I thought wistfully of the dungeon as I perused the New York Times real estate section in search of something that would not involve begging my father for money. But every dingy studio, every dilapidated loft, every ill-heated, mold-infested one-bedroom that faced brick walls required a salary that was forty-five times the rent, in some cases seventy-five times the rent, or a co-signer in the guise of a reliable, upper-middle-class parent.
But, as Bella kept reminding me over the phone, independence did not entail a “co-signer.” She urged me to go back to NYU, to take art classes, to see someone, do something—but after the initial thrill of independence wore off (lasting approximately seven days), I descended into a terrifying depression. The memories had now pushed open a tiny porthole and spilled out, invading my mind, inhabiting public space: I saw him in coffee shops, waiting at ATMs, passing me on sidewalks, visiting random stores. Phantoms with his likeness. So I stayed in, ordered in, or failed to eat at all. I lay in my room, gazing at the neon ceiling, at lights flashing through cracks in the window, at the stiff air replete with the screams of ambulances and taxis and people clinging to each other in the morning crush. I thought of the morning he asked me, “What do you think our children would be like?” and answered himself, “I hope they’ll have your brains and my resolve!” I shuddered: children? Was I supposed to bear them? Think about them? Perhaps I had never truly imagined that he and I could be a happily married, pregnant unit, not because he wasn’t Jewish, but because it seemed like sacrilege to marry someone you loved.
Like a foot in my gut, the sensation of his touch would roll through me and I would hold the concave space that used to be a stomach in my arms. Nothing could cure this howling, breath-depriving pain—not of loneliness but of loss, not of love disappointed or foolishly imagined but of love prematurely severed.
I put Adrienne Rich between my naked thighs, Betty Friedan on my chest, Elizabeth Cady Stanton on my navel, Simone De Beauvoir on one shoulder, Virginia Woolf on another, and Judith Butler on my forehead, where veins and nerves converged. I read: He is the Absolute, the essential; she is the Other, the inessential, always defined in reference to HIM. I read: a woman has no space, no privacy to create. I read: women were hung from a tree or squeezed in tight clothes, or trampled by feet to speed up their labor. I read: there is a strain of homosexual women who are not attracted to other women but want to be the equals of men—to be recognized as men. I read about prisons and enslavement, about how the institution of marriage bound and tied us, threw away our wills, and felt the decompression of my body, the swift advance of hindsight and insight, the timely contextualization of my mind, breasts, hips, vagina, and thighs.
I saw him as my prisoner now: the enemy, the subjugator, the Man. In the pure realm of womanhood, in this unadulterated strain of feminism, love could not exist. There was only one struggle, the struggle against men, and it rejuvenated me like a shot of adrenaline administered to a still heart.
Look at my women, my strong, powerful, beautiful yellers—how they hollered their whole lives against injustice, only to dismiss their woes with a coarse rejoinder: “that’s just the lot of being a woman—so why complain?” When my grandmother came home with two buckets of water after walking for sixty kilometers by foot through mud, Grandfather got angry because dinner wasn’t ready and knocked the buckets down, spilling precious water across the floor. Grandmother screamed, “You spineless, hysterical pussy!” and then she lifted the empty buckets onto her sore back and began the trek again. Blyat, whore, they called any woman who slept around, flirted indiscriminately, performed fellatio, staked out her territory, verbalized her desire, divorced men and found other men, spat on society’s double standards; blyat, whore, they called themselves. This moral language was tailored to describe women: sex conceived as a moral act, desire equated to bitchiness, unnaturalness, perversion. Yeshche shto zahotela? What else could she possibly want or rather how dare she want any more than this, this glorious life? These epithets were meant to implore us to lead the “good” life. Yet try applying them to men: consider for humor’s sake the case of my own father. His transgression was an acceptable by-product of our Russian cultural mores, caused inevitably by my mother’s wild, implacable nature. Hers was unacceptable, a threat to family and the state of marriage, inexplicable in the context of Father’s mild temper. But if you really want to be confused ask my women who they are and, without flinching, they’ll say, “we are the men.”
I placed the feminist texts upon my body, to cure the wounds inflicted on my women, to cleanse my system of empathy, sentimentality, defeat, to channel Erica Jong and seek out sex as a refutation of love’s entanglement with desire. A detangling, I called it. The very detangling I had intended that very night in La Cote Basque, as nothing but the act in itself. Grandmother won’t appear on the wall, and there won’t be any fluttering of possibility, of continuation, of emotion. The moment shall be circumscribed in space and time, restricted to my loins; I shall fuck for fuck’s sake. A one-night stand, at last consummated and accomplished, will be my flag staff raised in times of war.
So it came to pass: I went on bar excursions—to seek them out—my death-defying, feminism-activating one-night stands. They were like a cold or flu or a venereal disease, I thought, all I have to do is stick my tongue out to get it. I wore the same thing: black leather pants, stretching like ready-to-snap gum across my buttocks, a woven Lycra shirt tied at the open back by a crisscrossing rope, which made the bra an impossibility, and wrathful burgundy lipstick. This was not romantic leather like the kind I wore to La Cote Basque—this was I-loathe-men, dominatrix whipping, frothing, I-don’t-give-a-fuck leather. I made out indiscriminately with one man and another and yet another. I was a phantom following the instructions laid out in that ancient bible of seduction, watching myself from above: those pathetic hair flips and effortlessly winking eyes, sipping my chocolaty beer, pretending to be drunk, twisting my hips, arching my back, thrusting my breasts forward and up, up, up into the sky, to find the next man, the next escape. I danced everywhere: in hip discotheques in West Village and Chelsea, in run-down bars with dance floors somewhere between 10th Avenue and the river, in a seedy Irish pub in East Village with no dance floor where I squeezed in between chairs, between chests and backs, still dancing, still making music with my body out of a perennial internal beat. Can you see my admirers—smiling, hands clapping, eyes grasping, seizing, stroking my ego, egging me on. Some of the men took me to their places or I took them to mine. My oeuvre contained an intellectually riveting but sensually challenged lawyer; a happily married tourist lacking in irony; a self-adoring, gauche, cock-stuck-to-the-forehead banker; a long-haired, Jesus-look-alike, spewing-theories-about-existence-out-of-his-ass graduate student; and so it went. Their hands groping, tongues wagging, eyes admiring, wanting, none of them bathing me in pleasure—was I bathing them? Even in the actual world of rooms, where I would look up at the ceiling and a condom would pop out of a man’s wallet and he would pull it upon his member, speaking in that alien language called “sexual talk,” and I seemed “wet” and he would say, invariably, “you’re so wet,” as if to highlight his victory, even then, especially then, I felt lost, mentally removed. And when they moved, their faces interchangeable, inside me, I’d turn my head to the side, a patient on an operating table, anesthetized, told not to look, mining the memory vault for a moment of intimacy with Eddie. Against my will, he’d come to me, whispering, why are you doing this to yourself? And with my will, I’d kill him—blot out his image, his eyes, his warmth, his touch. All the men I slept with had one thing in common: they were all handsome, implacable in their physical perfection, and I adored the process of undressing them, of discovering their beauty fully, for I watched them as an artist. Not as a woman, never as a lover. One night I tap-danced on a bar table, not in drunken stupor but with a clear head, hitting my forehead on a low hanging chandelier; the bartender iced the bump in the backroom and stuck his tongue between my parted lips, sl
iding his fingers under the shirt’s crisscrossed ropes to encircle my breasts, and then his penis suddenly parted my thighs, and that was that. Quick, visceral, inconsequential. Was this what women and men called “fun”? Was this the life of the eternal bachelors who renounced marriage and children and love? Or was this a glimpse of the undead, the vampires, the zombies, those heroes of American goth, descending on the night, offering their gift of the eternal casual-sex purgatory? With horror, I recalled my sister—did she too dance with the undead? Would I too end up home in black with my hair cropped and married to Alex?
I wanted to die, be done with myself. I wanted to get this life out—out—of me. None of it mattered. If I had sex it wouldn’t matter. If I didn’t it wouldn’t matter either. I was alone. Without love, without Eddie, without wanting and feeling and yearning for this other soul, I felt broken, my limbs weakened, my face caught in a perpetual shadow. Whatever wars I had been waging—against chauvinism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrantism, anti-humanism: all of them dead, all of them meaningless. The thought of going to my family for help was the un-thought; it made death seem like a salve. And the idea that I was depressed or that a therapist could offer a modicum of relief—a dissecting-pain-talk marathon with a stranger—was as foreign to me as the English language had once been. Some characteristics never penetrate, never assimilate. In some ways I was still as Russian as Grandmother’s vobla … oh vobla, how I yearn for my briny vobla …
What does it really mean to survive this life? Where was one supposed to find the strength to lift one foot in front of the other and greet one’s allotted slice of sunlight for that day? How was one supposed to seal the memory banks, the heart valves, the constant trickle of disappointment and meaninglessness, and say here begins another day—not as a shot at happiness or joy or inner peace but simply as an opportunity to not die—to not drown in your hotel’s cracked bathtub, or “accidentally” leap toward the oncoming 1 or 9 train? To survive this life took guts, willpower, resilience, ingenuity; it took the abrupt, almost physical surrender to an old nagging desire: to paint!
The Androgynous Woman
The International Art Coalition of New York was an imperious school in midtown Manhattan. Instead of degrees at the end of its three-year apprenticeship program, the school produced showings—its focus was not simply to teach but to give birth to working artists. The place attracted corporate sponsors, gallery curators, private patrons, and ambitious youth. With its stellar reputation in the art world and promises of stardom, the Art Coalition was notoriously difficult to get into, and featured a fount of insane professors, stars in their own right. Professor Grayhart once mentioned it to me, and so I walked up to the front office, asked for an application, and was ushered into a studio. The lady at the front desk said, “We have an outreach program—you can paint in one of our public studios, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the class schedule.”
The elevator opened onto a massive room with fifteen-foot windows and aluminum pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. The stench of acrylic and turpentine stunted the air. Canvases shrouded in gray sheets and black garbage bags were piled against cement walls like priceless artifacts waiting to be unveiled. Active canvases in the throes of creation beamed from wooden stands, and the paintbrushes appeared to the unaccustomed eye like dancers who, independent of their masters, leapt from bottles into grotesque easels and settled with brilliant poise upon virgin canvases, erasing with one chassé, one pirouette, one grand jeté the chaos you felt upon entering the room.
Young-looking, disheveled countenances peered at me suspiciously. They sipped their coffees, edging away from their canvases intermittently to chat with each other. But for the most part, their socializing appeared guarded and stingy, their smiles carefully circumscribed in restraint, hiding from each other their fantasies, their grandiose ambitions, their already intoxicating stories of success.
I set a place for myself in a corner that was cut off from the rest of the room, shadowed by columns, illuminated only by elusive sunspots.
I didn’t know how many hours passed or where the painters went, but when I stepped away from my canvas not a soul breathed around me. The other canvases were either shrouded or simply gone. The sky beamed New York’s nocturnal pink light. Pain pulsed under my shoulder blades, my spine turned crooked, my fingers groaned from old age, swelling with arthritis, hardening into paintbrushes, as if they too were made from fine Italian wood. My torso was frozen at a sixty-degree angle, and to unglue it, I bent it in the opposite direction in vain. My eyes swam in red webs, and my stomach had contracted to the width of cardboard. Food had become a distant memory, though I vaguely recalled swallowing a blueberry muffin whole.
The image itself, an unfinished figure in a purple dress, had started out as a woman. But as the night progressed the body stiffened, the face grew into a square. Above its red-lined angry mouth, the eyes had become callous and the forehead protruded beneath a short black mane. The jaws cut out of brown shadows denoted a stubborn man. Yet the purple dress fell away to reveal a woman’s breast. The androgynous figure teetered on the edge of a chair, tied and bound by purple ropes that resembled headless snakes, trapping her inside their own circular life.
I wrestled with the stubborn colors, ominous and bitter, a vision of an aging queen, a muse of wrath, a disillusioned woman so overcome with grief she has turned into a man. I swam invisible inside her mouth—I owned the muscles on her face, the stern reproof in her cat eyes that warned of bitch-fests, of diatribes, of war. I was speaking through her, at her, for her.
Stripped of this feminine body, I was a man. Inside that man, I was a woman. The soul was subdivided into a thousand Matryoshkas; inside each head the head of the opposite sex loomed, the characteristics through each unscrewing growing indistinguishable from each other.
I needed to lighten the purple ropes that had grown too dark but my fingers weakened and released the paintbrush. Flaws seemed to have multiplied from the will to perfect, and a wave of impotence washed over me. I crawled into the purple prison, pitying myself. A mass of translucent curtains fell over my soul, gaining whiteness and a presence. I could feel it shifting around me and then—I could barely breathe—something held me in a large warm palm. I was no longer afraid. I said, “Is that You, God?” but no one answered. “God, is that You, God, God …” I kept repeating until exhaustion overtook me and I laid my head gently on the cement floor and closed my eyes.
I awoke to the sound of a striking voice. “No, no, Mr. Kilburn, no, you’re not early, we’re late—we’re late! If you don’t take this class seriously or the work we do here seriously then you have no place behind a canvas. Because painting is serious business,” the voice pursued. “It is as serious as law and medicine, as serious as saving another person’s life, because the life you’ll be saving is your own! The paintbrushes must become your friends, as dear to you as your ten fingers. So pick them well, treasure them, know their agility and limitations, because they will signal the limitations in yourselves.
“Now paint!” The woman appeared to be the commander of an army, and the students dropped their heads simultaneously, their collective gaze seizing the nude as if on cue. A model in her early fifties was sprawled on a leopard rug; her legs appeared to be attached to invisible stirrups, mimicking the act of labor. Behind her a cage contained a startling orange lizard, which, I later learned, was an import from the island of Tobago. The animal swished and hissed, staring occasionally at its own tail. One cloudy eye would widen under sharp scales and look at the students with human wonder. I missed my wounded blue-green iguana, my savior, my strange friend. When I stopped by Natasha’s apartment the first week I arrived in the city, to get the last of my mail, she told me that the animal passed away the day after I moved out.
The students were told to paint the woman and the lizard superimposed upon each other; they were to paint the natural world in an unnatural setting, art superimposed upon the artifice of modern life.
I want
ed to sprint from my concrete bed and join them—what wonder, what freedom—but I couldn’t move a single joint. Pain gripped every bone, pinched every nerve. I groaned as quietly as I could but the lizard, as though on purpose, grew still and looked at me. And the students following her lead now shifted their gaze onto me.
“Let’s see what the gods have dragged in this morning!?” the teacher cried, and the entire class burst into joyous laughter.
“An excellent case of androgyny, I’d say,” she went on, focusing only on my painting, skimming over me as if I were a metal pole. “Add a touch of navy to the purple ropes to give her more definition and fix the fingernails—they look like dirty pancakes.”
“Thank you,” I said meekly.
She laughed. “Don’t be afraid, speak up—what is your name, oh most dedicated of artists?”
“Emma Kaulfield,” I whispered.
“Louder,” she demanded.
“Emma, Emma Kaulfield—I don’t belong—I’m not in the Coalition—I just wanted to use the studio—” I stammered.
“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” she said with a laugh. “Anyone who spends a few nights stinking of turpentine, rejects the comforts of her own bed, and who, I imagine, hasn’t had a real meal in quite some time belongs here, among us, don’t you all agree?” She seemed so beautiful and confident, despite the miniature size of her body and the delicate face, that in my sleepless daze I thought I glimpsed giant wings upon her back.
I knew who she was: the great Fredericka Unitcheska, known for the looseness and inventiveness of her classes and her bravura style of teaching with its hard, militant edge. She was the infamous 1960s French painter who was the only female member of the Imbolists, a movement that defied convention by exploring sexual content through rapid free-floating strokes as a conceptual representation of unremitting change. Imbolism had its etymological roots in nineteenth-century Immoralism, but had acquired political overtones, requiring its devotees to plant revolutionary seeds in society’s fat conventional underbelly. Unitcheska first made her mark with her distinct study of reptiles on canvas, which she painted from memory (rumor had it) of her childhood in London brothels, where her mother belly-danced with a python. Her mother (it was said) was a descendent of Spanish gypsies and her father may have been an English lord, and her mother’s most loyal customer.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 39