The Romanian (10 page)

“You love me, don't you,” he sneers.

And I do. Or is it that I'm in love with his culture, hoping for a chance to go native?

How ironic that Carol II, the blueblood German-English son of a queen who sought to rehabilitate Romania in the eyes of the West, ended up acting out all the clichés of Latinity and Orientalism. For more than thirty years, from 1916 until the 1950s, journalists reported every exploit of the Eastern monarch who spoke a Latin tongue, clucking over his “orgiastic” interest in his harem of women. Thus did weak-chinned Carol, the product of a stuffy Hohenzollern upbringing, become a locus of libido, a titillating hybrid of the Oriental, the Slav and the Latin.

Now that Romulus is asleep, I open one of the books I've brought along to a photo of a kind of zaftig Garbo, with a wistful Flora-Dora smile. Her Pollyanna simper of a voice reaches me from a 1908 childhood in the Carpathian resort of Sinaia, where she and her mother were allegedly invited to high tea with Carmen Sylva.

On the same terrace of the royal mansion stood a brooding fourteen-year-old Prince Carol, so mesmerized by the girl's sunburst of strawberry hair that he offered her a box of Belgian chocolates. At his request, she ate one, but when she refused another, he tried to place it in her mouth.

Some seventeen years later, the now grown-up strawberry blonde is crossing a military parade ground near Bucharest. Sunlight ignites the ringlets around her face into another burst of fire, reflected in the eyes of a mesmerized grown-up Carol, now a libertine of a prince. Who could the stunning woman be?

Lupescu, they tell him. But she's a Jewess.

VII

BRONCHITIS MEANS OPIATES AGAIN. In New York, I ask the doctor for something stronger, hydrocodone syrup instead of codeine tablets. He gives me antibiotics, too.

I'm back on the job at the financial printing house, in the white room with the keyboard-tapping immigrants. Nobody noticed that I was gone. No one seems to be noticing what I'm doing. No one pays any attention to my eyelids falling shut, my head bobbing and jerking up again.

I talk to the doctor about it, without telling him how much hydrocodone I'm taking. He thinks it's a symptom of sleep apnea.

The plan is that Romulus and I will meet again for two or three weeks in Bucharest, in about a month and a half. Meanwhile I'm to research options for being together longer—his coming to New York or some other place that lets in Romanians.

Romania may be a figment, a fantasy, to me, but for Romulus, New York has the aura of an amusement park. To him the advantages of life in America seem so disproportionate, so unreal, that it's almost like another planet. He can't imagine the humdrum steps of making a life here, only the thrill of the pavement beneath his feet.

Maybe his attitude isn't all that unrealistic. Calls to a couple of immigration lawyers make it just too clear that Romanians applying for tourist visas, like people from other poor nations, are assumed to be intending to emigrate—are guilty unless proven otherwise. Romulus would probably need a large bank account, property, a business and family as proof of ties to Romania to get even a one-week tourist visa.

Sunday night, the tingling of hydrocodone, sparkly globules coursing through my muscles and nerve cells, instills me with infinite patience. My body feels like a phony hologram of murmuring dots. I begin an Internet search. There are, it appears, a few countries that don't require visas from Romanians. Turkey and, unexpectedly, Costa Rica, are on the list. The latter conjures New Age fantasies of Romulus confined in a house on the beach, cheap prices. Indolent as he seems, he could be the perfect candidate for beach pet. How much competition could the impoverished local girls be, in the long run? This infantile Tarzan fantasy, idiotically fueled by images of him in swim-wear, hardens into a scenario wrapped in red tape when I begin researching the voyage from Bucharest to San José, Costa Rica. Martinair, with stopovers in Amsterdam and Miami, looks like the cheapest, but even its fares start at $2,500.

The following morning, a searing migraine slices through my brain vacated by opiates. I call in sick to work, then spend hours on phone trees, gathering information from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It turns out there's such a thing as a transit visa, needed by some travelers from high-risk countries who want to pass through a U.S. airport on the way to somewhere else. I wonder whether he'd be able to get one.

That afternoon, after lubricating another two teaspoons of hydrocodone with a glass of scotch, I call him. Over the connection fading in and out, his purring voice sounds amoral, charged with ill-intentioned excitement at the idea of setting foot in Miami, even in a cordoned airport lounge. For months afterward, I'll see the airports I freely use for changeovers in a different way, my eyes obsessively searching the doors and windows I pass as possible escape routes. I'll imagine his foolhardy dashes into parking lots where I'm waiting with a rented car.

I bring my crusade to my vague job at the financial printing company. One wearing afternoon, I become fixated on a doubtful Internet site that claims to be in the business of selling information leading to passports. According to this site, a certain Caribbean country will issue passports to those willing to stay for more than forty-eight hours. This citizenship changes an individual's immigration status radically, allowing, for example (and this in all caps), TRAVEL TO CANADA WITHOUT A VISA. For a mere $30,000, the identity of this amazingly welcoming country will be revealed, and all arrangements for passport application taken care of.

Since no one is watching, I lapse into a deep fantasy about importing Romulus to the passport-granting country, where we're surrounded for forty-eight hours by soldiers of fortune and corporate criminals on the run, as tongues are stung by rum or slaked with bottled water without ice cubes, in scorching heat where dust encrusts ceiling fans—all followed by a trip to a chilly Toronto in autumn.

 

 

NEXT COMES a three-day weekend in Syracuse with my acutely alert but failing mom. Somehow her fantasies about me seem more desperate and romantic than mine about Romulus. And of course, they're as narcissistic as those of Queen Marie for her son. It's no accident that both he and I became libidinists. As a shield, I bring my opiates with me.

She's been ill, another bout of pneumonia. My older brother came up a few days ago to watch over her in the hospital. Now that she's home, he's left and I've come to take my turn.

Just as I sometimes do, my brother has left angry. Nearing sixty, with huge responsibility in a government executive job, he can still become the target of Mom's reformative criticisms. This time the argument was about his weight. But unlike me, my brother finds the autonomy to leave the house when he's up there, abandoning her for an afternoon, in the midst of grumpy judgments, to visit old friends.

Even a recent hospital stay hasn't kept Mom from having her pure-white hair arranged into a stiff artichoke at her weekly hairdresser appointment, or instructing her home companion—a warm, affectionate gay guy who lives next door—to help her into her girdle (so rare these days that she had to replace it by mail order), hose, pressed gray slacks and spotless royal-blue blouse, which enlivens the color of her glittering, inquisitive china-blue eyes. Without his help, she's covered her pallor with the usual liberal doses of powder and rouge and brightened her mouth with red lipstick. Now she stands stiffly, as straight as she can despite her arthritic hump, with one hand grasping the back of a chair, and minutely surveys my clothes, skin and hair, searching my eyes a little anxiously for inattention or irony as her gnarled hand adjusts the collar of my shirt. Her eyes well with disappointment as she checks out my pants, which have lost their crease and wrinkled in the train ride up.

The phone rings and Mom hobbles to it, then bellows, “Who is it?” several times until the caller is shouting loud enough for me to hear every word. It's someone from the Housing Authority, on which, at ninety-six, she still holds a seat, calling to ask if she'll be attending the meeting. “Of course!” she booms into the receiver, with the voice of a young cheerleader, a voice temporarily infused with an astounding force. It's a fresh, energetic soprano she can still muster, to the extent that friends who call often ask me who the young girl was who answered the phone.

Even at this stage of her life, she treasures her resolve and community involvement and is fixated on her social status. These values stem from immigrant girlhood in a tiny town in upstate New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, when her poor family, who spoke only Yiddish, was also the only Jewish family in town. Her parents didn't learn English until my mother entered kindergarten, picked it up herself and came home to teach it to them. During years of exclusion and loneliness and anti-Semitic gibes, my mother struggled to prove her worth to this provincial, bigoted Anglo-Saxon community. She became the highest achiever in school and then entered Syracuse University for a degree in library science. Her vow, which she fulfilled, was to make a name for herself; and as she was appointed to more and more county offices or offered directorships of more and more women's groups and charities, I spent more and more time wilting at the big picture-window in anticipation of the crunch of her tires on the graveled drive.

After digging out details about my last trip to Budapest, Mom settles down to read, borrowing one of the books from my suitcase—
Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair.
Always a voracious reader, she takes easily to this tale of intrigue in early-twentieth-century Romania. She's quick to condemn the Jewish mistress Lupescu as a tramp and a home-wrecker, and she sides immediately with Queen Marie, that establishment figure who suffered at the hands of her disobeying, philandering son. I divert Mom's swift progress toward yet another discussion of my own misbehavior and a mother's suffering by claiming that she's partial to Marie because Marie was a relative of the Romanovs (her mother was a Russian grand duchess). It's a joke we've been sharing for years: the idea that Russian-born Mom might really be Anastasia. True, Anastasia was born in 1901 and Mom claims to have been born at the end of 1903, but she's the first to admit that the year may be off, since at the time there were no birth records. Then there's the similarity between my mother's married name—Ida Benderson—and that of the woman—Anna Anderson—who claimed to be Anastasia. And finally, there's that picture of Anastasia as a child, who had the same light-colored eyes and dirty-blond hair as Mom's, arranged in the same sausage curls Mom wore as a child. It's one of our timeworn routines based partly on my childhood fascination for the hilarious absurdity of Mom's immigrant name change, from the Russian Itke Mariashka Olshansky to the anglicized-Norwegian Ida Mae Olsen, both of which, I teasingly maintain, are actually aliases of Anastasia.

As usual, Mom plays along, averting her eyes, pasting a mysterious, regal look on her face and vowing, “I'll never tell. I can't reveal this.” She's always been a good sport. A year ago, I convinced her to pretend to be a still-surviving silent film star, whom my friends at an Oscar party heard on speakerphone being interviewed about D. W. Griffith and the pink Surrealist-inspired Schiaparelli gown she once wore to an Oscar ceremony. If I brought up this episode, she could recall every syllable of it. My mother has a photographic memory.

Our moment of hilarity is enough to exhaust her, so she trudges to bed, using the wall of the hallway to correct her teetering, and continues to read, but just for a moment, until she's fallen into a labored snooze. I tiptoe into the other bedroom to check my e-mail but become fixated on a favorite photo of Romulus I took and uploaded to the Internet, in which he's wearing the brief blue bikini I bought for him and doing push-ups on the floor of our room at the Gellért, his spare, muscled body straight as a blade, parallel to the carpet, his cheekbones casting sculpting shadows into the hollow of his cheeks.

My trance is broken as I feel Mom's stiff arthritic fingers on my shoulder. Tortured by the fact that my consciousness may have wandered into some sphere beyond her conventional grasp, she has awoken and come to hunt me out, like an officer doing a surprise barracks inspection. Squinting with troubled eyes at the image on the screen, she asks in a dead, cynical, almost accusatory tone if that could be the reason for all my traveling.

Her acceptance of homosexuality has come a long way in the years since she learned about mine, in contrast to my now deceased father, who could never overcome his disgust at the thought of two male bodies in clumsy postures of coupling. Mom's love, on the other hand, caused her to work hard to dredge up memories of old-maid librarians living together in the 1920s, and she was able to come to the sentimental conclusion that love can exist between any two people. Even so, no amount of biographies of Rock Hudson or Liberace, nor any Christopher Isherwood novel or gossip about Garbo, can enlighten her about my kinds of obsessions. Confused by what appears to her as pure perversity, she pleadingly and repeatedly demands an explanation of why I choose such objects of affection, why my affairs can't be more like those of the charismatic middle-aged gay couple who live next door, with their decent professional income and well-appointed living room. Despite her knowledge of Rock Hudson's preference for blonds half his age or Liberace's suing chauffeur, she's at a loss as to my interest in younger bodies from coarser backgrounds.

Her words sting me, and my harangued mind flees to the equally painful story of opinion-fearing Queen Marie meeting her son on a train in 1918 at CreÅ£eşti-Ungheni, as he's being shipped to imprisonment, after deserting an army post to run away and marry a commoner named Zizi Lambrino. “Is it possible that you should have lost to such a degree your sense of honor and duty,” she rants. “Wouldn't it be better for you to die, a bullet in your head, and be buried in good Romanian ground . . . ?”