is partly a cover for shyness.
In a state of some disorientation, I give my lecture, accusing certain lauded visual artists who were Situationists, and those who more recently are Conceptualists and Appropriationists, of severing the essential bond between art and pleasure—between eye and appetite. Focusing on Guy Debord’s paranoid concept of the “Spectacle,” that capitalist media show that keeps us “enthralled,” these artists think that their job is to free us from our enslavement to the pageant of mediatic manipulation. In place of this, I call for a return to Georges Bataille and his belief that all cultural production is rooted in ancient traits and myths, in sacrifice, communal celebration and sexuality, behaviors that are not structured by anything rational or concertedly political. Those who’ve carried on this tradition of sexual celebration, I claim, are certain pre-Stonewall homosexual artists, whose immersion in popular culture and promiscuity pushed pleasure to the extreme, penetrated class and social barriers, and by means of parody subverted that “Spectacle” so bandied about these days. In the pansies’ interest in drag, Hollywood and sex, I see a true movement toward a kind of orgiastic celebration that automatically challenges capitalist media production.
Reaction to my speech is slight, but when Dustan gets up to speak, offers an accusatory diatribe against the straight world and affirms his belief in barebacking (sex without condoms), the audience warms up. Here’s an outsider with an accessible hostile agenda that seems to interface perfectly with straight guilt. The audience is delighted, apologetic.
The days after the museum drag on. I see some friends—the writer Benoît Duteurtre and his lover, Jean-Sébastien; my editor and my agent, François and Catherine Guérif; and my publicist Agnès Guéry-Plazy and her companion Gilles. I’m staying in Montparnasse, in a tiny apartment that belongs to Duteurtre and used to be a maid’s chamber. Something is wrong with me. I have spent months in Paris in the past, but now its beauty seems sharpened by what Romulus doesn’t have. I can’t like it, can only gawk at it in curiosity as at some fetish from my past.
Jean-Sébastien gives me a tour of the Marais, Paris’s gay ghetto. With glazed eyes, I watch men on the streets and in bars, who are supposed to be my brothers. Is my exile from the cultures of my past permanent?
I’ve promised to write an article for The Village Voice about my desire to live in Bucharest with Romulus, so I hole up for a couple of days.
“I’m back in the closet and loving it, in a country that still criminalizes homosexuality, with a lover who doesn’t consider himself gay,” I boast. “Here in Bucharest, Romania, where I’ve opted to spend several months with my Romanian partner, I am, it occurs to me, a willful sexual exile. . . .”
Later in the article, I claim, “From the very beginning, our relationship has had an ‘old-fashioned’ dynamic. It’s a ‘don’t-ask, don’t-tell’ aesthetic in which the growing solidarity between us is forbidden to be put into words. Since my friend isn’t gay, it’s understood he’ll sometimes be sleeping with women. But when he’s with me, the sex is hot, though the roles—who does what to whom—are rigidly enforced. . . .”
I end the article maintaining that “I’ve chosen to write my own script, which is a mixture of old values and experimental approaches. It’s a risky, shadowy thriller that won’t ever make a pilot for primetime television.”
However, when I call Romulus, who has the only key to our apartment, to say I’m coming back pronto, my “risky, shadowy thriller” is deflated. He seems happily integrated into his own community minus me, in no hurry to get back to Bucharest. He’s at his mother’s in Sibiu, playing soccer, yet probably aware that he’s supposed to be in Bucharest already, to meet me the next day with the key. Adamantly, I make his mother go to the soccer field to get him. He comes to the phone out of breath, sounding elated, relaxed and casual, like some American teenager called in from baseball. There are other people in the room, who seem to be having a good time. I think I hear a girl’s voice. With a sinking heart, I ask him what bus he’s leaving on. “Too late now,” he chirps. “When soccer finishes, no more bus.”
“You have our keys!”
“The old lady is there, this I am sure. She will let you in.”
He’s referring to the landlord’s stoop-shouldered, fearful, poetry-reciting mother, who lives below us on the shadowy first floor, among the fading portraits of her family. She’s tried to show her goodwill in a variety of ways, the last being a china plate holding two wrapped hard candies, left outside our door. In Paris, I’ve bought her s
ome Belgian chocolates and planned to put them on the same plate in front of her door when I got back. But what if she’s not home? I can see myself with my heavy suitcase banging on the front door, as the wild neighborhood watchdogs howl and bark. Or coming across the parking lot again with that cumbersome suitcase, as the bewildered bitch with the swinging black teats, resentful and confused, attacks.
“But the dogs!” I shout shrilly.
Was that a chuckle I heard? “Is the way you walk,” he says. “They feel when you are afraid.”
I’m infuriated. “I’m not any more afraid than you are! And the danger’s real. Dozens of people a day get bitten in Bucharest.”
“Only those who are coward,” he teases.
I fly into a rage. “You were too fucking lazy to make another key. So you’d better get your ass on a bus and be there when I arrive tomorrow!”
“All right,” he says, suddenly sounding submissive. It’s almost as if he was hoping for my rage, sees it as a kind of mastery. “I will come.”
As I hang up: a Technicolor tableau of Romulus on the soccer field, so real that I fall back on the bed, bedazzled. The image devours every other reality and reduces Paris to a shrunken figment. It’s that state of transport Saint Ignatius believed could be achieved by rigorous meditation and the use of the imagination, when the Lord and the places touched by His steps surge up, blinding you with their three-dimensionality. Through belief and discipline, sacred scenes become real, palpable.
His shorts are green, his calf muscles so tensed that every sinew shows, his body crouched as he tries to block the black-and-white ball from another, bulkier outstretched leg. The calls and raucous laughter are sucked up by the funnel of heat above the playing field, with its coarse grass churned into the mud in places; I can smell the acrid sweat making bulged half-moons on his shirt under the arms, and see, rooted like some sacred figurehead at the edge of the field, an innocent blonde. Probably no more than seventeen, her forehead a smooth dome over a heart-shaped face, her smile placid but fearful.
That smile holds everything I need to know. It has a message for me. When he stops playing for a moment and strides breathlessly to the edge of the field to take her in his arms, I’m filled with a sadness I’ve never experienced before, a form of reverence whose meaning I search for in her half-trusting, frightened eyes.
The next morning the feeling stays with me all the way to the airport. As the plane takes off, I face the fact that I’ve condemned myself to a weird antechamber. In exchange for the impossible fantasy of loving a hustler, I’ve convinced myself that nothing else—not even Paris—matters. I’m thinking about the girl again, wondering what she could have to tell me. She knows, I suddenly realize, what it feels like to be desired by Romulus. To be the one he kisses on the mouth. But this knowledge feels so frightening.
XVI
HE’S MEETING ME at Unirii to help me with my bags. What a vivid fantasy striding toward me as if it were flesh and blood. Across the wide avenue swaggers a lower-class man, muscular, depressed. For some reason he looks astoundingly vertical, like those Futurist demigods they drew in the thirties. His lips, the corner of which holds a cigarette, are smiling at me. For a moment I don’t feel any connection. It all seems too new, exciting, like my mother’s repeated tale of not believing that blue-eyed treasure was hers when they first brought me to her in the hospital. Is he really coming to meet me?
He hoists the suitcase on one bulging shoulder, and we walk across the parking lot toward our street. He’d recognized me in the crowd, he jokes, by my walk. But this time the reference is jovial, even affectionate. The dogs bark, advance, but I feel inviolable. Without the slightest fear we stride to our door.
By the time we’re sitting on the couch, drinking kiosk-bought bootleg scotch that tastes like metal and rubbing alcohol, I realize what’s causing this strange sense of equilibrium. He’s telling me how he got here the night before. Wanting to impress his parents with the hundred dollars I’d left for him, he took them to dinner at an expensive restaurant, then spent the rest on a leather jacket. He then had to hitchhike to Bucharest because he had no money for the bus. His week of misbehavior, coupled with my belligerent orders on the phone, is what has produced this sensual, vital mood in him that’s giving me so much pleasure. He even sneaks a hand across the couch to clasp mine. He’s responded, I realize, to a kind of authoritarianism. Disobeying me and being reprimanded is a gratifying ritual. He’s actually a kind of masochist.
THE NEXT DAY I start some work that, preposterously, will play a huge role in my relationship with him. Because we’re almost out of money, I’ve agreed to translate Céline Dion’s co-written memoirs for the publisher William Morrow, in an impossibly short time—three weeks. The $10,000 that Morrow was offering made me accept the project, despite some embarrassment at having my name linked to such a frivolous enterprise. I told myself it would be taken as a prank by my more serious readers. But the text seems amazingly false, a mountain of unaware narcissism whose banality falls just short of camp.
Those who translate are familiar with the deeply intimate experience of working on a text; in many ways it becomes a merging with the consciousness of the author. Dion would complicate the project by requiring post-translation additions, and I would end up working at it ten to fourteen hours a day for about six weeks, not three, while editors at Morrow waited on pins and needles for each new section. Sheer immersion would entangle me in her lust for pop power, her sentimentalizing of her husband’s relentless career ploys and her working-class sense of always being the little girl no matter how many crowds she swayed. Juxtaposed with the life I was leading here in Bucharest, Céline’s life and her dreams would take on a hysterical absurdity. As the poor girl with the too-long incisors struggled to become “the greatest singer in the world,” I was sinking into a proletarian fantasy in a country that the world seemed to have forgotten. I tried sharing some of the more absurd passages with Romulus for a good laugh, but he failed to see the humor.
Even so, the project adds a comic element to our playing house. There is Romulus, cooking a hot lunch while I pound away at my inane text about the queen of pop, my overworked eyes beginning to resemble fixed marbles. Occasionally, he chases me out of my seat, puts on my glasses and does a parody of my concentration, which seems deranged to him, and I take pictures of the imitation.
The heat wave has gotten worse. With nothing to do, Romulus immolates himself with cigarettes before the television in the sweltering bedroom, watching soccer and soft-core movies until he’s nearly comatose. Every hour or so, I go in and lie face-down next to this smoking sarcophagus and put my head against his hip. Then he absentmindedly pets my head or back as if I were a dog. Tiptoeing into the bedroom late at night, I find him in a nonverbal state, and since I’m so worked up, I grab the key and go to the bar at the end of the street for a drink. The first time I did, a dirty, shaggy animal that probably served as the bar’s unofficial watchdog followed me growlingly right up to the bar seat. I was wearing shorts, and at one point, I felt gums, whiskers and hot breath touching my leg. This seemed unremarkable to the barmaid, who merely asked me what I wanted to drink. After that, I carried dog biscuits and left a trail of them from the house to the bar, like something out of Hänsel and Gretel. The dog scarfed them up on the way, but barked belligerently whenever I went through the door.
In the meantime, I’ve discovered the correct phone number for the Romanian film critic Alex Leo Şerban, who’s taken me for a fascinating walk through the more elegant neighborhoods of Bucharest. He’s the first intellectual I’ve met in the city, and I’m astonished by the ways he’s adapted to life here. He’s a pure aesthete who speaks English and French fluently and leaves the country regularly for film festivals throughout Western Europe. Somehow, his wit and epicureanism are unabated by the squalor around him.
Through Alex, I learn to marvel at the fractured beauty of Bucharest, its crumbling homes that hint at Mediterranean and Oriental grandeur.
I begin to understand that much of the city is a reference to other times, places and peoples: Rome, nineteenth-century France, the Greek Phanariots, Turkish sultans and French-educated Boyars; these displacements from the present gradually become a rich source of poetry and fancy for me, not confusion and fear.
Alex takes me to the offices of a magazine called Dilema that will eventually publish a satire I write. They are located in a little red-brick villa in a fashionable part of the city, on Aleea Vulpache, and I’ll later learn that this was once the pied-à-terre of Carol’s terminal mistress Lupescu. The Fascist Iron Guard turned it into a museum of decadence after she fled in 1940. They tried to display what they termed proof of her extravagant luxuries at the state’s expense and her orgiastic behavior. Apparently, her royal assistant, “Puiu” Dimitrescu, who may have also been her clandestine lover, and who later plotted to murder her, took care of the decoration. Scandal sheets boasted of the decadence of the place; but Countess Waldeck, author of the gossipy, brilliantly written Athene Palace, said it would have made Madame Pompadour turn in her grave. According to Waldeck, it was dark, dismal and full of bric-a-brac, except for a few pieces of eighteenth-century china with pornographic scenes and some paintings rumored to have been stolen from the state museum. There wasn’t much else—some detective novels in French, a few Elizabeth Arden cosmetics and “a staggering amount of alum,” which Waldeck surmised served as that same “arcanum” employed by seventeenth-century ladies.
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