The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Really, that’s amazing—what a small world! He’s actually my teacher.”

  “You study?” Grant asked, raising his brows.

  “Yes, I’m at NYU—I mean I take art on the side,” I muttered with embarrassment.

  “Very good, very good! Everyone should study. When I stare at his painting I feel at peace. Partially, of course,” Grant noted, “because it reminds me of just how much nonsense I can afford. Sure it’s pretty and it makes me think of fall, and my happy childhood in rural Vermont, but I ask myself, couldn’t my thirteen-year-old daughter have drawn it just as well?”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more!” Eric chirped. “People are always trying to shock us nowadays but what you get is some asinine idea that any dolt could have come up with—a black blob for a canvas or salad leaves on top of a brown sac—I swear that was an exhibit at the Guggenheim! Does that sound like art to anyone?

  “Speaking of being bamboozled, could you believe Robertson today?” Eric went on excitedly. “Just on Friday he was fuming, but today he bought everything—results, numbers, even recommendation—hook, line, and sinker. I mean, after Friday’s fiasco, I didn’t think we’d get off the ground with him.”

  “Well, disasters do happen,” Grant said in a reproving tone, “but Eddie did a superb job this morning. It just proves what a little social finagling can do.

  “You turned the whole situation around. Robertson was actually beaming! I couldn’t be more pleased. The way you handled that, Eddie—that was pure genius!”

  I caught Eric’s eyes narrowing, envy rising, spreading from his forehead to his chin.

  “Well, Eric and Sylvia were indispensable,” Eddie said.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Sylvia blurted out, appealing to Grant. “Eric handed me the wrong report. That’s why Eddie had the problem with Robertson in the first place.”

  “Is that true?” Grant demanded. “You almost lost our biggest client?”

  “I had nothing to do with it. My stupid secretary gave me the wrong report, that fucking idiot!” Eric snapped.

  “No, it was you,” Sylvia insisted. “You tried to make me look bad in front of Eddie.”

  Eddie scanned Sylvia’s face, then in a neutral tone, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.” Tears gathered at the edges of her eyes, and I leaned in, wanting to touch her forearm, but she reeled from me.

  “No one’s accused you of anything,” Grant said to Sylvia. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Eric laughed violently. “Women! They’re always so dramatic! Relax, Sylvia, I’ll fire my secretary.”

  He resembled a toad that had been imprudently placed on top of a tall, muscular body, and although that gave him a disconcerting presence, his toad-like face, with its bulging eyes and a rather extensive mouth, brought one relief. Had he been outright handsome, he would have been difficult to bear, but in his case there were no discrepancies between appearance and personality.

  “Forgive us, Emma, we always revert to shop talk.” Grant turned to me with a smile and extended a bowl of peanuts. “Did you know that this bar is the hot spot for all the white-collar professionals of this city?”

  “Oh, is that why no one’s dancing?” I exclaimed.

  “Of course, because as a general rule white-collar professionals are expected—actually required to be exceedingly boring. Do you see that group over there gulping their drinks—those are the MDs popping antidepressants and drinking themselves to death!” He laughed and pointed toward a distant section of the bar where three men and two women huddled together in conspiratorial postures. “And those mousy heads over there with slouching backs and ghostly faces are the lawyers—pathetic nerds with little money and enough bitterness to sue us all into bankruptcy. They work harder than we do, and make ten times less.”

  “And what are we by that estimation?” Eric asked, looking up at Grant.

  “We—We are the Gods,” Grant replied in earnest. “We rule this city.”

  “Ooooh, I like that,” I cooed, smiling at him.

  “So how did Eddie convince you to go out with him?” Grant flirted back.

  “Eddie—convince me? He leered at me from a table of white-haired Gods.”

  “Our clients,” Grant laughed. “By the way, I’m an excellent leerer!”

  Sylvia skewered me with her light blue eyes. “So, how’s your old boyfriend, Alex?”

  “How would I know?” I shot back.

  “Are we talking about the same Alex, Alex Bagen?” Eric burst out. “He was a great guy—such a riot, with his wild yellow and pink ties, man, those ties killed me! It’s a shame what happened to him.”

  Eric stared at me with sudden interest. “Wait a second—you’re not that Russian chick, Lena—are you? The one Alex was going to marry?”

  “Same one,” I replied, my heart somersaulting in my chest.

  “You sneak,” Eric taunted, “dating our Eddie and marrying good old Alex on the side. Now that’s what I call the new wave of feminism in the nineties!”

  “We broke up months ago.”

  “Of course you did. I’m just pulling Beltrafio’s leg!”

  “I’ve always said there’s no tougher mind than Eddie’s,” Grant observed. “If there’s a loose end, he’ll tie it up; if there’s a loose cannon, he’ll get rid of it.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Grant,” Eddie protested. “I did what had to be done.”

  “It’s a good thing you got rid of him, Eddie,” Sylvia murmured, gently brushing Eddie’s forearm with her fingers.

  “Still, getting fired after what—a month, a month on the job—is brutal. Shit, I’d be pissed as hell,” Eric said.

  “Who got fired?” I recalled my mother’s suspicious eyes circling Alex as he insisted, in front of everyone, that he left of his own accord—for a fantasy of personal greatness.

  “I guess Alex didn’t tell you,” Eddie remarked casually. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “No, no he didn’t, but why didn’t you—why didn’t you tell me?” My voice quivered from sudden indignation on account of Alex; stung to my very bones, I felt as if I too had been fired, as if the whole lot of us, the immigrants, had been fired. I bit my lower lip to steady it and said, “I hear from my family that Alex is going to Harvard in the fall.”

  “Is that so?” Grant exclaimed, “Doing what?”

  “PhD in physics,” Eric said with a smile, winking at me. “We’ve kept in touch.”

  “I didn’t know you two were so close.” Eddie scanned Eric’s face with mistrust.

  “Oh, you know how it is, Beltrafio, when you’re both starting out in the copy room.”

  “No one put you in the copy room,” Grant rejoined (Eric was Grant’s nephew by marriage, as Eddie earlier explained, and this job was a happy meeting between guilt and nepotism). “I gave you a good position right away. There are tons of people who’d kill to have your job!”

  “Sure, and I’m grateful,” Eric conceded with open sarcasm. “Let’s get another round of good Old Fitzgerald—for the special lady of the hour.” He motioned at our waiter.

  “Well I, for one, am glad for Alex,” Grant remarked. “He was a solid guy. He meant well, anyhow.”

  “He belongs with the academicians,” Sylvia observed. “None of them have any social skills.”

  “Neither do business people, for that matter,” Eddie admonished.

  “Yeah,” Eric cut in, cackling. “Look at you.”

  “I never knew you had such an eye for detail, Conners—you should have been an interior decorator!” Eddie shot back.

  Everyone broke into a booming laugh, and Eric, burning in pink, giggled like a school girl whose ass had been unexpectedly slapped.

  “Hottest girl I ever dated in college was Russian, but then again she dated everyone!” He chuckled and the malicious grin rippled across his toad mouth. “Did you and Eddie start dating while you were still dating Alex—I mean I was just curious if Beltrafio here didn’t fire Alex out
of that alpha male need to get rid of the competition? I mean what the f—excuse my language, ladies—did Alex do to get fired?”

  “Technically it was me who fired him,” Grant said.

  “These things are confidential, Eric,” rebuked Sylvia, landing a protective gaze on Eddie.

  “Sure they are!” Eric laughed.

  “What competition, Conners? Sparks flew when Emma and I met!” Eddie declared like a man brandishing a flag.

  “There were sparks between you two even when you were still dating me,” Sylvia noted. Her injured face was meekly angled at Eddie as if she were still ferreting out remnants of his love.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered, and our eyes met over the men.

  “Hey, you did me a favor,” she said. “Everyone around here knows that Eddie is quite the playboy—what did you tell me, Grant, he’s dated every model in the Village, and every struggling B-actress as icing on the cake.”

  “No need to be cruel, Sylvia, sweetheart,” Grant purred. “Everyone knows my weakness for office gossip. A guy as good looking as Eddie—why the secretaries practically stalk him like the paparazzi!”

  “I have no secrets from Emma,” Eddie announced. “She knows the truth from gossip, and she doesn’t care.”

  “Does she know about your ménage à trois with a trapeze dancer and an ophthalmologist?” asked Eric. “Now that was the best frigging story I ever heard, man!”

  “The best gossip you ever heard,” Eddie retorted with typical confidence, giving me an apologetic look. “Besides, Emma isn’t the jealous type: my stories amuse her.”

  “All women are jealous when their men stray,” Sylvia pounced.

  “The only cure to straying men,” I said, swooping in, “is to cheat ourselves—and why not—our desires are no less magnificent than theirs.”

  “Oooh, I like her,” Grant murmured. “Where did you find her?”

  “In an art gallery, of all places!” Eddie exclaimed.

  “And did she speak English then?” Eric pushed on, his mouth curving unattractively into his cheekbones. “What I mean is—were these sparks the international language of love or were they based on some bullshit Eddie fed you about a painting?”

  “How did you guess? Not a word of English—I just grunted—da, nyet,” I snapped, “and as to your second question, I thought you knew that Eddie has a master’s degree in bullshit?” Eddie and Grant and even Eric laughed, but Sylvia kept a tight grin. “That’s the problem with women today,” she said sternly, “they’re willing to overlook everything—”

  “What I want to know,” Eric cut her off (her half-parted mouth seemed to be on the verge of illuminating the full extent of her pain, making me want to erase all the men in the room and shroud her in a pink flannel quilt that would symbolize our universal feminine solidarity), “is if I had met you at the gallery first and drooled over some asinine artist who didn’t know a paintbrush from his dick, would there have been international sparks between us?”

  “Now that’s a thin dick!” Grant cried, chuckling.

  “Galleries are excellent pickup joints,” I enthused, “honey wells for the horny elite of this city. Only beware: you have to fawn over artists as if they were your own children.”

  “For you, I’d trot around naked and proclaim myself an exhibit,” Eric offered.

  “I wouldn’t want to see that turn into reality.” Grant laughed.

  “Are you flirting with my girlfriend, Conners?”

  “I didn’t know you were so territorial, Beltrafio—I heard from Sylvia that you date to sample, not to hog.”

  “I’m starting to think your interest in my love life is a little unhealthy,” Eddie remarked, and he and Grant exchanged glances.

  My face ignited from sudden shame. I rose from my chair, overcome by a yearning for the abandoned dance floor.

  “Are you leaving us?” Grant touched my arm.

  “Oh no, I just love that song,” I said, discerning with horror a disjointed confluence of beats and melodies, which quite possibly included “Le Freak,” “Bust a Move,” and “I Will Always Love You.” As I pushed past him, the room began to spin, and Eddie ceased to belong to me: he had turned into an indistinguishable particle in the complex self-propelling organism known as “men.”

  Only the stage, a desolate stretch of brown wood under flashing strobe lights and an outdated silver ball, beckoned to me. A dejected DJ clad in a pirate’s hat was holed up behind a protruding black podium that once must have been intended for dignitaries and informed lecturers. The music jumped from hip-hop to Madonna to seventies disco, remixes roaring from two giant speakers. Women in cliques around the bar waited for the men to approach them, as they sipped tall drinks and chatted with feigned indifference. The men stared concertedly at the women, measuring their faces and bodies, weighing their own desperation against a gauge of who they could and couldn’t get. Some were already mingling, conversing, passing their numbers on wet paper napkins, but no one danced. No matter how many tequilas, Kahluas, vodkas, bourbons, beers, cosmopolitans, martinis, Bloody Marys, Sex on Kitchen Counters, and Naughty Orgasms they had had, nothing seemed potent enough to break through their inhibitions.

  The dance floor belonged solely to me: a breathing, pulsating organ, sprouting thorns that pricked my feet in evenly timed beats. Brown velvet vines rose from the ground and entwined my ankles, my entire body held captive by the sounds vibrating on my tongue. The floor is music, is flesh, its inanimate surface infuses the willing with life. The DJ-pirate, catching my fever, plugged in “Bust a Move.” As I flailed and tapped and twirled and shook my head and chest from side to side, screaming “Something Fellow, I am Yellow,” eyes began to turn my way, out of curiosity, or perhaps to see if the wild beast on display could tap into their own primordial instincts. Men and women interrupted their conversations to look at me, and I was no longer alone with the music, but I was with them. Feeling triumphant, triumfucknant, thinking I’d transcended everything—the dance floor, the bar, the men, even my very predicament. I was the sultaness again … Like gnats their eyes landed on my skin, their superficial perceptions stinging, invigorating my blood, swelling my vanity; I moved faster, faster, until the disparate parts of my body seemed to fly off my torso, and my legs, moving by themselves as if disconnected from my brain, cut across the dance floor and burned it with my heat.

  Then I felt a sweaty hand squeeze my elbow:

  “You’re a wild one,” a voice cried into my ear. Eric’s reptilian countenance materialized inches from my face.

  The abrupt cessation of movement brought me to a sudden awareness of other people. The dance floor had miraculously sprung to life; the same stationary bodies that had lavished me with their disdain were now laughing and thrashing against one another in an ecstatic communal dance.

  “Don’t you dance?” I spoke at last, relieved.

  “I’d need a gallon of beer before I could do what you did up here! You got this whole place in a frenzy—impressive!” He surveyed my face with his invasive toad eyes. “So, you’re getting married to Alex and screwing Beltrafio on the side. I like that, but it’s not that original.”

  “I don’t know what you mean—”

  “Alex has already sent me an official invitation to your wedding. But I promise I won’t tattle tale; it’s quite the opposite. I want you to go out with me. Hell, if you’re dating two guys, why not add a third? Now that would be original, wouldn’t it?”

  “Don’t be insane,” I cried.

  “I find that Russian women are excellent in bed, and very submissive in the kitchen.”

  You’re an astounding idiot, an idiotpanarama, a mudila, I was on the verge of saying, but instead, I merely observed, “While others are frigid virgins and don’t know what a spatula is, right?”

  “That’s what I like about you, Emma—you like to joke around just like me. You need a fun guy, somebody who can party hard with you and take you dancing, not that self-important asshole over there you call
your boyfriend. He doesn’t know what the word ‘fun’ means—he drives us all crazy with work, and he fired Alex for nothing, I tell you, for nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was plotting to oust me as well. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “I can’t see anything,” I muttered, and suddenly, without thinking, without knowing if it was true, without harnessing my mouth, added, “I’m in love.”

  “Then why marry someone else?” he asked. He was genuinely befuddled.

  “It’s complicated—”

  “Well why don’t we ask Eddie—hey Beltrafio, get over here before I ask your girlfriend out on a date!” Eric screamed across the dance floor and within seconds I saw Eddie moving through the crowd toward us. His gaze gripped me from across the room.

  “What are you doing?” I muttered in fear at Eric. “What do you want from me?”

  “I told you what I want,” he exclaimed with sudden cheer. “I want to fuck you—you fuck me and I won’t tell!”

  I laughed at him uproariously—because Eddie stood within inches of me.

  “Is Eric entertaining you?” Eddie asked both of us, but his eyes were glued to mine.

  “I was just complimenting Emma on her dancing,” Eric said. “Did you know she’s a professional?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t surprise me—” Eddie’s features constricted from an inability to hide his contempt for Eric.

  “I’ve taken jazz classes in college—”

  “Hey, Beltrafio, I may look dumb but when it comes to women, I’m fucking Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Hey Eric, I think Grant over there needs you,” Eddie said, pointing at Grant and Sylvia leaning into one another, with bourbons in their hands.

  “Listen, Beltrafio, Sylvia seriously fucked up, I’m telling you. It wasn’t me.”

  “Let’s discuss this later,” Eddie said with irritation.

  As he started to walk away, Eric called out to me, “Remember what I said to you Emma. Anytime!”

  My palms froze from congealed sweat when Eddie touched them, and I held the tears back.

  “What did he say to you?” he asked.

  “Nothing—he—”

  “You shouldn’t dance like that—”