The Romanian by Bruce Benderson Read Free Book Online Page A

knows—in case he’ll need them. Later a friend, the Romanian writer Carmen Firan, will describe this to me as a “Gypsy tongue.”
    In the restaurant, Romulus’s ears are pricked like a spy’s and his eyes blank. He’s evaluating that couple across the room. A Pole speaking accented German sprinkled with bad English to a woman speaking good German and English who must be Czech, he decides. His foxlike face screws up in shrewd satisfaction.
    Always next to his hip is the cell phone the ex-girlfriend bought him when she was in business at the brothel, so she’d be able to keep track of his whereabouts. I fix my eyes on it, ask about it. Now it can only receive calls, he says, not make them, the card’s been used up. But just as my mind moves elsewhere, the phone jangles.
    He holds it to his ear, speaks in Romanian. Who, who is it, I desperately want to know. His hooded eyes only grow more opaque, his pallor more pronounced. There is, he admits, after hanging up, another girl here in Budapest. He says the word “girl” the way you would say “job,” dispassionately, with an air of bored utilitarianism. I told her, he goes on, that my American uncle was coming to visit. (He rewards the word “uncle” with more status than “girl,” a tie of blood.) “And I told her that while my uncle was here for ten days, I could not be with her at all.”
    â€œAnd what did she say?”
    â€œâ€˜ Why?’” he says. “She say, ‘Why?’”
    â€œYou can see her once or twice,” I say, my eyes becoming more hooded than his. “Your job with me isn’t all twenty-four hours a day.” And of course, the word “job” cuts through him, my revenge for the word “uncle.”
    â€œIs not necessary,” he says, getting stonier.
    Â 
    Â 
    TWO DAYS LATER his very pungent cock dangles over my face as I sit on the floor between his legs and nip at the foreskin. It smells strongly of pussy. He’d disappeared for six hours with some of the money I’d given him to get a haircut, hooking up with his pleading girlfriend, I later found out. Supposedly, he took her to the movies, but then, he added casually, with a kind of masochistic pride in his vulgarity, fucked her in the toilets. While I lay in bed waiting and waiting and growing progressively more anguished, angrier, killing time by reading about King Carol’s enormous sexual prowess in the disappointing and clichéd Balkan Ghosts, until everything seen through the haze of the many codeine tablets I took somehow faded into this girl I’d imagined: the watery hair, the easily bruisable skin . . . And now I didn’t identify with her at all, or feel I was becoming her in that abject sense I’d felt before—and she became the enemy .
    Insolently coaxing the girl into the bathroom as she murmured over and over, “But why can’t I meet your uncle ?” Sliding the latch of the toilet door shut. Covering her neck with kisses forceful enough to leave bruises. Taking her hair in one hand like a horse’s tail and pulling her face against him, then lowering it slowly down his chest toward his open fly . . .
    When my mind was so choked with resentment that I couldn’t read the words on the page, I took a bus to the Corso, that board-walk along the Danube where we’d met, and sat glaring at the windswept waves. Then I began to walk, as if through gelatin and surreal loss. There was the occasional wizened hustler sitting in one of the small parks, face scoured by months of cold wind, hands cracking with vitamin deficiencies. . . . Until finally, I found myself sitting in a cab again, taking the useless trip back to the empty hotel room. It’s really an annoying trip. I had no idea the hotel was so isolated, would cost so much to get to.
    At the hotel a strange presence lurked about a hundred feet from the entrance, like an animal