The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Marriage is serious business,” my mother began diplomatically, “and your grandmother and I feel that he is not for us—”

  “You’re such a liar—you liked him!” I yelled. “That’s the worst part—you liked him more than Alex, far more. Out of everyone, you out of everyone, I thought, would understand—”

  “I’ve never said I didn’t like him. But the moral stakes were set in place long before you brought him to this house. You knew, you knew our objections—always, and yet you insisted! Meeting him has changed nothing.”

  “Why is Grandmother so silent suddenly—what does she have to say?” I cried. “How long are you going to be her mouthpiece—always obeying your mother, always the perfect daughter!”

  “This has nothing to do with your grandmother. This is my decision.” Her voice was calm, yet firm—a terrifying ordeal for anyone but I was, after all, her daughter.

  “Listen to me, Lena.” My mother seemed to be trying a new tack, her voice weaving a string of rhythmical cadences. “I know you think you’re in love, but love fades; love can survive tornadoes but not hardwired differences. How close is he to his mother? For the closer he is to his mother, the more—the more likely he’ll listen to her, perhaps not now when he’s so madly in love with you, but later when you have children, when the first flush of mad passion has worn off, and all that’s left between you are these differences. Differences, you see, my Lenochka, can grow into thorns, then bushes, then forests you can’t penetrate—these differences will tear you apart. Don’t you think I want you to be happy—if only I thought you found him: your fount of happiness! But I—I and your grandmother—we see things you cannot possibly see.”

  “Didn’t you hear him—he’s willing to convert for you!” I felt desperation lodging in my throat.

  “He’s a cunning operator,” Grandmother observed.

  “I love him—can you both understand this concept?”

  “Love—what’s love!” Grandmother jumped on her favorite topic. “Love was invented by the goyim to seduce the Jews and throw stardust in their eyes. But being a good mother, a good person—that—that is a far greater, nobler cause than the love of a man. Who is a man anyhow—a dick in dirty socks?”

  “What are you saying? Is that how you think I should treat my husband—with contempt?”

  “Contempt is inevitable,” Grandmother said. “Look at marriage from today to antiquity! If only young people knew that love is like having a noose around your neck—you suffocate, see stars all around you, feel like you’re dying, can’t breathe—am I right or am I right?” She looked at me with a clever grin. “But then the grip loosens—and reality hits you Bach! Vot i vse! Like a brick to the head, back in the real world—washing, cooking, cleaning, wiping noses and asses—the real stuff of marriage. Biggest problem if you ask me: women’s expectations! We want too much out of men, believe in men as if they’re gods but they’re just shmucks who lie, cheat, and shit all over your new bed sheets and they never put the toilet seat down.”

  “Eddie puts the toilet seat down,” I quipped.

  “It’s a metaphor, Lenochka,” Grandmother assured me, “the toilet is a metaphor for marriage.”

  “I hope you realize, Lenochka, that I was once madly in love with your father,” my mother joined in. “After six dates, ten bouquets of chrysanthemums, and an assistant professorship at Moscow State University in mathematics, I knew your father was a spectacular catch. Here was a man with a brilliant future, a man who was not afraid to speak of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, and who could crack out in-depth analyses of obscure paintings at the Hermitage as if he were spitting cherry pits into a bowl. Oh, make no mistake, Lenochka, I chose him!”

  “Then why did you have an affair?”

  Grandmother declared like Moses on Mount Sinai, “Because when a man wants, a woman can’t say no, and Fedya—oh, did he want your mother. Like a bat, he flew in every night to play durak. I was a fool—I didn’t see it. I couldn’t imagine that Sonya would fall for him—with his red face and his lisp—”

  “What lisp, maman, what lisp?”

  “If I had only stopped you—I knew everything but I thought, let her, she’s having a hard time—it was my fault, I allowed you too much!”

  “You knew nothing, nothing about me—you’re still blind,” my mother cried.

  “Shock me please—what didn’t I know?” Grandmother mocked.

  “What happened, mamulya,” I whispered, “how did you and Fedya first—begin?” I knew that secretly my mother was sympathetic to my longings. She lacked Grandmother’s absolutism—the stern cage of her reproof and outrage. There were moments when I could feel my mother relent, venture into the forbidden unknown, but these forays always ended in Grandmother’s decrees, with my mother becoming more ferocious, more puritanical than Grandmother, as though to compensate for her own fear of uncertainty. My very predicament of loving Eddie—of choosing Eddie—had only been possible because my mother allowed it; she let me flutter and re-interpret their admonitions—to discover my own take on the world. And although I myself suffered from an inability to separate prudery from goodness, sexual license from evil, mother offered me a release from the rigidity of time and traditional views. She whirled around me, flapping her golden wings like Zhar-ptitsa, whispering, “Run, child, be free—drink, eat, love—free yourself from us!” Or was it just a dream, a memory of a magical bird that grants Ivan his wishes, and turns imagination on its head, with me trying to free my mother as well as myself? For wasn’t she hobbling behind Grandmother, as much in her keeping as I was, as haunted by her commands as I?

  “The night I came back from,” my mother admitted at last, “the night I was sick—you remember that night, maman?”

  “What night?”

  “The night I came back from the hospital in July of 1980—during the Olympics.”

  “Oh, no, don’t,” Grandmother groaned, “don’t tell this to your child.”

  My mother ignored her. Her mouth quavered as she spoke. “Did you know that I was pregnant then, Lenochka?”

  “I remember you once asked me if I wanted another sister—”

  “Yes, we were already v podache. But the wait was agonizing, we had so little money, and your father and I fought all the time. He refused, categorically refused, to do anything to help. I had to get myself out of the Komsomol, and your father out of the Communist Party—I went in his stead and stood there, took all their horrible insults. So much bureaucracy, so many documents to hand in—I was the only woman standing in line with all the other men. I went to the KGB offices to figure out where we stood on the list; I was willing to do anything to get out. Nothing distracted me until the pregnancy. Oh, the relentless vomiting—no one thought I should have it, not your father, not your grandmother, not my mother-in-law. Only I thought about it, perhaps in the back of my mind I even wanted it. But our world made decisions for us. Abortions were standard, our only method of birth control. Like a frozen pork chop in a meat factory, you stood in line until it was your chance to be cut up.”

  “The doctor didn’t use an anesthetic. They cut the fetus out raw, raw out of my flesh. I was five months pregnant. The pain was excruciating, impossible to bear. When my screaming turned into a wail—I couldn’t keep it in, Lenochka—the nurse barked, “You keep your trap shut, you dirty Yid, or we’ll cut your whole vagina out.”

  “When I came home, still bleeding, keeling over in pain, no one looked my way or noticed me. Fedya was over at our house, playing durak, and your father said to me, ‘You better clean your face and put some makeup on. You look awful, and there are people here.’ Your father was in the first flush of his affair, and I became a nobody for him. If I screamed, he ignored me. And I never let him see me weep. It wasn’t only about vengeance, as you always thought, maman. I could have taken anything, even that cheap whore—but to be ignored—to be ignored—that I refused to bear.

  “It was Fedya who noticed my pain. One look in my face, and he knew i
nstantaneously what had happened to me. He left the game and took me to the kitchen, and held me. He kissed my face, my eyes, my neck, real kisses with feeling in them. In front of him I cried.

  “He wasn’t much of a lover but what a soul he had. It was he, not your father, who shared my anti-Soviet feelings and wanted so desperately to flee.”

  My mother looked at me, her eyes moist, and then she smiled. “But that’s the ancient past.”

  “What if Fedya came to America—I mean if you saw him now, would you leave Father?”

  “Oh, Lenochka, life is so very difficult. Being here in this country, isolated from the outside world and alone—it’s changed your father and me, made us strangely dependent upon one another. There we existed as separate beings; we each had our own circle of friends, our interests, our summers apart, our lovers. We were bound together only by you and Bella, but here, here we’ve been forced into each other’s company and I’ve grown attached to your father.”

  “Do you hear yourself?” I exclaimed. “‘Attached, attached,’ but where’s love? You loved Fedya but because of grandma, because of—oh I don’t know why—weakness, fear, you couldn’t do anything—you couldn’t act! Imagine a lifetime of being in love, of being understood! Dear God, your lives are study charts in human suffering and paralysis—why should I—why should I follow in your footsteps, tell me?”

  “Because of goodness, because there are things that are higher than human pleasure. I’m proud of my life. I’ve done right by my children, by my mother, my father, my husband; I’m not ashamed to look you in the eye.” She spoke with conviction and strength, and yet her eyes betrayed a shift that only I could see. My words had momentarily transported her to him, to a feeling she’d only known briefly, to the bliss of feeling perfectly understood.

  “Yerunda, nonsense!” Grandmother shouted. “Love is nonsense—stop torturing your mother.”

  “It’s a good thing your father and I stayed together.” Mother perked up, retrieving her pragmatic Mother-Hen persona. “How many children of Russian immigrants are pursuing an advanced degree in statistics while secretly painting works of art?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  I stared intently at my mother, recalling that special gift she possessed for peering into people’s souls. Did she see Eddie too?

  “Don’t think I don’t understand you,” she said. “I may not agree with everything you do, but I understand you.”

  “I don’t want to end up like Bella,” I cried. “You pushed her into marrying Igor: she could have had anyone.”

  “Oh, but she couldn’t!” Grandmother spat. “She only attracted hoodlums and rich assholes. At least Igor loves her—he respects her.”

  “She could have waited, searched more—she needed time and practice,” I insisted.

  “No, what she needed was a bucket of cold water on her head to wake her up from delusions of grandeur on the stage,” Grandmother said.

  “You pushed and pushed,” my mother shouted, suddenly turning on her mother, “even when she returned from New York dejected and helpless, all her curves had disappeared and that short awful hair, dear God, she would have said yes to a branch if it asked. You handed her Igor on a silver platter.”

  “I won’t be blamed for Bella’s chronic unhappiness—”

  “You take too much upon your old shoulders—let people live, maman, let them live!”

  “Ahhh, do you even know what you’re saying, you fool! ‘Let people live!’ Hah—how modern of you, dear daughter! You think it is of no consequence that Lyuba Tourkman’s son is on drugs, or that Felix Gourevich doesn’t have any identifiable profession and now his Korean girlfriend’s pregnant and his parents are paying for the hospital bills. Or that Lana Shtein’s daughter is marrying a goy from such a simpleton family that he’s demanding a stripping contest for the bridesmaids and hotdogs for hors d’oeuvres? That’s what it means to let your children live—to not ever tell anyone what to do—to leave fate in the hands of stupidity and lust—”

  I couldn’t hear Grandmother after a while, her words lost their grip, their meaning, just sounds weaving a familiar drone. My mind drifted to the cottage in Maine, to that moment I ran back to Eddie, wrapped in my towel, and jumped in the hot tub, splashing water to the floor, speaking so strangely, so freely: “Yes, yes, Eddie, I’ll marry you.” He had intended to ask me formally over dinner, but he confessed that he couldn’t wait. He ran out of the cabin, soaked and naked, to ferret the ring out of the Jeep’s glove compartment, and returned with a silver box embroidered in amethyst stones and Latin engravings, which he had some difficulty prying open. The ring itself startled me. The shape and texture of the silver band resembled a panther whose head came to rest at the joint, and from its parted mouth a purple diamond flared, its smooth surface pricked by the predator’s miniature silver teeth.

  “This ring, I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” I told Eddie, unable to tear my gaze away from the lilac and indigo hues emanating from the diamond’s center.

  “It’s one of a kind,” he said, “now don’t get a big head, but I—I bought it at an auction. It once belonged to the Duchess Du Barry.”

  “Duchess Du Barry? The courtesan you believe I resemble?”

  “Yes, I saw her portrait—”

  “You told me once, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.”

  “I stood there for hours in front of her. They were having a retrospective on eighteenth-century female artists. On my favorite, Vigee-Lebrun.”

  “A retrospective on female artists in the eighteenth century? I think you and the curator of the National Portrait Gallery are the only two men in the world who know Vigee-Lebrun! I mean, really! Name anyone who can speak of Mary Cassatt and Monet in the same breath!”

  “I am trying to seduce you,” he said, “for one moment, could you let me seduce you?”

  “Please go on.”

  “I had seen the portrait a few weeks before the fateful client meeting in La Cote Basque, and for some reason, it struck me. I was so bored during that meeting—same old jokes, same tap dance to say the right things; I turned my head to look around and there you were, like an apparition—so beautiful and angry and you wore red.”

  “Yes, I remember you looking.”

  “I remember you catching me. Our eyes met, and I felt transported. You reminded me of the painting, of the Duchess. I knew instantly you were from another world. When you got up to go to the bathroom, I got up as well. I had to get there first. I kept thinking—if I could just touch her.”

  “I had no idea, I always assumed I wanted you first.”

  “No, no, I wanted you first.” He paused. “When I heard about the auction, you and I were in the first flush. I didn’t know if you’d ever be with me, but I took that chance.”

  “How crazy of you! Our first flush was just sex!” I exclaimed incredulously.

  “Never underestimate the power of ‘just’ sex,” he said, laughing.

  “And here I thought you were a committed playboy.”

  “I was,” he returned, smiling, meeting my gaze boldly, “but for me, you were never ‘just’ sex. I fell in love with you that night, the night of La Cote Basque, before I knew anything about you. I thought, I must see her again. I thought, why didn’t I get her number! So when I saw you again at the gallery, when I saw you in that turtleneck and skirt. Your body, your body owned space, and you—and your eyes: there was so much power and magnetism in your eyes—I swore at that moment …” He paused; his hands seemed to be shaking. “I was instantly in love with you. I am in love with you.”

  “Are you listening to me, Lena—where’s your brain?” Grandmother broke through my reverie like a hammer. “What are we going to do—what are people going to say about us—us who are such devoted Jews?”

  “What do you mean ‘devoted,’” I sneered, “we don’t even know where the closest synagogue is!”

  “Devoted in our hearts, in the way we defend Jews, in our fight
against anti-Semitism,” my mother exclaimed.

  “And the way he touches you,” Grandmother put in, as if she could envision him lying naked across my forehead, “why, it’s outright pornography! Did he touch you like that when you met his mother? You think all Americans are liberated, but I’m telling you this mother of his probably doesn’t subscribe to your feminism.”

  “Oh, dear God,” I groaned, “not my feminism again, Grandmother. If there’s any feminist among us, it’s you. You! You don’t like men, and you don’t like sex—and you’re never willing to compromise or listen to any man or to any woman, for that matter.”

  “Now that you have fancy degrees, you think you can talk your way out of everything. Besides, who said I don’t like men and sex—just because my standards were always very high does not mean I was happy that your grandfather was shtupping half of Moscow. Was I supposed to swallow my pride and let him shtup me as well and become the laughingstock on our block? If there was one power I held over him, it was not giving in! What—you think I’m not a normal woman—you think I wasn’t interested? Sure, sometimes I thought about IT”—Grandmother’s face and neck were suffused in hues of burgundy and red—“but the thought of IT with him made me nauseous. Once in a while I’d give in, on days when he wept and begged my forgiveness. Staryj kozel!”

  “Then why did you marry him?”

  “Oh, Lenochka, I’ve already told you many times: it was the war, there were few men left, and you grabbed whatever you could,” Grandmother said, “or you ended up with the crumbs: the red-faced drunks. Everyone said, ‘how, Zinayida, how did you manage to snatch him up,’ as if he was made of gelt. As soon as I saw your grandfather, I thought Tsuris! He’s too good looking to be faithful—he’ll cheat on me. But did I listen to my instincts? I was like you, always misguided by illusions of love and passion. And where did my passion get me—walking in on your grandfather and our neighbor from downstairs, Nina Pavlovivna, in my very bed. He’s got one hand on her breast and the other on her tuchus and she’s smiling wildly, like she’s just bought herself Italian leather boots. So I ran in and smacked him across his head. Nina started crying, apologizing. I couldn’t care less what she said; I just kept slapping him till he went red in the face. That was the last time your grandfather used our bed for his habit. You know what the old ladies on benches used to whisper when they’d see us pass by: ‘oh there they go—the blond fool and her sly cat.’”