The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “You must learn to be more feminine,” Alla said in my ear, her tongue practically tickling my earlobe. “You say too much of what’s on your mind—men don’t like that. My Alex is a very sensitive individual and you must learn to handle him because I assure you”—she stared meaningfully at my profile—“talk of feminism will get you nowhere.”

  “Take more kabachki,” Grandmother urged Alex, while eyeing Alla with grave mistrust.

  “Speaking of feminism,” Igor joined in, “what does everyone think of that prostitute, Monica Lewinsky?”

  “She’s certainly not a feminist,” Bella noted.

  “Grotesque,” Grandmother offered, referring not to Monica herself but to oral sex.

  “Poor Beel Clinton,” Alla murmured as though he were her lover. “I feel sorry for him.”

  “Me too,” my father said, “a man has a little fun and the whole country wants to burn him alive. Don’t Americans realize that all politicians lie—they have to lie to subsist! I would have lied in his shoes!”

  “She’s to blame!” Grandmother cried.

  “Who—Monica?” Bella asked.

  “No, Hillroy Climpton—”

  “Hilllllllarrrrry Clinnnnnton,” my mother corrected her.

  “It’s all Hillroy’s fault,” Grandmother went on. “When your man is a chronic philanderer, you need to be on guard. Keep your eyes peeled open and a frying pan nearby—for his unfaithful head.”

  “Which brings me to an important issue!” Mrs. Bagdanovich galloped in to insert her seven cents, “Let me begin by saying that I’m delighted our children are getting married and next May is as good a month as any, but there’s something I must get off my chest. My experience in life tells me that if I don’t speak, no one ever will.” She quieted down to give the guests a chance to prepare for the inevitable scourge of the evening. “The Drake is very expensive, and although I accompanied Sonya on this decision, I feel that I must protest—Fima and I simply don’t have the same resources—”

  “Allochka, I told you, not in front of people,” Fima murmured.

  “These aren’t mere people”—Mrs. Bagdanovich pointed with her manicured forefinger at my mother—“these are our future in-laws—why, they’re practically our family!”

  “No worries—I’ll take care of it—I mean we, my wife and I,” my father stammered, glancing fearfully at my mother, “will take care of the bulk.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Semeyon, but I can’t have that,” Fima said. “I must insist.”

  “With what money do you want to insist?” Mrs. Bagdanovich cut in. “Everyone knows we’re nose-deep in debt! Like pigs in manure!”

  My father swiftly raised his glass before Alla could elucidate and said, “I’d like to make a toast to a very special young man—to our very own Alexei—who I’m proud to call my future son-in-law. May your genius flourish at Harvard!” My father abhorred confrontations of any kind, despite his propensity for them, but the ones about money in particular riled his stomach acid, resurrecting his Soviet-era heartburn.

  “May it flourish, indeed,” my mother said. Then she rose from her chair and aimed a suspicious gaze at Alex. “Lena tells us you really loved working at the bank. So I was wondering why you only stayed there for a month or was it less?”

  Alex stood up as well. With his shot glass embedded in his palm and in a sonorous baritone, he announced, “First, Sonya, Semeyon, and of course, Zinayida Genadevna, I want to make a toast to you for raising such a remarkable and beautiful young woman.”

  “Nu, nu, molodetz,” my grandmother exclaimed, “now that’s a toast for you!” And with that, everyone downed their glasses, eyes shutting from the desire to momentarily escape each other.

  “As to your question, Sonya,” Alex went on, “I think Lena is mistaken. I loathed the bank. Mindless cruelty is what it amounted to—slavery for a thinking individual—”

  “Well stated, son!” his mother effused.

  “Our children have become such idealists! I wish I had the luxury to be an idealist,” Fima put in.

  “I wanted greater things for myself than what the corporate world had to offer. I have a fantasy—of a personal greatness.” Alex addressed only my mother.

  “You don’t have to explain yourself, Sashenka,” Mrs. Bagdanovich said.

  “I could have stayed on indefinitely, Sonya, if that’s what you’re implying—I was supremely successful at the bank! And Mother,” he said, turning to her with all the gentleness he could muster, “you have nothing to worry about—I have plenty to contribute to the wedding.”

  “What a wonderful boy!” my grandmother remarked, smiling at Alex. “What a heart.”

  In reality, she was bemoaning this state of affairs: a mama’s boy, a wet rag, possibly not even a real man … but there were so many other blessings, like his pristine Russian and his verifiable Jewishness!

  “Look, we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” my mother said. “Let’s hope everything works out—”

  “Well, why shouldn’t it work out?” Mrs. Bagdanovich directed a scouring gaze at my mother.

  “Oh, I mean no offense, but a wedding requires superior planning. When our Bellochka was getting married, it was pandemonium in this house. What with the dress fiasco, and the flower people, who tried to rip us off—”

  “They were homosexuals,” my father put in.

  “We have nothing against homosexuals,” my mother quickly added, “but—”

  “They’re a blight on the human race,” Grandmother summed up, her cheeks filling with warm mauve tones, “espousing their ideology on every corner and corrupting the young with their unnatural ways.”

  “What do you suggest, Grandma,” I shouted, “that we do to homosexuals what they did in Russia—put them in jail? Or kill them, like the NKVD killed Tchaikovsky?”

  “Don’t you tell me about the NKVD—I knew the NKVD before any of you were born—dear Lord, what they did to our family—” Grandmother’s voice cracked and her eyes moistened. The dinner table entered a moment of silence, to mourn Stalin’s victims, of course, but more importantly to assure Grandma that all her views were admissible on account of her unsurpassable suffering.

  “I have nothing against specific homosexuals,” Grandmother said. “And Swan Lake—everyone knows is my cure against insomnia—no doctor can explain it, but when I get to the second act I drop off like a corpse, every time.”

  “As I was saying,” my mother cut in, “we have nothing against anybody, but when the orchids arrived, they were wilted, practically brown from age—”

  “Oh, our mother exaggerates,” Bella declared, “my wedding was a royal affair—no expense was spared.”

  “I’ve already told you—I will never make as much money as your father, so stop dreaming!” Igor barked at his wife.

  “My darling Igoryek”—Bella adopted the amicable playfulness of a kitten (for we had a saying: if there’s a prick in the family, no one else has to know about it)—“have I ever complained about your career—you’ve done brilliantly!” As she scratched the back of Igor’s head, her fingernails, like the needles of an acupuncturist, seemed to cure his nerves.

  “Honestly, we can do something simple, modest, and elegant.” My mother looked apologetically at Alla, baring for the table her guilt and kindness. “We don’t have to have orchids; we can just have roses. White ones or crème, or a wild theme in red like that actress, I forget her name. It all depends on the children. What do you want—Lenochka, Sashenka, what do you two want?”

  “Oh, I leave such matters to the ladies,” Alex announced, warming my grandmother’s heart. Real man, real man, real man … she chanted through closed lips.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said and rose from the table.

  Alex lunged toward me. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No, Sasha, please, I’m going to the washroom.”

  The table quieted down for my departure. In a panic, instead of using the downstairs bathroom
, I ran up our winding wooden staircase and ducked behind the gargoyles perched on the banisters (my mother’s homage to old Victorian homes).

  I plopped on my bed and felt my heart zigzagging inside my body, heat gathering in my armpits and under my closed lids. I pleaded with God: Aveenu Malcheynu Haneynu Vi Aneynu Vi At Anu Maasim. The Yom Kippur prayer had stayed with me since Hebrew school, since I first learned it as a nine-year-old child, since I practiced it in secret, without letting my family know that I still fervently clung to this elusive God we had denounced in Russia. The melody unlocked a refuge in my head, and from the Hebrew I offered it to myself in English: Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned.

  For here it was, barreling through my heart, an unexpected exhilaration in the act of lying. Lying as the postponement of commitment, of choosing, of being owned. Lying not conventionally defined but as the ultimate act of self-bifurcation, the precise condition of double identity, a near perfect simulacrum of two parallel languages and cultures swimming side by side within one mind. I switched between them as I did between the men, with a heightened devotion to each—a full transformation from my inner thoughts to the outer placement of my tongue. I luxuriated in the fluency I now possessed in both languages, in this ability, now fifteen years later, to move seamlessly from one state of being to the next, to pretend to be “one of you,” so clearly differentiated from “one of them,” and yet continued to feel the brunt of alienation within the very language and culture I found myself in. I was a stranger unto myself, at once at home in each world and an alien in both, never belonging.

  My fingers tapped against the phone, and with each click I felt the muscle from my cheek to my brow tensing, my tongue hardening, my jaws readjusting and locking into that familiar position of the Other—my American self.

  “Hello,” I said into the receiver, “it’s me.”

  His low, crisp voice was tinged with exhaustion, yet it gave me immediate release.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.

  “I’m dying.”

  “Of horniness?” he asked.

  “That,” I submitted, “and madness: my family is driving me insane.”

  “What are they doing to you?”

  “Nagging. Plotting out my life. Secretly getting disappointed,” I replied.

  “Am I still your secret goy?”

  “You are,” I confessed warmly, staying approximately ten kilometers away from the actual truth, and then I added a tender lie on top of it: “I haven’t had the courage to tell them.”

  “Don’t—I like being your sin,” he said. “When are you flying home?”

  “In three days, if I don’t lose my mind.”

  “You won’t. And if you do, I’ll fuck you back to sanity.”

  “Can you do that? Can you cure my depression with your dick?”

  “I can—I am that confident!” He laughed. “Now think of me on top of you and scream as loud as you can, ‘Fuck me, Eddie, fuck me!’”

  “I’d say keep everything except the name. Eddie is too common, too prosaic. I should scream, ‘Fuck me, Ignatius, fuck me, your royal highness, fuck me properly!’ That way when they accuse me of whoredom, at least I’ll be seen as an aristocratic whore, a throwback to the days of the educated courtesans, those rare birds who knew how to hold a fork, recite poetry, and lift their skirts with just the right modicum of modesty.”

  “Is that what you aspire to be—a courtesan?”

  “In my fantasies of you, yes. I aspire to be cortigiana onesta.”

  Eddie laughed. “I’m glad I’m having that effect, my honest courtesan.”

  “You know what it means?”

  “You sound surprised whenever I know anything other than my subfields of econ and finance,” he said cheerfully, “but I happen to be an avid admirer of courtesans. You’re my Duchess Du Barry. Grand, extravagant, stunning looking—like you. You look like her.”

  “I look like Duchess Du Barry? How strange of you to think that. We are talking about the last mistress of Louis XV of France, the one who was beheaded during the Reign of Terror?”

  “Same one,” he said.

  “I only know everything about her because Vigee-Lebrun painted her and I studied female artists who are missing from history books.”

  “There’s a painting of her in London—in the National Portrait Gallery. I’d like to take you to London with me one day to see it.”

  “I’d like to do that: paint a portrait that will one day hang in a gallery. I want to paint as if it will matter in the future—I want to paint you, Ignatius—naked.”

  “When I see you at the airport, I want you to scream ‘Fuck me Ignatius, your royal highness, fuck me—I’m your cortigiana onesta!’”

  I laughed. “Should I be in costume?”

  “Yes, in costume!”

  “In a black corset and no underwear under the poofy skirt?”

  “God, try to have mercy on me: I’m painfully erect already.”

  I smiled to myself, then said, “I want you miserably.”

  He breathed into the phone. “I didn’t realize until after you left, just how much, how much I would miss you.”

  “It’s like there’s a hole in my stomach and I can’t quite plug it.”

  “I keep thinking I forgot something and then I realize it’s you,” he said.

  My entire body seemed to convulse with longing, and tears broke from my eyes. No, I thought, I take no relish in the lying, in the pain of bifurcating love, of splintering myself: I feel only one thing, for only one man.

  “Two more days,” I said.

  “Yes, I—I—” He seemed on the verge of saying something more, but instead he only said this: “Two more days. Forty-eight hours. Two thousand, eight-hundred and eighty minutes.”

  “Oh, please don’t stop counting—give it to me in seconds. It’s such a turn on!” He laughed and I laughed, and we hung up.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Mascara globs ran down my cheeks and chin, and my green eye shadow spread into my forehead. In the dark, my features undulated in the mirror and changing monstrous physiognomies swam across my face. I sipped the water running from the faucet—let pollution kill me!

  “Have you lost your head?” Alex was standing in the doorway. “Why are you here in the dark, drinking tap water? Who drinks tap water anymore?”

  “I’m so glad to see you, Sashenka,” I cried, hurtling at him like an offensive tackle. How it was possible to long for one man one minute, then to pretend so convincingly with another; that’s right, I was now smooching Alex’s celestial features as if we had been temporarily parted by the Iron Curtain. How could a woman compartmentalize herself so unceremoniously? I thought of them: the courtesans. Could I have been one of them in another life?

  He caught me in his arms and, balancing us on my lacquered maroon dresser, murmured: “To what do I owe such a vigorous sensual advance, my love?”

  I detected a shade of fear in his loving gaze and dug in at once. “I can’t believe you told your father about my feminist views!”

  “As if you would have sat quietly as he made his absurd, tired speech! Do you realize that there isn’t a single Russian woman in Chicago who hasn’t had to endure his evolutionary theories? You’re the only one who’s dared to oppose him.”

  “Well, that’s just pathetic!” I said.

  “They’re simply more devious than you, that’s all. You need to learn to maneuver language to appease all parties. Mother is an extremely sensitive individual, and she takes offense easily.”

  “Oh, Sashenka, why is everything so difficult? Mothers-in-law never like their daughters-in-law. It’s a golden rule.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re like anyone else—they can be plied and buttered up, and told what they want to hear. You’re just so damn stubborn. You think everything is a cause.”

  “You’re probably right,” I replied, collapsing my head on his shoulder. “I always want to prove things to
them—to make them see—”

  “Let them be,” he chided wisely. “We can never change them. They are what they are after years of swallowing Soviet propaganda. It’s astounding they’ve adjusted to this country at all.”

  “Yes, they are what they are,” I agreed. This conversation—this implicit understanding of our mutual families, our common history and struggle, our balancing act between two worlds—could never take place between Eddie and me, I noted.

  “Don’t be nervous about me going away to Harvard. I’ll make every effort to see you.”

  He kissed my forehead, and his lips gently traveled down my cheek to my mouth where they lingered, his tongue soothing and warm. “Is something going on? Are you having second thoughts?”

  “Yes, Alex, you’re right, I’m having second thoughts—with the deposit already put down on the Drake and the invitations already in the mail, you can practically map my escape route!” I laughed hysterically.

  “It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask—I don’t want you to feel forced into this—I know your grandmother is pushing, but my dearest Lenochka, I want you to want me for me.”

  A sharp pain stirred within me. Tears fell from my eyes, and the fierce tenderness I felt for him swelled for a moment into a magnificent flame.

  “Oh, my dearest Sashenka, I’ve just been under enormous stress—”

  “I know just how to cure you! I’m ready for you, Lenochka. Let’s activate the volcanoes, moya krasavitza, rouse the gods from their sleep! We’ve waited long enough and now that the wedding is iron clad—”

  “You feel morally liberated—”

  “Yes, from my evil nature,” he murmured. “It was you I had been trying to protect.”

  Protect yourself, I thought in silence, protect yourself, and settled quietly into his arms. You can be sure, patient reader, that we did not have sex that evening.

  The Artist on a Corporate Playground

  When I got off the plane in LaGuardia, I instantly reverted to a New Yorker. The congested, overcrowded terminal pumped my body with adrenaline, extinguishing the last remnants of guilt I had been dragging through the neon tunnels of O‘Hare Airport. I wasn’t merely moving forward, I was gliding, sashaying, daring men to look at me. It was difficult at first—these men were busy with their newspapers and meetings and their Nokia phones, but with a kick of an effort, with a look of Fuck-Off amiability, with a stern mouth, a swiveling round butt in white jeans, with breasts pointing upward in the blue gauze of summer, with strident legs on sharp heels, with hair grazing the gloss of my crimson lips, the men as if one by one got caught in my circumference—my nifty butterfly net. From the side, from behind, from up ahead, determined pairs of eyes landed on me. I amplified my walk, added more seductive juice to my frame, as if I couldn’t get enough—because I couldn’t. I felt a pang for one man, then another, then a third, then a fourth; I could have any one of you, I thought imperiously.