The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  In the aftermath, he turned away from me to look at the naked sun. His back glistened in the winter twilight.

  “Eddie, Eddie—I want to tell you something—”

  “I don’t want to talk now,” he said without looking at me. I was still seated where he left me, on top of the washer, no clothes or sheets to hide behind, only shadows dancing on my exposed skin.

  “Please Eddie, if I don’t talk now, I will never gather the courage to say it again.”

  He didn’t answer. So I spoke into his back, into his silence.

  “I want you to know—I returned to New York for you. Let me begin again. I mean for you and art. Eddie, I realized that more than anything else, more than anything—I—I want to be with you. I don’t need to be with you; I’m not fragile, desperate, or lonely. What I feel—my love for you—comes from strength. Nothing else matters, everything else is meaningless. This—this”—I pointed at my heart—“will make us happy.”

  Abruptly, he turned to face me. He had a wild look in his eyes, the glare of ferocity.

  “How do you know that?” he demanded. “Sure, in the abstract nothing matters, in fairy tales nothing but love matters, but not for us—not for you and me! In our case, everything matters and did matter. Our families would never get along. We’d drown in problems. You were right from the start: it wasn’t realistic for us to be together. We were putting on Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet, and now the curtain’s dropped and it’s time for us to go home to our respective, boring, conventional lives. Snap out of the fantasy, Emma, we’re all just ordinary. There’s no true authentic starving artist anymore, and there’s certainly no forbidden love; there are just thrills and marriages of conveniences, and you and I—well, we were just a thrill.”

  I reeled from him, crossing my arms over my chest, wanting pitifully to wipe the traces of his saliva from my face and breasts and stomach, and there, there—between my thighs.

  “Ohh, ohhh,” I groaned as though he had smashed me in the stomach, “I—I see—you’re planning a marriage of convenience for yourself.”

  “I am,” he gloated. “Mother’s hungry for another grandchild, and as she likes to put it, ‘The great Beltrafios need another heir.’” Then he laughed uproariously. I understood at once: whether it was conscious or unconscious, his revulsion to me was real. The wall he had built around himself still had holes in it, and remnants of his desire still seeped through, but he intended to plug them all.

  I retreated, bloodied, wounded, deserted, but still glad to be alive. Sadness seized me in its throat-clenching grip but I did not cry. A strange feeling of goodwill overtook me, ameliorating the pain of seeing his indifferent, haughty face. I did not regret telling him at this strange juncture how much I loved him, telling it without any reservation or engrained pride. I took my warm clothes from the dryer and dressed quietly in my plain black uniform. I remembered that the purple diamond ring was still lodged in the inner pocket of my purse, and I placed it gently on the kitchen table, against the backdrop of the pink envelopes. As I hurried down the hall, I called out, “The ring is next to your wedding invitations. Goodbye, Eddie.” That was all I said, and he said nothing in return.

  The Apology

  The next morning I awoke to the deadening crush of rejection. I felt my body parts disengage, grow still, and refuse to cooperate. I forced clothes upon myself and, in a daze, with an asinine smile glued to my lips, I greeted customers and took orders, and nodded, yes, yes, thank you, and punched my hours in like a functioning individual when in fact I could feel my mind succumbing to the unremitting stillness of depression. How I needed—wanted—to anesthetize my cantankerous head! When drinking tea from a coffee mug, I heard Grandmother whisper, see, see, I was right, you prideless fool, he’s an alien virus, krovopijtza, merzkoye gavno! Or while wiping my face with a cheap towel, I felt my mother chiding me for chafing my skin, for weakening, for parading my feelings with such cruel disregard for my own well-being. Or when I wept into a Tempur-pedic pillow, stifling my wails with hard yellow foam, I could hear Bella’s resounding, sarcastic laugh at life’s absurd injustices. Or while arranging tubes of paint, I envisaged my father shaking his head at me, at the dilettante life I was leading, with no man to support my habits. Where is your 401 plan? he seemed to be tapping at my obstinate head. Will you have health insurance if you sell a painting? And when I sweated in the diner, returning home with my legs stiff and aching, when my arms fell to my sides like celery stalks, and when the stench of rotting lamb chops in a curry sauce emanating from the Indian restaurant became so endemic to my lungs that when I took a walk along the river I seemed to be polluting it with my own breath, I heard my dear ones, their hearts breaking into that old patriotic nag: we didn’t bring you to this country, didn’t pay for University of Chicago, for NYU graduate school, didn’t pamper you, feed you, love you so that you could end up here—torturing yourself for what? For whom? For this illusion of independence? The difference between you and every other struggling artist is that you still have a choice—you can come back to us!

  I had not spoken to Grandmother for three agonizing months—a time frame so unfathomable in our family that she was on the verge of declaring me dead or a crazy whore, the former clearly being the preferable condition of the two. I was certain she missed me, but her sense of injury was so finely honed that it rendered my suffering obsolete—and it became unconscionable to give in to me. The only cure to my suffering was to utter the dreadful apology—“Ya izvinyayus,” and admit at last that the world ended and began in her, the one who metaphorically bore us all. I would rather die a crazy whore.

  My mother understood us both, and brokered a peace treaty by sticking the receiver literally under Grandmother’s loud mouth, into which the latter immediately yelled, “You wouldn’t believe what people are saying about your mother—that she’s lost her bearings! Your mother called Lyuba Berkovich ‘a brainless, flat-assed viper’ to her face because Lyuba accused your mother of not loving her younger daughter”—i.e., letting me go to New York by myself. “They’re saying you’ve turned into a fancy feminist-spinster. ‘Nonsense,’ I told Lyuba, ‘our Lenochka is a professor of feeeeemenist teoriya!’” These perky insults were Grandmother’s roundabout method for teaching us moral lessons and so I sprinkled a little moral acid of my own. “They’re all idiots, anyhow, your Russian friends, stuck in old paradigms from the old country.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said, “jealous hags with enough evil eye to send a fly to the gulags! They can’t stand the fact that you don’t have to work because your father supports you.”

  “I have a job, babushka,” I protested in a wounded voice, “he’s not supporting me. I’m on my own.”

  “I hear he still sends you money because your fancy art school is very expensive. Your mother says it’s impressive, this so-called art school.”

  “I’m going to be an artist, babushka—a painter, like Chagall,” I said, swelling with sudden pride.

  “Out of all your opportunities, all your talents, why, why would you choose to be an artist—it’s a miserable profession, you’ll never be happy!”

  “Because this is my life, my life, don’t you see it, my life to choose and screw up!” I cried.

  “Yes, your life! Big words! What a fool I’ve been, thinking I can help you—save my Lenochka—for what? So much wasted breath!”

  “That’s not true!” Tears sprang from my eyes; how fortunate, I thought, that she couldn’t see them. “I hear everything—I try to listen, I do, but I want to find my own path, be my own person.”

  “Funny word, ‘own’—I, for one, don’t know what it means,” Grandmother said, “but you and your sister and your mother keep telling me about it, and I keep thinking to myself, if only I had had such a keen understanding of this word, ‘own,’ where would your lives be? Your mother was doing ‘important’ work with writers, and at night she went out with her ‘high-culture’ literary crowd. While I, while I raised
all of you: bathed you, powdered your bottoms, fed you, clothed you, licked the floors practically with my tongue, cooked feasts from scratch, folded and ironed the laundry with my bare hands, cleaned up everyone’s shit, and wiped everyone’s and I mean everyone’s asses—your father’s and grandfather’s included. I did it so that you could all study and develop your brains and succeed in your careers, while I worked as a maid for free. So I wonder now if only I had known such words as ‘own,’ ‘free,’ or ‘my, my my life,’ where would you all be?”

  We sat in silence, crushed by the weight of her perennial self-sacrifice as it hovered over our heads, over the telephone poles in New York and Chicago, over the entire Western hemisphere, and expanded like a behemoth hydrogen balloon across the sky. And for the first time, without seeing her proud face, I could hear bitterness in her voice: the bitterness of community, charity, devotion, and the worst, most insidious bitterness of all—family.

  “You didn’t have to do all that,” I whispered. “You could have run.”

  “Oh, dorogaya vnuchenka, I could have done a lot of things, but one thing I couldn’t do was run.”

  “Then why don’t you let me run?”

  “That’s just it, that’s what you don’t see—I am letting you run. I’ve let you run very, very far. Don’t you understand? You’re a mouse in a maze; you think you’re getting out by changing cities, careers, men, but you’ll end up where I was, where your mother was, where your sister is—shackled just like the rest of us. There’s nowhere else for us women to go.”

  When I hung up the phone, I laughed outright at my naïve old grandmother: what do you know, I screamed; shut your trap, I screamed; look at me, I screamed; I’m a hawk perched on a cliff ingesting the open sky.

  The Long, Tortuous Trajectory of Great Art

  The gallery was a dark cluttered basement of a three-story town house. Chintzy, bronze-encrusted chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and tall scented candles lit up cobwebbed corners. Incense burned on an altar table with a statue of a Hindu goddess, and a sweet odor of bark and ginger-root swirled in our nostrils. The gallery was owned by a woman named Linda Fern, who was decked out in a multicolored robe that clashed with her sallow skin and gave her a momentary lapse in coordination. She greeted the guests with an air of geniality and sweetness, and the usual array of characters who visit art galleries were reduced to their friendlier, kinder selves. By offering very low prices for the work she showed and talking up these artists as though they were the next Picasso, Dali, or Unitcheska, Linda would lure rich clients by convincing them that these paintings were “investments” that would eventually be worth thirty to sixty thousand dollars apiece, if not more.

  Although it was not an established gallery, it was known among people in the art world as a “quiet swirl of activity,” “a hidden gem,” “a surprising mix of the traditional and the avant-garde.” Once in a while a major critic would stop by and write a piece on some lucky bastard in a prominent art magazine. Even though I had to share wall space with two other students, my friend Stone and another woman from Unitcheska’s class, Carol, I withheld this innocuous detail from my family when I announced the sensational news over the phone. At first, they didn’t seem to understand me: was I buying art for myself? Did I need money? Did I want to come home now that someone was going to finally sell off my crazy paintings? Or was this just an educational event where I would get a simulation of what it must be like to be seen and sold without actually being seen or sold? When I told my father that Linda Fern took seventy percent of the profit from several hundred dollars, he let out a groan of pain. “Dear child, why, you’re being robbed from your forehead to your toenails!”

  Although Linda was mildly impressed with The Mermaid-Child and Prehistoric Children, commenting on their interesting suffusion of color and expressive eyes, she was mercilessly critical about the rest. For The Girl Under a Green Umbrella, she felt a kind of visceral disgust; the child suspended in the air appeared too skinny and pathetic looking under the massive umbrella, whose actual tint was not green at all, but “sewage-mustard gray.” “Awful,” she concluded. My Secret Chanterelle exposed the skin of a perforated orange mushroom, inside of which a pre-pubescent girl, in Carmen’s red skirt and black blouse, showed her face and waved one plump thigh. “Are you trying to sexualize children like that pervert, Balthus?” Linda wanted to know. “With today’s obsession over child molestation, do you think anyone is going to be bold enough to buy this?” Toward Sprites in a Can she expressed only intellectual dismay. “Now, here, I see you’ve moved on to torture?” The latter painting was my most ambitious undertaking, capturing eleven children lying side by side in a partially opened metal can, their bodies clad in silver gowns, irrespective of gender, their faces smiling and crackling with laughter. Yet underneath their mirth, you could see them squirming, pushing aside the arms of their neighbor to make breathing space for themselves, or perhaps even to escape. Toward The First Cigarette, which depicted my grandfather at the age of nine smoking a cigarette, his luxuriating face barely managing to fit inside the perfect square of the canvas, Linda summarized her feelings thus: “No one with children would ever want to buy this!”

  But it was toward the last, the seventh painting that she directed all her acidity and motherly reproof: The Monster. A magnified oak trunk dominated the center of the canvas, its bark rotting and beset with gaping holes that resembled vacuous eyes. A cavernous mouth opened at the bottom of the tree, and from its protruding lip grew thick, snarling roots. Numerous eyes burned through the bark, red and glittery like rubies, and the torso was afflicted with thorns and sprouted sharp-toothed branches. A child was splayed across its width, its hands and feet bound to the trunk, a transparent child through whose diaphanous body one could make out teeth, eyes, claws. The roots that rose from the bottom of the canvas imitated human hands and tugged at the child’s skinny, pale legs. It was, as I had often told myself, a scene of horror, and yet what joy, what satisfaction, what euphoria there had been in painting it—in watching the horror breathe with life. As I watched workers mount the canvas on a pallid wall, I breathed in long rapturous intervals, ballooning from pride, wondering, in secret, if I could possibly have it—that elusive quality that denotes true genius.

  “Good Lord, child, what is this morass?” Linda exclaimed, glancing at it in clear physical dismay. “How am I ever going to sell this thing? No one but a freak would like it, and the people who buy art are as a general rule never freaks.” She threw a leg up through the air for an exclamation mark, and her bright multicolored skirt cascaded down her body like a parachute.

  “I beg to differ!” Unitcheska appeared out of nowhere and gazed with tenderness at my work. “You should have placed Emma at least in the second room; it’s a shame to exile her—”

  “I took her in the first place out of a favor to you. This isn’t a museum. Already they’re cleaning out the warehouse next to me to build a new gallery. I toil in the real world—Oooooh, Samuel, how wonderful to see you!” And with that Linda was whisked away by the pitter-patter of money, for Samuel F. Levenson was an important patron of the arts.

  “You’ll be all right, Emma,” Unitcheska assured me in a motherly tone. “You’ve got that rare quality that so few artists possess—a knack for making your audience suffer with you.”

  Even though The Monster would hang on the gallery’s farthest wall, in a room that could only be accessed by a long winding corridor, I was elated. Consider that there was an invitation at all—a poster with tiny reprints of our paintings next to our names: Reagan as a Cobra next to Stone Hograth, A Soup Medley next to Carol Smith, and Girl Under a Green Umbrella next to Emma Kaulfield! I didn’t care about the back wall or the exhausting staircase, or even the possibility that no one would buy my work—I was already envisioning myself as the next Unitcheska. Even the black velvet décolleté blouse I wore and the purple suede pants that hugged my behind and released torrents of sweat down my thighs made me feel magnificent,
hip, accomplished, so quintessentially New York. Painting alone was not enough: it was the fusion of painting and showing, the process of seeing and being seen that so marvelously gratified me. Linda had arranged my paintings along two walls, creating a progression of themes and color from the olive-hued, muddied faces of Prehistoric Children to the surfeit of lime and verdant tones in Girl Under the Green Umbrella to the yellow-cobalt maze of The Child-Mermaid to the rust-colored mushroom in My Secret Chanterelle, culminating in the silver kaleidoscope of Sprites in a Can, which created a magical continuity between the paintings, imbuing them with a collective voice. But The Monster, ominous in its frenetic strokes and corrugated knife-like branches, stood apart on a separate wall.

  On opening night, the guests passed from one painting to the next with a meticulous slowness, eyeing each canvas with the graveness I had only encountered in hospital waiting rooms. A woman and a gay couple froze in front of The Child-Mermaid, and I watched their heads bobbing up and down in assent to its free-form ambiguity. An intermingling of fear and joy charged through my veins: would they buy it? Occasionally my heart would squeeze from the sudden fear of seeing Eddie, and I’d scan the room in search of him. Confessing love was far worse than concealing it, I had realized in the bleak aftermath, so that upon discerning a suit, I would shudder and retreat into the deeper reaches of the gallery, scurrying into the corridor or hiding in the bathroom, giving the unidentified suit time to leave.