The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Then he got up to pack his clothes and philosophize about his future while I watched. He had a flight at ten o’clock that very same night. I returned to my apartment, feeling drained of myself. February was giving way to March and droplets of warmth crept into the air like magicians, enticing us to throw away our coats in our mad rush for spring. I walked out of the dungeon as I was, in my jeans and sweatshirt, and at midnight found myself in an underground S and M French boutique shop three blocks from Eddie’s apartment. In the cramped, moldy dressing room of La Femme Libre, I tried on bizarre revealing dresses I decreed to never buy. As I watched my body in the mirror squeeze into glittering red leather pants, petite jean skirts bedecked in spikes and zippers, and necklaces that looked like collars for a German shepherd, it occurred to me that life situates us in categories that over time turn into self-enclosed squares: once shaped by others, now maintained by us. There we stay locked and content, becoming incapacitated and unable to cross the very boundaries we’ve built around ourselves. At that very moment, I knew I could do anything, go anywhere—I had enough willpower to break out of my square. I walked out of the store wearing a burgundy velvet sheath that matched my hair, drew curvaceous lines around my hips, and cut a heart-shaped hole across my back. It was dark and windy outside and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Hunger gripped my stomach in its iron fist, making me feel hollow. I stepped inside the dingy pizza parlor across the street from his building and nursed hot Lipton tea in a Styrofoam cup, sipping with ardor this miserable piss-twanged liquid and inhaling five slices of burned pizza adorned in canned mushrooms and lifeless olives. Surreptitiously I watched men in navy suits pass in and out of the parlor after midnight, eating their slices on the go, standing or leaning against the dirty pink counter, hoping that one of them was him. But upon closer inspection, only strangers gazed back at me, their eyes glinting with desire as if to mock me.

  At one in the morning I stood at the edge of his formidable lobby, with its heavy revolving door and a black awning that guarded its residents from the street. Through the thick glass I saw Clarence, the gray-haired doorman, frozen in contemplation behind the podium. My body lunged back and forth like a seesaw, caught between pride and desire, reeking of its perennial uncertainty. The wind lashed against my naked back and legs, and with its cold wide palms pushed me inside the marble-floored vestibule.

  “Hello there!” Clarence straightened up and smiled without seeming to recognize me, which is why his next statement made me stagger. “You must be looking for Eddie—well, I’ve been here all night and I haven’t seen him.” How many of us faceless women were looking for Eddie?

  “He must be at work,” I offered nervously.

  “Works hard, that Eddie. Do you want to wait for him?”

  I leaned against the front desk, hesitating, my eyes fixed on the swiveling door. No one was coming in, and small drops of rain started pelting against the thick glass.

  “I’ll wait,” I said and headed for the black leather couch that occupied an isolated corner at the back of the lobby.

  I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes the sky was breaking in pink and yellow lights and Eddie’s voice was bouncing off the ceiling.

  “Helloooooooo, Clarrrrrrence!” he exclaimed, laughing, “and how was your night, my friend!” His speech was by turns clear and muffled, ringing in loud hiccupping tones. He was clearly drunk and a tall woman trailed behind him, a long-haired brunette on high black heels, swathed in a short black dress, her features round and small, her lips pouting in a child’s frown.

  “Mr. Beltrafio,” the doorman muttered in an official tone, visibly discomfited, “Emma—Ms. Kaulfield’s waiting for you.” He pointed toward the back of the lobby at my still lying form. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

  “Ah, the tortured artist is here!” Eddie’s laughter reverberated through the lobby, and then the wind swallowed their voices. He and the woman stood in a huddle and whispered, and I caught Eddie leaning gently into her ear. A jealous claw burrowed into my abdomen. From one half-opened eye, I saw the woman clank her heels against the floor and twirl out the door, her long thin figure flailing in the wind, her short dress flapping against skinny thighs—a model out of a catalogue, I thought wryly to myself.

  “C’mon, you faker,” he said into my ear, grabbing me by the arm, “get you on up—Up—Hop stairs to my bed.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” I burst out and my sweaty palm landed on his cheek, leaving a red imprint. He stared at me in disbelief, then broke out in a thunderous, convulsive laugh.

  “Oh, my dear lady, thou hath no right to blow me such expressions of your love!”

  “Shut up, who the hell was that?”

  “Who the hell was that?” he exclaimed in a mock imitation. But his face turned from laughter to rage in an imperceptible second. “That was my mistress, my business, my time away from you—and what have you been doing with your time away from me?”

  “Thank you for the male gift—I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

  Still shouting, we dove into the palatial gold elevator.

  “How are the wedding plans coming along, my little sphinx? So you’re the marrying feminist, suffering not from male oppression, it seems to me, but from bizarre contradictions.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you—Alex is my third fiancé—it’s much safer to be my lover.” The doors opened on the twenty-seventh floor and we walked in silence down the hall.

  He fumbled with his keys, struggling to unlock his apartment, and I breathed into his back, exhaling my fury. Yet everything about him excited me. Even the smell of alcohol seeping from his mouth, his clothes, hair, face, punctured me with desire. Outside the wind turned into a torrent of rain and smashed against the floor-to-ceiling window that covered the southern wall. I had the sensation of being doused in water.

  He plopped on his gray leather couch and, in a hoarse voice, muttered, “I need coffee.”

  “Let me make it for you,” I offered.

  “Just sit here—sit here! So you had two other poor chaps who planned their weddings with you and you left them at the altar?”

  “Yes, they’re always poor chaps when we women dump them, but they’re men when they dump us! Isn’t it right, Ignatius?”

  “You know what boils my blood—it’s this goddamn self-righteous air you put on, as if you’re some kind of victim. Like you’re on a warpath to avenge all men for the wrongs they incurred to other women, but clearly not to you!”

  “Alex is leaving New York, he quit his job, and he’s taking me with him,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be your punching bag, do you hear me?”

  “Alex couldn’t take you, apparently. Said you were a horrible boss. Said you were only interested in me.”

  “Did he—is that why you came to me tonight, to find out if I was interested in you?”

  “I came to you tonight—I came to you tonight to ask you why you mistreated him—you promised me you wouldn’t be horrible to him—”

  “Look, I think this game has gone a little too far: you want to keep fucking me, you want to marry him, and then force me—I assume as a just reward for getting to fuck you—to give him his job back so that he can make money and support your artistic aspirations.”

  I couldn’t see clearly; I could only feel spite and rage flooding my nostrils, spewing from the rims of my eyes. I swung my palm through the air and slapped his other cheek, the one that wasn’t pink yet.

  “With such a temper,” he retorted without moving away or giving up a millimeter of space, “Alex can’t possibly be what you want or need.”

  “No, you’re right: what I want is a raw motherfucker—straight up tuna sashimi! No soy sauce to confound me.”

  “Oh, I do like your imagery, lady,” he came back at me, “but if you’re going to compare me to food groups, I prefer to be a slab of meat—a porterhouse rather than such delicate matter as raw fish.”

  I laughed and so did he. Each se
cond amplified our laughter, unified our voices, our open mouths, our smiling eyes. After a while we didn’t know why we laughed, and how, without being conscious of it, we got caught in this moment of perfect mutual understanding. Then, as if on cue, we stopped with one look of hate.

  I pried open the living room balcony door and stepped into the rain. Water pummeled my head and deluged my dress and seeped inside my bra. I watched the color strip in its first washing, gathering round my toes in blood-red pools, and stuck my tongue out from a childish habit of wanting to taste the rain. How could I explain? Twenty-seven floors below, dots of human beings hid under umbrellas and merged with one another to create an interlocking web of ominous black heads. I thought of him again, the boy-crush from childhood and what my mother told me years later in America—that zhidko could mean both a dirty Yid and weakness, that the two could be synonymous, that his parents loathed Jews, that Grandmother concealed the truth from me. Lightning from my childhood struck the side of the building and, for an instant, seemed to torch me with its sharp white tip.

  “Emma, get in here for Christ’s sake—” I heard a voice blaring, a figure at my back. I couldn’t recognize the language for an instant, for in my head everything swam in Russian. “Ya ne ponimayu,” I wanted to say, “I speak no English—English no speak!” I stepped back into the apartment and whispered, “It smells like Russia out there, in the rain. The sidewalks and the gray buildings—everything is somber and gray like Russia.”

  “Have you lost your mind—do you want to die?” he screamed, a coffee mug in his hand, his red-rimmed eyes zigzagging and awake.

  “I—I—”

  “Take the dress off and put something dry on—here—” He came back with a heavy white robe and, without speaking, pulled down my soaking dress. “Take everything off,” he commanded and I obeyed, my mind revolving around the same stubborn sentence that wouldn’t come out. Only when I stood naked before him, with not a cloth to hide behind, I said, “You—I want you—I don’t care how or where or what—I want you and I don’t want you to see other people.”

  He didn’t answer so I went on, by this point, completely pride-deprived. “How many women have you slept with this month, this month that you haven’t called?”

  “How could I have called once I found out you were engaged to Alex—you were sleeping with Alex?”

  “What do you mean ‘sleeping with Alex?’”

  “He boasted—”

  “Nonsense! He has a colorful vocabulary, that’s all—empty words! Alex couldn’t get beyond my bra,” I exclaimed with a sudden laugh.

  “So you think this cleans your moral palate, this makes everything all right?”

  “How many women—how many?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Before I give us a try, I want to know what I’m trying—how many other people I’m sleeping with.”

  “Lady—you’re fucking the whole country!”

  “I can never marry you,” I threw back.

  “Oh, and have I proposed?”

  “You know what I mean. This will be temporary—this—us—must be temporary until we run the natural course of falling in love.”

  “So you think love has limits?”

  “Love is a concept,” I replied firmly, “an illusion for the masses like religion; love is a question of willpower. You can plug it or you can fan its flames—all is controlled by reason.”

  He turned on me with a grim face. “So this is all because I’m not Jewish?”

  I wrapped his robe around my body and sinking into its warm protective layers, I muttered, “I’m tied to them in ways I can’t explain. They suffered too much on account of being Jewish for me to betray them. They’re my baggage.”

  “Everyone suffers,” he said, “everyone has baggage.”

  “I’m not talking about something that can be resolved in a few therapy sessions!” I let out a quiet mocking laugh. “I’m talking about a world where you can’t get out, where there’s no recourse but full submission—”

  “How wonderful it must be to be Russian! If you ever fuck up, you just say, ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, it’s my damn culture.’ That’s precisely the kind of reasoning lawyers use in their insanity pleas for murderers.”

  “Are you purposefully being an idiot?”

  Anger seized his face, constricting his features, squeezing his eyes, so that only faint slivers of blue glared at me from under thick brown brows. “I don’t care how you define us—love buddies, sex mates, committed sadists—but I need the truth. If we’re going to try this thing, you have to be honest with me.”

  “Listen to me: I’m not Russian anymore, not anymore! I don’t want to be Russian, not after everything I’ve done to become American. My family is my Russia now and all that’s left of it—the language and our passionate tempers and our singing. They’re wonderful, you know …”

  “Are you going to let them decide who you fall in love with?”

  “I owe them my life,” I cried.

  “In all my years of dating, I’ve never been driven this crazy by a woman. You give me a headache, you know that?”

  “That’s only because you feel like you can’t have me. If you could, the headache would be mine.”

  He let out a laugh. “Dating is a cutthroat sport, and you and I—we both like to win.” I felt the floor swivel beneath me, switching our positions in this game of high-stakes chess. He caught me by the elbow, caught my fear with his eyes. “Let’s not anoint the winner just yet. Let’s go to bed and do what we do best—basic training!”

  We circled each other like two enraged bulls in a ring. It was splendid, awkward, painful to be ravaged by the gnawing sensation of being led nowhere, just its own circular motion of wanting and not being able to want. I couldn’t feel his flesh or mine, only our bones mashing underneath. And at the moment of complete compression, when I could barely breathe, he disengaged from me with a start, and traced with a single finger the curvature of my exposed form.

  “There’s been no one,” he spoke at last. “No one since you.”

  “I too, I’ve thought and wanted—I’ve dreamed only of you,” I whispered, and felt it in my eyes and heart and back, a loud, grating knock, my body tossed on waves against a gale and dropped mercilessly on shore. I felt regret spread inside my chest, regret for speaking, for feeling, for lying here bare like an animal about to be pried open for a feast. But his countenance was startlingly kind, and his lips like two ambassadors of peace joined together in a smile.

  There was something healthy and optimistic in that smile, in the blue spheres of his eyes, and in the very color of his skin—a golden brown that made one think of sand under the sweltering noon sun. He had a strong thick body that gained texture from the brown curls sprinkling his chest, and his delicately woven back tapered off like an inverted pyramid into long slender legs. As I pressed my lips against the smooth brown terrain of his stomach, I tasted salt and sweat, his inner world on my tongue. Here, here, I thought, dwelt the American spirit—inside the ridges of his muscles, sloping up his chest into his shoulders and across his elongated arms, inside the sharp squares of his jaws and generosity of his smile and shapeliness of his calves and thighs, grounding his perfect posture in the ample width of his feet, marking the shift of his body from side to side, even conveying humility to his swagger. It seemed to reside in all his indiscernible qualities that couldn’t be pinned to any specific characteristic, but simply acted as a collective, defining us according to the soil upon which we’re born. And in kissing him, I felt myself as other—the other walking, smelling, smiling, taking in the American landscape, reinventing it as my own life.

  PART II

  An Ode to Soap Operas

  It was the May scorch in Chicago. My father suffered his seventh major stock loss and began transferring money into a secret bank account in case of a crash, which came to him in a dream; my mother, to celebrate designing her first corporate office space, spent thirty thousand dollars
without remorse on a Russian sable jacket, claiming it was a summer sale and not entirely disregarding the sensitive condition of my father’s brain (a floor-length coat would undoubtedly have inspired more stock-related dreams); Bella was now openly sneaking out of the house to meet that same non-existent lover (or lovers) after sunset and returning home starving and exhausted, which convinced Igor’s mother (who in turn convinced Igor) that the lover was forcing Bella to perform unseemly sexual acts and join him in debauched orgies; Grandmother had sent the plumber away under the pretext of not wanting to be alone with a strange man, but in reality she suspected him of being a KGB agent disguised as a plumber (the stock loss could not have been a random accident); and Alexei Bagdanovich, Grandmother’s ideal husband incarnate, had moved back to Chicago to live with his parents, freeing me to date Eddie in New York without fear of discovery, and ironically freeing me to plan my wedding with Alex without forcing the poor man to have sex with me.

  An unanticipated perfection seemed to abet the unfolding of these events, as if the Lord Almighty had personally devised a challenging obstacle course for me and I was excelling at every jump with Her seal of approval (for surely, God was a woman in my book). Alex quit his job on Thursday, packed his clothes, bid me goodbye, and flew to Chicago all on the same day, leaving me to spend the entirety of March and April with Eddie. And out of concern for Alex’s well-being, out of guilt for sampling every five-star restaurant in New York including the exquisite Jean Georges (where after finishing a bottle of champagne, Eddie and I fondled each other under the uncomfortable round table and the waiter in his snooty primness cleared his throat like an old headmistress spanking us with her ruler), out of pity for his scantily concealed feelings of defeat, I suggested to Alex that we must light a forest fire under our parents’ asses and reserve a place for the wedding, thereby not only creating an illusion of wild enthusiasm but also sealing myself into a deadline. Alex begged me to come to Chicago and search with him, but unlike every other truly committed bride on planet America, I left the decision entirely in our mothers’ hands. “Nothing will go wrong,” I assured him. “Our mothers have exquisite taste.” For two months I postponed the inevitable trek to Chicago to approve the wedding plans, for two months I basked in the unparalleled bliss of Eddie’s devotion to my body, for two months Alex and I held conference calls with our parents to dissect wedding logistics: whom to invite, where to seat them, and whom to snub. I delved into every detail with the ferociousness of a greedy accountant, disregarding the fact that these discussions triggered an overproduction of mucus in my nasal passages.