My Life in Heavy Metal (11 page)

We made love, or fucked, did that thing where our center parts fit and unfit, a half dozen times, in panicky sessions, ten minutes or so, until she cried out
tak! tak!
then fell still. She consented to my movements with her body and spoke only once, toward dawn, saying, as my hand brushed up her thigh, “I am having so wet.” I knew then—at that exact moment—Basha had been sent to rescue me from the dull plight of my life.

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

I saw her across the street, her arms poking out of a red dress with white polka dots, the fabric tight around her bum. She came to me and kissed me and I could smell the rot of her mouth. And the rot of her mouth turned me on! (Is there nothing the early days of love won't fetishize?)

We went to the mall to buy last-minute gifts. Basha circled the pavilion, fretting over a belt, a bottle of lotion, blushing at the inquiries of the sales staff. She was a nervous shopper, which I took to be a mark of her unfamiliarity with the ritual. I had all sorts of crappy ideas rattling around my head about life in Poland. I knew, vaguely, that the Poles had broken from the Soviet Bloc. But I still imagined a lumpen gulag: endless lines, bare shelves, faces like potatoes in kerchiefs. And my poor Basha trapped amid this needy vulgarity! I stood behind her and called out to the clerks:
One of those! Make it two! Why not? Do you have this in black?

Our relationship was filed under
dalliance,
which allowed us to write one another without much pressure. Basha was an excellent correspondent. She made it a point to send me sexy photos of herself. My favorite showed her leaning toward the camera, kissing at a cigarette, mascara smeared, hair tousled—a Bond girl at the end of a long vodka party.

That summer I got stoned, sat on my porch, tried to figure out where everyone had gone. Across the street, guys with whistles were running a girl's soccer camp, which I could watch if I wasn't too obvious. The girls were sweet and clumsy. They lacked the essentials of the sport—the ability to steal and confront and tackle—but their legs enjoyed flirting with these ideas. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation.

My answering machine was the enemy. Often, returning from the grocery store, or the Greek diner where I took suppers, I gazed at the red zero flashing smugly and punched the machine. Then, one day, there was a message.

Hayizmeimeezyucullme.

When I called her back, Basha wanted to know, immediately, if she would ever see me again. “I made a breakup with my boyfriend,” she said.

“What boyfriend?”

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “I have my vacations at end of August.”

At the airport in Warsaw she came running, her eyes blurry hazel, a skirt shaping her hips, and she was far too beautiful for me, my sharp face and chickeny bones. I felt (as I often feel) a dramatic error in the accounting, though she pressed herself to me and made me feel, thereby, in the midst of that lousy airport, with its plastic counters and vague feculence, different from myself, heroic.

We found a cheap hotel and signed in as man and wife. Basha did the talking, while the concierge squinted at her.

“She thinks I am a whore,” Basha said in the elevator. She smiled, her gums like a second, wetter smile. “Maybe I am a whore.” She shut the door to our room, and tore the button off my pants. I'd seen this sort of thing, in films hoping to suggest reckless passion. But this was the first time I'd been inside the animal experience, so famished for physical love as to overleap the gooey crescendo of intimacy. We never even got our shirts off.

Basha wanted nothing to do with clitoral stimulation, tricky positioning, langorous gazes. Put it in, was her agenda. Let the flesh speak. Her face went rubbery. She took on the aspect of a mad-woman plucked from one of Hogarth's Bedlam prints, ready to tear her hair, throw shit, which pleased me, as did her internal
muscles, which yielded in rings of contraction. Sun from the window lit a glaze of perspiration on her small white breasts. Her hips rocked.

“Make big come,” she said. “Make big come in my pussy.”

“Tell me—”

“Now. Now-now-
now.
”

Afterward, her body looked like something tossed ashore.

Basha reached down and took hold of me: “You have huge meat.”

I laughed.

“Really,” she said.

“I'm pretty sure I have normal meat,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I remember the first time we were together, when I first saw, thinking this.”

I studied her expression for some sign of caginess. But caginess was not her style. She didn't speak about the particulars of sex in the same way an American woman might. And she appeared quite serious in her assessment, as if my size were a matter she had considered privately.

My ego flew in wild circles overhead. Is there nothing man desires more than to be regaled about his own huge meat?

Basha didn't remember her father, who had died when she was two years old. He was no more than a blurry figure in photographs, with her tiny arrow of a nose. Her first love—her only great love, from what I could tell—was her stepfather Tomas, a gentle mathematician who had worshiped Basha's mother.

“What happened to him?” I said.

“He died when I was eight,” she said. “Returning from a conference in Germany. There was snow on the road.”

“My God,” I said. “I'm so sorry.”

I reached for Basha, but she slipped to the side of the bed and sat up, regarding me curiously. “Don't be sorry. I barely remember.”

In Kraków we went to see the palace, but it was closed for repairs, so we walked to the other end of the plaza. The tourist bureau had organized a folk dancing festival, surly teenagers spinning in peasant garb. Basha herself wore a summer dress, loose around the legs, and open-toed sandals. I thought about all the girls in their summer dresses, and tried to understand why I cared only to look at Basha.

We made love in our muggy pension room, lathered one another in the shower, then returned to the plaza, to feel the breeze on our limbs, which were sore in secret places, to watch the stars against the drape of night, and browse the stalls of painted eggs and cigarette cases. The cafes were open, the tabletops lit by bouncing candles.

My own tranquility astounded me.

“What do you think about?” Basha said.

“Night,” I said. “A beautiful night like this.”

She squeezed my hand and leaned in for a kiss. Her eyes were deep green and perfectly serious. In a soft, almost embarrassed voice, she said: “I want to come to America to make a life with you, David.” Her hands were trembling. Her breathing was ragged. This was all terribly real. I had to remind myself.

“Yes?” she whispered. “What do you think about it?”

Hadn't I come to Poland in the hopes of just such a plea? Don't we all, in the private kingdom of our desires, dream about such pleas?
And yet there was something deflating about the declaration. Without warning, in one sentence, Basha had called an end to the hunt, laid herself before me, forced me to make good on the promises of my extravagant furious charm. I felt my heart chop.

We were ideally suited to the long-distance relationship, with its twisted calculus of wish fantasy and deprivation. We wrote long epistles full of desire and ardent grief. We perfected the art of nostalgia: extracting the finer moments from the tangle of actual experience, burnishing them with new longing. We took the inconvenience of our love as proof of its profundity.

And so, Christmas in Poland. Katowice struck me as suitably impoverished. Men selling carp on the corners, slashing the fish until blood soaked their aprons, while the wives peddled roe. Everyone looked glum and underdressed; the sidewalks ran off into mud.

Basha lived with her mother, but they were both at work. She'd left me the key to the apartment. Her building was part of a massive Soviet-style
panelak,
crinkled like a fan, five stories of concrete smeared with soot, stairwells sharp with piss. Her room was the size of a cell: a single bed, a dresser, a desk with my letters neatly stacked in one corner. Over the bed she'd taped a picture of us kissing on a street corner in Kraków. I'd taken the photo myself, holding the camera with one hand while hauling her into an embrace. The white pelt of Basha's cheek was draped across the frame, her eyes closed, her mouth thrown toward the kiss. The photo was blurred: as if the action captured had been terribly swift, or the moment dreamed.

Outside, snow fell like confetti, dissolving on the pavement. Every time I heard the tock of a woman's shoes my body tensed.

Basha burst into the apartment finally, out of breath, her eyes glassy. I experienced the brief paralysis of gratification.
You mean this is actually mine?
Her hands slipped beneath my sweater. Her minty tongue touched mine. Basha backed me into her room. The smell of her rose up, a sweet bacterial tang. She let out a luxurious sigh as I slid into her. Such drama! It was like leaping onto Broadway cock-first.

And later, scrubbed and pink-eared, I sat at the Olszewska's dining-room table, gorged on rice laced with cumin and slivers of sautéed liver. Mamu appeared, flushed from the cold (and, it would turn out, a good deal of wine). She was a handsome woman, wide cheeks and a plucked mouth. Basha's face bloomed. It was clear at once that they were deeply in love, as mothers and daughters sometimes grow to be, without the interfering needs of men.

I stood and Mamu looked me over. I could see Basha watching us, the slowing of her breath. Mamu shook my hand and announced, in her wobbly English, that she was delighted to meet me. Then she pulled me into a sloppy hug and Basha laughed and pulled me back to her side, scolding Mamu in Polish, a language that seemed to me always, in the mouths of the Olszewska women, a volley of quick and playful whispers.

What did I have to do? Stand there and look pretty. This was the secret dividend of loving a woman from a foreign country: very little was required of me.

“We will have wodka,” Mamu said.

“
V
odka,” Basha said.

“
Vodka,
” Mamu corrected herself elaborately.

Yes! Vodka with bitter tonic and lemon wedges, drunk from tall glasses. And later, in Mamu's room, plum brandy from snifters. The three of us were huddled at the foot of her bed; there was no other place to sit. Her room accommodated a single bed, a bookshelf, a small dresser for clothes.

Mamu was one of those smokers whose motions are so calm and practiced, so assumed, that the act becomes an extension of their personality. She preferred a brand called Petit Ceours, whose box was decorated in tiny gray hearts. The cigarettes themselves were as slender as lollipop sticks. Mamu could kill one in six drags, though often she let them burn down untended, the ashes making elegant snakes. She seemed to enjoy the option of smoking as much as the act.

Basha and I took the tram to the central plaza, with its smooth new cobblestone and stately, gabled buildings, refurbished with foreign money and painted in cake-frosting colors. These housed clubs and restaurants and clothing shops, for tourists of course, but also for the new class of strivers represented by Basha and her friends, who had learned the first lesson of the bourgeoisie: that the acquisition of wealth required, to some mysterious degree, the appearance of wealth.

We visited a few clubs, smoky places full of old pop songs and young people trying hard to acquire the defensive irony of American culture. This made me sad. But liquor helped soften my sadness, helped me occupy a little more gracefully my role as Basha's exuberant Americanski. We wound up in some hotel lounge. Basha was there, next to me, laughing. The other women, dour and beautiful,
watched me. I downed shot after shot and proposed toasts in mangled French and serenaded Basha with a fair rendition of Elvis Presley. Some fellow pulled a glass pipe from his pocket. “Hash,” he said. “Hashish.” I smoked some of that, too. Sure. I was the star. The star drinks. The star smokes.

Then we were outside, on the stumbling cobblestone, under the splotchy moon. Basha folded herself into me. Everything about her seemed perfect just then: her cheeks, the way her mouth smooshed vowels, her new decadence, her pale body. She was emotionally inobvious. That was true. But wasn't that just part of the mystery? Wasn't that, in some sense, the entire point?

That we made love I recognized only by the feeling of my lower body, a wet, suctiony joy. Most nights I would have curled around her, kissing the skin between her shoulder blades, my low arm going slowly numb beneath her. But the bed didn't seem entirely solid, seemed more in the nature of an ocean. Salt rose in my throat and I staggered to the bathroom. My body heaved and gasped. I suspected—as do all unpracticed drinkers—that I would never feel right again. Far above, I could see the racks of emollients, Basha's cherished blow-dryer, panty hose laid like molted skin across the radiator, a calliope of homely bras.

There was a tap on the door. Basha. Basha come to rescue her lover.

I struggled to my feet and opened the door. Mamu stood in her robe, blinking. I was naked. My penis dangled. The sweetness of her daughter's sex, like flesh that has been perfumed and licked, rose into the air between us. I wanted to duck behind the door, but in that moment such an action seemed to constitute an accusation.

“You are sick?” Mamu said. She was careful not to let her gaze drop below my chest.

“I drank too much,” I said. “Wodka.” I pantomimed taking a shot, and in this motion, as my arm rose to my mouth, my fingers flipped toward my lips, I became acutely aware of my cock, rising up, settling back.

“You would like tea?” Mamu said.

“Oh no.” I laid a palm on my stomach. Mamu glanced down, not entirely understanding the gesture, and her eyes settled there for a moment, not even a moment, a charged little half moment.