“What do you mean ‘mocked our last names’? Have you no memory, no pride?”
“What are you two talking about?” Sylvia cut in.
I forced myself to turn away from Alex to face her and Eddie. “We’re talking about anti-Semitism. That’s why we left Russia.”
“Yes, I gathered that much,” Eddie said with a mysterious glint in his eyes.
“My Russian hairdresser is always telling me stories about how she was mocked for her big nose,” Sylvia pitched in happily.
“Yes, of course, us and our big noses,” I laughed uproariously as if Sylvia and I had shared a joke and rose from my seat. I muttered something that sounded like “excuse me,” and stumbled over people’s chairs, keeping an idiotic smile plastered to my face, trying not to knock down wine bottles and dishes overflowing with wriggling seafood. I could feel Alex’s anger mounting like a sand storm at my back, and when I found an open clearing my feet broke into a run.
But I was angry too. How could he not support me, how, how could he not defend me, how could he not say, “Yes, yes, I lived it too”? Even if he with his perennial beauty didn’t know exactly what I meant, even if he didn’t have the lacerations on his skin to prove it, he had read, devoured everything Russian, taken Russian Civilization in college just like me. He knew, yet still he pretended—why, why—as if I had to ask? As if I didn’t smell his fear. Eddie, the stranger who knew nothing, suddenly seemed like a real option, a mind to write my truths upon—instead of this cruel trampling by those just like me.
There were two unisex bathrooms with wide gray doors and large silver handles that beamed like beacons in the dark. I stood listlessly and waited, even though I knew both were open.
“You’re an intriguing woman, Emma.” I heard a voice inside my hair. “Or is it Lena?”
“It’s whatever you want it to be, Eddie, or Ignatius,” I whispered, turning to face him.
“You’re on a very dangerous path, you know—”
“Excuse me?”
“A dangerous path for people like us,” he returned.
“People like us?”
“People who can do anything in this life.”
“So what—so what that I can do anything?”
“Then why do what you hate? Why not paint—paint all the time—it’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“Because the word ‘want’ does not exist in my Russian vocabulary.”
He laughed.
“Well, you should try to incorporate it into your English one.”
“Very funny.” I paused and turned to him with sudden anger. “What do you know about me, anyway—we’ve just met.”
“Did we just meet? Because I think La Cote Basque was one of the most memorable French restaurants I’ve ever been to, and it’s not because of the food.”
“How quickly did you know?” I felt my cheeks catch fire.
“How could I forget—how could I forget you?”
“But you seemed confused—you had such difficulty placing my face.”
“I was pretending,” he offered victoriously. “I knew within a minute—when you smiled. I was just buying time. How quickly did you know?”
“As soon as you looked at me—I remembered your blue eyes, your strange name—it’s only been a few months, or has it been less?”
We stood there at the foot of this other restaurant bathroom, in a warm, saccharine silence, holding each other’s gazes, soaking in the pleasure of our secret past. I wondered briefly if restaurant bathrooms were going to become our dens of sin, our dingy out-of-the-way motels, sinks in lieu of showers, toilets in lieu of beds.
“We should get back to our table or they’ll get suspicious.”
“Hey, you’re not upset about what Sylvia said back there—she’s ignorant—don’t pay any attention to her.”
“Oh, I don’t know why I start up these conversations! Who cares, you know, who cares that I—that he and I are from Russia—it was a long time ago—it barely merits mentioning.”
“Why do you say that? I was riveted.”
“By my ‘big’ nose?” I asked, laughing.
“By you.”
We froze inside an asphyxiating silence that whitened my field of vision, replacing all vestiges of reason with desire. He reached for my waist with a hesitant hand, and yet there was surety in his touch, triumph in his face. “Will you give me your number this time?”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“Is he your boyfriend—does it really matter?”
“We’re terrible,” I murmured, “terrible together,” and my face fell in defeat against his chest.
“That night we met, Alex and I were—Alex is my—” I went on, the word “fiancé” ribbeting like a toad upon my lips, but what came out was this: “Alex and I are dating—”
“I don’t think I’m too late,” he said confidently.
“This won’t affect his job—”
“I may be terrible,” he whispered, “but I’m not immoral.” Then he kissed me—a hard forceful kiss that stayed on my lips for days.
The next day I walked westward to the Hudson River in the icy rain, holding an empty canvas under my armpit, acrylic paints in a bag, my wooden stand across my back. I would paint, paint it all out: the swarming black underground, the tangle of four lost people, the question of what to do next when the stranger would call, for he would call.
People were running back to their crowded apartments, restaurants, shops. Even those hiding under a silver awning grew impatient, scolding and arguing with the rain. In minutes, the pier was empty. I set my wooden stand at its edge and watched water rise to lick my feet. The sky billowed in gray faces and spat upon me, and I watched lightning burn a hole in its center. Pellets of water tapped against red bricks, barricaded warehouses, black tar drying, windows installed but not secured—tap—tap—tap—water drops upon my head. Russia surfaced like dead rotting fish in my consciousness. Memories called forth by smells and sights, faces dug out of an unplumbed past. I smelled Usiyevicha Street here, on hot concrete, on sidewalks turning black, exhaling the sweet perfume of heat into the air and twirling in my nostrils like a beguiling witch that took me under …
Painting #1
I’m eight and the sidewalk is alive, breathing from the cooling rain. Trees vibrate in green and cobalt hues and smile at the howling sky. It is spring, and my feet and hands are small, and air thickens over the hidden sun. Clouds fuse into a brown sheet and water pours onto my tongue. Rain is on my gums, inside my throat. I rise on toes to touch the leaves that feel like velvet scarves and paint in violet, then red, then purple-black the bludgeoned sky; it roars as though enraptured just with me. Lightning cracks the sky in half and, for an instant, whitens my multicolored world, sending a mingling of fear and pleasure through my blood. Lenochka, Lenochka, I hear my grandmother’s voice echo through our artificial forest. She’s on the balcony, I know, her forehead wrinkled, her yellow hair matted from the rain. My dress is dripping in my shoes, underwear clings to my stomach, sags between my thighs, makes me want to pee. But eyes refusing to obey are tethered to the purple sky.
I feel a hand against my back—what are you doing here, the boy says. Playing in the rain, I reply, his face and hair wet like mine, eyes sparkle in the fading light. Let’s run around the park and dip our feet in mud, he says. Misha is his name, I think, I think I have a crush on him. We run toward the soccer field, now just a brown swamp. Dirt swishes in my shoes, snakes around my toes, and grabs my ankles. He takes my hand and pulls me under, into earth. We sink and splash and scream. Our noses, lips, and eyes are sheathed in bold black stripes, our bodies made of mud. We look like warriors without bows or arrows, like prehistoric children without clothes on our backs. Our stern black gaze disintegrates in laughter. Our laughter rises, harmonizes, swims. He takes my face into his grimy hands and plants a grimy kiss upon my lips. His legs bind mine, slide between my thighs. I slap his cheek, pretend I’m mad, know mad is how I’m supposed
to act, but mad I do not feel. Only the butterflies arrive, one two three, a battalion inside my anxious stomach. He jumps away, then runs toward a hill: let’s see if you can make it down that hill without falling. We run together, hand in hand, and at the top, we bend our knees, prepare to ride the mud, our shoes are flying through the air. He glides down the hill in perfect form; his back is straight, arms out to the sides, his face a stoic mask, a soldier in a battle. But I collapse along the way, legs shaking, caving from the kiss. My body drowns in the boiling earth, and then I hear his laughter, his grotesque cry: Zhidko, zhidko, zhidko! An arrow shoots into my chest—this pain I cannot bear—not this again, not him, I whisper to myself. Zhidko, he keeps on mocking. Against my will, I feel my tears break free, my throat close, my heart flail in the sky. I run without turning back, a shoe inside each hand, hiccupping, barefoot, steeped in mud, my tears are washing me.
What happened, who hurt you, Grandmother cries out as I step through our front door, dragging mud into the entrance hall. Misha told me I was zhidko, zhidko. He called me a Yid, a Zhid, I weep. But zhidko isn’t Zhid, Grandmother says, zhidko means weak, like a liquid, my sweet silly child. It doesn’t mean Zhid, the answer lingers on, and Grandmother, to soothe me, smiles. I run out to the balcony and see Misha trailing home, barefoot like me, head hanging low, rain still pouring, peeling mud from his face. I wipe my tears; my crimson skin is burning under dirt. A new unbearable emotion presses in, crushing my ribcage. I’ll recognize it soon—the tug of shame.
The Subterfuges of Desire
When Eddie showed up at my door, rain was gelling into snow mid-flight, turning the city’s roads and highways into sleet and ice. And I, recalling the imprint of his lips upon my breasts, recalled the shame of my youth, the shame that would spawn all shame.
“Compliments of La Cote Basque,” he exclaimed, sporting a wide luminous smile and a bag of potpourri composed of lavender and thyme under his arm.
“Come in, come in,” I said and, picking up the bag of dried flowers, stumbled into an embarrassed laugh. “Thank you.”
He towered over me in his dark navy suit, his figure elongated in crisp straight lines. Gold-rimmed cufflinks hung at the edges of his sleeves. His gold-flecked hair was layered neatly across his head in glistening crescent waves and his cheeks glowed, as though the skin had been thoroughly cleansed and burnished. The narrow hallway seemed to bow in deference to him, widening at its edges to accommodate the air of importance he carried on his back, and I wondered if there was a touch of the asshole in his demeanor. Rather than repelling me, it made me want him more. I stared at him, unabashedly, without wincing, in search of an objective evaluation of his looks. But my judgment was lost in the quiet beauty of his disproportioned face. Alone, each feature was perfectly designed, but when combined subtle incongruities emerged and lingered like puzzles to be solved. His nose was thin and straight, widening into a flare above a full, sharply drawn pale mouth, its tip seeming to touch the upper lip. The eyes, sunk into the recesses of his skull, outlined by heavy lids and thick hazel brows, danced in vivacious blue-green hues. More than any other feature, they seemed to capture his mysterious appeal, despite their close proximity to the inset of his nose. He was in many ways more beautiful than the classically drawn men; he was a project—a face to explore, analyze, interpret as it changed moods, colors, thoughts. I painted him in my head—part God, part man, part inanimate object.
“You look good,” he offered casually, appraising my dress—a black sheath that grazed my knees and was missing one sleeve, so that one white shoulder protruded and drew an imaginary line toward my breasts.
“Would you like some water?” I pointed down the narrow corridor toward the kitchen, but he caught sight of my roommate’s private parts staring from walls, the black cracks in the parquet floor and peeling paint, revealing soot and water stains that had turned brown over the years.
“I can afford a better place,” I quickly assured him without knowing his thoughts, in case he pitied me or, worse, pegged me as a poor immigrant. “I mean, my parents are always willing to help out. But I want to suffer—to tough it out—I want—”
“You want to feel like a starving artist?” he finished the thought for me.
“Yes, something like that—I want to live like one,” I corrected him.
“So let’s see your famous paintings,” he said, seeking in the labyrinth of the dungeon’s hallway my closet of a room.
Inside a murky interior, canvases leaned against walls, and atop my futon bed, next to the sunless window, stood my latest creation: Prehistoric Children under a Bludgeoned Sky. A boy doused in mud strung a bow across his chest, and pointed the arrow at a girl’s heart.
“This is incredible,” he whispered, his eyes glistening. He stayed silent for a while, simply looking. Then he said, “Is the girl you?”
“Me as a child. I paint the past. I paint Russia,” I tried to meet his eyes as I spoke, but he only looked at the girl, at the terror in her verdant eyes, at her skinny grimy hands shielding her chest.
“Do your parents know?”
“What—that I spend all of my time painting, that I’ve got four Incompletes, and that I’m on a date with you? No—and we aren’t going to tell them.”
I handed him a glass of cold water and he drank it slowly, as if he were drinking me.
“I promise to keep your sins to myself,” he said, his wet mouth curling into a grin.
“And what are your sins?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He sidled up behind me—arms like two pythons slithered round my waist, across my breasts, down my stomach, and halted between my thighs.
“We can’t do this—” I blurted, yanking my body out, pushing him out of my room, back into the hallway toward the door. “I have to work—I have a survey to whip up, a painting to paint, I have a boyfriend—”
“Do you always feel this guilty?”
“Yes, well—”
“The Jews and the Catholics and all their guilt—” He cheered as if we were somehow identical.
“Try being Russian on top of that.”
“I’ll try anything for you.” He grabbed my waist impatiently and held me under his breath.
“What are you trying to do?” I muttered through a haze of desire. “Deflower me?”
“Ahhh”—he laughed—“I promise to be gentle.”
“I can get gentle anywhere—what I want is something else—what I want—”
“What do you want?” His face underwent an unexpected shift, his eyes turning stark and grim. “We never finished what we started in the bathroom. Someone got cold feet.”
“My grandmother appeared on the bathroom wall like an apparition.” I tried to explain what really happened, apparently out loud. “‘Don’t be a slut,’ she said, ‘or you’ll end up like my aunt Irma—alone, old, and childless.’” I paused and looked at his bemused face. “That’s when I stopped us.”
“And now—is your grandmother on the wall now?” he asked, laughing.
“I want to go now—I’m hungry!”
“Oh, you’re always hungry, Emma!”
And then without warning, he plugged my mouth with his tongue and, pressing both hands into my waist, jammed us violently against the wall. And I, as if energized, emboldened even by the sudden rush of pain, gripped his neck and threw my legs around his waist, my body wrapping his. We kissed like hawks colliding in mid-flight, bruising our lips, teeth, tongues, emitting strange and wondrous sounds. I felt my back smash into Natasha’s photographs, tasted hair mixed with sweat, heard something tear and then a thud on the creaking floor. He ripped my underwear in half with what felt like a third arm, and entered me, brazenly, urgently, without words or equivocations. I felt my body dissolve and scatter in the air, leaving only one sensation in what used to be my hips and thighs—a loud, protesting, by turns a dying cry. Through a blur I thought I saw the metal door shudder, a shadow creeping in. I imagined Natasha watching us through the keyhole, bursting in
to find us thus—bruised and naked in a thaw—and the thought cut my orgasm in half. In unison, we collapsed on the floor of the hallway. Steam rose off our skin, my shoulder blades pulsated with pain, his pants now sported a rip, a slice of broken glass glistened on the entrance rug, and a sly smile sparked in our mirrored faces.
“Now we can go to dinner,” he said, his fingers caressing my hair, looking at me so tenderly I had to look away. “Now I can eat in peace; now I can bear looking at you for an hour or so without wanting—without wanting to be in you.”
I opened my mouth to say “And I at you!” but instead only a strange silent acquiescence came.
I had discarded the Bronze and Silver Rules.
The next night I put on my giant black winter coat and went to his apartment because I couldn’t stop wanting him. My hunger had intensified. The wind howled in my ears as I made my way into the subway and in its glum airless confines I felt at ease with myself, with only artificial lighting illuminating people’s empty expressions, their lives ghostly like my own, finite and without purpose. I was mourning something I couldn’t put my finger on, battling some undetectable virus in my gut. My diaphragm constricted and all the air I had taken in from the cold had been squeezed out of me, draining my body of breath and will. I stared at the oncoming train—it seemed to taunt me—jump under me, it cried, its shrill soothing and familiar. The train screeched and whistled even when it stood still. People poured out and I poured in, squeezing myself between them, their bodies heavy, sinking into my ribs and back, carrying me along with their briefcases and shopping bags and frustrations. How did I turn—or was it jump or leap—from the perfect immigrant child to this, this execrable creature? All those years Grandmother tried to instill morals in me fell away, a waste swirling beneath me—of time, effort, air. I told myself: “Men are incurable assholes, expert boasters and virtuoso complainers, insensitive fools with ultra-sensitive egos—they don’t deserve your mercy.” I told myself: “Alex isn’t doing it with you because he is a chauvinist crusader and sex will be your undoing in his eyes: you’re within your rights!” But the more excuses I conjured, the more intense the pain, the further I reeled and bent against the throng, shrinking under my culpability, brandishing my scarlet-letter sin—L for Liar, L for Lena—upon my chest. I felt a thousand eyes dig into me—could they see it blazing there? Through a haze of static the conductor’s urgent voice announced: “14th Street up ahead.” Then again, “14th Street up ahead.” I should get out here, turn around and run back home. But I couldn’t—something other than sex drew me to the stranger—some arcane force tugged and pulled on me, whispering in my ear of souls meeting through the warped forks of destiny. And who was I to argue with destiny—because wasn’t it destiny that brought us to the same gallery, bowing before the same painting, that even, dare I say, brought him and Alex together to the same interview? Who was God but a tactless jokester? Through tears, I saw a man staring at me two inches away. He seemed to be on the brink of flirtatious sympathy and a clichéd coffee request, but violently I flung my head away. He held no interest for me now.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 8
