The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Oh, no, I decided to cut myself off—I want to make it on my own.”

  “That’s just where you were when I met you—living in the dungeon, wanting to be a starving artist and yet somehow you were never starving. Are you finally starving now?”

  “And what happened to you—they finally let the prisoners out on a Saturday? Or is Norton Bank on a firing spree?” I inquired, consciously wanting to be cruel.

  “Very funny! Actually, I’ve been promoted”—he paused, his face tilting humbly to the floor—“to managing director.”

  “So now they’ve given you carte blanche to fire anyone you want! Did you by any chance fire that mudak Eric?”

  “Funny you should mention him—he just got promoted to senior analyst.”

  “Oh.” I considered for a second telling him the truth about Eric, but my mouth wouldn’t open.

  “You look different,” he said.

  I wanted to ask “good or bad different?” to fall back into the safe zone of being evaluated by him, but I fought against this execrable weakness. “Yes, I’ve reinvented myself, you might say—painting full time now—that is, when I’m not serving.”

  “Or being picked up by your customers.”

  “Ah, good to know you still have all of your eavesdropping skills intact.” We stared at one another with such intensity that there was no other alternative but to laugh. I wondered why we weren’t more awkward together, why our tense banter was causing us such piquant euphoria.

  “Waitress!” I heard the teenager cry out, “waitress, yoo-hoo, where are you?”

  “Grant still talks about you,” he said.

  “I have to go.” I looked at him with longing and my skin burned, my ruby cheeks giving me away. I wanted to ask—do you want to have coffee with me—but I caught his eyes traveling over several tables and landing on a striking, tall brunette. She was motioning to him with her hands, and her annoyed expression pierced my stomach with the force of a bullet.

  “Hey, if you get a chance, give me a call sometime and we’ll do coffee. We should stay friends,” he offered, turning halfway toward her.

  “Oh, Ignatius, don’t you remember—I’m too sexual for friendship with men.”

  The smile vanished. His voice, hard and remote, said, “I remember you.” I remembered him—the way he looked in the morning in a T-shirt and black boxer shorts, his muscular calves pressed against the leather couch, the Wall Street Journal rustling in his lap, a mug of black coffee in his hand, his gaze lost in small print, swimming past me and yet always, with the corner of one eye, reeling me back in. I used to wonder in secret: what alien textures, smells, sights are these—am I just a fly trapped in your world?

  “Lady, I don’t have all day,” someone hollered from a table I forgot was mine.

  “I have to go,” he said after a long pause and then headed toward her—the immaculately pretty creature who reminded me of a fairy with her miniature lips and turned-up nose and wide-set quizzical eyes.

  “Hey, Eddie,” I called out. He twisted halfway toward me. “I’m having an exhibition of my work at this small gallery next week. It’s really no big deal, really.”

  “Wow, an exhibition—congratulations! I’m impressed.”

  “I was wondering if you’d like to come—well, in either case, there’ll be lots of people and you could bring your friend.”

  His expression went mute.

  “I’d like that,” he said after a long pause, starting to walk away. “I’m so glad you didn’t give up on yourself—I mean on painting.”

  “January 15th at the Fern Gallery, eight o’clock,” I called after him, “three blocks down from Nebu—”

  “Where we met—”

  “Yes, though you’d never think it’s a gallery—”

  “Hey, I’m happy for you,” he said, turning away.

  “Thanks. Merry Christmas!” My voice was loud, peppy.

  He shifted halfway, and with an open generous smile, replied, “Happy Hanukkah!”

  But somehow he sounded distant, and within seconds, his tall broad frame bent apologetically before her. I wanted to run after him, to remind him that January 15, 1998, exactly a year ago, was the day we saw each other for the second time and we began this—this thing I couldn’t bring myself to call a relationship because the word was too prosaic to capture what we had, what we still had. But I remained in the same spot, my feet planted in imaginary sand that was rapidly disappearing. And in its wake, water spread and closed around me: an anthropomorphic ocean with a swaying torso and globular arms and a headless voice that roared—I shall swallow you in my black foam—until my head crashed against a reef, until my pain felt insurmountable, until the call, “Waitress, waitress, waitress!” struck my head like a singular shard of glass splitting my skull in half. Other waiters and busboys took over my tables. Ghigash, the manager, fumed behind his imperious host’s podium. But I couldn’t move; I saw him settle next to her, her mouth zigzagging in nervous strokes, wondering, asking what I would have asked had I been her: “Who is she?” He told her the truth, I was certain of that, because he didn’t care for lies, because he laid himself bare like a jigsaw puzzle with every piece secured in its assigned place—and if she didn’t like it, he would open the door and ask her to leave. I imagined he cared even less now because of what I had done to him.

  At last I unlocked my face, my feet, my arms, and, shifting slowly toward the three men, said with some composure, “I’m sorry.”

  “An old boyfriend?” Frank, the psychic, noted.

  “Yes.” What did it matter if I was honest with these strangers? “An ancient one.”

  “So how about a new, modern one—our man Aaron here is a prime candidate!” Frank sounded wonderfully, oddly reassuring.

  “I guess coffee never hurt anyone,” I said with a wink at Aaron, and with the sudden ease and suavity of an old courtesan, I wrote my number on a napkin. Aaron’s expression brightened and his small, pale mouth unwound into an eager smile.

  As they left, Aaron sang out, “I’ll call you, I’ll definitely call you,” forgetting the advice he had received from his advertising buddies: never seem too eager, too available, too desperate. But I wanted desperate—with the way I felt at that moment, only the desperate could heal me.

  I watched the three men head toward the revolving door of the diner. I told myself to look away but it was too late: Eddie’s hand was pressed into the girl’s back as they pushed their way out the door. I felt something tear in my stomach and my legs weaken in preparation for a fall, but I stood where I was—Ghigash was eyeing me with contempt and the teenager was hollering at her parents. “Why do you always say these embarrassing things, like you’re from the boonies? Wish I was dead!” The parents looked dumbstruck, or as they say in good Russian, “like folks who’ve been doused in buckets of shit.” I gave the father the check and smiled reassuringly, as if he and I and his wife suffered from the same malaise. And the truth of it struck me: the three of us toiled under the same self-serving delusion—that what we love necessarily loves us back.

  I ran outside into the merciless air. Ice-laden snow slapped my cheeks, whirred up my nostrils, pummeled my eyes. My austere black uniform became drenched in seconds. The cotton hardened into sheet metal. Still, I pushed ahead, fighting the wind and snow with my shivering arms and unseeing eyes, stumbling over the steps of some building, some bank whose neon lights flashed blue inside my head. I tumbled to the ground. It didn’t seem real that he didn’t love me anymore. Not love me—how is that possible—why me? And this thought pulled me down, taking with it my sense of self, my beauty, my confidence, even my art.

  Then I saw it—a jittery shadow crept across the snow like a hallucination or a disjointed dream. I looked up and there he was, trying to out-scream the traffic: “What the hell are you doing to yourself?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Have you lost your mind? Is this part of your artistic martyrdom?”

  “Don’t
be such an ass, don’t be such a conceited ass!” I spat under my breath, glaring at the snow.

  “C’mon, get up and put something on—get your coat from the restaurant!”

  “I’m not cold,” I said. “Why did you come—did you forget something?”

  “I wanted to see if—”

  “Where is she?”

  “In a taxi—going home.”

  The wind was howling at our backs, picking up speed, pushing us forward, then sideways. Wet frozen pants clung to my thighs and my tears formed a thin layer of ice on my cheeks. My chest felt bare, exposed to the cruelties of nature. Winter was repainting my blood in white. How my teeth chattered—in outrage.

  “Is she your—are you together?”

  “You must be freezing; come to my place,” he said, taking off his jacket and throwing it over my shoulders.

  “Take your jacket away,” I said, throwing it back at him. “I’m going to catch a cab—what are you going to tell your girlfriend if she finds out I stopped by?”

  “Why don’t you come over to my apartment and dry off—I’m just a few blocks south of here.”

  “I know where you live, Eddie.” There was viciousness and loathing in my voice I couldn’t quite recognize. “Remember, I lived there once with you.”

  “Look, I can put your stuff in the dryer, and then you’ll be on your way. If you get sick, how will you paint?”

  “What do you care if I paint?” I flung back without noticing that he had wrapped his coat around me and held his hands there an instant longer than he should have, and that we had walked, one after the other, through the revolving door of his lobby.

  “I care about talent, Emma, always have—”

  “Eddie, stop—stop saying meaningless things—I didn’t want things to be like this.”

  “What—our first meeting after the breakup to be awkward?”

  “Awkward? You call this pain awkward?” I pointed at my heart.

  “You never were much of a realist,” he said, laughing cruelly.

  I felt a knot in my stomach at the familiarity of the marbled foyer, at Clarence greeting people with his elastic smile, and I wanted to wind time back. I waved and nodded at him, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. “Good evening, Mr. Beltrafio,” he said mechanically, and I felt invisible, as though I had long ceased to exist.

  His apartment was imbued with a new floral scent. At once, I saw her imprint everywhere: a bouquet of pansies rested in a vase that had remained empty while we dated, a pink embroidered pillow sat on his couch, fur-lined beige boots leaned against the closet door, purple heart-shaped Christmas cards were arranged neatly in front of pre-addressed pink stamped envelopes on his table, a pasta maker and a cappuccino machine loomed in the kitchen next to discarded ice cream cartons—it was a full-throttle invasion, and I saw her pretty fussy face worrying over thank-you cards and wedding invitations and time!

  I trembled from the sudden memory of my own presence in his apartment: what had defined me, marked me, where were my pink envelopes and embroidered pillows and ice cream buckets? He used to say to me, you’re not like other women—was I like other men? Sketches of my work used to congest his hallway corners and bedrooms. My notebooks, novels, philosophy, statistics, and probability texts grew like weeds from the floor, and Crime and Punishment in Russian lay in a perennial state of discontent on his nightstand—I read it three pages at a time in torment over this excruciatingly difficult language that I called my own. My unfinished paintings were piled against the walls of his second bedroom, and instead of ice cream cartons, empty jars of Osetra and Beluga caviar stood like testaments of his love for me in the recycling bin. The burgundy curtain that had split the living room in half was gone; only the rail on the ceiling remained, resembling an unprotected water pipe. A painting that used to hang in the living room had been taken down. In oil pastels a meticulously sculpted naked ice-blue man melted from a fire rising in the shape of a woman. I had spent days, as I had promised, painting Ignatius, forcing him to stand in the nude for hours while I struggled with color and depth and likeness. I had named it Ignatius in Flames and he had marveled at it for hours, saying it soothed his nerves.

  “I thought your girlfriend looked very upset when she saw you with me,” I said. “Did you tell her who I am?”

  “Stop playing games. I don’t want to regress. Stop with your idiotic jealousy—if you knew what it’s been like for me, you’d know how stupid you sound.”

  “How do you want me to act—like it doesn’t matter?” I retreated, submitting to the force in his face.

  “I’ve taken up photography again,” he said briskly. “I want a picture of you.”

  “A memento for your future grandchildren?”

  “I want to see you naked,” he said.

  “What—have you lost your mind—what about her?” I pointed at the pink envelopes.

  “I told you it’s not serious!” He grabbed my arm.

  “Does she know that?”

  “I know that competition has always been one of your secret aphrodisiacs!” He laughed at first but then his jaws clicked and the pupils widened, an internal light flaring from hatred, and then the hatred grew. He appeared to turn into a beast, a demonic creature circling above me for the kill. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them belligerently against the wall, his breath streaming in hot swathes around my throat.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I cried, struggling to wriggle myself free. But he held on and I didn’t know what I feared more: what he would do to me or to himself.

  “Take off your clothes—I want to watch you.”

  “Watch—watch me?”

  “I don’t have any respite from you,” he replied, abruptly releasing me. “You’re everywhere: in my apartment, in my cabin, even in restaurants. God, we must’ve sampled every goddamn restaurant in the city. I can’t take these women anywhere without being reminded of you. It was such luck, I thought, to have run into you—now I can try to end it, end it in a way that ends it for me—for me, do you hear me? Because I don’t want you back, Emma. I want a happy life, and—I can’t have happiness with someone I can’t trust.”

  “Your mother has never—now I know that for a fact—never wanted you to end up with me!”

  “What does one have to do with the other?”

  “I guess I never expected it. I was optimistic, you know. I was sure it couldn’t be true. Not you, I thought, not your family.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, you can stop pretending now—don’t tell me you haven’t been apprised of your mother’s anti-Semitic views—that she only verbalized them upon meeting me!”

  “What are you talking about—what views?”

  “I overheard her say things like: ‘I never want my grandchildren to have Jewish blood! How will I be able to look into their eyes and not think they’re the spawn of the Devil?’”

  He laughed uproariously. “And you caught this illicit evidence—when—during dinner? When your family was skewering my family in Russian?”

  “No, I overheard your mother speaking in the library with your father—I spied on them, through the door and I heard her, loud and clear—”

  “You heard this? Is this a joke—you expect me to believe that you spied on my parents? Are you sure you understood her?”

  “Are you questioning my English?”

  “No, your sanity! After what happened in your childhood, don’t you think you need to be more cautious when you accuse people? Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been so scarred that you see everything through this ugly lens? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”

  I closed my eyes to make him disappear, and recalled with unambiguous horror that moment—as it spilled from memory the pitch of her outrage. I rearranged her words and then I sewed the sentences back together, arriving at the same conclusion with which I began. Or did my English fail me? Did my mind? Could it be that she didn’t use the word “Devil,” that I merely imagined it? Perhaps I only wi
tnessed their mouths moving, zigzagging, reproof marring their expressions, but their voices were muffled by the French doors? Perhaps I had only sensed the truth, circled a truth, but I didn’t own it. Suddenly I didn’t trust myself. Or was it possible that the mistrust of my own mind was an elaborate subterfuge knitted by an increasingly unbearable desire? This desire blindfolded me, blurring his motives into something vague and conveniently unimportant. What does it matter, I told myself, if he’s ignorant of his mother’s vileness? Even worse, what if he knows the truth but can’t admit it? Why would he? I wouldn’t if I were him—I’d deny it, the way I denied the existence of Alex, the way I denied what I saw that day in the woods, the way I stared into Sarah’s eyes and said, “she’s lying.” Upon the final groping of my brain, I came back to the most terrifying possibility of all: I wanted him so dementedly I no longer cared. I was willing to mangle my own memory, assign insanity and auditory hallucinations to my psyche, playact at forgetfulness to do the very thing I swore to never do: pretend I don’t mind—pretend anything for his love.

  “You have to remember you’re in America now,” he went on, though I wasn’t sure whether this speech was intended for me or for himself. “It’s not like that here. Sure, there may be pockets of hatred here and there, in some bumble-fuck town in the middle of nowhere, but not here, not in New York, and certainly not in our home in Westchester. For all my mother’s flaws, I never heard her speak that way.” He looked at me with some strange culmination of kindness and anger in his eyes before adding, “Besides, what does it have to do with us? Her behavior in no way justifies your own—your betrayal of me was the issue at hand, still is!”

  “I’m sorry, Eddie, I’m truly sorry for what I did to you,” I muttered, recalling abstractly that I had entirely fabricated my “betrayal” of him.

  But he didn’t seem to hear me. He was looking past me into the enormous glass window at my back. “Look, Emma, we’ve crossed over some invisible line, from love into hatred—from hatred into hell—and we can’t go back anymore. I can’t even look at you.”