The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “I don’t want to hear anymore. I’ve heard enough. I get it. You were raised as an anti-Semite and now—now—I don’t even know what you want from me—”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you—what I’ve tried to tell you for so long. Just because she is my mother doesn’t mean that’s who I am. I was never, ever like my mother or my brother!” he insisted. “The girl I told you about—the dancer—I never told you her name.”

  He told me now, staring out the window at the street below. “Her name was Tziporah. Her father was Israeli, her mother an Orthodox Jew. That’s why she couldn’t date me or anyone, why she was so shy, why she—she—”

  “My God—then all of this—us—you and me—you’ve just been trying to repent for her.”

  “I’ve spent my life—I’ve spent my life, Emma, trying—trying to—”

  “Trying to atone for your mother’s and brother’s sins? You’ve spent your life seeking a way out, and hallelujah, you found me!” I dropped my face in my hands and leaned against the wall. “You—you—everything was calculated: that night the four of us went out—the night of the gallery? What luck that I was Jewish! Oh, you’d fight for me then. You had to. No one could stand in your way, not even a fiancé. It didn’t really bother you that I was with someone else. You had to have me for yourself.”

  He let out an acrid laugh. “Are you crazy? Do you really think I fell in love with you for that?”

  “God, I thought I had left it all behind. I thought: here’s real freedom, freedom from being constantly differentiated and compared and judged on some invisible scale of a stereotype no one has yet been able to prove to have any connection to reality. I thought: no, no, there’s no anti-Semitism here in this country I love so much. Grandmother can’t be right on this one.

  “And then I met you—ah, I’d be with you, the quintessential blond tan American.” I laughed forcefully, the pain in my chest constricting my voice. “With you, I’d wipe it all away. You’d cure me with your optimism, your idealism, your marvelous manners, your very smile. You were my escape, my puerile happiness. I was ready to forget, to give it all up. With you, for weeks on end, I couldn’t remember a thing—joyous amnesia. That’s why I never brought up Alex. I was reborn, a new person who simply didn’t know these ugly things exist, ugly things that could only happen there, only there, but here—here you are!”

  He closed his eyes and stood there, a befuddling image swaying in the winter dusk. “Here I am,” he murmured. “I’m still the same man.”

  “Did you ever consider the possibility that your mother influenced your brother’s seduction of Tziporah—that she pushed him to steal her?”

  “I don’t know—that seems extreme. Whose mother hasn’t interfered in their relationship? I mean, look at your parents!”

  “Don’t you dare compare us—in my family it’s all out in the open—”

  “Like Alex’s mother showing up? Don’t tell me that wasn’t sabotage.”

  “My grandmother was merely trying to protect me from the likes of your mother. She saw right through her—she didn’t need a single English word to crack her open!” I paused, glaring at him with impatience and a loathing all my own. “Think about it—all it would take is one carefully planned night—for you to walk in and find your brother and girlfriend compromised. I think it’s totally within your mother’s repertoire—I think she enjoyed it.”

  “What are you saying—what are you implying—that my mother is downright evil?”

  “Why not? Why, when there’s so much evil in the world, why should you or I be spared? People talk about evil as if it’s out there, removed from them, in the news or fiction, or faraway lands, evil in the form of death or torture. But what about furtive evil that lacks color and stage presence, that doesn’t announce itself when it walks in but sows its roots inside your own home? Imagine being so close that you can’t see it.”

  “My mother is many things but she’s not evil—she’s just misguided, backward—”

  “Maybe, just maybe, she used the rivalry between you and your brother to get what she wanted—to get rid of Tziporah. And maybe, just maybe, she used what you told her about me—my sensitivities, you might say—to fire directly into my wound. Maybe she meant for me to hear her just as she meant for you to walk in on Tziporah.” I shuddered as I spoke.

  “I don’t believe it—”

  “It’s not just about anti-Semitism—it’s about power,” I kept blazing on. “She’s always wanted power. And which anti-Semitic tyrant throughout history didn’t?”

  “Impossible—impossible—you—with your dark past, your life, your pessimism about human nature—only you could think such a thing!” There was such agony in his face that I wanted to soothe it with a tender stroke, but I felt beaten, my extremities in too much pain to help another being.

  “I’m not afraid to face the truth.”

  “I don’t care about my mother,” he said. “I’ve come here tonight to tell you that I want you back—I want us back.”

  I laughed uproariously. “You must be joking—you must realize that whatever compromises I was willing to make for you—all peanuts in comparison to the compromise I’d have to make now to bear your mother—”

  “If I understand you correctly, my only option is to cut myself entirely from my mother.”

  “Like all children of abuse, you must realize that it’s not your fault. Your mother, Eddie—are you listening to me?—your mother is not your fault.”

  “And do you—do you believe that? Can you see that she and I are two separate beings? You’re the one who’s always conflating children with their parents—”

  “I was wrong—now all I see is children trying to claw their way out—”

  “But failing miserably. Look at you tonight: maybe that’s why you ruined your own masterpiece—that took you how many months to complete, how many years to conceive? Yet I couldn’t help but think there was greatness in your act. Just like you destroyed us, you destroyed your painting. I realized too late that you’re even willing to destroy yourself.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I finally got it, I finally understood—”

  “That night, at my parents’ house, I wanted to lie down on the ground and beg your forgiveness but instead—instead only venom and lies came out.”

  “Then let me lie down on the ground and beg your forgiveness now.”

  “For what—for what, Eddie?”

  “Because I didn’t see it then, at that moment I was blind, blinded by them, by my mother, by you.”

  “And what is it that you see now?”

  “That you were willing to kill us off. I didn’t have it in me to imagine anyone—any woman—going that far. You forced me into thinking—into imagining—a vision of you in bed with him! And here’s the crazy thing: I was willing to forgive you—”

  “I know—if only—”

  “If only it was before Maine—before you and I shared everything—”

  “That was the thing that seemed so unbelievable—that you were willing to forgive me so much!”

  “How could you do such a monstrous thing? And I, I treated you monstrously in return.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it suddenly without giving me time to rip it away. “I should have known, I should have figured it out right then, at that moment—why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t you tell me that night that you listened to my mother’s bile—I would have known instantly that your only way out was to break me, break free of me. I would have known, asked myself the right question: can our love survive her hatred? But you didn’t tell me—why? Why?”

  “Because I was loyal to them—in that house, my family owned me, in that house, after hearing your mother, I had to end it?”

  “But here you are back in New York, away from them: you came back to me—”

  “I did—and you didn’t want me.”

  “I want you now!”

  “I never slept with Alex.”<
br />
  “I know. I was a fool to ever think it: that night in your parents’ house, in a split-minute decision, you felled us in one swoop, leaving no breathing organ to revive.”

  He caught my hand in his and said, “We can build ourselves up from nothing, from nothing, Emma, we can start anew on a clean slate.”

  “We’re too attached to our little spheres of suffering, Eddie, to ever find a clean slate.”

  “I’m willing to erase mine—I am—”

  “It’s too late, Eddie, what you told me just now—the fact that it’s real—that it isn’t just a phantom in my mind—but that your mother’s hatred is real! God, I kept thinking, hoping: I’m imagining this, I’m overly sensitive! Even my sister didn’t believe me, but you—by telling me the truth tonight—you’ve made it real.”

  “You yourself said that my mother and I are separate beings—”

  “I understand the theory, Eddie. I didn’t say I could live with it. I didn’t say I could ever look into your face and not see her in it. I didn’t say that when the time came and my anger at you for something ridiculous like the dishwasher, or our child’s misbehavior, or whatever else might happen in our future, wouldn’t end up in me calling you an anti-Semite.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said with confidence. “You’re smarter than that.”

  “I wish you were right”—I felt my voice quaver—“but when you’ve been damaged like me, there is a price to pay. You’ll be so much happier with Melanie. I’m sure of it now.”

  “Are you telling me that if I hadn’t told you about my mother’s real views, that you’d come back to me? Are you telling me that I ruined everything by telling you the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s impossible. Completely unfair.”

  “Yes, but that is the way it is. You cannot unsay it. I cannot undo how I feel now.”

  “No, I refuse to believe that.” He held his ground. “Just give it time. With time, you’ll let go of the pain.”

  I thought about the dissidents, the Jewish fighters decaying in the gulags, dying for us, for me. I thought of my grandfather being carted off by the KGB. I thanked them all silently, as I often did, for this spirited voice I now possessed, for my dancing legs and strong arms, for the courageous stomach that lunged forward into the great solitary unknown, and in the distance I saw my heart hanging in the air, bright and red as a rotting cherry, and ventricle by ventricle, I shut it off.

  “Time won’t cure me. Can’t you understand: this thing, this anti-Semitism business is the mainstay, the all-consuming trope of my life.”

  “Then you have not transcended anything at all,” he returned, meeting my gaze with defiance, “not your past, not your circumstances—then what was all this art for?”

  “For the children who cannot speak,” I told him with sudden calm. “Now you must leave me, Eddie. You must leave me and never come back. Do you hear me: never.”

  He stood there, helpless, motionless, like a child lost, not knowing what to do. I wanted to say “goodbye,” or to give him directions—to help him find the secret passage out of my life—but there wasn’t a word available to me without the incumbent tears. I don’t know how long it took him to shift his shoulders and then careen blindly toward the open door. An unfamiliar doom in his expression tilted his shoulders forward, making him hunch over, and I thought with bitter humor that I had finally done it: turned him into a depressed Russian soul. I heard his body hit the stairwell, his feet tapping, each tap growing fainter, disappearing from my life. I couldn’t see anything after that. The candles had burned out and traffic screamed from below, and tears gathered in my throat like a noose that kept tightening until I let them surface. They had been there all along, and only now, in his absence, I could let them cut across my scarlet face—my lugubrious gray rivers swallowed up in all that red.

  Painting #8 (For a Future Installment)

  I’m in my thick black shuba with an ear-flapped hat and a verdant scarf to match my eyes, running through an arch toward the sound of children screaming. Screaming, I tumble into a mound of snow and lick it with my tongue, imagining white honey. Laughter escalates and grips me, at once a cackle and a ballad, an echo piercing a dazzling, phantasmagoric sky. Winter’s mirth can never live in spring or fall or summer; see winter’s merry tears harden on my cheeks and lashes and carve ice flowers on my skin. Into clear ice I turn—into Snegurochka—the fair snow princess can only breathe in winter air and so, like her, my shuba is an iridescent gown and my fingers are bluish-white like royal gloves. My toes are numb inside transparent slippers, my black felt valenki have holes and leak, and in my ear, my grandmother’s dulcet voice beckons: come, Lenochka, come home … The other children laugh and tackle one another, and suddenly their shubas glisten—we’re all transforming into fairies sculpted out of snow. We spread out our arms and legs and succulent white flakes paint patterns on our faces, and our frozen fingers burrow into diamond quilts beneath our backs. We stare up at the sky and speak to distant planets: oh capitalist universes where Levi’s jeans and booming color televisions and shapely Coca-Cola bottles grow like oranges from trees—what dost thou think of us? Our cheeks grow hotter, redder, our hearts are beating wild, our eyes are rapt in stars. Our breath is glowing in ribbons of white fire, and as it intertwines, it dances and melts our differences in snow. Come Lenochka come home …

  Epilogue

  Grandmother is delighted because my fiancé, Aaron, is Jewish and a heart surgeon, and because I’ll be twenty-nine in a month and my headlong plunge into the swamp of spinsterhood seems to have been timely aborted. Thank heaven for Aaron, she exclaims, even as she criticizes him. He is too gaunt, she quips, like a reed in the Siberian freeze. Still he must never gain weight, she points out faithfully, because fat men with such small nondescript features tend to lose their looks completely, not to mention the pitfall of no longer resembling real men. Yet she has solutions (as she does for everything): all his mishugas would be cured if he only took a bite of her Holodetz (a traditional Russian meat jelly held together by pure fat). She applies succinct axioms to describe his personality, the most noteworthy being: a starving British hound, a misguided interloper, and an American Neanderthal (i.e., a prehistoric man with American manners). The latter, in particular, stems directly from a breakfast confrontation in which Aaron lectured Grandmother on the perils of her yolk-rich omelets and liver pâtés for her aging seventy-three-year-old heart. “Did he just guess ‘seventy-three’? If I was seventy-three right now, I’d be dead.” No one knew Grandmother’s exact age, but her green card said she was closing in on eighty, and so Aaron, by supposedly deducing it, committed two cardinal sins against Russian womanhood: first, mentioning a woman’s age, and second, doing so without mentally subtracting forty years from that number.

  “Only mannerless dolts throw calories and cholesterol diseases at your face while you’re enjoying your egg,” Grandmother told him, which I fortunately had enough sechel to mistranslate. Still, even as she dissects and upbraids, Grandmother repeats her favorite motto: “no man is perfect, and Aaron like your father is—tfu, tfu, tfu—very, very close!”

  I nod my head three times and consider the facts: under Aaron’s supervision, I’ve gained calm, muscle tone, improved reasoning skills. He is superbly disciplined in keeping me healthy and sane: garlic and tofu for my circulation, cucumbers and papaya for my boldly sprouting wrinkles and cuckoo digestive tract, and wheat germ and macadamia nuts for my—we won’t mention it—brain. Although he can afford it and he is no cheapo, Aaron has been limiting my intake of steak au poivre, Hungarian salami, and Beluga caviar on thick layers of butter and French baguettes. Because of his initiative and perseverance, I’m finally contributing to my heart retirement fund.

  Aaron believes genius is not an inborn trait but one that is cajoled into existence; case in point: he is God in open-heart surgery. I admire his confidence, attention to detail, thorough knowledge of all medical subspecialties, and le
ctures on topics ranging from the Himalayas and the benefits of yoga breath to the preposterousness of having robots replace humans in open- heart surgery. Although Aaron was raised in a conservative Jewish home, and although his father’s parents came to America to escape the pogroms in 1914 under the Tsar, he does not like to dwell on my Russia—he believes it is “BAD” as in “BAAAHAAAD” for my nerves and digestion. For during those early years of our courtship (when I was still recovering from Eddie and could not hold a paint brush between my two fingers without succumbing to a hiccupping hysteria), he would inundate me with Post-its, announcing my deadlines, pushing me to complete one painting and move on to the next. Aaron was used to patients. He gave me valium and Ambien and melatonin to help me sleep but I was inconsolable. He didn’t seem to mind that I sometimes lost track of days, forgot what he said, wept at inappropriate moments, or closed my eyes temporarily during his lectures. Aaron saved me. I was able to paint and produce, and despite that voice blaring in my ear—“you’re producing shit, SHIT”—people seemed to be buying. I even gained a permanent spot at the Nebu gallery—until two years ago, that is, when Aaron proposed.

  In my studio, on 27th Street, nestled between 7th and 6th Avenues, I climb to the seventh floor of a non-elevator building and “work” on my paintings, work and procrastinate, pace the narrow workspace, a rectangle of gray linoleum and red-brick walls. A torn, filthy sheet from ART magazine hangs from a nail, as a quasi-muse and personal torturer. I stare at it when I paint and when I can’t, a steady reminder of that tumultuous year. My face is compressed into a tiny square, my smile wide and intact. Beneath it a caption reads: “Children at Play, Out of Soviet Russia.” I’m quoted as saying, “My family and I came to America at the height of the Cold War when Reagan called Russia the Evil Empire. It was very hard in the beginning … I’m so thankful to my family for always being supportive of my endeavors. They have always believed in my art.”