The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “But you are looking at me,” I broke out, beseeching him. “Perhaps you’re even seeing me—seeing me at last—or for the first time …”

  “You can take a towel and robe from the closet—you know where everything is.” His face was now sheathed in his customary kindness, and his lips, as if to spite me, relaxed into their pleasant easy curve. “You can throw your stuff in the washer first, then you can put it in the dryer. After that, you can leave.”

  “I’ll leave now!” I yelled, my pride swelling, aching from his mechanized, cruel rejection. I headed toward the door, but I could feel the grime caking on my pants and shirt, the freezing sensation on my back, and I stopped, wanting to be roped back in.

  “Please, spare me the dramatics,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Just take care of yourself.”

  “Eddie,” I called out as he moved toward the bedroom. He turned halfway toward me to allow himself an escape route, and parts of his body visibly shuddered. I imagined his fingers and toes and even his heart springing out to touch me, but his head-center was commanding him: ABORT, ABORT! “Nothing, thank you, Eddie,” I simply said. I too shall be a vision of stoicism and abnegation—I will not reach out and detach those parts of me that long for you—because I am a boulder too. Because there lie the pink envelopes on the kitchen table to remind me that this—this I—am an invasion of their home.

  I moved knowingly toward the end of the hallway, where a spacious enclave, adjacent to the master bathroom, housed a giant washer and dryer. I peeled my clothes off my body, and at once the chill dissipated and warmth penetrated my skin. On the bathroom wall I caught sight of a photograph of my profile. A sliver of hope passed through my stomach—not hope for reconciliation, but hope that his feelings for me still rumbled beneath the jagged terrain that had now become his skin.

  The black-and-white sly curve in my smile in the photograph brought back that weekend in Maine. Beneath the wild hair and the nose protruding into the black shadows, one could see the edge of a collarbone peeking, starkly white like a denuded bone that merged into the silver frame. Only he and I knew that we had been lounging naked on white fur, next to a crackling fireplace, and candles dripping wax brought out drastic oppositions of light and dark. That we were past an orgasm and en route to another one after he would snap forty more shots of me in different poses, that he would readjust my body, cut up my limbs with light, that he would reveal my exposed breasts, my thighs fusing together, the triangle of my navel crossing my pelvis into my pubic zone, that like my own paintings, his photographs would never draw a distinct line between my body parts and my face, granting me the gift of anonymity. He would disembody me as I had so often disembodied my subjects.

  The moment stroked me again and again: the massive black concoction rising out of a duffel bag, his head leaning over my stomach, hands maneuvering the camera like a fragile infant, fingers nimbly straddling a thick long lens. “Let me do this,” he whispered, “I haven’t done this in years, but the way you look in this light … I want to capture your beauty.” He dotted the space around my body with candles—a wizard casting a spell—and his compliments, like quiet incantations, healed my mind. He had built a fire in his imperious black marble fireplace, and we listened to it crackle, listened to the buzzing chatter of crickets in the air, seeming to mimic the conversation of the flames. He arranged the candles at my ribs to illuminate, sideways, my breasts, and spreading my legs apart he set the candles between my thighs to expose me to the encroaching lens. I struggled to free myself of my body, to release my spirit into the black hovering sky, so acute the pain of arousal had become.

  It was this objectification of me, I understood only much later, the quick consecutive clicks, the knowledge that he was staring at me through a lens, which with every shot seemed like an organic outgrowth of his eye—that raised the debauched underground of my desire to the surface. In between shots, he would come closer and move my body around: “I want you to relax more, let it go.” “Let what go?” I’d ask. “Fear,” he’d say and place a warm hand on my stomach as if we both agreed it resided there. “Open your body more toward me. Open your legs. And breathe.” “Breathe how?” “Breathe in and out. Normally.” “Except that my heart is jumping, running somewhere …” He put his hand between my breasts and whispered, “Breathe as if your heart has only one purpose: desire. Imagine blood pumping into your heart, opening you up from within and then—breathe!” And so I did: I sighed, panted, breathed, with urgency, with a mouth full of steam and cravings. “Yes, like that, like that, yes with your back arched, God, you look stunning … your body like that … lift your chest higher and hold it there—beautiful, Emma.” He whispered, “Keep it, keep your face still—don’t move anymore. Quiet the desire.” Quickly, he returned to the camera, as if the canvas lived inside that black mechanical concoction, and his fingers were the paintbrushes, swift and dexterous, clicking, seizing angles, shadows, translating the object into subject, cutting me up into fragments which then became images—works of art to be hung on walls of galleries, homes, museums—where eyes would greet my body and wonder curiously, how did these images get made? This process unspooled me: my legs spread, knees collapsed sideways, mouth parted, head fallen back. I felt more aroused, more stunned, more wet than I had ever felt from human touch, from any sexual encounter—this was the apotheosis of sensuality—the subversive pleasure in stillness, in being watched and devoured by a lens. He stepped away from the camera and looked at me in amazement, as if he suddenly didn’t trust its mechanics, its ability to capture me. When he stood over me again, his hands fell between my thighs, his fingers grazing, circling, entering me, then traveling like feathers along my skin. He kissed my stomach and nipples and mouth and clitoris, and whispered, “I don’t know if I can work anymore.” “Oh, but you must finish,” I urged him, laughing. “I’m in post-coital near-death bliss. Take advantage of it, and we’ll call the image The Quest for the Perfect Orgasm.” “Yes,” he said, “you’re such an acrobat with words.

  “Lie still,” he said, “so that I can finish. Let me finish you. Finish this post-coital, near-death version of you. Lie still. Stop breathing, stop wanting momentarily.” He smiled. “Just momentarily.” The clicking began again, quicker and quicker, and the pulse in my veins beat into my temples, and I forced desire down my throat through the intestines where it lingered, lighting fires in my kidneys and liver, in the nether regions of my pelvis, and then down it fell, down past the thighs into my feet. And it felt like death itself, as cumbersome and final and painful, this simultaneous outpouring and containment of desire. I found myself possessed, thrown into the impossible state of wanting and not knowing how to stop the wanting. I became a machine gone defunct, unable to experience true satiety. So that in the aftermath of being photographed, during our most dazzling sex, when he lifted my body off the floor and carried me to the dining table and, with one hand, removed the candles and the cups we had drunk from and the placemats we had laid out, and with the other hand, placed my entire body on top with my legs raised and my ankles in his grip, and my eyes upon him, I felt the quiet pang of dissatisfaction. Even after the excruciatingly spastic orgasm where my body convulsed, moaned, undulated like a ribbon in his hands, even after that—in light of all that—I longed for the stillness of the lens, and blamed it for the ensuing relentlessness of my desire, for longing to be objectified, again and again. In the shower, as I scrubbed and chafed my skin with hard, angry strokes, I blamed him for having corrupted me.

  How miserably I wanted to confess to him! Two days after I accepted his proposal, we were driving back into the city under the arch of a charcoal sky. Stars peered through the front window like judges weighing in on my soul.

  “Eddie,” I started, “you’ve known me for such a short time. I mean everything, us, has happened so fast—”

  “I know everything I need to know.” He took one hand off the wheel and put it on my knee.

  “You’ve corrupted me,” I said at once.
“I will never be the same person, the same girl. I will always want more.”

  “More than me?”

  “I don’t know,” I returned, hesitating, tracing figures in the steam that had collected on the window. At last I said, “I guess I’m afraid I will never want anyone other than you.”

  “Well, then we’re good to go—we’re set for life.” He beamed at me with such openness and wonder I should have kept quiet. But I was suspicious of happiness—itching to pry it open and dangle it under the elements to test its mettle.

  “Are we—are we truly set, Eddie? You never mention your mother. Have you told her?”

  He held one hand on the wheel as he turned to me with surprise. “I’ve been so worried about your family’s disapproval of me that, honestly, I haven’t given her a single thought.”

  “I mean when I met her I was just a girl—a girlfriend—and now, now things are different.” I still couldn’t bring myself to utter the word “fiancée,” because Alex was too closely associated with it, because the word itself felt like a parasite I needed to expunge. “Do you think she’ll want me? She seemed so particular.”

  “Everyone wants you, Emma,” he cried enthusiastically, “tell me who doesn’t want you? My brother will squirm from jealousy and my father thinks you’re the most extraordinary and beautiful woman he’s ever met! His words, not mine.”

  I recalled the sharp pinch of recognition, followed by a slow, dull nausea: he had conspicuously failed to mention his mother. My Russian instinct, my truth-telling, flag-waving, war-waging instinct, told me to confront him, and yet, yet, I felt secure enough, American enough to let it go—to keep it buried beneath the surface. He had already taught me to draw a line of distinction between a parent and a child, and now he wanted me to respect this distinction in him. Only it never occurred to me to wonder why he clung to it with such ferocity.

  “You’ve awakened me,” I announced with glee, backtracking to that mischievous, substantially less troublesome topic of desire. “Now I can bed any man!”

  He smiled widely, taking both hands off the wheel as if to crash us into the black sky.

  “Yes,” he said ominously.

  “Are you trying to kill us?”

  “Desire has no limits,” he snapped. “I know that better than anyone. Like all things of excess, it can turn into something ugly and banal into addiction. You end up worse off than before—who knows what our true motives are? Or at least I’ve never known or understood mine. Until you—until I fell for you. Now my motives are clear; I do things to be with you. Love creates its own moral universe, I believe that, and there are breaches that cannot be undone.” He twisted his neck to face me and said, “If you ever cheat on me, Emma, I will never forgive you—do you hear me, no matter how I feel, I will not hesitate to leave.”

  I let out a rickety laugh. “Don’t be melodramatic! I’m just playing with you!”

  “Don’t play! Don’t play with this.” He grabbed my hand and placed it on his heart.

  We didn’t speak for a while after that. I remembered my eyes closing involuntarily and sleep swallowing me as the car rocked from side to side. I awakened in the Lincoln Tunnel. “We’re in New York,” he said, and I feared suddenly that I had poisoned him with my mistrust.

  “Are you all right in there? You’re taking forever—” Now I heard him mumble through the door, and felt his breath intermingling with the steam from the shower, settling on me.

  “I’ll leave in ten minutes,” I said, turning off the water. My feet had pruned—how long had I been there? Was he waiting for me?

  I wrapped a towel around my torso and draped another one over my shoulders and chest, so that I was completely shrouded in white. Only my dark hair hung like a black curtain over my face.

  “I just put your clothes in the dryer—it shouldn’t take too long, another twenty minutes,” he said, his body frozen at the other end of the hallway. “If you want, you could borrow Melanie’s pants and sweater—I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

  I couldn’t speak; until that moment I hadn’t connected a name to the pink envelopes.

  “I’m sure she would,” I said after an agonizing pause. “Look, if you can’t stand to have me here a minute longer, I can put my wet clothes on and leave—I’ll leave right now!”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “What it is then?”

  “You know perfectly well what it is. Don’t look at me with those eyes—you forget how well I know you. I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

  “Then don’t!” I screamed and rushed toward the dryer. My clothes were roiling in an empty machine, smashing against the metal like the cry of someone drowning, gasping for air, gasping inside of me, and I thought quickly, consciously, that if I were to finish this great act of self-destruction, the minute I would step into the merciless wind and snow, my clothes would freeze on my skin and I would ride in the taxi half-dead, in the throes of pneumonia. But as he refused to move toward me, as that smug, scornful grin continued to crimple his face, I wanted to go on—to spite, to bite, to loathe. I was too vain, too proud, too confident to let pneumonia or death prevent me from declaring war. I yanked open the dryer and pulled the soaking clothes out.

  One hand tightened the towel around my body, while the other hand tried to push one leg through a dripping, cold pant leg. I bent like an acrobat gone catatonic in the middle of an ambitious backward flip, all the while trying not to drop the towel. Still balancing on one leg, I managed at last to get the clinging pant leg up to one knee. My muscles stiffened from the wet cloth, both legs froze, and I teetered sideways like a dejected human triangle. He was watching me, his eyes fixed on the towel shifting over my thighs, riding up my hips, the edges coming apart as I struggled with the pant legs. He was closing in on me, exuding his familiar scent. Let me not smile, dear Lord, or beam like an idiot or emit the shrieks of a fornicating baboon. He slammed the lid of the machine shut with such vigor that I almost passed out from delight, and then he pulled the wet pants down my legs with enough force to peel away my skin. He rose back up, slowly, his eyes climbing up my calves, between my thighs, gliding over the towel, without touching me. From the waist down, I felt raw, skinless, and then a finger—a single index finger drew a line from my collarbone to the knot of the towel between my breasts.

  “It was a mistake to come here,” I murmured, shutting my eyes. I felt suffocated by the emptiness in my ribs, by the sharp ache of wanting and resisting. I clutched the towel with both hands.

  “Don’t touch me, don’t look at me.” I shivered.

  “Why not?” he said, “why not? We’re past everything, you and I.”

  “Why are you with someone else?”

  “What did you expect—that I’d join the priesthood and wait for you?” He laughed, flaunting his pleasure.

  “I had hoped that you’d at least mourn us—not jump right in—how long has it been, three months at most?”

  “Ah, but now we’re even.”

  “Is that what you’ve been doing all along—avenging me?”

  “It doesn’t feel good, does it—to know you’re competing with someone else. Did you really think you’re the only one who can play that game?”

  “How did you know I’d be working at the restaurant—why did you come there?”

  “It was a coincidence,” he said.

  “You’re lying!”

  “I called your sister.”

  “So you wanted me to see you with this other girl—you did this on purpose?”

  “It wasn’t a grand scheme, if that’s what you’re wondering. I didn’t give it that much thought. But maybe it was a subconscious act—to give us both clarity.”

  “Clarity?” I laughed, full of bitterness. “Is that what we’re after—does Melanie know that you’re playing a game at her expense?”

  “Don’t play the considerate feminist with me, I beg you! I know you, remember!”

  “I wasn’t purposefully trying to hurt you! It
’s not just about you. I needed to decide the rest of my life!”

  “How do you know it’s any different for me? How do you know if the rest of my life isn’t hanging in the balance?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He paused and turned from me. His eyes acquired a scorching cobalt hue in the gray afternoon sun. “This is my way of mourning.” His voice trailed off.

  “You’re using her,” I whispered.

  “No, I’m using you,” he said and with his index finger, I could see it through half-opened lids, he reached between my breasts and undid the towel, letting it drop to the floor. I stood naked before him as I had stood so many times before, only this time I felt the cruelty of exposure, the deprivation of privacy and power. He could see my heart as it was, extracted from my ribcage and perspiring on top of my chest. Here, take it, I wanted to shout, you’ve taken away everything else. Yet he seemed not to care; he could see it and still, he fingered it, mocked it—my poor dislodged heart.

  When my body collided against his, his clothes seemed to transform into rough skin, hostile to my own, and even after he had torn off his jeans, shirt, and underwear, his skin still remained rough. Yet he clung to me as I did to him, with the same voraciousness and desperation. “I missed you,” he mumbled, frantically kissing my eyes and cheeks and neck and breasts. We stood, entangled, transfixed in time. I had never seen him this naked before. The tenderness in his eyes was so peculiar, so aberrant on his thick masculine face, that for an instant I felt that I had glimpsed the countenance of a woman.

  He bent between my feet and threw my wet clothes back in the dryer and pushed the start button, and that too aroused me—his nose grazing my calves and knees as he rose from the floor. The dryer rumbled in my head. He lifted my naked body onto the washer, pinning me against its cold metal surface, and it thawed between my parted thighs. I blinked from tears, from seeing his head burrow between my legs, his mouth kissing the insides of my thighs, devouring me there—the burning space in between—and then I screamed from the pleasurable torture of being tickled and then pried open, from inferno breaths unlocking a slick cool tongue. When at last I sang—a soprano’s mournful treble—he stood up to face me, to lock me in his torrential gaze, to connect me to all my senses again, to my blurry eyes, wet with grief and pleasure, to my humming ears, to his fingers prying me open again, his mouth on my breasts, circling my face but never touching my lips. Why, why won’t you kiss me? And yet I knew why. With his weight slamming against my pelvis, he entered me roughly, madness riling between us. And when his movement gained a beat in a staccato rhythm, and then grew into a long, ceaseless crescendo, my mind fell away and watermarks burgeoned on my chin and neck and stomach like time marking my descent to old age. Yet all I value now, the only thing that has escaped memory’s cross oblivion, is the sensation of the moment when his index finger lingered near my sternum, when it invaded the space between wanting and resisting, when his clothes became grafted onto my skin, when my knees wobbled and then gave out from the pressure of wanting him so much.