The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t bear it, I stop functioning—I can only think of you.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  He put his palm on my sweaty neck and then reached inside my shirt, his fingers running down my ribs. Eric was watching us, pretending to move, but his face was turned sideways, his bulging eyes peering from the sides of his face.

  “Don’t—Eddie, not here, not now. Not in front of them—”

  “I can’t control myself—I don’t care about them!” he decreed triumphantly. “They’re all just jealous. Jealous vultures, all of them, ready for a feed.”

  “They’ll get the wrong idea—they’ll talk about me at work.”

  “So what, let them, let them talk about you. Stop caring so much about what people think.” He pulled my face in and kissed my mouth and licked the sweat off my neck and gyrated his hips to the staccato beats, moving with me—to me—his hands caressing my back, my behind, whispering in my ear: let them stare.

  When we finally strode out into the brightly lit night, a yellow cab awaited us like a magnificent carriage to whisk us away. I closed my eyes and landed in Eddie’s safe arms, and ached to tell him the truth—a truth—any truth, the final-sale truth that would have no return policy: You and I are a grim obsession, a sexual confluence of unmatched souls meant to move past each other, but not to converge. Too kind, too sugarcoated, I thought, so I went further: You mean nothing to me, just sex, a sexual fanaticism, a gripping infatuation, a crush, a crash. Then I’d sidle up to a finale: I’m still engaged to Alex, engaged despite your cry for honesty, engaged so irreversibly there’s a wedding in the offing and betrayal-grime on my heels … The horror of the moment, its stench, loss, desolation, even these very words seemed to carve themselves into my consciousness as though I’d already committed the act of confessing. But somehow I smiled, a hideous smile of someone so internally contorted the lines of her face begin to unspool at their seams.

  The cab raced down West Side Highway, offering us glimpses of the black river snaking beneath construction sites. When the cab came to a jolting stop and we unfolded ourselves onto the sidewalk, Eddie said, “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “The chauvinist assholes, myself, Sylvia—I’m sorry you had to find out about Alex this way.”

  “It wasn’t pleasant,” I replied. “What did he do?”

  “I’m not like them,” he said. “Oh, maybe I am, but in my mind, in my mind, I imagine I am made from a different cloth. There’s an act that’s required of us, and when need be, I put it on.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I pressed as we entered the building.

  “If it’s over between you two, why do you care?”

  His cerulean gaze met mine with longing and I felt a rush of power to my veins, power foaming between my thighs, power in the very spot his fingers were now probing. We were in his elevator, just the two of us and the camera above our heads. I grabbed his tie and brought his face closer to mine. We fell through his front door onto the marble kitchen tiles, his breath gaining upon me like a wild boar on my trail. How he struggled to peel all the skin-layers I wore to cover myself up; that’s how I was able to see him—by not letting him see me. Beneath his barefaced desire, jealousy and mistrust spilled from his eyes onto his suit. It was this suit—the navy jacket and slacks lit by a maroon tie, the rustling surfaces and multiple inner folds, the perfectly ascending lines that defined his features and delineated his jaws, the starched coarse texture intermingling with the soft surface of his fingers and knuckles—that aroused me. I imagined that not he, but it—this rigid symbol of power and wealth—had pinned my hands against the floor and swallowed me in its corporate jaws. A mask in navy stripes grew out of the jacket lapels and fell over his face, so that his features no longer surfaced as distinct elements but as continuations of each other, blending into the dark ceiling where only his eyes—greedy, transparent, crisply blue—peered at me. As the coarse wool rubbed my breasts and the slacks fell into the crevice between my legs, the suit seemed to lose its conventionality, its stiffness, its very association with a structured life, and as I straddled him now, I creased and mangled it to the point of decimation.

  I returned to the dungeon the next morning and lay on my futon with a wet pruned face. On my wall above my desk hung the To-Do List.

  1. Choose wedding theme color: pink, red, or violet. Choose wedding theme flower: roses or orchids.

  2. Choose menu: Russian (shrimp, lobster, kotleta, blintzes, and herring—grandma wants) or American (steak au poivre, braised Cornish hen and arugula salad—mom wants).

  3. Decide on band: Russian (ABBA, Alla Pugacheva, Gloria Gaynor, and any Celine Dion) or American (The Doors, Jimmy Hendrix, Blondie, The Bee Gees and Hava Nagila).

  4. Invitations already out!!!!

  5. Call Mom with final decisions by Friday.

  6. On Tuesday hang yourself.

  7. If still alive by Wednesday, confess everything to Mom and Grandma, down to the detail of when you and Eddie did it in the alley behind his building. You’ll feel better.

  8. Start a slow regimen of vodka. (All artists were/are alcoholics.)

  Concentrating on the last bullet point, I made my way to the kitchen, where I found Natasha’s bottle of Stolichnaya in the fridge and poured myself half a mug. She kept it there to keep up with her transformation, or as she liked to call it, Russofication, forcing herself to drink at least a shot a day, and working hard to overcome her true preferences, Corona beer and white wine. I went to the living room, where Natasha’s iguana hissed from the cage and sat on the floor beside it. The animal stared at me from one side of its face and opened its mouth as if to speak. She was a creature of stunning beauty, with cobalt blues dancing on her back and two turquoise spheres gathered round her strange evocative eyes. A purple wave zigzagged along her jagged spine and came to rest upon the top of her head, creating the illusion of a purple crown, as if to hint of royalty and glamor in a past life. I raised my shot glass to her highness. “Nazdarovye!” I said, to your health, you strange beguiling being, and took one tortured sip. Instantly, I felt bold, energetic, even artistic. Yet I was again confirmed in the knowledge I already cemented from previous such sips: I could never be a plate-throwing, toilet-hugging, acidly witty drunk. The embarrassing truth was that I loathed alcohol of all colors and odors, pretended at parties to have a low tolerance, and announced such profundities as “I need a drink, preferably vodka without frills” to fellow graduate students to show my hyper-funness, my laissez-faire attitude, my ubiquitous, authentic Russianness!

  I unlatched the cage as I had often done when Natasha was not home, and the creature followed me to my room, settling her heavy awkward body in the middle of the floor. Natasha warned me against freeing the iguana, even for a few hours at a time. “If you let her taste freedom, she’ll become aware of her cage.” But I grew attached to the animal, a strange bond had formed between us, and on the days when Natasha spent away from the dungeon, I let the creature watch me paint.

  I took out my palette, my expensive brushes, tubes of acrylic and oil paints, and the ancient silver bottle of turpentine. I mounted a new canvas on a wooden stand and ran my fingers along its crisp white skin, feeling my own bristle with desire. I inhaled the odorless emptiness, and the images came in spurts: my mother in crimson, my father in orange, the sky in gray. How the colors mingled with words—how loud they had been! How often had I thought of them as they were then: young, rebellious, exuberant souls waging war against each other.

  No, I don’t care anymore, I screamed at the walls, at the iguana, I welcome your world of irate souls who never meet, never intersect, never run into their other halves. There is no one out there for me, only desolate bars, cafes, streets, libraries. The supposed men I meet and love turn into paintings that cannot speak but stand in silent mockery of me. Everywhere I look, people settle for someone they do not love, for irritants whose inner
thoughts are diametrically opposed to their own. Love does not exist, only its illusory doppelganger grows in our collective consciousness, feeding on hype and wielding ceremonious reign over our hearts—a capricious tyrant that leaves us crushed and barren.

  Painting #3

  The colors leap onto my stage—a blackish blue sucked out of the modules of memory—and I, a calligrapher writing on white snow, a paintbrush skipping in and out of consciousness, am no longer here but there. I hear the gurgling of the lily stream, smell the aroma of burning leaves, see her—a tiny thing, a tiny me—running through the white birch forest in the Camp for Intellectuals before it all went down …

  Lenochka, I have the perfect stick for you, my mother mutters and appears, a magic fairy out of an old oak tree. She’s in white cotton that blends with her pale skin, and puffed white sleeves flap like wings upon her arms. The giant gray galoshes make her legs look skinny. The ground is bathed in autumn dew and I sink in, my nostrils drunk on grass, elms, lilacs, pansies, pines, Russia’s voluptuous nature. Take the stick, my mother says, and hands me a broken branch that’s half my size. She leans against her own, a crooked ancient staff. My guiding light, she calls it, lead me to the mushrooms! I mimic her; I adore her. Like wizards with our magic wands, we steal into the verdant darkness and peel away moist earth, discovering a prickly quilt of brown pine needles below. One moment she’s my mamochka and the next she’s a princess, a queen, a goddess, a gold-flecked mermaid shedding her disguises into the bellowing green sea. She can fly and sing and swim underwater and somersault through clouds and read my thoughts.

  We carry empty mushroom bags tied around our waists and mock each other—I will gather more, I shout, no I will gather more, she shouts. Hunched and lurching forward, I stay close to the ground, straining my eyes for the commoners—creminis and maslyata. Look carefully at pine trees, my mother teaches, maslyata hide in swathes of fallen needles under arching roots—their heads are moist and sticky, their bodies small and fat. But have your eye out for chanterelles, the lovers of my heart, their yellow-orange heads will bunch together under stumps or hide beneath the birches. And don’t forget the King Bolete—Beliy Grib—the thick white stem and golden russet head that lives under the sprawling oaks; it is the rarest, thickest, most delicious mushroom of them all. We’ll fry them on a bed of onions and potatoes, my mother cries, oh, most of all I want chanterelles. But all I find are standard brown heads: short, plain-clothed and glinting wet, with pine needles stuck to their skin.

  Then suddenly I shout: I found a chanterelle and bring it to my mother. I don’t know how I saw it, I mutter in delight, but her face cringes, breaks in half—I recognize that face—a sheet of pale terror. She grips my wrist and squeezes it with sudden force—the mushroom cascades to the ground. She takes my bag and empties the creminis and maslyata, and stamps them out with her foot. Poison, my mother screams, you found a poganka. I told you to watch closely! God forbid you’ll poison us all! You must remember the first law of mushroom picking—people die of them! I bring my face close to the killer on the brown earth; its torn leg and broken head is mixed among the body parts of innocents. They mimic the chanterelles, she says in a conciliatory voice, it’s difficult to know the difference but you must watch for a thin stem and round skirt upon its neck, and a dull umbrella head that crumbles as you pull it from the ground.

  The sun snakes through the trees and warms our heads. I make a circle round each mushroom now; my bag is empty. I smell them, breathe on them, brush aside the leaves and stare in fear. There are poganki under every tree; they are omnipotent like gods and omnipresent like the ants that crawl between our fingers; they seem to multiply and vanquish our shiny, stubby, brown-headed heroes. Dejection slips into my heart. Nothing is alive or edible or real—only poison, death, a grumpy angry forest—I throw my useless wand against the ground and suddenly my eyes catch Him: the King Bolete—Porcini—Beliy Grib. He sits proud and still, leaning like a retired general against a thorny shrub. The needles prick my skin and latch onto my hair, but still, with bare hands, I forge ahead and pull the Beliy Grib out whole, my fingers clenching its regal, portly stem. I found Him, I scream in joyous trepidation, tears tapping at my eyes, but my mother doesn’t hear. She’s singing to herself or is there someone else?

  A crowd’s gathered round my mother. Sonichka, Sonichka, they exclaim, the forest air does you good, you’re glowing! The sun draws specks of gold upon her skin, her rosy cheeks pinch into a smile. A man stands at her back, tickling her ribs, her neck; his fingers play unabashedly with my mother’s hair. Dimochka, she murmurs, blushes, this is my daughter, Lenochka; Lenochka, he cries in shrill delight, but only looks at her. And I feel small and frail in a yellow blouse, my skinny legs drowning in tattered jean overalls. I’m the mushroom in the ground hidden in my mother’s skirt, shielded by her stalwart body. But Dmitry sees me now and lifts me in the air and seats me on his shoulders. My Beliy Grib, I thunder, but he laughs, they laugh so hard I want to cry.

  At the bonfire, there are so many chanterelles and King Boletes that my paltry contribution seems only fit to feed the camp’s old dog. Pans are frying on the fire and mushrooms crackle, glistening in browns and orange-reds. Potatoes sizzle and sparks fly through the air and black bread blackens on jagged sticks. The taste of charcoal permeates my tongue, and I feel the pangs of a supine, mirthful hunger. The mood infects me and I laugh from nothing, from the air, the breeze, the fire, from guitars strumming, songs spilling from crimson vodka-laced lips, from voices harmonizing and diverging like seals quaking out of tune.

  My mother radiates at its very center, flocked by men, by women, even by the old camp dog. She laughs and downs shots and sways and cracks clever jokes, stringing the words and innuendos so seamlessly together that her eloquence seems almost invisible except to me. She sits on one man’s lap and curls the hairs of another with her soft, long fingers. Someone else’s hand is rubbing her arching back, her swan-like neck. Ooooh, Sonichka, you have such lovely skin, a bald-headed man says. Sonichka and her luminescent aristocratic skin, her stunning face, those sky-blue eyes, why, she’s every poet’s dream, a woman from another time, from the Renaissance, a woman painted by Renoir. And Lubochka, what a glorious body you have, what breasts, what waist, what thighs, Dmitry coos, grabbing another woman’s hips, you remind me of Catherine the Great; this is my mother’s closest friend, a voluptuous blonde beauty, these two devushki are the ladies of the ball.

  Their husbands, my mother’s and Lubochka’s, are in Moscow: working, huffing, puffing, cheating. The wives have been exiled to the outskirts of the city—to camps and dachas—to soak in the summer nights, cleanse children’s lungs of fumes, imbue their bodies with the sinews of Russian nature—the healing evergreens, judicious oaks, blushing birches, and alluring eves. Yet each wife is here for a purpose: Sonichka’s part of the Collective Farmers sojourn. All the editors at her journal have been sent to pick potatoes, sunflower seeds, corn stalks so that they may understand—viscerally connect to—the hardness of a farmer’s life. Physical labor, as the saying went, never did anyone harm. There are other intellectuals here—publishers, scientists, columnists, professors, teachers—amassing hours as farmers: The Workers’ Collecteev Unites! They’ll return to Moscow refreshed, invigorated, their stubbed fingernails and calloused hands and new earth-sown wrinkles will herald their physical prowess, their Communist values, their hatred of snobbism, intellectualism, capitalism and the evil West. Only the doctors, dentists, and nurses come here to work as doctors, dentists, and nurses, a special privilege handed through connections, to give their children fresh air and keep out of their spouses’ reach.

  My mother is Carmen tonight, a puffy black blouse frames her chest and shoulders, and from her narrow waist a crimson skirt unfurls into a fan around her legs. Her fiery auburn curls bounce on her pale cheeks. She’s done duets with balalaikas, guitars, flutes, even violins, but at this moment the only instrument’s her voice. She sings Carmen’s seductive “H
abanera” a cappella, and rising from the men, unclasps her hands and frees her body from their grasp. She snaps her fingers and throws the skirt up in the air, showing a smidgen of white thigh. She shakes her shoulders, chest, and hair; the blouse rides the crescents of her breasts. Her feet tap-tap-tap against the moist black ground, her belly undulates before our eyes. Her voice crescendos—a spear—a warrior’s jubilant cry.

  The others join in. The men accost her, their arms like legs of octopuses squeeze her narrow waist. Why didn’t I see you first, a man says. Sonichka belongs to me, another claims. My mother laughs, her laughter quavering in high soprano. The air stings and crackles on the open flames, and in our eyes, life gathers into a single moment, embalmed in startling blue joy. Across this fire I watch her and wonder if I’ll ever be free like her. Come to me, Lenochka, come dance with me, she picks me from the crowd. I wiggle arms and legs and arch my back into a perfect bridge. The crowd roars in boisterous approval, shaking its medusa head. And I shake mine together with my mother and feel the music teach my body how to dance. Give my child a microphone, my mother screams, and someone throws a stick. I grip it like a pro, and out of my mouth Alla Pugacheva streams, the chords of “Where Does the Summer Go?” Longing and melancholy issue from my lips, and thou behold, my figure assumes the adult pose of seduction. My audience grows quiet, their faces coalesce into a blur.

  The next day when my father visits, my mother looks exhausted, her hair disheveled, eyes swollen, closing as she struggles to keep them wide awake. He’s brought her a box of chocolates and she thanks him meekly, but their eyes only briefly meet. You want to sleep longer, he whispers, climbing into bed with her. I watch them, pretending to be asleep, one eye a slit for catching secrets. The covers slide, I see his fingers on her thigh, sneaking inside her nightgown. She turns to face him and there’s a kiss I cannot see, but hear saliva swishing, lips smacking, the whispering in between. My father squeezes her behind, have you missed me, he wonders out loud, and she says, shhhhh, of course I’ve missed you, it’s terrible you can’t stay longer. You look tired, he tells her, you look tired, she tells him, and they laugh, as if they both know what they’re tired from. They kiss again, only it’s lighter, gentler now, like cautious tigers circling their domain, afraid to stir their underlying wrath. But suddenly, there’s an invasion: my father’s hand abruptly pulls down mother’s shirt and one breast falls out, a white pear with gray creases round a soft pink nipple. Don’t, Semeyon, Lena might awake, my mother whispers and shrouds her body in the sheet. She’s asleep, he says. She’s always awake, my mother counters, even when I think she’s asleep, her eyes are watching me. I wonder what he wants from my mother, why does he nag her, push her so, why should he want to see her breasts. You’re imagining things, he says, I’ve missed you, he says, I need it, he says. Later, later when it’s dark, when it’s night, she promises.