Free The Romanian by Bruce Benderson Page A

gravity that protects me. Incredibly, this brings me into good rapport with the clientele. Among the severely deprived, my bizarre sacrificial state is interpreted as genuine confidence, even a type of paternalism.
    Before long, a smooth-skinned, wiry man with reptilian lids is basking under my attention. He’s got a bony, angry body, dry, dirty hands and bulging, meditative eyes. Marius comes back only on those frequent occasions when he wants another drink, for which I flamboyantly hand over more money.
    English is limited between me and the Romanian with bulging eyes, but liberal Latin codes of male bonding allow for starkly sensual innuendoes. As long as body poses follow that impudent etiquette of the confident male, the face, I’ve found, can express many playful messages that we Anglos might interpret as flirtation but that these Latins call solidarity. At one point, I take his hand in mine, supposedly to compare its roughness with my smoothness. It’s an old trick I learned with rough trade—a coded confession of femininity safeguarded by that thrilling message of class superiority: my hand is smooth not just because I’m a fag but also because it hasn’t done any manual labor; it’s the hand of a writer, which I explain by pantomiming the act of typing for him, watching his eyes light up at the novelty of it. Yet for me, sitting broad and sturdy with my knees wide apart, my grasped hand feels as thrilled as a young maiden’s; and on the surface, no one will be the wiser.
    From what I can tell from his quirky utterances and pantomimes, he’s from the city of Cluj, the twenty-three-year-old son of displaced peasants whose village thirty miles to the northwest was razed by Ceauşescu so that they could be moved into Communist high-rise housing and work in a new factory. It was a common-enough occurrence in the last decade of the leader’s rule, an attempt to sever Romania from its rural past and fast-forward the country’s industrialization. But now, with the hundreds of lay-offs in the soon-to-be-privatized factory, the deterioration of the housing project, his forty-three-year-old father’s poorly treated heart condition, there seems to be no reason for anything but dazed wandering, a canine life motivated by following scents, vague leads about work, from one capitalist subsistence subculture to the next.
    It’s hard to judge people like me, I assume he’s thinking. The way I’m dressed looks confusingly awkward, but he’s seen Americans like that. How can somebody with all that money for drinks be wearing such unfashionable, dirty shoes, so broad and dusty? Even so, my face with its clean skin and wide, candid eyes reminds him of something positive. He’s got nothing better to do than sit here and bask in those eyes, pouring out more approval than most eyes he’s looked into for a very long time. Yet what, really, do they want?
    Abruptly I’ve stood and announced that we’re going to the Old Man Club. As we get up to leave, Marius runs after us. He’s very drunk now, playing a bad Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote, trying to pump up his bodyguard role by walking like a soldier, albeit a drunken one.
    The other Romanian isn’t very comfortable in the Old Man Club, opened to Romanians by Romulus a short time ago. The tables are packed, the customers talkative and intense. On the dance floor, there’s everything from Portuguese to African-Americans. Burning with excruciating freedom, or loss, I begin dancing, disintegrating. The pain of separation from Romulus is ecstatic and full of new possibilities, including doom. It doesn’t matter that I outrank most of those on the dance floor in age. I weave through the spaces talking to anyone who interests me, oozing energy and generosity, buying drinks wherever I can. The other Romanian is watching from a distance with a patient poker face. He’s seeing this peculiar dancing