Though Connie had been living in Budapest for two years now, she had not been to all the baths. She alternated between three that were her favorites—an art nouveau spa on a rocky hill in Buda, a Turkish one on the side where she lived, in Pest, and one in between, on the Danube, on an island that also housed a Japanese garden and petting zoo. The Japanese garden was not the most accurate or charming emulation she had seen; even the one in Los Angeles, where she was from, was far superior. This was not surprising. Paying homage to other cultures was not one of Hungary’s strong suits. The country had wonderful sausage—with crispy skin and a spicy interior—nothing like the disgusting mush that Germany was so famous for. Goulash was okay, too. But even the country’s shining citadel—Budapest—did not quite achieve the cosmopolitan air of New York or Rome.
To begin with, there were no other people but Hungarians. And Hungarians came in one flavor, it seemed. Pale, dark-haired, and the men were either short and stocky or tall and brooding. Both kinds had a flair for anger. The women were strong, in both psyche and physique. Or so it seemed to Connie. When she first arrived, she emailed everyone about how safe she felt. And then she realized it was because there was no visible sub culture, no minorities, no homeless people. No black people, no Chinese tourists, no gays. And then she was ashamed about feeling safe, and she learned something about herself. She stopped telling people how safe she felt, and told them about the lack of diversity.
Everyone on the street was a Hungarian—a heterosexual, upstanding, strong-seeming, distinctly Hungarian-looking Hungarian. Though Connie was merely a different kind of white, she felt like she stuck out like a piece of plastic in a coral reef. Not that plastic was so rare, but rather, it elicited a desire, upon seeing it, to pluck it out. She couldn’t quite say why she had stayed so long. The superb public transportation system was the closest she could get to the truth.
Or, if she really pressed herself, while drifting off to sleep, she could admit that she liked how there were only Hungarians in Hungary. (As uncomfortable as that made her, and though she wouldn’t admit it in waking life). She liked being somewhere she didn’t belong; where she was an outsider and special for it; where Hungarian was the only language all around her and impossible to learn. It made her feel impossibly real, and impossibly alert, like she was in another world. It was the opposite of how she felt in Los Angeles, like she was drifting along from billboard to billboard.
Everything counted more in Hungary. She had slept with seven men. (She did not count an eighth, who had fallen asleep on the stairs of her apartment building after initiating third base on her). The boys were all very Hungarian: gruff and shy, inexplicably rude at times, and suddenly tender right after sex, except for one, who tried to act like she was a prostitute. (He tried to leave her fifteen forints, or around sixty dollars; she used it buy a dress). All eight paid for everything leading up to sex: drinks, coffee, dinner, and even transportation, as no one believed she also had an unlimited monthly card. All eight were enchanted by the Hungarian she knew and quizzed her on it: jó napot/ jó reggelt / jó estét/ köszönöm/ nem beszélek magyarul/ and hogy vagy? All of this could be summed up in Good day! How are you? I don’t speak Hungarian, thank you. It impressed all of them.
The men were different from the ones in LA. There was something different in the blood. LA had the LA riots and they had all seen the videos. But in Hungary there had been Nazis and the Holocaust and they were the Nazis. Somehow, it lingered in Hungary in a way it didn’t in Germany. Germany was more liberal, of course, and it couldn’t be too nationalistic, not anymore. But it didn’t shake down to just politics. There was something about the men she slept with that reminded her of darkness and violence. It made the sex very good. It was the opposite of sex in LA, which often lacked all urgency, and in which both parties were constantly worried about the angles and how their bodies and faces looked. In Hungary, she was reminded that she was an animal.
And to the men, she supposed, she would remain the American girl who was easy to bed. When she liked a boy, she had sex with him whether he tried very hard to or not. She also sensed that Hungarian girls were difficult to bed. When she saw young women on the street, even in their mid-twenties, she knew she was looking into the faces of virgins.
No boy stayed until the morning. Most expressed gratitude, but all expressed disgust. Maybe it was because she was American. Maybe it was because she had been too easy, or Hungarian girls weren’t. Connie decided that Hungarian men could not, or didn’t see the reason to, mask their faces from the brute truth. Sex is disgusting, and that’s what makes it sexy. This was the thought that lingered as she lay on her mattress on the floor and smoked a cigarette, watching a naked man doze in his postcoital sweat. Now that he was peeled from her body, in that distance of a few feet, she saw how revolting he was—this foreign, dying vessel of shit and disease.
Her last encounter had been especially beastly. The man, he must have been thirty-seven or so, kept asking her to fart on his face. She couldn’t, and wouldn’t satisfy this request, much to his disappointment. He perfunctorily went through the motions, farted loudly himself during orgasm, and went home. Connie emailed her best friend about it, mentioning James Joyce’s letters to his wife, Nora, and farts, and shit, and the rest of it, and she ended with the conclusion that she thought it was ‘realer’ than sex in LA, which was like sex in the movies. Sex and defecation come in and out of the same holes, she wrote, and the closer you get to the disgusting side of it, the sexier you are, not like the girls on TV with their bleached hair and bleached anuses.
Connie, reclining in a room that reminded her of sanitoriums in Edith Wharton’s time, was pretending that she had indeed journeyed back in time, and was in Switzerland for her health in accordance with her doctor’s orders. Orderlies in white flitted in and out of massage rooms and perfected her fantasy. She was at her favorite bath, the one on the hill, and a few hours in. This bath was huge with many wings and looked more like a palace, with its green and blue walls and water spurting from ornate animal mouths. She had wandered from one string of baths to another, glancing up at the stained-glass atriums, and sometimes dipping one foot into the water. She couldn’t say why she was feeling drained. A few chairs over, a boy was lying on his side, reading the newspaper and looking up at her every so often. She had talked to him in one of the tubs. She knew if she let her robe fall from her shoulders, that he would watch her, and that if she smiled at him before getting up to leave, that he would follow her through a labyrinth of sultry rooms to whatever corner she found.
This Hungarian boy looked like a typical specimen, dark-haired and moody around his eyes and stubborn around his mouth, like a Parisian left as a child in the woods, like a Russian grown in the shadow of a castle. She got up from her seat and went out to the terrace, listening for his steps. He was following her. She lit a cigarette and shivered in the blast of cold air. She had not yet decided if she would sleep with him. He was sitting on a lawn chair behind her; she was leaning over a balcony, looking down over another terrace of lawn chairs and hot spring fountains. She imagined him coming up behind her and taking her, making her cigarette ash. She imagined leaning over with her face to the cold stone. She began to swirl below her stomach and then she was wet.
The only other person on their terrace was a grandmother who was smoking, too. Connie put out her cigarette and sat in the lawn chair right next to the boy, though all the other chairs were vacant. This was her invitation. But the boy got up and went over to the old lady. He put his arm around her and kissed her neck, and the side of her face. He was gripping her frizzy hair.
Connie watched the cigarette fall from the woman’s fingers as the boy dipped her head back and kissed her long and hard on the mouth. He sucked her whole mouth up into his, making her mouth pucker like an anus. Connie watched, transfixed.
She felt strangely sad, watching them. ‘I’ll never get married,’ she thought randomly. She left them on the terrace and went to get dressed. She avoided the sight of naked women around her in the locker room, but the sounds of bare flesh slapping echoed in her ears, and the trickling of water trickled into her soul. She felt that she was on a brink, that one wrong step and she would fall into an abyss, that she would lose her mind. She couldn’t say why, but it had to do with the bath, and the smell of sulfur, and salt, and moldy towels, and women’s bodies. ‘Calm down,’ she thought. ‘You love the baths in Hungary,’ she told herself.
But as she was pulling on her shirt, a wet towel whipped across her back.
She turned and saw the grandmother—the kissing grandmother—with a livid face, her mouth twisting. And then the sounds of angry Hungarian reached her ears. The old woman raised her wet towel above her head and began to whip Connie, side to side.
She couldn’t move. She stood there and took it. Her mouth hung open and she couldn’t produce a single sound. The old woman, mollified by her lack of response, softened her blows. She spit at Connie’s feet. Finally, now merely mumbling, she turned and walked away. Connie watched her go down the row of lockers, and turn towards the showers. An attendant appeared at her side and asked gently, in English, what had happened. Connie smiled and shook her head. The only thing that came to her to say was “nagyon jó,” which she repeated idiotically. It meant, “very good,” and it was what she said to waiters when asked about her food.
She smiled softly her whole walk to the streetcar. She had been close to the brink before the grandmother touched her.