The Romanian Read Online Free Page B

every twenty minutes or so to type the words “new york . . . budapest” or dropping my head to read the book in my lap about King Carol II’s Jewish mistress, Lupescu: The Story of a Royal Love Affair.
    In exchange for an impossible fantasy about a hustler, I’ve convinced myself that this temporary situation doesn’t matter. My mind is full of strategies for fleeing the city into the next touch of his hard-rubber body. In this stuffy white room, excitement courses through me like sap. I imagine great bursts of inspiration. Books about Eastern Europe and love and risk and class dissonance. Sexual desire, I’m convinced, is merely the interplay of social inequities—or should I say dreams about the libidinal possibilities of the Other. But now that gentrification has increasingly separated us from a clash with those who are different, libidinal energies are becoming blocked and denatured. If we want to, we can go our whole lives without seeing someone from another background. The Other has been banished from our reach. Am I foolish enough to think that I’ve found a way out?
    Earlier I claimed that arousal is just an unconscious sense of discrepancy, a feeling of imbalance. Then desire, or love, must be the servant of that same impression of injustice—a perverse urge to settle the balance.
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    THESE THOUGHTS RECUR in fragmented form in a low-ceilinged suburban bedroom in Syracuse, New York, in the house in which I grew up. I’ve come back here to visit my ancient mother—another exile from Eastern-bloc turmoil. A Jew, she came to the States from Russia at the age of two, almost a century ago, with her family, so that her father could avoid being drafted into the czar’s army.
    Now, as I gaze out the bedroom window at the carpet of snow, drugs lick my nervous cells into bolder imaginings. Is this the eighth or ninth tablet of codeine I’ve taken—ostensibly for a toothache? I really should watch it, stop raiding friends’ medicine cabinets to supplement my stash, popping them at the slightest sense of isolation.
    It must be past two a.m. Like a mask of latex sealing off the head of a fetishist, the drug encases my brain, and my whole body disintegrates into a low-resolution image. Visions are pulsing, full of that energy that was killed off in New York with the last peep show. Periodically, the glowing silver shovel of Romulus’s face leaps out, as in an old-fashioned photographic instant when the flash powder goes off. Then the image melts away, and the dark bedroom in Syracuse pops back into hard focus.
    I open my eyes, feel the drops of fantasy evaporating from neurons, the bright emulsion fading, and I remember my stubborn, endlessly resilient but finally failing mom lying in the next boxy room. Our doors have been left ajar all night because she’s awoken so many times by her bad heart. With a twinge of guilt, I rise unsteadily and tiptoe into her bedroom to check on her again, a glimpse of the bundled body I’ve known all my life, so still now and surrounded by foreboding; and then I come closer, bend with held breath until my face is nearly touching hers, to be sure she’s still breathing. . . .
    Before we went to bed, we talked about my time in Budapest, which is—it comes to mind—only a few hundred miles from Shedrin, in White Russia, where she was born. I had to shout because her hearing is going. But despite her advanced age of ninety-six, her strong will and sharp intelligence are completely intact. I can picture her so clearly right now, frail but enlivened by the favorite topic of me—leaning forward on the very edge of her seat at the kitchen table so as not to miss a word, scrutinizing me with attentive, worried eyes, asking probing questions and desperately hoping for all the false answers; hoping I’ll materialize by some magic into the prudent, cautious traveler I wasn’t.
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    FASCINATION CAME