Naturally, there was the occasional erotic encounter; the girl in the wheelchair ought to know this too. A waitress in a restaurant where I sometimes ate my modest dinner would not be taken in by my superior airs; she dragged me up to her room. I owed a proud night to her experience, but there was no repeat. She might do for a casual adventure, but an out-and-out relationship with a waitress was, I felt, beneath my dignity — by which I meant, to my disgrace, my social dignity. There was a pretty salesgirl in a boutique in Cotroceni, a remote area where a residential district had grown around the palace of the Queen Mother Maria. I knew this salesgirl had a crush on me, and accordingly I treated her badly. One day, I asked her out to the movies, then to supper. She refused to come to my room; she was scared of God knows what, perhaps only of getting home late. So we finally did it on the park bench where we had been necking and squeezing each other for hours. The discomfort and constant fear of being discovered by a park watchman or late stroller made it so horrible that when I saw her again, on the occasion of a decoration change from Velvet soapflakes to mint toothpaste in the windows of the boutique she worked in, I acted as if nothing had ever gone on between us.
For a couple of weeks, I was even in love, or at least fascinated — the focus of my attention being the extraordinary horsewomanship of the daughter of a trainer who now and again let me ride one of his horses. She was an impish creature with a pug face and tow-blond, curly hair; but to see what she did with a horse when she mounted it gave me such sensual pleasure that it turned into desire. She would have come to my room without further ado and would probably have soon installed herself there: a convenient long-term affair. But I carefully kept my early-morning role as a gentleman rider separate from my daytime role as a window decorator for the Aphrodite Company, and I revealed nothing of the circumstances under which I changed costumes from one role to the other to either my work colleagues or my riding colleagues. Even if I had been willing by some chance to let someone in the cosmetics world know where and how I lived, I refused to allow anyone in the riding world to find out anything about what I did for a living. Thus, she and I got together on bales of straw in the fodder room; the pungent odor of the girl’s body, especially her very wet vagina, prevailed so victoriously against the mare and cat urine that I felt almost sick. It was because of her that I consulted Dr. Maurer again, this time to get a prescription for potency pills, because, for a while, I was incapable of any repetition. Instead of potency pills, Dr. Maurer repeated his prescription for a tranquilizer. When I called upon the sharp-glanded horsewoman once again, I found I had long since been replaced by an English jockey.
Meanwhile, my imagination blazed away. If just once I could call one of them my own — one of those long-legged, high-bosomed creatures with curls tumbling luxuriously on their shoulders, the kind of woman that Mr. Garabetian’s son drove around in his Chrysler! If just once I could sway with one of them, nestling body to body in a dancing-bar to the rhythms of nostalgic blues, feel her breasts, her lap pressed snugly against my thighs, my lips in her hair. When the bittersweet voices of the saxophones had died out, I would wander with her somnambulistically into the starry night, hand in hand, lead her to my bed, strip her clothes off piece by piece while she threw her head back, cover her bare body with my kisses while she moaned, unite with her tenderly yet mightily, almost drunkenly ….
I did not envy young Mr. Garabetian for his beauties. I merely took them as the basis of departure for my dreams, although, of course, I realized what kind of shady tarts and floozies they were. The imagination is flexible, as we know; my fantasy beloved, as I saw her, was physically as exciting as those others, and also much sweeter, softer, finer, better bred — less vulgar, to be blunt. She was a lady from head to toe, and she had a wonderful soul. Needless to say, she was an excellent horsewoman and she loved country life — horses, sheep, dogs. In a word, she was perfect. All too frequently, her image inserted itself between me and the real women, who could not hold a candle to her but who were willing to make at least the erotic part of my wishful thinking come true.
She, of course, the girl in the wheelchair, fitted my ideal image almost perfectly, even though there would probably be a hitch in regard to country life. She could have as many dogs and sheep as she liked, but there would probably be no question of her riding. The rest was exactly what I wished for, especially her breasts: I thought of them with inexhaustible delight; I pictured them vividly in my mind. Nor was there any doubt as to the depth of her soul; her gaze had revealed it to me fully. I wanted her to know that I treasured this soul of hers far more than the charms of her body, which, maimed in the lower extremities, was probably all the more manageable above the waist.
Despite my fiery thoughts about sensory joys, I cared more about her mind, her empathy, her education, her good breeding, her ladylike qualities — everything I awaited from a lifetime partner. That was what I desired more than anything: to have someone I could love constantly, all my life. That was what had spirited the hard-on when I saw her: the delight, the divine joy of encountering a human being whom I could love all my life because her soul was congenial with mine and her rank equal to mine.
And that was why I had to tell her about my true fall from grace, about how I had betrayed her by giving my heart away. Betrayed not only her, but my ability to love, betrayed them shamefully below my dignity: with a widow, an aging widow, and a Jewess, to boot. Whether I could ever regain the purity of my feeling, and thereby of my dignity, depended on her forgiveness.
It was not all that long before, a few weeks at the most. My itinerary included the cosmetics stores of Văcăreşti, Bucharest’s Jewish quarter. A nearby district was called Crucea de Piatră—the Stone Cross. The one-story petit bourgeois houses, with gabled ends facing the street and narrow longitudinal courtyards in between, were all brothels. These courtyards teemed with girls; they swarmed through the streets in an eternal, plundering Mardi Gras, which — odd as it may sound — fitted in with one of the mood elements of my childhood. For this carnival made something obvious: the fundamental erotics in Surrealism, whose origin, I thought, could be traced back to some fanciful artists of the Jugendstil. There were mouths with black lipstick, and green eyelids under powdered rococo periwigs, such as I knew from illustrations in some of my mother’s books; thin, supple riding crops and fans, corsets and tutus; one girl had a toreador jacket on and was naked underneath down to her pirate boots; another wore wide Turkish pantaloons of transparent muslin with her bushy pubic hair sticking through; another had enormous breasts dangling naked out of a tangle of necklaces that constricted her body like shackles — Beardsley characters. Still another was entwined in a black feather boa like a serpent; her skinny naked body, which stilted along on towering high heels through the throng of musketeers, veil dancers, sailors, dragonflies, looked as if it had been drawn by Beyros. Sphinxes lay in the windows, corseted trunks like that of the “trunk lady” in sideshows, putto heads with gigantic ostrich plumes, flowing Mary Magdalene hair, fiery red wigs around pre-Raphaelitic angel faces, rachitic adolescents, matrons, crones, fatties ….