“I’m sure there’s a way. You just haven’t thought of it,” she advised.
The tips of my fingers slipped the elastic below her belly and thrilled to a rougher texture. Her breast tasted salty sweet. I stretched back the isthmus of her swimming suit, expecting rich oils and perfumes, and cupped instead dry sand. Even the most passionate of women are sometimes slow starters. I edged down her belly, determined that when I dipped my mouth to drink, desert would turn to spring. A sharp click of flint and acrid-smelling smoke lifted my head. Monika stared at the ceiling, arm curled beneath her head while she smoked a cigarette.
“What if your father dies?” she asked.
“My entire family could be wiped out in an earthquake and it wouldn’t change the terms of the trust fund. I get the distinct feeling making love right now doesn’t interest you.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t.”
I sat up, stared down at her with resentment.
“Would you like me to give you a hand job or something?” she asked, I think seriously.
“I want to know how you can just lie there, smoking a cigarette, as though you feel absolutely nothing.”
“But it’s true!” she protested. “I don’t feel anything.”
“When I touch you, you feel nothing,” I repeated. I couldn’t grasp the implication of that and suspected she lied for advantage.
Monika sat up, tied the robe around her waist, and retrieved the champagne from the sitting room. She swigged straight from the bottle, passed it to me, and said, “Normal sex doesn’t interest me enough to even pretend I enjoy it. It’s like my skin turns to rubber.”
I put the bottle to my lips and drank. The champagne tasted sweet, but the bubbles left a bitter aftertaste. “So when I touch you, like just now, you feel what?”
“Bored,” she said. She could have said anything else and hurt me less. “You don’t excite me. No man excites me, not really, except Sven, and that because of other reasons.”
“Why are you lying to me?” I demanded.
“I’m not lying to you.” Her expression of wronged innocence meant nothing. She lied with the face of an angel.
“What about that night in the Hotel Paříž? Not once but twice you attacked me.”
“It wasn’t you. It was the situation.”
“And last night. You threw me to the floor, you were in such a hurry.”
She grabbed the champagne bottle and fixed me with a look so frankly eroticized I began to tumesce again. “That was great sex,” she said. “The night in Hotel Paříž even more so.”
“Then how can you tell me you feel nothing?”
“I felt more than you can possibly understand. But it wasn’t you, Nix. It was the situation.”
“What do you mean, ‘the situation’?”
Monika lit another cigarette and set the champagne bottle on a crossed knee. She drew successive lungs of smoke while she observed me; I waited, stoic in body but inwardly squirming with impatience and pain. “Stealing excites me,” she admitted, not in the tone of a confession but as a blunt statement of fact. “Some other situations excite me also, but mostly it’s stealing. It’s the only time I feel sexual. My skin tingles. I think faster. I feel things more deeply. If it’s a good situation, I feel like I’m flying a million miles an hour. Most of all, I’m laughing inside. I’m fooling everybody. They want me so badly I can do anything. They can’t take their eyes off me, and it turns them blind. That’s when the situation is really good. That’s when I feel really sexual.”
“So I don’t matter.”
“You’re the one who gets me into the situation.”
“But your passion is blind. I could be anybody, really, when we’re making love.”
“It’s better when I know the person.” She smiled with a beguiling ambiguity and added, “But sometimes it’s better when I don’t. It all depends on the situation.”
“But that isn’t human!” I protested. “If that’s your entire sex life, it’s not just kinky, it’s perverse.”
“I know it is,” she admitted, without the inflections of regret.
“Think of the kind of life it forces you into.”
“I know I can’t go on stealing forever. I’ll end up in jail, no matter how clever I am. Maybe acting will excite me in some of the same ways that stealing does. Because acting to me is the art of fooling people into believing I’m someone I’m not, even if the person I’m pretending to be is closer to the real me than the person sitting here, for example, smoking a cigarette and talking to you. Because she’s not real either.”
“Then which one of you is real?”
“None,” she said. “None and all.”
26
My conversation with Monika left me feeling distinctly afterwitted; it seemed I had begun our relationship with a series of assumptions which, when discovered to be false, led me to another set of assumptions equally false. I felt like a cartoon character who walks over the edge of a cliff and stands on nothing more substantial than air and ignorance. Sven, whom I had derided as a brute lacking imagination, had been cleverer than I supposed, having organized his larcenous activities around a relatively safe, simple, and repeatable plan. When aroused, Monika was indiscriminate of partner and place; consequently, he rarely let her out of his sight. His violent reaction to the prospect of a rival consummation was not less genuine for being planned. The perverse nature of her sexual responsiveness made big scores less desirable than frequent ones. I had assumed Sven’s intent was to make money, criticized his methods as cheap thuggery, and only that sleepless night realized his central organizing principle had been her sexual needs.
When Monika announced she would be spending the day with Henrík filming a screen test at the state film complex, I despaired that the moment I had discovered the animating principle of her sexuality, I would lose her to a different fetish, which I had helped to create but could not control. If acting inspired an erotic reaction as strong as theft, her first scenes before a camera would culminate in a betrayal certain to terminate our relationship, either by the strangulation of consecutive deceits or with one big bang. With acting as her new fetish, she would have no reason to steal and no need to continue our complicity. And there was always the possibility that Monika had lied about her sexuality. She often lied not just to seek advantage but from habit. She had never given me cause to believe in the veracity of anything she had said, either in passing or in confidence.
A financial crisis complicated these anxieties. Just six notes remained of the ten thousand dollars in counterfeit bills I had brought to Europe. In Prague I could have survived a month on such an amount, but at Monika’s rate of expenditure the sum wouldn’t last two days. Clearly, we needed a scheme profitable enough to meet immediate expenses and pay Havran his extortion money. Such a plan would take a week to research and execute, and though I had little doubt of our ability to dodge the Gellért for the few days not covered by Monika’s advance, I had no intention of remaining celibate so long. I would steal forints from a blind beggar’s cup before enduring another twenty-four hours of frustration.
Like Prague, Budapest’s banking system relied on bank transfers and briefcases to move large amounts of cash from one point to another. I left the hotel determined to find a way to combine the frequent opportunities for petty theft with the rewards of grand larceny. I stood in a half dozen bank lines, observing customers and tellers. Most transactions involved the paper transfer of funds from one account to another, but just before noon closing time I witnessed a gold-spectacled individual in gray suit, purple shirt, and white socks collect five bundles of 10,000-forint notes. I followed him at a distance of ten yards, surprised at the careless ease with which he carried a briefcase containing more than thirty thousand dollars.
When he turned into a door marked by a gold plaque, I continued on to the consulate to pick up my new passport, contemplating scenarios that would painlessly separate my white-socked friend and others like him from his cash
. Witnessing a withdrawal of that amount hadn’t been luck; in a cash economy, thousands of businessmen, lawyers, government officials, and crooks used bundles of cash just like checkbooks to fund operations. Carrying large amounts of money from bank to store or office was routine, as it had been in Prague. Routines make people careless. I imagined myself on a Vespa, Monika at my back, snatching the case as I sharply brake and speed away. That I had neither money for a Vespa nor experience driving one mattered less than the cinematic image of Monika and me speeding away with fifty grand between us, scarves blowing in the wind.
Even if jealousy did not allow me the cerebral calms of reason, that Monika had not returned by late afternoon was not logical cause for concern. But as I paced the suite in anticipation of her arrival, I could not help suspecting that the later the hour, the greater the odds of infidelity. Each pair of footsteps in the hall halted my own as I listened, hoping a turn of latch was imminent. In the private screening room of my imagination, Monika’s tongue skimmed the masculine line between sternum and navel but instead of encountering my surgically trimmed and shaped member tasted a rough and hooded fellow that brought the fantasy reel to an abrupt end. Eventually, I convinced myself that the watched-pot principle was in effect—she would not return while I so obviously waited—and wrote a note informing her that I visited the spa below. The hotel provided complimentary robe and slippers—marked to my amusement with a request that they not be stolen—and so attired I shuffled down the corridor to a matron in starched whites who locked me into a quaint wire-cage contraption which, with the switch of a massive brass lever, dropped five floors to an entrance reserved for hotel guests. For my five hundred deutsche marks a day, it seemed, I enjoyed unlimited free use of the spa and the prestige of a semiprivate entrance.
Considering what had transpired on my previous visit to the Gellért Spa, combined with an environment resembling the interior of the three witches’ kettle from Macbeth, the mineral baths should have been the last place to regard as suitable for relaxation. Among the octogenarian wraiths soaking in the 100 degree pool I spied a more vital figure who, from behind, so resembled Sven that I tripped over backward in surprise, splashing awkwardly into an opposing pool. I had not intended to make myself conspicuous, and certainly didn’t wish to attract the affections of the skinny Turk who gazed at me with lovelorn eyes and none too discreetly paddled to my side whenever I paused to soak. The steam room offered less respite. The sweltering fog so erased the features from every face that every face became Sven’s. I knew I suffered from paranoia even as I hallucinated, but the shock of seeing his face superimposed on a dozen milling specters so unnerved me that I crashed through a pair of them, drawing rude protests and a forearm to the back as I careened out the door. Braced against a tiled wall, I clenched my chest to keep my heart from bursting. A Magyar as burly and hirsute as a bear asked if I wanted a massage and gestured toward the adjacent room, where four men lying on steel tables were soaped, pummeled, and hosed like so much meat in an abattoir. I declined and fled to the far wall. In a small room directly opposite, an old man sat on a metal ring perched above a pipe jutting from the tiles below, and by pulling a metal chain shot a jet of water up his ass. The toothless bugger let out such a pleasured gasp I choked with laughter, certain I had been transported into the mise-en-scène of a Pasolini-Mapplethorpe coproduction from hell. I reeled through the mineral baths to the relative sanity of the dressing rooms, where I stuffed a towel between my jaws to stifle a laughing fit which threatened to escalate to hysterical shrieking.
“Shooting late?” I inquired, when Monika stormed into the suite far too late for any excuse to mitigate my suspicions. She hadn’t even bothered to dress properly after the act that had delayed her, net stockings torn and seams askew, blouse and skirt creased as though tossed aside in the heat of the moment. I had been waiting with all the lights blazing bright, pacing the suite’s diagonals as I reminded myself that ghosts are a projection of the mind, invested with the power to terrorize by belief. Most tellingly, she wore little makeup, and what little she wore looked randomly applied with no great care of accuracy.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, her tone rivaling the brusqueness with which she brushed past me to shut herself in the bathroom. I was certain it portended the end, and listened disconsolately through the door to the splash of sink water and, more curiously, a single vulgar epithet repeated four times in escalating volume.
“Can I get you anything?” I called, and immediately cursed myself for being so nice. Monika despised niceness in men. When the door snapped open, she held a towel to a face scrubbed clean. Her blouse had been flung to the floor and kicked into a corner.
“You can get away from the door, is what you can get,” she said.
I backed away, bitten. She lit a cigarette from her bag and sat on the bed, legs tightly crossed, shoulders slumped around her chest, elbows pressed protectively into her belly. The room filled with smoke. She picked up the phone, pressed a digit, and ordered a bottle of wine from room service.
“Stop staring at me,” she said. “I’m tired of people staring at me.”
“Problems with the makeup artist?” I asked, injecting into those simple words a venomous irony.
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“Film companies have professional makeup artists. You came in here looking like a circus clown.”
Monika responded by locking herself in the bathroom again. A spatter of water on tiles wafted from beneath the door. Even her need to shower was cause for suspicion—why else would she rush beneath the spray except to wash away the incriminating smells? I did not trust myself to act rationally. She had wedged herself into an elemental crack in my character; the twist of her leaving would split me apart. But I had no evidence that my suspicions were more factual than paranoid. Had she planned to leave, she wouldn’t have bothered to confess the strangeness of her sexual desires the night before. In a relationship marked by wariness and mistrust, that moment had been our greatest intimacy.
The room service tray of wine and glasses gave me the excuse to announce its arrival. That brought her out of the bathroom fast enough, wrapped in a robe, her black curls dripping. I clenched my teeth to gate an incautious tongue. She gulped down two glasses of wine and, lighting another cigarette, sipped between puffs through the third. Despite her inexperience as an actress, Monika would be impossible not to watch on screen. She consumed the space around her the way she consumed cigarettes and wine: with a focus sometimes nervous, at other times wearily composed, but always projecting an intensity that suggested her emotions no matter how concealed burned hotter and brighter than everyone else’s. She riveted the eye. Her presence shattered my concentration; I could only pretend to ignore her. She dug through her purse for a big-toothed comb and sat on the corner of the bed opposite mine, watching me. I glanced up, trying to appear preoccupied.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Look, I need a situation. Do you think you can do that? Can you get me a situation?”
The timbre in her voice approached desperation. I asked, “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t need to talk about it, understand? What I need is a situation.”
I tried to flatter myself with the thought that passion for me prompted the request, knowing that I was merely the specific means to satisfy a desire which, at its core, had nothing to do with me. She avoided my eyes and white-knuckled the comb. I began to explain my vision of men carrying briefcases stuffed with money, and how the next morning we might—
“Tonight. Not tomorrow. I need a situation tonight.”
Admitting that I did not have a situation for that evening would prove an ill-advised failure. Desperation would drive her to fulfill on her own what I could not provide. I assured her that I had prepared a second plan, which I would reveal when she finished dressing. While she prepared herself in the bathroom, I turned out the pockets of my trousers and coats, searching for the silver and garnet
ring purchased when I had first tracked her down in Budapest. I had fantasized marrying her then, and now thought to turn that fantasy into a situation. I found the serpents entwined in tissue paper, buried in the side pocket of the jacket I had worn that day. What I had in mind wasn’t so specific as a plan, but a scenario I hoped would be risk free and profitable.
“It looks expensive. Is it mine?” Monika asked when I slipped the ring onto her wedding finger. The silver and garnets sparkled against the setting of her champagne complexion.
I said, “If I told you it wasn’t yours you’d only steal it.”
She pecked me affectionately on the cheek, taking my remark as a compliment. Though the trace of her lips on my skin did not intend eroticism, I felt my heart accelerate and the tissues in my mouth parch with anticipation.
During the taxi ride we discussed details of character—I supplied her with a troubled past and a rich but jealous husband as part of the role—and right up to the hotel steps I whispered hurried directions to her ear. She wore the fetching cocktail dress from the night we had taken Zdeněk and swept into the Forum with the same eye-catching result. My role in the scenario was not inconsequential, and I mentally rehearsed the demands of the part while I watched through the glass. I’ve always been more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it—invention frightens me less and pleases me more than performance—but the games I had played with young tourists had been performance of a sort and helped me to prepare. When I estimated sufficient time had passed, I made my inconspicuous entrance. As expected, Monika had not remained long unaccompanied at the bar, though her choice of suitors dismayed me. He towered politely above her, his gangly height topped by a ridiculous cowboy hat. At the reception desk, I identified myself as a guest of the hotel and asked the most touristic questions I could imagine, from directions to the castle which lay in plain sight across the bridge to the safety of the drinking water. Perhaps Monika believed that because he dressed the cliché of the Texas oil man he really was one; more likely the conspicuousness of the target gave her greater thrill.
Gypsy Hearts Page 25