The Romanian by Bruce Benderson Read Free Book Online Page B

crouched in the bushes. And then slowly, abashedly, it appeared, like something that had no right to be there, creeping toward me with head bowed, and a timid, self-punishing smile that gave me a secret twinge of pleasure. . . . He was a bona fide guest at this four-star hotel, but I’d forgotten, again, to consider his amazing sense of disentitlement, the effort he must have been expending to walk in and out of the lobby past the concierge. So when he’d returned and found me gone, instead of asking for another key, he’d loitered in front of the hotel and even hid in the bushes so as not to be shooed away. The animal he incarnated, skulking from the bushes when he saw me getting out of the taxi, wasn’t a dog, despite the hangdog look, but a fox . . . a sly fox only temporarily cowed by my stony glance, my barking admonition, “If you don’t want the job, then okay!”
    â€œI disappeared on purpose,” retorted the shy fox craftily, “just to see what you do. I was testing you.”
    That was ten minutes ago. Now I’m sliding my mouth up his thigh, licking at the scent of her arousal in the toilet of the movie theater with the thought of her fear and despair at losing him. “Always bring me your cock when it smells of pussy,” I advise, as I slowly gulp it to the root.

IV
    ROMANIAN HISTORY HAS CREPT back into my story like an enticement; or is it a warning? King Carol II, of the enormous sexual stamina. And his Jewish mistress Lupescu, of the pursed Cupid’s-bow lips and sashaying loins. In a landscape like my current life, it’s natural to expect, or at least long for, the spectacular.
    From the books I’ve been reading here in the Margitsziget while Romulus watches round after round of TV soccer, I can piece together life in Romania during Carol’s early manhood, around 1915, when the new nation bristled with excitement, looking eagerly toward Western Europe for acceptance. I can picture the future king, Prince Carol, as a cocky, moody, blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old, with an extravagant mop of wavy blond hair and a weak Hohenzollern chin, pulled in even further by Hohenzollern propriety. I’ve also learned that Romania’s capital, Bucharest, where young Carol accumulated his sexual conquests (including one, called The Crow, slender and witchlike with cocaine-dilated pupils), was already known as Little Paris at the time. It was a bustling nexus between East and West, built up by Romania’s rich reserves of oil and wheat and its access to the Danube. The fashionable main streets overflowed with natty young gentlemen smoking oval-shaped Turkish cigarettes and often available seraglio-eyed women, their shiny black hair framing Eastern-kohled eyes, their undulating hips sheathed in Turkish silks or filmy French organdy.

    A full-lipped Carol in early manhood—soon to become Europe’s most sensual monarch.
    These images of Romania’s past animate the isolation of that hotel on Margitsziget Island, but it’s still becoming a bad place for Romulus and me. There’s an air of family groups and bird-watchers, and there’s no sex at all on TV. Motivated by the stories of Carol’s amorous exploits, I spice up our sex sessions by inventing turn-of-the-last-century scenarios, whispering into Romulus’s ear minutely detailed descriptions of moist labia beneath frilly corset edges and rippling breasts.
    One day I come back to our room after a short sightseeing trip to the Dohány Street Synagogue and find Romulus lying stiffly on the bed, a shade lighter than his usual pallor, with no television playing. Boredom had driven him outside, where he was astonished to see someone entering the hotel as he was leaving.
    Who?
    Well, just a person . . .
    Eventually, I’m able to pry out the story of a choreographer, an obsessed john whom Romulus dropped as a customer a little while ago, after which an assistant was set on