The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Against my better judgment, I suggested to Alex that we might consider taking our pawing to the next level. “What level might that be?” he inquired like an innocent lad of twelve. “The level of sex—of your room or my room or anywhere, let’s just do it, do it!” Yes, I said those exact words in my usual straightforward uninhibited style. And in the face of my extraordinary courage and my obvious, mauve-hued embarrassment, he remained as unperturbed as ever, a cocoon of virtue and reserve, explaining himself as a “devout Romantic—some people believe in God, I believe in Love.” I had no recourse but to wonder: (a) Do I have noxious oily fish breath? (b) Is he a Catholic priest masquerading as a Russian Jew? (c) Is he a repressed homosexual pretending to be a homophobic—bordering on chauvinistic—intellectual of the Russian variety? or (d) Is he the real article—a man of truly chivalrous convictions? Still, my pride wailed: how could any man not want me, me? And so I raged against him as if I were raging against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, as if sex itself had become the great equalizer, an emblem of American democracy, and we either had to have it or die!

  But Alex stopped my diatribe with a sumptuous, almost ardent kiss and this: “‘Here I dwell, for heaven is in these lips / And all is dross that is not Helena.’”

  So I replied: “‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.’”

  “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”

  “Please don’t!” I cried and together, he and I burst into laughter. For only two immigrants with English-inferiority complexes and healthy self-esteems could suddenly, without blushing, quote Marlowe, Frost, and Shakespeare to recuperate from a fight.

  The Bathroom Incident that Launched a Thousand Guilt Trips

  So there I was, stuffing garlic cloves in my bras and under my pillows, impatiently awaiting Alex’s return for his tfu, tfu, tfu interviews at New York banks, and my sex. My behavior was exemplary, my devotion pitch perfect, especially in my Probability and Stochastic Modeling class where I (being the only female) valiantly rebuffed the amorous attentions of two mathematically endowed men. When, alas, Alex called from the airport to announce, “I’ve arrived, expect the unexpected!” my heart pounded and my hands masterfully scrubbed my body to rid it of garlic odor—to prepare it for a full-scale physical seduction of the reluctant gentleman. Optimistically embracing the love-to-sex concept, I donned knee-length black leather boots, a leather miniskirt, and a leather jacket—the look of a slick badass or, worse, an Ivy League whore. Upon seeing me, Alex murmured, “Superb as ever!” and apologized for failing to secure reservations at Le Bernardin. Would I be terribly disappointed with the inferior La Cote Basque? No, I would not. Then he placed an airy peck on my puckered lips while I panted like an overheated dog in leather.

  The dining room had the air of an old duchess, puffing with regal mannerisms and haughty remarks, and yet fully aware of her own decline and antediluvian views of the world. Stern rectangular white tables were met by plush blue sofas spiraling along the walls and gilded chandeliers, reminiscent of great Parisian ballrooms, offered only the illusion of light, enveloping each face in a gray glow. The restaurant appeared to be an enclave for the elderly with mink coats and cigars, and I instantly felt the need to pull my skirt down.

  “I sal tell vou about ze speciales,” our waiter said with a vague foreign accent, and Alex lifted his head abruptly to stare at him.

  “Qu’avez-vous pensé?” Alex exclaimed in French to the waiter, for it turned out that Alex also spoke fluent or, as I liked to think of it, Russian-inflected French.

  The waiter appeared not to hear him and then, politely lowering his head, said, “I vill be right back—give vou foo minute to make decision.”

  “He’s clearly French,” Alex announced. “I can spot the French anywhere. Did you see how polite he was?”

  “How was he polite?” I asked.

  “He didn’t want to speak French to me out of respect for you.”

  “He looks Italian to me,” I said.

  The waiter returned with the bottle of red wine Alex had ordered and a shy smile on his face, again directed exclusively at me. He now visibly ignored Alex’s appeals to him in French. I cringed, then grinned seductively at the waiter in an attempt to counteract Alex’s faux pas.

  “Are you making eyes at the waiter?” he asked angrily after we ordered our appetizers.

  “What else am I supposed to do when you won’t leave him alone?” I snapped.

  “Are you still sore about the sex?”

  “I’m not sure you can handle a modern woman,” I said. “You are clearly put off by my desires.”

  “It’s not that. You never gave me a chance to explain. I just like us the way we are—you reeling me in but not giving me what I want, and me running after you like your faithful dog servant.” He paused as if to twirl the words on his tongue and rephrased the concept: “I want to keep feeling the way I’m feeling—ravenous but not yet satiated!”

  “Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “I’m a gambling man,” he said, smiling.

  “And I’m a hard-core feminist,” I flung back. “Are you aware that I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on Judith Butler—the same Judith Butler who claimed that gender is performative, that we’re not born male or female, but made so by our culture, a culture that stuffs these definitions down our throats! And did I tell you that my title was ‘Burgeoning Feminism in Chauvinistic Immigrant Communities: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Judith Butler—’”

  “On numerous occasions,” Alex replied with a laugh. “Anyhow, I thought you were a statistician now?”

  “I am—of course I am a statistician, but only because of them! If it hadn’t been for them—” I thought with regret of that day in December when I carried two sets of application essays to the post office. I called my mom and said, “Mom, I don’t know if statistics is for me—what I really want to do is study art and feminism, and there’s a program at Irvine, California where I could do exactly that—I could become a professor—and I’d—” What I wanted to say was: paint, paint women’s faces, their suffering, paint within a postmodern feminist tradition, paint to breathe. But instead I raised the fact that within our family and other Russian families the man still resides upon a throne: he is served, fed, clothed, and fanned with ridiculous compliments, and that women’s rights, her rights, Grandmother’s rights are brushed under the proverbial tablecloth. “We need a new language,” I told her, “to cleanse our palate, and your core beliefs are in fact aligned with mine.” But my mother’s brilliant manipulative mind enveloped me at once: “Yes, of course I agree with you, Lenochka! So then imagine what you’ll contribute to women’s rights, to feminism itself, if you’ll specialize in statistics—a lone woman in a male-dominated field. It’s such a gift that you’re sooooo good at this!” My ego swelled and got stuck in my throat, and at once, I dropped the folder containing the feminist theory and gender studies application to University of California at Irvine into the nearest garbage bin.

  “For them—you mean your parents?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, if it hadn’t been for them, I’d be painting, and doing my PhD on Judith Butler or Luce Irigaray at Irvine—I had a good shot at getting in, too.” I paused. “I’d be happy.”

  “And you would have been the butt of every joke among our relatives and friends—”

  “Are you mocking me?” I asked with a murderous grin.

  “Not at all! I simply disagree with you: Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf in her own room, a naked pregnant Demi Moore—what’s the difference? Their feathers might be of different colors, but under all that pomposity all these women want is the same thing: a good man. If you’re honest with yourself, you’d see that feminism is just not realistic, not natural. Look at the way men and women interact. Look at real life, no matter what women say, a woman relinquishes control when she has sex and a man gains it. Wom
en just cannot treat sex nonchalantly.”

  “I don’t see why you have these absurd, antiquated Russian notions—” I protested loudly.

  “You have an excellent vocabulary,” he observed, then added, “Just because American men claim they’re feminists in public doesn’t mean they don’t think like Russian men privately. They just hide better behind all that politically correct bullshit.”

  I wanted to paddle back to Judith Butler, but instead I said, “If you were American, we would have done it by now. I don’t see what you were afraid of, unless you’re—”

  “I’m very, very potent,” he protested, “in fact, so virile that women, once they sleep with me, can never leave me.”

  “You’re not serious?” I laughed.

  “Are you doubting my manhood?”

  “No, I’m merely affecting shock at your purported sluttiness! Does your mother know?”

  Through laughter, he replied, “No, she erroneously believes I’m averse to sexual pleasure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because until you, no woman has yet given my heart cause to melt!” His beautiful dark brown eyes peered at me with confidence. “All jokes and metaphors aside, why don’t you marry me, Elena?”

  “Marry you?”

  “I love the way you are, so full of desire and spunk,” he continued in the same glowing tone, mistaking my response for a display of feminine insecurity. “I am utterly serious—my dearest Lenochka.”

  He reached across the table and laid a small velvet box next to my appetizer. Ah, the dreaded ring. When my eyes feasted on the magnificent emerald stone perched upon a skinny gold band, I swallowed the duck foie gras in its entirety and felt the grease coagulate in the back of my throat. Marriage rose before me like the parted jaws of a shark, and on its back sat Alex, murmuring: “I’ll be a magnificent lover; I’m very well versed in the literature of sexual arousal.”

  He burst into a self-effacing chuckle and I laughed with relief. He pried my fingers open (both hands were apparently locked in tight fists) and, placing the ring in my palm, gravely declared, “This is no ordinary ring, Elena—my uncle Yossel smuggled it in his lower intestines. The KGB missed it—with their laser technology—those pompous fools! Yossel stuck it in caramel and swallowed it whole. He kept it in till he reached our apartment on Pratt Street eighteen years ago. This ring has been in my family for centuries—a survivor of Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, Stalin, the pogroms, World War II, the Cold War, The Reagan administration, and Yossel’s bowels.”

  “Oh, Alex, thank you,” I groaned. “It’s beautiful, really, I feel honored, really—this is so unexpected—”

  “Unexpected—my dear Elena, why, I wanted to propose on our first date—”

  I smiled: to think that he wanted to marry me on the first date at the behest of his mother and my grandmother was at once endearing and nauseating.

  “You know I’m crazy about you, Sashenka,” I said, “but have we really had enough time? This is a colossal step.”

  “Yet you think that’s a sufficient timetable for sex—” he countered with a laugh. “Look, my father proposed to my mother on the third date.”

  “So did my father to my mother—on the first date, on the first because she was so beautiful! But that was Russia—in America we can take our time and make sure we’re not making a mistake.”

  “Oh, I know I’m not making a mistake,” he said. “You’re exactly what I want—what I need—feisty, opinioned and you will always call me on my bullshit.”

  I grabbed his hand and kissed it, “You’re such a wonderful person, Sashenka, really, even with all your silly views of women—”

  “Which you’ll undoubtedly fix in no time!” He laughed good-naturedly, and I smiled. Smiled and trembled and held the table for support, and fought an urgent sensation in my bladder to deluge the entire marble entrails of La Cote Basque. I rose from my chair and announced, “I must go to the bathroom!”

  “I understand: you want to torture me a little, give me a taste of purgatory—I’m willing to wait!” he sang after me. “I’m used to waiting.” I heard him as I hurried away.

  I stepped behind the purple mantle that separated the bathroom area from the dining room, and the sensation in my bladder miraculously receded. In the stilted, dusty confines of the waiting area, a man stood in an arrogant pose.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I muttered, feeling faint.

  “You look pale,” he said in a kind voice.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I smiled at him and wiped my forehead. We stood looking at one another for a second, then directed our gaze to the two wooden bathroom doors.

  “You can use the men’s room if you want,” the stranger offered, pointing in the direction of a flinging door.

  “I’m not in a hurry,” I sighed, shaking my head. “I’m just very warm.”

  “Yes, it’s very warm in here,” he whispered and, swinging his arm to lean against the wall, gently brushed my hair.

  He cut a tall sharp figure in the dimness, with light eyes, the color of which I couldn’t make out, and long muscular fingers, which periodically swept over his forehead to remove beads of sweat. He arched over me like a black amorphous shadow, his features blurring, his mouth a cave emitting strange soothing sounds.

  “Life’s just so confusing.” I was apparently talking again, despite myself.

  “Isn’t it,” he took me up. “If you ask me, he isn’t for you.”

  “How did you conclude that?”

  “Oh, that’s easy—he lacks guts,” he said.

  “And you, I suppose, have them in spades?”

  “If I weren’t a feminist already, I’d convert. If I were a virgin, I’d beg for your mercy. And if you begged to sleep with me—well you can guess what I’d say—” He laughed warmly, somehow neutralizing this perverse intrusiveness with his coiling lips, and added, “You were very loud.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “Who said I was nice?” He turned on me with brows raised in a triangle above his eyes, lips parted as if waiting still to speak, but offering only silence. Only the sentence—“Who said I was nice?”—rose into view like an opened gate, letting a stream of intimacy run between us.

  The women’s room opened up but we didn’t move.

  “Are you going in?” A lady was standing behind me.

  “You go ahead,” I said to her, remaining still, and perked my nose to inhale the stranger’s breath. It smelled of wine and goat cheese and rushed into my lungs in hot puffs of air. I noticed after a while that we had breached each other’s space. We kept up pretenses at first, as though our natural camaraderie was just a social fluke, an innocent exchange of pleasantries, but with each sentence and each person stealing our turns, our stillness grew and truncated our speech. I thought of breaking out, and quietly mouthed, “Well, it was nice to meet you. I better go.” But in silence he kept at me, with eyes that fixed me to the wall—what was this strangeness we had bred between us? I turned to go, made two steps forward, but then my arm, as though of its own accord, leapt out at him. Our palms locked midair and we stayed tethered to the ground like two statues waiting to be moved. I felt his other hand across my back, his fingers on my red silk shirt, drawing imaginary lines round my shoulder blades, along my spine, delineating cloth from flesh, penetrating both. I shut my eyes, imbibing each sensation without consciousness or thought—existing only in the breathing of my body. I opened up my eyes in time to see that we had made our way into the men’s room.

  When we emerged, the man and I went our separate ways, without much spoken in between. I shook as I sashayed across the restaurant floor, my leather miniskirt chafing at my skin, my leather boots utterly inappropriate.

  When I returned to the table, Alex was speaking to the waiter in broken French. I sat down at my chair and wiped my forehead with a soiled napkin. I felt my lungs constrict, breath becoming rapid. Please, dear Lord, do not let me have an allerg
ic reaction right now—Benadryl was tucked away in my dungeon.

  Allergies to dust, Lysol, ragweed, pollen, cats, chlorine, flowery detergents, or simply bad armpit odor were my constant companions, never failing to alert me to the unstable seesaw between life and death.

  There was still the chunk of porterhouse I had not touched, and it lay there across my gold-rimmed plate with its blood seeping out, roiling my stomach with sudden nausea. My blood, I thought grimly, let it be my blood! I tried to concentrate on Alex’s moving mouth, but the interlude in the bathroom danced in my head. And I saw his face again under the dim pink lighting, casting his features in a lurid glow. An aroma of lavender and thyme filled the air, and the oval mirror reflected my hand on his buttocks. “I’ve never done this before,” I murmured into his ear, an old, female-honored platitude. “Yum, your hair smells like garlic bread,” he murmured in return, as if this were a popular celebrity perfume. And then his hands, disregarding these peculiar discrepancies of language and odors, worked boldly over my body, rubbing my ribs and squeezing my leather-wrapped ass. I was hyperventilating, bordering on an orgasm of ancient Greek proportions—from what—from practically nothing if we consider the exhaustive literature on sex, and yet was it nothing when his fingers, like a horde of thieves, snuck over the border of my lacy red bra. (Yes, I wore red lace, out of that subterranean hope for an adventure.) Dear Aphrodite, then there were those lips: neither too wet nor too dry, neither too fat nor too slim, the perfect soft bowtie swirling over my breasts without touching them, then landing expertly on my nipples and pulling away, as though here was the god of foreplay in the flesh taunting me until I couldn’t bear it any longer—until I burned to tear off my clothes and scream MUTINY ON BOARD! But I had Grandmother to consider and my ideal husband waiting for me in the main dining room; I was a feminist with numerous responsibilities, with several heads on top of my head. Responsibilities that obviously could wait—I kissed his cheeks, neck, fingers that seemed like extensions of my own limbs, but our mouths never met. We were at once too familiar and too estranged to kiss, our tongues reserved only for each other’s skin. At some point he held me, for my knees caved, ankles bent to the floor. “Will I see you again?” he asked. “I want you,” I whimpered pathetically, but in my mind, I was far more eloquent: I’m fainting from pleasure—flying, somersaulting, whirling right up to the bathroom ventilator. I’m literally decomposing from the impossibility of what I’m doing, from the way you smell and grab me, from the muscles under your blue shirt, and yes, most of all, from the anonymity of your face. He murmured something I couldn’t understand, then lifted me into the air, my skirt riding up my waist—