The rat - From 'The Romanian, a Memoir' - Excerpt

Literary Review, Wntr, 2003 by Bruce Benderson

I flailed away from the image and tried to stand, but couldn't unstick myself. Now the dank bedroom featured a nest of undulating hips and slapping thighs, until the train finally pulled into that satanic, rubbery smell of rot that greets you each time you come back to New York and jerked to a stop and my eyes popped open.

Two weeks later, in Budapest, in that very room I'd imagined, his very pungent cock dangled over my face as I sat on the floor between his legs and nipped at the foreskin. His dick smelled strongly of vagina. I'd given him money to get a haircut, and he'd disappeared for six hours with it, hooking up with his pleading girlfriend, I later found out, the one who had been calling the cell phone a few times a day. 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. And I, unknowingly, had been lying in bed waiting and waiting and growing progressively more anguished, more angry, watching CNN, whose images, seen through the haze of codeine tablets I took one after another, somehow faded into this girl I'd imagined: the watery hair, the easily bruisable skin ... And while I shriveled on the sheets before CNN, I no longer identified with her, nor felt I was becoming her in that abject sense I'd felt before, and she became the enemy. He became my impudent betrayer, insolently coaxing the girl into the bathroom as she murmured over and over again, "But why can't I meet your friend from America?" Sliding the latch of the toilet door shut. Covering the gift's neck with kisses so forceful they threatened to leave bruises on it. Taking her watery-colored hair in one hand like a horse's tail and pulling her face against him, lowering it slowly down his chest toward his fly. Lifting her skirt and plunging his strong dry hands deep inside her underwear, gently prying at the lips of her vagina until her moans of arousal were indistinguishable from desperate sobs ...

Using hearsay and fantasy, I've been piecing together his nonprostitutional sex life, which fills me with fear and compulsion Sometimes it occurs to me that I savor each story and add it to my repertoire. His body has become the number of women he seduced, their pubic hair, what their nipples were like, their buttocks, assholes and odors.

When he finally came back, it was getting late. The river and the cable car stop below our window were awash with golden light. On the balcony, the gusts of wind were surprisingly balmy. It was only February, but there was a feeling of an early spring. White shirts under jackets glimmered on the black bridge across the Danube like white blossoms in liquid tar, competing with the red and white flowers in a kiosk across the tracks, which were lit unnaturally by the floods from a hotel facade. The yellow of a building across the river had paled into the fluorescence of whipped butter.

By four in the morning, after we had argued for hours about the girl, he was asleep, and I, despite the codeine, wide-awake. It's true that night seemed to cradle us like black cotton wool, and that the air was lazy with cigarette smoke nudged by gusts of river wind rattling the French windows at the balcony; yet this was not the vibrating black of that room in Syracuse, but something stiller and more ominous. Certainly things were tinged with doom, even if night seemed also to make a false promise of permanence. His leg on mine felt light as a wing. But when he moved away just an inch, it was like watching his body through the wrong end of a telescope. Bundled in his individual comforter his body grew tiny, frail and still. The vulgarity of our twin states of desperation reappeared, and temporary security dissolved into the darkness.