15 Years Later …

The Extraordinary Powers of Raw Garlic

My grandmother thinks that with my looks and figure I should have been married four times by now. When I remind her that I’m only twenty-four, a mere infant by American standards, Grandmother assures me that Americans have very low standards, and American women are currently drowning in the putrid waters of spinsterhood. “When are you going to have children?” she moans, “in your thirties, God forbid?” These discussions have no actual point except to prove to me that while we may physically be living in America, mentally we are still stuck in Russia.

Grandmother chose a groom for me during my senior year in college while I was dating someone else. In theory he was my perfect mate: a Russian Jew like me, with a BA from the University of Chicago, my alma mater, and a future in internal medicine to cure me of all my real and imagined illnesses. In reality he was a mule, who redoubled his wooing efforts when he found out that my boyfriend was undecided about his major. I received mass deliveries of red gardenias, regular invitations to dinner at Château Le Tiff (or Miff) and such delicate assurances as “I just want to be friends,” which could easily have meant “Let’s have friendly sex.” It took an emergency intervention by Grandmother to keep his family from ruining my family’s good name after I told him in plain Russian to fuck off. When I raised these facts against him, Grandmother nodded her head in approval and said, “Now there’s a real man.” By which she meant that my boyfriend was not.

To define a real man is a very difficult business indeed, but my grandmother is an expert in this field. I shall attempt to capture the highlights here.

1.   A real man can withstand a woman’s emotional outburst without having one himself.

2.   A real man has to rise above the debasing insults of a marital squabble and, regardless of whether he is right (no one but Grandmother was right all the time), apologize for everything.

3.   A real man always wakes up early in the morning. Waking up at noon or in the taboo hours of a late afternoon can get him instantly demoted to a sloth, which, in real-man speak, is akin to a pussy.

4.   A real man will not complain about his current job even if in the motherland he was once a prodigy violinist, pianist, or a philandering conductor; an engineer, chemical or otherwise, who also by the way wrote poetry in his spare time; a mathematician, physicist, chemist, or any other scientific subfield with unscientific hobbies; a dentist, surgeon, obstetrician, or a KGB-employed psychiatrist; a black market specialist; a director of an X factory or rising star in a fledgling computer industry. He has to endure his new humiliations with the courage and willpower of a war hero, and try not to focus too much on the fact that he’s now a cab driver, a driving instructor, a fixer of broken typewriters, a hotel janitor, an uncertified masseuse, a mover of boxes, a liquor store cashier, or, saddest of all, an unemployed intellectual.

5.   A real man is always a cauldron of ambition, striving to rise, to transcend his current mess, to look at his English not as a done deal, but as a trajectory leading to self-improvement, and finally never feel offended when his wife corrects his pronunciation, because a real man has boundless reserves of confidence.

6.   Finally (or not so finally), a real man, under no circumstances, would major in the humanities, which oddly enough included philosophy, literature, and drama, but not history. History majors sat on the borderline of real manhood, in that they were still technically real but so boring that they failed to inspire the passions of a real woman.

I knew very early in life that I would never find myself a “real” man, nor did I want to. Unlike many women I knew, I did not suffer from the panic of no longer being a virgin and remaining unmarried. Although my sister was not one of these women (she felt that the whole point of emigrating to America was to free ourselves from Soviet idolatry of virgins), she was still deeply affected by Grandmother’s lectures on the pitfalls of slutdom, and believed, possibly in tandem with Grandmother, that a prolonged single life led to social retardation and acne. Under such pressures, Bella married the most persistent of her suitors at twenty-five, a certain Igor Rabinsky, and a year later bore us a beautiful daughter named Sirofima. Having achieved the state of desired normalcy, Bella was now free to be tragically unhappy and blame everyone for having given up her dream of becoming a Broadway actress.

Against the backdrop of my sister’s tragediya, I refused to date Russian men. Deeply obsessed with reaching the highest state of Americanization, I jumped into long-term relationships with upstanding American men: a whining intellectual on the verge of self-discovery and in the throes of a dissertation on Brezhnev’s Five-Year Economic Plan, and a self-absorbed, intellectually vapid, pompously moralistic, romantically minded gynecologist. They were my most persistent suitors, with whom I stayed longer than my nerves could bear, in part because they were both Jewish and therefore Grandmother would be tepidly satisfied, and in part because of their creative marriage proposals. The intellectual, a dabbler in many arts, painted a rose with a diamond ring hanging on one of its thorns and presented it to me at the History Department annual spring picnic. Needless to say, there was celebratory boohooing, whistling, and smacking of lips, which made it impossible for me to say “no” once I realized that this was a proposal—the intellectual did not actually articulate the words, “Will you marry me?” but rather stared smugly at my face. The gynecologist was more conventional in style—he took me to a fancy restaurant where he spoke about the indeterminate color of my eyes, my soft skin and hot body, and how he was also good looking, which led to the unexpected topic of our future children and a scrumptious blueberry mousse cake, which I was forced to lick off the plate without swallowing and thus uncover an enormous diamond ring, shrouded in blue mousse, which therefore did not shine but did scrape my sensitive tongue.

An artist’s journal, the gift from my father, became my refuge in those early years. Without language, I sketched, drew, painted to express myself, expressions that filled more journals and sketchbooks and soon needed canvases to capture them all. Although my parents complained about the messes I made and the money they were spending on art supplies, they never denied me: they purchased the best oil pastels and oil paints and acrylics and a panoply of watercolors and top-of-the-line sable brushes and fancy stretched canvases intended only for real artists. “We are in America,” my father would say, carrying an enormous sketchpad under his arm. “We sacrifice ourselves for our children!” My mother acknowledged that I had “talent,” but no one in the family was certain if it was “real,” as they required, like most people from Eastern Europe, confirmation from above—from those invisible authority figures who decreed what is and what isn’t, what is talent and what is mere facade. The idea that art might be my career was unfathomable. But in college, I began to hear people throw around a wildly shocking, original, thoroughly innovative concept that I had never encountered before: “do what you want!” Here people spoke of “talent,” broadly defined, as a matter of hard work and determination and subjectivity, not simply a black-and-white preordained God-given gift. It was here that I first tasted a tentative longing to paint full time. Friends encouraged me to enter my work into contests and, to my great surprise, I won the first prize in a citywide College Surrealism Competition. The Chicago Herald published tiny images of my paintings and award next to an article, entitled “Young Chicago Artists at Work,” and I brought home this incontrovertible evidence to prove to my mother and grandmother and father that I was in possession of “raw God-given” talent. But they scoffed at the idea: “You’re just a university student,” my mother pointed out, “you haven’t competed in the ‘real’ world, with ‘real’ artists.” For Grandmother, the world was simpler: “Over my dead body,” she said, “we didn’t bring you to America so that you could waste your life, your brains, your University of Chicago education, making doodles and googly eyes all day long.” My father was manly and resourceful: “Why don’t you try your hand at mathematics like me or Computer Sciences like your third cousin Yulya. She’s now programming at CitiBank and to think that not so long ago she wanted to be an actress!”

It was inevitable, I suppose, the obligatory fate of our young immigrant generation: children with suppressed dreams and Herculean stamina for enduring careers that made us want to slit our wrists. And among them, indeed, sat I. I juggled three nightmares in my head—physics, computers, and mathematics. My competence in all three fields was in the sub-zero region. Grade-wise, I was mustering B-minuses because the university had a propensity for grade inflation and because my father was working overtime, doing my homework for me, calling me “stupid” out of desperation. One day, my father’s boss recommended that I should look into becoming an actuary. “A wonderful field with numerous job prospects,” the man assured my father. Although I had failed my first statistics exam and loathed every graph and probability equation with the passion of an axe-murderer, my father gave me positive reinforcements: “You’re Russian,” Father said, “and Russians do not give up!” I chose statistics as my major, with a minor in feminist theory and gender studies, which became known in my family as my little immigrant rebellion, my American mishugas. During my senior year, I applied and was accepted to a program called Statistics Probability and Survey Modeling, nicknamed SPASM, at NYU’s prestigious school of Arts and Sciences. In the Russian community of Chicago’s wealthy suburbs, my new program was viewed as my parents’ grand achievement and unanimously hailed as an ideal career for a woman: I could become an actuary, a professor, a wife, a mother, and a money-making entity by analyzing, constructing, and concocting surveys that explained Americans’ way of life. What glorious conversations Grandmother was now having with grandmothers and mothers of daughters who went to mediocre colleges and ended up hygienists, accountants, optometrists, and careerless wives: “Well, our Lenochka is studying Matimatiku at New York University, the Center for Matimatika, studying to be a professor, our Lenochka, or she can be a CEO if that’s where her heart leads!”

After I moved to New York City to pursue SPASM, I became the perfect immigrant child. I avowed to my mom and grandma that my “silly” dream of becoming a painter had now been fully submerged under my “serious” dream of becoming an actuary.

To bring matters to a state of almost hysterical bliss, I was at long last dating the man of Grandmother’s dreams, a real man: a certain Alexei Bagdanovich, a Princeton graduate with the manners and looks of a White Russian aristocrat, and the blood of a pure Jew.

But as all perfect immigrant children know, I wasn’t without my scintillating little secrets. My apartment in the West Village, which I affectionately dubbed “the dungeon,” was one of the most hideous dwelling places I had ever chanced upon in my short life. The kitchen boasted a healthy population of cockroaches; the toilet required manual pumping with a plunger to properly flush; a four-foot-long blue pet iguana resided in the living room; and a roommate named Natasha, originally Nancy—a self-proclaimed Russophile—hung tiny snapshots of her asshole and vagina examined from a variety of perspectives on the hallway walls. This exposé, Natasha was quick to elucidate, marked her short stint as a “model” during her “early years” in New York.

After spending a studious, will-defying, brain-numbing, hands-wringing, depression-inducing, face-contorting year studying a field I had no aptitude for or interest in, and receiving a C+ for Survey Analysis, a D– for Advanced Statistics Level 400, and an F for Probability and Stochastic Modeling, I threw myself into researching the key ingredients of successful suicide attempts. But again, I had to remind myself of this execrable fact—we are Russian, after all, and Russians don’t give up … they lie.

Fall was upon me, a new semester was in full swing, and I was now auditing a secret art class, which was run by the tyrannically and openly philandering Professor Grayhart. Though Grayhart—an attractive old letch, if you don’t mind sagging skin and a smoker’s rasp—became obsessed with trying to recruit me to model in the nude (after class, that is), I adored him for all the right reasons: his incisive critiques of my disproportionate figures and his insistence that painting can be a career, a concept so taboo in my family that you might as well major in cannibalism.

Finally, there was the microscopic fact that despite my heavy commitment to Alex, I was now eyeing other men. Let me broadly define “eyeing”: flipping one’s hair in a come-hither fashion; staring lustily while pretending not to stare; mouthing pleasantries like “Oh you didn’t have to, but thank you for that blueberry muffin,” or “I guess a cup of Starbucks coffee never hurt anyone,” or that well-known death to all fidelity: “Hah, hah, hah, that’s so funny!” When these small infractions started happening, I attributed them to general youthful malaise and restlessness—my joie de vivre, my last cough against society’s deification of monogamy. Once Alex and I were married, I reassured myself, these strange virulent longings would subside, these flirtations would level off into a kind of humdrum marital nod to past transgressions, and I would be an exemplary wife. As I nestled in his arms, discussing our favorite English translation of Anna Karenina, I’d swear that I would never stray again, that upon smelling another man, I’d handcuff myself to the nearest pole and imagine that I was Odysseus on the open sea being seduced by the Sirens. But a few weeks later, while perusing my beloved feminist theorists at Barnes & Noble, I found myself etching my phone number into some guy’s palm. While attending a lecture on Simone de Beauvoir’s tortured affair with Sartre, I found myself discussing the quest for a perfect feminist orgasm with a continental philosopher in a dusty hallway corner (a kind of virtual simulation of sex, if you ask me). I consoled myself with only one recurring thought—thank God for my Silver and Bronze Rules, respectively: (1) Official Dates Are Not To Be Tolerated Under Any Pretenses; (2) No Slippery Foreign Tongue Inside Mouth, No Foreign Fingers Upon Breasts, No Foreign Penis Entity In Vagina; in a word, NO SEX, NO SEX, NO SEX Under Any Circumstances (not even in an overheated discotheque with writhing bodies swaying to that fatally sexual song, “Like A Virgin!”). Thus my guilt remained at tolerable levels, that is, my allergies were kept at bay, except for a few barely noteworthy incidents where my eyes began to itch uncontrollably, my throat stung, my esophagus convulsed, and my mucus flowed so generously from my nose that I had to tell people I had the flu. I called Mom and Grandma with the sincerest hope that they could cure me.

“Mamochka, Babulya, dorogiye moyi,” I murmured in my sweetest Russian voice, “I’ve been thinking—I mean Alex is great, really great, but what if I’m not ready—I mean would it make sense to date around a bit more, take a little tiny mini-break from Alex, and then, then go back to him later?”

“Are you speaking in Mongolian?” Grandmother cried.

“What do you mean ‘go back to Alex’—go back from what? What’s going on?” my mom, with her KGB-trained brain, asked.

“All these men ask me out—what I mean is that just the other day a nice Jewish boy wanted to take me to a movie—” (He was a graduate student in film studies and although he had no biological affiliation to Jews, he had a splendid knowledge of Holocaust movies.)

“You mean like that ‘nice Jewish boy’ you dated in college who told you he was adopted but whose parents turned out to be Efiscofallicaans and his last name turned out to be McNuel?”

“I’ve barely dated,” I said, trying a different tack. “I’ve always been engaged.”

“And whose fault was that?" Grandmother yelled. “The point of life is to marry, not date senselessly and idiotically! Listen to me, Alex is the best thing that ever happened to you. Look at your history, whenever you’ve chosen for yourself it’s been a disaster! Like that mudila who believed in Communist fairy tales, or that imbecilic ginecolog who chewed with his mouth open and didn’t say a word to me.”

“That’s because you don’t speak a word of English, babushka!” I shot back.

“An educated brute is what he was—didn’t even look me in the eye. Oh, why argue over your silly history—these were mistakes you made in your past, and now you’re a success. Now you’re doing smart things in your career, practical things with a future on the horizon, not like that Feeeeminist drivel you almost majored in—”

“Feminist, feminist,” I cried, “that was my minor—I minored in feminist studies.”

“Or, God forbid, Art!” my mother added with a laugh. “Grandmother would never sleep again and therefore, neither would we!”

“Most importantly, you’re now with Alexei,” Grandmother assured me in a conciliatory voice. “Can you think of any other Russian Jew who doesn’t make any grammatical mistakes in Russian and doesn’t stick English into every godforsaken sentence?”

“And yet he’s so wonderfully Americanized, just like you,” my mother effused.

“And he’s so handsome,” Grandmother muttered breathlessly.

“He’s practically Tom Cruise with a Jewish brain,” my mother said.

“Better looking than Tom Cruise,” Grandmother effused, “Apollon! And a genius in quantum physics.”

“He’s interviewing at banks, Babushka, he’s going into business—”

“Details,” she shot back. “You should wear that mauve velvet dress your mother bought you at Marshall Field’s—it brings out your eyes—when he comes next weekend.”

“Lenochka, we don’t want to push you or make this important decision for you”—my mother was embracing her infamous manipulation strategy—“but you’ve always been blind when it comes to men, and now once again you don’t see what is so patently clear to everyone else—that the right person for you, for you, my love, is Alex.”

“I know, I know, I’m sure you’re right; all I’m saying is that it’s hard to have a long-distance relationship. There are all these temptations.”

“Ah, well that’s a different topic. Your mother and I are experts in this field,” Grandmother boasted. “When a woman is beautiful it’s hard to say ‘no’ to men; beauty as you well know is a disease. The only answer is the law of repulsion. Eat four cloves of garlic a day and you’ll stink so bad no man will want to touch you—you’ll even stink down there—”

“Garlic is wonderful,” my mother burst out. “Did you know, Lenochka, that in Russia we used to stuff garlic up our assholes to get rid of parasites? But I’ve never heard of this nonsense—which aunt told you this ancient fairytale, maman?”

“Nonsense? Well this nonsense has kept numerous marriages together, plus warded off colds!”

“Thank you, Grandma, thank you, you’re brilliant—I’ll do that—I’ll do exactly that!” I muttered happily and hung up.

That very weekend I purchased several wreaths of garlic and stuffed salted cloves into black bread. With my eyes watering and my tongue drawing fire, I devoured it like I did as a child in wintertime, like my grandmother did to survive the freezing winter and the Nazis of the war.

Meet Tom Cruise with a Jewish Brain

Let me backtrack for you, patient reader. About a year ago, Grandmother stepped up the perennial marriage nudge as my single status was giving her “kolbasa-heartburn” and “Stalinist insomnia.” After two disastrous engagements that Grandmother strove to zap from the start, after months of dogged resistance and lackluster flings, I caved under Grandmother’s nagathon. After all, she was Queen Guildenshtein, the reigning force behind most of the actions and inactions of my mother, father, sister Bella, and me, and her insistence that I needed a serious boyfriend (as opposed to the unserious ones who were neither fully Jewish nor mathematically inclined) was akin to a royal command. Alex Bagen (or, more precisely, Alexei Ifimovich Bagdanovich) was the fourth man Grandma sent to New York to marry me. After several unsuccessful matches—one was a bald-headed pharmacist, the second a tall engineer without social skills, and the third a computer genius suffering from an overproduction of saliva (he slobbered on my foot in preparation for a kiss)—Grandmother stumbled upon Mrs. Bagdanovich at the Three Sisters Delicatessen on Devon Avenue, a hobnob for nostalgic Russian immigrants. It was she—Alex’s discerning mother—who saw me dancing with Bella in Moscow Nights (a Russian discotheque that also poses as a restaurant) and approached Grandmother about a possible merger. Mrs. Bagdanovich wanted me specifically, because she thought Bella was too “Russian looking” for her Americanized Alex. Bella’s beauty evoked Botticelli’s Venus, with her voluptuous figure, flowing blonde hair, and serene blue eyes, and Mrs. Bagdanovich was in search of something a little less intimidating and more modern for her son. Besides, Bella was already married, while I was the perfect postmodern beauty—a slouching skinny red-haired mess with pouty lips and eyes so dark no one could tell what color they were, except the woman who bore me and swore they were Byzantine green. Jeans were my preferred mode of existence, unless I was on a date with a Russian, and my language of choice was always English.

Alex arrived in New York like a prince on an alabaster unicorn—the unicorn being a white Mercedes where he offered me air cleansed of New York’s diesel fumes and Corona beer, which neither of us drank. He resembled a Greek god perched on the Italian leather of the limo’s interior—a dark-haired Zeus with philosophical brown eyes that assailed you with a mixture of disapproval and desire. He was the sort of handsome that made your tongue so moist it salivated clichés: “Do you come here often?” you wanted to say, or “You look familiar,” even though he didn’t. I imagined women drawn to him like refrigerator magnets, clinging to his chest, women Alex could never get rid of without the help of his mother.

For our first date, Alex wooed me with front-row seats to Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast to satiate our musical souls, Tavern on the Green to impress our never-satisfied palates, and the Russian Tea Room to awaken our nostalgia through vodka and cheap caviar. He was also eager to demonstrate that he was not averse to spending his parents’ money. We immediately seized on our mutual grueling years of trying to fit in and become egregiously American, and shared a secret sense of superiority over the other Russians.

“Why should I feel embarrassed at looking American?” Alex asked rhetorically, sipping his vodka cautiously as if it was poison. “Is it such a crime that I work out?” Alex ran in place on treadmills like all the other hardworking Americans, not in freezing winter storms along Lake Michigan like his nostalgic father. “It’s not that I wanted so desperately to assimilate,” Alex held forth when he explained why he changed his name. “I was just so sick of people asking: ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Isn’t it freezing in Moscow?’ I was the fucking valedictorian, for Christ’s sake, I could take their English on any day, and these ignoramuses were asking me if I knew what supercilious meant?” During his second year at Princeton, he truncated his long name and reemerged as a new man in the quicker and less cumbersome form of Alex Bagen, which ironically led people to mistake his last name for “Bagel.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I told Alex. “I’m not Lena Kabelmacher anymore.”

“Mother didn’t tell me you also changed your name!” He perked up with excitement.

“My grandmother keeps it a secret,” I said. “Besides, she can’t pronounce my new name—Emma Kaulfield.”

“Emma Kaulfield—what an excellent appellation!”

“I know it doesn’t sound too much like my name, but I figured I might as well go all the way …” My story came to me with a blend of pride and revulsion.

It wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with Elena Kabelmacher; it had a certain exotic ring to it. In Russia, I was branded as the Jew, and in America, I was confused with a German, which accounted for such unsightly misspelled mutilations as Kabelhuffer and Habbermuffer. I was tired of being asked, “So what nationality are you?”—tired of being seen as the foreigner, tired of myself playing the part. And in my search for a new name, I wanted no chopping of consonants, no half-baked contortions that take pleasant names like Bayakovksy or Feldshtein and squeeze them into a legless Bayak or an insipid Feld. I chose an aesthetic overhaul: I would become Emma Kaulfield, a literary invention with a few key letters to pay homage to my past and a lilting musicality to signal my future. I alerted my family to my new name when we were standing before a judge with hundreds of other immigrants, renouncing our allegiance to the Soviet Union in order to become passport-waving, anthem-belting, fully-pledged American citizens. “I’m changing my name,” I told my mother, arguing that I would have a better chance of getting into Harvard if I got rid of Kabelmacher, my father’s ancestral calling (whose roots apparently reached all the way back to the Jewish Vikings). She in turn calmed my grandmother, saying, “She needs to do this for her career,” and my father, like a soldier beaten in battle, nodded obsequiously. Only Bella bristled with indignation: “Traitor. It’s like you’re embarrassed of us.”

“She got to me,” I confessed to Alex. “I still feel like a traitor, especially when I date American men—it’s like, like—”

“Like it’s all part of our elaborate conspiracy to escape them, or something—”

“Exactly,” I cried, full of gratitude. “It’s like no matter what choice you make they think you’re saying, ‘I’m embarrassed to be seen with you!’”

“At least yours thought you were embarrassed of them,” Alex noted ruefully. “My mother blushes every time she hears anyone call me Mr. Bagen.”

“I hate vodka,” I said suddenly.

“Me too,” he murmured with passion and we leaned into each other simultaneously for a very public kiss against the plush crimson booth of the Russian Tea Room. Excitement gurgled in my stomach, brimming with the possibility of potential love, making me want to whisper: “You’re so unbelievably gorgeous—it’s a wonder, a miracle, really, that you also have a brain!” But I refrained. If he were an American, I would’ve spat it out without pause, but Russian men required serious circumspection.

I admired so much about him: his regular assaults on the Republicans and Democrats alike; his feverish adherence to notions of libertarianism and social hedonism; and the polite, gentle, non-judgmental way he denounced our parents (though never to their faces) for being so unflappably Republican. I revered him for being a Princeton man, and the only Russian Jew to have been accepted to an Ivy League institution without using his immigrant woes to beef up his application essay. In college, Alex could have done anything, but he majored in physics to prove to his parents that he was devoted to them. Despite constant praise from his mother, Alex experienced a loss of confidence upon graduation. Desire for travel, feelings of monetary inadequacies, and demanding girlfriends made him lose faith in his priyemuschestva—his great advantage. After highlighting his hair (an act dubbed by his father as “gay”) and dabbling in everything from advertising to computer programming to freelance writing, Alex experienced a typical post-college, I-am-almost-American-without-a-career meltdown. But he did not wallow in self-pity for long and, gathering himself in his arms, as the Russian saying went, sent his resume to every bank and consulting firm in New York, causing his mother considerable discomfort at having to tell people that her son was now interested in “biziness.” (To console his mother, he promised to apply to physics graduate programs at Harvard, MIT, and Cal Tech in December). Fantasies of rolling in wealth, traveling to Japan and China, and perhaps making a stopover in Mother Russia whirred in his brain and recalibrated his priyemuschestva in a new, dazzling light.

Alex and I saw each other as rebels, as rare immigrant specimens that didn’t obey their parents’ commands. We argued vociferously, criticizing other people with abandon, and boasted without applying to ourselves the American restraint of humility. Our long-distance relationship of twelve months together amounted to nine dates and fifty-six hours of phone conversations, canvassing the hard terrain of Russian history. We spoke about pogroms, Lenin’s bald head and Trotsky’s hubris, Stalin’s mustache and his bosom torturer, Beria, Brezhnev’s bushy eyebrows and his abysmal articulation, and the grotesque absurdities of the KGB. Yet somehow we eluded our personal histories, the miseries our families endured at the hands of those we mocked, the scars Russia carved upon us all; it made us feel good about ourselves to know that we had so much in common without having to expose our skeletons and to feel that beneath all our sophisticated blather we were dating the old-fashioned way—sans sex.

Grandmother warned me against having sex with him. “The whole Russian community will find you out—wait till he proposes,” she admonished. But I felt antiquated and buffoonish; after all, I was twenty-four, almost at my sexual peak, which I imagined as a state of unremitting horniness. I didn’t consider myself a nymphomaniac or, in Grandmother’s grand words, “an eternal slut,” but I knew that sex mattered, the way food and water matter, the way global warming matters. Yet after all those dates—during his sporadic New York visits—after simpering innuendos in smelly cabs, after feeling each other up and down (though not nearly up nor down enough—how could we in the hotel lobby), Alex had yet to invite me to his room. He bid me goodbye with “arrivederci” and a very unenthusiastic tongue, which barely grazed my gums before sheepishly retreating to its own mouth. Alex fancied himself a gentleman, a paragon of the self-restrained male, a relic from the Victorian Age. The ass, the ass, I wanted to scream, I want you to squeeze my ass. But his hands, those ticklish caterpillars, stayed stubbornly on my lower back.

Still, one has to give me credit for my peerless restraint. I stayed in my room and spoke to no one and kept my nose in sexually neutered texts. I ate dinner alone. I was every man’s fantasy of a long-distance girlfriend. I likened myself in my head to an existential stoic, a Russian monk, Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. Until, until, that is, November, when a cruel winter breeze began terrorizing the city and hot currents suddenly coursed through my veins, thawing my body for the advent of spring. I would sit next to a good-looking man in the library, gulp maniacally from a water bottle, and try not to think about ripping his shirt off together with his chest hair.

Against my better judgment, I suggested to Alex that we might consider taking our pawing to the next level. “What level might that be?” he inquired like an innocent lad of twelve. “The level of sex—of your room or my room or anywhere, let’s just do it, do it!” Yes, I said those exact words in my usual straightforward uninhibited style. And in the face of my extraordinary courage and my obvious, mauve-hued embarrassment, he remained as unperturbed as ever, a cocoon of virtue and reserve, explaining himself as a “devout Romantic—some people believe in God, I believe in Love.” I had no recourse but to wonder: (a) Do I have noxious oily fish breath? (b) Is he a Catholic priest masquerading as a Russian Jew? (c) Is he a repressed homosexual pretending to be a homophobic—bordering on chauvinistic—intellectual of the Russian variety? or (d) Is he the real article—a man of truly chivalrous convictions? Still, my pride wailed: how could any man not want me, me? And so I raged against him as if I were raging against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, as if sex itself had become the great equalizer, an emblem of American democracy, and we either had to have it or die!

But Alex stopped my diatribe with a sumptuous, almost ardent kiss and this: “‘Here I dwell, for heaven is in these lips / And all is dross that is not Helena.’”

So I replied: “‘Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.’”

“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”

“Please don’t!” I cried and together, he and I burst into laughter. For only two immigrants with English-inferiority complexes and healthy self-esteems could suddenly, without blushing, quote Marlowe, Frost, and Shakespeare to recuperate from a fight.

The Bathroom Incident that Launched a Thousand Guilt Trips

So there I was, stuffing garlic cloves in my bras and under my pillows, impatiently awaiting Alex’s return for his tfu, tfu, tfu interviews at New York banks, and my sex. My behavior was exemplary, my devotion pitch perfect, especially in my Probability and Stochastic Modeling class where I (being the only female) valiantly rebuffed the amorous attentions of two mathematically endowed men. When, alas, Alex called from the airport to announce, “I’ve arrived, expect the unexpected!” my heart pounded and my hands masterfully scrubbed my body to rid it of garlic odor—to prepare it for a full-scale physical seduction of the reluctant gentleman. Optimistically embracing the love-to-sex concept, I donned knee-length black leather boots, a leather miniskirt, and a leather jacket—the look of a slick badass or, worse, an Ivy League whore. Upon seeing me, Alex murmured, “Superb as ever!” and apologized for failing to secure reservations at Le Bernardin. Would I be terribly disappointed with the inferior La Cote Basque? No, I would not. Then he placed an airy peck on my puckered lips while I panted like an overheated dog in leather.

The dining room had the air of an old duchess, puffing with regal mannerisms and haughty remarks, and yet fully aware of her own decline and antediluvian views of the world. Stern rectangular white tables were met by plush blue sofas spiraling along the walls and gilded chandeliers, reminiscent of great Parisian ballrooms, offered only the illusion of light, enveloping each face in a gray glow. The restaurant appeared to be an enclave for the elderly with mink coats and cigars, and I instantly felt the need to pull my skirt down.

“I sal tell vou about ze speciales,” our waiter said with a vague foreign accent, and Alex lifted his head abruptly to stare at him.

“Qu’avez-vous pensé?” Alex exclaimed in French to the waiter, for it turned out that Alex also spoke fluent or, as I liked to think of it, Russian-inflected French.

The waiter appeared not to hear him and then, politely lowering his head, said, “I vill be right back—give vou foo minute to make decision.”

“He’s clearly French,” Alex announced. “I can spot the French anywhere. Did you see how polite he was?”

“How was he polite?” I asked.

“He didn’t want to speak French to me out of respect for you.”

“He looks Italian to me,” I said.

The waiter returned with the bottle of red wine Alex had ordered and a shy smile on his face, again directed exclusively at me. He now visibly ignored Alex’s appeals to him in French. I cringed, then grinned seductively at the waiter in an attempt to counteract Alex’s faux pas.

“Are you making eyes at the waiter?” he asked angrily after we ordered our appetizers.

“What else am I supposed to do when you won’t leave him alone?” I snapped.

“Are you still sore about the sex?”

“I’m not sure you can handle a modern woman,” I said. “You are clearly put off by my desires.”

“It’s not that. You never gave me a chance to explain. I just like us the way we are—you reeling me in but not giving me what I want, and me running after you like your faithful dog servant.” He paused as if to twirl the words on his tongue and rephrased the concept: “I want to keep feeling the way I’m feeling—ravenous but not yet satiated!”

“Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

“I’m a gambling man,” he said, smiling.

“And I’m a hard-core feminist,” I flung back. “Are you aware that I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on Judith Butler—the same Judith Butler who claimed that gender is performative, that we’re not born male or female, but made so by our culture, a culture that stuffs these definitions down our throats! And did I tell you that my title was ‘Burgeoning Feminism in Chauvinistic Immigrant Communities: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Judith Butler—’”

“On numerous occasions,” Alex replied with a laugh. “Anyhow, I thought you were a statistician now?”

“I am—of course I am a statistician, but only because of them! If it hadn’t been for them—” I thought with regret of that day in December when I carried two sets of application essays to the post office. I called my mom and said, “Mom, I don’t know if statistics is for me—what I really want to do is study art and feminism, and there’s a program at Irvine, California where I could do exactly that—I could become a professor—and I’d—” What I wanted to say was: paint, paint women’s faces, their suffering, paint within a postmodern feminist tradition, paint to breathe. But instead I raised the fact that within our family and other Russian families the man still resides upon a throne: he is served, fed, clothed, and fanned with ridiculous compliments, and that women’s rights, her rights, Grandmother’s rights are brushed under the proverbial tablecloth. “We need a new language,” I told her, “to cleanse our palate, and your core beliefs are in fact aligned with mine.” But my mother’s brilliant manipulative mind enveloped me at once: “Yes, of course I agree with you, Lenochka! So then imagine what you’ll contribute to women’s rights, to feminism itself, if you’ll specialize in statistics—a lone woman in a male-dominated field. It’s such a gift that you’re sooooo good at this!” My ego swelled and got stuck in my throat, and at once, I dropped the folder containing the feminist theory and gender studies application to University of California at Irvine into the nearest garbage bin.

“For them—you mean your parents?” Alex asked.

“Yes, if it hadn’t been for them, I’d be painting, and doing my PhD on Judith Butler or Luce Irigaray at Irvine—I had a good shot at getting in, too.” I paused. “I’d be happy.”

“And you would have been the butt of every joke among our relatives and friends—”

“Are you mocking me?” I asked with a murderous grin.

“Not at all! I simply disagree with you: Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf in her own room, a naked pregnant Demi Moore—what’s the difference? Their feathers might be of different colors, but under all that pomposity all these women want is the same thing: a good man. If you’re honest with yourself, you’d see that feminism is just not realistic, not natural. Look at the way men and women interact. Look at real life, no matter what women say, a woman relinquishes control when she has sex and a man gains it. Women just cannot treat sex nonchalantly.”

“I don’t see why you have these absurd, antiquated Russian notions—” I protested loudly.

“You have an excellent vocabulary,” he observed, then added, “Just because American men claim they’re feminists in public doesn’t mean they don’t think like Russian men privately. They just hide better behind all that politically correct bullshit.”

I wanted to paddle back to Judith Butler, but instead I said, “If you were American, we would have done it by now. I don’t see what you were afraid of, unless you’re—”

“I’m very, very potent,” he protested, “in fact, so virile that women, once they sleep with me, can never leave me.”

“You’re not serious?” I laughed.

“Are you doubting my manhood?”

“No, I’m merely affecting shock at your purported sluttiness! Does your mother know?”

Through laughter, he replied, “No, she erroneously believes I’m averse to sexual pleasure.”

“Why?”

“Because until you, no woman has yet given my heart cause to melt!” His beautiful dark brown eyes peered at me with confidence. “All jokes and metaphors aside, why don’t you marry me, Elena?”

“Marry you?”

“I love the way you are, so full of desire and spunk,” he continued in the same glowing tone, mistaking my response for a display of feminine insecurity. “I am utterly serious—my dearest Lenochka.”

He reached across the table and laid a small velvet box next to my appetizer. Ah, the dreaded ring. When my eyes feasted on the magnificent emerald stone perched upon a skinny gold band, I swallowed the duck foie gras in its entirety and felt the grease coagulate in the back of my throat. Marriage rose before me like the parted jaws of a shark, and on its back sat Alex, murmuring: “I’ll be a magnificent lover; I’m very well versed in the literature of sexual arousal.”

He burst into a self-effacing chuckle and I laughed with relief. He pried my fingers open (both hands were apparently locked in tight fists) and, placing the ring in my palm, gravely declared, “This is no ordinary ring, Elena—my uncle Yossel smuggled it in his lower intestines. The KGB missed it—with their laser technology—those pompous fools! Yossel stuck it in caramel and swallowed it whole. He kept it in till he reached our apartment on Pratt Street eighteen years ago. This ring has been in my family for centuries—a survivor of Ivan the Terrible, Lenin, Stalin, the pogroms, World War II, the Cold War, The Reagan administration, and Yossel’s bowels.”

“Oh, Alex, thank you,” I groaned. “It’s beautiful, really, I feel honored, really—this is so unexpected—”

“Unexpected—my dear Elena, why, I wanted to propose on our first date—”

I smiled: to think that he wanted to marry me on the first date at the behest of his mother and my grandmother was at once endearing and nauseating.

“You know I’m crazy about you, Sashenka,” I said, “but have we really had enough time? This is a colossal step.”

“Yet you think that’s a sufficient timetable for sex—” he countered with a laugh. “Look, my father proposed to my mother on the third date.”

“So did my father to my mother—on the first date, on the first because she was so beautiful! But that was Russia—in America we can take our time and make sure we’re not making a mistake.”

“Oh, I know I’m not making a mistake,” he said. “You’re exactly what I want—what I need—feisty, opinioned and you will always call me on my bullshit.”

I grabbed his hand and kissed it, “You’re such a wonderful person, Sashenka, really, even with all your silly views of women—”

“Which you’ll undoubtedly fix in no time!” He laughed good-naturedly, and I smiled. Smiled and trembled and held the table for support, and fought an urgent sensation in my bladder to deluge the entire marble entrails of La Cote Basque. I rose from my chair and announced, “I must go to the bathroom!”

“I understand: you want to torture me a little, give me a taste of purgatory—I’m willing to wait!” he sang after me. “I’m used to waiting.” I heard him as I hurried away.

I stepped behind the purple mantle that separated the bathroom area from the dining room, and the sensation in my bladder miraculously receded. In the stilted, dusty confines of the waiting area, a man stood in an arrogant pose.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I think so,” I muttered, feeling faint.

“You look pale,” he said in a kind voice.

“I’m fine, thank you.” I smiled at him and wiped my forehead. We stood looking at one another for a second, then directed our gaze to the two wooden bathroom doors.

“You can use the men’s room if you want,” the stranger offered, pointing in the direction of a flinging door.

“I’m not in a hurry,” I sighed, shaking my head. “I’m just very warm.”

“Yes, it’s very warm in here,” he whispered and, swinging his arm to lean against the wall, gently brushed my hair.

He cut a tall sharp figure in the dimness, with light eyes, the color of which I couldn’t make out, and long muscular fingers, which periodically swept over his forehead to remove beads of sweat. He arched over me like a black amorphous shadow, his features blurring, his mouth a cave emitting strange soothing sounds.

“Life’s just so confusing.” I was apparently talking again, despite myself.

“Isn’t it,” he took me up. “If you ask me, he isn’t for you.”

“How did you conclude that?”

“Oh, that’s easy—he lacks guts,” he said.

“And you, I suppose, have them in spades?”

“If I weren’t a feminist already, I’d convert. If I were a virgin, I’d beg for your mercy. And if you begged to sleep with me—well you can guess what I’d say—” He laughed warmly, somehow neutralizing this perverse intrusiveness with his coiling lips, and added, “You were very loud.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Who said I was nice?” He turned on me with brows raised in a triangle above his eyes, lips parted as if waiting still to speak, but offering only silence. Only the sentence—“Who said I was nice?”—rose into view like an opened gate, letting a stream of intimacy run between us.

The women’s room opened up but we didn’t move.

“Are you going in?” A lady was standing behind me.

“You go ahead,” I said to her, remaining still, and perked my nose to inhale the stranger’s breath. It smelled of wine and goat cheese and rushed into my lungs in hot puffs of air. I noticed after a while that we had breached each other’s space. We kept up pretenses at first, as though our natural camaraderie was just a social fluke, an innocent exchange of pleasantries, but with each sentence and each person stealing our turns, our stillness grew and truncated our speech. I thought of breaking out, and quietly mouthed, “Well, it was nice to meet you. I better go.” But in silence he kept at me, with eyes that fixed me to the wall—what was this strangeness we had bred between us? I turned to go, made two steps forward, but then my arm, as though of its own accord, leapt out at him. Our palms locked midair and we stayed tethered to the ground like two statues waiting to be moved. I felt his other hand across my back, his fingers on my red silk shirt, drawing imaginary lines round my shoulder blades, along my spine, delineating cloth from flesh, penetrating both. I shut my eyes, imbibing each sensation without consciousness or thought—existing only in the breathing of my body. I opened up my eyes in time to see that we had made our way into the men’s room.

When we emerged, the man and I went our separate ways, without much spoken in between. I shook as I sashayed across the restaurant floor, my leather miniskirt chafing at my skin, my leather boots utterly inappropriate.

When I returned to the table, Alex was speaking to the waiter in broken French. I sat down at my chair and wiped my forehead with a soiled napkin. I felt my lungs constrict, breath becoming rapid. Please, dear Lord, do not let me have an allergic reaction right now—Benadryl was tucked away in my dungeon.

Allergies to dust, Lysol, ragweed, pollen, cats, chlorine, flowery detergents, or simply bad armpit odor were my constant companions, never failing to alert me to the unstable seesaw between life and death.

There was still the chunk of porterhouse I had not touched, and it lay there across my gold-rimmed plate with its blood seeping out, roiling my stomach with sudden nausea. My blood, I thought grimly, let it be my blood! I tried to concentrate on Alex’s moving mouth, but the interlude in the bathroom danced in my head. And I saw his face again under the dim pink lighting, casting his features in a lurid glow. An aroma of lavender and thyme filled the air, and the oval mirror reflected my hand on his buttocks. “I’ve never done this before,” I murmured into his ear, an old, female-honored platitude. “Yum, your hair smells like garlic bread,” he murmured in return, as if this were a popular celebrity perfume. And then his hands, disregarding these peculiar discrepancies of language and odors, worked boldly over my body, rubbing my ribs and squeezing my leather-wrapped ass. I was hyperventilating, bordering on an orgasm of ancient Greek proportions—from what—from practically nothing if we consider the exhaustive literature on sex, and yet was it nothing when his fingers, like a horde of thieves, snuck over the border of my lacy red bra. (Yes, I wore red lace, out of that subterranean hope for an adventure.) Dear Aphrodite, then there were those lips: neither too wet nor too dry, neither too fat nor too slim, the perfect soft bowtie swirling over my breasts without touching them, then landing expertly on my nipples and pulling away, as though here was the god of foreplay in the flesh taunting me until I couldn’t bear it any longer—until I burned to tear off my clothes and scream MUTINY ON BOARD! But I had Grandmother to consider and my ideal husband waiting for me in the main dining room; I was a feminist with numerous responsibilities, with several heads on top of my head. Responsibilities that obviously could wait—I kissed his cheeks, neck, fingers that seemed like extensions of my own limbs, but our mouths never met. We were at once too familiar and too estranged to kiss, our tongues reserved only for each other’s skin. At some point he held me, for my knees caved, ankles bent to the floor. “Will I see you again?” he asked. “I want you,” I whimpered pathetically, but in my mind, I was far more eloquent: I’m fainting from pleasure—flying, somersaulting, whirling right up to the bathroom ventilator. I’m literally decomposing from the impossibility of what I’m doing, from the way you smell and grab me, from the muscles under your blue shirt, and yes, most of all, from the anonymity of your face. He murmured something I couldn’t understand, then lifted me into the air, my skirt riding up my waist—

“Well, my dearest Elena,” Alex broke into my thoughts, “have you made your decision?”

“Yes, yes, merci, I’ll marry you!” I cried because it was suddenly clear to me that if I didn’t pledge my love to wonderful, loyal, brilliant Alex, to my Alexei Ifimovich Bagdanovich (what glorious features my children would have, what phenomenal brains and warm hearts), I’d be doomed, doomed to endless family squabbles and regrets and bathroom flings, to my grotesque desires, to my own dazzling reflection in the mirror: a scarlet-winged butterfly wanting every dandelion and pansy and sunflower in her path, masking sexual perversity in a feminist’s cry.

“Glorious, glorious,” Alex exclaimed, “You’ve made me a very happy man!” He opened his palm, which had grown moist from sweat and nerves, and gingerly tried to push the ring down my third finger. He failed at the second knuckle.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to get the ring reset,” Alex said, frowning from this unexpected hurdle. Within seconds he threw his jacket over his shoulders and stuffed a generous wad of cash into the reluctant hands of the assaulted waiter, who it turned out was not French after all, but Portuguese. Alex did not know any Portuguese but thought it was a fascinating culture.

I scanned the restaurant, miserably wanting to locate the stranger. The place swarmed with silver-haired men with wide luminous smiles and after-dinner drinks in their veiny hands, and I wondered if my stranger was not a few decades older than me. But as I stood up and swiveled my head, I caught his eyes settling on my behind, disrobing it. There was a blonde woman at his side and two handsomely dressed men seated at a large round table. They appeared animated, in some discussion about Microsoft stock. I heard one of the men say, “We shouldn’t have been bankers—we should have been computer geeks.” “Yeah, but then we’d have to wait till our IPO quadrupled to get the women,” the stranger said, and the table, including the blonde, burst into a communal chuckle.

The stranger looked young, perhaps younger than his years. He had an easy contagious smile and eyes that shone in clear blue slivers out of a tan square face. He appeared at this range genial and pleasant, and despite wide shoulders and a solid thick body, he seemed light, almost weightless against the backdrop of Alex’s perfectly sculpted solemn face.

“Ready, my love—are you ready to go?” Alex said in a buttery voice, pushing me along with stealth impatience. But I stood still, staring at the stranger.

“Goodbye,” I said out loud, and then I heard an echo, a mantra whirring in my head: goodbye all things fleeting and pleasurable and reckless and insane …

His table quieted down and everyone turned to look at me.

“Goodbye,” the stranger returned, his eyes latching onto my figure like two splendid cerulean doves, following me out of the restaurant as I held onto Alex for support.

Alex didn’t seem to notice our exchange. In the cab, he was concerned about his blunder with the waiter. “I shouldn’t have assumed he was French, just because the restaurant was French. I know better than that,” he berated himself, and broke into a quiet laugh. We stepped out in front of my building and entered a narrow, dilapidated foyer with leaking walls and the stench of piss emanating from a cracked linoleum floor. I invited Alex to my apartment but he hesitated, initially seeming to be daunted by the prospect of climbing a broken staircase all the way up to the fifth floor. And when his mouth met mine with an erect tongue, when he pinned me against the besmirched mustard-colored wall of my foyer, I welcomed him, thinking, yes, I’ve been a miserable girlfriend, but I’ll be an exemplary fiancée; I even tried to summon that ferocious desire, those notes of anonymity and truncated breaths, whispering to myself: pretend you don’t know his name. But Alex slid his hands inside my bra and, patting my breasts, whispered, “my gorgeous perfectly contoured fiancée—till next time!” And with that, he sprang out the door, hailed a cab, and dove in like a man trying to outrun a fire.

The Men Who Take Us to Art Galleries

Two months into my engagement, I was wrapped in garlic from head to foot. Alex was in Chicago, living at his mother’s house, taking a hiatus after having proposed to me. I didn’t know whether he was afraid of sex or running out of his parents’ frequent flier miles. Whatever his reasons, I learned to eat garlic straight up and raw, without any bread or condiments, just a self-executed human torture for my ballooning guilt. The incident in the bathroom had left me bedazzled and scared. The shadowy stranger awakened in me such a flurry of primitive desires that I locked myself in my room and swore I would never emerge, not even to pee, lest I bump into one of Natasha’s lovers on the way to the malfunctioning toilet and grab his or her buttocks on a lusty whim. I had become aware of every tic in my body, every pang of perverse hunger, every murmur of the vagina apparatus—an intimacy I must say I never thought possible. So, in solitude and excellent humor, I did what any self-respecting, garlic-clad monk would do: I began a vigilant masturbation routine, preferably right before sleep, imagining the men’s room of La Cote Basque as if it were a major research center for human sexuality. On the streets, I spied men everywhere, burgeoning out of desks and sidewalks and corners, their phone numbers pasted to their foreheads, approaching me with no regard for my garlic aroma. (Apparently, most men have no sense of smell whatsoever.)

At long last, in an anguished phone call, Alex admitted that he couldn’t face me. His first round of interviews at New York banks had ended in excruciating failure.

But like all good immigrants, Alex was not one to give up easily. After enduring advice from condescending relatives and friends, he concurred that his job history was simply ill-matched for the narrow focus of an investment banker. So he sought out the Russian resume guru, Lenny Berman, who like the driver’s license guru, Felix Luzhinsky, and the tax guru, Rita Gruffman, were loyal and wise servants of the Chicago Russian community, facilitating our smooth transition into the complex mishugas of American bureaucracies. For immigrants did not think the way Americans did: that one’s life was a culmination of what one actually did, that it was bound by some unspoken honor code to be truthful and accurate about every event in one’s life, and that a resume, while it certainly could be polished, could not be fundamentally changed. For an immigrant’s life was a kaleidoscope of dreams, a reality so thoroughly interspersed with the surreal and fantastical that one’s experiences, foibles, and even memories could easily be smudged, if not entirely written over, in one’s struggle to catch that elusive American prize: success!

The banks responded in the affirmative to the fabricated resume, and now Alex was facing the staggering prospect of nine interviews. His trip would be paid for, and he arrived on Friday at my building, glowing with ethereal joy. It was the first time that he climbed the broken staircase and, panting heavily, stepped inside my apartment, where Natasha’s nude photos greeted him in the hallway. I took him inside my room and spread my arms helplessly in a vague circle to indicate my life’s passion: my paintings. But he didn’t seem to see them. He said, “I can’t believe it, nine interviews, nine! And one of them is with Norton Bank! They turned me down two months ago and they don’t even remember! Amazing country, this America!” Squeezing my buttocks with his long, aristocratic fingers, he burrowed his tongue deeper inside my mouth than I had hoped. (Though it did indicate progress.) Then he checked himself, fixed his sweater, and within minutes started to lecture me on Degas.

“No, no—he wasn’t really an impressionist—he was a realist,” Alex said. The arts had taken a particularly vicious hold of him since he learned that I secretly wanted to be an artist.

“You look beautiful, my darling fiancée,” he murmured, “like that effervescent dancer in L’etoile. Have you ever seen it? It’s at the Musée d’Orsay?” I glanced at my own body in a tiny cracked hallway mirror, and felt his flattery seep into my veins like a disorienting barbiturate. I wanted him to comment on my work but instead I was suddenly struck with my self: I wore chocolate-hued suede boots, a beige suede skirt that clung to my thighs and buttocks and tapered off right above my knees, and a ribbed, cream-colored turtleneck that demarcated my breasts, which were loosely contained in a transparent silk bra. The overall effect of my outfit was one of a strange wintry transparency—of a figure so tightly bound in its thin wool fabrics that I appeared more exposed than if I were wearing a bikini. The only thing concealing me from the world was a striped brown jacket, which I threw on after Alex had a chance to absorb me in my original state. We could do it right now, I thought blissfully, but Alex asked, “Where are we going?” quite possibly to deflect my feeble attempts to seduce him again.

“Nebu, it’s a gallery in Soho,” I said in my offended voice.

“We should really be exploring the Met—they have an excellent Degas collection. Besides, you need to study from the masters—your attempts are infantile at best,” he announced, pointing to a sketch of two suffering ballet dancers he glimpsed on my bed.

“I wish you wouldn’t always say what’s on your mind.”

“If anyone can take it, it’s you,” he shot back, and at once I forgave him.

“How was your interview at Norton Bank?” I asked as we walked down Prince Street.

Alex furrowed his brows in disapproval at the question: “You know how I hate talking about this before I know anything for sure.” Like my grandmother, he abided by all the Russian superstitions and I adored this about him. He saw a block of wood hanging from a run-down building, and knocked on it three times, murmuring the mandatory tfu, tfu, tfu under his breath. Then, with a relaxed smile, he said, “I think it actually went really well. The guy who interviewed me knew what he was doing, and we got along famously. This is the most prestigious bank in the city and the money—”

“That’s nice,” I interrupted without enthusiasm.

“It would really be something if they took me—I mean the money in this city—you can’t imagine.”

“I can imagine,” I said even though I was never very good at imagining money. Although I had specifically matriculated in SPASM with a vague hope for a practical career, I could not understand what money was, or what I, for instance, would have to do to make it. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine a cubicle, a desk, a name tag, a corporate ladder which I might climb. Nor did it occur to me that what Gloria Steinem and numerous other feminists wrote about and fought for—“equal pay for equal work”—could apply to me, could liberate me! Despite my protestations at the cultural inequity between the sexes, at the grotesque social burden placed on women to lose weight, look superb and wrinkle-free, and add dubious plastic matter to their breasts (“Why aren’t men adding plastic matter to their penises?” “When are women going to start asking, ‘is this shlong real?’”), I could not translate my feminist rage into practice. Like all women who’ve been inculcated for centuries with the Sleeping Beauty myth of a man rescuing, awakening, jump-starting a woman, I too longed for Alex to jump-start me. Perhaps in the back of my mind there lingered a secret egotistical wish: if I married Alex, I wouldn’t have to pursue statistics—I could paint all day and night, paint until I conceived of myself as a true artist. Then I wouldn’t mind Alex’s antiquated expositions on women or his derivative lectures on Degas. After all, he lectured like all Russian men (or perhaps all men) lectured, the way Igor misquoted Tolstoy, my father paraphrased The Economist, and my ex-fiancé recited Marx—with the urgency of an ego in need of constant watering like fussy hydrangea plants. Ah, marriage, how akin you are to gardening!

By the time we got to the gallery, I was so exhausted, in such urgent need of food and drink, that I was ready to marry Alex on the spot. The doors were made of heavy glass, and as they closed behind me, I found myself in the immaculate space of another world. The paintings, covering almost the entirety of each wall, were speckled in luminous orange and yellow flames that created an orgy of naked red bodies—men and women heaped one top of the other, their legs and arms intertwining like thickly woven ropes. The colors, although bright and sloppily protruding from the canvas, filled one with grating melancholy. Some faces appeared suspended in a spasm of pain while others curled with joy, and one almost necessarily had to wonder if they were dying or fucking.

“The artist has an unusually astute understanding of color,” Alex exclaimed and whipped out a note pad to jot down the artist’s name. The artist’s name was Michael Cobb, and I found myself imagining a buttery corn on the cob; I dabbed my mouth to guard against the very real possibility of drooling. “It’s obvious that the color indicates the perverse pleasures of an orgy,” Alex pontificated as I faded in and out of consciousness. I was gripped at once with hunger and a gnawing sense of inadequacy before these seven-foot-long pieces. My own paintings were small and modest, attempts at capturing a singular face disconnected from its body: a ballerina suspended in space, a woman merging into a man. I could manage one, two figures at most, but to capture a throng of people, to master so much human space—that I couldn’t do.

Alex and I waltzed from painting to painting in a daze until we ended up in the last room of the gallery. There, covering an entire wall, was the artist’s latest creation: grayish-blue, emaciated bodies interlocked at the bottom of the canvas. Arms were reaching toward the sky, legs smashing against other people’s breasts and abdomens. They too were naked, struggling in the blue light to reach some center that resided between them. Their fingers scratched and clawed each other’s backs, and blood trickled from their bluish-gray skins. Under the painting, it said, The Abyss. I froze inside it. “What do you think it is?” I asked Alex after catching my breath.

“Exasperating! I detest postmodern art,” he said with a loud sigh. “There’s no attempt to reach higher ideals. This is horror, plain and simple—modern kitsch. This isn’t art; this is the grotesque.”

“I think it’s about death,” I said, unable to take my gaze off the blue center.

“This is so moving,” I heard a voice behind me say. I could see from the corner of my eye an elegant thin blonde in a black jacket and a red scarf.

“Yes,” the man next to her said, “very interesting.”

“What do you think it means?” the woman went on.

“If I had to guess”—he paused and cleared his throat—“I’d say it’s a Biblical story, an end to the human race. Perhaps they are sinners trying to claw their way out of death. I believe, but don’t quote me on this: it’s a scene right out of Jonah—”

“You read the title?”

“No, but if you look closely there is a whale behind the blue bodies—they’re reaching toward it, and there’s a tiny man inside the whale’s mouth looking up at the sky. The painting is transparent—”

“I can’t believe you saw that,” the woman exclaimed. “That’s so impressive!”

“That is impressive,” I said, apparently out loud, and immediately noticed an enormous black mass in the shape of some underwater monstrosity. Behind the blue bodies, a brightly lit figure was suspended in the center with its face directed at them, so that it appeared as though the man and the human race were facing one another in some agonizing exchange.

The man and the woman had edged toward me, I imagined with horror, to reprimand me for interrupting their conversation.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to listen in, but I just saw that myself—” I muttered nervously, then my mouth went numb: the man looked painfully familiar. I felt those words, “dirty,” “slutty,” “easy”—words I taught myself no feminist should feel—burn fire into my skin, but couldn’t figure out why.

“I know you from somewhere,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Yes, so do I but I just can’t recall where—” I kept it up with escalating enthusiasm when Alex exclaimed, “Ignatius Beltrafio—what a small world!”

“Hello, Alex,” the man said, “but please call me Eddie, everyone calls me Eddie.”

“Emma, this is Ignatius, I mean Eddie,” Alex gushed, “the man who interviewed me this morning—what a coincidence!”

I stretched out my hand, and the man smiled awkwardly at me. He had magnificent blue eyes. I knew him and in that instant I knew where and how.

“Emma, Alex, this is Sylvia, my colleague at the bank,” the man said, and gently drew the blonde at his side into our circle. She smiled but there were rigid lines round her mouth, signs of irritation surfacing on her neatly powdered face.

“Nice to meet you,” I said to her, then turned to the stranger. “Ignatius—is that Catholic?”

“Yes,” he said, hanging his head and blushing. “My mother named me after a saint and I still haven’t gotten around to living up to her expectations.” He winked at all of us, but I imagined it was somehow at me. “I should officially change my name to Edward, shouldn’t I?”

“No, of course not, then how will you ever disappoint your mother’s expectations?” I countered.

“You must be Catholic.”

“No,” I said, smiling, “but my closest friends are Catholic—the natural evolution of being Jewish.”

“Right, me too.” The stranger broke into a laugh. “But God, you do seem so familiar—perhaps you just have one of those great faces—”

“It will come to you,” the blonde snapped in a petulant voice. “Let’s get going, Eddie, I’m hungry.”

“What are you two doing after this?” he asked Alex. “Sylvia and I were planning to grab a bite to eat—do you want to join us?”

I couldn’t breathe.

“That’s a great idea,” Alex exclaimed.

“There’s an excellent place around the corner—are you hungry?” the stranger addressed only me.

“Starving,” I said. “I think this art has wiped me out.”

We walked out of the gallery into the crisp winter air that stank of car exhaust and neglected trash. There was something inexplicably romantic in the mayhem of constantly jerking yellow cabs and impatient pedestrians and bare trees lining the sidewalks. Light snow drizzled from the sky and turned gray streets to white. I smiled at the ground and as my boots cut a path between my fiancé and this new strange man, I felt a sharp, electrifying thrill. Perhaps it was the thrill of being wanted from two sides, or the thrill of wanting two men at the same time, or simply wanting—wanting as the raison d’être for living.

I took note, however, of the polished blonde. Her hair was long and straight, harnessed by hairspray into submission, each tress conforming to the general flat shape of her head. She wore a heavy black coat over a heavy black suit that had been ironed and steamed, and kept her rigid in its frame. Only the red scarf looming around her neck murmured of repressed passions.

Alex started eyeing the blonde while the stranger and I gravitated toward each other.

“Do you go to galleries often?” he asked as we slowed down behind the other two.

“I don’t get out much,” I said, laughing, “Do you?”

“I try to make time for culture, otherwise I’ll drown.”

“In work?”

“In the process—of living only for work.”

“Is it a process?”

“More like—an addiction—”

“To making money?”

“Is that how you see investment bankers?”

“Are you asking me what my perspective is on investment bankers in general or you in particular?”

He laughed casually.

“Are you always this direct?” he asked.

“Are you always this coquettish?” I returned.

“Me—coquettish?”

“Is that word a problem for you—because you’re a man?”

“If I weren’t a feminist already, I’d be confused right now. But as it happens, I’m a huge fan of Judith Butler.”

“Now that’s a first!” I laughed and he laughed in return, and that inexplicable ease erupted between us, and I knew at once that he recognized me, that he and I were playing the same game.

“Lena, Emma,” Alex shouted, “this is Mercer Kitchen—the restaurant I just told you about with that famous chef I read about in the New Yorker.” He winked at Sylvia.

A staircase led into a pitch-black underground where only candlelight brought focus to our faces. There were black ceilings, black tables, black umbrellas hanging from black walls, and fashionable young people crowding the bar: men in sleek suits and stylish jackets, women in backless gowns and glittering halter tops, merciless eyes skipping over one another in search of greater perfection. Our table supposedly seated four, but it might as well have seated one person. The four of us had to suffer in unwanted intimacy. Our knees collapsed into each other under the table and fingers grazed elbows and forearms. Sylvia immediately took off her jacket to reveal her thin muscular frame and full round breasts. She glided her fingers along Ignatius’s arm, and traced his back. He shifted with visible discomfort in his chair to edge away from her to me. I felt our knees rub, my skirt against his pants; then my knees smashed into hers.

Ignatius looked at me and said, “So, Emma, I know what Alex wants to do with his life—what do you want?”

I stared blankly at the menu, then met his gaze. “What do you mean—what do I want?”

“I meant in life—what do you do?”

“Oh, Emma is a statistician!” Alex answered for me proudly.

“Actually, I mean I am—but I’m also an artist on the side.”

“She dabbles in it—it’s a hobby.”

“I see,” the Ignatius returned with circumspection. “Do you see it as a hobby, Emma?”

“I—I—well, a very involved hobby—a hobby I work on—pretty much all the time.”

“Emma is just saying that because she wants to impress you, Eddie, but she’s going to be a statistician. She’s extraordinary: the only woman in her department! Emma is a woman of many talents.” Alex paused for an instant, reconsidered, and launched into this: “But I don’t believe in this ‘artist on the side’ business. Either you’re an artist like Van Gogh and you struggle and starve and live as a pauper and cut off your own ear, or you choose the sensible life and you work like everyone else and you call your artistic endeavors what they are: a hobby, a diversion. Like reading a good book.”

“Well, I agree with you, Alex,” Ignatius said, laughing. “I think Emma should definitely not cut off her ears!”

“I only meant that—”

“I know what you meant—a kind of metaphorical vision of self-sacrifice! I loved it, Alex, really! But the reality in this city is that people do all kinds of things to survive—for art.”

“You speak like someone who knows from experience,” I said.

He actually blushed. “At one point a while back I wanted to do photography.”

“Oh, well, it’s a good thing you didn’t,” Sylvia trilled. “Eddie is amazing—he’s headed for the top. Everyone says so—Grant calls you his star!”

“I think you exaggerate, Sylvia, but thank you.”

“Well the practical world is very seductive: I understand that,” I said quietly.

“You shouldn’t give up your art, Emma—if it’s what you deeply want,” he said.

“It’s the way I breathe, Ignatius, I mean Eddie. If I didn’t paint, I think I’d stop breathing.”

The moment—with its visceral image, with its intonation of death and longing and wanting, with the memory of the bathroom—brought us together and in one swoop dispersed our anonymity. Like two winged compatriots in flight, we found ourselves suspended above, leaving Alex and Sylvia in the dark fog of the underground restaurant.

“Oh, Emma likes to be really melodramatic about these things.” Alex broke through with his inveterate pragmatism. “But people get over this stuff. Life arrives—marriage, children, the need for survival. Especially for women.”

“My program is called Statistics, Probability, and Survey Modeling—SPASM for short,” I said.

“That’s impressive,” Sylvia said, “and you’re the only woman in the program?”

“Yes, the other four who started with me have dropped out.”

“And you’re sticking with it, I suppose?” she remarked.

“That’s a good question. Some days I’m sticking with it, other days I imagine myself impoverished and earless.”

Eddie laughed uproariously.

The waitress came around and poured everyone a glass of wine, letting Eddie taste it first.

“Excellent,” he said, looking at me, then he lifted his glass. “We must drink! To our fortuitous acquaintance!”

We clinked glasses, the four of us, and Alex exclaimed, “Yes, what luck, what luck to have bumped into you, Eddie!”

“Well, Alex, I really hope you join Norton. Eddie and I are on this insaaaane project together, and when Alex joins the firm, which I’m sure you will”—Sylvia smiled encouragingly at Alex—“he’ll also be doing all-nighters with us. Isn’t that right, Eddie?”

“You’re gonna get the real truth here,” Eddie said, and then, as if he were offering Alex a relaxing massage, he added, “By the time we get through with dessert, you won’t want to work for Norton Bank.”

“How does it look?” Alex still wanted to know. “I mean, about my prospects?”

“It looks good for you, my friend,” Eddie replied, then turned abruptly to me. “How did you and Alex meet?”

“We were set up,” I said, breaking into a laugh, squeezing Alex’s frozen shoulder, “of all people, by my grandmother, but in our world, it’s common practice.”

I knew at once, without having to look at his expression, that Alex had intended to hide his Russian self. But I felt free, riding high on my vanity, wanting desperately to win, to reel this stranger into my world.

“Alex and I are Russian,” I announced boldly.

“Oh, how interesting,” Sylvia observed. “Isn’t there a large Russian community in Brighton Beach?”

“We’re not recent arrivals—Emma and I have been here forever,” Alex explained in a tense voice.

“Forever,” I echoed. “I, for one, have been in this country for fifteen years.”

“You immigrated?” Eddie asked.

“My family and I—we were political refugees—we fled Russia.”

“How did you get out?” he asked, drawing his hands under his chin, like a child preparing for a fairy tale.

“It’s actually a fascinating story,” I burst out, bubbling with excitement. “Russian Jews were traded for grain. In 1974 two senators helped create the Jackson-Vanik Amendment—an agreement with the Soviet Union that would allow Jews to leave Russia, and in exchange, Russia would receive grain from the United States. And since it was the Cold War, America wanted the world to know about the oppression in Russia—”

“That’s unbelievable,” Eddie interrupted. “I never knew that.”

“I had no idea we were in for a history lesson,” Sylvia put in casually.

“A Jew for a loaf of bread,” I added in a peppy shrill, as though this meant nothing to me, as though I had come across these tidbits on a graffiti wall or in some antiquated encyclopedia and gleefully recited them at cocktail parties to seduce ignorant American men. When, in fact, I was obsessed. During my second year at the University of Chicago, while taking a class on Russian Civilization, I came across a strange red book that told the story of sixteen dissidents who attempt to hijack a Soviet airplane on June 15, 1970. Knowing the KGB were closely monitoring them, the dissidents proceeded with their plan undaunted, only to be arrested at the Swedish border before they could approach the plane—to be arrested, the little red book argued, with such a thud and ceremony, with so much death and publicity cloying the air as to awaken the entire world to the plight of Soviet Jews. As I memorized their names, their prison terms, their fates, I felt my own life quaking with a silent mutiny against its current uselessness; the simple rituals of going to class, speaking on the phone to my family, musing over dinner, flirting, dating, chasing love—all stank of ordinariness and meaninglessness. And I longed for it again—the loud explosion of anti-Semitism to sear my flesh, to re-ignite my childhood pain. When I learned that hundreds of other dissidents from Moscow to Kiev to Kazakhstan who had signed petitions and worked underground to free Soviet Jews were arrested at the same time under charges of espionage, I suddenly wished that my parents had been the dissidents, two of the sixteen, two of the hundred, that they had the vision to imagine in the sixties that the Soviet monolith could be moved, and risked their lives—my life—for this freedom which I now held so carelessly in my hands. I wanted to breathe and rot and die in their war. Had I, had we suffered at all in comparison to them? They seemed like gods whose capacity for enduring humiliation and torture was infinite, sacrificing themselves so that we, mere mortals, made of fear and caution and self-preservation, could get out. And there were other gods I could never touch or know, the Western ones who cared—so strange, so incomprehensible—about our doomed destinies. For neither Senator Jackson nor Senator Vanik were Jewish, and yet it was they who wrote the bill, who proposed to trade Jews for grain and set the immigration process in motion; they were the architects of my fate, responsible for the state ID card in my wallet, for the Ahi Tuna I now tasted, for the language I called my own spilling effortlessly from my tongue, for this very moment of sitting in a dark New York restaurant, speaking my mind. Better be traded for grain than not to be traded at all.

Still, it stung me that after all this time in the political arena a Jew could still be weighed and measured, exchanged for a loaf of bread—why, why didn’t I know which grain was I —barley, wheat, or rye?

“Lena, zachem tyi ehto im razkazyvaesh?” Alex reprimanded me in Russian. I felt his growing dread—of being found out, of not getting the job, of latent prejudices. But I couldn’t contain my mouth, couldn’t keep my body from rising out of the chair onto some invisible stage.

“Many people don’t know,” I went on, “but it’s absolutely incredible!”

“Eddie, do you know if Grant wanted the report by Monday?” Sylvia interrupted, turning away from me to Eddie.

But Eddie seemed to see only me. “I want to know, Emma, please go on.”

“You see, the reason why there was even this amendment, the reason why we were traded for grain, is because in 1970 there was the infamous Hijack Plot Affair or, as it was known in secret circles, Operation Wedding, when sixteen dissidents tried to hijack a Soviet plane to fly to Sweden, and eventually go to Israel. By the time the dissidents arrived at Smolnye Airport near Leningrad, the KGB were already waiting for them. The story goes that the KGB had infiltrated the group and wanted to publicize the fact that Jews were plotting to hijack a plane, but this publicity stunt backfired. Hundreds of people were arrested on that same day, the sixteen dissidents were sentenced to prison, some receiving as long as fifteen years in the gulags, and the two leaders of the group, including the pilot, were sentenced to death. The world was outraged. Everyone from the Pope to Nixon to famous world leaders to celebrities denounced Russia’s hard line. To save face, the Soviet government mitigated the death sentences to fifteen-year prison terms, which some said was worse than death. But what the plot did—what it did—was alert the rest of the world to Soviet human rights violations. That’s why Senators Jackson and Vanik wrote the 1974 bill, made the deal with Russia to trade Jews for grain and by 1975, there was a process in place. It wasn’t easy but there was a process. That’s how we got out, how our families got out.”

“I never heard this story,” Alex said. “How did you find this out?”

“In college. I became obsessed. I read everything I could get my hands on. Autobiographies and memoirs of KGB defectors, dissidents, refuseniks. I found KGB archives at the library and read and read … I couldn’t believe what I discovered. How we survived. How did we survive?”

“So what happened to your families?” Eddie asked, gazing at Alex and me.

“We got out in August of 1978,” Alex said, “I don’t remember much. I was very little, never been on a plane before—I was afraid we were all going to die—”

“My family,” I cut in, “we were late bloomers. We only gathered the courage to apply for exit visas in 1980 but by then Russia attacked Afghanistan, and the deal was off, no more trades, US-Soviet relations had completely crumbled, the US boycotted the Soviet Olympics in 1980, and the doors closed. My family got out on a fluke in 1982.”

“It’s amazing how well you both speak in English,” Sylvia broke in, looking at me. “I mean I can hear a slight tinge of something but if I didn’t know, I’d bet you were Canadian.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I said.

“Your story, this story is extraordinary,” Eddie remarked. His eyes glowed when he looked at me.

“So do you and Alex speak in Russian to each other?” Sylvia went on. “It must be so nice to be able to speak to each other in your native tongues, so romantic …”

“Yes, we can speak in Russian quite proficiently,” Alex chipped in happily, “and it is in fact romantic, but we both happen to be virtuosos in English, and if there was one quality that I could claim as Russian in me and Elena, it’d have to be our love of perfection. Wouldn’t you agree, Lenochka?”

“Russian is such a melodious language,” Sylvia went on. “Unfortunately, I only know ‘privet.’ I wish I knew some language other than English. I’m so boringly American. I mean, I could have been fluent in French if only I had applied myself, if only my parents had pushed us kids. But we were just so Greenwich.”

“Greenwich?” I asked.

“You know, Greenwich, Connecticut—you’ve never heard of it?”

“Sylvia means rich, very rich,” Eddie pointed out, laughing casually. “One of the wealthiest suburbs in America, a haven for investment bankers. Half of Norton resides there. Grant lives there.”

“But only after they marry!” Sylvia said with a knowing smile. “Until then, they party it up in Manhattan like good little bad boys.”

She took a sip of her wine, as if to stop herself from revealing more.

Eddie abruptly turned away from Sylvia and shifted his entire upper body toward me. “Would you ever want to go back to Russia, I mean now that there’s democracy?”

“Go back? To Russia?” I laughed at his simplicity. “It’s a horrible place, and this democracy business is just an illusion for the West. Give Russia ten, fifteen years and all these freedoms, this so-called democracy will vanish, and Russia will go back to a dictatorship.”

“Why do you say such pessimistic things, Emma?” Alex cut in. “Russia is like America—every country has its pluses and minuses. I hate it when people act like this is paradise.”

“I agree with Alex,” Sylvia said.

“There’s no comparison,” I spat, color flooding my cheeks. “I don’t care how hard being an immigrant is, we’re far better off here—don’t you remember the way they treated us?”

“We were treated like everyone else, and we had everything we wanted. So here and there, they mocked our last names, so what, but look at my parents now, you think my mother is happy cutting people’s hair when she was a pianist back in Russia, and my father—I mean he was an engineer, and now what—a high-tech salesman, sure he’s got money, but where’s the intellectual stimulation?”

“What do you mean ‘mocked our last names’? Have you no memory, no pride?”

“What are you two talking about?” Sylvia cut in.

I forced myself to turn away from Alex to face her and Eddie. “We’re talking about anti-Semitism. That’s why we left Russia.”

“Yes, I gathered that much,” Eddie said with a mysterious glint in his eyes.

“My Russian hairdresser is always telling me stories about how she was mocked for her big nose,” Sylvia pitched in happily.

“Yes, of course, us and our big noses,” I laughed uproariously as if Sylvia and I had shared a joke and rose from my seat. I muttered something that sounded like “excuse me,” and stumbled over people’s chairs, keeping an idiotic smile plastered to my face, trying not to knock down wine bottles and dishes overflowing with wriggling seafood. I could feel Alex’s anger mounting like a sand storm at my back, and when I found an open clearing my feet broke into a run.

But I was angry too. How could he not support me, how, how could he not defend me, how could he not say, “Yes, yes, I lived it too”? Even if he with his perennial beauty didn’t know exactly what I meant, even if he didn’t have the lacerations on his skin to prove it, he had read, devoured everything Russian, taken Russian Civilization in college just like me. He knew, yet still he pretended—why, why—as if I had to ask? As if I didn’t smell his fear. Eddie, the stranger who knew nothing, suddenly seemed like a real option, a mind to write my truths upon—instead of this cruel trampling by those just like me.

There were two unisex bathrooms with wide gray doors and large silver handles that beamed like beacons in the dark. I stood listlessly and waited, even though I knew both were open.

“You’re an intriguing woman, Emma.” I heard a voice inside my hair. “Or is it Lena?”

“It’s whatever you want it to be, Eddie, or Ignatius,” I whispered, turning to face him.

“You’re on a very dangerous path, you know—”

“Excuse me?”

“A dangerous path for people like us,” he returned.

“People like us?”

“People who can do anything in this life.”

“So what—so what that I can do anything?”

“Then why do what you hate? Why not paint—paint all the time—it’s what you really want, isn’t it?”

“Because the word ‘want’ does not exist in my Russian vocabulary.”

He laughed.

“Well, you should try to incorporate it into your English one.”

“Very funny.” I paused and turned to him with sudden anger. “What do you know about me, anyway—we’ve just met.”

“Did we just meet? Because I think La Cote Basque was one of the most memorable French restaurants I’ve ever been to, and it’s not because of the food.”

“How quickly did you know?” I felt my cheeks catch fire.

“How could I forget—how could I forget you?”

“But you seemed confused—you had such difficulty placing my face.”

“I was pretending,” he offered victoriously. “I knew within a minute—when you smiled. I was just buying time. How quickly did you know?”

“As soon as you looked at me—I remembered your blue eyes, your strange name—it’s only been a few months, or has it been less?”

We stood there at the foot of this other restaurant bathroom, in a warm, saccharine silence, holding each other’s gazes, soaking in the pleasure of our secret past. I wondered briefly if restaurant bathrooms were going to become our dens of sin, our dingy out-of-the-way motels, sinks in lieu of showers, toilets in lieu of beds.

“We should get back to our table or they’ll get suspicious.”

“Hey, you’re not upset about what Sylvia said back there—she’s ignorant—don’t pay any attention to her.”

“Oh, I don’t know why I start up these conversations! Who cares, you know, who cares that I—that he and I are from Russia—it was a long time ago—it barely merits mentioning.”

“Why do you say that? I was riveted.”

“By my ‘big’ nose?” I asked, laughing.

“By you.”

We froze inside an asphyxiating silence that whitened my field of vision, replacing all vestiges of reason with desire. He reached for my waist with a hesitant hand, and yet there was surety in his touch, triumph in his face. “Will you give me your number this time?”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“Is he your boyfriend—does it really matter?”

“We’re terrible,” I murmured, “terrible together,” and my face fell in defeat against his chest.

“That night we met, Alex and I were—Alex is my—” I went on, the word “fiancé” ribbeting like a toad upon my lips, but what came out was this: “Alex and I are dating—”

“I don’t think I’m too late,” he said confidently.

“This won’t affect his job—”

“I may be terrible,” he whispered, “but I’m not immoral.” Then he kissed me—a hard forceful kiss that stayed on my lips for days.

The next day I walked westward to the Hudson River in the icy rain, holding an empty canvas under my armpit, acrylic paints in a bag, my wooden stand across my back. I would paint, paint it all out: the swarming black underground, the tangle of four lost people, the question of what to do next when the stranger would call, for he would call.

People were running back to their crowded apartments, restaurants, shops. Even those hiding under a silver awning grew impatient, scolding and arguing with the rain. In minutes, the pier was empty. I set my wooden stand at its edge and watched water rise to lick my feet. The sky billowed in gray faces and spat upon me, and I watched lightning burn a hole in its center. Pellets of water tapped against red bricks, barricaded warehouses, black tar drying, windows installed but not secured—tap—tap—tap—water drops upon my head. Russia surfaced like dead rotting fish in my consciousness. Memories called forth by smells and sights, faces dug out of an unplumbed past. I smelled Usiyevicha Street here, on hot concrete, on sidewalks turning black, exhaling the sweet perfume of heat into the air and twirling in my nostrils like a beguiling witch that took me under …

Painting #1

I’m eight and the sidewalk is alive, breathing from the cooling rain. Trees vibrate in green and cobalt hues and smile at the howling sky. It is spring, and my feet and hands are small, and air thickens over the hidden sun. Clouds fuse into a brown sheet and water pours onto my tongue. Rain is on my gums, inside my throat. I rise on toes to touch the leaves that feel like velvet scarves and paint in violet, then red, then purple-black the bludgeoned sky; it roars as though enraptured just with me. Lightning cracks the sky in half and, for an instant, whitens my multicolored world, sending a mingling of fear and pleasure through my blood. Lenochka, Lenochka, I hear my grandmother’s voice echo through our artificial forest. She’s on the balcony, I know, her forehead wrinkled, her yellow hair matted from the rain. My dress is dripping in my shoes, underwear clings to my stomach, sags between my thighs, makes me want to pee. But eyes refusing to obey are tethered to the purple sky.

I feel a hand against my back—what are you doing here, the boy says. Playing in the rain, I reply, his face and hair wet like mine, eyes sparkle in the fading light. Let’s run around the park and dip our feet in mud, he says. Misha is his name, I think, I think I have a crush on him. We run toward the soccer field, now just a brown swamp. Dirt swishes in my shoes, snakes around my toes, and grabs my ankles. He takes my hand and pulls me under, into earth. We sink and splash and scream. Our noses, lips, and eyes are sheathed in bold black stripes, our bodies made of mud. We look like warriors without bows or arrows, like prehistoric children without clothes on our backs. Our stern black gaze disintegrates in laughter. Our laughter rises, harmonizes, swims. He takes my face into his grimy hands and plants a grimy kiss upon my lips. His legs bind mine, slide between my thighs. I slap his cheek, pretend I’m mad, know mad is how I’m supposed to act, but mad I do not feel. Only the butterflies arrive, one two three, a battalion inside my anxious stomach. He jumps away, then runs toward a hill: let’s see if you can make it down that hill without falling. We run together, hand in hand, and at the top, we bend our knees, prepare to ride the mud, our shoes are flying through the air. He glides down the hill in perfect form; his back is straight, arms out to the sides, his face a stoic mask, a soldier in a battle. But I collapse along the way, legs shaking, caving from the kiss. My body drowns in the boiling earth, and then I hear his laughter, his grotesque cry: Zhidko, zhidko, zhidko! An arrow shoots into my chest—this pain I cannot bear—not this again, not him, I whisper to myself. Zhidko, he keeps on mocking. Against my will, I feel my tears break free, my throat close, my heart flail in the sky. I run without turning back, a shoe inside each hand, hiccupping, barefoot, steeped in mud, my tears are washing me.

What happened, who hurt you, Grandmother cries out as I step through our front door, dragging mud into the entrance hall. Misha told me I was zhidko, zhidko. He called me a Yid, a Zhid, I weep. But zhidko isn’t Zhid, Grandmother says, zhidko means weak, like a liquid, my sweet silly child. It doesn’t mean Zhid, the answer lingers on, and Grandmother, to soothe me, smiles. I run out to the balcony and see Misha trailing home, barefoot like me, head hanging low, rain still pouring, peeling mud from his face. I wipe my tears; my crimson skin is burning under dirt. A new unbearable emotion presses in, crushing my ribcage. I’ll recognize it soon—the tug of shame.

The Subterfuges of Desire

When Eddie showed up at my door, rain was gelling into snow mid-flight, turning the city’s roads and highways into sleet and ice. And I, recalling the imprint of his lips upon my breasts, recalled the shame of my youth, the shame that would spawn all shame.

“Compliments of La Cote Basque,” he exclaimed, sporting a wide luminous smile and a bag of potpourri composed of lavender and thyme under his arm.

“Come in, come in,” I said and, picking up the bag of dried flowers, stumbled into an embarrassed laugh. “Thank you.”

He towered over me in his dark navy suit, his figure elongated in crisp straight lines. Gold-rimmed cufflinks hung at the edges of his sleeves. His gold-flecked hair was layered neatly across his head in glistening crescent waves and his cheeks glowed, as though the skin had been thoroughly cleansed and burnished. The narrow hallway seemed to bow in deference to him, widening at its edges to accommodate the air of importance he carried on his back, and I wondered if there was a touch of the asshole in his demeanor. Rather than repelling me, it made me want him more. I stared at him, unabashedly, without wincing, in search of an objective evaluation of his looks. But my judgment was lost in the quiet beauty of his disproportioned face. Alone, each feature was perfectly designed, but when combined subtle incongruities emerged and lingered like puzzles to be solved. His nose was thin and straight, widening into a flare above a full, sharply drawn pale mouth, its tip seeming to touch the upper lip. The eyes, sunk into the recesses of his skull, outlined by heavy lids and thick hazel brows, danced in vivacious blue-green hues. More than any other feature, they seemed to capture his mysterious appeal, despite their close proximity to the inset of his nose. He was in many ways more beautiful than the classically drawn men; he was a project—a face to explore, analyze, interpret as it changed moods, colors, thoughts. I painted him in my head—part God, part man, part inanimate object.

“You look good,” he offered casually, appraising my dress—a black sheath that grazed my knees and was missing one sleeve, so that one white shoulder protruded and drew an imaginary line toward my breasts.

“Would you like some water?” I pointed down the narrow corridor toward the kitchen, but he caught sight of my roommate’s private parts staring from walls, the black cracks in the parquet floor and peeling paint, revealing soot and water stains that had turned brown over the years.

“I can afford a better place,” I quickly assured him without knowing his thoughts, in case he pitied me or, worse, pegged me as a poor immigrant. “I mean, my parents are always willing to help out. But I want to suffer—to tough it out—I want—”

“You want to feel like a starving artist?” he finished the thought for me.

“Yes, something like that—I want to live like one,” I corrected him.

“So let’s see your famous paintings,” he said, seeking in the labyrinth of the dungeon’s hallway my closet of a room.

Inside a murky interior, canvases leaned against walls, and atop my futon bed, next to the sunless window, stood my latest creation: Prehistoric Children under a Bludgeoned Sky. A boy doused in mud strung a bow across his chest, and pointed the arrow at a girl’s heart.

“This is incredible,” he whispered, his eyes glistening. He stayed silent for a while, simply looking. Then he said, “Is the girl you?”

“Me as a child. I paint the past. I paint Russia,” I tried to meet his eyes as I spoke, but he only looked at the girl, at the terror in her verdant eyes, at her skinny grimy hands shielding her chest.

“Do your parents know?”

“What—that I spend all of my time painting, that I’ve got four Incompletes, and that I’m on a date with you? No—and we aren’t going to tell them.”

I handed him a glass of cold water and he drank it slowly, as if he were drinking me.

“I promise to keep your sins to myself,” he said, his wet mouth curling into a grin.

“And what are your sins?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He sidled up behind me—arms like two pythons slithered round my waist, across my breasts, down my stomach, and halted between my thighs.

“We can’t do this—” I blurted, yanking my body out, pushing him out of my room, back into the hallway toward the door. “I have to work—I have a survey to whip up, a painting to paint, I have a boyfriend—”

“Do you always feel this guilty?”

“Yes, well—”

“The Jews and the Catholics and all their guilt—” He cheered as if we were somehow identical.

“Try being Russian on top of that.”

“I’ll try anything for you.” He grabbed my waist impatiently and held me under his breath.

“What are you trying to do?” I muttered through a haze of desire. “Deflower me?”

“Ahhh”—he laughed—“I promise to be gentle.”

“I can get gentle anywhere—what I want is something else—what I want—”

“What do you want?” His face underwent an unexpected shift, his eyes turning stark and grim. “We never finished what we started in the bathroom. Someone got cold feet.”

“My grandmother appeared on the bathroom wall like an apparition.” I tried to explain what really happened, apparently out loud. “‘Don’t be a slut,’ she said, ‘or you’ll end up like my aunt Irma—alone, old, and childless.’” I paused and looked at his bemused face. “That’s when I stopped us.”

“And now—is your grandmother on the wall now?” he asked, laughing.

“I want to go now—I’m hungry!”

“Oh, you’re always hungry, Emma!”

And then without warning, he plugged my mouth with his tongue and, pressing both hands into my waist, jammed us violently against the wall. And I, as if energized, emboldened even by the sudden rush of pain, gripped his neck and threw my legs around his waist, my body wrapping his. We kissed like hawks colliding in mid-flight, bruising our lips, teeth, tongues, emitting strange and wondrous sounds. I felt my back smash into Natasha’s photographs, tasted hair mixed with sweat, heard something tear and then a thud on the creaking floor. He ripped my underwear in half with what felt like a third arm, and entered me, brazenly, urgently, without words or equivocations. I felt my body dissolve and scatter in the air, leaving only one sensation in what used to be my hips and thighs—a loud, protesting, by turns a dying cry. Through a blur I thought I saw the metal door shudder, a shadow creeping in. I imagined Natasha watching us through the keyhole, bursting in to find us thus—bruised and naked in a thaw—and the thought cut my orgasm in half. In unison, we collapsed on the floor of the hallway. Steam rose off our skin, my shoulder blades pulsated with pain, his pants now sported a rip, a slice of broken glass glistened on the entrance rug, and a sly smile sparked in our mirrored faces.

“Now we can go to dinner,” he said, his fingers caressing my hair, looking at me so tenderly I had to look away. “Now I can eat in peace; now I can bear looking at you for an hour or so without wanting—without wanting to be in you.”

I opened my mouth to say “And I at you!” but instead only a strange silent acquiescence came.

I had discarded the Bronze and Silver Rules.

The next night I put on my giant black winter coat and went to his apartment because I couldn’t stop wanting him. My hunger had intensified. The wind howled in my ears as I made my way into the subway and in its glum airless confines I felt at ease with myself, with only artificial lighting illuminating people’s empty expressions, their lives ghostly like my own, finite and without purpose. I was mourning something I couldn’t put my finger on, battling some undetectable virus in my gut. My diaphragm constricted and all the air I had taken in from the cold had been squeezed out of me, draining my body of breath and will. I stared at the oncoming train—it seemed to taunt me—jump under me, it cried, its shrill soothing and familiar. The train screeched and whistled even when it stood still. People poured out and I poured in, squeezing myself between them, their bodies heavy, sinking into my ribs and back, carrying me along with their briefcases and shopping bags and frustrations. How did I turn—or was it jump or leap—from the perfect immigrant child to this, this execrable creature? All those years Grandmother tried to instill morals in me fell away, a waste swirling beneath me—of time, effort, air. I told myself: “Men are incurable assholes, expert boasters and virtuoso complainers, insensitive fools with ultra-sensitive egos—they don’t deserve your mercy.” I told myself: “Alex isn’t doing it with you because he is a chauvinist crusader and sex will be your undoing in his eyes: you’re within your rights!” But the more excuses I conjured, the more intense the pain, the further I reeled and bent against the throng, shrinking under my culpability, brandishing my scarlet-letter sin—L for Liar, L for Lena—upon my chest. I felt a thousand eyes dig into me—could they see it blazing there? Through a haze of static the conductor’s urgent voice announced: “14th Street up ahead.” Then again, “14th Street up ahead.” I should get out here, turn around and run back home. But I couldn’t—something other than sex drew me to the stranger—some arcane force tugged and pulled on me, whispering in my ear of souls meeting through the warped forks of destiny. And who was I to argue with destiny—because wasn’t it destiny that brought us to the same gallery, bowing before the same painting, that even, dare I say, brought him and Alex together to the same interview? Who was God but a tactless jokester? Through tears, I saw a man staring at me two inches away. He seemed to be on the brink of flirtatious sympathy and a clichéd coffee request, but violently I flung my head away. He held no interest for me now.

Eddie lived in a loft on the twenty-seventh floor of a sleek black building in Tribeca on West Street, one of the new developments springing up in the area, towering over warehouses and the Hudson River. I had only managed to step through the front door of his apartment when he greeted me, clad only in a towel, and said, “Stay with me, stay as long as you wish—I want us to make love, many, many times, for as long as it’s humanly possible before we both pass out.” He took off my coat and jeans and boots and we laughed and made love, and watched the sun squeeze between buildings.

After that I didn’t leave. At some point I visited the dungeon to get a change of clothes, my toothbrush, shampoo, other toiletries. I returned without feeling like I had ever left or lived anywhere else, without recalling the acute guilt I felt during that first subway ride.

Eddie’s days were spent at the office. Only late at night when the traffic would subside into a dull hum would he find me sprawled on his bed, hypnotized by the TV, waiting sometimes into the morning hours for the warmth of his body. He operated without sleep, without respite, moving like a phantom between deadlines. Yet his fatigue would vanish and untapped reserves of energy would be unleashed upon seeing me. In those first heaving days when the newness of each other’s bodies palpitated under our fingertips, he seemed intent on having me in public space. We did it on rooftops, in courtyards, in elevators, in the laundry room, and on the indomitable kitchen floor—standing, sitting, lying, flying through the air. Our bodies had become so familiar to one another that when he crawled into bed in the dark, I slid my body into position, my eyes glued with sleep, my mouth already half-opened in anticipation of a wordless cry. At the first pink light, he appeared to be someone else, in his stern dark suits, feet in fine leather, face pampered and perfumed, wrists bedecked in cufflinks, his brisk gait carrying him out the door. And I would roll in his king size bed, imbibing a view of the Empire State Building and the Hudson River, and order food from dingy restaurants down the street and eat in bed, crumbs and salad leaves mashing under my naked skin.

The longer I stayed, the more I felt my academic mind grow stale and dissipate from comfort and sexual decadence. I lost my sense of time and responsibility, forgot to pay bills, skipped classes, and resigned myself to yet another Incomplete. I moved between clashing emotions, wondering one instant if he was a hollow shell with a sophisticated finish and accidental insights into human life, and the next, imagining that he alone understood me, that he possessed truths I had only guessed at. The motion of life as I had known it ended. I no longer went to bars at night. I stopped attending graduate school parties or gazing lasciviously at my professors. I stopped wanting other men, stopped seducing other men in classes, libraries, and coffee shops. If I flirted, it was by force of habit. I even stopped painting, so exhausting, so satisfying, so utterly luxurious it was to simply exist naked, to be aroused and aroused again, to swell from one consuming thought: when will we do it again? Perhaps we were entirely unmatched as people—we did not take the time to find out—but when in bed we swam like eels, our slippery souls intertwining to the deafening motor of unfettered lust.

For three sumptuous weeks, I sleepwalked through my obligations to that other life, the one bustling in Chicago in another tongue. It amazed me how quickly the human mind can adapt itself to moral failure, how natural, comfortable it was to simply forget that out there another person cared for you, longed for you, intended to marry you—how inscrutably easy it was to pretend! How did my parents mollify their guilt, I’d ask myself sporadically, and then with shame, with a bitter salute to my own inadequacy, I’d recall how much they hated each other ideologically. Where was my ideological war? My guilt seemed to recede into some irretrievable cabinet inside my mind, only to resurface through the Pandora’s Box, otherwise known as the telephone. Alex, thank God, called with a new penchant for brevity, as he was “temporarily living” with his parents and they were using the phone bill to extract more devotion from him. I told myself to compartmentalize him into my future: a husband I would one day want, dote on, adore, desperately need, and affectionately call “my darling mudila,” “you unbearable asshole,” and “my sweet spineless fool.”

On the phone I was the dutiful wife-in-training, discussing Alex’s phenomenal array of offers from New York banks. I was mahaing and ahaing as he mulled over the pros and cons of working at Lehman Brothers vs. Morgan Stanley, but Norton Bank remained a silent vault. No letter had arrived, no one had called, no Eddie. And Alex wondered out loud if the chance meeting at the gallery might have ruined his chances. “I wish you hadn’t told them I was Russian—I think that whole story made me look bad.” “I’m sorry,” I said instantly, because the possibility that Eddie was stalling on Alex’s offer began to gnaw at me. But strangely, Alex himself appeared undecided about his future. He confessed that sometimes he dreamed of going to physics graduate school to make a difference in the world, and yet, yet, he wretchedly, selfishly wanted to make money—to be his own man. He peppered me with hypotheticals: he will move to New York, work at Norton or Lehman or Morgan, and we will marry atop Sears Tower next fall. What a wonderful idea, I cried with robotic enthusiasm. There should be liberty and mischief and all the trappings of youth in my situation, I told myself, I have a lover and a fiancé. I should embrace them both, the way I embraced the two sides of my brain that existed in different languages and ran on different tracks of thought. I should free myself from this moral carnage, from this guilt-spewing whale in my brain, but I couldn’t.

Sometimes I awoke unable to breathe. The doctor said I might develop asthma soon if I didn’t take care of myself. Take care of myself? I wasn’t taught to take care of myself—they had always taken care of me. Mom and Grandma told me how to think, what to think, when to think. But now, on my own, what a chance I had to separate myself from their incessant, caring, worrying intrusiveness—to become myself! Yet without their wills to guide me, where were my ideas, mores, ethical certainties—where was my feminist roar—under what boulder hid my will? I felt morally naked, stripped of opinions, lost in a plethora of choices, unable to pinpoint or even ask the question: “Who am I?”

When I stopped returning to the dungeon, I started lying to throw Mom and Grandma off my scent. I told them I was drowning in work, that my brain belonged to the library stacks now, that I was interned in a prison we fellow inmates liked to call SPASM HELLHAS’EM! I told them these things to please them—to keep them from hassling me—calling every other night from Eddie’s bed while he was stuck at work.

“When are you coming to Chicago to make appointments?” my mother was ripping into me for the thirtieth time that week. “You need to start thinking about a place for the wedding. Everything is usually booked in advance—you remember what it was like for Bella—”

“Because this isn’t one of your hoodlums,” Grandmother gleefully pointed out, “this is Alla Bagdanovich’s son—we know these people, we go to Moscow Nights with them, we see them at every noteworthy event: Alla is friends with everyone and related to everyone. We might as well go into exile if you screw this one up.”

“Everything happened too quickly with Alex—maybe I’m making a colossal mistake.”

“You never last beyond a year with any man,” my mother noted. “It’s a tragedy,” Grandmother added.

“I’ve been with Alex for over a year, over a year and I still don’t know if he was nine or ten when he left Russia or what happened to them there. What is all this ‘I-am-so-Americanized’ bullshit? Maybe he’s a fraud, maybe he’s really just Russian underneath his perfectly chiseled veneer.”

“Is there someone else?” My mother’s voice dropped several octaves.

Grandmother moaned and blackmailed. “I can’t take it anymore, Lord, you’re squeezing my heart, Bozhenka—”

“Alex won’t have sex with me—I think that proves he’s really not American,” I said after some thought, giving them a chance to absorb the possibility of someone else.

“Good for him! What a gentleman!” Grandmother recovered quickly. “Tell me, please, that you aren’t pressuring him?”

“Where are you now?” my mother asked. “Where are you calling from?”

“Nowhere!”

“Oh, my good Bozhenka,” Grandmother whimpered.

“Nowhere—nowhere.” I kept at it.

“So you’re calling from someone else’s apartment,” my mother stated with confidence. “You’ve got a lover—am I right, am I right, you have a lover?” She was screaming now, but I allowed myself to imagine that in the shrill echelons of her outrage there was a wisp of nostalgia.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I confessed quickly, like an ape ripping a Band-Aid from its chest, “He is no one—just sex.” Was there a foot-long needle in my ass pricking me to confess? Who confesses such things to their family members? Who? What happened to manipulative, well-intentioned, nerve-soothing lies?

“What is wrong with the women in this family?” Grandmother jumped in. “I was always a paradigm of virtue, sacrificing my whole life for my children; I tried to teach all of you the difference between right and wrong, and what do I get—a bunch of eternal sluts!”

“You must end it,” my mother said.

“What do you mean by ‘eternal sluts?’ Bella’s your golden girl, married to your ideal man, Igor, and the mother of a most gifted child—where is this venom coming from?”

“We believe,” my mother announced morosely, “that Bella is having an affair.”

“Good for her,” I shot back.

“Do you understand what you’re saying—she’s going to destroy her family—everything she’s worked for!” my mother yelled.

Grandmother urgently recounted the evidence: “She’s been sneaking out of her house late at night, asking us to take Sirofima in the afternoons and not telling us where she’s going, and Igor and his mother are on to her—they’re on to her—he’s been hiding money from her, trying to keep her from spending it on her lover—”

“You’re all crazy KGB agents, suspecting everyone of everything—you’re all crazy—have you asked her—have you asked my sister what she’s doing?”

“We don’t have to,” my mother assured me. “We know everything and we’re always right.”

“Alex is moving to New York, Bozhenka, oy vey, oy vey, Bozhenka help us, help us! He’s moving to New York to be with you—he got the job at that bank—”

“Which bank?”

“At Norfox Bank? Or was it Norfan?” wondered Grandmother, then with extreme passion declared, “He got all the jobs this time, all the jobs, imagine that: your Alex, your genius! Oh the pay is excellent! Excellent!” Eddie had made Alex an offer after all.

“Oh, I have to go.” I heard the door click and Eddie’s footsteps break across the parquet floor. I saw him before me, tall and stately, his face breaking into a thousand smiles upon seeing me. My mouth parched, whitening, a loss of breath. The feeling I now struggled to contain climbed up my throat and like boiling water stung my gums, my tongue, the insides of my cheeks, taking me over the pain threshold into numbness. For I could not drink—it held out its hand yet was never mine to hold—someone else’s fear of loss.

“You must end it, do you hear me?” my mother’s voice belted out of the receiver. “Sex comes and goes but your children, think of your children—”

“What children, what children, mother?” I begged, feeling myself disappear.

“The ones you’re going to have if you marry this or any other goy,” Grandmother explained with sudden patience, as if I had become in the span of one minute a hapless imbecile.

“Why can’t I just have fun? Why can’t life be simple and happy? Why can’t I fool around a bit, you know, before I have to settle down for the rest of my life?” I asked Grandmother, because as an authority on virtue and most likely God, she had to have a satisfactory answer, one that would settle the moral dilemma of cheating once and for all. Because it didn’t seem fair that rising out of the massive spaceship that is New York City, with its millions of faces, banks, corporations, stores, law firms, medical establishments, and other diverse industries, Norton Bank should emerge as a setting for the coincidences in my life.

“Because only the honest ones get caught,” my mother answered. “Because it’s one of God’s serpentine ways of teaching moral lessons to the guilt-ridden cheaters. The ones who don’t care, who don’t suffer, who don’t feel any guilt always get away with everything. They never pay the price.” Was she implying that despite my admission, I was still good, that good meant sinning and suffering for it?

“Hi, what’s going on,” I instinctively said, smiling back at Eddie.

“Are you talking to your family—tell them privet from me,” Eddie said and closed his eyes.

“Do you hear him, do you hear him, Sonichka,” my grandmother wailed, “an American —he’s an American and a goy and most likely a hoodlum! Semeyon is going to have to support everyone again. That Alex is golden! If he only knew what a flippant hussy you are!”

A Catholic would never do, I told myself as I watched Eddie get undressed, as I listened to Grandmother rail, starting from the Stalin era to the current ABC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, against ancient hatreds and conspiracies, dooming the world with her every breath, unveiling before me (as if for the first time) the anti-Semitic strain that like an incurable virus corrupted the blood of every individual on earth. But all I could think was why couldn’t Eddie have been a Protestant, like the other goyim I dated? A Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Quaker might have been more palatable, more feasible, for the Protestants as a lot seemed less attached to their religions and eminently more convertible. The Catholics, on the other hand, rose before us like fierce Christian warriors from the Middle Ages, like Crusaders, like the Spaniards who exiled us; their grandiose churches and ostentatious rituals, their guilty conscience and penchant for constantly asking for forgiveness gave them an insularity against other faiths and an eerie similarity to Judaism, making them ironically as blood-bound.

Yet as I watched Eddie drifting into sleep, with half-closed lids, as I caressed his cheeks, kissed his forehead, ran my fingers through his thick crop of hair, as I observed his flaring nostrils and his breath ballooning in and out, in and out, from this peculiar angle, I thought, no, no one, no one would do. Not even a secular Protestant or an exiled Mormon, not even a philandering Southern Baptist like Bill Clinton or a fun-loving Buddhist like Richard Gere!

For what we were in America we had never been in Russia. My father would pose rhetorical questions at dinner parties. “What are we? A religion? Us, Jews, a religion, what nonsense! God-worshippers when there is no God! Are you trying to tell me that other people now want to become us—us—whom everyone wanted to kill for centuries? What a glorious country America is!” They thought it was surreal, unthinkable, an insult almost that a person could pick up the Jewish bible, take a few classes in Hebrew, read a few texts on the Holocaust, court the local rabbi, light the Sabbath candles as if the very wax could alter the genetic makeup of their blood, and miraculously—in one swoop—be proclaimed a Jew. So much so that their children would now be indisputably Jewish, and even their sketchy pasts, pasts no doubt filled with offenses against these very Jews, would be wiped clean. “We, we,” my father would yell, “we are a people, a race!”

I hung up the phone and Eddie’s eyes popped open.

“They don’t know about you,” I told him with sudden urgency, “because if they did, if they did—well then—”

“What then,” he asked with a laugh, “would they disown you—cut off your allowance?”

“I enjoy you like an addiction,” I offered, “nothing more.”

Silence came between us and he rolled to the other side of the bed to face me.

“Is that how you feel? Nothing but this?” He pointed at my breasts, and I grabbed my shirt for cover.

“We’re having fun, right? Isn’t that what all men want?”

“Is this your brand of feminism? You want to turn yourself into a man?”

“Tell me, tell me what’s the difference between us—between man and woman? I can want sex just as much as you, and not care, not want you for anything else. Maybe I don’t even like you. Hasn’t that ever occurred to you, or has every woman you bedded want to be welded to you at the hip? Maybe you think we all want marriage—well, not me! Not me!” I yelled, yelled the way my mother yelled at my father. But he didn’t react the way my father did; he smiled exultantly, and said, “Ah, I see, I’ve hit a nerve. If I were to make an educated guess, I’d say you like me too much already.”

“Oh, please, your arrogance doesn’t surprise me—”

“What if I told you I don’t like you, what if I switched places with you and said, I want you just for sex—how would you feel?”

“I’m coming at you from a position of powerlessness, a history of powerlessness—women do not have the power! The reason they protest—the reason they want to numb their emotions is that we’re always trying to regain the power that has always been denied us.”

“Why are you so intent on equating yourself with men? Why is that power? Look at men: blind and lumbering fools who don’t see anything until it’s too late. In my life, women have always had all the power—far too much power—”

“I want to paint, to cut everyone off, to cut—”

“Me off?” he offered.

“Yes.”

“I can’t stop you,” he said. “I’m a great believer in freedom. But how about something in between, a compromise, a male gift, you might say—”

“What?”

“We can see other people—and still see each other.”

“I’m an all or nothing woman,” I shot back. “We either commit, or this means squat.”

“Ah, so you want to do whatever you want but imprison me in you. How so female of you!”

“Explain the term ‘other people.’ Apprise me of the rules of your game.”

“We see each other, but when we don’t and are presented with the opportunity for sex, for meaningless sex, as you say, we take it. We take it because we don’t really like each other—right? How does that strike your appetite?”

“Brilliantly, a brilliant solution—a wonderful solution!” I rallied with zeal. “I’m perfectly happy with that arrangement—I’m always getting propositioned.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are.”

The next morning I returned to my dungeon physically drained and in pain; the memory of our awkward sex, of our naked bodies stiffening from some unspoken mutual animosity, gave me a feeling of closure. Inside my room, drowning in the stench of garbage trucks and bleating groans of cars and trains, I returned to my adolescent brood. My temples felt as though they were being squeezed in a metal vise and the world was convulsing in an existential spasm. The bliss of the last three weeks, after being torturously reexamined, emerged as a state of delusion, so that I could no longer say with certainty whether I had actually experienced pleasure or only imagined it.

I lifted my head out of this torpor long enough to see two messages blinking on the answering machine. “Great news, I got the job—I’ve been wanting to talk to you all morning. Call me.” Beep, beep, then another one: “Oh I’ll be working with that guy Eddie we met at the gallery. Can you believe it? I’m moving to New York just like we planned. Call me.”

That weekend Ignatius did not call me. Red bumps flared on my neck and chest and ankles, causing itching attacks. The rash would scorch my body and then miraculously disappear, alternating my skin from a white hue to a bulbous pink-red within ten-minute intervals. Visiting the doctor seemed like a mortifying ordeal, as I envisioned our exchange. “You say you have a rash—where is it now?” “It comes and goes,” I reply as the doctor searches inside his forehead for that one anomaly he came across in medical school. Of course, I didn’t go to any doctors, for even I suspected that I was a prototypical hysterical woman, right out of Freud’s case studies, suffering on account of my indecisiveness. Who caused my itching, I asked myself like a diligent psychoanalyst: Alex or Eddie? Was I stricken with fear that Alex would demand that wedding invitations go out tomorrow, that we reserve the top of Sears Tower and Sears Tower would say YES? Or was it Eddie whose absence sent my body into convulsions? Eddie who wouldn’t call—who shouldn’t call! Time would wipe him out and relegate our brief affair into that happy category of “hot fling.”

I woke up the next morning to Alex announcing that he was at O’Hare Airport, en route to JFK, en route to me. The sky was dull and white, submerged in winter. The city was under siege from a blizzard that raged for days, blocking roads, blinding traffic. The plane, however, had not been delayed, as if Destiny Herself had cut a clear path in salt. “It’s only been three weeks, only January, a cold inhuman month, let him go,” I muttered to myself, the phone nestled at my ear, my fingers dialing, hanging up, dialing again.

“Hello?” I said, “Hello? Is Eddie there?”

A woman’s voice answered, “Can I help you?” and I promptly hung up.

I picked up a long thin paintbrush and it began to dance.

Painting #2

I awaken in a ray of light, in our government-appointed Moscow apartment, in an aquarium brimming with human flesh, or is it fish—don’t you see the resemblance?—we’re mermaids without tails. Whispers of a celebration reverberate through permeable walls, and tables fill with breads, potatoes, salads, caviar, kolbasas. Green pickled tomatoes and mayonnaise-filled eggs sit atop delicate crème plates painted in sapphire tulips, the china Grandma saved from Stalin’s goons that belonged to her great-ancestors, the German “aristocrats” whose superior manner and confidence she brilliantly embodies. Mother chops radishes and peppers as she hums a gypsy song, her fingers tap in quick methodical steps to Grandmother’s precise directions. The sun turns scarlet-orange and slides behind the horizon, and in its stead, the ocean rises above our heads in webs of blue-green algae.

Our neighbors upstairs leave Russia in a week but the husband tangos with the KGB, a dance of amiable conversations and the stench of threats. He resells furniture for higher prices, engages as they say in spekulyatziya, a Western pastime but in Russia it’s a bona fide crime, punishable by incarceration. Mother’s throwing them a bash, a romp of vodka, debauchery, and envy. The lamps outside our windows flicker and the light creeps in, peering through the cracks inside our curtains like yellow eyes.

Now we fly in, the children, a multitude racing from room to room, wiggling between the adults and the food and coils of smoke. Already thudding, tapping, stomping to foreign music—such tiny tots already mouthing infectious Western songs—in defiance of proscribed sleep. We’re lifted high on arms and necks, and there’s Andrei, the handsome son of KGB-watched neighbors, one of my suitors, looming like a Tsar upon his father’s head. He screams: Englit, I speak Englit, and everybody nods in awe. His youth and careless tongue glow in their eyes like promises of freedom. We too, my mother whispers, can be them.

A cocktail of vodka and anti-Soviet jokes and rowdy laughter flows through our aquarium of captured fish, and suddenly, the lucky youth, whose parents will be arrested in forty-eight hours, has closed his eyes. My father carries him into our middle room where all the other children lie perpendicular in slumber.

But not I! Not Bella! Although they’ve brought us to my room and flung our nightgowns on, our lids are obstinate, awake, and so we crawl like thieves through passages between the drunken bodies that smile and grab our cheeks and ruffle our hair. Not us! We know that ardor flares after midnight and Cinderellas lose their slippers at the ball. Not us—why wasn’t I invited, a neighbor thinks, because you’re not a Jew, because you cannot know the whispers that pass from tongue to tongue of relatives we’ll never see again, of friends we’ll soon forget or perhaps run into in a supermarket in Iowa, LA, Chicago, or Brighton Beach. Because our neighbor Dina will catch us in the act of disappearing—where’s your furniture, she’ll cry, poking her long snout into our hall. We’re leaving Russia, emigrating to Israel, Grandmother will reply. Well, well, so traitors live next door to me, she’ll bridle—why, it’s a shame Hitler didn’t finish all of you!

For can’t you see—we do not know who or what we’re truly saying goodbye to. Except for our belongings! Our books, our hard-earned sofas, laminated oak tables, embroidered silk, sapphire rings, gold necklaces, tulip china, emerald wallpapers, burgundy velvet curtains, ancient chests and carved steel beds will still remain as though here lies and eats and dreams a Jew. But once sold to other lives, our belongings will be stripped of us: our stains, blemishes, fingerprints, and spit washed, polished, excised from the glass and wood and metal. We’ll disappear without a trace, without a mark left of our lives.

My mother shuts the curtain and commands: simmer down, simmer down, but no one hears her except my grandfather who frowns from his throne, the green reclining chair. I told you not to have these celebrations any more, he warns in an ominous low voice, but my mother longs to dance and sing, for she’s young and glorious and thirty-eight. And Bella’s streaming in—she too is young and glorious and fifteen. Away from Mother’s gaze, my sister jumps upon two chairs that lean against the southern window and begins to sway. The moon’s ethereal white light touches her hair and dissipates the gown’s cotton shield, snaking around the child’s waist and burgeoning breasts.

The men, enticed into a silent thrill, glance at her wearily from guilt and hunger, and in their eyes, a question flickers: is she a child or a nymph?

She’s supposed to be asleep, my mother screams, both girls are supposed to be asleep! Put something on, she screams at Bella, where’s your shame? Dear God, they can see your breasts—you’re not a child anymore! The nipples poke the gown like two stern arrows about to shoot into the heart of every man. They are beside themselves, the men, they cannot look but yet their eyes, as though unfastened from their sockets, navigate the room and land upon her swaying shape. She does not know herself why she wears this yellow gown, why no shame crisscrosses her cheeks. She does not blush but smiles—grins—caresses with her eyes their faces and seeks her prince.

He has a look: a handsome talker with profound eyes—she’s painted him for me. Oh, feverish, implacable adolescence—she’s dancing on her bare feet. Barefooted, my mother moans, get her shoes—take my shoes, a woman says, and Bella’s feet slide into high blue heels. She now seems older, taller, like an almost-woman. There’s not a drop of makeup on her face.

A man appears out of the smoke—an apparition, maybe. Like a hawk, he swoops down to our Bella, circling her body with his hawk-like bulging eyes. He has a predator’s wide mouth, claws for fingers, and fur for skin, but she—she cannot see.

The morning after blood stains the yellow nightgown. What have you done, my mother yells in terror—how could I have missed it! Ah, when the castle had fallen into a deep, deep sleep, the sleepless beauty was lured into the sorcerer’s lair, and there, in innocence, in faithful homage to the gods of love, to princes of her beloved fairy tales, she gave him—how do they say in adult-speak—her soul! The child-mermaid swears she is in love and there, arrested by her pain, melts into the wall like silent foam.

Wanting and Not Resisting

Alex was delighted to be in New York, working at the prestigious Norton Bank, living on the swanky Upper East Side in corporate housing, and dating “a catch,” who was apparently me. I was now taking a cab from my dungeon to 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, to a high-rise cookie-cutter apartment building, spending evenings and nights with my fiancé.

We would kiss languorously for hours, speckled with gentle caresses, but at some invisible juncture, he would repeat his usual refrain: “Leave something to be desired, my dearest Elena, leave the best for last.” By which I assumed he meant marriage. Our lives now consisted of the daily monotonous routine of moving toward marriage, career goals, visible achievements we could bring home to our families and declare as trophies, won fairly in the American marketplace of success. Our peculiar celibacy would remain till marriage, Alex said, till it was all settled. But what needed to be settled, I didn’t know, I didn’t ask. I simply acquiesced in this arrangement, the way I acquiesced to everything else in my life. Even art, under Alex’s prodding, had to be abandoned for the far more urgent task of completing my statistics degree. “You need to think about making money,” Alex said. “We’ll have a two income-household, and then after you have children, you’ll go back to work with a ready-made remeslo, an expertise.” I locked my unfinished paintings in my locker at NYU and registered for Probability and Stochastic Modeling for spring semester, the class I had already failed once before. I felt a perverse pleasure in following his orders, in negating my feelings, my creativity, my sexuality—my essential self.

Memories of Eddie stayed in me and intensified: his taste, his scent, his touch, all of him consumed me. In the midst of some discussion with Alex, I’d imagine Eddie moving inside me, the sharp hook of an orgasm spreading into an unbearable longing in my gut. I’d steal away and hide in the bathroom—to breathe in the images undisturbed. Time, I told myself, would cure me.

Except for one strange inescapable fact: Alex now worked for Eddie. After almost a month at Norton Bank, Alex’s daily sustenance—his grandiose obsession—became Eddie. He described an alarming image of a ruthless tyrant hell-bent on driving Alex into the ground and burying him before the age of thirty. “I’m telling you he loathes me with inexplicable rancor!” Alex would exclaim between hurried sips of late evening tea. “You’re exaggerating,” I’d offer, painfully recalling my last conversation with Eddie. “They’re all so stupid, he’s stupid, everyone is just so stupid!” Alex would declare. Yet he wanted me to figure out, with my “brilliant social mind” (his words, not mine), what every facial tic, declaration, casual remark uttered by Eddie symbolized, and when, when, Alex begged, would he get on his good side?

Eddie kept Alex in the office till late, assigning him more and more work, overburdening him and, according to Alex, treating him worse than the common intern.

And the astonishingly long hours, the menial work, the endless spreadsheets, the complete disregard for his superior brain were taking a toll on Alex’s enthusiasm for making money. Even when his check arrived at the two-week mark, he felt it failed to attenuate his humiliation at the whim of Eddie’s whip. Though the sudden and complete extrication from the arms of his parents—this feeling so beautifully bound up in the American concept of independence—did allow him some measure of happiness, he felt “virally disaffected with the corporate world.” He had become a shadow of his previous self; his voracity for life, for adapting to sundry social environments, for playing Victorian courtship, for tepid foreplay with the express purpose of, as he put it, “inflaming the undergrowths of our mutual desires in anticipation of sexual bliss,” for inverting his Russian pessimism into a madcap hyperbole of American optimism seemed to be waning. He had grown thinner, paler, more subdued; the working world most certainly interfered with his excellent digestion, and I wondered out loud if he might not consider quitting.

I can’t remember how many days passed, but soon after I deposited this idea in his head, Alex came to my dungeon and before even crossing the threshold announced: “I’ve left that putrid swamp.” He couldn’t take it anymore, he confessed, and called Eddie a “nefarious asshole,” among other things. Although he had all sorts of explanations for what happened—he was too brilliant for them all, Eddie was “rancid” with jealousy, the clients were imbecilic, there was too much “ass-licking” and not enough thinking, he always returned to his favorite sound bite: he and he alone was waging a war against ingrained American stupidity (forgetting, naturally, that he considered himself one).

“Anyhow, I’m moving back to Chicago—I’m still waiting for replies from physics grad schools,” he said after a long pause. His olive-colored skin still glowed in angry hues, adding a touch of pink rouge to his complexion, and I marveled absently at his beauty.

“What about us?” I asked.

“You know my situation, Elena, I can’t afford to live in New York without a job; my parents don’t have that kind of money. We’ll live together when we get married,” he went on. “I figure it’ll take me three—four, max—years to finish grad school and then I’ll get a professorship, and hopefully we can settle in Chicago near our parents, so that when we have children, it’ll be easier for us to take care of them.”

Feebly, I protested, “But what about me, my art?” I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in weeks, but still his speech about our future struck me as severely unjust.

“You’ll get a job in statistics—you’ll be so much happier in the work world, Lenochka. You’re so good with people. And as for painting, I’ve already told you—and please don’t take this the wrong way again—you’re no Dali. Keep it as a hobby, on the side—we’ll decorate our living room!”

I’m no Dali, I whispered to myself, I’m a hobby on the side, on the side, I’m hanging in our living room, I whispered to myself, and thought of my painting, The Child-Mermaid I’d call it, my painting of Bella growing a corn-colored tail and long mesmeric curls and fantastical breasts. The fused thighs and knees were shrouded in scales, and the face took on the hue of a cobalt ocean, out of which two eyes beamed like violet suns. I thought of her, my sister, and pitied myself.

“I want you—us to live in New York!” I pleaded with him, terrified by our impending separation.

“Are you listening to me, Elena? I don’t want to be an investment banker anymore—I am destined for greatness. I’ll be making real discoveries that will impact science, not some algorithms that’ll make more money for people who already have too much—”

“Is that the Marx in you talking? What about capitalism—the very beauty—the very artery of this country?” I objected but so weakly that the sides of my mouth seemed to be drooping from exhaustion.

“Is that our parents in you talking?” he snapped.

I turned away from him, but he reached for my hair and ran his fingers through it tenderly, making me purr like an old cat. “Oh, c’mon, forget all this silly ideology. Stop picking fights with me,” he said. We sat down on his queen-sized bed and held each other for a minute. Then I laid myself out and closed my glum, dissatisfied eyes, and let his aristocratic hesitant fingers traverse my body: up, down, sideways, in, out, and in again. After finishing (i.e., finishing off) the business of lethargic, sleep-inducing, what-is-still-edible-in-my-fridge foreplay, he zipped me back up and triumphantly declared a new variation on an old refrain. “At the end, always leave something to be desired. Always keep a man guessing, running back for more!” And I wondered to myself, where’s my orgasm—where’s my incentive for not thinking about Hungarian salami on pumpernickel bread or herring Grandma-style, straight up? We lay together afterward in a tranquil, tender embrace, and I felt the heat of my future approach me, the heat of regret and children and old age and clogged arteries.

Then he got up to pack his clothes and philosophize about his future while I watched. He had a flight at ten o’clock that very same night. I returned to my apartment, feeling drained of myself. February was giving way to March and droplets of warmth crept into the air like magicians, enticing us to throw away our coats in our mad rush for spring. I walked out of the dungeon as I was, in my jeans and sweatshirt, and at midnight found myself in an underground S and M French boutique shop three blocks from Eddie’s apartment. In the cramped, moldy dressing room of La Femme Libre, I tried on bizarre revealing dresses I decreed to never buy. As I watched my body in the mirror squeeze into glittering red leather pants, petite jean skirts bedecked in spikes and zippers, and necklaces that looked like collars for a German shepherd, it occurred to me that life situates us in categories that over time turn into self-enclosed squares: once shaped by others, now maintained by us. There we stay locked and content, becoming incapacitated and unable to cross the very boundaries we’ve built around ourselves. At that very moment, I knew I could do anything, go anywhere—I had enough willpower to break out of my square. I walked out of the store wearing a burgundy velvet sheath that matched my hair, drew curvaceous lines around my hips, and cut a heart-shaped hole across my back. It was dark and windy outside and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. Hunger gripped my stomach in its iron fist, making me feel hollow. I stepped inside the dingy pizza parlor across the street from his building and nursed hot Lipton tea in a Styrofoam cup, sipping with ardor this miserable piss-twanged liquid and inhaling five slices of burned pizza adorned in canned mushrooms and lifeless olives. Surreptitiously I watched men in navy suits pass in and out of the parlor after midnight, eating their slices on the go, standing or leaning against the dirty pink counter, hoping that one of them was him. But upon closer inspection, only strangers gazed back at me, their eyes glinting with desire as if to mock me.

At one in the morning I stood at the edge of his formidable lobby, with its heavy revolving door and a black awning that guarded its residents from the street. Through the thick glass I saw Clarence, the gray-haired doorman, frozen in contemplation behind the podium. My body lunged back and forth like a seesaw, caught between pride and desire, reeking of its perennial uncertainty. The wind lashed against my naked back and legs, and with its cold wide palms pushed me inside the marble-floored vestibule.

“Hello there!” Clarence straightened up and smiled without seeming to recognize me, which is why his next statement made me stagger. “You must be looking for Eddie—well, I’ve been here all night and I haven’t seen him.” How many of us faceless women were looking for Eddie?

“He must be at work,” I offered nervously.

“Works hard, that Eddie. Do you want to wait for him?”

I leaned against the front desk, hesitating, my eyes fixed on the swiveling door. No one was coming in, and small drops of rain started pelting against the thick glass.

“I’ll wait,” I said and headed for the black leather couch that occupied an isolated corner at the back of the lobby.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes the sky was breaking in pink and yellow lights and Eddie’s voice was bouncing off the ceiling.

“Helloooooooo, Clarrrrrrence!” he exclaimed, laughing, “and how was your night, my friend!” His speech was by turns clear and muffled, ringing in loud hiccupping tones. He was clearly drunk and a tall woman trailed behind him, a long-haired brunette on high black heels, swathed in a short black dress, her features round and small, her lips pouting in a child’s frown.

“Mr. Beltrafio,” the doorman muttered in an official tone, visibly discomfited, “Emma—Ms. Kaulfield’s waiting for you.” He pointed toward the back of the lobby at my still lying form. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.

“Ah, the tortured artist is here!” Eddie’s laughter reverberated through the lobby, and then the wind swallowed their voices. He and the woman stood in a huddle and whispered, and I caught Eddie leaning gently into her ear. A jealous claw burrowed into my abdomen. From one half-opened eye, I saw the woman clank her heels against the floor and twirl out the door, her long thin figure flailing in the wind, her short dress flapping against skinny thighs—a model out of a catalogue, I thought wryly to myself.

“C’mon, you faker,” he said into my ear, grabbing me by the arm, “get you on up—Up—Hop stairs to my bed.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I burst out and my sweaty palm landed on his cheek, leaving a red imprint. He stared at me in disbelief, then broke out in a thunderous, convulsive laugh.

“Oh, my dear lady, thou hath no right to blow me such expressions of your love!”

“Shut up, who the hell was that?”

“Who the hell was that?” he exclaimed in a mock imitation. But his face turned from laughter to rage in an imperceptible second. “That was my mistress, my business, my time away from you—and what have you been doing with your time away from me?”

“Thank you for the male gift—I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

Still shouting, we dove into the palatial gold elevator.

“How are the wedding plans coming along, my little sphinx? So you’re the marrying feminist, suffering not from male oppression, it seems to me, but from bizarre contradictions.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you—Alex is my third fiancé—it’s much safer to be my lover.” The doors opened on the twenty-seventh floor and we walked in silence down the hall.

He fumbled with his keys, struggling to unlock his apartment, and I breathed into his back, exhaling my fury. Yet everything about him excited me. Even the smell of alcohol seeping from his mouth, his clothes, hair, face, punctured me with desire. Outside the wind turned into a torrent of rain and smashed against the floor-to-ceiling window that covered the southern wall. I had the sensation of being doused in water.

He plopped on his gray leather couch and, in a hoarse voice, muttered, “I need coffee.”

“Let me make it for you,” I offered.

“Just sit here—sit here! So you had two other poor chaps who planned their weddings with you and you left them at the altar?”

“Yes, they’re always poor chaps when we women dump them, but they’re men when they dump us! Isn’t it right, Ignatius?”

“You know what boils my blood—it’s this goddamn self-righteous air you put on, as if you’re some kind of victim. Like you’re on a warpath to avenge all men for the wrongs they incurred to other women, but clearly not to you!”

“Alex is leaving New York, he quit his job, and he’s taking me with him,” I said.

“I don’t want to be your punching bag, do you hear me?”

“Alex couldn’t take you, apparently. Said you were a horrible boss. Said you were only interested in me.”

“Did he—is that why you came to me tonight, to find out if I was interested in you?”

“I came to you tonight—I came to you tonight to ask you why you mistreated him—you promised me you wouldn’t be horrible to him—”

“Look, I think this game has gone a little too far: you want to keep fucking me, you want to marry him, and then force me—I assume as a just reward for getting to fuck you—to give him his job back so that he can make money and support your artistic aspirations.”

I couldn’t see clearly; I could only feel spite and rage flooding my nostrils, spewing from the rims of my eyes. I swung my palm through the air and slapped his other cheek, the one that wasn’t pink yet.

“With such a temper,” he retorted without moving away or giving up a millimeter of space, “Alex can’t possibly be what you want or need.”

“No, you’re right: what I want is a raw motherfucker—straight up tuna sashimi! No soy sauce to confound me.”

“Oh, I do like your imagery, lady,” he came back at me, “but if you’re going to compare me to food groups, I prefer to be a slab of meat—a porterhouse rather than such delicate matter as raw fish.”

I laughed and so did he. Each second amplified our laughter, unified our voices, our open mouths, our smiling eyes. After a while we didn’t know why we laughed, and how, without being conscious of it, we got caught in this moment of perfect mutual understanding. Then, as if on cue, we stopped with one look of hate.

I pried open the living room balcony door and stepped into the rain. Water pummeled my head and deluged my dress and seeped inside my bra. I watched the color strip in its first washing, gathering round my toes in blood-red pools, and stuck my tongue out from a childish habit of wanting to taste the rain. How could I explain? Twenty-seven floors below, dots of human beings hid under umbrellas and merged with one another to create an interlocking web of ominous black heads. I thought of him again, the boy-crush from childhood and what my mother told me years later in America—that zhidko could mean both a dirty Yid and weakness, that the two could be synonymous, that his parents loathed Jews, that Grandmother concealed the truth from me. Lightning from my childhood struck the side of the building and, for an instant, seemed to torch me with its sharp white tip.

“Emma, get in here for Christ’s sake—” I heard a voice blaring, a figure at my back. I couldn’t recognize the language for an instant, for in my head everything swam in Russian. “Ya ne ponimayu,” I wanted to say, “I speak no English—English no speak!” I stepped back into the apartment and whispered, “It smells like Russia out there, in the rain. The sidewalks and the gray buildings—everything is somber and gray like Russia.”

“Have you lost your mind—do you want to die?” he screamed, a coffee mug in his hand, his red-rimmed eyes zigzagging and awake.

“I—I—”

“Take the dress off and put something dry on—here—” He came back with a heavy white robe and, without speaking, pulled down my soaking dress. “Take everything off,” he commanded and I obeyed, my mind revolving around the same stubborn sentence that wouldn’t come out. Only when I stood naked before him, with not a cloth to hide behind, I said, “You—I want you—I don’t care how or where or what—I want you and I don’t want you to see other people.”

He didn’t answer so I went on, by this point, completely pride-deprived. “How many women have you slept with this month, this month that you haven’t called?”

“How could I have called once I found out you were engaged to Alex—you were sleeping with Alex?”

“What do you mean ‘sleeping with Alex?’”

“He boasted—”

“Nonsense! He has a colorful vocabulary, that’s all—empty words! Alex couldn’t get beyond my bra,” I exclaimed with a sudden laugh.

“So you think this cleans your moral palate, this makes everything all right?”

“How many women—how many?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Before I give us a try, I want to know what I’m trying—how many other people I’m sleeping with.”

“Lady—you’re fucking the whole country!”

“I can never marry you,” I threw back.

“Oh, and have I proposed?”

“You know what I mean. This will be temporary—this—us—must be temporary until we run the natural course of falling in love.”

“So you think love has limits?”

“Love is a concept,” I replied firmly, “an illusion for the masses like religion; love is a question of willpower. You can plug it or you can fan its flames—all is controlled by reason.”

He turned on me with a grim face. “So this is all because I’m not Jewish?”

I wrapped his robe around my body and sinking into its warm protective layers, I muttered, “I’m tied to them in ways I can’t explain. They suffered too much on account of being Jewish for me to betray them. They’re my baggage.”

“Everyone suffers,” he said, “everyone has baggage.”

“I’m not talking about something that can be resolved in a few therapy sessions!” I let out a quiet mocking laugh. “I’m talking about a world where you can’t get out, where there’s no recourse but full submission—”

“How wonderful it must be to be Russian! If you ever fuck up, you just say, ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, it’s my damn culture.’ That’s precisely the kind of reasoning lawyers use in their insanity pleas for murderers.”

“Are you purposefully being an idiot?”

Anger seized his face, constricting his features, squeezing his eyes, so that only faint slivers of blue glared at me from under thick brown brows. “I don’t care how you define us—love buddies, sex mates, committed sadists—but I need the truth. If we’re going to try this thing, you have to be honest with me.”

“Listen to me: I’m not Russian anymore, not anymore! I don’t want to be Russian, not after everything I’ve done to become American. My family is my Russia now and all that’s left of it—the language and our passionate tempers and our singing. They’re wonderful, you know …”

“Are you going to let them decide who you fall in love with?”

“I owe them my life,” I cried.

“In all my years of dating, I’ve never been driven this crazy by a woman. You give me a headache, you know that?”

“That’s only because you feel like you can’t have me. If you could, the headache would be mine.”

He let out a laugh. “Dating is a cutthroat sport, and you and I—we both like to win.” I felt the floor swivel beneath me, switching our positions in this game of high-stakes chess. He caught me by the elbow, caught my fear with his eyes. “Let’s not anoint the winner just yet. Let’s go to bed and do what we do best—basic training!”

We circled each other like two enraged bulls in a ring. It was splendid, awkward, painful to be ravaged by the gnawing sensation of being led nowhere, just its own circular motion of wanting and not being able to want. I couldn’t feel his flesh or mine, only our bones mashing underneath. And at the moment of complete compression, when I could barely breathe, he disengaged from me with a start, and traced with a single finger the curvature of my exposed form.

“There’s been no one,” he spoke at last. “No one since you.”

“I too, I’ve thought and wanted—I’ve dreamed only of you,” I whispered, and felt it in my eyes and heart and back, a loud, grating knock, my body tossed on waves against a gale and dropped mercilessly on shore. I felt regret spread inside my chest, regret for speaking, for feeling, for lying here bare like an animal about to be pried open for a feast. But his countenance was startlingly kind, and his lips like two ambassadors of peace joined together in a smile.

There was something healthy and optimistic in that smile, in the blue spheres of his eyes, and in the very color of his skin—a golden brown that made one think of sand under the sweltering noon sun. He had a strong thick body that gained texture from the brown curls sprinkling his chest, and his delicately woven back tapered off like an inverted pyramid into long slender legs. As I pressed my lips against the smooth brown terrain of his stomach, I tasted salt and sweat, his inner world on my tongue. Here, here, I thought, dwelt the American spirit—inside the ridges of his muscles, sloping up his chest into his shoulders and across his elongated arms, inside the sharp squares of his jaws and generosity of his smile and shapeliness of his calves and thighs, grounding his perfect posture in the ample width of his feet, marking the shift of his body from side to side, even conveying humility to his swagger. It seemed to reside in all his indiscernible qualities that couldn’t be pinned to any specific characteristic, but simply acted as a collective, defining us according to the soil upon which we’re born. And in kissing him, I felt myself as other—the other walking, smelling, smiling, taking in the American landscape, reinventing it as my own life.