The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Right, me too.” The stranger broke into a laugh. “But God, you do seem so familiar—perhaps you just have one of those great faces—”

  “It will come to you,” the blonde snapped in a petulant voice. “Let’s get going, Eddie, I’m hungry.”

  “What are you two doing after this?” he asked Alex. “Sylvia and I were planning to grab a bite to eat—do you want to join us?”

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “That’s a great idea,” Alex exclaimed.

  “There’s an excellent place around the corner—are you hungry?” the stranger addressed only me.

  “Starving,” I said. “I think this art has wiped me out.”

  We walked out of the gallery into the crisp winter air that stank of car exhaust and neglected trash. There was something inexplicably romantic in the mayhem of constantly jerking yellow cabs and impatient pedestrians and bare trees lining the sidewalks. Light snow drizzled from the sky and turned gray streets to white. I smiled at the ground and as my boots cut a path between my fiancé and this new strange man, I felt a sharp, electrifying thrill. Perhaps it was the thrill of being wanted from two sides, or the thrill of wanting two men at the same time, or simply wanting—wanting as the raison d’être for living.

  I took note, however, of the polished blonde. Her hair was long and straight, harnessed by hairspray into submission, each tress conforming to the general flat shape of her head. She wore a heavy black coat over a heavy black suit that had been ironed and steamed, and kept her rigid in its frame. Only the red scarf looming around her neck murmured of repressed passions.

  Alex started eyeing the blonde while the stranger and I gravitated toward each other.

  “Do you go to galleries often?” he asked as we slowed down behind the other two.

  “I don’t get out much,” I said, laughing, “Do you?”

  “I try to make time for culture, otherwise I’ll drown.”

  “In work?”

  “In the process—of living only for work.”

  “Is it a process?”

  “More like—an addiction—”

  “To making money?”

  “Is that how you see investment bankers?”

  “Are you asking me what my perspective is on investment bankers in general or you in particular?”

  He laughed casually.

  “Are you always this direct?” he asked.

  “Are you always this coquettish?” I returned.

  “Me—coquettish?”

  “Is that word a problem for you—because you’re a man?”

  “If I weren’t a feminist already, I’d be confused right now. But as it happens, I’m a huge fan of Judith Butler.”

  “Now that’s a first!” I laughed and he laughed in return, and that inexplicable ease erupted between us, and I knew at once that he recognized me, that he and I were playing the same game.

  “Lena, Emma,” Alex shouted, “this is Mercer Kitchen—the restaurant I just told you about with that famous chef I read about in the New Yorker.” He winked at Sylvia.

  A staircase led into a pitch-black underground where only candlelight brought focus to our faces. There were black ceilings, black tables, black umbrellas hanging from black walls, and fashionable young people crowding the bar: men in sleek suits and stylish jackets, women in backless gowns and glittering halter tops, merciless eyes skipping over one another in search of greater perfection. Our table supposedly seated four, but it might as well have seated one person. The four of us had to suffer in unwanted intimacy. Our knees collapsed into each other under the table and fingers grazed elbows and forearms. Sylvia immediately took off her jacket to reveal her thin muscular frame and full round breasts. She glided her fingers along Ignatius’s arm, and traced his back. He shifted with visible discomfort in his chair to edge away from her to me. I felt our knees rub, my skirt against his pants; then my knees smashed into hers.

  Ignatius looked at me and said, “So, Emma, I know what Alex wants to do with his life—what do you want?”

  I stared blankly at the menu, then met his gaze. “What do you mean—what do I want?”

  “I meant in life—what do you do?”

  “Oh, Emma is a statistician!” Alex answered for me proudly.

  “Actually, I mean I am—but I’m also an artist on the side.”

  “She dabbles in it—it’s a hobby.”

  “I see,” the Ignatius returned with circumspection. “Do you see it as a hobby, Emma?”

  “I—I—well, a very involved hobby—a hobby I work on—pretty much all the time.”

  “Emma is just saying that because she wants to impress you, Eddie, but she’s going to be a statistician. She’s extraordinary: the only woman in her department! Emma is a woman of many talents.” Alex paused for an instant, reconsidered, and launched into this: “But I don’t believe in this ‘artist on the side’ business. Either you’re an artist like Van Gogh and you struggle and starve and live as a pauper and cut off your own ear, or you choose the sensible life and you work like everyone else and you call your artistic endeavors what they are: a hobby, a diversion. Like reading a good book.”

  “Well, I agree with you, Alex,” Ignatius said, laughing. “I think Emma should definitely not cut off her ears!”

  “I only meant that—”

  “I know what you meant—a kind of metaphorical vision of self-sacrifice! I loved it, Alex, really! But the reality in this city is that people do all kinds of things to survive—for art.”

  “You speak like someone who knows from experience,” I said.

  He actually blushed. “At one point a while back I wanted to do photography.”

  “Oh, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t,” Sylvia trilled. “Eddie is amazing—he’s headed for the top. Everyone says so—Grant calls you his star!”

  “I think you exaggerate, Sylvia, but thank you.”

  “Well the practical world is very seductive: I understand that,” I said quietly.

  “You shouldn’t give up your art, Emma—if it’s what you deeply want,” he said.

  “It’s the way I breathe, Ignatius, I mean Eddie. If I didn’t paint, I think I’d stop breathing.”

  The moment—with its visceral image, with its intonation of death and longing and wanting, with the memory of the bathroom—brought us together and in one swoop dispersed our anonymity. Like two winged compatriots in flight, we found ourselves suspended above, leaving Alex and Sylvia in the dark fog of the underground restaurant.

  “Oh, Emma likes to be really melodramatic about these things.” Alex broke through with his inveterate pragmatism. “But people get over this stuff. Life arrives—marriage, children, the need for survival. Especially for women.”

  “My program is called Statistics, Probability, and Survey Modeling—SPASM for short,” I said.

  “That’s impressive,” Sylvia said, “and you’re the only woman in the program?”

  “Yes, the other four who started with me have dropped out.”

  “And you’re sticking with it, I suppose?” she remarked.

  “That’s a good question. Some days I’m sticking with it, other days I imagine myself impoverished and earless.”

  Eddie laughed uproariously.

  The waitress came around and poured everyone a glass of wine, letting Eddie taste it first.

  “Excellent,” he said, looking at me, then he lifted his glass. “We must drink! To our fortuitous acquaintance!”

  We clinked glasses, the four of us, and Alex exclaimed, “Yes, what luck, what luck to have bumped into you, Eddie!”

  “Well, Alex, I really hope you join Norton. Eddie and I are on this insaaaane project together, and when Alex joins the firm, which I’m sure you will”—Sylvia smiled encouragingly at Alex—“he’ll also be doing all-nighters with us. Isn’t that right, Eddie?”

  “You’re gonna get the real truth here,” Eddie said, and then, as if he were offering Alex a relaxing massage, he added, “By the time we get th
rough with dessert, you won’t want to work for Norton Bank.”

  “How does it look?” Alex still wanted to know. “I mean, about my prospects?”

  “It looks good for you, my friend,” Eddie replied, then turned abruptly to me. “How did you and Alex meet?”

  “We were set up,” I said, breaking into a laugh, squeezing Alex’s frozen shoulder, “of all people, by my grandmother, but in our world, it’s common practice.”

  I knew at once, without having to look at his expression, that Alex had intended to hide his Russian self. But I felt free, riding high on my vanity, wanting desperately to win, to reel this stranger into my world.

  “Alex and I are Russian,” I announced boldly.

  “Oh, how interesting,” Sylvia observed. “Isn’t there a large Russian community in Brighton Beach?”

  “We’re not recent arrivals—Emma and I have been here forever,” Alex explained in a tense voice.

  “Forever,” I echoed. “I, for one, have been in this country for fifteen years.”

  “You immigrated?” Eddie asked.

  “My family and I—we were political refugees—we fled Russia.”

  “How did you get out?” he asked, drawing his hands under his chin, like a child preparing for a fairy tale.

  “It’s actually a fascinating story,” I burst out, bubbling with excitement. “Russian Jews were traded for grain. In 1974 two senators helped create the Jackson-Vanik Amendment—an agreement with the Soviet Union that would allow Jews to leave Russia, and in exchange, Russia would receive grain from the United States. And since it was the Cold War, America wanted the world to know about the oppression in Russia—”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Eddie interrupted. “I never knew that.”

  “I had no idea we were in for a history lesson,” Sylvia put in casually.

  “A Jew for a loaf of bread,” I added in a peppy shrill, as though this meant nothing to me, as though I had come across these tidbits on a graffiti wall or in some antiquated encyclopedia and gleefully recited them at cocktail parties to seduce ignorant American men. When, in fact, I was obsessed. During my second year at the University of Chicago, while taking a class on Russian Civilization, I came across a strange red book that told the story of sixteen dissidents who attempt to hijack a Soviet airplane on June 15, 1970. Knowing the KGB were closely monitoring them, the dissidents proceeded with their plan undaunted, only to be arrested at the Swedish border before they could approach the plane—to be arrested, the little red book argued, with such a thud and ceremony, with so much death and publicity cloying the air as to awaken the entire world to the plight of Soviet Jews. As I memorized their names, their prison terms, their fates, I felt my own life quaking with a silent mutiny against its current uselessness; the simple rituals of going to class, speaking on the phone to my family, musing over dinner, flirting, dating, chasing love—all stank of ordinariness and meaninglessness. And I longed for it again—the loud explosion of anti-Semitism to sear my flesh, to re-ignite my childhood pain. When I learned that hundreds of other dissidents from Moscow to Kiev to Kazakhstan who had signed petitions and worked underground to free Soviet Jews were arrested at the same time under charges of espionage, I suddenly wished that my parents had been the dissidents, two of the sixteen, two of the hundred, that they had the vision to imagine in the sixties that the Soviet monolith could be moved, and risked their lives—my life—for this freedom which I now held so carelessly in my hands. I wanted to breathe and rot and die in their war. Had I, had we suffered at all in comparison to them? They seemed like gods whose capacity for enduring humiliation and torture was infinite, sacrificing themselves so that we, mere mortals, made of fear and caution and self-preservation, could get out. And there were other gods I could never touch or know, the Western ones who cared—so strange, so incomprehensible—about our doomed destinies. For neither Senator Jackson nor Senator Vanik were Jewish, and yet it was they who wrote the bill, who proposed to trade Jews for grain and set the immigration process in motion; they were the architects of my fate, responsible for the state ID card in my wallet, for the Ahi Tuna I now tasted, for the language I called my own spilling effortlessly from my tongue, for this very moment of sitting in a dark New York restaurant, speaking my mind. Better be traded for grain than not to be traded at all.

  Still, it stung me that after all this time in the political arena a Jew could still be weighed and measured, exchanged for a loaf of bread—why, why didn’t I know which grain was I —barley, wheat, or rye?

  “Lena, zachem tyi ehto im razkazyvaesh?” Alex reprimanded me in Russian. I felt his growing dread—of being found out, of not getting the job, of latent prejudices. But I couldn’t contain my mouth, couldn’t keep my body from rising out of the chair onto some invisible stage.

  “Many people don’t know,” I went on, “but it’s absolutely incredible!”

  “Eddie, do you know if Grant wanted the report by Monday?” Sylvia interrupted, turning away from me to Eddie.

  But Eddie seemed to see only me. “I want to know, Emma, please go on.”

  “You see, the reason why there was even this amendment, the reason why we were traded for grain, is because in 1970 there was the infamous Hijack Plot Affair or, as it was known in secret circles, Operation Wedding, when sixteen dissidents tried to hijack a Soviet plane to fly to Sweden, and eventually go to Israel. By the time the dissidents arrived at Smolnye Airport near Leningrad, the KGB were already waiting for them. The story goes that the KGB had infiltrated the group and wanted to publicize the fact that Jews were plotting to hijack a plane, but this publicity stunt backfired. Hundreds of people were arrested on that same day, the sixteen dissidents were sentenced to prison, some receiving as long as fifteen years in the gulags, and the two leaders of the group, including the pilot, were sentenced to death. The world was outraged. Everyone from the Pope to Nixon to famous world leaders to celebrities denounced Russia’s hard line. To save face, the Soviet government mitigated the death sentences to fifteen-year prison terms, which some said was worse than death. But what the plot did—what it did—was alert the rest of the world to Soviet human rights violations. That’s why Senators Jackson and Vanik wrote the 1974 bill, made the deal with Russia to trade Jews for grain and by 1975, there was a process in place. It wasn’t easy but there was a process. That’s how we got out, how our families got out.”

  “I never heard this story,” Alex said. “How did you find this out?”

  “In college. I became obsessed. I read everything I could get my hands on. Autobiographies and memoirs of KGB defectors, dissidents, refuseniks. I found KGB archives at the library and read and read … I couldn’t believe what I discovered. How we survived. How did we survive?”

  “So what happened to your families?” Eddie asked, gazing at Alex and me.

  “We got out in August of 1978,” Alex said, “I don’t remember much. I was very little, never been on a plane before—I was afraid we were all going to die—”

  “My family,” I cut in, “we were late bloomers. We only gathered the courage to apply for exit visas in 1980 but by then Russia attacked Afghanistan, and the deal was off, no more trades, US-Soviet relations had completely crumbled, the US boycotted the Soviet Olympics in 1980, and the doors closed. My family got out on a fluke in 1982.”

  “It’s amazing how well you both speak in English,” Sylvia broke in, looking at me. “I mean I can hear a slight tinge of something but if I didn’t know, I’d bet you were Canadian.”

  “Thanks, I guess,” I said.

  “Your story, this story is extraordinary,” Eddie remarked. His eyes glowed when he looked at me.

  “So do you and Alex speak in Russian to each other?” Sylvia went on. “It must be so nice to be able to speak to each other in your native tongues, so romantic …”

  “Yes, we can speak in Russian quite proficiently,” Alex chipped in happily, “and it is in fact romantic, but we both happen to be virtuosos in English, and if there
was one quality that I could claim as Russian in me and Elena, it’d have to be our love of perfection. Wouldn’t you agree, Lenochka?”

  “Russian is such a melodious language,” Sylvia went on. “Unfortunately, I only know ‘privet.’ I wish I knew some language other than English. I’m so boringly American. I mean, I could have been fluent in French if only I had applied myself, if only my parents had pushed us kids. But we were just so Greenwich.”

  “Greenwich?” I asked.

  “You know, Greenwich, Connecticut—you’ve never heard of it?”

  “Sylvia means rich, very rich,” Eddie pointed out, laughing casually. “One of the wealthiest suburbs in America, a haven for investment bankers. Half of Norton resides there. Grant lives there.”

  “But only after they marry!” Sylvia said with a knowing smile. “Until then, they party it up in Manhattan like good little bad boys.”

  She took a sip of her wine, as if to stop herself from revealing more.

  Eddie abruptly turned away from Sylvia and shifted his entire upper body toward me. “Would you ever want to go back to Russia, I mean now that there’s democracy?”

  “Go back? To Russia?” I laughed at his simplicity. “It’s a horrible place, and this democracy business is just an illusion for the West. Give Russia ten, fifteen years and all these freedoms, this so-called democracy will vanish, and Russia will go back to a dictatorship.”

  “Why do you say such pessimistic things, Emma?” Alex cut in. “Russia is like America—every country has its pluses and minuses. I hate it when people act like this is paradise.”

  “I agree with Alex,” Sylvia said.

  “There’s no comparison,” I spat, color flooding my cheeks. “I don’t care how hard being an immigrant is, we’re far better off here—don’t you remember the way they treated us?”

  “We were treated like everyone else, and we had everything we wanted. So here and there, they mocked our last names, so what, but look at my parents now, you think my mother is happy cutting people’s hair when she was a pianist back in Russia, and my father—I mean he was an engineer, and now what—a high-tech salesman, sure he’s got money, but where’s the intellectual stimulation?”