The Elusive One-Night Stand

I returned to New York in pieces, weak and depressed; only its vibrancy and anonymity and perennial crudeness gave me relief from my thoughts. There were multitudes of cranky cab drivers; gaseous exhausts from trucks and buses decreasing your lung capacity; vans and SUVs that almost ran you over as you crossed on green light; Fifth Avenue saleswomen who helped you find the exit; art gallery curators who stared you down till you were several inches shorter; outrageous fashions erupting on sidewalks on men and women, gay and straight and transgender, at whom you could gape without feeling self-conscious unless they were famous, in which case you had to jerk your head in the opposite direction to feign indifference; apartments the size of a kitchen sink in a Midwestern suburb with unobstructed views of other people’s perverse habits; and, naturally, rude people who pushed, elbowed, cursed and glared at you in the subway, and for whom you prostrated yourself and murmured “I’m sorry” as they smacked your head with their briefcases (because of the still untainted Midwestern heart you hid in your chest).

Here where every waitress, doorman, banker, lawyer, housekeeper, taxi driver, doctor, butcher, and cashier was a closet writer, painter, dancer, singer, and musician—here I belonged, specifically on the corner of 44th Street and 7th Avenue, where a neon sign read Fantasy Hotel and directed one to use the exit door to enter. On Bella’s generous loan, I called this Broadway hole my home until I got a job and a more permanent hole for myself. Murals of jungle animals were etched into walls, and a leopard-print blanket straddled the king-sized bed. There was a coffin-like compression to the space that gave one the sensation of being interred in a cage for futuristic scientific observation. The amenities included Neutrogena soap, a sink large enough to wash one hand but not two at the same time, and cheap polyester linen masquerading (in the brochure) as “Egyptian silk” that enveloped the body like a heating pad. The heater raged incessantly, puffing my face into a fiery dragon. This was a “boutique hotel,” New York’s answer to the standardized and banal Radissons, Hyatts, and Holiday Inns.

I thought wistfully of the dungeon as I perused the New York Times real estate section in search of something that would not involve begging my father for money. But every dingy studio, every dilapidated loft, every ill-heated, mold-infested one-bedroom that faced brick walls required a salary that was forty-five times the rent, in some cases seventy-five times the rent, or a co-signer in the guise of a reliable, upper-middle-class parent.

But, as Bella kept reminding me over the phone, independence did not entail a “co-signer.” She urged me to go back to NYU, to take art classes, to see someone, do something—but after the initial thrill of independence wore off (lasting approximately seven days), I descended into a terrifying depression. The memories had now pushed open a tiny porthole and spilled out, invading my mind, inhabiting public space: I saw him in coffee shops, waiting at ATMs, passing me on sidewalks, visiting random stores. Phantoms with his likeness. So I stayed in, ordered in, or failed to eat at all. I lay in my room, gazing at the neon ceiling, at lights flashing through cracks in the window, at the stiff air replete with the screams of ambulances and taxis and people clinging to each other in the morning crush. I thought of the morning he asked me, “What do you think our children would be like?” and answered himself, “I hope they’ll have your brains and my resolve!” I shuddered: children? Was I supposed to bear them? Think about them? Perhaps I had never truly imagined that he and I could be a happily married, pregnant unit, not because he wasn’t Jewish, but because it seemed like sacrilege to marry someone you loved.

Like a foot in my gut, the sensation of his touch would roll through me and I would hold the concave space that used to be a stomach in my arms. Nothing could cure this howling, breath-depriving pain—not of loneliness but of loss, not of love disappointed or foolishly imagined but of love prematurely severed.

I put Adrienne Rich between my naked thighs, Betty Friedan on my chest, Elizabeth Cady Stanton on my navel, Simone De Beauvoir on one shoulder, Virginia Woolf on another, and Judith Butler on my forehead, where veins and nerves converged. I read: He is the Absolute, the essential; she is the Other, the inessential, always defined in reference to HIM. I read: a woman has no space, no privacy to create. I read: women were hung from a tree or squeezed in tight clothes, or trampled by feet to speed up their labor. I read: there is a strain of homosexual women who are not attracted to other women but want to be the equals of men—to be recognized as men. I read about prisons and enslavement, about how the institution of marriage bound and tied us, threw away our wills, and felt the decompression of my body, the swift advance of hindsight and insight, the timely contextualization of my mind, breasts, hips, vagina, and thighs.

I saw him as my prisoner now: the enemy, the subjugator, the Man. In the pure realm of womanhood, in this unadulterated strain of feminism, love could not exist. There was only one struggle, the struggle against men, and it rejuvenated me like a shot of adrenaline administered to a still heart.

Look at my women, my strong, powerful, beautiful yellers—how they hollered their whole lives against injustice, only to dismiss their woes with a coarse rejoinder: “that’s just the lot of being a woman—so why complain?” When my grandmother came home with two buckets of water after walking for sixty kilometers by foot through mud, Grandfather got angry because dinner wasn’t ready and knocked the buckets down, spilling precious water across the floor. Grandmother screamed, “You spineless, hysterical pussy!” and then she lifted the empty buckets onto her sore back and began the trek again. Blyat, whore, they called any woman who slept around, flirted indiscriminately, performed fellatio, staked out her territory, verbalized her desire, divorced men and found other men, spat on society’s double standards; blyat, whore, they called themselves. This moral language was tailored to describe women: sex conceived as a moral act, desire equated to bitchiness, unnaturalness, perversion. Yeshche shto zahotela? What else could she possibly want or rather how dare she want any more than this, this glorious life? These epithets were meant to implore us to lead the “good” life. Yet try applying them to men: consider for humor’s sake the case of my own father. His transgression was an acceptable by-product of our Russian cultural mores, caused inevitably by my mother’s wild, implacable nature. Hers was unacceptable, a threat to family and the state of marriage, inexplicable in the context of Father’s mild temper. But if you really want to be confused ask my women who they are and, without flinching, they’ll say, “we are the men.”

I placed the feminist texts upon my body, to cure the wounds inflicted on my women, to cleanse my system of empathy, sentimentality, defeat, to channel Erica Jong and seek out sex as a refutation of love’s entanglement with desire. A detangling, I called it. The very detangling I had intended that very night in La Cote Basque, as nothing but the act in itself. Grandmother won’t appear on the wall, and there won’t be any fluttering of possibility, of continuation, of emotion. The moment shall be circumscribed in space and time, restricted to my loins; I shall fuck for fuck’s sake. A one-night stand, at last consummated and accomplished, will be my flag staff raised in times of war.

So it came to pass: I went on bar excursions—to seek them out—my death-defying, feminism-activating one-night stands. They were like a cold or flu or a venereal disease, I thought, all I have to do is stick my tongue out to get it. I wore the same thing: black leather pants, stretching like ready-to-snap gum across my buttocks, a woven Lycra shirt tied at the open back by a crisscrossing rope, which made the bra an impossibility, and wrathful burgundy lipstick. This was not romantic leather like the kind I wore to La Cote Basque—this was I-loathe-men, dominatrix whipping, frothing, I-don’t-give-a-fuck leather. I made out indiscriminately with one man and another and yet another. I was a phantom following the instructions laid out in that ancient bible of seduction, watching myself from above: those pathetic hair flips and effortlessly winking eyes, sipping my chocolaty beer, pretending to be drunk, twisting my hips, arching my back, thrusting my breasts forward and up, up, up into the sky, to find the next man, the next escape. I danced everywhere: in hip discotheques in West Village and Chelsea, in run-down bars with dance floors somewhere between 10th Avenue and the river, in a seedy Irish pub in East Village with no dance floor where I squeezed in between chairs, between chests and backs, still dancing, still making music with my body out of a perennial internal beat. Can you see my admirers—smiling, hands clapping, eyes grasping, seizing, stroking my ego, egging me on. Some of the men took me to their places or I took them to mine. My oeuvre contained an intellectually riveting but sensually challenged lawyer; a happily married tourist lacking in irony; a self-adoring, gauche, cock-stuck-to-the-forehead banker; a long-haired, Jesus-look-alike, spewing-theories-about-existence-out-of-his-ass graduate student; and so it went. Their hands groping, tongues wagging, eyes admiring, wanting, none of them bathing me in pleasure—was I bathing them? Even in the actual world of rooms, where I would look up at the ceiling and a condom would pop out of a man’s wallet and he would pull it upon his member, speaking in that alien language called “sexual talk,” and I seemed “wet” and he would say, invariably, “you’re so wet,” as if to highlight his victory, even then, especially then, I felt lost, mentally removed. And when they moved, their faces interchangeable, inside me, I’d turn my head to the side, a patient on an operating table, anesthetized, told not to look, mining the memory vault for a moment of intimacy with Eddie. Against my will, he’d come to me, whispering, why are you doing this to yourself? And with my will, I’d kill him—blot out his image, his eyes, his warmth, his touch. All the men I slept with had one thing in common: they were all handsome, implacable in their physical perfection, and I adored the process of undressing them, of discovering their beauty fully, for I watched them as an artist. Not as a woman, never as a lover. One night I tap-danced on a bar table, not in drunken stupor but with a clear head, hitting my forehead on a low hanging chandelier; the bartender iced the bump in the backroom and stuck his tongue between my parted lips, sliding his fingers under the shirt’s crisscrossed ropes to encircle my breasts, and then his penis suddenly parted my thighs, and that was that. Quick, visceral, inconsequential. Was this what women and men called “fun”? Was this the life of the eternal bachelors who renounced marriage and children and love? Or was this a glimpse of the undead, the vampires, the zombies, those heroes of American goth, descending on the night, offering their gift of the eternal casual-sex purgatory? With horror, I recalled my sister—did she too dance with the undead? Would I too end up home in black with my hair cropped and married to Alex?

I wanted to die, be done with myself. I wanted to get this life out—out—of me. None of it mattered. If I had sex it wouldn’t matter. If I didn’t it wouldn’t matter either. I was alone. Without love, without Eddie, without wanting and feeling and yearning for this other soul, I felt broken, my limbs weakened, my face caught in a perpetual shadow. Whatever wars I had been waging—against chauvinism, anti-Semitism, anti-immigrantism, anti-humanism: all of them dead, all of them meaningless. The thought of going to my family for help was the un-thought; it made death seem like a salve. And the idea that I was depressed or that a therapist could offer a modicum of relief—a dissecting-pain-talk marathon with a stranger—was as foreign to me as the English language had once been. Some characteristics never penetrate, never assimilate. In some ways I was still as Russian as Grandmother’s vobla … oh vobla, how I yearn for my briny vobla …

What does it really mean to survive this life? Where was one supposed to find the strength to lift one foot in front of the other and greet one’s allotted slice of sunlight for that day? How was one supposed to seal the memory banks, the heart valves, the constant trickle of disappointment and meaninglessness, and say here begins another day—not as a shot at happiness or joy or inner peace but simply as an opportunity to not die—to not drown in your hotel’s cracked bathtub, or “accidentally” leap toward the oncoming 1 or 9 train? To survive this life took guts, willpower, resilience, ingenuity; it took the abrupt, almost physical surrender to an old nagging desire: to paint!

The Androgynous Woman

The International Art Coalition of New York was an imperious school in midtown Manhattan. Instead of degrees at the end of its three-year apprenticeship program, the school produced showings—its focus was not simply to teach but to give birth to working artists. The place attracted corporate sponsors, gallery curators, private patrons, and ambitious youth. With its stellar reputation in the art world and promises of stardom, the Art Coalition was notoriously difficult to get into, and featured a fount of insane professors, stars in their own right. Professor Grayhart once mentioned it to me, and so I walked up to the front office, asked for an application, and was ushered into a studio. The lady at the front desk said, “We have an outreach program—you can paint in one of our public studios, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the class schedule.”

The elevator opened onto a massive room with fifteen-foot windows and aluminum pipes crisscrossing the ceiling. The stench of acrylic and turpentine stunted the air. Canvases shrouded in gray sheets and black garbage bags were piled against cement walls like priceless artifacts waiting to be unveiled. Active canvases in the throes of creation beamed from wooden stands, and the paintbrushes appeared to the unaccustomed eye like dancers who, independent of their masters, leapt from bottles into grotesque easels and settled with brilliant poise upon virgin canvases, erasing with one chassé, one pirouette, one grand jeté the chaos you felt upon entering the room.

Young-looking, disheveled countenances peered at me suspiciously. They sipped their coffees, edging away from their canvases intermittently to chat with each other. But for the most part, their socializing appeared guarded and stingy, their smiles carefully circumscribed in restraint, hiding from each other their fantasies, their grandiose ambitions, their already intoxicating stories of success.

I set a place for myself in a corner that was cut off from the rest of the room, shadowed by columns, illuminated only by elusive sunspots.

I didn’t know how many hours passed or where the painters went, but when I stepped away from my canvas not a soul breathed around me. The other canvases were either shrouded or simply gone. The sky beamed New York’s nocturnal pink light. Pain pulsed under my shoulder blades, my spine turned crooked, my fingers groaned from old age, swelling with arthritis, hardening into paintbrushes, as if they too were made from fine Italian wood. My torso was frozen at a sixty-degree angle, and to unglue it, I bent it in the opposite direction in vain. My eyes swam in red webs, and my stomach had contracted to the width of cardboard. Food had become a distant memory, though I vaguely recalled swallowing a blueberry muffin whole.

The image itself, an unfinished figure in a purple dress, had started out as a woman. But as the night progressed the body stiffened, the face grew into a square. Above its red-lined angry mouth, the eyes had become callous and the forehead protruded beneath a short black mane. The jaws cut out of brown shadows denoted a stubborn man. Yet the purple dress fell away to reveal a woman’s breast. The androgynous figure teetered on the edge of a chair, tied and bound by purple ropes that resembled headless snakes, trapping her inside their own circular life.

I wrestled with the stubborn colors, ominous and bitter, a vision of an aging queen, a muse of wrath, a disillusioned woman so overcome with grief she has turned into a man. I swam invisible inside her mouth—I owned the muscles on her face, the stern reproof in her cat eyes that warned of bitch-fests, of diatribes, of war. I was speaking through her, at her, for her.

Stripped of this feminine body, I was a man. Inside that man, I was a woman. The soul was subdivided into a thousand Matryoshkas; inside each head the head of the opposite sex loomed, the characteristics through each unscrewing growing indistinguishable from each other.

I needed to lighten the purple ropes that had grown too dark but my fingers weakened and released the paintbrush. Flaws seemed to have multiplied from the will to perfect, and a wave of impotence washed over me. I crawled into the purple prison, pitying myself. A mass of translucent curtains fell over my soul, gaining whiteness and a presence. I could feel it shifting around me and then—I could barely breathe—something held me in a large warm palm. I was no longer afraid. I said, “Is that You, God?” but no one answered. “God, is that You, God, God …” I kept repeating until exhaustion overtook me and I laid my head gently on the cement floor and closed my eyes.

I awoke to the sound of a striking voice. “No, no, Mr. Kilburn, no, you’re not early, we’re late—we’re late! If you don’t take this class seriously or the work we do here seriously then you have no place behind a canvas. Because painting is serious business,” the voice pursued. “It is as serious as law and medicine, as serious as saving another person’s life, because the life you’ll be saving is your own! The paintbrushes must become your friends, as dear to you as your ten fingers. So pick them well, treasure them, know their agility and limitations, because they will signal the limitations in yourselves.

“Now paint!” The woman appeared to be the commander of an army, and the students dropped their heads simultaneously, their collective gaze seizing the nude as if on cue. A model in her early fifties was sprawled on a leopard rug; her legs appeared to be attached to invisible stirrups, mimicking the act of labor. Behind her a cage contained a startling orange lizard, which, I later learned, was an import from the island of Tobago. The animal swished and hissed, staring occasionally at its own tail. One cloudy eye would widen under sharp scales and look at the students with human wonder. I missed my wounded blue-green iguana, my savior, my strange friend. When I stopped by Natasha’s apartment the first week I arrived in the city, to get the last of my mail, she told me that the animal passed away the day after I moved out.

The students were told to paint the woman and the lizard superimposed upon each other; they were to paint the natural world in an unnatural setting, art superimposed upon the artifice of modern life.

I wanted to sprint from my concrete bed and join them—what wonder, what freedom—but I couldn’t move a single joint. Pain gripped every bone, pinched every nerve. I groaned as quietly as I could but the lizard, as though on purpose, grew still and looked at me. And the students following her lead now shifted their gaze onto me.

“Let’s see what the gods have dragged in this morning!?” the teacher cried, and the entire class burst into joyous laughter.

“An excellent case of androgyny, I’d say,” she went on, focusing only on my painting, skimming over me as if I were a metal pole. “Add a touch of navy to the purple ropes to give her more definition and fix the fingernails—they look like dirty pancakes.”

“Thank you,” I said meekly.

She laughed. “Don’t be afraid, speak up—what is your name, oh most dedicated of artists?”

“Emma Kaulfield,” I whispered.

“Louder,” she demanded.

“Emma, Emma Kaulfield—I don’t belong—I’m not in the Coalition—I just wanted to use the studio—” I stammered.

“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” she said with a laugh. “Anyone who spends a few nights stinking of turpentine, rejects the comforts of her own bed, and who, I imagine, hasn’t had a real meal in quite some time belongs here, among us, don’t you all agree?” She seemed so beautiful and confident, despite the miniature size of her body and the delicate face, that in my sleepless daze I thought I glimpsed giant wings upon her back.

I knew who she was: the great Fredericka Unitcheska, known for the looseness and inventiveness of her classes and her bravura style of teaching with its hard, militant edge. She was the infamous 1960s French painter who was the only female member of the Imbolists, a movement that defied convention by exploring sexual content through rapid free-floating strokes as a conceptual representation of unremitting change. Imbolism had its etymological roots in nineteenth-century Immoralism, but had acquired political overtones, requiring its devotees to plant revolutionary seeds in society’s fat conventional underbelly. Unitcheska first made her mark with her distinct study of reptiles on canvas, which she painted from memory (rumor had it) of her childhood in London brothels, where her mother belly-danced with a python. Her mother (it was said) was a descendent of Spanish gypsies and her father may have been an English lord, and her mother’s most loyal customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Paintings I Left for Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A show—you mean like in a gallery?”

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

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

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

The Waitress in Black

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Making a living,” I retorted with pride.

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

“Oh, no, I decided to cut myself off—I want to make it on my own.”

“That’s just where you were when I met you—living in the dungeon, wanting to be a starving artist and yet somehow you were never starving. Are you finally starving now?”

“And what happened to you—they finally let the prisoners out on a Saturday? Or is Norton Bank on a firing spree?” I inquired, consciously wanting to be cruel.

“Very funny! Actually, I’ve been promoted”—he paused, his face tilting humbly to the floor—“to managing director.”

“So now they’ve given you carte blanche to fire anyone you want! Did you by any chance fire that mudak Eric?”

“Funny you should mention him—he just got promoted to senior analyst.”

“Oh.” I considered for a second telling him the truth about Eric, but my mouth wouldn’t open.

“You look different,” he said.

I wanted to ask “good or bad different?” to fall back into the safe zone of being evaluated by him, but I fought against this execrable weakness. “Yes, I’ve reinvented myself, you might say—painting full time now—that is, when I’m not serving.”

“Or being picked up by your customers.”

“Ah, good to know you still have all of your eavesdropping skills intact.” We stared at one another with such intensity that there was no other alternative but to laugh. I wondered why we weren’t more awkward together, why our tense banter was causing us such piquant euphoria.

“Waitress!” I heard the teenager cry out, “waitress, yoo-hoo, where are you?”

“Grant still talks about you,” he said.

“I have to go.” I looked at him with longing and my skin burned, my ruby cheeks giving me away. I wanted to ask—do you want to have coffee with me—but I caught his eyes traveling over several tables and landing on a striking, tall brunette. She was motioning to him with her hands, and her annoyed expression pierced my stomach with the force of a bullet.

“Hey, if you get a chance, give me a call sometime and we’ll do coffee. We should stay friends,” he offered, turning halfway toward her.

“Oh, Ignatius, don’t you remember—I’m too sexual for friendship with men.”

The smile vanished. His voice, hard and remote, said, “I remember you.” I remembered him—the way he looked in the morning in a T-shirt and black boxer shorts, his muscular calves pressed against the leather couch, the Wall Street Journal rustling in his lap, a mug of black coffee in his hand, his gaze lost in small print, swimming past me and yet always, with the corner of one eye, reeling me back in. I used to wonder in secret: what alien textures, smells, sights are these—am I just a fly trapped in your world?

“Lady, I don’t have all day,” someone hollered from a table I forgot was mine.

“I have to go,” he said after a long pause and then headed toward her—the immaculately pretty creature who reminded me of a fairy with her miniature lips and turned-up nose and wide-set quizzical eyes.

“Hey, Eddie,” I called out. He twisted halfway toward me. “I’m having an exhibition of my work at this small gallery next week. It’s really no big deal, really.”

“Wow, an exhibition—congratulations! I’m impressed.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to come—well, in either case, there’ll be lots of people and you could bring your friend.”

His expression went mute.

“I’d like that,” he said after a long pause, starting to walk away. “I’m so glad you didn’t give up on yourself—I mean on painting.”

“January 15th at the Fern Gallery, eight o’clock,” I called after him, “three blocks down from Nebu—”

“Where we met—”

“Yes, though you’d never think it’s a gallery—”

“Hey, I’m happy for you,” he said, turning away.

“Thanks. Merry Christmas!” My voice was loud, peppy.

He shifted halfway, and with an open generous smile, replied, “Happy Hanukkah!”

But somehow he sounded distant, and within seconds, his tall broad frame bent apologetically before her. I wanted to run after him, to remind him that January 15, 1998, exactly a year ago, was the day we saw each other for the second time and we began this—this thing I couldn’t bring myself to call a relationship because the word was too prosaic to capture what we had, what we still had. But I remained in the same spot, my feet planted in imaginary sand that was rapidly disappearing. And in its wake, water spread and closed around me: an anthropomorphic ocean with a swaying torso and globular arms and a headless voice that roared—I shall swallow you in my black foam—until my head crashed against a reef, until my pain felt insurmountable, until the call, “Waitress, waitress, waitress!” struck my head like a singular shard of glass splitting my skull in half. Other waiters and busboys took over my tables. Ghigash, the manager, fumed behind his imperious host’s podium. But I couldn’t move; I saw him settle next to her, her mouth zigzagging in nervous strokes, wondering, asking what I would have asked had I been her: “Who is she?” He told her the truth, I was certain of that, because he didn’t care for lies, because he laid himself bare like a jigsaw puzzle with every piece secured in its assigned place—and if she didn’t like it, he would open the door and ask her to leave. I imagined he cared even less now because of what I had done to him.

At last I unlocked my face, my feet, my arms, and, shifting slowly toward the three men, said with some composure, “I’m sorry.”

“An old boyfriend?” Frank, the psychic, noted.

“Yes.” What did it matter if I was honest with these strangers? “An ancient one.”

“So how about a new, modern one—our man Aaron here is a prime candidate!” Frank sounded wonderfully, oddly reassuring.

“I guess coffee never hurt anyone,” I said with a wink at Aaron, and with the sudden ease and suavity of an old courtesan, I wrote my number on a napkin. Aaron’s expression brightened and his small, pale mouth unwound into an eager smile.

As they left, Aaron sang out, “I’ll call you, I’ll definitely call you,” forgetting the advice he had received from his advertising buddies: never seem too eager, too available, too desperate. But I wanted desperate—with the way I felt at that moment, only the desperate could heal me.

I watched the three men head toward the revolving door of the diner. I told myself to look away but it was too late: Eddie’s hand was pressed into the girl’s back as they pushed their way out the door. I felt something tear in my stomach and my legs weaken in preparation for a fall, but I stood where I was—Ghigash was eyeing me with contempt and the teenager was hollering at her parents. “Why do you always say these embarrassing things, like you’re from the boonies? Wish I was dead!” The parents looked dumbstruck, or as they say in good Russian, “like folks who’ve been doused in buckets of shit.” I gave the father the check and smiled reassuringly, as if he and I and his wife suffered from the same malaise. And the truth of it struck me: the three of us toiled under the same self-serving delusion—that what we love necessarily loves us back.

I ran outside into the merciless air. Ice-laden snow slapped my cheeks, whirred up my nostrils, pummeled my eyes. My austere black uniform became drenched in seconds. The cotton hardened into sheet metal. Still, I pushed ahead, fighting the wind and snow with my shivering arms and unseeing eyes, stumbling over the steps of some building, some bank whose neon lights flashed blue inside my head. I tumbled to the ground. It didn’t seem real that he didn’t love me anymore. Not love me—how is that possible—why me? And this thought pulled me down, taking with it my sense of self, my beauty, my confidence, even my art.

Then I saw it—a jittery shadow crept across the snow like a hallucination or a disjointed dream. I looked up and there he was, trying to out-scream the traffic: “What the hell are you doing to yourself?”

“Why are you here?”

“Have you lost your mind? Is this part of your artistic martyrdom?”

“Don’t be such an ass, don’t be such a conceited ass!” I spat under my breath, glaring at the snow.

“C’mon, get up and put something on—get your coat from the restaurant!”

“I’m not cold,” I said. “Why did you come—did you forget something?”

“I wanted to see if—”

“Where is she?”

“In a taxi—going home.”

The wind was howling at our backs, picking up speed, pushing us forward, then sideways. Wet frozen pants clung to my thighs and my tears formed a thin layer of ice on my cheeks. My chest felt bare, exposed to the cruelties of nature. Winter was repainting my blood in white. How my teeth chattered—in outrage.

“Is she your—are you together?”

“You must be freezing; come to my place,” he said, taking off his jacket and throwing it over my shoulders.

“Take your jacket away,” I said, throwing it back at him. “I’m going to catch a cab—what are you going to tell your girlfriend if she finds out I stopped by?”

“Why don’t you come over to my apartment and dry off—I’m just a few blocks south of here.”

“I know where you live, Eddie.” There was viciousness and loathing in my voice I couldn’t quite recognize. “Remember, I lived there once with you.”

“Look, I can put your stuff in the dryer, and then you’ll be on your way. If you get sick, how will you paint?”

“What do you care if I paint?” I flung back without noticing that he had wrapped his coat around me and held his hands there an instant longer than he should have, and that we had walked, one after the other, through the revolving door of his lobby.

“I care about talent, Emma, always have—”

“Eddie, stop—stop saying meaningless things—I didn’t want things to be like this.”

“What—our first meeting after the breakup to be awkward?”

“Awkward? You call this pain awkward?” I pointed at my heart.

“You never were much of a realist,” he said, laughing cruelly.

I felt a knot in my stomach at the familiarity of the marbled foyer, at Clarence greeting people with his elastic smile, and I wanted to wind time back. I waved and nodded at him, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. “Good evening, Mr. Beltrafio,” he said mechanically, and I felt invisible, as though I had long ceased to exist.

His apartment was imbued with a new floral scent. At once, I saw her imprint everywhere: a bouquet of pansies rested in a vase that had remained empty while we dated, a pink embroidered pillow sat on his couch, fur-lined beige boots leaned against the closet door, purple heart-shaped Christmas cards were arranged neatly in front of pre-addressed pink stamped envelopes on his table, a pasta maker and a cappuccino machine loomed in the kitchen next to discarded ice cream cartons—it was a full-throttle invasion, and I saw her pretty fussy face worrying over thank-you cards and wedding invitations and time!

I trembled from the sudden memory of my own presence in his apartment: what had defined me, marked me, where were my pink envelopes and embroidered pillows and ice cream buckets? He used to say to me, you’re not like other women—was I like other men? Sketches of my work used to congest his hallway corners and bedrooms. My notebooks, novels, philosophy, statistics, and probability texts grew like weeds from the floor, and Crime and Punishment in Russian lay in a perennial state of discontent on his nightstand—I read it three pages at a time in torment over this excruciatingly difficult language that I called my own. My unfinished paintings were piled against the walls of his second bedroom, and instead of ice cream cartons, empty jars of Osetra and Beluga caviar stood like testaments of his love for me in the recycling bin. The burgundy curtain that had split the living room in half was gone; only the rail on the ceiling remained, resembling an unprotected water pipe. A painting that used to hang in the living room had been taken down. In oil pastels a meticulously sculpted naked ice-blue man melted from a fire rising in the shape of a woman. I had spent days, as I had promised, painting Ignatius, forcing him to stand in the nude for hours while I struggled with color and depth and likeness. I had named it Ignatius in Flames and he had marveled at it for hours, saying it soothed his nerves.

“I thought your girlfriend looked very upset when she saw you with me,” I said. “Did you tell her who I am?”

“Stop playing games. I don’t want to regress. Stop with your idiotic jealousy—if you knew what it’s been like for me, you’d know how stupid you sound.”

“How do you want me to act—like it doesn’t matter?” I retreated, submitting to the force in his face.

“I’ve taken up photography again,” he said briskly. “I want a picture of you.”

“A memento for your future grandchildren?”

“I want to see you naked,” he said.

“What—have you lost your mind—what about her?” I pointed at the pink envelopes.

“I told you it’s not serious!” He grabbed my arm.

“Does she know that?”

“I know that competition has always been one of your secret aphrodisiacs!” He laughed at first but then his jaws clicked and the pupils widened, an internal light flaring from hatred, and then the hatred grew. He appeared to turn into a beast, a demonic creature circling above me for the kill. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them belligerently against the wall, his breath streaming in hot swathes around my throat.

“Have you lost your mind?” I cried, struggling to wriggle myself free. But he held on and I didn’t know what I feared more: what he would do to me or to himself.

“Take off your clothes—I want to watch you.”

“Watch—watch me?”

“I don’t have any respite from you,” he replied, abruptly releasing me. “You’re everywhere: in my apartment, in my cabin, even in restaurants. God, we must’ve sampled every goddamn restaurant in the city. I can’t take these women anywhere without being reminded of you. It was such luck, I thought, to have run into you—now I can try to end it, end it in a way that ends it for me—for me, do you hear me? Because I don’t want you back, Emma. I want a happy life, and—I can’t have happiness with someone I can’t trust.”

“Your mother has never—now I know that for a fact—never wanted you to end up with me!”

“What does one have to do with the other?”

“I guess I never expected it. I was optimistic, you know. I was sure it couldn’t be true. Not you, I thought, not your family.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, you can stop pretending now—don’t tell me you haven’t been apprised of your mother’s anti-Semitic views—that she only verbalized them upon meeting me!”

“What are you talking about—what views?”

“I overheard her say things like: ‘I never want my grandchildren to have Jewish blood! How will I be able to look into their eyes and not think they’re the spawn of the Devil?’”

He laughed uproariously. “And you caught this illicit evidence—when—during dinner? When your family was skewering my family in Russian?”

“No, I overheard your mother speaking in the library with your father—I spied on them, through the door and I heard her, loud and clear—”

“You heard this? Is this a joke—you expect me to believe that you spied on my parents? Are you sure you understood her?”

“Are you questioning my English?”

“No, your sanity! After what happened in your childhood, don’t you think you need to be more cautious when you accuse people? Maybe, just maybe, you’ve been so scarred that you see everything through this ugly lens? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”

I closed my eyes to make him disappear, and recalled with unambiguous horror that moment—as it spilled from memory the pitch of her outrage. I rearranged her words and then I sewed the sentences back together, arriving at the same conclusion with which I began. Or did my English fail me? Did my mind? Could it be that she didn’t use the word “Devil,” that I merely imagined it? Perhaps I only witnessed their mouths moving, zigzagging, reproof marring their expressions, but their voices were muffled by the French doors? Perhaps I had only sensed the truth, circled a truth, but I didn’t own it. Suddenly I didn’t trust myself. Or was it possible that the mistrust of my own mind was an elaborate subterfuge knitted by an increasingly unbearable desire? This desire blindfolded me, blurring his motives into something vague and conveniently unimportant. What does it matter, I told myself, if he’s ignorant of his mother’s vileness? Even worse, what if he knows the truth but can’t admit it? Why would he? I wouldn’t if I were him—I’d deny it, the way I denied the existence of Alex, the way I denied what I saw that day in the woods, the way I stared into Sarah’s eyes and said, “she’s lying.” Upon the final groping of my brain, I came back to the most terrifying possibility of all: I wanted him so dementedly I no longer cared. I was willing to mangle my own memory, assign insanity and auditory hallucinations to my psyche, playact at forgetfulness to do the very thing I swore to never do: pretend I don’t mind—pretend anything for his love.

“You have to remember you’re in America now,” he went on, though I wasn’t sure whether this speech was intended for me or for himself. “It’s not like that here. Sure, there may be pockets of hatred here and there, in some bumble-fuck town in the middle of nowhere, but not here, not in New York, and certainly not in our home in Westchester. For all my mother’s flaws, I never heard her speak that way.” He looked at me with some strange culmination of kindness and anger in his eyes before adding, “Besides, what does it have to do with us? Her behavior in no way justifies your own—your betrayal of me was the issue at hand, still is!”

“I’m sorry, Eddie, I’m truly sorry for what I did to you,” I muttered, recalling abstractly that I had entirely fabricated my “betrayal” of him.

But he didn’t seem to hear me. He was looking past me into the enormous glass window at my back. “Look, Emma, we’ve crossed over some invisible line, from love into hatred—from hatred into hell—and we can’t go back anymore. I can’t even look at you.”

“But you are looking at me,” I broke out, beseeching him. “Perhaps you’re even seeing me—seeing me at last—or for the first time …”

“You can take a towel and robe from the closet—you know where everything is.” His face was now sheathed in his customary kindness, and his lips, as if to spite me, relaxed into their pleasant easy curve. “You can throw your stuff in the washer first, then you can put it in the dryer. After that, you can leave.”

“I’ll leave now!” I yelled, my pride swelling, aching from his mechanized, cruel rejection. I headed toward the door, but I could feel the grime caking on my pants and shirt, the freezing sensation on my back, and I stopped, wanting to be roped back in.

“Please, spare me the dramatics,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Just take care of yourself.”

“Eddie,” I called out as he moved toward the bedroom. He turned halfway toward me to allow himself an escape route, and parts of his body visibly shuddered. I imagined his fingers and toes and even his heart springing out to touch me, but his head-center was commanding him: ABORT, ABORT! “Nothing, thank you, Eddie,” I simply said. I too shall be a vision of stoicism and abnegation—I will not reach out and detach those parts of me that long for you—because I am a boulder too. Because there lie the pink envelopes on the kitchen table to remind me that this—this I—am an invasion of their home.

I moved knowingly toward the end of the hallway, where a spacious enclave, adjacent to the master bathroom, housed a giant washer and dryer. I peeled my clothes off my body, and at once the chill dissipated and warmth penetrated my skin. On the bathroom wall I caught sight of a photograph of my profile. A sliver of hope passed through my stomach—not hope for reconciliation, but hope that his feelings for me still rumbled beneath the jagged terrain that had now become his skin.

The black-and-white sly curve in my smile in the photograph brought back that weekend in Maine. Beneath the wild hair and the nose protruding into the black shadows, one could see the edge of a collarbone peeking, starkly white like a denuded bone that merged into the silver frame. Only he and I knew that we had been lounging naked on white fur, next to a crackling fireplace, and candles dripping wax brought out drastic oppositions of light and dark. That we were past an orgasm and en route to another one after he would snap forty more shots of me in different poses, that he would readjust my body, cut up my limbs with light, that he would reveal my exposed breasts, my thighs fusing together, the triangle of my navel crossing my pelvis into my pubic zone, that like my own paintings, his photographs would never draw a distinct line between my body parts and my face, granting me the gift of anonymity. He would disembody me as I had so often disembodied my subjects.

The moment stroked me again and again: the massive black concoction rising out of a duffel bag, his head leaning over my stomach, hands maneuvering the camera like a fragile infant, fingers nimbly straddling a thick long lens. “Let me do this,” he whispered, “I haven’t done this in years, but the way you look in this light … I want to capture your beauty.” He dotted the space around my body with candles—a wizard casting a spell—and his compliments, like quiet incantations, healed my mind. He had built a fire in his imperious black marble fireplace, and we listened to it crackle, listened to the buzzing chatter of crickets in the air, seeming to mimic the conversation of the flames. He arranged the candles at my ribs to illuminate, sideways, my breasts, and spreading my legs apart he set the candles between my thighs to expose me to the encroaching lens. I struggled to free myself of my body, to release my spirit into the black hovering sky, so acute the pain of arousal had become.

It was this objectification of me, I understood only much later, the quick consecutive clicks, the knowledge that he was staring at me through a lens, which with every shot seemed like an organic outgrowth of his eye—that raised the debauched underground of my desire to the surface. In between shots, he would come closer and move my body around: “I want you to relax more, let it go.” “Let what go?” I’d ask. “Fear,” he’d say and place a warm hand on my stomach as if we both agreed it resided there. “Open your body more toward me. Open your legs. And breathe.” “Breathe how?” “Breathe in and out. Normally.” “Except that my heart is jumping, running somewhere …” He put his hand between my breasts and whispered, “Breathe as if your heart has only one purpose: desire. Imagine blood pumping into your heart, opening you up from within and then—breathe!” And so I did: I sighed, panted, breathed, with urgency, with a mouth full of steam and cravings. “Yes, like that, like that, yes with your back arched, God, you look stunning … your body like that … lift your chest higher and hold it there—beautiful, Emma.” He whispered, “Keep it, keep your face still—don’t move anymore. Quiet the desire.” Quickly, he returned to the camera, as if the canvas lived inside that black mechanical concoction, and his fingers were the paintbrushes, swift and dexterous, clicking, seizing angles, shadows, translating the object into subject, cutting me up into fragments which then became images—works of art to be hung on walls of galleries, homes, museums—where eyes would greet my body and wonder curiously, how did these images get made? This process unspooled me: my legs spread, knees collapsed sideways, mouth parted, head fallen back. I felt more aroused, more stunned, more wet than I had ever felt from human touch, from any sexual encounter—this was the apotheosis of sensuality—the subversive pleasure in stillness, in being watched and devoured by a lens. He stepped away from the camera and looked at me in amazement, as if he suddenly didn’t trust its mechanics, its ability to capture me. When he stood over me again, his hands fell between my thighs, his fingers grazing, circling, entering me, then traveling like feathers along my skin. He kissed my stomach and nipples and mouth and clitoris, and whispered, “I don’t know if I can work anymore.” “Oh, but you must finish,” I urged him, laughing. “I’m in post-coital near-death bliss. Take advantage of it, and we’ll call the image The Quest for the Perfect Orgasm.” “Yes,” he said, “you’re such an acrobat with words.

“Lie still,” he said, “so that I can finish. Let me finish you. Finish this post-coital, near-death version of you. Lie still. Stop breathing, stop wanting momentarily.” He smiled. “Just momentarily.” The clicking began again, quicker and quicker, and the pulse in my veins beat into my temples, and I forced desire down my throat through the intestines where it lingered, lighting fires in my kidneys and liver, in the nether regions of my pelvis, and then down it fell, down past the thighs into my feet. And it felt like death itself, as cumbersome and final and painful, this simultaneous outpouring and containment of desire. I found myself possessed, thrown into the impossible state of wanting and not knowing how to stop the wanting. I became a machine gone defunct, unable to experience true satiety. So that in the aftermath of being photographed, during our most dazzling sex, when he lifted my body off the floor and carried me to the dining table and, with one hand, removed the candles and the cups we had drunk from and the placemats we had laid out, and with the other hand, placed my entire body on top with my legs raised and my ankles in his grip, and my eyes upon him, I felt the quiet pang of dissatisfaction. Even after the excruciatingly spastic orgasm where my body convulsed, moaned, undulated like a ribbon in his hands, even after that—in light of all that—I longed for the stillness of the lens, and blamed it for the ensuing relentlessness of my desire, for longing to be objectified, again and again. In the shower, as I scrubbed and chafed my skin with hard, angry strokes, I blamed him for having corrupted me.

How miserably I wanted to confess to him! Two days after I accepted his proposal, we were driving back into the city under the arch of a charcoal sky. Stars peered through the front window like judges weighing in on my soul.

“Eddie,” I started, “you’ve known me for such a short time. I mean everything, us, has happened so fast—”

“I know everything I need to know.” He took one hand off the wheel and put it on my knee.

“You’ve corrupted me,” I said at once. “I will never be the same person, the same girl. I will always want more.”

“More than me?”

“I don’t know,” I returned, hesitating, tracing figures in the steam that had collected on the window. At last I said, “I guess I’m afraid I will never want anyone other than you.”

“Well, then we’re good to go—we’re set for life.” He beamed at me with such openness and wonder I should have kept quiet. But I was suspicious of happiness—itching to pry it open and dangle it under the elements to test its mettle.

“Are we—are we truly set, Eddie? You never mention your mother. Have you told her?”

He held one hand on the wheel as he turned to me with surprise. “I’ve been so worried about your family’s disapproval of me that, honestly, I haven’t given her a single thought.”

“I mean when I met her I was just a girl—a girlfriend—and now, now things are different.” I still couldn’t bring myself to utter the word “fiancée,” because Alex was too closely associated with it, because the word itself felt like a parasite I needed to expunge. “Do you think she’ll want me? She seemed so particular.”

“Everyone wants you, Emma,” he cried enthusiastically, “tell me who doesn’t want you? My brother will squirm from jealousy and my father thinks you’re the most extraordinary and beautiful woman he’s ever met! His words, not mine.”

I recalled the sharp pinch of recognition, followed by a slow, dull nausea: he had conspicuously failed to mention his mother. My Russian instinct, my truth-telling, flag-waving, war-waging instinct, told me to confront him, and yet, yet, I felt secure enough, American enough to let it go—to keep it buried beneath the surface. He had already taught me to draw a line of distinction between a parent and a child, and now he wanted me to respect this distinction in him. Only it never occurred to me to wonder why he clung to it with such ferocity.

“You’ve awakened me,” I announced with glee, backtracking to that mischievous, substantially less troublesome topic of desire. “Now I can bed any man!”

He smiled widely, taking both hands off the wheel as if to crash us into the black sky.

“Yes,” he said ominously.

“Are you trying to kill us?”

“Desire has no limits,” he snapped. “I know that better than anyone. Like all things of excess, it can turn into something ugly and banal into addiction. You end up worse off than before—who knows what our true motives are? Or at least I’ve never known or understood mine. Until you—until I fell for you. Now my motives are clear; I do things to be with you. Love creates its own moral universe, I believe that, and there are breaches that cannot be undone.” He twisted his neck to face me and said, “If you ever cheat on me, Emma, I will never forgive you—do you hear me, no matter how I feel, I will not hesitate to leave.”

I let out a rickety laugh. “Don’t be melodramatic! I’m just playing with you!”

“Don’t play! Don’t play with this.” He grabbed my hand and placed it on his heart.

We didn’t speak for a while after that. I remembered my eyes closing involuntarily and sleep swallowing me as the car rocked from side to side. I awakened in the Lincoln Tunnel. “We’re in New York,” he said, and I feared suddenly that I had poisoned him with my mistrust.

“Are you all right in there? You’re taking forever—” Now I heard him mumble through the door, and felt his breath intermingling with the steam from the shower, settling on me.

“I’ll leave in ten minutes,” I said, turning off the water. My feet had pruned—how long had I been there? Was he waiting for me?

I wrapped a towel around my torso and draped another one over my shoulders and chest, so that I was completely shrouded in white. Only my dark hair hung like a black curtain over my face.

“I just put your clothes in the dryer—it shouldn’t take too long, another twenty minutes,” he said, his body frozen at the other end of the hallway. “If you want, you could borrow Melanie’s pants and sweater—I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

I couldn’t speak; until that moment I hadn’t connected a name to the pink envelopes.

“I’m sure she would,” I said after an agonizing pause. “Look, if you can’t stand to have me here a minute longer, I can put my wet clothes on and leave—I’ll leave right now!”

“No, it’s not that.”

“What it is then?”

“You know perfectly well what it is. Don’t look at me with those eyes—you forget how well I know you. I don’t have to spell it out for you.”

“Then don’t!” I screamed and rushed toward the dryer. My clothes were roiling in an empty machine, smashing against the metal like the cry of someone drowning, gasping for air, gasping inside of me, and I thought quickly, consciously, that if I were to finish this great act of self-destruction, the minute I would step into the merciless wind and snow, my clothes would freeze on my skin and I would ride in the taxi half-dead, in the throes of pneumonia. But as he refused to move toward me, as that smug, scornful grin continued to crimple his face, I wanted to go on—to spite, to bite, to loathe. I was too vain, too proud, too confident to let pneumonia or death prevent me from declaring war. I yanked open the dryer and pulled the soaking clothes out.

One hand tightened the towel around my body, while the other hand tried to push one leg through a dripping, cold pant leg. I bent like an acrobat gone catatonic in the middle of an ambitious backward flip, all the while trying not to drop the towel. Still balancing on one leg, I managed at last to get the clinging pant leg up to one knee. My muscles stiffened from the wet cloth, both legs froze, and I teetered sideways like a dejected human triangle. He was watching me, his eyes fixed on the towel shifting over my thighs, riding up my hips, the edges coming apart as I struggled with the pant legs. He was closing in on me, exuding his familiar scent. Let me not smile, dear Lord, or beam like an idiot or emit the shrieks of a fornicating baboon. He slammed the lid of the machine shut with such vigor that I almost passed out from delight, and then he pulled the wet pants down my legs with enough force to peel away my skin. He rose back up, slowly, his eyes climbing up my calves, between my thighs, gliding over the towel, without touching me. From the waist down, I felt raw, skinless, and then a finger—a single index finger drew a line from my collarbone to the knot of the towel between my breasts.

“It was a mistake to come here,” I murmured, shutting my eyes. I felt suffocated by the emptiness in my ribs, by the sharp ache of wanting and resisting. I clutched the towel with both hands.

“Don’t touch me, don’t look at me.” I shivered.

“Why not?” he said, “why not? We’re past everything, you and I.”

“Why are you with someone else?”

“What did you expect—that I’d join the priesthood and wait for you?” He laughed, flaunting his pleasure.

“I had hoped that you’d at least mourn us—not jump right in—how long has it been, three months at most?”

“Ah, but now we’re even.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing all along—avenging me?”

“It doesn’t feel good, does it—to know you’re competing with someone else. Did you really think you’re the only one who can play that game?”

“How did you know I’d be working at the restaurant—why did you come there?”

“It was a coincidence,” he said.

“You’re lying!”

“I called your sister.”

“So you wanted me to see you with this other girl—you did this on purpose?”

“It wasn’t a grand scheme, if that’s what you’re wondering. I didn’t give it that much thought. But maybe it was a subconscious act—to give us both clarity.”

“Clarity?” I laughed, full of bitterness. “Is that what we’re after—does Melanie know that you’re playing a game at her expense?”

“Don’t play the considerate feminist with me, I beg you! I know you, remember!”

“I wasn’t purposefully trying to hurt you! It’s not just about you. I needed to decide the rest of my life!”

“How do you know it’s any different for me? How do you know if the rest of my life isn’t hanging in the balance?”

“What do you mean?”

He paused and turned from me. His eyes acquired a scorching cobalt hue in the gray afternoon sun. “This is my way of mourning.” His voice trailed off.

“You’re using her,” I whispered.

“No, I’m using you,” he said and with his index finger, I could see it through half-opened lids, he reached between my breasts and undid the towel, letting it drop to the floor. I stood naked before him as I had stood so many times before, only this time I felt the cruelty of exposure, the deprivation of privacy and power. He could see my heart as it was, extracted from my ribcage and perspiring on top of my chest. Here, take it, I wanted to shout, you’ve taken away everything else. Yet he seemed not to care; he could see it and still, he fingered it, mocked it—my poor dislodged heart.

When my body collided against his, his clothes seemed to transform into rough skin, hostile to my own, and even after he had torn off his jeans, shirt, and underwear, his skin still remained rough. Yet he clung to me as I did to him, with the same voraciousness and desperation. “I missed you,” he mumbled, frantically kissing my eyes and cheeks and neck and breasts. We stood, entangled, transfixed in time. I had never seen him this naked before. The tenderness in his eyes was so peculiar, so aberrant on his thick masculine face, that for an instant I felt that I had glimpsed the countenance of a woman.

He bent between my feet and threw my wet clothes back in the dryer and pushed the start button, and that too aroused me—his nose grazing my calves and knees as he rose from the floor. The dryer rumbled in my head. He lifted my naked body onto the washer, pinning me against its cold metal surface, and it thawed between my parted thighs. I blinked from tears, from seeing his head burrow between my legs, his mouth kissing the insides of my thighs, devouring me there—the burning space in between—and then I screamed from the pleasurable torture of being tickled and then pried open, from inferno breaths unlocking a slick cool tongue. When at last I sang—a soprano’s mournful treble—he stood up to face me, to lock me in his torrential gaze, to connect me to all my senses again, to my blurry eyes, wet with grief and pleasure, to my humming ears, to his fingers prying me open again, his mouth on my breasts, circling my face but never touching my lips. Why, why won’t you kiss me? And yet I knew why. With his weight slamming against my pelvis, he entered me roughly, madness riling between us. And when his movement gained a beat in a staccato rhythm, and then grew into a long, ceaseless crescendo, my mind fell away and watermarks burgeoned on my chin and neck and stomach like time marking my descent to old age. Yet all I value now, the only thing that has escaped memory’s cross oblivion, is the sensation of the moment when his index finger lingered near my sternum, when it invaded the space between wanting and resisting, when his clothes became grafted onto my skin, when my knees wobbled and then gave out from the pressure of wanting him so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Apology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why don’t you let me run?”

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

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

The Long, Tortuous Trajectory of Great Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By nine o’clock, the place roared with excitement; people were streaming into the foyer in droves, piling their coats on hangers and counters, their faces red and pinched by the cold. We had no idea how Linda managed to greet four or five people at once, with her hands and eyes darting in opposite directions, and her face drenched in a constant oily glow of pleasure. But that’s what she needed to do: for rather than pricing our paintings before the opening, the way established galleries did, Linda preferred the high-pitched frenzy of an auction. She felt that her method of smelling desire in the buyer—of gauging exactly how much they were willing to part with and asking for just a smidgen more—would yield the greatest profit. She was a natural saleswoman, she confided in us, she could have gone corporate if she didn’t still have her ideals. I watched her sell Stone’s Boa Constrictor with the rapidity of a train crash: “Sold!” she’d say out loud to spawn more desire, “Sold!” to prevent the interference of rational thought. “Don’t you love this?” Linda murmured to me, “people are asking to meet you—someone wants to buy the Prehistoric Children,” she said. “What are they offering?” I asked. “Three-hundred and fifty dollars.” It took me five months to finish this painting, I lamented bitterly to myself, but out loud I asked to meet them. We pushed past a crowd gathered in front of Nixon as a Rattlesnake, down the corridor and into the back room where my paintings hung. There were noticeably fewer people here, but they appeared to my eager eye to be more engrossed in my paintings, to be—as I fantastically imagined it—embedding intricate parts of me in their languorous souls.

“Here’s the artist,” Linda exclaimed, situating me in front of a bald man and a handsome woman in a glittering yellow dress.

“We’re so impressed,” the woman murmured, “the colors are so understated, and yet the emotions are large and alive!”

“There’s real passion in your work!” the bald man next to her said.

“My husband is already in love with you,” the wife said. “If only we had more money, but living in the city—well I’m sure you know how hard it is—oh our daughter would love this painting!”

“I’m so happy you like it,” I said, bowing my head to them.

“We’re artists ourselves in a way,” he said. “I’m a writer, and my wife is an actress; perhaps you’ve head of her newest production, The Bird, The Cat, and the Everything. It’s playing at the Kraine, an excellent off-off-Broadway theater.”

“Oh Clive, must you advertise my play to everyone?” She lowered her head bashfully and pulled a postcard from a crumbling leather purse. On skinny paper, a tiny reprint of her face accompanied a bold title: The Cat, The Bird, and the Everything, starring Bertha Fermish. I wondered vaguely if their only purpose at the gallery was to advertise her play, and the euphoria I felt seconds before in seeing my name in print vanished.

“Thank you, I’ll try to see it,” I said, taking the postcard.

“Linda says the price is 350 dollars—but would it be possible—I know this isn’t customary—to give us a discount?” the woman said. “We’d be so happy!”

A tall, exquisitely groomed man in a shimmering black suit stomped in front of us, and after a perfunctory glance at Prehistoric Children, lasting a total of four seconds, demanded to know the price.

“Four hundred,” Linda trilled.

“All right,” the man said, “I’ll take it.”

“But you already gave it to these people—I want this couple to have it,” I protested.

Linda smiled at the couple, and then pulled me to the side.

“This isn’t a bazaar, Emma, this is a business. Highest bidder wins.”

From the corner, I watched her scribble the word “sold” under my painting and usher the man into her office, his checkbook glued to the palm of his hand. The actress and her husband bowed their heads in humility and shuffled out the door.

After the initial sale, my paintings took on a sudden momentum. My Secret Chanterelle went to the gay couple who perceived the influence of Balthus in my work. The Child-Mermaid went to a fashionably attired lady in “finance” who declared it a “great bargain and a future masterpiece.” The First Cigarette went to a wealthy, diamond-sprouting woman in her sixties, an old friend of Unitcheska and a patron of the Fern Gallery. She too had wanted Prehistoric Children, but settled on my grandfather, whom she felt perfectly captured her egotistical ex-husband. Girl Under a Green Umbrella went to a pregnant couple who felt that the verdant tones set against a gray sky would perfectly match their green-hued nursery.

But The Monster, as Lydia had predicted, appealed to no one. I clung to the hope that it would remain untouched, but an hour later I discerned a gathering of three people around it.

“Such interesting use of color,” I heard a woman in white mink remark, “so much gray and then suddenly this outpouring of red.”

“And the strokes here really evoke a sense of movement, of time, of continuity,” an older gentleman in a tweed jacket noted.

“Yes,” their companion agreed, “I think it’s an excellent portrayal of a winter storm.”

“What is that white thing in the center—is that a face?” the older man asked. “I think I see eyes.”

“It looks like some kind of meditation on the elusiveness of existence,” the woman observed.

“These artists nowadays—none of them have any serious training.” An older woman in a blonde wig appeared out of nowhere. She could have put forth any idiotic theory and it would have sounded plausible on account of her age and sharp aristocratic features.

How I wanted to push them aside and tape their tongues to their noses! How many years had it taken me to gather the courage to bring color to canvas that was the exact replica of the color in my head, the color that was also voice, memory, confession. How many months of sketching and re-imagining it in its various disguises, in its palatable form!

It wasn’t merely personal but political—outrage at the suffering of all children mapping the scars that Stalin’s supreme manias left behind. The child’s face was to contain universal sadness, and at its back, the trunk—the monster—was the ill-begotten offspring of human cruelty, capturing in its detailed claws and regimented bark scabs the way cruelty functioned, directing its bullets at the helpless and the weak, until the helpless and the weak rose in the social hierarchy to avenge their oppressors on the new crop of the helpless and the weak. This is not a meditation on the meaninglessness of existence, I wanted to scream, but on its painful and very present meaning—on the endless circle of vengeance, hatred, and rage.

There, in Russia, we were never alone. Even our thoughts hung like sheets in public space for inspection and approval. We were conditioned to exist without silence—to view silence as danger—to welcome interference, advice on how to live, what to say, who and what to believe, obedience as an incessant conversation. Disobedience could only live in silence, in the radical cessation of the collective voice. But here, here in America, I reveled in silence. I could shut the world out and it would let me breathe in solitude, indifferent to my miseries and pleasures. Happiness was within reach. Happiness as silence—as the impenetrable cocoon of one’s own thoughts. I didn’t have to be an artist; I could have been a statistician. I didn’t have to be a statistician; I could have stayed at home with my parents. I could have married Alex or Eddie and stayed at home with them. I could go off to Montana, buy myself a cabin and paint, and that too would be a life—a perfectly respectable life. Even if the small town’s people would gawk at me, an artist after forty, unmarried, they would leave me alone as the town’s solipsistic freak. She don’t bother me, they’d say, does she bother you? Even the prejudice I’d experience upon telling someone that I was Russian or Jewish would slide off of me, off of them over time, over my efforts, over the work I’d do. I was an individual, a separate entity from my mother and grandmother, from my father and sister, and from the men I loved or didn’t love. If I uttered a peep against the chorus of peeps, no one would arrest me. If I wanted to fight, to carry slogans, to roar behind a podium, a road block would be set up to prevent cars from interfering with my speech.

Someone had left an umbrella on the floor next to my foot, and I picked it up—its sharp, almost knife-like edge glistened in the gallery’s precise light. Holding it tightly between my fingers with its edge pointing down, I came between the older gentleman and the ginger-haired woman.

“Excuse me,” I said, moving in front of them.

“You’re blocking our view,” they said, unaware.

“I’m the artist,” I said.

“Oh,” they murmured in a chorus, “there’s so much we’ve wanted to ask you—what does it really mean?”

“Torture,” I replied. And with a sudden violent jerk of my hand, I struck the sharp point of the umbrella into the center of the painting, piercing the canvas and the wall, and then, with a note of relief, pulled it out. A small hole now marked the body of the phantom-child. The hole seemed strangely congruous with the red ruby eyes scattered across the trunk, but the canvas was ostensibly ruined.

The room went aghast. The strangers’ mouths were still open when I turned to face them. They staggered back in fear, for they suspected that if I could puncture a living painting, I could puncture their flesh as well. “No,” I wanted to scream, “I’m sane—emotional but sane, broken hearted but sane, supremely depressed but perfectly sane!” But it was too late. Minds were fast at work. I could see their thoughts on their foreheads: well for crying out loud—what in the world—who is this crazy fucking bitch? Whenever civilization is interrupted by a socially inappropriate act, an act that has the potential to unravel it, human beings begin to feel as if they too could be infected by the “crazy” disease. It’s important in such cases to promptly remove the threat. An ambulance will arrive any minute and carry me out on a white stretcher, I convinced myself, when suddenly out of the stultifying silence came this:

“Brilliant,” a man exclaimed, “absolutely brilliant!”

“I see it too—” the mink-clad woman agreed enthusiastically, “the painting has gained a new meaning.”

“So this is what they mean by performance art! How absolutely riveting and fresh!”

“Do you need serious training to do performance art?” a fortyish man asked, whom I recognized as a homeless man on my street.

“I want it,” the gentleman in the tweed jacket announced, “it might be valuable one day.”

“It’s valuable already!” Linda descended on the crowd like a circus-trained tiger.

A man whose throat was wrapped in a pink scarf and whose head was pinched by a gray-checkered cap was taking copious notes. My recurring reverie whizzed by, and I deduced between ecstatic breaths that he was a critic from ART magazine. Things are happening, I serenaded myself, not in spite of the hole, but because of it! Other people were trickling in to investigate the source of the commotion.

“It must have been planned—the hole is dead center—pure genius!”

“But what does it mean?”

“It’s an expression of the rupture of our society—of our morals and values—of the way the Internet will ruin all our lives—”

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“Someone mentioned that the artist is from Russia?”

“Perhaps it’s a meditation on her double identity. There’s a hole in all of us—and through it our many identities seep from one into the other—it’s about the fluidity of identity.”

“I hardly agree—there’s something monstrous here, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Maybe you’re referring to the fact that the painting is called The Monster.”

The admiration in people’s voices and their conspiratorial laughter passed through my body like the pleasurable currents of a lethal drug, administered only to the incurably vain. How I beamed at all of them—how I marveled at my impulsive act!

“I’ll take it for two thousand!” someone thundered from the back of the room, and in that instant all my pleasure turned to dread.

“I’ll raise it to two thousand five hundred,” someone else shouted and the auction went into full swing. Linda’s face ignited, her voice rose. “Three thousand, do I hear three? Yes, we have three thousand from the gentleman in the back.” More people streamed in; the room was engulfed in hysteria and commotion.

I felt it then—his eyes drilling into the back of my head. I shifted my body in a half-circle, cautiously, and then I saw him at the back of the room, gripped in an artificial stillness. He wore a sleek nocturnal suit with a crisp white shirt and yet another striped variation of his signature maroon tie. There, at the corners of his mouth, danced his easy habitual smile. The room vanished from my field of vision and only he remained, only his eyes beckoned to me, bringing me within inches of his face.

“You didn’t think I’d miss your debut,” he said, grinning. He examined my black décolleté blouse, taut pants, and the amethyst pendant drawing a triangle at the base of my neck, but his eyes never settled on my face.

“So you’ve come for advice on your upcoming nuptials?” I noted in my aloof, extraterrestrial voice.

“I don’t understand you! Do you actually believe these pompous idiots, do you believe their praise? You ruined your best piece, right on time, as if to spite me—”

“Emma, I’m soooooo proud of you,” Linda crooned, descending upon us. “I honestly have no idea how I’m going to part with this incredible painting! And who is this?” Her feverish eyes latched onto Eddie. “Perhaps you’d like to make your bid on The Monster.”

“I already did—I was the initial bid for two thousand,” he replied with a polite nod.

“Oh, I wish I hadn’t sold your others quite so early,” Linda lamented to me.

“I hadn’t meant to imply that I’m not in awe of Ms. Kaulfield’s work,” Eddie intervened.

“No, God forbid.” Linda said. “Well, I must run! Do I hear five—the lady in the mink coat—yes, sold for five thousand dollars!” She had spotted an important-looking being in glitter and plowed a path through the crowd with her rakish arms and bulldozer heels. “Sold, sold!” she screamed in ecstasy.

“Is there any place we can speak in private?” he asked.

“We have nothing to say to each other,” I threw back.

“Please, Emma—I won’t take long.”

I submitted out of a sudden hope and led him up a creaking staircase into Linda’s den. You poor abused heart, still so naïve, so opulently optimistic, imagining that he has come to apologize for the punctures he left in your four ventricles.

But when I glanced at him, his face betrayed nothing: a polished mask.

The bedroom housed people’s coats and purses, and the art world’s salacious secrets. A stack of shrouded paintings leaned against a wall. Invitations to galleries, magazines, letters spilled from half-opened drawers, and slides of artwork were scattered on her oak desk. Candles burned in old wine bottles, illuminating the centerpiece: a mammoth scarlet bed.

We attempted with great difficulty to avoid eye contact with the lascivious silk bedding. There were rumors that Linda brought young male artists here after their shows and demanded gratitude for her labors. A draft blew in from a cracked windowpane and the candle flames, in a communal sigh, bent toward us.

He touched my arm and leaned chillingly close to my face, rendering me momentarily mute.

“What are you doing?”

“I came here tonight,” he said, retreating, “to say something—I want to wash my hands of pretense—”

“You want to ‘wash your hands of pretense’—let me try and decipher your meaning, my banker-poet!” I cried with an acrid shrill instead of the intended Zen laugh.

“Shut up—shut the fuck up and listen to me. I need for you to listen.”

“You’re too late—I don’t want to hear anything from you—”

“I need to explain why I behaved the way I did—you must know the truth.”

“The truth—the truth—when was there ever a more perfidious word!”

“It was never the way you said. I didn’t grow up with a flag-waving racist.”

“You’ve come to tell me your mother was, after all, or still is an anti-Semite—is that it?” I laughed hideously.

“Mother wanted to feel superior to everyone. She said things like: ‘those people with their green pastures,’ her favorite euphemism for Jewish money. My father used to argue with her at the beginning of the marriage, but I have few memories of that. The breakdown wiped everything out. The breakdown and the bankruptcy. My father’s partner was half-Jewish and she clung to that. ‘Do you think it’s peculiar that Russell stole your father’s money and professed to be Christian, despite his obvious Jewishness?’ she’d ask Andy and me as if it was a riddle to be solved.”

“Dear God—is this the world you grew up in?”

“Yes, everyone did. My mother wasn’t unique.”

“Are you excusing her? Am I supposed to be comforted by your bigoted environment?”

“I’m just trying to capture it for you. Prejudices were spewed about every religion and nationality: blacks, Asians, Indians, you name it, but the Jews, yes. You have to understand our neighborhood used to be all WASPs, people like my parents, people my parents were friends with—they considered themselves ‘broad-minded’ because they were friends with Jews or in business with Jews but in private, there was no restraint.

“My mother was better than most in keeping quiet. She’d even reprimand other mothers in our presence. She thought it was ‘unsavory’—”

“I don’t want to hear anymore. I’ve heard enough. I get it. You were raised as an anti-Semite and now—now—I don’t even know what you want from me—”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you—what I’ve tried to tell you for so long. Just because she is my mother doesn’t mean that’s who I am. I was never, ever like my mother or my brother!” he insisted. “The girl I told you about—the dancer—I never told you her name.”

He told me now, staring out the window at the street below. “Her name was Tziporah. Her father was Israeli, her mother an Orthodox Jew. That’s why she couldn’t date me or anyone, why she was so shy, why she—she—”

“My God—then all of this—us—you and me—you’ve just been trying to repent for her.”

“I’ve spent my life—I’ve spent my life, Emma, trying—trying to—”

“Trying to atone for your mother’s and brother’s sins? You’ve spent your life seeking a way out, and hallelujah, you found me!” I dropped my face in my hands and leaned against the wall. “You—you—everything was calculated: that night the four of us went out—the night of the gallery? What luck that I was Jewish! Oh, you’d fight for me then. You had to. No one could stand in your way, not even a fiancé. It didn’t really bother you that I was with someone else. You had to have me for yourself.”

He let out an acrid laugh. “Are you crazy? Do you really think I fell in love with you for that?”

“God, I thought I had left it all behind. I thought: here’s real freedom, freedom from being constantly differentiated and compared and judged on some invisible scale of a stereotype no one has yet been able to prove to have any connection to reality. I thought: no, no, there’s no anti-Semitism here in this country I love so much. Grandmother can’t be right on this one.

“And then I met you—ah, I’d be with you, the quintessential blond tan American.” I laughed forcefully, the pain in my chest constricting my voice. “With you, I’d wipe it all away. You’d cure me with your optimism, your idealism, your marvelous manners, your very smile. You were my escape, my puerile happiness. I was ready to forget, to give it all up. With you, for weeks on end, I couldn’t remember a thing—joyous amnesia. That’s why I never brought up Alex. I was reborn, a new person who simply didn’t know these ugly things exist, ugly things that could only happen there, only there, but here—here you are!”

He closed his eyes and stood there, a befuddling image swaying in the winter dusk. “Here I am,” he murmured. “I’m still the same man.”

“Did you ever consider the possibility that your mother influenced your brother’s seduction of Tziporah—that she pushed him to steal her?”

“I don’t know—that seems extreme. Whose mother hasn’t interfered in their relationship? I mean, look at your parents!”

“Don’t you dare compare us—in my family it’s all out in the open—”

“Like Alex’s mother showing up? Don’t tell me that wasn’t sabotage.”

“My grandmother was merely trying to protect me from the likes of your mother. She saw right through her—she didn’t need a single English word to crack her open!” I paused, glaring at him with impatience and a loathing all my own. “Think about it—all it would take is one carefully planned night—for you to walk in and find your brother and girlfriend compromised. I think it’s totally within your mother’s repertoire—I think she enjoyed it.”

“What are you saying—what are you implying—that my mother is downright evil?”

“Why not? Why, when there’s so much evil in the world, why should you or I be spared? People talk about evil as if it’s out there, removed from them, in the news or fiction, or faraway lands, evil in the form of death or torture. But what about furtive evil that lacks color and stage presence, that doesn’t announce itself when it walks in but sows its roots inside your own home? Imagine being so close that you can’t see it.”

“My mother is many things but she’s not evil—she’s just misguided, backward—”

“Maybe, just maybe, she used the rivalry between you and your brother to get what she wanted—to get rid of Tziporah. And maybe, just maybe, she used what you told her about me—my sensitivities, you might say—to fire directly into my wound. Maybe she meant for me to hear her just as she meant for you to walk in on Tziporah.” I shuddered as I spoke.

“I don’t believe it—”

“It’s not just about anti-Semitism—it’s about power,” I kept blazing on. “She’s always wanted power. And which anti-Semitic tyrant throughout history didn’t?”

“Impossible—impossible—you—with your dark past, your life, your pessimism about human nature—only you could think such a thing!” There was such agony in his face that I wanted to soothe it with a tender stroke, but I felt beaten, my extremities in too much pain to help another being.

“I’m not afraid to face the truth.”

“I don’t care about my mother,” he said. “I’ve come here tonight to tell you that I want you back—I want us back.”

I laughed uproariously. “You must be joking—you must realize that whatever compromises I was willing to make for you—all peanuts in comparison to the compromise I’d have to make now to bear your mother—”

“If I understand you correctly, my only option is to cut myself entirely from my mother.”

“Like all children of abuse, you must realize that it’s not your fault. Your mother, Eddie—are you listening to me?—your mother is not your fault.”

“And do you—do you believe that? Can you see that she and I are two separate beings? You’re the one who’s always conflating children with their parents—”

“I was wrong—now all I see is children trying to claw their way out—”

“But failing miserably. Look at you tonight: maybe that’s why you ruined your own masterpiece—that took you how many months to complete, how many years to conceive? Yet I couldn’t help but think there was greatness in your act. Just like you destroyed us, you destroyed your painting. I realized too late that you’re even willing to destroy yourself.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I finally got it, I finally understood—”

“That night, at my parents’ house, I wanted to lie down on the ground and beg your forgiveness but instead—instead only venom and lies came out.”

“Then let me lie down on the ground and beg your forgiveness now.”

“For what—for what, Eddie?”

“Because I didn’t see it then, at that moment I was blind, blinded by them, by my mother, by you.”

“And what is it that you see now?”

“That you were willing to kill us off. I didn’t have it in me to imagine anyone—any woman—going that far. You forced me into thinking—into imagining—a vision of you in bed with him! And here’s the crazy thing: I was willing to forgive you—”

“I know—if only—”

“If only it was before Maine—before you and I shared everything—”

“That was the thing that seemed so unbelievable—that you were willing to forgive me so much!”

“How could you do such a monstrous thing? And I, I treated you monstrously in return.” He grabbed my hand and kissed it suddenly without giving me time to rip it away. “I should have known, I should have figured it out right then, at that moment—why couldn’t I see it? Why didn’t you tell me that night that you listened to my mother’s bile—I would have known instantly that your only way out was to break me, break free of me. I would have known, asked myself the right question: can our love survive her hatred? But you didn’t tell me—why? Why?”

“Because I was loyal to them—in that house, my family owned me, in that house, after hearing your mother, I had to end it?”

“But here you are back in New York, away from them: you came back to me—”

“I did—and you didn’t want me.”

“I want you now!”

“I never slept with Alex.”

“I know. I was a fool to ever think it: that night in your parents’ house, in a split-minute decision, you felled us in one swoop, leaving no breathing organ to revive.”

He caught my hand in his and said, “We can build ourselves up from nothing, from nothing, Emma, we can start anew on a clean slate.”

“We’re too attached to our little spheres of suffering, Eddie, to ever find a clean slate.”

“I’m willing to erase mine—I am—”

“It’s too late, Eddie, what you told me just now—the fact that it’s real—that it isn’t just a phantom in my mind—but that your mother’s hatred is real! God, I kept thinking, hoping: I’m imagining this, I’m overly sensitive! Even my sister didn’t believe me, but you—by telling me the truth tonight—you’ve made it real.”

“You yourself said that my mother and I are separate beings—”

“I understand the theory, Eddie. I didn’t say I could live with it. I didn’t say I could ever look into your face and not see her in it. I didn’t say that when the time came and my anger at you for something ridiculous like the dishwasher, or our child’s misbehavior, or whatever else might happen in our future, wouldn’t end up in me calling you an anti-Semite.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said with confidence. “You’re smarter than that.”

“I wish you were right”—I felt my voice quaver—“but when you’ve been damaged like me, there is a price to pay. You’ll be so much happier with Melanie. I’m sure of it now.”

“Are you telling me that if I hadn’t told you about my mother’s real views, that you’d come back to me? Are you telling me that I ruined everything by telling you the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s impossible. Completely unfair.”

“Yes, but that is the way it is. You cannot unsay it. I cannot undo how I feel now.”

“No, I refuse to believe that.” He held his ground. “Just give it time. With time, you’ll let go of the pain.”

I thought about the dissidents, the Jewish fighters decaying in the gulags, dying for us, for me. I thought of my grandfather being carted off by the KGB. I thanked them all silently, as I often did, for this spirited voice I now possessed, for my dancing legs and strong arms, for the courageous stomach that lunged forward into the great solitary unknown, and in the distance I saw my heart hanging in the air, bright and red as a rotting cherry, and ventricle by ventricle, I shut it off.

“Time won’t cure me. Can’t you understand: this thing, this anti-Semitism business is the mainstay, the all-consuming trope of my life.”

“Then you have not transcended anything at all,” he returned, meeting my gaze with defiance, “not your past, not your circumstances—then what was all this art for?”

“For the children who cannot speak,” I told him with sudden calm. “Now you must leave me, Eddie. You must leave me and never come back. Do you hear me: never.”

He stood there, helpless, motionless, like a child lost, not knowing what to do. I wanted to say “goodbye,” or to give him directions—to help him find the secret passage out of my life—but there wasn’t a word available to me without the incumbent tears. I don’t know how long it took him to shift his shoulders and then careen blindly toward the open door. An unfamiliar doom in his expression tilted his shoulders forward, making him hunch over, and I thought with bitter humor that I had finally done it: turned him into a depressed Russian soul. I heard his body hit the stairwell, his feet tapping, each tap growing fainter, disappearing from my life. I couldn’t see anything after that. The candles had burned out and traffic screamed from below, and tears gathered in my throat like a noose that kept tightening until I let them surface. They had been there all along, and only now, in his absence, I could let them cut across my scarlet face—my lugubrious gray rivers swallowed up in all that red.

Painting #8 (For a Future Installment)

I’m in my thick black shuba with an ear-flapped hat and a verdant scarf to match my eyes, running through an arch toward the sound of children screaming. Screaming, I tumble into a mound of snow and lick it with my tongue, imagining white honey. Laughter escalates and grips me, at once a cackle and a ballad, an echo piercing a dazzling, phantasmagoric sky. Winter’s mirth can never live in spring or fall or summer; see winter’s merry tears harden on my cheeks and lashes and carve ice flowers on my skin. Into clear ice I turn—into Snegurochka—the fair snow princess can only breathe in winter air and so, like her, my shuba is an iridescent gown and my fingers are bluish-white like royal gloves. My toes are numb inside transparent slippers, my black felt valenki have holes and leak, and in my ear, my grandmother’s dulcet voice beckons: come, Lenochka, come home … The other children laugh and tackle one another, and suddenly their shubas glisten—we’re all transforming into fairies sculpted out of snow. We spread out our arms and legs and succulent white flakes paint patterns on our faces, and our frozen fingers burrow into diamond quilts beneath our backs. We stare up at the sky and speak to distant planets: oh capitalist universes where Levi’s jeans and booming color televisions and shapely Coca-Cola bottles grow like oranges from trees—what dost thou think of us? Our cheeks grow hotter, redder, our hearts are beating wild, our eyes are rapt in stars. Our breath is glowing in ribbons of white fire, and as it intertwines, it dances and melts our differences in snow. Come Lenochka come home …