The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Fall was upon me, a new semester was in full swing, and I was now auditing a secret art class, which was run by the tyrannically and openly philandering Professor Grayhart. Though Grayhart—an attractive old letch, if you don’t mind sagging skin and a smoker’s rasp—became obsessed with trying to recruit me to model in the nude (after class, that is), I adored him for all the right reasons: his incisive critiques of my disproportionate figures and his insistence that painting can be a career, a concept so taboo in my family that you might as well major in cannibalism.

  Finally, there was the microscopic fact that despite my heavy commitment to Alex, I was now eyeing other men. Let me broadly define “eyeing”: flipping one’s hair in a come-hither fashion; staring lustily while pretending not to stare; mouthing pleasantries like “Oh you didn’t have to, but thank you for that blueberry muffin,” or “I guess a cup of Starbucks coffee never hurt anyone,” or that well-known death to all fidelity: “Hah, hah, hah, that’s so funny!” When these small infractions started happening, I attributed them to general youthful malaise and restlessness—my joie de vivre, my last cough against society’s deification of monogamy. Once Alex and I were married, I reassured myself, these strange virulent longings would subside, these flirtations would level off into a kind of humdrum marital nod to past transgressions, and I would be an exemplary wife. As I nestled in his arms, discussing our favorite English translation of Anna Karenina, I’d swear that I would never stray again, that upon smelling another man, I’d handcuff myself to the nearest pole and imagine that I was Odysseus on the open sea being seduced by the Sirens. But a few weeks later, while perusing my beloved feminist theorists at Barnes & Noble, I found myself etching my phone number into some guy’s palm. While attending a lecture on Simone de Beauvoir’s tortured affair with Sartre, I found myself discussing the quest for a perfect feminist orgasm with a continental philosopher in a dusty hallway corner (a kind of virtual simulation of sex, if you ask me). I consoled myself with only one recurring thought—thank God for my Silver and Bronze Rules, respectively: (1) Official Dates Are Not To Be Tolerated Under Any Pretenses; (2) No Slippery Foreign Tongue Inside Mouth, No Foreign Fingers Upon Breasts, No Foreign Penis Entity In Vagina; in a word, NO SEX, NO SEX, NO SEX Under Any Circumstances (not even in an overheated discotheque with writhing bodies swaying to that fatally sexual song, “Like A Virgin!”). Thus my guilt remained at tolerable levels, that is, my allergies were kept at bay, except for a few barely noteworthy incidents where my eyes began to itch uncontrollably, my throat stung, my esophagus convulsed, and my mucus flowed so generously from my nose that I had to tell people I had the flu. I called Mom and Grandma with the sincerest hope that they could cure me.

  “Mamochka, Babulya, dorogiye moyi,” I murmured in my sweetest Russian voice, “I’ve been thinking—I mean Alex is great, really great, but what if I’m not ready—I mean would it make sense to date around a bit more, take a little tiny mini-break from Alex, and then, then go back to him later?”

  “Are you speaking in Mongolian?” Grandmother cried.

  “What do you mean ‘go back to Alex’—go back from what? What’s going on?” my mom, with her KGB-trained brain, asked.

  “All these men ask me out—what I mean is that just the other day a nice Jewish boy wanted to take me to a movie—” (He was a graduate student in film studies and although he had no biological affiliation to Jews, he had a splendid knowledge of Holocaust movies.)

  “You mean like that ‘nice Jewish boy’ you dated in college who told you he was adopted but whose parents turned out to be Efiscofallicaans and his last name turned out to be McNuel?”

  “I’ve barely dated,” I said, trying a different tack. “I’ve always been engaged.”

  “And whose fault was that?" Grandmother yelled. “The point of life is to marry, not date senselessly and idiotically! Listen to me, Alex is the best thing that ever happened to you. Look at your history, whenever you’ve chosen for yourself it’s been a disaster! Like that mudila who believed in Communist fairy tales, or that imbecilic ginecolog who chewed with his mouth open and didn’t say a word to me.”

  “That’s because you don’t speak a word of English, babushka!” I shot back.

  “An educated brute is what he was—didn’t even look me in the eye. Oh, why argue over your silly history—these were mistakes you made in your past, and now you’re a success. Now you’re doing smart things in your career, practical things with a future on the horizon, not like that Feeeeminist drivel you almost majored in—”

  “Feminist, feminist,” I cried, “that was my minor—I minored in feminist studies.”

  “Or, God forbid, Art!” my mother added with a laugh. “Grandmother would never sleep again and therefore, neither would we!”

  “Most importantly, you’re now with Alexei,” Grandmother assured me in a conciliatory voice. “Can you think of any other Russian Jew who doesn’t make any grammatical mistakes in Russian and doesn’t stick English into every godforsaken sentence?”

  “And yet he’s so wonderfully Americanized, just like you,” my mother effused.

  “And he’s so handsome,” Grandmother muttered breathlessly.

  “He’s practically Tom Cruise with a Jewish brain,” my mother said.

  “Better looking than Tom Cruise,” Grandmother effused, “Apollon! And a genius in quantum physics.”

  “He’s interviewing at banks, Babushka, he’s going into business—”

  “Details,” she shot back. “You should wear that mauve velvet dress your mother bought you at Marshall Field’s—it brings out your eyes—when he comes next weekend.”

  “Lenochka, we don’t want to push you or make this important decision for you”—my mother was embracing her infamous manipulation strategy—“but you’ve always been blind when it comes to men, and now once again you don’t see what is so patently clear to everyone else—that the right person for you, for you, my love, is Alex.”

  “I know, I know, I’m sure you’re right; all I’m saying is that it’s hard to have a long-distance relationship. There are all these temptations.”

  “Ah, well that’s a different topic. Your mother and I are experts in this field,” Grandmother boasted. “When a woman is beautiful it’s hard to say ‘no’ to men; beauty as you well know is a disease. The only answer is the law of repulsion. Eat four cloves of garlic a day and you’ll stink so bad no man will want to touch you—you’ll even stink down there—”

  “Garlic is wonderful,” my mother burst out. “Did you know, Lenochka, that in Russia we used to stuff garlic up our assholes to get rid of parasites? But I’ve never heard of this nonsense—which aunt told you this ancient fairytale, maman?”

  “Nonsense? Well this nonsense has kept numerous marriages together, plus warded off colds!”

  “Thank you, Grandma, thank you, you’re brilliant—I’ll do that—I’ll do exactly that!” I muttered happily and hung up.

  That very weekend I purchased several wreaths of garlic and stuffed salted cloves into black bread. With my eyes watering and my tongue drawing fire, I devoured it like I did as a child in wintertime, like my grandmother did to survive the freezing winter and the Nazis of the war.

  Meet Tom Cruise with a Jewish Brain

  Let me backtrack for you, patient reader. About a year ago, Grandmother stepped up the perennial marriage nudge as my single status was giving her “kolbasa-heartburn” and “Stalinist insomnia.” After two disastrous engagements that Grandmother strove to zap from the start, after months of dogged resistance and lackluster flings, I caved under Grandmother’s nagathon. After all, she was Queen Guildenshtein, the reigning force behind most of the actions and inactions of my mother, father, sister Bella, and me, and her insistence that I needed a serious boyfriend (as opposed to the unserious ones who were neither fully Jewish nor mathematically inclined) was akin to a royal command. Alex Bagen (or, more precisely, Alexei Ifimovich Bagdanovich) was the fourth man Grandma sent to New York to mar
ry me. After several unsuccessful matches—one was a bald-headed pharmacist, the second a tall engineer without social skills, and the third a computer genius suffering from an overproduction of saliva (he slobbered on my foot in preparation for a kiss)—Grandmother stumbled upon Mrs. Bagdanovich at the Three Sisters Delicatessen on Devon Avenue, a hobnob for nostalgic Russian immigrants. It was she—Alex’s discerning mother—who saw me dancing with Bella in Moscow Nights (a Russian discotheque that also poses as a restaurant) and approached Grandmother about a possible merger. Mrs. Bagdanovich wanted me specifically, because she thought Bella was too “Russian looking” for her Americanized Alex. Bella’s beauty evoked Botticelli’s Venus, with her voluptuous figure, flowing blonde hair, and serene blue eyes, and Mrs. Bagdanovich was in search of something a little less intimidating and more modern for her son. Besides, Bella was already married, while I was the perfect postmodern beauty—a slouching skinny red-haired mess with pouty lips and eyes so dark no one could tell what color they were, except the woman who bore me and swore they were Byzantine green. Jeans were my preferred mode of existence, unless I was on a date with a Russian, and my language of choice was always English.

  Alex arrived in New York like a prince on an alabaster unicorn—the unicorn being a white Mercedes where he offered me air cleansed of New York’s diesel fumes and Corona beer, which neither of us drank. He resembled a Greek god perched on the Italian leather of the limo’s interior—a dark-haired Zeus with philosophical brown eyes that assailed you with a mixture of disapproval and desire. He was the sort of handsome that made your tongue so moist it salivated clichés: “Do you come here often?” you wanted to say, or “You look familiar,” even though he didn’t. I imagined women drawn to him like refrigerator magnets, clinging to his chest, women Alex could never get rid of without the help of his mother.

  For our first date, Alex wooed me with front-row seats to Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast to satiate our musical souls, Tavern on the Green to impress our never-satisfied palates, and the Russian Tea Room to awaken our nostalgia through vodka and cheap caviar. He was also eager to demonstrate that he was not averse to spending his parents’ money. We immediately seized on our mutual grueling years of trying to fit in and become egregiously American, and shared a secret sense of superiority over the other Russians.

  “Why should I feel embarrassed at looking American?” Alex asked rhetorically, sipping his vodka cautiously as if it was poison. “Is it such a crime that I work out?” Alex ran in place on treadmills like all the other hardworking Americans, not in freezing winter storms along Lake Michigan like his nostalgic father. “It’s not that I wanted so desperately to assimilate,” Alex held forth when he explained why he changed his name. “I was just so sick of people asking: ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Isn’t it freezing in Moscow?’ I was the fucking valedictorian, for Christ’s sake, I could take their English on any day, and these ignoramuses were asking me if I knew what supercilious meant?” During his second year at Princeton, he truncated his long name and reemerged as a new man in the quicker and less cumbersome form of Alex Bagen, which ironically led people to mistake his last name for “Bagel.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I told Alex. “I’m not Lena Kabelmacher anymore.”

  “Mother didn’t tell me you also changed your name!” He perked up with excitement.

  “My grandmother keeps it a secret,” I said. “Besides, she can’t pronounce my new name—Emma Kaulfield.”

  “Emma Kaulfield—what an excellent appellation!”

  “I know it doesn’t sound too much like my name, but I figured I might as well go all the way …” My story came to me with a blend of pride and revulsion.

  It wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with Elena Kabelmacher; it had a certain exotic ring to it. In Russia, I was branded as the Jew, and in America, I was confused with a German, which accounted for such unsightly misspelled mutilations as Kabelhuffer and Habbermuffer. I was tired of being asked, “So what nationality are you?”—tired of being seen as the foreigner, tired of myself playing the part. And in my search for a new name, I wanted no chopping of consonants, no half-baked contortions that take pleasant names like Bayakovksy or Feldshtein and squeeze them into a legless Bayak or an insipid Feld. I chose an aesthetic overhaul: I would become Emma Kaulfield, a literary invention with a few key letters to pay homage to my past and a lilting musicality to signal my future. I alerted my family to my new name when we were standing before a judge with hundreds of other immigrants, renouncing our allegiance to the Soviet Union in order to become passport-waving, anthem-belting, fully-pledged American citizens. “I’m changing my name,” I told my mother, arguing that I would have a better chance of getting into Harvard if I got rid of Kabelmacher, my father’s ancestral calling (whose roots apparently reached all the way back to the Jewish Vikings). She in turn calmed my grandmother, saying, “She needs to do this for her career,” and my father, like a soldier beaten in battle, nodded obsequiously. Only Bella bristled with indignation: “Traitor. It’s like you’re embarrassed of us.”

  “She got to me,” I confessed to Alex. “I still feel like a traitor, especially when I date American men—it’s like, like—”

  “Like it’s all part of our elaborate conspiracy to escape them, or something—”

  “Exactly,” I cried, full of gratitude. “It’s like no matter what choice you make they think you’re saying, ‘I’m embarrassed to be seen with you!’”

  “At least yours thought you were embarrassed of them,” Alex noted ruefully. “My mother blushes every time she hears anyone call me Mr. Bagen.”

  “I hate vodka,” I said suddenly.

  “Me too,” he murmured with passion and we leaned into each other simultaneously for a very public kiss against the plush crimson booth of the Russian Tea Room. Excitement gurgled in my stomach, brimming with the possibility of potential love, making me want to whisper: “You’re so unbelievably gorgeous—it’s a wonder, a miracle, really, that you also have a brain!” But I refrained. If he were an American, I would’ve spat it out without pause, but Russian men required serious circumspection.

  I admired so much about him: his regular assaults on the Republicans and Democrats alike; his feverish adherence to notions of libertarianism and social hedonism; and the polite, gentle, non-judgmental way he denounced our parents (though never to their faces) for being so unflappably Republican. I revered him for being a Princeton man, and the only Russian Jew to have been accepted to an Ivy League institution without using his immigrant woes to beef up his application essay. In college, Alex could have done anything, but he majored in physics to prove to his parents that he was devoted to them. Despite constant praise from his mother, Alex experienced a loss of confidence upon graduation. Desire for travel, feelings of monetary inadequacies, and demanding girlfriends made him lose faith in his priyemuschestva—his great advantage. After highlighting his hair (an act dubbed by his father as “gay”) and dabbling in everything from advertising to computer programming to freelance writing, Alex experienced a typical post-college, I-am-almost-American-without-a-career meltdown. But he did not wallow in self-pity for long and, gathering himself in his arms, as the Russian saying went, sent his resume to every bank and consulting firm in New York, causing his mother considerable discomfort at having to tell people that her son was now interested in “biziness.” (To console his mother, he promised to apply to physics graduate programs at Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech in December). Fantasies of rolling in wealth, traveling to Japan and China, and perhaps making a stopover in Mother Russia whirred in his brain and recalibrated his priyemuschestva in a new, dazzling light.

  Alex and I saw each other as rebels, as rare immigrant specimens that didn’t obey their parents’ commands. We argued vociferously, criticizing other people with abandon, and boasted without applying to ourselves the American restraint of humility. Our long-distance relationship of twelve months together amounted to nine dates and fifty-six hours of
phone conversations, canvassing the hard terrain of Russian history. We spoke about pogroms, Lenin’s bald head and Trotsky’s hubris, Stalin’s mustache and his bosom torturer, Beria, Brezhnev’s bushy eyebrows and his abysmal articulation, and the grotesque absurdities of the KGB. Yet somehow we eluded our personal histories, the miseries our families endured at the hands of those we mocked, the scars Russia carved upon us all; it made us feel good about ourselves to know that we had so much in common without having to expose our skeletons and to feel that beneath all our sophisticated blather we were dating the old-fashioned way—sans sex.

  Grandmother warned me against having sex with him. “The whole Russian community will find you out—wait till he proposes,” she admonished. But I felt antiquated and buffoonish; after all, I was twenty-four, almost at my sexual peak, which I imagined as a state of unremitting horniness. I didn’t consider myself a nymphomaniac or, in Grandmother’s grand words, “an eternal slut,” but I knew that sex mattered, the way food and water matter, the way global warming matters. Yet after all those dates—during his sporadic New York visits—after simpering innuendos in smelly cabs, after feeling each other up and down (though not nearly up nor down enough—how could we in the hotel lobby), Alex had yet to invite me to his room. He bid me goodbye with “arrivederci” and a very unenthusiastic tongue, which barely grazed my gums before sheepishly retreating to its own mouth. Alex fancied himself a gentleman, a paragon of the self-restrained male, a relic from the Victorian Age. The ass, the ass, I wanted to scream, I want you to squeeze my ass. But his hands, those ticklish caterpillars, stayed stubbornly on my lower back.

  Still, one has to give me credit for my peerless restraint. I stayed in my room and spoke to no one and kept my nose in sexually neutered texts. I ate dinner alone. I was every man’s fantasy of a long-distance girlfriend. I likened myself in my head to an existential stoic, a Russian monk, Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. Until, until, that is, November, when a cruel winter breeze began terrorizing the city and hot currents suddenly coursed through my veins, thawing my body for the advent of spring. I would sit next to a good-looking man in the library, gulp maniacally from a water bottle, and try not to think about ripping his shirt off together with his chest hair.