The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “You are Eddie! Giant pleasure to meet you!” My mother opened the door in a glittering black sweater and silk black pants.

  “Same here, same here, I’ve heard so much about you, Mrs. Kabelmacher.”

  “Call me Sonya. No need for being official.”

  “Sonya,” Eddie repeated, smiling. He had prepared for this moment in advance, practicing each name in the taxi from O’Hare Airport, and in his arms he held a 1990 Château Lafite Rothschild, a bouquet of fresh lilacs, and an egg-shaped box of Truffles from La Maison Du Chocolat.

  “Vaw, I speechless! Sank you for your romantic thoughts,” my mother exclaimed, even though she had no idea how expensive these romantic thoughts were, for we were neither wine drinkers nor chocolate eaters.

  In the background I could hear my father shouting, “Is he here? Is he here? I can’t find my brown pants—Sonya, where are my brown pants?” and Grandmother groaning from the living room in Russian, “Oy, gevalt, may the Lord save us all—the goy is here!”

  “I assume that’s me—the goy,” Eddie said, laughing, plucking out the one recognizable word.

  “Maman, everyone can hear you,” my mother exclaimed, arching her voice above a tolerable decibel.

  “So what!” Grandmother bellowed back, “I want him to know that we know who he is!”

  But my grandmother’s rough antics melted as soon as she was confronted with Eddie.

  “So tall,” she murmured as she came closer with a slight skip and proceeded to scrutinize his face, “and handsome—very handsome. Almost blond, yes, a hazelnut hue in the hair, and the eyes—are they blue—in fact, they are blue.” Then, blushing like a schoolgirl, she extended her hand and announced, “Zinayida Genadevna Guildenshtein, ochen priyatno.”

  “Ignatius Cyril Beltrafio, but everyone calls me Eddie,” he said, shaking her hand.

  “Nice To Meet Voo,” Grandmother belted out the four English words she knew.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Eddie said, flashing his splendid smile.

  “Are ze women bozering you already?” My father materialized from behind my grandmother, as though he had been secretly sniffing out the situation before stepping into it, and announced, “Semeyon Kabelmacher—ve chave been awaiting impatiently for you!”

  “Zere’s not much in fridge,” my mother said, “we’re going to big event tonight. My brozer-in-law just bought Moscow Nights from previous owner and now he vants to make it more fun, better dance music, and has surprise for us.”

  “Is that a club?” Eddie asked. “You’re all going to a dance club?”

  “No,” my mother replied with a laugh, “it’s a restaurant vhere we eat, sing, and dance.”

  “Oh,” Eddie looked confused.

  “But if you hungry now,” my mother offered, “we have meat soup and steak stew, or salami and bologna—very tasty if you like?”

  “You don’t have to worry on account of me—I’ll have whatever Emma’s having.”

  “Who?” my father exclaimed in a derisive voice.

  Grandmother joined in. “Tell him we don’t like the way you butchered your name.”

  “Grandmother wants you to call me Lena,” I interpreted for Eddie.

  “Lena is an excellent name,” he quickly corrected himself.

  “Oh, don’t listen to my mozer—I love her new name,” my mother said.

  “Yes, yes, both are great names!” Eddie let out a smile that froze midway, like a physical manifestation of the stalemate within my family’s political climate.

  Moscow Nights was an enclave of the happily un-Americanized Russians. They arrived in cheerfully gaudy outfits, drawn by nostalgia to the surplus of vodka, the exclusivity of the Russian language, and the mutilated American songs that now resembled depressing Russian ballads. The dance floor was illuminated in flashing pink squares, and sprawling gold-plated chandeliers practically grazed bopping heads. Red tablecloths, ornate gilded vases of red roses, and a gold minidress on the lead singer perfectly rounded off the restaurant’s ambience. Women pranced around the dance floor like proud roosters, their multicolored feathers perfectly arrayed after a full day of primping. Their excellent features, accentuated by heavy strokes of makeup, gave them at once an air of inaccessibility and of sexual friskiness. Their hair was dyed either in a glistening yellow, a sleek bluish black, or a bright red hue that varied from eye-popping orange to a sultry auburn. And their bodies, voluptuous if they were married, reed thin if they were single, were stuffed into a size smaller than what your humble Midwestern saleslady might suggest. Their cramped black dresses revealed wide expanses of undulating breasts and backs rolling with fat. They were Rubenesque figures shaking with mirth and flirting indiscriminately with the old, the young, and the middle-aged. The men, untouched by the homophobic fears of American men, strutted across the dance floor looking busy and ambitious in bright orange, yellow, and purple shirts, either with ties or a few buttons undone to show off their masculine chest hair. The waiters generally spoke only in Russian—they were recent arrivals who as a general rule had been either speech therapists, economists, or depressed intellectuals in the Soviet Union, and were not too happy with such demanding customers as my grandmother who wanted to know if the Cornish hen was fresh, or if they were just saying that as part of the restaurant policy? One clever-tongue replied “We didn’t kill it with our bare hands a few seconds ago if that’s what you’re implying.” “Hoodlum!” Grandmother fired back, “hasn’t your mother taught you manners?” At moments like these Bella and I were quietly ecstatic that Grandmother did not speak a word of English.

  An enormous white table, offering an unobstructed view of the stage, awaited our family. Yakov, his wife Katya, and son Larry (aka Valery) were already seated there in silence, decked out in their shiniest royal attire. At the other end of the table, Igor hovered, paranoid, over his daughter. Sirofima wore a puffy satin white dress and her blonde hair was braided and wrapped around her head like a wreath.

  Eddie caused considerable commotion as he passed through a throng of people gathering around the dance floor. I could hear them murmuring in Russian, “There goes an American,” with a note of derision and respect, and in some of the female faces, I caught faint envy.

  “I’m Sirofima, but Americans call me Sam!”—Sirofima was the first one to greet Eddie with a note of caution—“but grandma thinks it sounds mannish so don’t call me that in front of her.”

  “All right,” Eddie said, smiling and gripping her tiny hand, “but just between us, it’s nice to meet you, Sam.” The child curtseyed, blushing, and ran back to her seat.

  “Nice to meet you,” Katya said.

  “We xhrespect Americans,” Yakov announced, shaking Eddie’s hand with unusual zeal.

  Katya leaned into her husband and unashamedly pinched his thigh under the table, so that he winced as he spoke. As she was a quiet woman with a round face and dark serene eyes that were difficult to read, she resorted to pinching her husband under tables to demonstrate her dissatisfaction with some utterance he made, an occurrence so frequent and powerful one felt that it held their marriage together.

  Larry was Katya’s stepson, a young man at odds with his surroundings. It was true that he loathed his father, but he loathed his stepmother more. The two parents were so concerned over Larry’s lack of a girlfriend that he called them, to their faces and behind their backs, “well-meaning sadists.” They bombarded him at dinner with such torturous questions as “Why aren’t you married yet?” when hapless Larry hadn’t been on a date for seven months (he was now twenty-nine); “Why aren’t you normal?” when Larry had difficulty with concepts such as “sociable” and “likeable”; “What is wrong with Galya, Nadya, Helen, etc. …” and many others they had set him up with, when the aforementioned culprits had not even returned his calls. Larry got his bachelor’s at the California Institute of Technology (a school not known for its abundance of females), majored in material engineering (a major in desperate need of females), and wa
s now working in a mostly male division of a highly specialized subfield at Maletura Corporation (whose single female was ten years older than Larry. She wore black-rimmed glasses that gave her that je ne sais quoi ugliness and Cleopatraesque allure. Larry feared her more than the flying dinosaur, Pteranodon).

  If Larry ever gets married, my mother liked to say, it’ll be because some woman tied up his hands and feet and held the wedding ceremony on her bed. “A shmata,” my grandmother called him, “a soaking rag!” But I didn’t agree. I always believed that if Larry ever did get tied down, he would untie himself eventually, and his true self—the essence that hid behind his hard black eyes—would emerge and gain power over time, squashing the girl’s independence the way his father squashed women.

  For when Yakov first fell in love with Katya, one could argue he had gone limp in the brain. Although he had blithely cheated on his first wife (Larry’s mother died when Larry was nine, giving birth to a stillborn son, and it was her absence, everyone believed, that directly impacted Larry’s social barometer), Yakov lost his philandering instincts upon meeting Katya a year later. A man who cared deeply about money, prestige, and women, Yakov became blind to the fact that Katya was poor, that her parents were uneducated farmers (they worked as cashiers at the vegetable market on Lenninsky Prospect), and that she was not Jewish. Nor was she a beauty. But her features were large and evocative of suppressed sexual desire, and she did not like to speak, a quality that has appealed to men since the evolution of the Homo sapien barbarian. For not only does the woman’s silence give men free rein to pontificate on any topic, it confirms their belief, flowing directly from their mothers’ breast milk, that they are geniuses. Yakov yearned for such admiration, so much so that when his beloved’s parents called Jews “blood-sucking thieves, money-grubbing kikes, and dirty mannerless zhlobs,” he had to pretend his hearing was impaired. “I couldn’t quite make out what they said,” he’d tell my father, “maybe I misheard!” After all, they assured him he was different, embraced him with vodka, open arms, and flapping, flattering tongues like Pavlovian dogs at the flicker of gold coins. Yakov had enough money to save them and their daughter ten times over from abject poverty. They encouraged her to marry him even as she protested that she did not love him. Love in Russia was never a requirement, and Katya quickly understood that her petulant demands for love needed to be submerged under larger considerations, such as the fact that Yakov wanted to go to America, and this—for a Russian, a non-Jew who could never leave the Soviet Union “legally” the way Jews were leaving—was a dream.

  Two years after they married, Yakov, Katya, and Larry boarded the plane to Vienna on their way to America. Larry had always secretly suspected Katya of grave insincerity, but when he mentioned it to his father, the latter simply replied, “Women are capricious creatures, my son; one moment they loathe you, the next they want to scrub your feet and lick between your toes.” His father’s prediction, in all its ribald irony, came true. After twenty-two years in America, Katya was now jumping around like a poodle, excited by the slightest gesture her husband made, pampering him with lavender oil foot massages and dead-sea-salt baths, perhaps out of his exponential ability to make money or perhaps out of that human tendency to grow, over time, welded to the choices we make in life because we stop seeing other ones. But when Yakov repeated, “We xhrespect Americans,” and Katya pinched him again with excessive force under the table, she reminded us that for a Russian woman, the power shift was never fait accompli.

  Yakov neither cringed nor blushed, for he was accustomed to unexpected pain. He merely cackled loudly for support.

  “What my husband mean is we very please to meet you!” Katya exclaimed, spreading her round face into a smile.

  “Good to meet all of you,” Eddie said, without guessing how many meanings “xhrespect” had in a Russian mind. On the one hand, Russians courted Americans, behaving like pathetic lackeys; on the other hand, in private, Russians skewered and mocked and poked holes in their generic definition of the “American character.” I could see silent laughter in Yakov’s eyes, throbbing at the quagmire his brother was in.

  “I chave surprise for you!” Yakov spoke as he poured vodka into our glasses.

  “Where’s Bella?” I asked.

  “Zhat’s surprise!” Yakov let out ecstatically.

  The music began clamoring in the background before anyone could utter another word, and from behind a black door that until this point had masqueraded as a wall, my sister appeared, followed by four men who took their places at their designated instruments. Bella wore a floor-length burgundy velvet gown that created a stark contrast with her golden hair and porcelain skin, and revealed just a hint of a voluptuous cleavage. It was the sort of dress she might have worn for her debut performance of La Bohème at the Metropolitan Opera. Instead, her first words were “Money, money, money, always sunny in a rich man’s world …” My family, as though gripped in a metal vise, could only gasp.

  “Uh, that’s my sister,” I whispered to Eddie as people stormed the dance floor in a nostalgic rush to catch the song that they believed encapsulated the mysterious West.

  “What is our Bella doing up there?” Grandmother shouted in Russian. “You miserable lout, how dare you put our child on the stage like a two-ruble whore? Do you know that she has a degree in Macaroni Economics and Poeziya from Northwestern—from Northwestern University—not some basement college but a university!”

  “Don’t blame my husband”—Katya jumped in to rescue Yakov—“Bella wanted to earn money and what better way than to sing? It’s what she loves to do—you should thank him instead!”

  “It’s great for business,” Yakov said. “This place needed a makeover. We need more people to dance, we need energy on the dance floor! Look at the crowd now—they love Bella!”

  “Bella belongs on a real stage—on Broadway—in the theater! Not this, not this—this—this—” My mother’s face was repainted in a maroon dye, her cheeks blazing, and with one trembling hand, she shut her mouth to manually prevent it from speaking.

  “You repulse me,” my father said to his brother under his breath. “All you care about is money.”

  “You know what? When I had more money than you in Russia, it made sense that you accused me of being a capitalist pig, but now you’re a just hypocrite—you’re wealthier than everyone. I’m just trying to afford my wife and prepare a dowry for Larry.”

  “You didn’t have to do it with my daughter!” my father grumbled. “You knew how we felt.”

  “All of you are always feeling, feeling, feeling things! When are you not feeling something, and not getting offended?” Yakov yelled back. “Have you asked Bella how she feels?” He downed another glass of vodka and, turning a snickering smile at Eddie, switched to English. “See vhat it like in Russian families, always fighting, always not happy wiz somesing.”

  Eddie could only nod without comprehending.

  “Our daughter”—my mother now addressed Eddie in English—“was trained in Russian Conservatory since she was little girl, it impossible to get into like your Juliyard, but she got in and she was ochen, ochen talented. What a voice she had, what a golos! And now to do zis, it is so embarrassing!”

  The crowd on the dance floor dispersed as soon as the first course of appetizers arrived and “Ochi Chyornye” broke from the instruments. Bella’s lips parted and unleashed a piercing cry in her perfect coloratura voice that took the sensuality out of the song, replacing it with a doleful, funereal dirge that made everyone want to weep.

  Yakov turned his fury on my mother, as though she controlled Bella’s vocal cords. “This is the result of your high and mighty attitude, Sonya,” he yelled in Russian. “I hire your daughter to sing disco and she delivers operatic arias fit for Bizet’s Carmen! How can anyone dance to that singing—the whole dance floor has collapsed into a depression!”

  “What—you thought you’d hire our daughter and tell her what to do?” My father cackled, obviously lux
uriating in his child’s iron will.

  Suddenly hysterical laughter erupted from our table. Everyone looked around in confusion as the laughter rose into the ceiling and mixed with Bella’s quavering voice. It was Igor.

  “What’s so funny, Igoryek?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing, nothing, ha, ha, ha—” Igor kept on, his laughter subsiding and then resuming again with greater force.

  “Are you laughing at me?” Yakov lashed out, feeling inexplicably insecure.

  “No, no, at my wife, I mean not at my wife, but at myself! All those nights she was merely practicing—meeting band mates to prepare for this, for you!” He pointed a finger at Yakov as though the latter was a roach. “She wasn’t cheating on me! She doesn’t have a caravan of lovers!”

  “A caravan of lovers.” Yakov burst into a billowing laugh. “Bella, a caravan of lovers! Haven’t you understood your wife yet? When a woman is as beautiful as she is, she no longer cares about men. They become mere instruments in her rise to near-godliness. Don’t you see—she has one mode of existence: self-adulation. All she cares about is the stage—any stage will do—but a stage it has to be nevertheless. You’re a very lucky man, Igor.”

  “What a stupid analysis of my daughter!” my mother retorted in an injured voice. But my mother’s pain was drowned out by the general feeling of goodwill as every person, except Eddie, realized that Bella was not having an affair, and this collective epiphany seemed to suffuse our Bella in a warm, celestial glow (the dry steam that periodically sputtered from the ceiling confirmed one’s sense that Bella was literally of the divine).

  Eddie had stoically withstood what seemed like an eternity of Russian, without once demanding a translation, and I decided that it was a propitious moment to switch languages.

  “Bella has always dreamed of the stage; she even went to New York,” I began.

  “Are you crazy,” Grandmother interrupted in Russian, “are you telling him about her mishugas! And don’t you dare speak of our suspicions—he’s a stranger—why does he need to know anything?”