The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Just noting that you’re still desirable,” he chirped, “—good sign for the future,” and I wondered suddenly, was he always this annoying?

  The spotless white eighties kitchen opened onto a carpeted living room, where two black spheres (otherwise known as footstools) abetted a phallic-shaped glittering red leather spaceship (otherwise known as a couch). The sexual imagery was not lost upon me. A narrow staircase, leading to his room, was crowded with his degrees, awards, and gold statues for fencing competitions; an enlarged 15 x 20 photograph of his face hung brazenly on the central wall next to the bathroom, invoking comparisons to presidents.

  He approached me slowly, tepidly, each move tentative, with a corollary revision to each step, indecisiveness warping his face. His hands shook as he unbuttoned my jeans and raised my black T-shirt above my head, and I let him, because his hesitation soothed me, allayed the memory of Eric’s uninvited assault on my body. His eyes were magnificent and dark, his expression stoic like that of a warrior in confining metal armor. He bit his voluptuous lower lip, as if the process of undressing me produced acute pain. His deference and beauty devastated me; I felt a pang of desire for him, desire that seemed to flow directly from the well of his fear of me. I wanted to scream: existential crisis here—woman on the verge of imploding! But, as in all good stories of confusion coupled with the act of betrayal, this intense feeling was followed by the still more intense feeling of a rope tightening round my throat and suffocating me, which could also have been a reflex to body odor, which in Alex’s case was DKNY cologne for men.

  Alex robotically removed his clothes, retaining the purple Calvin Klein underwear and alas, he was practically naked. “I’m all yours,” he declared, “but before we proceed—let me serenade you!” And with that let me, Alex spread his feet shoulder distance apart, took a deep breath of air, and let out a sound. It took me a few seconds to realize that the instrumentals for The Phantom of the Opera were issuing from his stereo, and that Alex was singing, in a gorgeous countertenor, “The Phantom of the Opera is here inside your mind!” and marching thunderously in a quartet of steps to the titillations of his own voice. Only a Russian man could perform a Broadway tune and lightly tap (barefoot) without wincing, without, for an instance, worrying that he might appear gay if anything, his features strained as though he were performing massive masculine feats, such as lifting boulders or impersonating the Terminator. Still, I had to admit: like his face, so was his body proof of God’s virtuosity and commitment to perfection—and not surprisingly, Alex also had a superb voice.

  Who would have guessed that he had once dreamed of the stage like Bella? That in Russia he had taken ballet and tap lessons and envisioned himself the next Baryshnikov or Godunov with a jazzy edge, that there were piano, voice, and guitar lessons woven into his daily schedule of advanced math, physics, penmanship, and German by his ingenious mother? Were we all, these children of immigrants, doomed to nostalgia for our youths when we were tiny gods, doomed to perform only in the close quarters of our lovers while longing for packed houses of adoring audiences—for their enthralled eyes and exuberant applause to placate our perennial inferiority complexes? Wouldn’t I want to be married to a man who could regale me with tunes from the Sound of Music, Les Misérables, Cats, and, most vitally, Fiddler on the Roof? How many times while lying in the arms of a boyfriend did I wish (albeit in my subconscious) that he would burst into “If I were a rich man, Yabadabadabada!”

  Soon the instrumentals turned to “Think of Me” and Alex exclaimed, “Think of me—join me, join me, Lena, before I say goodbye.” Although it felt preposterous and remarkably unsexual, I jumped off the bed (who was I to resist a chance to perform?) and, hitting my mezzo-soprano, thundered: “Think of me, think of me, Alex, when I say goodbye, remember me once in a while, la, la, la if you try la la …” My clothes miraculously dissolved in an act of jolly solidarity. I was in my brassiere and, farcically enough, as if I had planned the entire thing myself, purple polka-dotted underwear. Alex’s hands were now busily attempting to rip through the complex architectural design of Victoria’s Secret’s Brassiere #5: God’s gift to virgins.

  A trickle of laughter spilled from the corners of my mouth, but I held the bulk of it in and summoned an austere, properly aroused expression for to my shock—Alex’s penis had become erect!

  But it wasn’t until he produced a gold-tinted condom and waved it jubilantly in the air that the horror and absurdity of this moment came to me.

  His fingers crawled over my breasts and then snuck ever so gingerly between my thighs—naturally, to prepare me for his grand entrance. And what did I do, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what did I do, mothers and grandmothers of the high moral court: what did I do? I burst into cacophonous, plug-my-own-ears laughter. I was laughing so hard my stomach turned into a trampoline that might have given him a considerable flip if he stepped on it. Thank the Lord Almighty that my underwear was still covering my vagina, and though one nipple had shamelessly popped out of Brassiere #5, the other breast was fully cloaked. I pushed the nipple back in, and oddly enough, burst into an even more crippling laughter. Oh, thou a silent mute with parted jaws and globular tears. Secretly, I hoped this would disgust Alex or scare him, or at least stop him in the midst of what appeared to be a steel-willed determination to consummate the act. He was desperate for consummation, for a wrapping up, if you will, for confirmation that he could do this and that I wanted him. But it was too late. I wanted only friendship now, only a sympathetic ear, or just an actual ear canal into which I could holler: I am in love! I don’t know why it took me so long to admit it outright, to Alex, to myself, or why I had to wait till Alex danced in the nude to Phantom of the Opera, till he was rubbing his gold member between my thighs, till the comedy of my predicament seemed to pry open my subconscious and spill its contents out like vomit triggered by overeating. So there I lay and there they lay: my feelings unfiltered through any notion of what should or should not be but simply bare, simply here, as they existed inside my mind, as they gurgled and fermented and became true despite myself. I was in love with Eddie—with Edward—with Ignatius Cyril Beltrafio. And it was not merely love caught in a moment, of the sort I felt in the aftermath of meeting Mrs. Beltrafio, which may have been gratitude for not taking her side, but the daily sort, the nagging sort, the stomach-churning sort, the smiling-blithely-and-idiotically-into-empty-space sort.

  “Did I do something wrong—is something the matter, Lenochka? Maybe this was a tad over the top, I admit it, but I—I wanted it to be spectacular. Are you not aroused?” He slumped down on the bed next to me and stopped the music with a slipper that seemed handily nearby. I was thankful for this little miracle.

  “Oh, no, no, no, Sasha, this is wonderful and very stimulating—you are spectacular—it’s not that—I’m just a horrible, miserable, abominable person.”

  “You seem to find this very amusing—this depiction of your own character—or is it me—have I made an utter fool of myself? Tell me honestly.”

  “No, it’s not you, Sashenka—it’s me—it’s all my fault. I’ve been—despicable—”

  “Believe me, Elena, I’ve already forgiven you, whatever it is—”

  “You’re not making this easy for me, Alex. I don’t know exactly how I arrived here—I was trying to please everyone, trying to do the right thing by everyone—by you especially! And I didn’t want to hurt anyone—well, the long and the short of it is that I’ve been—”

  “You’ve been naughty!” he returned with a sudden belligerent laugh.

  “What—wait—what?”

  “I’ve known for quite some time,” he said, turning away from me, his laughter subsiding into startling gloom. “The worst of it, of course, is that it’s Beltrafio—that’s the worst of it.”

  “How long? How long have you known?”

  “Oh, I started to suspect you a while back—I’m not Russian for nothing!” he cackled, his gaze menacing. “When you stopped actively pursuin
g sex with me, the notion that you were with someone else began to haunt me. But that it was Beltrafio—that I couldn’t have borne on my own—”

  “Oh God, oh God, that toad Eric told you—”

  “You should never underestimate your enemies, Elena Kabelmacher—how un-Russian of you!”

  “I thought my feelings would change, I wanted them to change.”

  “A few days ago Eric called me to say he won’t be coming to our wedding—that it was morally repugnant to him. He said you’re still with Eddie—is that true?”

  “Eric is a vile, vile person—”

  “Answer me—”

  “I thought you and I were perfect for each other. I was planning to dump him, I was planning all the time, but then I—you see—I—”

  “So dump him now!”

  “How can you stand to be with me? How could you take it—all that time talking to me, sharing yourself with me, knowing, knowing that I was with him—how you must have hated me!”

  “Oh, I’ve never hated you. I’m a realist, moya dorogaya Lenochka, or haven’t you realized by now? I pride myself on being a postmodern man, on having serious insight into human nature, into the putrefaction of desire. I want you to dump him now. I don’t care about the past. We’ll get married as planned and never mention him again.”

  What a glorious option he was giving me—saving me from myself, forgiving me, giving me what I’d always wanted in life: a clean slate. Oh, if only I could clean Eddie out—if only there were a detox program for people like me: a special spa treatment, like a man-exfoliation mask or a turning-a-new-leaf bath or just simply a laser to dull my obsessive, cantankerous, lovelorn brain. But no such spa existed nor ever will. As the case remained, the idea of never seeing Ignatius again made me sick, quite literally. I endured actual symptoms: rapid breath-depriving inhalations otherwise known as “the no-more-fabulous-sex asthma attack,” a bout of extreme stomach nervousness otherwise known as “abandoned lover’s diarrhea,” and even the old enigmatic rash otherwise known as “the incurable liar’s hives.”

  “I wish that was possible, Sashenka, but unfortunately I’ve—I’ve fallen in love.”

  “You just think you’re in love with Eddie because you’ve been copulating with him. Once we make love—don’t you see—we must make love!”

  “But you’re too late—if only—if only then in November when I begged you …”

  “Haven’t you understood why I’ve been so reticent—what a fool you’ve been! I wanted to wait, not for all the stupid reasons I gave you, not because I was afraid for you—I was afraid of you.”

  “Of me—why—what do you mean?”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you and I wanted it to be special, phenomenal! I wanted you to always remember our first time, to look back on it with fondness. I had such romantic ideas but more than that, I was worried that you were experienced and I—well, I not so much.”

  “You’re a virgin?” I asked with horror.

  “If you must put labels on things, yes, technically I am.”

  “Good God, Alex,” I murmured, “I had no idea, I thought—oh, Sashenka, I’m so very sorry! But you should have told me right away.”

  “Mother always said: be cautious with women, women are very sensitive about sex—she just never prepared me for how sensitive I’d be.”

  “And to think how much you argued with me! If I had only known, I might have—I might have acted differently.” I paused, choking on this possibility: I might have never looked or touched Eddie or entered La Cote Basque’s bathroom had Alex had enough sechel to be upfront with me; it would have been morally implausible to abandon him then. I thought of destiny, of its imperceptible forks in the road, a slight tilt to the right instead of the left, and with our own free will, we alter our fate irreversibly. Eddie was my irreversible fork.

  “Can’t you just do it with me? Can’t you do me that favor—you owe me at least that.”

  “I can’t!”

  “I’m better than him in every way. I’ll be better in bed. I’ll be a feminist for you—do you want me to pledge my devotion to feminism—is that what’s holding you back?” Melancholy spread from his eyes into the rest of his face and swam there, under his skin, like a thousand muted gray fish. “I need you,” he whispered. “I need you in my life.”

  “Are you listening to me? I’m in love with him; I’m so in love with him I don’t know if I’ll survive …”

  “Do you seriously expect me to pity you? God! I just kept thinking, ‘this is her last hoorah before marriage, her last man before me, before our forever vows.’ I wanted to give you space, time. I thought you’d come to me with worldly understanding, with appreciation, you’d feel so lucky to have me—never, ever, in all my calculations did I ever assume you’d choose him over me.”

  “You assumed too much, Alex. Didn’t you know anything about the draw sex has on a person?”

  “What’s sex when the rest of your life hangs in the balance? If you try to marry him—why, your grandmother will eat him for breakfast!” He struggled to maintain civility but his voice snapped. “Weren’t you the one always thundering about what you went through in Russia—all your purported anti-Semitism? How could you ever conceive of yourself with this, this, this ignoramus?”

  I grabbed my clothes and began to dress manically, laboring to get inside my jeans and shirt. Love didn’t seem to matter; love was a pragmatic notion, maneuverable, forgettable, and reversible. He reminded me of the way I had once spoken of love to Eddie: Love is a concept, dependent on our wills … spoken before I knew love, before I had fallen.

  “I know what he is,” I murmured. Ah, but alas, the true blow was not in the telling but in the way a single memory, a single image of Eddie kissing my face goodbye at the airport, surfaced and thawed my face. When I opened my eyes I saw that Alex had become alarmingly white. He glared without seeming to see me, and his mouth, at first failing to emit sound, began hurtling words at an accelerating speed: “Whore! Blyat! Who does such a thing to a person? To a man? What kind of monster are you? Chyort, what are we going to tell our parents—what about the invitations? All the fucking invitations have been sent out already! I’ll look like a degenerate. Do you realize what you’ve done to me—this will ruin my mother!”

  “I’m so very sorry, Sashenka,” I mumbled in fear, “you can tell her you left me—”

  “Don’t you dare call me ‘Sashenka,’ you’ve lost that right; second of all, I’m not a liar like you. Oh, how you snowballed my mother, oh, how she cooed about you—Lenochka this and Lenochka that, and she may be outspoken, but she’s gorgeous and what an excellent person!” He waited for my response, but my mouth wouldn’t open. “Do you know what that asshole did—he fired me, fired me for nothing, so that he could have you all to himself! When he finds out what a prevaricating blyat you are—an egomaniac like him—he’ll dump you faster than I am going to walk out that door!” He pointed at his own door and briskly walked toward it, his beautiful bare chest still on display, and there he stood, wavering, as if there were one more score to settle, one extra tidbit of evidence to present: because he was a good person, after all, my Sashenka! “Fool—you’re a fool! Don’t you know how many women he’s been with? Traded a good guy for a bad one, you foolish bitch!” And for lack of the other slipper, he hurled a blanket at his stereo, which accidentally clicked from Phantom of the Opera to Eurythmics Greatest Hits: “Sweet dreams are made of this … everyone wants to use you!” Alex twisted the doorknob with the heavy air of a man who’s been stabbed and shot, and from across the threshold, cried, “I should have guessed that all your feminism was bullshit—you’re just an ordinary whore!” Then, as if infused with new energy, as if he could already see flames engulfing me in hell, he raced down the staircase, cackling, his contorted visage igniting in me an irrepressible urge to strangle my own neck.

  I crawled across the room to his desk on all fours like a CIA field operative and, surreptitiously removing the mammoth re
ceiver from the dinosaur-era telephone, dialed my house. To my great relief, Bella picked up.

  “Bella,” I said, “I need you now! I’m at Alex’s house.”

  “I smell a rat,” she exclaimed happily, for she always wanted to smell rats as a long sufferer of housewifely ennui. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re done for—broken up!”

  “You’re just in time. Alla Bagdanovich and Mother just agreed—at long last—on pink orchids.”

  “Oh Lord,” I mumbled.

  “Relax, melodrama queen,” she said. “I’ll get you in ten minutes.” By which, of course, she meant she’d drive the twenty miles at twice the speed limit, because Bella, with her spectacular face and blonde hair, never got tickets, not even from female police officers.

  Bella arrived in seven minutes, exchanged a few civilized pleasantries with Alex, who was concentrating intently on the TV, and safely ushered me into the driveway without his supposed notice.

  “Confess,” Bella demanded once she locked the car doors and turned the air conditioning on full blast. “Confess all your sins to your older and wiser sister.”

  “Sins, what can be my sins?”

  “That you have a lover in New York you’re mad about and that’s why you won’t marry Alex.” She flashed me a wide, insinuating smile.

  “How—how did you—”

  “Oh, I didn’t; I was just fantasizing!” She laughed freely and unreservedly, holding her stomach, stuttering, “Oh, Grandma, Grandma will be in—ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaa—in—purgatory, and our poor, poor, poor mother, hah, hah, hee, hee, will be blamed for everything.”

  “I’m a terrible person, Bellochka,” I whimpered, collapsing my head on the dashboard.