The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  During our fifth day in Rome, a certain Veronica Rabinsky (aka Rabinovich) set her sights on our Bella. After spying on her for several days, she barged in on my parents in the midst of a tumultuous debate: Russian Jews were being transferred to two coastal towns to wait for their entry visas to the US.

  “Ostya is cheaper, I heard from the Bershovskys,” my father was saying.

  “But the Ladispoli apartments have better access to the beach,” my mother held.

  “No, no, you mustn’t even consider Ostya—everyone from the provinces is going there!” Veronica announced from behind my father’s back. “All the Moscovites are going to Ladispoli, end of story.” My mother broke into a glowing smile and instantly offered Veronica a seat next to her.

  Veronica moved like a samovar on legs, wide-armed and confident, zealously determined to control life’s chaotic trajectories. Naturally, the first victims of such zeal are one’s family members; her husband and her only child, Igor, were jammed deeply under her thumb.

  “I hear all the Moscovites are off to Florence,” she said, vigorously exploiting our common bond, and failing to mention that she herself was originally from Mogilev Podolsk, a small town in Ukraine.

  “I terribly want to go,” my mother murmured and threw a menacing glance at my father.

  “Well, we decided to play it safe.” Veronica softened her voice, picking up on my parents’ strife. “My husband”—she pointed at a skinny gray looking man sitting next to an even skinnier boy three tables away from us—“says Florence can wait.”

  “Now that’s a smart man!” my father thundered.

  With that, the Rabinskys transferred themselves to our yard sale table permanently. Two weeks after our sojourn in Rome, all the Russian Jews were transferred to seaside towns to await their entry visas into the United States.

  We ended up in Ladispoli together with the Rabinskys, our apartment two floors above theirs. Veronica’s pimply son, Igor, was a miniature version of his mother, only without the vitality or the charm. At eighteen, he was a surly, negative character who never spoke unless there was cause to criticize: the Italians were loud and mannerless; the people from Kiev and especially Odessa chafed at his perfect Russian; and the conditions in the apartment were below his expectations of the coveted “West.” Only Bella had the ability to brighten his complexion and raise his eyebrows into a semi-circle above his glum eyes. Besides the defect of his skin (which made his father and mother lovingly refer to him as “our leper son”), Igor had excellent features—a straight thin nose, rich brown eyes, coarse copper hair, and gaunt cheekbones. He smacked of the emaciated Jesus and the depressed Raskolnikov. During our communal excursions to the black-sanded beaches of Ladispoli, Igor trailed after Bella like a tail she couldn’t quite cut off her ass. He neither addressed her nor looked at her, but zeroed in on her breasts, which offered him solace. He would stand in perfect stillness, his feet sinking into the burning sand, his hands clamped against skinny hips, a white dry film caking on his lower lip. And she would laugh and run into the water, her breasts bopping up and down, falling out of the tiny red scraps designed to hide them. “What do you think of him,” I asked once when we were alone. “Who?” “You know who, pimply Igor, I mean, would you like him if he wasn’t pimply?” “He’s a bore, a depressing, long-winded bore,” she cried out. “You miss Nicholai?” “Don’t speak of my Nicholai in the same breath as Igor!” “Nicholai was an even bigger bore,” I told her, recalling his silly recitations from Romeo and Juliet. “You little twerp, what do you know of love, of its sublime pain!” “Nicholai raped you—is that the pain you mean? He raped you that first time, Bella, why do you pretend he was so wonderful?” I yelled but it was wasted breath—Bella would never speak of it, never admit to having been abused; such weakness of spirit was not to be tolerated in our home. She looked at me defiantly and said, “Besides, I have my eye set on a fancy American.” “You don’t know any fancy Americans,” I pointed out. “Oh, yes, I do—I just saw him on TV. His name is Tom Brokaw!”

  It just so happened that we received our visas to America earlier than the Rabinskys, and despite “tearful” goodbyes and promises to reconnect in the States, I never thought we’d see Igor and his parents again. But two years later, the Rabinskys showed up at our one-bedroom apartment on Morris Lane to have tea and never left. Had my mother known that Veronica Rabinsky had planned in 1982 to marry off her pimply son to our Goddess Bella, she would have banished Veronica from our yard table back in Rome. But no one fathomed, not even my grandmother, that a woman could have that much foresight. No one imagined that Veronica’s incessant praise of my grandmother’s cooking and my mother’s excellent looks and my father’s brain were stepping stones to a successful merger—a plot devised, after all, by a provincial brain.

  Besides, given Bella’s quick Americanization, we assumed she would end up with an American. High school brought Bella euphoric popularity and an infinite array of suitors. Bella dated the crème de la crème of high school: the muscle-sprouting, beer-guzzling, God-fearing, sexually advanced football players. She paraded them in our home like daggers to stick in Grandmother’s gut. With her smug smile and manicured fingers pressed under her chin, she welcomed our grandmother’s roar: “Sex—I hope you are not having any sex!” But it fell on deaf ears. Not only was Bella technically doing “it” (she did not fear Grandmother’s wrath, venereal diseases, or getting pregnant—she only feared needy men), she was enjoying it, and threatening Grandmother with a life dedicated to casual screwing, drinking, and the stage.

  For Bella dreamed of becoming an actress. She would jump on my bed in her underwear and bra, cradling an invisible microphone and mouth everything Madonna, and I would brim with pride, imagining her face splattered all over US Weekly, People Magazine, and the Enquirer. She rebelled, not like other children of Russian immigrants rebelled, by smoking pot on the sly and still becoming computer scientists, or by crashing their parents’ cars into the neighbor’s fence after a drunken party and still ending up in dental school, but by doing the unthinkable: leaving.

  What ensued during the year that Bella turned twenty-two would forever be dubbed in the family as Bella’s mishugas. Bella received her BA from Northwestern University with a respectable major in economics and a minor in drama. Igor was still buzzing like an irritating fly in her hair whom she swatted repeatedly but couldn’t quite kill. He endured her serial dating and indifference to his longing glances with the stoicism of a monk. He accepted, after his fourth proposal of marriage, the state of “friendship” she offered as a final peace offering, and endured as a loyal “friend” her tales of exploits. After a bevy of interviews, Bella had several offers from major Chicago consulting firms. All of her friends from college coveted these jobs, and Bella beamed at her unexpected success. She didn’t even seem to mind that Veronica Rabinsky, her husband, Kiril, and Igor came to our house to celebrate her success, or that following dinner, in the close quarters of our library, Igor prostrated himself once more with a fifth marriage proposal. Marriage, as he put it this time, would be a binding of mutual admiration between them, if not love, a statement suggested to him by his clever mother who believed that the gates of womanhood could only be broken down by dogged persistence.

  That night after everyone retired to their private quarters to knock on wood in the jittery anticipation of a wedding, my sister sneaked into my room dressed in travel gear and rolling suitcase. “Don’t panic,” she preempted. “I’m going to New York. There’s a one a.m. flight. A girl I know from Northwestern said I could stay with her.” “New York,” I cried, “it’s midnight—have you lost your mind?” “Keep your mouth shut!” “But why—you can have all these prestigious jobs—what are you doing?” I was seventeen, dreaming of college, dreaming of emulating my sister’s GPA. “I’ve turned them down, every one of them—including Igor. Fuck it—fuck it all,” she said, “I’m going to be an actress—on Broadway! I’ve already signed up for classes at the New School.” �
��New School? I’ve never heard of it.” “You haven’t heard of a lot of things,” she chided. “Oh, Bellochka, you can turn Igor down but you don’t have to run away to New York—there are classes here. This just seems so radical, so final, as if I’ll never see you again,” I muttered in fear, “Grandma will have a fit—” “Look, if I don’t do this now, I’ll never get out. I’ll be stuck here like every other child of Russian immigrants, making money, bearing children, buying big houses, and hating my life—” “How do you know they all hate their lives?” “They may not, but I will,” she said. “Say goodbye to them for me.” She kissed both my cheeks and her figure receded into the black void of our palatial hallway.

  I presented the note to the family at breakfast the next morning: “Dear Loved Ones, I’ve decided to try my luck at acting in New York. Will call from there! Kisses, Bella.” It unleashed such a foul-mouthed tirade from Grandmother, a person who had denounced profanities as the terrain of the basest simpletons and goys, that I thought a provincial demon had entered her body. My father proposed to call his contacts at Friendly Airlines (whose stock was part of his portfolio) and manually retrieve her. Grandmother, never being one to half-ass an operation, demanded that we contact the FBI. Only my mother remained calm and, if I wasn’t entirely hallucinatory, quietly elated for her daughter. “What do you want us to tell the FBI,” she said, trying to reason with Grandmother, “that your granddaughter needed to flee to another state to be free of you?” But Grandmother didn’t see the logic in this. “Freedom! Freedom!” she yelled. “What an imbecilic, idiotic, godforsaken, meshugganah word!”

  A year later Bella returned from New York, silent and dour, with a new cropped hairdo, maroon lipstick, and a black ripped T-shirt in the style of eighties punk. She did not speak about what happened, and whenever Grandmother would question her, Bella would say, “Nothing happened, I just didn’t get lucky.” All Bella told us was that she shared an apartment with a girl from Northwestern, a graduate student of English Literature who loved theater as much as Bella. But she never described her auditions or talked about her job as a hostess in some fancy restaurant. We knew she barely made any money because my father incessantly complained about having to funnel money into her bank account. Although he threatened to cut her off if she didn’t come home, we knew that Bella could have stayed on—she always read our father correctly—but when her lease ran out she packed her bags and left New York on the first available flight. She showed up at midnight on our doorstep, her face drawn and fatigued.

  Igor showed up a week later with a dozen red carnations, cheap and already rotting, but they had a strange effect on our Bella; she wept, welcomed him with open arms, and upon his sixth proposal of marriage, she agreed.

  After they were firmly engaged, Igor began to openly reminisce about his walks in birch forests, his parents’ dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, “real” kefir, nitrate-free hard salami, and non-alcoholic beer, known as kvac. Igor turned out to be a repressed Russophile, who spoke of Russian literature as though each text was a woman he once loved, and vowed to make their future children read Tolstoy by age six. I blamed my mother and grandmother for Igor. For them, his irksome qualities were outweighed by a heavily touted resume. He ended up at MIT almost as soon as he arrived in America, placing not only out of all high school math and science requirements, but the first two years of college math and science as well. Although he struggled with English, he managed to graduate with a 3.8 GPA and entered a PhD program at Northwestern University to study artificial intelligence. During the summers he tackled the English language with something bordering on fanaticism, and after four years in America, he spoke in perfect grammatical structures with a grating accent that was neither Russian nor British, but his own brand of universal snobbism. Every time Veronica waltzed through our front door, she recited his achievements to my grandmother as though she were depositing a magic potion into Grandmother’s hypothalamus, which kept her in a state of inane ecstasy for hours.

  After Bella’s interlude in New York, Grandmother became convinced that Igor was the rock that could tether Bella to the ground and keep her from falling down the bottomless pit of “the American Dream.” “I know he’s an insufferable mudila,” Grandmother would say when I brought evidence against him, “but he’ll make your sister happy! He’ll be a good husband. He’ll keep her head straight and keep her away from all those artsy ruffians without a future.” These invisible artsy ruffians were the men that Bella must have slept with, the New York men she must have met at bars and acting classes and auditions, the men who never stepped through our door, but we knew they existed, as certainly as we knew that the year Bella spent away from us existed. “Why don’t you give Igor another chance?” Grandmother would nudge me. “He’s brilliant, and he’s not bad looking.”

  Igor was in fact not good looking. His face, after years of pimple therapy, was still pimply and gray, concealed from the world by oily reddish hair. His features had lost their youthful delicacy and proportion, perhaps from battling Bella for so long, and he had grown, we all had to admit, uglier over the years. He was always seized by some interesting idea about society or computers that was too sophisticated to be understood by the ignoramuses around him.

  But when in Bella’s presence, Igor’s large brown eyes seemed to glisten from a secret fount of happiness. He diligently asked her about her feelings, goals, dreams. And Bella told him that she longed for the stage—an actress, a singer, a dancer—anything that would make her feel that her beauty and talents were not being wasted in life, that there was a reason behind her flawless nose and sapphire eyes and a gold mane so naturally shiny that Russian beauticians wanted to use her in their salon ads. She lamented her degree in economics, her “stupid” year in New York, and she shared Igor’s love for Russian literature, although she read most of it in English. Igor listened to Bella with such concerted admiration that she mistook it for love. “No one could love me the way he loves me,” she confided in me. “But where’s the lust, the desire?” I asked. “All you care about are looks—I’ve looked into his soul, and there’s beauty within,” she insisted. “Empty words,” I shot back, “you’re not in love with him.” “I don’t think I fall in love as easily as you,” she told me.

  To this day, I keep returning to that very moment, replaying it over and over in my head. And in each reenactment, I remind her what Igor said when she confessed her longing for the Broadway stage: “You’ll grow out of it.” In each reenactment, I say decisively: Igor is a viper, uglier within than he is on the surface, he’ll eat your flesh and once he gains entry, he’ll devour your soul. He’ll lock you in his immaculate prison of intellectual puff and moral righteousness, in his intellectualisms and realisms and chauvinisms, stinking, all of them, of hypocrisy and vapidity, and then he’ll swallow the key. He will carefully plot out the passages through which you’ll inevitably walk but the doors will close, one by one, extinguishing your last flicker of hope, your plan B escape route. I scream at her: Imagine your life five, ten, fifteen years into the future. Run while you still have legs, run while you still have a will. But in each reenactment I fail to speak, or if I speak, I fail to move her. And I see that Bella’s future was strangely sealed.

  Now, as we drove up to my parents’ mansion, I said, “I’m going back to New York.”

  “To your forbidden lover?” She spoke with joy, her small mouth breaking into a warm glowing smile, her beauty spilling all around me.

  “Yes, to Eddie,” I said, speaking his name out loud for the first time.

  “Wait until tomorrow, tell them you’re leaving. You need to tell them you broke up with Alex.”

  “No. You tell them. It’s my turn to run. I don’t want to talk to them anymore. I just want to pack and leave.”

  No one was at home. I called Eddie and said, “I’m coming back, I’m coming back to you. Now. Today. I want to go with you to your secret cottage in the wild woods of Maine.”

  Within minutes, he purchase
d a ticket for me to New York on that same day, and Bella drove me to the airport. As the car approached the terminal, screeching against the onslaught of traffic, we turned to one another, Bella and I, looking in silence until tears rolled out of our eyes.

  “Never be afraid, never give up, derzhis!” She said what we said to each other as children, children going into battle, children hiding, children learning to survive.

  Escape from New York

  The city receded slowly behind us as we crawled along the George Washington Bridge. Cars grunted and grazed each other’s backsides. I rolled down a window and breathed in the diesel fuel with mysterious pleasure. I was smiling. My face burned from the glare of the hot August sun. He sped, passing every car, his eyes taking on a lion’s ferocity, his hands barely on the wheel. “I want you right now!” I said, as an empty highway unfurled before us.

  I grabbed his thigh, his erection already swelling between his legs, and the sudden thrill of wanting and being able to have silenced me. You are here for me, for me, for the taking. And I, at last, am here for you.

  Eight hours later we entered Acadia and the road narrowed, taking us into dark, uninhibited nature. Black mountains soared at our sides, pockmarked with yellow, orange, and red stones as if to signal the dawn of fall, and wild flowers peeked out of uneven grasslands in sweeping fuchsias, lavenders, and whites, bowing intermittently to make room for giant pines and evergreens. Brown earth unfurled at the feet of majestic orange-leafed oaks and naked birches swayed like emaciated ballerinas attempting flight. How did I get here, I wondered with a mingling of rapture and trepidation, how did I manage to grab this piece of happiness for myself—to do that which seemed impossible one year ago, one month, one week ago?