The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  “At least it’s an honorable prison.”

  “Imagine what I’ve imagined hundreds of times in my head: us five, ten, fifteen years into the future, and we’re both married with children and we bump into each other accidentally or on purpose—doesn’t matter—and the old spark returns. We’ll have an affair or if we don’t, we’ll think about it—we’ll want to—that’s what matters. And we’ll cause greater pain to more people—our spouses, even our children.”

  “Not if we never meet—not if we never, ever meet again.”

  “Listen to me, Emma, my mother’s ruined lives.

  “I told you about myself and my brother, but I didn’t tell you the saddest story of them all—the story of Tziporah. After her parents found out about her ‘sin’ with Andy, they married her off to a Hasidic man thirty-two years her senior. She lives with him in New Jersey; she has six children. I wonder sometimes, does she still dance in her pajamas with her children or is that too painful …”

  “Too painful,” I reply.

  “With me you’d still be painting.”

  “I don’t need you to save me, Eddie—I am no Tziporah. I can save myself.”

  “Don’t you hear what I’m asking for: I’m asking you to save me, Emma. Save me!”

  He holds out his hand and I put mine in it and feel him pressing his heart into my palm—do you hear it, he seems to whisper—do you hear it bleating? We do not look at one another: our lips, our eyes are shut. It is only when I hear him say, “We can be happy, Emma, like we once were,” that my hand breaks free and my feet carry me across the street, and I’m breathing the fire of possibility, and it stings and dances on my tongue. I don’t feel my red heels click against the cold asphalt stone; I don’t see the traffic lights before me. I run to the river with my eyes closed—to the house of white dresses and lost brides. I am among them. We’re all Cinderellas at the royal ball—magicians, illusionists, dreamers. We don’t see the prince, only ourselves, only the vision perfected over time: white lilies and orchids, white laced veils, white four-tiered cakes, white and luminescent like the silk that sheathes our expectant aroused bodies. I’m in the silk of crème, not white, not entirely virginal, but of the virgin’s mind. A wreath of leafy vines and lush purple irises sits upon my russet head and sprouts teething branches from my hair. A rosy sheen of gloss sparkles on my lips and slippers shape my feet; they’re made from stone or glass or flesh, I cannot tell, and I’m skipping on black waves, held up by other Cinderellas. The ghost brides are galloping like wild steeds, confused, disjointed, disconnected, and I’m among them.

  We’re here in the middle of the night, and yet it is our day—the day the sun is blistering and yellow-hot and summer calls all wild creatures out to marry! For solidarity, for strength, for will, for pleasure, for children, for the future, for sacrifice, for love—his address sticks to my wet palm and drips, imprinting ink onto my skin. And lest I lose it on this tumultuous, ink-blue day, I memorize the number, street, and corner: will I go there, tonight, I ask the pink industrial sky.

  I start to walk, then run, my stilettos push into my toes, indent my tender skin. I take one shoe off, then the other, the pier’s cold cement stings my bare feet … the river beckons to me. The winds and waves hold hands and sing and lure me under, under the surges. Water lashes out in spurts, in plumes of foam, crashing against cold cement, crashing against me. I’m soaked in the river’s angry lashes, soaked in polluted water. I’m at last alone, naked, devoid of will, of ego, of preconceptions, freed from the claws of some primordial past that lived within me, the claws of morality and duty, those ancient schisms of good and evil that strove at will to vilify the nerve-endings of desire, to stamp out a woman’s longing at her central spinal root! As if to surgery, I hand my body over, present it in blue cloth, under the general state of numbness, knocked out by the fist of anesthesia, lungs spastic, devoid of vitality, of lucid breath—is that what asthma is? Is that why I still have it, this disease of guilt, of obligation, of contrition? With each act of longing, with each paroxysm of desire, the fear sets in and swathes subversive words in spit, in mucus floods that permeate the nostrils, mouth, and throat, that occlude your vision. And if you dare to speak, instead of sound, a cough appears, a grating whirr, a barely audible orchestration of the larynx and vocal cords spewing from swollen lips, revealing your humiliation, your state of gutlessness, your courage stunted—was I ever breathing?

  I see them: the faces of my women—Mother, Grandmother, Bella, great-grandmothers, great-great-grandmothers, my past and present—the living swimming with the dead. I see my blonde-haired great-great-grandmother who gave birth to eighteen children, who lived through Tsars and Cossacks, through pogroms and rapes and Stalin’s collectivization of Ukraine, through starvation and oppression, through prison and gulags, through the loss of fifteen children, through the loss of husband and sons and daughters. I see her daughter, my direct lineage, my grandmother’s beloved mother dying from diphtheria in the mansion Stalin’s henchmen re-appropriated to the peasants, depriving my family of their dignity, their will. They now lie across the attic floor, how many of them in unwanted intimacy, their suffering I cannot fathom, and yet I am certain I was there among them. I see humiliation scattered across my soul like the infected molded bread crumbs in my great-grandmother’s mouth and I see her, my eight-year-old grandmother weeping, feeding her mother poisonous bread crumbs, thinking she’s saving her from hunger, hungry herself, not knowing that she’s killing her mother, lying for days next to her mother’s dead body, weeping, “Wake up, mamochka, wake up, why won’t you wake up?” I see death fly in through half-open windows, through the cracks in the attic, in the hot starving summer of 1931, when people lived on ashes and there was no time to love, to write, to paint, to think of culture, to fantasize of riches, to dream: you barely existed—existence as survival. I see history, my history, coiled into the history of nations, stretching across the particular weave of my double-triple identity, from East to West to the Jewish Diaspora. And suddenly my pain seems innocuous, insignificant, inferior in this interminable web of suffering, of human wars. We are alone, abysmally alone. What is this being we call “myself” or, in my native tongue, “Ya”? What is “Ya”?

  The river beckons to me now and I lean in, closer, closer, a blur of waves and memory and women, and I want to swim under the surges, swim among the dead. And Death appears like Beauty, a purple-blue-green goddess with perfect features in a swaying lilting shape, a thing of water seamless and seductive, smelling of algae and blue-green moss, perched at the mouth of the river. “Come in,” she whispers, “come in, I’ll soothe your pain, I’ll plug the holes in your heart,” and in that moment, she’s the relief to my unexamined acts of living—for I was always in the act of dying! Paralyzed, plugged, asthmatic, stuck in cages of my own making or the cages built for me by others, always trapped, always yearning, never doing, never leaping, never living. Death as relief! Death as the river: tall, lithe, rising, defying gravity, facing me like a mother-mirror, a sinewy black reflection of the bridal dress. For this weave of pearl silk and lace, this symbol of purity, commitment, sanctified desire, entangled in one cloth, is a cage, my cage, the cage I had been put in, kept in, the cage I walked into and stayed … How long have I been here? How old was I when I first walked in? The river roars and spits upon the dress and turns the crème into rancid gray and putrid green, and colors bleed into each other, altering me from within. I will the dress to change—to wither—to succumb to mud! I mangle its static bodice, its voluptuous hoop skirt. I demand that the cloth is no longer silk but a mottled brown rag, devoid of luster, shine, color. I dissolve the glass slippers. And from my head, branches fall to earth and re-sow roots beneath my bare feet, feet bound by gravity, by dirt. I’m of the dirt. I unload all of me: my memories, my failures, my happiness, my love, my rage, my suffering, my implacable dancing heart—empty but I holler “free”—into the river’s gurgling, snaking void. Until I’m just a sketch painted on
an ashen sky, inviting image after image in, traversing empty plains of my mind, and there a paintbrush stands and paints me in, not as I’ve been, but as I dream: reborn upon the canvas, I am myself, the incarnation of my stubborn will.

  “Emma.” I hear a voice inside my head—it’s him.

  “Eddie,” I say. “You’re here?”

  His laughter vanishes, his eyes grow cryptic, grim. “Why did you come tonight, tell me the truth—I mean, why did you come to my opening?”

  “It’s so simple, really. I simply wanted to see how you look, what you smell like, what you’re wearing. I didn’t want anything from you but simply to see you.”

  “What did you think?” he says, laughing. “How did I smell?”

  “Like an artist, like you hadn’t showered,” I answer, laughing, pausing. “Like you weren’t you.”

  “I was putting the images up on walls, I couldn’t sleep. I must have switched the locations a thousand times. I thought you’d laugh at me—that I had suddenly become an artist, that you’d think I was a fraud.”

  “But still you wanted me to see you?”

  “Yes, I wanted you to see me, see that I was more than what I once was, that I was more deeply connected to you than I had ever imagined—or you.” He gazes at me strangely. “I saw it, saw you coming, envisioned your face, your clothes, the contours of your body. I watched the glass doors religiously all evening, but when you actually appeared—I gasped.”

  “You did? Why?” I smile casually, but his words clutch my heart.

  “Because you were more beautiful than I had remembered you, but this new beauty was harder, somehow—oh, I don’t know—there was new sadness in you.”

  “There is always sadness in me.”

  “Yes, but this new sadness and your beauty—your face—it was …”

  “It aged, that’s all.”

  “It cut across the room, your eyes cut across the room. Like you had suddenly become inaccessible. That’s what I meant to say, your old sadness was kinder, approachable even. Sometimes your old sadness seemed to invite people in. Your new one encircled you like a wall.”

  “Because it is a wall.”

  “In the first few moments of seeing you I thought I’d never get the courage to speak to you, much less say what I had planned to say.”

  “So you planned to say all that in advance?”

  “Yes, of course, I practiced.” He pauses.

  I laugh.

  “I practiced how I’d win you back. I practiced what to say. But when I saw you—I wondered if it’d be better to say nothing. I wondered if I could just stand next to you in silence and we wouldn’t speak, and you’d figure it all out.”

  “I did figure it all out, but I was engaged.”

  “You ‘were’? As in past tense?”

  “Yes,” I say tentatively because even though I haven’t called Aaron yet to break up with him, I know I will. I’ve memorized the words I’ll utter in the breaking. I know I will never return to him, and Eddie knows this too: he reads this in my eyes.

  I look at Eddie now, with full force, with my knotted throat, with tears swelling, bursting out of my gaze. “No marriage, Eddie, just us, from now on, just us—day by day—moment to moment.”

  “Moment to moment.”

  “You made me happy every day that we were together,” I say. “Can you make me happy today and tomorrow and maybe the day after? That’s all I ask.”

  Tears spring to his eyes but he holds them in.

  “We’ve lost so much time,” he murmurs and then lets go.

  “Only four years, but look at what we found,” I say.

  “What?” He caresses my hair and pulls strands away from my face and runs his finger down my neck across my collarbone and lingers there, above my breasts. And then he kisses them, each breast, lightly, gently, with inexplicable tenderness, as if I might crumble if he exerts more force. I cup his face inside my palms but he can’t look at me anymore; he buries his head in my chest and sobs. And I sob in return and he drinks my tears off my skin and clothes.

  We stand in silence sobbing in each other’s arms, mourning the loss of time, of tenderness, of fear and pain and pleasure—the loss of love’s intricate joy.

  I speak at last. “You were right about what you said in the gallery: no matter where we go, how far we run—we’d return here.” Entwined in his body, I press him closer and closer to me till there’s no space left between us. “Because we didn’t understand then what we understand now … because this is all that matters, because I didn’t understand, Eddie, it’s me! I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to breathe …” And I can’t breathe now because I’m buried in my tears, in my mucus, in my suffusions of feelings, my asthmatic lungs swelling and contracting to the silent beat of impatience burrowing through my blood. Through a blur I see my tears trickle down the pier’s cold cement and into the mouth of the river, and quietly I say, “Everything I’ve said to you about myself, the things I said that matter so much to me: my family, my ancestry, my Jewishness, my Russianness, my suffering, this—this interwoven identity I have treasured and nurtured and kept, kept up—it will always stay with me no matter what.”

  “Yes,” he whispers, kissing my wet eyes, face, mouth, “yes, stay no matter what.”

  “I said those things to you because there in the gallery I was breathing again: I was breathing again, living again, because I was with you again, and I didn’t realize that, I didn’t realize it until I ran out here, to this river and threw away my shoes and saw my past lives flash before me … I didn’t realize that I can’t breathe—can’t live—can’t survive this life if I don’t have—if I don’t have love—if I don’t have you.”

  He simply nods.

  And then he whispers, “Ya lublyu tebya … Lena, Elena, Lenochka.”

  I smile.

  “You finally learned what it means.”

  “Yes,” he mutters, “I finally learned—late, but I did finally learn.”

  “So am I, I am also very late!” I’m quick to reply, my heart is pumping faster, faster, my mouth goes dry, but I say it, I still say it with courage. “I love you, Eddie, Edward, Ignatius, I love you even more.”

  A cool breeze dances on my skin and on his skin and his breath slows down, and so does mine, and for an instant we stop breathing altogether. The air is humid and prickly and leaves rustle on bending croaking trees and the wind speaks in human monotones. And when we gulp it in, this unity of air and wind and water floating between us—we breathe more, live more, want more … and there on that river’s edge where death meets life and ancestors swim on polluted streams and languages mingle and crisscross identities and open trapped doors and release imprisoned souls—there, he lifts me from the ground and holds me in his arms and beams his golden smile … I’m barefoot and wet and free. And he—he balances my body on his arms and carries me for seven city blocks and brings me to the footsteps of his brownstone and opens up the door and together we cross the threshold.