The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  In reality, of course, Fredericka Unitcheska was originally Ansel Bernstein, who grew up in Brooklyn and was the faithful daughter of Jewish German immigrants. She studied at the Sorbonne, spent a year painting in Florence, returned to the States satiated, and received a PhD in art history. The following year, after receiving a tenure-track position at Barnard at the unripe age of twenty-six, she lost her bearings. Painting, some believe, kidnapped her mind. She could no longer remember who she had once been. She renounced her family, laughed at their calls for propriety, and began to paint what she described as “a bubble in her stomach.” Disembarking from her meltdown, Ansel Bernstein re-emerged as Unitcheska and rejected her hapless fiancé. “Until I find a man who understands my longings, my indisputable sexual equality to him, I will not subjugate myself to this ancient imprisonment known as marriage,” she had written under a painting of a woman transmogrifying into a blue iguana beneath a pale yellow sky. Today, hailed as one of the most important living female artists and the Cleopatra of our time, Unitcheska enjoyed a plethora of lovers, beautiful young female and male models, and even husbands of important society women, many of whom were rumored to be so smitten with her that if she would only breathe in their direction, they would file for divorce. She never did; retaining her independence was the breathing mechanism of her work.

  “So what do you call her?” Unitcheska asked, approaching me at the end of class.

  “The Androgynous Woman,” I replied, stunned at my own quick thinking, at this sudden unveiling of my explosive desire.

  “Don’t touch it anymore—don’t detract from her maleness. Are you interested?”

  “In what?” I murmured, sweating, half-understanding.

  “We hold this seminar every Tuesday and Thursday—we would love to have you. You can start now, immediately.”

  “May I go and change though?” I asked, thinking desperately about a warm cup of tea.

  She laughed. “I may be God but I’m not without human feeling! Sleep, eat, and come to my class this Thursday at noon. Don’t be late.”

  In late October, Unitcheska single-handedly created a space for me within the Art Coalition’s three-year apprenticeship program (a program that fielded close to ten thousand applicants and a hefty waiting list). The ripple effect of my unusual acceptance into the program was that I became a social pariah. People viewed me as an interloper or, worse, a thief, robbing them, the legitimate students, of their rightful access to the great Unitcheska, and thus I was quietly nicknamed “the Imposter.” So competitive was the atmosphere in the school that to repeat my “stint” of success, students on the waiting list went so far as to sleep on the studio floor and awaken as I did—to Unitcheska’s class streaming in—to demonstrate their inordinate commitment. But these hijinks only infuriated her and led the department to ban sleeping in studios.

  Unitcheska’s advanced seminar was tinged with subversion—a conscious revolt against convention, civilization, and imperious grandmothers. There was no discrimination in age or species. Human models included men and women in their sixties and early twenties, hermaphrodites, pregnant women, and the homeless in rags and broken shoes, still clutching brown bags over mysterious bottles. We were regaled with parrots, cages with lizards, snakes, aquariums filled with exotic fish, and rare African plants whose names we could never pronounce. She liked to see a human model against the backdrop of a cage—to imagine the human caged and the animal free. She would cry, “Models, imagine that you’re the parrot or the toad, imagine that your mouth is a beak and your stomach is a green sphere—and now you, my painters, imagine that!” On days when Unitcheska wore red, she’d cry, “Remember, art is not about power structures, but the voluptuous human imagination.”

  Painting was no longer a guilty addiction for me but a way of life, my energy source, and Unitcheska was the magnificent human-shaped fire in the middle of the room. How my nervous system luxuriated in the new, the unseen, the hitherto unimaginable, how it understood before the brain that this joy was rooted in the act of self-embrace: in painting as a daily grind, in the notion that yes I, I possessed leafy-green courage, that my arms were the branches of an ancient oak and I could grab hold of what belonged to me all along—the will to create. For this inherent right had been stripped from my family tree and replaced by the overweening need to survive—so I painted for them as much as for myself.

  That is why, after Bella’s money ran out, I did not bury my head in a jar of viscous Soviet strawberry jam and return to Chicago, reeking of sweet failure. I was an immigrant after all, I told myself, a matter of great significance in an immigrant city, and I heard that a small international community in the West Village, a little sister of the Upper West Side’s famed International House, or more aptly put, a sunless hole on Leonard Street, was still accepting applications. Despite the grime on windowsills, the bleak interiors, a squeaky twin bed, and a beaten desk, Students United required that I write an essay proving my international origins—a task I feverishly embraced, and within a week, I was accepted.

  This room sat atop a charming Indian restaurant and shared a bathroom with another room. That’s how I met Stone Hograth, the woman I credit with catapulting me to adulthood. She was one of Unitcheska’s favorites, a strange blonde-haired creature who hailed from blue-collar parents, had Norwegian origins, wore military jackets and combat boots, and said “Fuck” a great deal. And perhaps, had we not shared a bathroom, she would have ignored me like the others. But I grew on her like fungus, she said, and she said other things too. “You’re so fucking happy all the time, what are you so fucking happy for?” “I’m just polite,” I’d reply, and she’d laugh and laugh. Laugh because she heard me weeping at night, heard me arguing with myself in Russian, heard me scream in my sleep. “You’re pretty fucked up,” she said one morning, “but you know what, Kaulfield, I like you—I like fucked up.”

  Stone didn’t merely wish to help me; she saw herself as my savior, as my bridge to true Americanization. “You don’t know the first thing about being on your own,” she said. “Get a fucking waitressing job, for starters!” I admitted that I had never actually worked; I’d volunteered, interned, assisted professors, but I had never made a cent. We were passing Grizzly’s Place during this conversation, a twenty-four-hour breakfast joint that had a neon flashing sign in the window: Mules Wanted, Sign Up. Stone had to physically drag me inside to apply. To the manager, she said: “She’s really upbeat—customers will love her!” It was only later that I wondered whether I resisted because I couldn’t fathom myself as a waitress, or because the place was also coincidentally located five blocks from Eddie’s apartment.

  The Paintings I Left for Dead

  After seeing my midterm, Unitcheska asked me the question that every aspiring art student hears in their tormented, acrylic-zonked dream: “Do you have anything else in this vein?” or, in Unitcheska’s exact words, “So Ms. Kaulfield, what else have you broken your back for?” I stammered, “Nothing.” “Nothing,” she cried, “I don’t believe you—you didn’t start painting the day I saw you awaken on concrete!” “No, but it’s not anything I meant for anyone to see.” “Why, Ms. Kaulfield, those are the best kind. Whatever it is you never meant for anyone to see—that is what I must see!”

  Thus she sent me back to the underground, to the canvases I birthed while juggling Eddie and Alex and then left for dead in my NYU locker, number 38. I wanted them to rot there in the basement of the Art Building, my poor starved orphans, to never glimpse daylight again. They were painted with the express purpose of self-alleviation: painting as catharsis, painting for the therapeutic enterprise of recovering memory and rendering it powerless to infect. But when I opened the door with a glittering silver key, they were still breathing, still living, each canvas neatly leaning upon its neighbor, separated by black garbage bags: faces of children staring into unfathomable blackness.

  I took out my camera, set them against the concrete wall, and snapped.

  When I bro
ught the slides to Unitcheska’s office in a small blue container, it seemed incredible that human universes could shrink into inch-long squares, that Unitcheska could lift her head with a regal flip of her black mane and say, “Well, Ms. Kaulfield, place your babies here!” as if I were laying rags before her, and not my very limbs. I imagined the red scarf around her neck was an artery pulsing out of the open window, reaching for the landscape below—so that if she hated them, my children—my infants cut out of my flesh by an emergency C-section—I could grab hold of it, climb down without shame, and without shame disappear. Her fingers fumbled with an enormous gray projector, which in my nervousness I mistook for a bloodless heart.

  She took a drag from a cigarette and exhaled upon them, murmuring, “mmmuhum”—an endless mahaing and muhuing that together with the twitches of her brow and the red twang of her mouth fried my nerves. Smoke coiled her head and emanated from my slides, and I breathed it in, an entire room of fire. A magnifying glass was attached to her right eye, and I felt her peering in, through these miniature portals, into my childhood, but if I remained nameless, if I eschewed vanity and memory and self-pride, they could be mistaken for a series of children at play. She didn’t lift her head for over ten minutes, and I smiled meekly as I caught signs of her approval: the burning cigarette in the ashtray, the magnified eye aglow and widening, the cheeks slacking from surprise.

  When she looked up, all she said was, “Do they have titles?”

  “Some of them—I haven’t been able to decide—”

  “Well, get them all titled. And decide! You have something here, something extraordinary, I should say. It’s as if I’ve entered another world—they are all very sad.”

  “They’re of Russia,” I told her, “of things I experienced in Russia.” I wanted to say more, to reveal these truths, these boulders I carried on my back, but she waved her hand in the air as if to admonish me for trying to contextualize them—to ruin a universal truth with my private pain.

  “So what were you doing with your life before you awakened in my studio that day?”

  “I’m was in a master’s program studying statistics at NYU.”

  “So you repressed it—your art? These paintings are like explosions from the center of your body! Out of all plausible repressions, why pick statistics—why graph yourself in?”

  I wanted to say, “My parents, immigrant mentality, fear,” but instead, I replied, “practical considerations—considerations of survival.”

  “And the survival of your soul—did you ever worry about that? You’re a painter through and through. Paint one more—I need at least seven paintings to give you a show.”

  “A show—you mean like in a gallery?”

  “Yes, like your own show in a real gallery, but don’t get overly excited; it’s early for you, the gallery is a small operation, and the owner will price your work very low. But it’ll give you a chance to be seen.”

  I told myself the very same thing, don’t get overly excited, but my lips distended, curling into my very eyes, and the eyes themselves seemed to sprout arms that enfolded Unitcheska in an invisible hug. Dear God, I certainly never expected this much so soon! I lunged for her wooden desk, knocked three times, and tfu, tfu, tfued myself under my breath as inconspicuously as I could, but she caught it. “Is that some kind of ancient ritual you’re performing?”

  “A Russian-Jewish superstition—our protection against total doom and fear!” I cried, and tears streamed from my eyes, but I smiled vigorously against them. “Thank you, Unitcheska, thank you.”

  The Waitress in Black

  Winter came abruptly at the end of December when bounteous snow swallowed the city, and the missing seventh painting came with it, pouring out of me as though I were a mouth in the sky. I would spend fourteen uninterrupted hours battling my canvas like a man with an axe unable to cut down an ancient tree. During intense spurts of sleep I would see a child impaled on the tree, its face a replica of mine. I would reach toward it, wanting to save it, but when my fingers would touch its skin, the child would dissolve into rain, and I would crawl away, an injured wet dog, not wanting to save anything but itself. Upon awakening, my fingers would feel numb and a burning sensation would sting my tongue, and in the mirror I’d see Eddie, his easy countenance propping me up, firing my dead hands. I saw him in my dreams and when my eyes were open, I heard him say, “It’s all right if you don’t paint the whole truth—that’s the way art is—it takes what it needs from your soul.”

  I wore red lipstick, a crimson red I’d never worn before, the day I saw Eddie again. I showed up at the restaurant at eight in the morning after painting through the night, my system subsisting on caffeine and the will to finish the painting when I got home. My expression would periodically freeze amid an order or at the cash register, seeking lost sleep in still moments. By three o’clock, sweat and exhaustion sat on my face like two fingerprints; only the lipstick pumped me with confidence. A Merry Christmas sign hung over the entrance and greeted customers with giant electrical yellow letters that flickered and emitted muffled buzzing sounds. Table seven featured a teenage girl decked out in puffed army pants and a go-to-hell expression, which she directed at her plainly victimized parents. “They’re from New Jersey,” she said to me as if her parents were the site of a garbage dump. “She’s always embarrassed of us,” the mother put in meekly. “What’s good here?” the father asked. “You should try the chicken gyro sandwich, it’s very good,” I said. The three of them nodded.

  I made a mental note of three gyro sandwiches in my head (a head that never failed to screw up each order) and stumbled into a table of three men. “Hi I’m Emma and I’ll be your waitress!” I chirped. The men’s polished demeanor, starched shirts, college pinky rings, and smarmy glances gave me the sensation that I was serving advertising Lotharios. One of them even had an irreparable winking eye.

  “So Emma, what do you do when you’re not charming your customers?” he said as if on cue.

  “Philosophizing—now, gentlemen, what will you be having?” I delivered this in a stern voice, scrambling to retrieve that critical mass of inaccessibility and disdain men long for in their ideal woman.

  “I think therefore I am,” the handsome one purred, “wasn’t it Socrates who said that?”

  “No, that was Descartes—and actually it was ‘I think therefore I exist.’ Socrates said an unexamined life isn’t worth living,” I said, correcting him with inexplicable contempt.

  “So you want to play charades with us, don’t you, Emma—you want us to guess what you do,” the one called Frank taunted and scratched his shiny forehead.

  I smiled, for I could weave a sweet fantasy—I would never see these men again—and my reply was not for them, but for Grandmother: “It’s only because you’re my most faithful customer that I’ll let you in on a little secret—I’m studying to be an otolaryngologist.”

  “She specializes in tying up men’s vocal cords,” the quiet one suddenly joined in.

  Frank put his arm around him and said, “Aaron here is practically your soul mate—he’s studying to be a heart surgeon, but those chicks in residency programs—well, let’s just momentarily suspend our politically correct persona—they look like dogs on sticks. Now you on the other hand—”

  “Well, then you must be blind—last time I checked I was a Doberman pinscher and I bite.” I could feel my anger roiling into hatred, flickering at the men.

  “We don’t mind a few bites in the right places—”

  “Shut up, Frank—” the quiet man muttered.

  “I’m getting hungry,” the handsome one butted in. “Let’s get the gyros already.”

  “The chicken gyro is very good,” I offered happily. Because the chicken gyros were dried out, because they sometimes got stuck in one’s throat, and because I loathed my inability to be disliked by men.

  “You haven’t answered our most important question,” Frank said. “How about a date?”

  “With all three of
you?” I asked with an inviting smile, and the men let out a synchronized happy chortle.

  “Sure, we’d be game.” Frank, the winker, took me up. “Except that Doug and I are married—you’d have to make do with our man Aaron here.”

  I looked at Aaron anew; he sprouted curly brown hair atop pallid skin that appeared to have been dabbed with powder (a direct consequence of his lack of exposure to nature’s elements), a rectangular forehead, and an intricately cut nose with two underdeveloped nostrils. He was not good looking, but he had intelligent black eyes that bespoke a satirical sense of humor and a small mouth that curled in disapproval at his friends.

  “Hello, there, stranger.” A familiar voice tapped at my back.

  I stood still for a few seconds, unable to process the person whose voice I recognized. Behind me, I felt his face beaming, his hands at his sides, his tan skin, his blue eyes, his jeans crinkling as he walked, as he stepped closer. I heard myself say, Eddie, then “Eddie” out loud, my neck twisting to face him, my stomach in a vise, but I was an actress after all, and the old easy, flirtatious glance I had flashed at the three strangers I now directed at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “No, better question is—what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Making a living,” I retorted with pride.

  “As a waitress? What—your parents finally disowned you for dating a goy?” He let out a compassionate laugh, marred by a faint note of ridicule. There was something remarkably spirited and loose in his expression. He moved like a stream around me, drowning out the excruciating memory of our breakup.