The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  By nine o’clock, the place roared with excitement; people were streaming into the foyer in droves, piling their coats on hangers and counters, their faces red and pinched by the cold. We had no idea how Linda managed to greet four or five people at once, with her hands and eyes darting in opposite directions, and her face drenched in a constant oily glow of pleasure. But that’s what she needed to do: for rather than pricing our paintings before the opening, the way established galleries did, Linda preferred the high-pitched frenzy of an auction. She felt that her method of smelling desire in the buyer—of gauging exactly how much they were willing to part with and asking for just a smidgen more—would yield the greatest profit. She was a natural saleswoman, she confided in us, she could have gone corporate if she didn’t still have her ideals. I watched her sell Stone’s Boa Constrictor with the rapidity of a train crash: “Sold!” she’d say out loud to spawn more desire, “Sold!” to prevent the interference of rational thought. “Don’t you love this?” Linda murmured to me, “people are asking to meet you—someone wants to buy the Prehistoric Children,” she said. “What are they offering?” I asked. “Three-hundred and fifty dollars.” It took me five months to finish this painting, I lamented bitterly to myself, but out loud I asked to meet them. We pushed past a crowd gathered in front of Nixon as a Rattlesnake, down the corridor and into the back room where my paintings hung. There were noticeably fewer people here, but they appeared to my eager eye to be more engrossed in my paintings, to be—as I fantastically imagined it—embedding intricate parts of me in their languorous souls.

  “Here’s the artist,” Linda exclaimed, situating me in front of a bald man and a handsome woman in a glittering yellow dress.

  “We’re so impressed,” the woman murmured, “the colors are so understated, and yet the emotions are large and alive!”

  “There’s real passion in your work!” the bald man next to her said.

  “My husband is already in love with you,” the wife said. “If only we had more money, but living in the city—well I’m sure you know how hard it is—oh our daughter would love this painting!”

  “I’m so happy you like it,” I said, bowing my head to them.

  “We’re artists ourselves in a way,” he said. “I’m a writer, and my wife is an actress; perhaps you’ve head of her newest production, The Bird, The Cat, and the Everything. It’s playing at the Kraine, an excellent off-off-Broadway theater.”

  “Oh Clive, must you advertise my play to everyone?” She lowered her head bashfully and pulled a postcard from a crumbling leather purse. On skinny paper, a tiny reprint of her face accompanied a bold title: The Cat, The Bird, and the Everything, starring Bertha Fermish. I wondered vaguely if their only purpose at the gallery was to advertise her play, and the euphoria I felt seconds before in seeing my name in print vanished.

  “Thank you, I’ll try to see it,” I said, taking the postcard.

  “Linda says the price is 350 dollars—but would it be possible—I know this isn’t customary—to give us a discount?” the woman said. “We’d be so happy!”

  A tall, exquisitely groomed man in a shimmering black suit stomped in front of us, and after a perfunctory glance at Prehistoric Children, lasting a total of four seconds, demanded to know the price.

  “Four hundred,” Linda trilled.

  “All right,” the man said, “I’ll take it.”

  “But you already gave it to these people—I want this couple to have it,” I protested.

  Linda smiled at the couple, and then pulled me to the side.

  “This isn’t a bazaar, Emma, this is a business. Highest bidder wins.”

  From the corner, I watched her scribble the word “sold” under my painting and usher the man into her office, his checkbook glued to the palm of his hand. The actress and her husband bowed their heads in humility and shuffled out the door.

  After the initial sale, my paintings took on a sudden momentum. My Secret Chanterelle went to the gay couple who perceived the influence of Balthus in my work. The Child-Mermaid went to a fashionably attired lady in “finance” who declared it a “great bargain and a future masterpiece.” The First Cigarette went to a wealthy, diamond-sprouting woman in her sixties, an old friend of Unitcheska and a patron of the Fern Gallery. She too had wanted Prehistoric Children, but settled on my grandfather, whom she felt perfectly captured her egotistical ex-husband. Girl Under a Green Umbrella went to a pregnant couple who felt that the verdant tones set against a gray sky would perfectly match their green-hued nursery.

  But The Monster, as Lydia had predicted, appealed to no one. I clung to the hope that it would remain untouched, but an hour later I discerned a gathering of three people around it.

  “Such interesting use of color,” I heard a woman in white mink remark, “so much gray and then suddenly this outpouring of red.”

  “And the strokes here really evoke a sense of movement, of time, of continuity,” an older gentleman in a tweed jacket noted.

  “Yes,” their companion agreed, “I think it’s an excellent portrayal of a winter storm.”

  “What is that white thing in the center—is that a face?” the older man asked. “I think I see eyes.”

  “It looks like some kind of meditation on the elusiveness of existence,” the woman observed.

  “These artists nowadays—none of them have any serious training.” An older woman in a blonde wig appeared out of nowhere. She could have put forth any idiotic theory and it would have sounded plausible on account of her age and sharp aristocratic features.

  How I wanted to push them aside and tape their tongues to their noses! How many years had it taken me to gather the courage to bring color to canvas that was the exact replica of the color in my head, the color that was also voice, memory, confession. How many months of sketching and re-imagining it in its various disguises, in its palatable form!

  It wasn’t merely personal but political—outrage at the suffering of all children mapping the scars that Stalin’s supreme manias left behind. The child’s face was to contain universal sadness, and at its back, the trunk—the monster—was the ill-begotten offspring of human cruelty, capturing in its detailed claws and regimented bark scabs the way cruelty functioned, directing its bullets at the helpless and the weak, until the helpless and the weak rose in the social hierarchy to avenge their oppressors on the new crop of the helpless and the weak. This is not a meditation on the meaninglessness of existence, I wanted to scream, but on its painful and very present meaning—on the endless circle of vengeance, hatred, and rage.

  There, in Russia, we were never alone. Even our thoughts hung like sheets in public space for inspection and approval. We were conditioned to exist without silence—to view silence as danger—to welcome interference, advice on how to live, what to say, who and what to believe, obedience as an incessant conversation. Disobedience could only live in silence, in the radical cessation of the collective voice. But here, here in America, I reveled in silence. I could shut the world out and it would let me breathe in solitude, indifferent to my miseries and pleasures. Happiness was within reach. Happiness as silence—as the impenetrable cocoon of one’s own thoughts. I didn’t have to be an artist; I could have been a statistician. I didn’t have to be a statistician; I could have stayed at home with my parents. I could have married Alex or Eddie and stayed at home with them. I could go off to Montana, buy myself a cabin and paint, and that too would be a life—a perfectly respectable life. Even if the small town’s people would gawk at me, an artist after forty, unmarried, they would leave me alone as the town’s solipsistic freak. She don’t bother me, they’d say, does she bother you? Even the prejudice I’d experience upon telling someone that I was Russian or Jewish would slide off of me, off of them over time, over my efforts, over the work I’d do. I was an individual, a separate entity from my mother and grandmother, from my father and sister, and from the men I loved or didn’t love. If I uttered a peep against the chorus of peeps, no one would arrest me. If
I wanted to fight, to carry slogans, to roar behind a podium, a road block would be set up to prevent cars from interfering with my speech.

  Someone had left an umbrella on the floor next to my foot, and I picked it up—its sharp, almost knife-like edge glistened in the gallery’s precise light. Holding it tightly between my fingers with its edge pointing down, I came between the older gentleman and the ginger-haired woman.

  “Excuse me,” I said, moving in front of them.

  “You’re blocking our view,” they said, unaware.

  “I’m the artist,” I said.

  “Oh,” they murmured in a chorus, “there’s so much we’ve wanted to ask you—what does it really mean?”

  “Torture,” I replied. And with a sudden violent jerk of my hand, I struck the sharp point of the umbrella into the center of the painting, piercing the canvas and the wall, and then, with a note of relief, pulled it out. A small hole now marked the body of the phantom-child. The hole seemed strangely congruous with the red ruby eyes scattered across the trunk, but the canvas was ostensibly ruined.

  The room went aghast. The strangers’ mouths were still open when I turned to face them. They staggered back in fear, for they suspected that if I could puncture a living painting, I could puncture their flesh as well. “No,” I wanted to scream, “I’m sane—emotional but sane, broken hearted but sane, supremely depressed but perfectly sane!” But it was too late. Minds were fast at work. I could see their thoughts on their foreheads: well for crying out loud—what in the world—who is this crazy fucking bitch? Whenever civilization is interrupted by a socially inappropriate act, an act that has the potential to unravel it, human beings begin to feel as if they too could be infected by the “crazy” disease. It’s important in such cases to promptly remove the threat. An ambulance will arrive any minute and carry me out on a white stretcher, I convinced myself, when suddenly out of the stultifying silence came this:

  “Brilliant,” a man exclaimed, “absolutely brilliant!”

  “I see it too—” the mink-clad woman agreed enthusiastically, “the painting has gained a new meaning.”

  “So this is what they mean by performance art! How absolutely riveting and fresh!”

  “Do you need serious training to do performance art?” a fortyish man asked, whom I recognized as a homeless man on my street.

  “I want it,” the gentleman in the tweed jacket announced, “it might be valuable one day.”

  “It’s valuable already!” Linda descended on the crowd like a circus-trained tiger.

  A man whose throat was wrapped in a pink scarf and whose head was pinched by a gray-checkered cap was taking copious notes. My recurring reverie whizzed by, and I deduced between ecstatic breaths that he was a critic from ART magazine. Things are happening, I serenaded myself, not in spite of the hole, but because of it! Other people were trickling in to investigate the source of the commotion.

  “It must have been planned—the hole is dead center—pure genius!”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “It’s an expression of the rupture of our society—of our morals and values—of the way the Internet will ruin all our lives—”

  “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  “Someone mentioned that the artist is from Russia?”

  “Perhaps it’s a meditation on her double identity. There’s a hole in all of us—and through it our many identities seep from one into the other—it’s about the fluidity of identity.”

  “I hardly agree—there’s something monstrous here, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Maybe you’re referring to the fact that the painting is called The Monster.”

  The admiration in people’s voices and their conspiratorial laughter passed through my body like the pleasurable currents of a lethal drug, administered only to the incurably vain. How I beamed at all of them—how I marveled at my impulsive act!

  “I’ll take it for two thousand!” someone thundered from the back of the room, and in that instant all my pleasure turned to dread.

  “I’ll raise it to two thousand five hundred,” someone else shouted and the auction went into full swing. Linda’s face ignited, her voice rose. “Three thousand, do I hear three? Yes, we have three thousand from the gentleman in the back.” More people streamed in; the room was engulfed in hysteria and commotion.

  I felt it then—his eyes drilling into the back of my head. I shifted my body in a half-circle, cautiously, and then I saw him at the back of the room, gripped in an artificial stillness. He wore a sleek nocturnal suit with a crisp white shirt and yet another striped variation of his signature maroon tie. There, at the corners of his mouth, danced his easy habitual smile. The room vanished from my field of vision and only he remained, only his eyes beckoned to me, bringing me within inches of his face.

  “You didn’t think I’d miss your debut,” he said, grinning. He examined my black décolleté blouse, taut pants, and the amethyst pendant drawing a triangle at the base of my neck, but his eyes never settled on my face.

  “So you’ve come for advice on your upcoming nuptials?” I noted in my aloof, extraterrestrial voice.

  “I don’t understand you! Do you actually believe these pompous idiots, do you believe their praise? You ruined your best piece, right on time, as if to spite me—”

  “Emma, I’m soooooo proud of you,” Linda crooned, descending upon us. “I honestly have no idea how I’m going to part with this incredible painting! And who is this?” Her feverish eyes latched onto Eddie. “Perhaps you’d like to make your bid on The Monster.”

  “I already did—I was the initial bid for two thousand,” he replied with a polite nod.

  “Oh, I wish I hadn’t sold your others quite so early,” Linda lamented to me.

  “I hadn’t meant to imply that I’m not in awe of Ms. Kaulfield’s work,” Eddie intervened.

  “No, God forbid.” Linda said. “Well, I must run! Do I hear five—the lady in the mink coat—yes, sold for five thousand dollars!” She had spotted an important-looking being in glitter and plowed a path through the crowd with her rakish arms and bulldozer heels. “Sold, sold!” she screamed in ecstasy.

  “Is there any place we can speak in private?” he asked.

  “We have nothing to say to each other,” I threw back.

  “Please, Emma—I won’t take long.”

  I submitted out of a sudden hope and led him up a creaking staircase into Linda’s den. You poor abused heart, still so naïve, so opulently optimistic, imagining that he has come to apologize for the punctures he left in your four ventricles.

  But when I glanced at him, his face betrayed nothing: a polished mask.

  The bedroom housed people’s coats and purses, and the art world’s salacious secrets. A stack of shrouded paintings leaned against a wall. Invitations to galleries, magazines, letters spilled from half-opened drawers, and slides of artwork were scattered on her oak desk. Candles burned in old wine bottles, illuminating the centerpiece: a mammoth scarlet bed.

  We attempted with great difficulty to avoid eye contact with the lascivious silk bedding. There were rumors that Linda brought young male artists here after their shows and demanded gratitude for her labors. A draft blew in from a cracked windowpane and the candle flames, in a communal sigh, bent toward us.

  He touched my arm and leaned chillingly close to my face, rendering me momentarily mute.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I came here tonight,” he said, retreating, “to say something—I want to wash my hands of pretense—”

  “You want to ‘wash your hands of pretense’—let me try and decipher your meaning, my banker-poet!” I cried with an acrid shrill instead of the intended Zen laugh.

  “Shut up—shut the fuck up and listen to me. I need for you to listen.”

  “You’re too late—I don’t want to hear anything from you—”

  “I need to explain why I behaved the way I did—you must know the truth.”

  “T
he truth—the truth—when was there ever a more perfidious word!”

  “It was never the way you said. I didn’t grow up with a flag-waving racist.”

  “You’ve come to tell me your mother was, after all, or still is an anti-Semite—is that it?” I laughed hideously.

  “Mother wanted to feel superior to everyone. She said things like: ‘those people with their green pastures,’ her favorite euphemism for Jewish money. My father used to argue with her at the beginning of the marriage, but I have few memories of that. The breakdown wiped everything out. The breakdown and the bankruptcy. My father’s partner was half-Jewish and she clung to that. ‘Do you think it’s peculiar that Russell stole your father’s money and professed to be Christian, despite his obvious Jewishness?’ she’d ask Andy and me as if it was a riddle to be solved.”

  “Dear God—is this the world you grew up in?”

  “Yes, everyone did. My mother wasn’t unique.”

  “Are you excusing her? Am I supposed to be comforted by your bigoted environment?”

  “I’m just trying to capture it for you. Prejudices were spewed about every religion and nationality: blacks, Asians, Indians, you name it, but the Jews, yes. You have to understand our neighborhood used to be all WASPs, people like my parents, people my parents were friends with—they considered themselves ‘broad-minded’ because they were friends with Jews or in business with Jews but in private, there was no restraint.

  “My mother was better than most in keeping quiet. She’d even reprimand other mothers in our presence. She thought it was ‘unsavory’—”