The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  The Hudson River shimmers in deceptive charcoal hues and echoes to me like a handsome stranger with lithe arms. I’ve known for two days. I find it impossible to eat, sleep, speak, or make love to Aaron. I’ve been puffing on Albuterol and Flovent all day, the greatest intake since the first official diagnosis of my asthma four years ago, since the first emergency room visit and the shock of learning I am chronically out of breath. The water is a black soft quilt mottled in white lights under a murky moon—is he an artist now? Has the world turned upside down? Why am I still moving? I hold the invitation in my hand as though it’s poison: a four by six reprint of a photograph reveals a man’s face fused with a computer screen, and beneath it, the title reads The Modern Corporation. Why are my feet hurrying to the traffic light, clicking against cobblestones, crossing alleys into the heart of Soho, to see this exhibit? Over four years have passed between us, and I have not forgiven him; I have kept, nurtured, sustained my rancor. In a red satin V-neck blouse hanging loosely over taut dark jeans and red suede stilettos, thick black eyeliner magnifying my eyes and my hair clasped in a stern French twist high upon my head, I look exactly how I feel—ferocious. But as I approach the gallery—a stunning open space whose glass walls and doors give one the feeling of swimming and breathing in turquoise water—my knees wobble and the stiletto heels bend untowardly and threaten to send me, face-first, into a gray summer puddle.

  I inhale, exhale, think of Aaron, brace myself with yoga breath, then I enter. My eyes settle on the black-and-white photographs, which even from afar strike one with their surfeit of gray, their mundane, muted expression of everyday life in the cubicle. People are sipping champagne in skinny postmodern flutes and tiny heart-shaped hors d’oeuvres pass from tray to mouth. Then I spot him: a tall statue in black. He does not move. He appears as if he’s been stranded on an island naked and people have suddenly begun to materialize from the surrounding bushes. He does not seem to possess the same ease, smile, laugh I remember. The face is gaunt and pale, and a stubble sits in uneven crescents on square sharp jaws. His eyes appear to have been repainted in blue charcoal, grown inscrutable in a sudden dusk. A black T-shirt covers a narrower body. The muscles on his chest have shrunk; jeans hang from his hips. He appears to my great amazement to resemble the typical artist-type; the banker’s polish has been effaced, except for the closely cropped brown hair. Two men and a dazzling woman, in a fuchsia-hued dress and hefty silver earrings, circle him like three giant wasps.

  “Everything is moving along marvelously. I’m pretty sure I just spotted Frank Grovel, the—I mean the IMAGE critic,” the woman chirps.

  “I hear the upstairs hasn’t had much action,” the young prim-looking man declares, and the other nods. “We need to get them up there—I still don’t understand why you didn’t have the nudes on the first floor—they’re by far your best.”

  Eddie remains silent.

  Stay calm, smile, appear happy, it’s been a century, act like you’re completely indifferent. I approach them and meet his eyes.

  “Eddie,” I say, then with a grin, “Ignatius.”

  “Emma,” he says with a kind smile, “Lena—Lenochka.”

  “So you’re an artist now?”

  “Oh, no, I’m still a banker at heart—I’m just a photographer on the side. The only real question is whether I have talent.”

  We laugh, and I note with the coolness and objectivity of a floating observer that the intimacy is instant between us.

  “I hoped you’d come,” he says. “You look—you look stunning!”

  “It’s the red satin,” I mutter, glancing at my shirt.

  “It’s not the shirt.” He comes closer and I stagger from him.

  “Let me introduce you to Edith—she runs the gallery.” But Edith and the two men have been swallowed by the throng.

  “So how did you become a side-dish artist?” I ask with a pinch of envy.

  “This almost didn’t happen,” he says, blushing. “I was this close to becoming the CEO of Beltrafio Movers and Shakers.” A nervous laugh erupts from his mouth, then quickly subsides.

  “Wow—that would have made your mother very happy!”

  “After I lost you, I lost the desire, the drive to make money. I remember it clearly: the Triploch-Fennimore merger. The deal on the table was a mess, not good for anyone. But I was told to urge the client to take it. We were punching insane hours, operating on autopilot. Everyone was nervous, gulping caffeine by the gallon, popping amphetamines, snorting coke. That’s when things got weird, you know. People just got weirder. I looked into one guy’s cubicle and saw him surfing porn sites and laughing out loud. Sylvia was doing her nails at three in the morning. Next day I brought my camera to the office and after midnight I started snapping whatever I saw—nobody cared—haggard faces would smile at me and I thought: this could be interesting …” He points at the wall, and inside a thick black frame, a young man’s enormous profile backlit by a computer screen reads, “Voluptuous Vixens in Threesomes.” Another photograph reveals a magnified paper cup of Folgers coffee on a stack of copied documents, dripping brown on the word URGENT. Next to it, a man is slumped over his chair, his slumbering face fused with the keyboard; the clock above him flashes 5:00 am, and drool trickles from his parted mouth. Another is a woman’s half-turned face, invoking in my mind Sylvia’s profile; it is juxtaposed against a pyramid of people’s names, earmarked by the date when they’ll be laid off. The photographs are intimate, precise; their derision of corporate life is coupled with a burning, gray-hued melancholy.

  But instead of praising him, instead of saying what simmered on the tip of my tongue—you’re so talented, Eddie—I ask, “Did you ever marry Melanie?”

  “How can you ask me that? You know I never did—you knew the last time I saw you.”

  “I knew,” I say, smiling, retrieving the buried feeling of being wanted by him.

  “And you—are you with someone?”

  “Me—with someone?”

  “Don’t tell me—engaged once again—the perennial fiancée?” he cries out, his voice reeking of cynicism, judgment.

  I recall my short spurts of independence from Aaron, our fleeting breakups when I’d bury my head in my studio and deny myself a future comforted by another soul, when loneliness would claw inside my stomach and bleed through its walls. I was a speck in a sea of unremarkable souls, seeking a way out of the ordinariness of life only to sink back into its warm, dark pouch.

  I want to tell him about this ugly loneliness but instead I say, “This one’s definitely headed to the altar—definitely!”

  “Were there any other fiancés along the way?”

  “Aaron and I have been together for four loyal years now,” I say sternly.

  “Impressive!” he returns with irony and raised brows. “Are you still painting?”

  Am I still painting, am I still living, breathing, thinking, am I still Emma?

  I look at him with all the sorrow and blame I had amassed for the last four years and cut him down. “Let’s talk more about you—about your artistic transformation! There you were, snapping pictures at work, so what? How did you go from Norton’s resident photographer to this?” I point at the walls, wanting to scream: what kind of a strange, unkind life is this—where one’s world can so easily be turned upside down? Why did it seem so proper for him to be a businessman and me to be the artist? Was it the female-male ratio of properly weighed monies and professions, whereas now, now look at me—a novice on a beam, legs in a quake, arms uneven, my art dried up and his just starting to sprout a lover’s seeds?

  But he picked it up without hesitation or acridity. “I was at a client’s house for this lavish dinner at this ridiculously gaudy Fifth Avenue apartment. The evening was going well. Same old bullshit—we’re talking about restructuring and the stock price when the conversation turns to art. The guy is a dilettante art collector, under the illusion that he’s some kind of a cultural phenomenon, and after dinner, he takes us on a little t
our to showcase his collection. Most of it is modern kitsch and commercial crap for which he paid astronomical sums, but here and there I’d see a gem.

  “Anyhow, that’s when I saw it—your painting hanging over his library desk. I felt you in the room suddenly, saw you there with us, laughing and flirting with your eyes. I ask him, ‘how did you get this?’ ‘Oh, my wife,’ he says, ‘bought it years ago for pennies at this small gallery in Soho and now I hear it’s worth serious money. I hear the artist was picked up by the Nebu gallery, but now they’re threatening to cut her off. She’s quit cold turkey—barricaded her studio with cardboard boxes—who knows why—it’s been two years since she’s produced anything. Of course, that makes her paintings all the more valuable. Now how outrageous is the art world—tell me!’

  “‘How can you stand to look at that scene of horror, of torture every day?’ I ask.

  “He laughs in my face. ‘All I see is a winter storm.’

  “‘The white light is a child,’ I tell him, ‘dead center where the hole is—that’s a child being tortured.’

  “‘The hole is great—everyone takes notice of it, and the white light’—he laughs again—‘that’s no child—that’s the winter light blinding us all to what’s directly in front of us.’

  “‘And what’s in front of us?’ I ask.

  “‘Sex and money,’ he replies, ‘the Devil’s handiwork—just look at that rotting bark and the red eyes—and tell me you haven’t tasted your share of hell! Pure catharsis!’ That’s when I knew—” Eddie stops talking.

  “You knew?” I ask, blood flooding my temples.

  “This dinner, this guy, the expensive china and chandeliers, his plastic wife, the work I was doing, the spreadsheet life, the endless analyses I’d been preparing for years for Grant—I was locked in some of kind of perverse universe. I couldn’t see myself at all, or what I saw, I didn’t recognize—I had disappeared. I had enough money, God knows, I had enough. I didn’t know what to do so I showed this guy my very first image and he bought it. He introduced me to gallery owners, gave me a foot hold and then it just fed off itself—slowly, I guess it’s still slow—”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s slow.”

  “But the whole time, the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about what he said, that you had stopped painting. I didn’t know if you had gotten married and had children. Or if you had become fed up with the art world.”

  “No, no, not that,” I murmur.

  “Why did you stop painting?”

  “Something happened, something that took time—once I got everything I wanted, once I saw my work hanging from those very same walls I once envied, my fingers and my mind stopped communicating with each other. Do you understand how terrible that can be? What I saw in my head wouldn’t come out. But my decline was gradual—I didn’t see it until I found myself wanting to cover up my paintings with a sheet. They repulsed me. Sometimes I imagined that the faces inside them were alive, and speaking to me, but I’d turn away and close my ears.”

  I stopped to breathe, to remember, but the paintings had been sold and I couldn’t recall a single distinct color. “They were nothing more than emotional diarrhea—no thought, no care was going into them, just a dumping ground. The reviewers were right. They were concoctions of moods—colors badly blended together—they were chaos—”

  “You’re wrong. They were some of the best work I’d seen you do. Yeah, it was dark, it was misery. People may not have wanted to chew a carrot stick looking at them, but that was always your strength. I bought two of those paintings.”

  “Throw them out,” I retort.

  I remember painting during those months following the night at the Fern Gallery, mired in nausea—what paroxysms of inspiration there were then! That was when a miraculous synchrony brewed between my fingers and my mind; I couldn’t stop sketching, imagining, layering paint on every conceivable white hole, couldn’t stop even when the stench of turpentine would clog my throat, and my intestines would compress, as if someone were squeezing them through my esophagus and out of my nose. Up and down, my stomach rode like a tractor mashing my nerves, never giving me a moment’s rest. “You shouldn’t paint anymore,” the doctor said, “it’s bad for the child.” The child? What child, I wondered, you mean the embryo, the blood vessel, the cell growing on my stomach’s wall? But I stopped painting anyhow; I scribbled with my black-ink pens and markers, with pencils and charcoal-stained hands. Anything that still made images, that captured my confusion, elation, anger, that made sense of this state of growing new life inside my body, like an exotic flower awakening in a petri dish, with beautiful spiderwebs and fins for hands and a tail instead of legs.

  “After I left you that night at the gallery”—he seems hesitant—“I imagined you’d paint it again—paint it anew.”

  “You mean my war against anti-Semitism?” I laugh absently, loudly.

  “The transparent child from your past—don’t you want to redo her?”

  “I don’t paint that because there’s no fight left in me. I paint new things now—new—”

  “Oh, I was hoping to see that painting recreated somehow, you see, I thought …”

  “I know what you thought.”

  “What do you paint now?” He trembles from the sense that something hidden and lurid is passing before him. But when he tries to grip it, I only make it slip away faster. I wait—let the dull, painful punch of ignorance form a crater in his head, then I point to a crowd and say, “Where’s everyone going?”

  People are ascending a white staircase that coils into the second floor, and I move catatonically toward them. He follows me. Our ascent is slow, ponderous, conversations shut down as we stare at each other’s backs, and I feel him in my hair—his breath weaving around my neck. The second floor is rectangular and claustrophobic; the lights are dimmer, sharper like pencils pointing at haphazard angles at black-and-white images. There, hanging on every wall, are parts of me. My collarbone leading up to my profile stretches for close to six feet and is the centerpiece of his collection. Disheveled hair is arrayed across a naked back. A torso cut between breasts and pubic hairs lies on a black sheet, capturing a quiver in the navel. A profile of one breast dominates a wide expanse of wall, the nipple protruding into space, pointy, aglow. Legs are spread apart as two male hands reach seductively over bent knees. A view from above reveals a naked body arching on a wooden floor, candles between the legs, inside the armpits, lighting up the back of the head, which is tilted backward, revealing a set of parted hungry lips. He took these pictures of me in Maine, all shot in a matter of hours, but to me they’re cryptograms of his nature, resurrections of his vindictiveness and cruelty the last night I laid in his bed. His anger fills every image: the black shadows, crisp silver lines, excesses of light delineating and dissecting my skin—how my body parts scowl at me like recriminations!

  I want to bury myself inside an industrial-sized garbage bag but nothing big enough presents itself. I feel the onlookers staring, judging, connecting me to the images on walls, and yet my mind is lucid enough to see that the photographs are vague, even universal, that they can be said to comprise an exegesis of a woman. The visitors are unaware of me; their eyes scan over my body parts in wonderment and stupor, reminding me of the wonderment and stupor of my own shows. Unhurriedly, their collective gaze travels to the opposing wall where—I can barely look, barely breathe—grim images of Russia assail me from every corner. Stalin’s shattered bronze head, a vandalized Jewish cemetery with Nazi swastikas emblazoned on my ancestors’ headstones, the entrance door flung open to the Moscow synagogue where I had once danced “Hava Nagila” in a circle of ecstatic Jews, guarded by soldiers and the KGB. At its epicenter, I’m confronted by an image of a street: a narrow sidewalk luxuriates in poplars and lavender trees, marking a path between a dense nature park and a red-brick building cast against a cloudless white sky. An arch opens at the entrance and there, directly above, a child beams from a balcony where I had once stood
, her right hand pinned diagonally across her face—the pioneer salute. I recognize her at once; the proud hopeful gaze is mine.

  “How did you do this?” I ask. “That’s my street—that’s Usiyevicha—is that me?”

  “The picture you gave me when you were eight—I inserted it into this photograph of your building.

  “First thing I did after I left Norton was travel. There were so many places I wanted to see—China, India, Israel, Russia. But when I got to Russia—to Moscow, especially, I found myself only wanting to find you.” He glances at the photograph of the child and murmurs, “but you weren’t there.”

  “I’m confused. Why did you expose me like this?” I say and bite my tongue.

  “I needed to understand you—to feel—to feel what you felt—to feel your powerlessness—to feel everything I couldn’t,” he says, smiling strangely. “I couldn’t touch or see you but I could recreate you in my mind. That’s what I did here—there’s no proof these images are you. But to me—they probably capture you more than—”

  “Than the real me—”

  “Only in the sense of what it meant for me. These images are as much about me as you—my gaze into myself. God, this is such grandiose bullshit—the truth is—the thing is that I needed to find a way to see you again.” He grows silent, his lower lip trembles, but when he speaks again, his voice exudes strength. “I went to the Moscow synagogue and prayed. I prayed with the Russian Jews. I couldn’t understand a word, but I bowed my head out of respect. People cried. I—I’ve wanted to see you for the last four years so that I can finally tell you—I had so much to tell you.

  “I tried to contact you. Three years ago I came to your building and waited on the steps till ten or eleven o’clock. But you never came out. I left messages with your family. They were very gracious, by the way—”

  “I know.”

  “One of the paintings I bought—is of a pregnant woman, her stomach transparent. Inside a child smiles, playing with the cord wrapped around its neck, while the mother weeps—is this about us?”