The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  The car finally came to a halt, but there was nothing in front of us except more trees and road.

  “We need to stop here because the road is too muddy up ahead,” he said.

  “I love it here.”

  “I knew you would—you belong in wild nature.”

  “I’m practically Thoreau,” I chuckled.

  “When I read him in college, I thought—that’s it, that’s what I need—nature.” He broke into a bitter laugh. “That’s why I majored in econ and moved to the city.”

  He led me through the groves into a gold-speckled meadow. Overlooking a bay, nestled among evergreens, stood his cabin. Daisies and goldenrod swayed among the weeds, and a narrow dirt road led to the mouth of the ocean. Waves crashed against mud-colored sand and ringlets of foam scattered across it like blackened snowflakes. I imbibed the air and my childhood appeared, my lips parted to drink it, taste it, this brisk, clear, unpolluted air, air squeezed from the boughs of pines. I saw a tiny scrap of a girl, a blurred face and body; only my eyes retained the same lime-hued clarity and joy. The outside world emerged as those eyes had caught it: running up the rickety steps of our dacha, bringing stalks of corn for Grandmother to boil, huge sunflowers rising over our heads and our tongues maneuvering seeds out of cracked black shells, and laughter—mine and other children’s intermingling in the vines of memory with something vile, unthinkable. I grabbed a handful of brown earth with my fingers as though I were reaching for my past, and smelled my childhood through my nose. I turned to him to say, “My childhood,” when he turned to me and said, “My childhood—it reminds me of my childhood.” His eyes glinted and his mouth was parched from the long drive. Yet there was something inconsolable in his face, framing it in the softness of a twelve-year-old boy’s.

  “I bought this place a few years back because it reminded me of my childhood on Martha’s Vineyard. My parents used to own a beach house before they lost their money and my brother and I would run wild in the dunes.” He pulled me toward the door, but I resisted. The memory from my childhood returned me to them at once, and I could hear Bella’s voice ring like an echo inside the trunks of ancient trees: “You must tell Mom and Grandma; you must tell them you’re serious about this lover.” My breaths grew quicker, shallower, evicting the sweet aroma of pines and salt water and warm wind, leaving me only one mordant thought: none of my other betrayals—betraying Alex, betraying Eddie, betraying myself—could compare in scope to my betrayal of them.

  “C’mon, let’s go in! It’s getting cold out here,” he said, jumping up the porch stairs and opening the front door. The inside of the cabin was made entirely from wood, wide auburn planks stretching from the floor into the walls and crisscrossing the ceiling. The hue filled me with serenity and warmth, transporting me mentally into an oversized sauna. A compact, dark living room gave way to a smaller dining enclosure where three wall-to-ceiling windows brought in the evening light. I felt myself sinking into him—into a world I barely knew.

  A steep staircase led down into a marvelous high-ceilinged basement he had transformed into a library; books lived everywhere—on coffee tables, peering out of corners, stacked in piles on the floor, crowding shelves built into walls. The pristine books, untouched by human hand save to purchase them, were those dealing with history, biography, presidential memoirs, trendy business texts, and sundry modern novels I had never heard of. But on the opposite wall, a walnut bookshelf with finely wrought engravings protruded into the center of the room. There Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Marx, Kant, Mill, Weber, Smith, Descartes, Nietzsche, Jane Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Henry James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky greeted me like old friends, and like old friends, they had been thumbed, underlined, ruffled and bent out of shape. The lower three shelves were devoted to photography and art, fancy hardcover books that too looked stricken and aged from overuse.

  Every remaining inch of wall space was covered in paintings. I recognized some abstract artists from trendy galleries and along one wall hung the Abyss by Michael Cobb, the one that in my mind brought us together. It seemed peculiar that the walls and bookshelves in his city apartment were glaringly bare, except for a few business texts he never opened. I imagined that there were two of him, and the half that lived in the cottage perfectly coalesced with my soul.

  One corner of the library was devoted exclusively to his photographs. They were arranged in a chronological order to showcase his development from childhood until the college years, which was the last time he luxuriated in “the idle exercise of snapping pictures.” The earlier work displayed a view of Manhattan from a yacht, and the one adjacent to it was a study of a cluster of rocks in Cape Cod. But huddled together, protected from the rest of the room by a mammoth walnut credenza, was an array of black-and-white photographs, his last work. There were naked backs, two thighs stuck together, hands shrouding breasts, a profile flaring against a black void, and detailed palpitating lips that exhaled desire. But you couldn’t see their faces, their eyes; you only felt the chill of abstractness—the women’s anonymity.

  “You’re very talented,” I said quietly. He had stood behind me as I looked at the women through the fog of my own desire. I too wanted to be watched, analyzed, photographed, my body deconstructed, limbs and neck disjointed from the torso.

  “Will you photograph me? I want you to photograph me. For real this time.”

  He turned away from me and walked over to the fireplace, picking up a box of matches to light a fire.

  “I don’t do it for real anymore,” he said. “I used to think of myself as an artist but that was a long time ago, when I imagined I was some kind of Don Juan.”

  I peeled off my shirt and jeans as if they were old skin I was shedding, and he stood askance, watching me, his hands clasped behind his back.

  There among pictures of his women—I did not ask who they were—we fell together in one swoop, in one gesture of defeat onto the black fur rug at the mouth of a fireplace. At first he seemed to be barely breathing, lying spent beneath me until a fierceness overtook him, and he threw me on my back. I looked up and saw them—his women, their hidden faces, concealing stories, stories I quickly wrote for them. In this room he and I were not alone, but we—he and I and his women—were clustered together, black and white repainted in color, bodies dancing in orange, red, and yellow flames, their souls fusing with mine.

  “Look at me, I want you to look at me,” he whispered, “nothing matters but you and me. No one compares to you. That’s the past, and it’s buried there behind the glass.”

  I closed my eyes and laid my head upon his chest. The musty odor of the wood spiraled through my lungs and I imagined he was made of the same matter as his cottage. Stripped of his polished surfaces, his essence was built from plain, thick, wooden planks: stationary, good, unbreakable. I can invest my whole self in you, I thought, I can trust you. And then a hobbling afterthought came: because at last I can trust myself.

  “What happened between you and your brother?” I asked.

  “It’s ugly—I’m embarrassed—”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I muttered, smiling, bringing his hand to my lips and burrowing my mouth, wet and full of feeling, into his palm. I love you, there’s no space between us now—I’ve taken all the impediments out. There’s nothing you can do to embarrass yourself. I’ll take all your secrets, your baggage, and your terrible family members, and carry them on my back.

  Out loud I merely said, “It doesn’t matter, Eddie, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” as if my curiosity weren’t squeezing the very gut of me.

  But that’s precisely when he let it out. “Every stupid high school cliché begins like this, but yes, there was a girl. My first love was a strange beautiful creature. For her, small talk was akin to torture. People said she was pathologically shy, said her parents were very strict—someone even told me she wasn’t allowed to date, that she was waiting for marriage. So she danced in order not to speak. Every school production gave her a solo—yo
u couldn’t tear your eyes away from her. Perhaps if things had turned out differently she would have gone on to Julliard. She had the bearing of a ballerina too, long neck, straight back, the way she stared down at us, us—dumb horny bastards. She wasn’t popular—girls didn’t take to her, never invited her to parties, but the guys—secretly we all wanted her.

  “She sat next to me in algebra. I offered to help her with math once and when she thanked me she got all red and flustered. She brought me oatmeal cookies the next day. That’s when I knew, when I saw the anguish in her face—it didn’t matter who I was—she would say yes to anyone. Anyone who made the effort. And God did I make an effort! I offered to help her with algebra every day. Every day we met for lunch. Every day I thought about kissing her. I asked her to the homecoming dance and she accepted with a silent nod. Maybe it was gratitude, maybe desperation for some sense of normalcy. But I was so in love by then, I couldn’t see straight. After that initial kiss in the October twilight, leaning against her parents’ car in the driveway, I’d feel this awful pain in my chest when she’d miss a day at school or was away at dance rehearsal or I’d see some guy talking to her in the hallway. We became an item quickly. Sometimes I’d kiss her in public—she hated that. I was always fighting for her.

  “We had been together for close to a year but we hadn’t had sex: she was a virgin. I told her I’d wait forever.” He laughed. “I masturbated a lot then.”

  “Who didn’t?” I said. “So did you eventually lose your virginity to her?”

  “No, no, that’s the thing.” His gaze drifted, discomfort climbed across his face. “She lost her virginity to my brother.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, my brother, my twin, the philosopher-playboy.” He spoke with such acrimony in his voice I thought the voice itself would disappear. “He was suave, juggling two, three girls at a time. You had to be a fool not to know Andy wanted her. He always wanted virgins, always wanted what he couldn’t have. I didn’t trust him but I couldn’t imagine he’d ever make a move. Inside I did get jealous when I saw her laugh at his insipid jokes and look at him the way girls did, like they just couldn’t believe he was talking to them. And in our home too, he was my mother’s blond God. She used to call him Aries, or Augustine, his Christian name. She named us after saints but I always suspected that she named my brother after an emperor.

  “He was a champion swimmer—the best diver our school had ever seen. This one ability gave him instant fame. Mother had hopes he’d win Olympic gold one day—our whole household made sure Andy ate right and slept right. But he was a dunce in school: lazy, inattentive, a clown. He needed my help in everything, except English. He saw himself as a bohemian philosopher. One day I came home and found him fucking my girl in our room, the room Andy and I shared. I vomited on the floor right in front of them. She just lay there, staring at me with her petrified eyes. Her clothes were still on her. The only thing I saw was his bare ass shining in the dark. I couldn’t understand it—my first instinct was to kill him; she looked like she was in such pain, like this was torture. But was the torture in seeing me or being with him? I didn’t know. She told me later through tears that she detested him, but felt she needed to do it with someone she didn’t care about so it’d be ‘special with us.’ ‘Special with us!’—I knew those were Andy’s words. Andy had said, ‘you’ll lose him if you don’t do it soon. Being a virgin gets tiresome for guys, don’t you know that? Don’t you know you sound like a self-righteous bitch? I can teach you. I can teach you to suck cock and act like you want it.’

  “I even thought I could forgive her when I heard that. But the pain was so intense, you know, I couldn’t look at her. I probably would have forgiven her eventually if I hadn’t—hadn’t done what I did.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Andy and I weren’t speaking to each other for maybe two weeks when my mother decided to have an intervention, a mediation, whatever the fuck she called it. So we stared at each other with my mother between us, and I said, ‘This fuck won’t even apologize!’ My mother, who never allowed swearing in the house, said, ‘Good, Ignatius, you’re letting your feelings be known.’ And Andy looked at me and just laughed—there were no human feelings there, nothing other than self-adulation—and he cried, ‘You’re such a self-righteous prick! Serves you right to know you were hot for a whore!’ And I snapped—I reached across the dinner table for his collar and just began to pummel him. I had so much rage I couldn’t stop—I probably would have killed him if my mother hadn’t called the police.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment, his voice cracked; tears surfaced, then retreated behind his pupils.

  “The thing is, the thing is—Andy was in bad shape—I broke his left arm and two ribs. All I had was a bruised eye, a bloody nose, and a police warning. Mother wouldn’t let them take me to jail, though one officer recommended it to teach me a lesson. After that, we didn’t speak at all—it was as if we had ceased to exist for each other. I moved into the basement, and Andy had pot feasts in our old room, right under my mother’s watchful eye. It took him a while to recover, but when he returned to swimming, he couldn’t regain his old speed. Diving became an exercise in public humiliation, and eventually the coach asked him to quit the team—‘for everyone’s sake.’”

  “God,” I murmured, “how horrible for you, Eddie!”

  “Oh Emma, my story doesn’t end there,” he said, pausing for an instant, his eyes closing momentarily as if to shield me from some unspeakable horror. “At the time, there were rumors in our school that someone had cheated on the SAT exam, and we were all under scrutiny. Some guy paid another guy two thousand dollars to take the test. The problem was that I had one of the highest scores and I, not knowing this, was immediately placed under high suspicion. A month after I beat up my brother, he marched into the principal’s office and declared before the entire administration that a guy paid Eddie Beltrafio to take the SAT for him. ‘I know this,’ he said, ‘because I’m his brother.’”

  “But why would anyone just believe him?”

  “Andy made a convincing case—he said our family was still suffering financially from my father’s mental breakdown, said I wanted to be the head of the household, said I desperately wanted to make money to help my mother out. I was completely railroaded. I had no idea why I was being questioned or what they were accusing me of. They had found the kid who didn’t show up to the exam—Luke Wallerton—and they pulled my test score to compare it to his. The results were stunningly similar but only because we both had close to perfect scores. Luke refused to give up his coconspirator, and I—I who had studied so diligently, who had done, it seemed, everything right—had nothing convincing to say in my own defense.

  “Andy made no pretenses about wanting to avenge me. His life was ruined without the swimming, without its luminous future; he was still popular but in a kind of pathetic way—a has-been—people still wanted to hang with him, girls wanted to sleep with him, but they’d never, ever consider being with him. These girls were headed to Stanford and Harvard and Yale—and Andy—where was he headed?”

  “And you—where were you headed, Eddie?”

  “I was suspended for three weeks from school, my acceptances from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia were all placed on hold, and I was asked to leave the football team. I became a social pariah—no one spoke to me. I was ostracized and suddenly suspected of stupid things like stealing library books or not paying for my lunch. It was horrible. I, who had been such a success, turned into a failure overnight. But the thing is I’m not sure I would do anything differently,” he stumbled, his mind seeking a way to withhold something he suddenly felt was unbearable to reveal.

  “I couldn’t forgive the girl—not for sleeping with him—but for the unseen consequences of this one act—the way it ruined all of our lives. I hated myself most of all, hated my life, hated my brother, hated the memories of being in love, hated my mother for feeling sorry for him, hated myself for hating the
girl, for blaming her for everything.”

  I reached for his hand and held it in both of mine—I didn’t know what could be done to soothe him. But he smiled awkwardly at me. “Oh, don’t feel bad for me, Emma. I’m the only one who made it out of the mess alive. By June, miraculously enough, the true culprit came forward and I was exonerated. Of course. I lost my place in all of the schools except for one: my mother’s alma mater, Columbia. They took me in, because the Dean still fondly remembered the money my father had once donated to the school in his heyday, and I studied harder than I had ever studied in my life. I lost all ability to live—or care for anyone. I just wanted to succeed.”

  “And your mother—where does she stand now—I mean whose side—”

  “Andy’s, of course, but she never tires of trying to get us to reconcile.” He closed his eyes when he said this. “My brother was destroyed by the incident—his future obliterated. He got into drugs, dropped out of high school, and just failed at one career after another, until my father gracefully gave him a job at Beltrafio Movers and Shakers, where he does absolutely nothing. He married a girl he once rejected long ago, and now cheats on her regularly. But no one expects anything from him—they all just feel sorry for him.”

  “But not for you,” I said, “not for you.”

  “No, not for me and no thought was ever given to my girl, no care, no feeling to what she was going through.

  “My relationship with my family is still classically dysfunctional. I don’t go home anymore. I’ve boycotted all holidays involving Andy. It works both ways. He hates me just as much. He’s still waiting for my apology, or so Mother says, and I—I guess I’m still waiting for his.”