The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Well, my dearest Elena,” Alex broke into my thoughts, “have you made your decision?”

  “Yes, yes, merci, I’ll marry you!” I cried because it was suddenly clear to me that if I didn’t pledge my love to wonderful, loyal, brilliant Alex, to my Alexei Ifimovich Bagdanovich (what glorious features my children would have, what phenomenal brains and warm hearts), I’d be doomed, doomed to endless family squabbles and regrets and bathroom flings, to my grotesque desires, to my own dazzling reflection in the mirror: a scarlet-winged butterfly wanting every dandelion and pansy and sunflower in her path, masking sexual perversity in a feminist’s cry.

  “Glorious, glorious,” Alex exclaimed, “You’ve made me a very happy man!” He opened his palm, which had grown moist from sweat and nerves, and gingerly tried to push the ring down my third finger. He failed at the second knuckle.

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to get the ring reset,” Alex said, frowning from this unexpected hurdle. Within seconds he threw his jacket over his shoulders and stuffed a generous wad of cash into the reluctant hands of the assaulted waiter, who it turned out was not French after all, but Portuguese. Alex did not know any Portuguese but thought it was a fascinating culture.

  I scanned the restaurant, miserably wanting to locate the stranger. The place swarmed with silver-haired men with wide luminous smiles and after-dinner drinks in their veiny hands, and I wondered if my stranger was not a few decades older than me. But as I stood up and swiveled my head, I caught his eyes settling on my behind, disrobing it. There was a blonde woman at his side and two handsomely dressed men seated at a large round table. They appeared animated, in some discussion about Microsoft stock. I heard one of the men say, “We shouldn’t have been bankers—we should have been computer geeks.” “Yeah, but then we’d have to wait till our IPO quadrupled to get the women,” the stranger said, and the table, including the blonde, burst into a communal chuckle.

  The stranger looked young, perhaps younger than his years. He had an easy contagious smile and eyes that shone in clear blue slivers out of a tan square face. He appeared at this range genial and pleasant, and despite wide shoulders and a solid thick body, he seemed light, almost weightless against the backdrop of Alex’s perfectly sculpted solemn face.

  “Ready, my love—are you ready to go?” Alex said in a buttery voice, pushing me along with stealth impatience. But I stood still, staring at the stranger.

  “Goodbye,” I said out loud, and then I heard an echo, a mantra whirring in my head: goodbye all things fleeting and pleasurable and reckless and insane …

  His table quieted down and everyone turned to look at me.

  “Goodbye,” the stranger returned, his eyes latching onto my figure like two splendid cerulean doves, following me out of the restaurant as I held onto Alex for support.

  Alex didn’t seem to notice our exchange. In the cab, he was concerned about his blunder with the waiter. “I shouldn’t have assumed he was French, just because the restaurant was French. I know better than that,” he berated himself, and broke into a quiet laugh. We stepped out in front of my building and entered a narrow, dilapidated foyer with leaking walls and the stench of piss emanating from a cracked linoleum floor. I invited Alex to my apartment but he hesitated, initially seeming to be daunted by the prospect of climbing a broken staircase all the way up to the fifth floor. And when his mouth met mine with an erect tongue, when he pinned me against the besmirched mustard-colored wall of my foyer, I welcomed him, thinking, yes, I’ve been a miserable girlfriend, but I’ll be an exemplary fiancée; I even tried to summon that ferocious desire, those notes of anonymity and truncated breaths, whispering to myself: pretend you don’t know his name. But Alex slid his hands inside my bra and, patting my breasts, whispered, “my gorgeous perfectly contoured fiancée—till next time!” And with that, he sprang out the door, hailed a cab, and dove in like a man trying to outrun a fire.

  The Men Who Take Us to Art Galleries

  Two months into my engagement, I was wrapped in garlic from head to foot. Alex was in Chicago, living at his mother’s house, taking a hiatus after having proposed to me. I didn’t know whether he was afraid of sex or running out of his parents’ frequent flier miles. Whatever his reasons, I learned to eat garlic straight up and raw, without any bread or condiments, just a self-executed human torture for my ballooning guilt. The incident in the bathroom had left me bedazzled and scared. The shadowy stranger awakened in me such a flurry of primitive desires that I locked myself in my room and swore I would never emerge, not even to pee, lest I bump into one of Natasha’s lovers on the way to the malfunctioning toilet and grab his or her buttocks on a lusty whim. I had become aware of every tic in my body, every pang of perverse hunger, every murmur of the vagina apparatus—an intimacy I must say I never thought possible. So, in solitude and excellent humor, I did what any self-respecting, garlic-clad monk would do: I began a vigilant masturbation routine, preferably right before sleep, imagining the men’s room of La Cote Basque as if it were a major research center for human sexuality. On the streets, I spied men everywhere, burgeoning out of desks and sidewalks and corners, their phone numbers pasted to their foreheads, approaching me with no regard for my garlic aroma. (Apparently, most men have no sense of smell whatsoever.)

  At long last, in an anguished phone call, Alex admitted that he couldn’t face me. His first round of interviews at New York banks had ended in excruciating failure.

  But like all good immigrants, Alex was not one to give up easily. After enduring advice from condescending relatives and friends, he concurred that his job history was simply ill-matched for the narrow focus of an investment banker. So he sought out the Russian resume guru, Lenny Berman, who like the driver’s license guru, Felix Luzhinsky, and the tax guru, Rita Gruffman, were loyal and wise servants of the Chicago Russian community, facilitating our smooth transition into the complex mishugas of American bureaucracies. For immigrants did not think the way Americans did: that one’s life was a culmination of what one actually did, that it was bound by some unspoken honor code to be truthful and accurate about every event in one’s life, and that a resume, while it certainly could be polished, could not be fundamentally changed. For an immigrant’s life was a kaleidoscope of dreams, a reality so thoroughly interspersed with the surreal and fantastical that one’s experiences, foibles, and even memories could easily be smudged, if not entirely written over, in one’s struggle to catch that elusive American prize: success!

  The banks responded in the affirmative to the fabricated resume, and now Alex was facing the staggering prospect of nine interviews. His trip would be paid for, and he arrived on Friday at my building, glowing with ethereal joy. It was the first time that he climbed the broken staircase and, panting heavily, stepped inside my apartment, where Natasha’s nude photos greeted him in the hallway. I took him inside my room and spread my arms helplessly in a vague circle to indicate my life’s passion: my paintings. But he didn’t seem to see them. He said, “I can’t believe it, nine interviews, nine! And one of them is with Norton Bank! They turned me down two months ago and they don’t even remember! Amazing country, this America!” Squeezing my buttocks with his long, aristocratic fingers, he burrowed his tongue deeper inside my mouth than I had hoped. (Though it did indicate progress.) Then he checked himself, fixed his sweater, and within minutes started to lecture me on Degas.

  “No, no—he wasn’t really an impressionist—he was a realist,” Alex said. The arts had taken a particularly vicious hold of him since he learned that I secretly wanted to be an artist.

  “You look beautiful, my darling fiancée,” he murmured, “like that effervescent dancer in L’etoile. Have you ever seen it? It’s at the Musée d’Orsay?” I glanced at my own body in a tiny cracked hallway mirror, and felt his flattery seep into my veins like a disorienting barbiturate. I wanted him to comment on my work but instead I was suddenly struck with my self: I wore chocolate-hued suede boots, a beige suede skirt that clung to my thighs and but
tocks and tapered off right above my knees, and a ribbed, cream-colored turtleneck that demarcated my breasts, which were loosely contained in a transparent silk bra. The overall effect of my outfit was one of a strange wintry transparency—of a figure so tightly bound in its thin wool fabrics that I appeared more exposed than if I were wearing a bikini. The only thing concealing me from the world was a striped brown jacket, which I threw on after Alex had a chance to absorb me in my original state. We could do it right now, I thought blissfully, but Alex asked, “Where are we going?” quite possibly to deflect my feeble attempts to seduce him again.

  “Nebu, it’s a gallery in Soho,” I said in my offended voice.

  “We should really be exploring the Met—they have an excellent Degas collection. Besides, you need to study from the masters—your attempts are infantile at best,” he announced, pointing to a sketch of two suffering ballet dancers he glimpsed on my bed.

  “I wish you wouldn’t always say what’s on your mind.”

  “If anyone can take it, it’s you,” he shot back, and at once I forgave him.

  “How was your interview at Norton Bank?” I asked as we walked down Prince Street.

  Alex furrowed his brows in disapproval at the question: “You know how I hate talking about this before I know anything for sure.” Like my grandmother, he abided by all the Russian superstitions and I adored this about him. He saw a block of wood hanging from a run-down building, and knocked on it three times, murmuring the mandatory tfu, tfu, tfu under his breath. Then, with a relaxed smile, he said, “I think it actually went really well. The guy who interviewed me knew what he was doing, and we got along famously. This is the most prestigious bank in the city and the money—”

  “That’s nice,” I interrupted without enthusiasm.

  “It would really be something if they took me—I mean the money in this city—you can’t imagine.”

  “I can imagine,” I said even though I was never very good at imagining money. Although I had specifically matriculated in SPASM with a vague hope for a practical career, I could not understand what money was, or what I, for instance, would have to do to make it. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine a cubicle, a desk, a name tag, a corporate ladder which I might climb. Nor did it occur to me that what Gloria Steinem and numerous other feminists wrote about and fought for—“equal pay for equal work”—could apply to me, could liberate me! Despite my protestations at the cultural inequity between the sexes, at the grotesque social burden placed on women to lose weight, look superb and wrinkle-free, and add dubious plastic matter to their breasts (“Why aren’t men adding plastic matter to their penises?” “When are women going to start asking, ‘is this shlong real?’”), I could not translate my feminist rage into practice. Like all women who’ve been inculcated for centuries with the Sleeping Beauty myth of a man rescuing, awakening, jump-starting a woman, I too longed for Alex to jump-start me. Perhaps in the back of my mind there lingered a secret egotistical wish: if I married Alex, I wouldn’t have to pursue statistics—I could paint all day and night, paint until I conceived of myself as a true artist. Then I wouldn’t mind Alex’s antiquated expositions on women or his derivative lectures on Degas. After all, he lectured like all Russian men (or perhaps all men) lectured, the way Igor misquoted Tolstoy, my father paraphrased The Economist, and my ex-fiancé recited Marx—with the urgency of an ego in need of constant watering like fussy hydrangea plants. Ah, marriage, how akin you are to gardening!

  By the time we got to the gallery, I was so exhausted, in such urgent need of food and drink, that I was ready to marry Alex on the spot. The doors were made of heavy glass, and as they closed behind me, I found myself in the immaculate space of another world. The paintings, covering almost the entirety of each wall, were speckled in luminous orange and yellow flames that created an orgy of naked red bodies—men and women heaped one top of the other, their legs and arms intertwining like thickly woven ropes. The colors, although bright and sloppily protruding from the canvas, filled one with grating melancholy. Some faces appeared suspended in a spasm of pain while others curled with joy, and one almost necessarily had to wonder if they were dying or fucking.

  “The artist has an unusually astute understanding of color,” Alex exclaimed and whipped out a note pad to jot down the artist’s name. The artist’s name was Michael Cobb, and I found myself imagining a buttery corn on the cob; I dabbed my mouth to guard against the very real possibility of drooling. “It’s obvious that the color indicates the perverse pleasures of an orgy,” Alex pontificated as I faded in and out of consciousness. I was gripped at once with hunger and a gnawing sense of inadequacy before these seven-foot-long pieces. My own paintings were small and modest, attempts at capturing a singular face disconnected from its body: a ballerina suspended in space, a woman merging into a man. I could manage one, two figures at most, but to capture a throng of people, to master so much human space—that I couldn’t do.

  Alex and I waltzed from painting to painting in a daze until we ended up in the last room of the gallery. There, covering an entire wall, was the artist’s latest creation: grayish-blue, emaciated bodies interlocked at the bottom of the canvas. Arms were reaching toward the sky, legs smashing against other people’s breasts and abdomens. They too were naked, struggling in the blue light to reach some center that resided between them. Their fingers scratched and clawed each other’s backs, and blood trickled from their bluish-gray skins. Under the painting, it said, The Abyss. I froze inside it. “What do you think it is?” I asked Alex after catching my breath.

  “Exasperating! I detest postmodern art,” he said with a loud sigh. “There’s no attempt to reach higher ideals. This is horror, plain and simple—modern kitsch. This isn’t art; this is the grotesque.”

  “I think it’s about death,” I said, unable to take my gaze off the blue center.

  “This is so moving,” I heard a voice behind me say. I could see from the corner of my eye an elegant thin blonde in a black jacket and a red scarf.

  “Yes,” the man next to her said, “very interesting.”

  “What do you think it means?” the woman went on.

  “If I had to guess”—he paused and cleared his throat—“I’d say it’s a Biblical story, an end to the human race. Perhaps they are sinners trying to claw their way out of death. I believe, but don’t quote me on this: it’s a scene right out of Jonah—”

  “You read the title?”

  “No, but if you look closely there is a whale behind the blue bodies—they’re reaching toward it, and there’s a tiny man inside the whale’s mouth looking up at the sky. The painting is transparent—”

  “I can’t believe you saw that,” the woman exclaimed. “That’s so impressive!”

  “That is impressive,” I said, apparently out loud, and immediately noticed an enormous black mass in the shape of some underwater monstrosity. Behind the blue bodies, a brightly lit figure was suspended in the center with its face directed at them, so that it appeared as though the man and the human race were facing one another in some agonizing exchange.

  The man and the woman had edged toward me, I imagined with horror, to reprimand me for interrupting their conversation.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to listen in, but I just saw that myself—” I muttered nervously, then my mouth went numb: the man looked painfully familiar. I felt those words, “dirty,” “slutty,” “easy”—words I taught myself no feminist should feel—burn fire into my skin, but couldn’t figure out why.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Yes, so do I but I just can’t recall where—” I kept it up with escalating enthusiasm when Alex exclaimed, “Ignatius Beltrafio—what a small world!”

  “Hello, Alex,” the man said, “but please call me Eddie, everyone calls me Eddie.”

  “Emma, this is Ignatius, I mean Eddie,” Alex gushed, “the man who interviewed me this morning—what a coincidence!”

  I stretched out my ha
nd, and the man smiled awkwardly at me. He had magnificent blue eyes. I knew him and in that instant I knew where and how.

  “Emma, Alex, this is Sylvia, my colleague at the bank,” the man said, and gently drew the blonde at his side into our circle. She smiled but there were rigid lines round her mouth, signs of irritation surfacing on her neatly powdered face.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said to her, then turned to the stranger. “Ignatius—is that Catholic?”

  “Yes,” he said, hanging his head and blushing. “My mother named me after a saint and I still haven’t gotten around to living up to her expectations.” He winked at all of us, but I imagined it was somehow at me. “I should officially change my name to Edward, shouldn’t I?”

  “No, of course not, then how will you ever disappoint your mother’s expectations?” I countered.

  “You must be Catholic.”

  “No,” I said, smiling, “but my closest friends are Catholic—the natural evolution of being Jewish.”