The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Eddie lived in a loft on the twenty-seventh floor of a sleek black building in Tribeca on West Street, one of the new developments springing up in the area, towering over warehouses and the Hudson River. I had only managed to step through the front door of his apartment when he greeted me, clad only in a towel, and said, “Stay with me, stay as long as you wish—I want us to make love, many, many times, for as long as it’s humanly possible before we both pass out.” He took off my coat and jeans and boots and we laughed and made love, and watched the sun squeeze between buildings.

  After that I didn’t leave. At some point I visited the dungeon to get a change of clothes, my toothbrush, shampoo, other toiletries. I returned without feeling like I had ever left or lived anywhere else, without recalling the acute guilt I felt during that first subway ride.

  Eddie’s days were spent at the office. Only late at night when the traffic would subside into a dull hum would he find me sprawled on his bed, hypnotized by the TV, waiting sometimes into the morning hours for the warmth of his body. He operated without sleep, without respite, moving like a phantom between deadlines. Yet his fatigue would vanish and untapped reserves of energy would be unleashed upon seeing me. In those first heaving days when the newness of each other’s bodies palpitated under our fingertips, he seemed intent on having me in public space. We did it on rooftops, in courtyards, in elevators, in the laundry room, and on the indomitable kitchen floor—standing, sitting, lying, flying through the air. Our bodies had become so familiar to one another that when he crawled into bed in the dark, I slid my body into position, my eyes glued with sleep, my mouth already half-opened in anticipation of a wordless cry. At the first pink light, he appeared to be someone else, in his stern dark suits, feet in fine leather, face pampered and perfumed, wrists bedecked in cufflinks, his brisk gait carrying him out the door. And I would roll in his king size bed, imbibing a view of the Empire State Building and the Hudson River, and order food from dingy restaurants down the street and eat in bed, crumbs and salad leaves mashing under my naked skin.

  The longer I stayed, the more I felt my academic mind grow stale and dissipate from comfort and sexual decadence. I lost my sense of time and responsibility, forgot to pay bills, skipped classes, and resigned myself to yet another Incomplete. I moved between clashing emotions, wondering one instant if he was a hollow shell with a sophisticated finish and accidental insights into human life, and the next, imagining that he alone understood me, that he possessed truths I had only guessed at. The motion of life as I had known it ended. I no longer went to bars at night. I stopped attending graduate school parties or gazing lasciviously at my professors. I stopped wanting other men, stopped seducing other men in classes, libraries, and coffee shops. If I flirted, it was by force of habit. I even stopped painting, so exhausting, so satisfying, so utterly luxurious it was to simply exist naked, to be aroused and aroused again, to swell from one consuming thought: when will we do it again? Perhaps we were entirely unmatched as people—we did not take the time to find out—but when in bed we swam like eels, our slippery souls intertwining to the deafening motor of unfettered lust.

  For three sumptuous weeks, I sleepwalked through my obligations to that other life, the one bustling in Chicago in another tongue. It amazed me how quickly the human mind can adapt itself to moral failure, how natural, comfortable it was to simply forget that out there another person cared for you, longed for you, intended to marry you—how inscrutably easy it was to pretend! How did my parents mollify their guilt, I’d ask myself sporadically, and then with shame, with a bitter salute to my own inadequacy, I’d recall how much they hated each other ideologically. Where was my ideological war? My guilt seemed to recede into some irretrievable cabinet inside my mind, only to resurface through the Pandora’s Box, otherwise known as the telephone. Alex, thank God, called with a new penchant for brevity, as he was “temporarily living” with his parents and they were using the phone bill to extract more devotion from him. I told myself to compartmentalize him into my future: a husband I would one day want, dote on, adore, desperately need, and affectionately call “my darling mudila,” “you unbearable asshole,” and “my sweet spineless fool.”

  On the phone I was the dutiful wife-in-training, discussing Alex’s phenomenal array of offers from New York banks. I was mahaing and ahaing as he mulled over the pros and cons of working at Lehman Brothers vs. Morgan Stanley, but Norton Bank remained a silent vault. No letter had arrived, no one had called, no Eddie. And Alex wondered out loud if the chance meeting at the gallery might have ruined his chances. “I wish you hadn’t told them I was Russian—I think that whole story made me look bad.” “I’m sorry,” I said instantly, because the possibility that Eddie was stalling on Alex’s offer began to gnaw at me. But strangely, Alex himself appeared undecided about his future. He confessed that sometimes he dreamed of going to physics graduate school to make a difference in the world, and yet, yet, he wretchedly, selfishly wanted to make money—to be his own man. He peppered me with hypotheticals: he will move to New York, work at Norton or Lehman or Morgan, and we will marry atop Sears Tower next fall. What a wonderful idea, I cried with robotic enthusiasm. There should be liberty and mischief and all the trappings of youth in my situation, I told myself, I have a lover and a fiancé. I should embrace them both, the way I embraced the two sides of my brain that existed in different languages and ran on different tracks of thought. I should free myself from this moral carnage, from this guilt-spewing whale in my brain, but I couldn’t.

  Sometimes I awoke unable to breathe. The doctor said I might develop asthma soon if I didn’t take care of myself. Take care of myself? I wasn’t taught to take care of myself—they had always taken care of me. Mom and Grandma told me how to think, what to think, when to think. But now, on my own, what a chance I had to separate myself from their incessant, caring, worrying intrusiveness—to become myself! Yet without their wills to guide me, where were my ideas, mores, ethical certainties—where was my feminist roar—under what boulder hid my will? I felt morally naked, stripped of opinions, lost in a plethora of choices, unable to pinpoint or even ask the question: “Who am I?”

  When I stopped returning to the dungeon, I started lying to throw Mom and Grandma off my scent. I told them I was drowning in work, that my brain belonged to the library stacks now, that I was interned in a prison we fellow inmates liked to call SPASM HELLHAS’EM! I told them these things to please them—to keep them from hassling me—calling every other night from Eddie’s bed while he was stuck at work.

  “When are you coming to Chicago to make appointments?” my mother was ripping into me for the thirtieth time that week. “You need to start thinking about a place for the wedding. Everything is usually booked in advance—you remember what it was like for Bella—”

  “Because this isn’t one of your hoodlums,” Grandmother gleefully pointed out, “this is Alla Bagdanovich’s son—we know these people, we go to Moscow Nights with them, we see them at every noteworthy event: Alla is friends with everyone and related to everyone. We might as well go into exile if you screw this one up.”

  “Everything happened too quickly with Alex—maybe I’m making a colossal mistake.”

  “You never last beyond a year with any man,” my mother noted. “It’s a tragedy,” Grandmother added.

  “I’ve been with Alex for over a year, over a year and I still don’t know if he was nine or ten when he left Russia or what happened to them there. What is all this ‘I-am-so-Americanized’ bullshit? Maybe he’s a fraud, maybe he’s really just Russian underneath his perfectly chiseled veneer.”

  “Is there someone else?” My mother’s voice dropped several octaves.

  Grandmother moaned and blackmailed. “I can’t take it anymore, Lord, you’re squeezing my heart, Bozhenka—”

  “Alex won’t have sex with me—I think that proves he’s really not American,” I said after some thought, giving them a chance to absorb the possibility of someone else.

  �
��Good for him! What a gentleman!” Grandmother recovered quickly. “Tell me, please, that you aren’t pressuring him?”

  “Where are you now?” my mother asked. “Where are you calling from?”

  “Nowhere!”

  “Oh, my good Bozhenka,” Grandmother whimpered.

  “Nowhere—nowhere.” I kept at it.

  “So you’re calling from someone else’s apartment,” my mother stated with confidence. “You’ve got a lover—am I right, am I right, you have a lover?” She was screaming now, but I allowed myself to imagine that in the shrill echelons of her outrage there was a wisp of nostalgia.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I confessed quickly, like an ape ripping a Band-Aid from its chest, “He is no one—just sex.” Was there a foot-long needle in my ass pricking me to confess? Who confesses such things to their family members? Who? What happened to manipulative, well-intentioned, nerve-soothing lies?

  “What is wrong with the women in this family?” Grandmother jumped in. “I was always a paradigm of virtue, sacrificing my whole life for my children; I tried to teach all of you the difference between right and wrong, and what do I get—a bunch of eternal sluts!”

  “You must end it,” my mother said.

  “What do you mean by ‘eternal sluts?’ Bella’s your golden girl, married to your ideal man, Igor, and the mother of a most gifted child—where is this venom coming from?”

  “We believe,” my mother announced morosely, “that Bella is having an affair.”

  “Good for her,” I shot back.

  “Do you understand what you’re saying—she’s going to destroy her family—everything she’s worked for!” my mother yelled.

  Grandmother urgently recounted the evidence: “She’s been sneaking out of her house late at night, asking us to take Sirofima in the afternoons and not telling us where she’s going, and Igor and his mother are on to her—they’re on to her—he’s been hiding money from her, trying to keep her from spending it on her lover—”

  “You’re all crazy KGB agents, suspecting everyone of everything—you’re all crazy—have you asked her—have you asked my sister what she’s doing?”

  “We don’t have to,” my mother assured me. “We know everything and we’re always right.”

  “Alex is moving to New York, Bozhenka, oy vey, oy vey, Bozhenka help us, help us! He’s moving to New York to be with you—he got the job at that bank—”

  “Which bank?”

  “At Norfox Bank? Or was it Norfan?” wondered Grandmother, then with extreme passion declared, “He got all the jobs this time, all the jobs, imagine that: your Alex, your genius! Oh the pay is excellent! Excellent!” Eddie had made Alex an offer after all.

  “Oh, I have to go.” I heard the door click and Eddie’s footsteps break across the parquet floor. I saw him before me, tall and stately, his face breaking into a thousand smiles upon seeing me. My mouth parched, whitening, a loss of breath. The feeling I now struggled to contain climbed up my throat and like boiling water stung my gums, my tongue, the insides of my cheeks, taking me over the pain threshold into numbness. For I could not drink—it held out its hand yet was never mine to hold—someone else’s fear of loss.

  “You must end it, do you hear me?” my mother’s voice belted out of the receiver. “Sex comes and goes but your children, think of your children—”

  “What children, what children, mother?” I begged, feeling myself disappear.

  “The ones you’re going to have if you marry this or any other goy,” Grandmother explained with sudden patience, as if I had become in the span of one minute a hapless imbecile.

  “Why can’t I just have fun? Why can’t life be simple and happy? Why can’t I fool around a bit, you know, before I have to settle down for the rest of my life?” I asked Grandmother, because as an authority on virtue and most likely God, she had to have a satisfactory answer, one that would settle the moral dilemma of cheating once and for all. Because it didn’t seem fair that rising out of the massive spaceship that is New York City, with its millions of faces, banks, corporations, stores, law firms, medical establishments, and other diverse industries, Norton Bank should emerge as a setting for the coincidences in my life.

  “Because only the honest ones get caught,” my mother answered. “Because it’s one of God’s serpentine ways of teaching moral lessons to the guilt-ridden cheaters. The ones who don’t care, who don’t suffer, who don’t feel any guilt always get away with everything. They never pay the price.” Was she implying that despite my admission, I was still good, that good meant sinning and suffering for it?

  “Hi, what’s going on,” I instinctively said, smiling back at Eddie.

  “Are you talking to your family—tell them privet from me,” Eddie said and closed his eyes.

  “Do you hear him, do you hear him, Sonichka,” my grandmother wailed, “an American —he’s an American and a goy and most likely a hoodlum! Semeyon is going to have to support everyone again. That Alex is golden! If he only knew what a flippant hussy you are!”

  A Catholic would never do, I told myself as I watched Eddie get undressed, as I listened to Grandmother rail, starting from the Stalin era to the current ABC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, against ancient hatreds and conspiracies, dooming the world with her every breath, unveiling before me (as if for the first time) the anti-Semitic strain that like an incurable virus corrupted the blood of every individual on earth. But all I could think was why couldn’t Eddie have been a Protestant, like the other goyim I dated? A Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Quaker might have been more palatable, more feasible, for the Protestants as a lot seemed less attached to their religions and eminently more convertible. The Catholics, on the other hand, rose before us like fierce Christian warriors from the Middle Ages, like Crusaders, like the Spaniards who exiled us; their grandiose churches and ostentatious rituals, their guilty conscience and penchant for constantly asking for forgiveness gave them an insularity against other faiths and an eerie similarity to Judaism, making them ironically as blood-bound.

  Yet as I watched Eddie drifting into sleep, with half-closed lids, as I caressed his cheeks, kissed his forehead, ran my fingers through his thick crop of hair, as I observed his flaring nostrils and his breath ballooning in and out, in and out, from this peculiar angle, I thought, no, no one, no one would do. Not even a secular Protestant or an exiled Mormon, not even a philandering Southern Baptist like Bill Clinton or a fun-loving Buddhist like Richard Gere!

  For what we were in America we had never been in Russia. My father would pose rhetorical questions at dinner parties. “What are we? A religion? Us, Jews, a religion, what nonsense! God-worshippers when there is no God! Are you trying to tell me that other people now want to become us—us—whom everyone wanted to kill for centuries? What a glorious country America is!” They thought it was surreal, unthinkable, an insult almost that a person could pick up the Jewish bible, take a few classes in Hebrew, read a few texts on the Holocaust, court the local rabbi, light the Sabbath candles as if the very wax could alter the genetic makeup of their blood, and miraculously—in one swoop—be proclaimed a Jew. So much so that their children would now be indisputably Jewish, and even their sketchy pasts, pasts no doubt filled with offenses against these very Jews, would be wiped clean. “We, we,” my father would yell, “we are a people, a race!”

  I hung up the phone and Eddie’s eyes popped open.

  “They don’t know about you,” I told him with sudden urgency, “because if they did, if they did—well then—”

  “What then,” he asked with a laugh, “would they disown you—cut off your allowance?”

  “I enjoy you like an addiction,” I offered, “nothing more.”

  Silence came between us and he rolled to the other side of the bed to face me.

  “Is that how you feel? Nothing but this?” He pointed at my breasts, and I grabbed my shirt for cover.

  “We’re having fun, right? Isn’t that what all men want?”r />
  “Is this your brand of feminism? You want to turn yourself into a man?”

  “Tell me, tell me what’s the difference between us—between man and woman? I can want sex just as much as you, and not care, not want you for anything else. Maybe I don’t even like you. Hasn’t that ever occurred to you, or has every woman you bedded want to be welded to you at the hip? Maybe you think we all want marriage—well, not me! Not me!” I yelled, yelled the way my mother yelled at my father. But he didn’t react the way my father did; he smiled exultantly, and said, “Ah, I see, I’ve hit a nerve. If I were to make an educated guess, I’d say you like me too much already.”

  “Oh, please, your arrogance doesn’t surprise me—”

  “What if I told you I don’t like you, what if I switched places with you and said, I want you just for sex—how would you feel?”

  “I’m coming at you from a position of powerlessness, a history of powerlessness—women do not have the power! The reason they protest—the reason they want to numb their emotions is that we’re always trying to regain the power that has always been denied us.”