CHAPTER THREE
My life, until the drama which brought it to a blast, had not been uneventful. Some would call it extreme. A superbly extreme life, for which little credit is attributed to me. Allow me to summarise.
My name is Patricia Lăzărescu and I am first child of a formidable peasant and a destitute aristocrat. My father came from new money. My mother hailed from old ruin. My mother became an extravagant housewife. My father is a very important man. But long before all this, they left for America during that capitalist craze in the nineties, in search of a big house and a nice car, or what all ex-communists dubbed “a better life.”
As for me, I was deserted on my grandparents’ farm. It was a big old farm in an ancient little village at the heart of Transylvania. Most girls have a dollhouse as their early occupation. I had a barn, with its talking lambs and sparkling ponies. I grew up lonely, sequestered, but very happy, in a fresh world of milk buckets, and haystack, hoofbeats, and the smell of manure on freshly turned soil. This heaven of mine glowed with an unearthly dust that slowed its motion in the sunlight. And when it rained over the wild lavender, the fields glimmered in a bluish mist. I still dream of the farm, and though I never found it again, I have kept some feeling of it with me. When I turned five, I left my rustic paradise and flew to New York to be with my parents. At the airport, my mother was wearing a brown dress with white polka dots and white stockings. My father was wearing belted kakis and man sandals. They were crying aggressively. They meant nothing yet to me, and I was petrified by their their unfamiliar affections; but on the way home, when my mother took me on her lap and I gazed upon the sheer white veiny softness of her cleavage, it caused me so much ecstasy that my eyes swelled up and I embraced her.
Now, a few words on my parents, the bare minimum that is relevant. My father is an unusually clever man, the result of a bizarre gift at birth as opposed to an education. He comes from from four generations of milkmen who could not read or write but were somehow shrewd enough to penny-pinch their way to fortune. His father herded cattle. His grandfather herded cattle. His great-grandfather slept with cattle. My father read Western literature, married the great-great granddaughter of eccentric occultists, and became a multimillionaire. As for my mother, she is of Russian descent. She comes from a rotting world of royal diaries and various mysteries, eye-poppingly beautiful, with a penchant for pomp and the temper of a Bulgakov devil. The story on her side is that her mother came over from Moscow to Kishinev, then from Kishinev to Bucharest, thus marking the final stop of a great aristocratic lineage. Apparently, love can make for an irreversible disaster. In my grandmother’s case, the disaster was Romania. She arrived in 1969, after an affair with a married Russian diplomat who was, allegedly, my grandfather. More on that later.
The shock of New York after my habitual heaven on the farm was something that disturbed me. I learned the feeling of fracture. I learned the violence of time. There was no time on the farm. There was night and day, and light and dark, and everything was lambent and eternal. Conversely, the years that followed are vague. Eventually, I conformed, and my biblical babyhood transitioned –little by little– in a public school, then a piano, then a preposterous pink tutu. I was always complaining. I found a few friends, not many. Unlike my early memories, a feeling of matteness radiates from this time. Flashes of film flicker before me like a long child-abduction movie – firehose sprinklers in the spring, playgrounds carpeted in mulch, brown rowhouses, pudgy kids and ice cream trucks, and a shabby bully named Gary who was too fat to live. Sometimes I wished I was abducted. No purity or magic could've survived New York. A saint could've suffered a lifetime to be sanctified, then came to Ridgewood only to be spoiled. I loathed every bit of it.
Still, I was top of my class in school. And since my mother had left her job to oversee my "education", at home, my scholarship continued. My immaculate angel mother, who taught me to walk, and sit, and talk, who read to me Persephone and the Pomegranate, The Adventures of Perseus, and Helen of Troy. She exasperated me, but I adored her. On weekends, she showed me off to her friends at garden parties, where they cooed and aah-ed like at a diamond necklace clasped around her neck. Then we ate cake, and they spoke about their husbands. This soft domestic evening world I liked better than the metallurgical dystopia outside.
As for my father, apart from a few Sundays and Christmas mornings, I hardly ever saw him. We lived a comfortable middle-class life, with my mother smiling often, hair done often, Stepford wife, shop-cook-look-good type. But the truth is he worked like a dog. Some days –Fridays especially, when the city was the busiest– he wouldn't come home until midnight, and I’d find him in the morning asleep in an armchair, his face black and greasy, his hair flat in cowlicks, smelling like a stew of onions and sweat.
He was a hotdog vender. A famous one, no less. "The Biggest Wiener in Manhattan" had done it for him. This genius money-making motto that fished in corporate lawyers, and venture capitalists, investment bankers, tycoons even! Lots of Richards and Simons and Hunters –silver silk ties and gelled-up side-parts– who spoke of "bonds" and "stocks" as of their blonde-headed children at home. Who spoke, in fact, less of their children than of IPOs and emerging markets, and for whom a "liquid lunch" had not to do with a martini, but with billion-dollar settlements over power tables at Michael's. The usual topic was business, between mustard pumps and coffee trickling in Anthora cups: "You're milking this town, man! Wha'd you make last night? Three grand? Five? You and your big wiener...You know what Adam? I think you're gonna do well for yourself. You got something here..." But however trivial these interactions, they were vital to his rise. Because there, in that cramped up, fatty sauerkraut-smelling space, my father saw into the sunlit uplands of wealth –Brioni suits, and handmade John Lobbs, glowing skin, dazzling veneers, flat bellies under a cashmere coat, and vermillion silk ties by Charvet.
His participation in my life was mainly materialistic –he’d shower me with bikes, and legos, and Lara Croft video games– though occasionally he dipped into paternal duties too, asking absently about my studies, advising me on bullies, and indulging me with ice cream at my dear café, Mars 2112. There he’d sit with a Soprano solemnity as I waited for my Cookie Monster Delight – his oversized brown jacket open, clutching his Coke, and eyeing me tentatively. He was a five-foot-seven lieutenant of a man –lean, olive, and coal-haired– and his silent stare would send me into a fit of bashful fidgetness. When he did speak, he’d tell me about the laws of the street and his childhood, peddling stolen plums and bootleg Turkish jeans. Then we’d discuss Sun Tzu and The Forty Eight Laws of Power, but don’t tell your mother about this, ok, you know how she’s got you all wrapped up in bubblegum, but life is tough out there, you gotta be prepared sweetheart, you gotta be prepared…
As his earnings grew, however, we saw each other even less, until save for a hello, ok, good-bye, he'd cut all ties with me and my mother. He didn’t eat dinner with us or talk to me much, and when he wasn’t quizzing me on Disraeli, Machiavelli, and war strategies, he was often found asleep on his desk, below a dirty lightbulb in the boiler. It was a creepy little room, like a bomb shelter or a nest of criminal planification. Low ceiling with a focused light, brassy pipes, and cave-like walls wrapped in quotes and yellow post-its. There was a sacred urgency about it all. He was devoted to becoming rich. Not as a materialistic pursuit, but as a spiritual one. Therefore, neither my mother nor I were overly surprised when he came home one evening with a headlamp, forceps, and a scalpel in the hand.
The following morning, I learned he’d forged a million dollars. It was a single bill and so immaculately he had faked it (pasting perfectly-cut zeros from a cash stack on a single) that the forgery was nearly impossible to tell. Then he glued the forgery to the ceiling. It was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes, and the last thing before he closed them. In time, concern became pity and soon my mother thought he’d lost his mind, treating him with patronising sympathy and nodding absent-mindedly at his rants. Two years later, by a lucky game of chance and the successful expansion of a liquor store, he became a millionaire.
Not long after they had bought a nice big house and a slick red car, and my mother had a bigger closet manufactured. Then they added –to my horror– two more babies to the family. After all, the American Dream had been achieved. But since they were deprived of real challenge, I think they needed a new dream. I think they needed a nightmare. So, after ten long, tireless years, in 2005 we returned to the homeland. And there I started missing New York.
No more the pastoral paradise I knew, I discovered a grizzly wasteland. And instead of a green plain with a blue sky, this world rose silently in heaps of ash and blinking retro neons. I’d seen it before in my history textbooks, when we’d studied Russia in the 1940s. A sense of populous oblivion: ruined trams, ruined buses, ruined people rushing home in a snowstorm. Their faces were always buried in wool. No eyes to be seen, no happy smiles ever. Just the noiseless city flattened by the mighty skies. Just the winds that blew into the boulevards a vile, Siberian breath. There was an eerie feeling of emptiness, as if walking through some deserted world, evacuated by those who could afford the journey. Everywhere you looked: a panel block, a flower stall, an ancient mini-market. Chunks of gray with tiny, matching windows –portals to their copy-pasted home life. All had the same antennas, and white needlework, and strings of dirty rags sloppy on the balcony. And sometimes, in the night, a fluorescent face would materialise inside a window – palm pressed on the glass, shrouded in a breathy mist. It just stood there, hepatic and sombre. It was bathed in a greenish, late-night television glow.
I suffered my first depression. I was thirteen; a skeletal, black-haired girl, skin so pale it was almost transparent, with a penchant for hand gestures and phrases like “let me tell you what I mean”. It wasn’t long before I understood that Gary, the bully, was a nice little girl compared to the Eastern-European punk. Children here had no pianos and no pink tutus. Instead, they’d grown up with a belt and semolina porridge, and (if they were lucky) a summer in Bulgaria.
"Major depressive disorder", the psychiatrist had said, "due to environmental change and social isolation, leading to significant brain chemistry imbalance". But since my fifteen-year-old brain was swimming in enough anti-depressants to put a snail to shame, I emerged from that time with a blissful forgetfulness. Whatever I do remember feels like a heavy dream; snapped threads with no time-sequence that vanish in a breeze just as I’m about to catch them. Mostly, there’s a white salon. And a bouncy ginger girl, Maria. Perfectly normal, until a knife carved out her stomach from inside. She was a schizophrenic. My friend was what she was, far wiser and kinder than the losers in high school who mocked my problematic cheerlessness. During our monthly hospitalisations – three days of various check-ups, cocktails, and sessions with psychiatrists – we’d laugh up a storm in the gardens. Embraced by the clinical purity of it all, we felt beautifully released from our own bearing. Our drugged-up brains were attuned to those of 19th century poets. Happy budding intellects debating love, Virginia Woolfe, and the genius of Green Day. She wanted to be an English teacher when she grew up. I wanted to raid tombs. My depression became unbearable after she died, and if it weren’t for some European literature and an internal world of my invention, I think I would have died too.
My parents approached my predicament with respective sensibilities.
My mother lamented, prayed, and shed glossy tears over lattice-crusted pies. My father became richer. He was not yet any tax evader with a Lionheart in Portofino, but the future looked immensely promising. The fact is that it was very easy to be rich in Romania of 2008. All you needed was a well-pressed Zegna suit, a shiny pair of Ferragamos, a Rolex, and the latest BMW. And just like that, the world was at your feet. They called my father "The American". They might as well have called him King. First, he went into construction. Then he dabbled a bit in politics, and soon became a freemason. It was two hundred lei to become a freemason, which meant about forty euros, and he had much more to spare. My mother, being a religious woman, locked him out of the house that night, screaming that he’d brought the Devil in her home. For all one knows, perhaps he did. Because in two years his company had scored some lucky contracts and he'd built two residential projects. Then in another two he'd built a few hotels. Then it was mostly him building. At his peak, he started funding politicians. I think he had outgrown, as his slicked-back undercut became grizzled and then grey, the amateur pursuit of money. He held himself like a military man and his minions called him "General". He cultivated the cool mannerisms of a tyrant, speaking in crumbs and many “hmms”. There were secret dinner parties and he stopped driving his sports car for a Jaguar with a driver. And because at the time, Romania was in burgeoning development, he was making so much profits, the cash seemed to flower like an Austrian prairie.
Life was good.
We moved into a house so big, my mother needed a five-staff team to run it. I was numb for much of it but the plush cuddle of wealth was congenial. A velvety place that sunk all troubles, if only for a moment, in a napkin-wrapped seltzer. I took morning swims in the pool, then a fluffy robe and a hot espresso on the terrace. Mother read Architectural Digest and nurtured a small obsession for Lalique vases. I read Wuthering Heights, pondered the Hollywood glamour of a well-staged suicide, then on to the hell of halfwits in highschool. In the evenings, we sometimes held dinners in the garden: a vast expanse of manicured shrubs, Wisteria, and Indian Lilac that stretched down to a dazzling black water. Lavender cake. Cream puffs. Compliments and malapropisms. Swarms of people came and went, sucking up to Mother like she was Messalina. The truth is that the woman had a killer sense of style, that money oh-so-softly lit up in her glazed cheek and white cashmere, so that to look at her was to see a snow leopard on prowl. In contrast, most of her friends were movable cake shops –gold rings and black furs, loud laughs and plump thighs– wrecks between a poor soul and a rich pocket, since I’m sure they couldn’t tell a Schweppes from a French 75. Sometimes I’d engage in conversation with a young baba whose breath was rectal, but she had a Gucci purse. Knowing well someday I’d make a character of her, this caused me some pleasure. Then voices asked about my studies. Lips moving silently. Billy Idol’s Eyes Without A Face playing somewhere in the distance. And the whispery glamour of it all –crab cakes and heritage silver, croquembouche and Tiffany china, even my mother’s red-lipped diamond of a smile– all of it was blunted to a gold, glittering tremor by my sneaky, secret death.
I recovered from my depression sometime after high school.
It was 2010 and by then I’d made a glamorous return. It’s true that I had also blossomed so to speak. But it was really my disorder that changed me, since where my little death had spread was now a stillness so magnetic it seemed to pulse a halo from within. Like a movie star out of a Küssnacht sanatorium, people turned their heads to look at me. I wore a lot of shiny black and cut my hair like Mia Farrow. I had a calfskin, floor-length Valentino coat. And so cool, and dark, and vague was I, with my minky slickness, Tom Ford shades, glossy chocolate boots and all, that I felt at times like a walking Goya painting.
I led a double life. At school, I argued about Wittgenstein and "What is nothingness?". At home, my life was luxuriant romantic ecstasy. And though I truly felt the agonies that prescribed me to Philosophy, most of all, I simply wanted to be different. Not just beautiful and rich, with a powerful daddy. But wise, and deep, and educated too. And because at home I was besieged by blue delphiniums and apple blossoms, vintage Vogue, and Nora shouting: "Would you like me to poach it at four minutes, dear, for that creamy edge around the yolk?!", sometimes, reading Sartre, I would close the drapes and light a candle.
I had few friends by choice. Not much of a social life. And apart from a few parties, charity outings, and Ayurveda with my mother, mostly I was on my own. I thought myself too smart to fit in with the rich crowd. I was definitely too rich to fit in with the smart crowd. Most of all, I was too young to know that all misfits were sentimental cynics, who were given all the options and failed in being anything at all.
My company I found in fiction. I read, painted, speculated. Drove my ice-blue 911 with Duran Duran on blast. I had endless tolerance for fine repetitive things. Silver bowls with green grapes, white tea in Ming porcelain, the lush embrace of Turkish cotton, steam saunas, and hot saunas, and usually Dostoyevsky to bed. I kept busy with various creative projects and interior design redecorations. To hold a job and slog through traffic struck me simply as ungraceful. This blissful universe of mine was beautifully supported by my parents. Until of course, it was not.
The day I left Romania, it spilled in sheets out of the sky like tears of a disappointed parent. But I was exuberant. A bird leaving the cage. My lullaby life was unfortunately prone to boredom, so much that my father’s abduction came as a welcomed ripple in the pond. I knew not what I was doing, but I knew what I was looking for. A new chapter, a new challenge, new faces and chances anew. And though I soon regretted it, the need for some unconquered land where things happened and life put up a fight, burned so deep within, that even on the way to the airport as we passed a towering sign that read "Don’t go!", I thought it was a music advertisement.