“Why are you so intent on equating yourself with men? Why is that power? Look at men: blind and lumbering fools who don’t see anything until it’s too late. In my life, women have always had all the power—far too much power—”
“I want to paint, to cut everyone off, to cut—”
“Me off?” he offered.
“Yes.”
“I can’t stop you,” he said. “I’m a great believer in freedom. But how about something in between, a compromise, a male gift, you might say—”
“What?”
“We can see other people—and still see each other.”
“I’m an all or nothing woman,” I shot back. “We either commit, or this means squat.”
“Ah, so you want to do whatever you want but imprison me in you. How so female of you!”
“Explain the term ‘other people.’ Apprise me of the rules of your game.”
“We see each other, but when we don’t and are presented with the opportunity for sex, for meaningless sex, as you say, we take it. We take it because we don’t really like each other—right? How does that strike your appetite?”
“Brilliantly, a brilliant solution—a wonderful solution!” I rallied with zeal. “I’m perfectly happy with that arrangement—I’m always getting propositioned.”
“Oh, I’m sure you are.”
The next morning I returned to my dungeon physically drained and in pain; the memory of our awkward sex, of our naked bodies stiffening from some unspoken mutual animosity, gave me a feeling of closure. Inside my room, drowning in the stench of garbage trucks and bleating groans of cars and trains, I returned to my adolescent brood. My temples felt as though they were being squeezed in a metal vise and the world was convulsing in an existential spasm. The bliss of the last three weeks, after being torturously reexamined, emerged as a state of delusion, so that I could no longer say with certainty whether I had actually experienced pleasure or only imagined it.
I lifted my head out of this torpor long enough to see two messages blinking on the answering machine. “Great news, I got the job—I’ve been wanting to talk to you all morning. Call me.” Beep, beep, then another one: “Oh I’ll be working with that guy Eddie we met at the gallery. Can you believe it? I’m moving to New York just like we planned. Call me.”
That weekend Ignatius did not call me. Red bumps flared on my neck and chest and ankles, causing itching attacks. The rash would scorch my body and then miraculously disappear, alternating my skin from a white hue to a bulbous pink-red within ten-minute intervals. Visiting the doctor seemed like a mortifying ordeal, as I envisioned our exchange. “You say you have a rash—where is it now?” “It comes and goes,” I reply as the doctor searches inside his forehead for that one anomaly he came across in medical school. Of course, I didn’t go to any doctors, for even I suspected that I was a prototypical hysterical woman, right out of Freud’s case studies, suffering on account of my indecisiveness. Who caused my itching, I asked myself like a diligent psychoanalyst: Alex or Eddie? Was I stricken with fear that Alex would demand that wedding invitations go out tomorrow, that we reserve the top of Sears Tower and Sears Tower would say YES? Or was it Eddie whose absence sent my body into convulsions? Eddie who wouldn’t call—who shouldn’t call! Time would wipe him out and relegate our brief affair into that happy category of “hot fling.”
I woke up the next morning to Alex announcing that he was at O’Hare Airport, en route to JFK, en route to me. The sky was dull and white, submerged in winter. The city was under siege from a blizzard that raged for days, blocking roads, blinding traffic. The plane, however, had not been delayed, as if Destiny Herself had cut a clear path in salt. “It’s only been three weeks, only January, a cold inhuman month, let him go,” I muttered to myself, the phone nestled at my ear, my fingers dialing, hanging up, dialing again.
“Hello?” I said, “Hello? Is Eddie there?”
A woman’s voice answered, “Can I help you?” and I promptly hung up.
I picked up a long thin paintbrush and it began to dance.
Painting #2
I awaken in a ray of light, in our government-appointed Moscow apartment, in an aquarium brimming with human flesh, or is it fish—don’t you see the resemblance?—we’re mermaids without tails. Whispers of a celebration reverberate through permeable walls, and tables fill with breads, potatoes, salads, caviar, kolbasas. Green pickled tomatoes and mayonnaise-filled eggs sit atop delicate crème plates painted in sapphire tulips, the china Grandma saved from Stalin’s goons that belonged to her great-ancestors, the German “aristocrats” whose superior manner and confidence she brilliantly embodies. Mother chops radishes and peppers as she hums a gypsy song, her fingers tap in quick methodical steps to Grandmother’s precise directions. The sun turns scarlet-orange and slides behind the horizon, and in its stead, the ocean rises above our heads in webs of blue-green algae.
Our neighbors upstairs leave Russia in a week but the husband tangos with the KGB, a dance of amiable conversations and the stench of threats. He resells furniture for higher prices, engages as they say in spekulyatziya, a Western pastime but in Russia it’s a bona fide crime, punishable by incarceration. Mother’s throwing them a bash, a romp of vodka, debauchery, and envy. The lamps outside our windows flicker and the light creeps in, peering through the cracks inside our curtains like yellow eyes.
Now we fly in, the children, a multitude racing from room to room, wiggling between the adults and the food and coils of smoke. Already thudding, tapping, stomping to foreign music—such tiny tots already mouthing infectious Western songs—in defiance of proscribed sleep. We’re lifted high on arms and necks, and there’s Andrei, the handsome son of KGB-watched neighbors, one of my suitors, looming like a Tsar upon his father’s head. He screams: Englit, I speak Englit, and everybody nods in awe. His youth and careless tongue glow in their eyes like promises of freedom. We too, my mother whispers, can be them.
A cocktail of vodka and anti-Soviet jokes and rowdy laughter flows through our aquarium of captured fish, and suddenly, the lucky youth, whose parents will be arrested in forty-eight hours, has closed his eyes. My father carries him into our middle room where all the other children lie perpendicular in slumber.
But not I! Not Bella! Although they’ve brought us to my room and flung our nightgowns on, our lids are obstinate, awake, and so we crawl like thieves through passages between the drunken bodies that smile and grab our cheeks and ruffle our hair. Not us! We know that ardor flares after midnight and Cinderellas lose their slippers at the ball. Not us—why wasn’t I invited, a neighbor thinks, because you’re not a Jew, because you cannot know the whispers that pass from tongue to tongue of relatives we’ll never see again, of friends we’ll soon forget or perhaps run into in a supermarket in Iowa, LA, Chicago, or Brighton Beach. Because our neighbor Dina will catch us in the act of disappearing—where’s your furniture, she’ll cry, poking her long snout into our hall. We’re leaving Russia, emigrating to Israel, Grandmother will reply. Well, well, so traitors live next door to me, she’ll bridle—why, it’s a shame Hitler didn’t finish all of you!
For can’t you see—we do not know who or what we’re truly saying goodbye to. Except for our belongings! Our books, our hard-earned sofas, laminated oak tables, embroidered silk, sapphire rings, gold necklaces, tulip china, emerald wallpapers, burgundy velvet curtains, ancient chests and carved steel beds will still remain as though here lies and eats and dreams a Jew. But once sold to other lives, our belongings will be stripped of us: our stains, blemishes, fingerprints, and spit washed, polished, excised from the glass and wood and metal. We’ll disappear without a trace, without a mark left of our lives.
My mother shuts the curtain and commands: simmer down, simmer down, but no one hears her except my grandfather who frowns from his throne, the green reclining chair. I told you not to have these celebrations any more, he warns in an ominous low voice, but my mother longs to dance and sing, for she’s young and glorious and thirty-eigh
t. And Bella’s streaming in—she too is young and glorious and fifteen. Away from Mother’s gaze, my sister jumps upon two chairs that lean against the southern window and begins to sway. The moon’s ethereal white light touches her hair and dissipates the gown’s cotton shield, snaking around the child’s waist and burgeoning breasts.
The men, enticed into a silent thrill, glance at her wearily from guilt and hunger, and in their eyes, a question flickers: is she a child or a nymph?
She’s supposed to be asleep, my mother screams, both girls are supposed to be asleep! Put something on, she screams at Bella, where’s your shame? Dear God, they can see your breasts—you’re not a child anymore! The nipples poke the gown like two stern arrows about to shoot into the heart of every man. They are beside themselves, the men, they cannot look but yet their eyes, as though unfastened from their sockets, navigate the room and land upon her swaying shape. She does not know herself why she wears this yellow gown, why no shame crisscrosses her cheeks. She does not blush but smiles—grins—caresses with her eyes their faces and seeks her prince.
He has a look: a handsome talker with profound eyes—she’s painted him for me. Oh, feverish, implacable adolescence—she’s dancing on her bare feet. Barefooted, my mother moans, get her shoes—take my shoes, a woman says, and Bella’s feet slide into high blue heels. She now seems older, taller, like an almost-woman. There’s not a drop of makeup on her face.
A man appears out of the smoke—an apparition, maybe. Like a hawk, he swoops down to our Bella, circling her body with his hawk-like bulging eyes. He has a predator’s wide mouth, claws for fingers, and fur for skin, but she—she cannot see.
The morning after blood stains the yellow nightgown. What have you done, my mother yells in terror—how could I have missed it! Ah, when the castle had fallen into a deep, deep sleep, the sleepless beauty was lured into the sorcerer’s lair, and there, in innocence, in faithful homage to the gods of love, to princes of her beloved fairy tales, she gave him—how do they say in adult-speak—her soul! The child-mermaid swears she is in love and there, arrested by her pain, melts into the wall like silent foam.
Wanting and Not Resisting
Alex was delighted to be in New York, working at the prestigious Norton Bank, living on the swanky Upper East Side in corporate housing, and dating “a catch,” who was apparently me. I was now taking a cab from my dungeon to 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, to a high-rise cookie-cutter apartment building, spending evenings and nights with my fiancé.
We would kiss languorously for hours, speckled with gentle caresses, but at some invisible juncture, he would repeat his usual refrain: “Leave something to be desired, my dearest Elena, leave the best for last.” By which I assumed he meant marriage. Our lives now consisted of the daily monotonous routine of moving toward marriage, career goals, visible achievements we could bring home to our families and declare as trophies, won fairly in the American marketplace of success. Our peculiar celibacy would remain till marriage, Alex said, till it was all settled. But what needed to be settled, I didn’t know, I didn’t ask. I simply acquiesced in this arrangement, the way I acquiesced to everything else in my life. Even art, under Alex’s prodding, had to be abandoned for the far more urgent task of completing my statistics degree. “You need to think about making money,” Alex said. “We’ll have a two income-household, and then after you have children, you’ll go back to work with a ready-made remeslo, an expertise.” I locked my unfinished paintings in my locker at NYU and registered for Probability and Stochastic Modeling for spring semester, the class I had already failed once before. I felt a perverse pleasure in following his orders, in negating my feelings, my creativity, my sexuality—my essential self.
Memories of Eddie stayed in me and intensified: his taste, his scent, his touch, all of him consumed me. In the midst of some discussion with Alex, I’d imagine Eddie moving inside me, the sharp hook of an orgasm spreading into an unbearable longing in my gut. I’d steal away and hide in the bathroom—to breathe in the images undisturbed. Time, I told myself, would cure me.
Except for one strange inescapable fact: Alex now worked for Eddie. After almost a month at Norton Bank, Alex’s daily sustenance—his grandiose obsession—became Eddie. He described an alarming image of a ruthless tyrant hell-bent on driving Alex into the ground and burying him before the age of thirty. “I’m telling you he loathes me with inexplicable rancor!” Alex would exclaim between hurried sips of late evening tea. “You’re exaggerating,” I’d offer, painfully recalling my last conversation with Eddie. “They’re all so stupid, he’s stupid, everyone is just so stupid!” Alex would declare. Yet he wanted me to figure out, with my “brilliant social mind” (his words, not mine), what every facial tic, declaration, casual remark uttered by Eddie symbolized, and when, when, Alex begged, would he get on his good side?
Eddie kept Alex in the office till late, assigning him more and more work, overburdening him and, according to Alex, treating him worse than the common intern.
And the astonishingly long hours, the menial work, the endless spreadsheets, the complete disregard for his superior brain were taking a toll on Alex’s enthusiasm for making money. Even when his check arrived at the two-week mark, he felt it failed to attenuate his humiliation at the whim of Eddie’s whip. Though the sudden and complete extrication from the arms of his parents—this feeling so beautifully bound up in the American concept of independence—did allow him some measure of happiness, he felt “virally disaffected with the corporate world.” He had become a shadow of his previous self; his voracity for life, for adapting to sundry social environments, for playing Victorian courtship, for tepid foreplay with the express purpose of, as he put it, “inflaming the undergrowths of our mutual desires in anticipation of sexual bliss,” for inverting his Russian pessimism into a madcap hyperbole of American optimism seemed to be waning. He had grown thinner, paler, more subdued; the working world most certainly interfered with his excellent digestion, and I wondered out loud if he might not consider quitting.
I can’t remember how many days passed, but soon after I deposited this idea in his head, Alex came to my dungeon and before even crossing the threshold announced: “I’ve left that putrid swamp.” He couldn’t take it anymore, he confessed, and called Eddie a “nefarious asshole,” among other things. Although he had all sorts of explanations for what happened—he was too brilliant for them all, Eddie was “rancid” with jealousy, the clients were imbecilic, there was too much “ass-licking” and not enough thinking, he always returned to his favorite sound bite: he and he alone was waging a war against ingrained American stupidity (forgetting, naturally, that he considered himself one).
“Anyhow, I’m moving back to Chicago—I’m still waiting for replies from physics grad schools,” he said after a long pause. His olive-colored skin still glowed in angry hues, adding a touch of pink rouge to his complexion, and I marveled absently at his beauty.
“What about us?” I asked.
“You know my situation, Elena, I can’t afford to live in New York without a job; my parents don’t have that kind of money. We’ll live together when we get married,” he went on. “I figure it’ll take me three—four, max—years to finish grad school and then I’ll get a professorship, and hopefully we can settle in Chicago near our parents, so that when we have children, it’ll be easier for us to take care of them.”
Feebly, I protested, “But what about me, my art?” I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in weeks, but still his speech about our future struck me as severely unjust.
“You’ll get a job in statistics—you’ll be so much happier in the work world, Lenochka. You’re so good with people. And as for painting, I’ve already told you—and please don’t take this the wrong way again—you’re no Dali. Keep it as a hobby, on the side—we’ll decorate our living room!”
I’m no Dali, I whispered to myself, I’m a hobby on the side, on the side, I’m hanging in our living room, I whispered to myself, and thought of my pain
ting, The Child-Mermaid I’d call it, my painting of Bella growing a corn-colored tail and long mesmeric curls and fantastical breasts. The fused thighs and knees were shrouded in scales, and the face took on the hue of a cobalt ocean, out of which two eyes beamed like violet suns. I thought of her, my sister, and pitied myself.
“I want you—us to live in New York!” I pleaded with him, terrified by our impending separation.
“Are you listening to me, Elena? I don’t want to be an investment banker anymore—I am destined for greatness. I’ll be making real discoveries that will impact science, not some algorithms that’ll make more money for people who already have too much—”
“Is that the Marx in you talking? What about capitalism—the very beauty—the very artery of this country?” I objected but so weakly that the sides of my mouth seemed to be drooping from exhaustion.
“Is that our parents in you talking?” he snapped.
I turned away from him, but he reached for my hair and ran his fingers through it tenderly, making me purr like an old cat. “Oh, c’mon, forget all this silly ideology. Stop picking fights with me,” he said. We sat down on his queen-sized bed and held each other for a minute. Then I laid myself out and closed my glum, dissatisfied eyes, and let his aristocratic hesitant fingers traverse my body: up, down, sideways, in, out, and in again. After finishing (i.e., finishing off) the business of lethargic, sleep-inducing, what-is-still-edible-in-my-fridge foreplay, he zipped me back up and triumphantly declared a new variation on an old refrain. “At the end, always leave something to be desired. Always keep a man guessing, running back for more!” And I wondered to myself, where’s my orgasm—where’s my incentive for not thinking about Hungarian salami on pumpernickel bread or herring Grandma-style, straight up? We lay together afterward in a tranquil, tender embrace, and I felt the heat of my future approach me, the heat of regret and children and old age and clogged arteries.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 10
