Epilogue

Grandmother is delighted because my fiancé, Aaron, is Jewish and a heart surgeon, and because I’ll be twenty-nine in a month and my headlong plunge into the swamp of spinsterhood seems to have been timely aborted. Thank heaven for Aaron, she exclaims, even as she criticizes him. He is too gaunt, she quips, like a reed in the Siberian freeze. Still he must never gain weight, she points out faithfully, because fat men with such small nondescript features tend to lose their looks completely, not to mention the pitfall of no longer resembling real men. Yet she has solutions (as she does for everything): all his mishugas would be cured if he only took a bite of her Holodetz (a traditional Russian meat jelly held together by pure fat). She applies succinct axioms to describe his personality, the most noteworthy being: a starving British hound, a misguided interloper, and an American Neanderthal (i.e., a prehistoric man with American manners). The latter, in particular, stems directly from a breakfast confrontation in which Aaron lectured Grandmother on the perils of her yolk-rich omelets and liver pâtés for her aging seventy-three-year-old heart. “Did he just guess ‘seventy-three’? If I was seventy-three right now, I’d be dead.” No one knew Grandmother’s exact age, but her green card said she was closing in on eighty, and so Aaron, by supposedly deducing it, committed two cardinal sins against Russian womanhood: first, mentioning a woman’s age, and second, doing so without mentally subtracting forty years from that number.

“Only mannerless dolts throw calories and cholesterol diseases at your face while you’re enjoying your egg,” Grandmother told him, which I fortunately had enough sechel to mistranslate. Still, even as she dissects and upbraids, Grandmother repeats her favorite motto: “no man is perfect, and Aaron like your father is—tfu, tfu, tfu—very, very close!”

I nod my head three times and consider the facts: under Aaron’s supervision, I’ve gained calm, muscle tone, improved reasoning skills. He is superbly disciplined in keeping me healthy and sane: garlic and tofu for my circulation, cucumbers and papaya for my boldly sprouting wrinkles and cuckoo digestive tract, and wheat germ and macadamia nuts for my—we won’t mention it—brain. Although he can afford it and he is no cheapo, Aaron has been limiting my intake of steak au poivre, Hungarian salami, and Beluga caviar on thick layers of butter and French baguettes. Because of his initiative and perseverance, I’m finally contributing to my heart retirement fund.

Aaron believes genius is not an inborn trait but one that is cajoled into existence; case in point: he is God in open-heart surgery. I admire his confidence, attention to detail, thorough knowledge of all medical subspecialties, and lectures on topics ranging from the Himalayas and the benefits of yoga breath to the preposterousness of having robots replace humans in open- heart surgery. Although Aaron was raised in a conservative Jewish home, and although his father’s parents came to America to escape the pogroms in 1914 under the Tsar, he does not like to dwell on my Russia—he believes it is “BAD” as in “BAAAHAAAD” for my nerves and digestion. For during those early years of our courtship (when I was still recovering from Eddie and could not hold a paint brush between my two fingers without succumbing to a hiccupping hysteria), he would inundate me with Post-its, announcing my deadlines, pushing me to complete one painting and move on to the next. Aaron was used to patients. He gave me valium and Ambien and melatonin to help me sleep but I was inconsolable. He didn’t seem to mind that I sometimes lost track of days, forgot what he said, wept at inappropriate moments, or closed my eyes temporarily during his lectures. Aaron saved me. I was able to paint and produce, and despite that voice blaring in my ear—“you’re producing shit, SHIT”—people seemed to be buying. I even gained a permanent spot at the Nebu gallery—until two years ago, that is, when Aaron proposed.

In my studio, on 27th Street, nestled between 7th and 6th Avenues, I climb to the seventh floor of a non-elevator building and “work” on my paintings, work and procrastinate, pace the narrow workspace, a rectangle of gray linoleum and red-brick walls. A torn, filthy sheet from ART magazine hangs from a nail, as a quasi-muse and personal torturer. I stare at it when I paint and when I can’t, a steady reminder of that tumultuous year. My face is compressed into a tiny square, my smile wide and intact. Beneath it a caption reads: “Children at Play, Out of Soviet Russia.” I’m quoted as saying, “My family and I came to America at the height of the Cold War when Reagan called Russia the Evil Empire. It was very hard in the beginning … I’m so thankful to my family for always being supportive of my endeavors. They have always believed in my art.”

The Hudson River shimmers in deceptive charcoal hues and echoes to me like a handsome stranger with lithe arms. I’ve known for two days. I find it impossible to eat, sleep, speak, or make love to Aaron. I’ve been puffing on Albuterol and Flovent all day, the greatest intake since the first official diagnosis of my asthma four years ago, since the first emergency room visit and the shock of learning I am chronically out of breath. The water is a black soft quilt mottled in white lights under a murky moon—is he an artist now? Has the world turned upside down? Why am I still moving? I hold the invitation in my hand as though it’s poison: a four by six reprint of a photograph reveals a man’s face fused with a computer screen, and beneath it, the title reads The Modern Corporation. Why are my feet hurrying to the traffic light, clicking against cobblestones, crossing alleys into the heart of Soho, to see this exhibit? Over four years have passed between us, and I have not forgiven him; I have kept, nurtured, sustained my rancor. In a red satin V-neck blouse hanging loosely over taut dark jeans and red suede stilettos, thick black eyeliner magnifying my eyes and my hair clasped in a stern French twist high upon my head, I look exactly how I feel—ferocious. But as I approach the gallery—a stunning open space whose glass walls and doors give one the feeling of swimming and breathing in turquoise water—my knees wobble and the stiletto heels bend untowardly and threaten to send me, face-first, into a gray summer puddle.

I inhale, exhale, think of Aaron, brace myself with yoga breath, then I enter. My eyes settle on the black-and-white photographs, which even from afar strike one with their surfeit of gray, their mundane, muted expression of everyday life in the cubicle. People are sipping champagne in skinny postmodern flutes and tiny heart-shaped hors d’oeuvres pass from tray to mouth. Then I spot him: a tall statue in black. He does not move. He appears as if he’s been stranded on an island naked and people have suddenly begun to materialize from the surrounding bushes. He does not seem to possess the same ease, smile, laugh I remember. The face is gaunt and pale, and a stubble sits in uneven crescents on square sharp jaws. His eyes appear to have been repainted in blue charcoal, grown inscrutable in a sudden dusk. A black T-shirt covers a narrower body. The muscles on his chest have shrunk; jeans hang from his hips. He appears to my great amazement to resemble the typical artist-type; the banker’s polish has been effaced, except for the closely cropped brown hair. Two men and a dazzling woman, in a fuchsia-hued dress and hefty silver earrings, circle him like three giant wasps.

“Everything is moving along marvelously. I’m pretty sure I just spotted Frank Grovel, the—I mean the IMAGE critic,” the woman chirps.

“I hear the upstairs hasn’t had much action,” the young prim-looking man declares, and the other nods. “We need to get them up there—I still don’t understand why you didn’t have the nudes on the first floor—they’re by far your best.”

Eddie remains silent.

Stay calm, smile, appear happy, it’s been a century, act like you’re completely indifferent. I approach them and meet his eyes.

“Eddie,” I say, then with a grin, “Ignatius.”

“Emma,” he says with a kind smile, “Lena—Lenochka.”

“So you’re an artist now?”

“Oh, no, I’m still a banker at heart—I’m just a photographer on the side. The only real question is whether I have talent.”

We laugh, and I note with the coolness and objectivity of a floating observer that the intimacy is instant between us.

“I hoped you’d come,” he says. “You look—you look stunning!”

“It’s the red satin,” I mutter, glancing at my shirt.

“It’s not the shirt.” He comes closer and I stagger from him.

“Let me introduce you to Edith—she runs the gallery.” But Edith and the two men have been swallowed by the throng.

“So how did you become a side-dish artist?” I ask with a pinch of envy.

“This almost didn’t happen,” he says, blushing. “I was this close to becoming the CEO of Beltrafio Movers and Shakers.” A nervous laugh erupts from his mouth, then quickly subsides.

“Wow—that would have made your mother very happy!”

“After I lost you, I lost the desire, the drive to make money. I remember it clearly: the Triploch-Fennimore merger. The deal on the table was a mess, not good for anyone. But I was told to urge the client to take it. We were punching insane hours, operating on autopilot. Everyone was nervous, gulping caffeine by the gallon, popping amphetamines, snorting coke. That’s when things got weird, you know. People just got weirder. I looked into one guy’s cubicle and saw him surfing porn sites and laughing out loud. Sylvia was doing her nails at three in the morning. Next day I brought my camera to the office and after midnight I started snapping whatever I saw—nobody cared—haggard faces would smile at me and I thought: this could be interesting …” He points at the wall, and inside a thick black frame, a young man’s enormous profile backlit by a computer screen reads, “Voluptuous Vixens in Threesomes.” Another photograph reveals a magnified paper cup of Folgers coffee on a stack of copied documents, dripping brown on the word URGENT. Next to it, a man is slumped over his chair, his slumbering face fused with the keyboard; the clock above him flashes 5:00 am, and drool trickles from his parted mouth. Another is a woman’s half-turned face, invoking in my mind Sylvia’s profile; it is juxtaposed against a pyramid of people’s names, earmarked by the date when they’ll be laid off. The photographs are intimate, precise; their derision of corporate life is coupled with a burning, gray-hued melancholy.

But instead of praising him, instead of saying what simmered on the tip of my tongue—you’re so talented, Eddie—I ask, “Did you ever marry Melanie?”

“How can you ask me that? You know I never did—you knew the last time I saw you.”

“I knew,” I say, smiling, retrieving the buried feeling of being wanted by him.

“And you—are you with someone?”

“Me—with someone?”

“Don’t tell me—engaged once again—the perennial fiancée?” he cries out, his voice reeking of cynicism, judgment.

I recall my short spurts of independence from Aaron, our fleeting breakups when I’d bury my head in my studio and deny myself a future comforted by another soul, when loneliness would claw inside my stomach and bleed through its walls. I was a speck in a sea of unremarkable souls, seeking a way out of the ordinariness of life only to sink back into its warm, dark pouch.

I want to tell him about this ugly loneliness but instead I say, “This one’s definitely headed to the altar—definitely!”

“Were there any other fiancés along the way?”

“Aaron and I have been together for four loyal years now,” I say sternly.

“Impressive!” he returns with irony and raised brows. “Are you still painting?”

Am I still painting, am I still living, breathing, thinking, am I still Emma?

I look at him with all the sorrow and blame I had amassed for the last four years and cut him down. “Let’s talk more about you—about your artistic transformation! There you were, snapping pictures at work, so what? How did you go from Norton’s resident photographer to this?” I point at the walls, wanting to scream: what kind of a strange, unkind life is this—where one’s world can so easily be turned upside down? Why did it seem so proper for him to be a businessman and me to be the artist? Was it the female-male ratio of properly weighed monies and professions, whereas now, now look at me—a novice on a beam, legs in a quake, arms uneven, my art dried up and his just starting to sprout a lover’s seeds?

But he picked it up without hesitation or acridity. “I was at a client’s house for this lavish dinner at this ridiculously gaudy Fifth Avenue apartment. The evening was going well. Same old bullshit—we’re talking about restructuring and the stock price when the conversation turns to art. The guy is a dilettante art collector, under the illusion that he’s some kind of a cultural phenomenon, and after dinner, he takes us on a little tour to showcase his collection. Most of it is modern kitsch and commercial crap for which he paid astronomical sums, but here and there I’d see a gem.

“Anyhow, that’s when I saw it—your painting hanging over his library desk. I felt you in the room suddenly, saw you there with us, laughing and flirting with your eyes. I ask him, ‘how did you get this?’ ‘Oh, my wife,’ he says, ‘bought it years ago for pennies at this small gallery in Soho and now I hear it’s worth serious money. I hear the artist was picked up by the Nebu gallery, but now they’re threatening to cut her off. She’s quit cold turkey—barricaded her studio with cardboard boxes—who knows why—it’s been two years since she’s produced anything. Of course, that makes her paintings all the more valuable. Now how outrageous is the art world—tell me!’

“‘How can you stand to look at that scene of horror, of torture every day?’ I ask.

“He laughs in my face. ‘All I see is a winter storm.’

“‘The white light is a child,’ I tell him, ‘dead center where the hole is—that’s a child being tortured.’

“‘The hole is great—everyone takes notice of it, and the white light’—he laughs again—‘that’s no child—that’s the winter light blinding us all to what’s directly in front of us.’

“‘And what’s in front of us?’ I ask.

“‘Sex and money,’ he replies, ‘the Devil’s handiwork—just look at that rotting bark and the red eyes—and tell me you haven’t tasted your share of hell! Pure catharsis!’ That’s when I knew—” Eddie stops talking.

“You knew?” I ask, blood flooding my temples.

“This dinner, this guy, the expensive china and chandeliers, his plastic wife, the work I was doing, the spreadsheet life, the endless analyses I’d been preparing for years for Grant—I was locked in some of kind of perverse universe. I couldn’t see myself at all, or what I saw, I didn’t recognize—I had disappeared. I had enough money, God knows, I had enough. I didn’t know what to do so I showed this guy my very first image and he bought it. He introduced me to gallery owners, gave me a foot hold and then it just fed off itself—slowly, I guess it’s still slow—”

“I wouldn’t say it’s slow.”

“But the whole time, the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about what he said, that you had stopped painting. I didn’t know if you had gotten married and had children. Or if you had become fed up with the art world.”

“No, no, not that,” I murmur.

“Why did you stop painting?”

“Something happened, something that took time—once I got everything I wanted, once I saw my work hanging from those very same walls I once envied, my fingers and my mind stopped communicating with each other. Do you understand how terrible that can be? What I saw in my head wouldn’t come out. But my decline was gradual—I didn’t see it until I found myself wanting to cover up my paintings with a sheet. They repulsed me. Sometimes I imagined that the faces inside them were alive, and speaking to me, but I’d turn away and close my ears.”

I stopped to breathe, to remember, but the paintings had been sold and I couldn’t recall a single distinct color. “They were nothing more than emotional diarrhea—no thought, no care was going into them, just a dumping ground. The reviewers were right. They were concoctions of moods—colors badly blended together—they were chaos—”

“You’re wrong. They were some of the best work I’d seen you do. Yeah, it was dark, it was misery. People may not have wanted to chew a carrot stick looking at them, but that was always your strength. I bought two of those paintings.”

“Throw them out,” I retort.

I remember painting during those months following the night at the Fern Gallery, mired in nausea—what paroxysms of inspiration there were then! That was when a miraculous synchrony brewed between my fingers and my mind; I couldn’t stop sketching, imagining, layering paint on every conceivable white hole, couldn’t stop even when the stench of turpentine would clog my throat, and my intestines would compress, as if someone were squeezing them through my esophagus and out of my nose. Up and down, my stomach rode like a tractor mashing my nerves, never giving me a moment’s rest. “You shouldn’t paint anymore,” the doctor said, “it’s bad for the child.” The child? What child, I wondered, you mean the embryo, the blood vessel, the cell growing on my stomach’s wall? But I stopped painting anyhow; I scribbled with my black-ink pens and markers, with pencils and charcoal-stained hands. Anything that still made images, that captured my confusion, elation, anger, that made sense of this state of growing new life inside my body, like an exotic flower awakening in a petri dish, with beautiful spiderwebs and fins for hands and a tail instead of legs.

“After I left you that night at the gallery”—he seems hesitant—“I imagined you’d paint it again—paint it anew.”

“You mean my war against anti-Semitism?” I laugh absently, loudly.

“The transparent child from your past—don’t you want to redo her?”

“I don’t paint that because there’s no fight left in me. I paint new things now—new—”

“Oh, I was hoping to see that painting recreated somehow, you see, I thought …”

“I know what you thought.”

“What do you paint now?” He trembles from the sense that something hidden and lurid is passing before him. But when he tries to grip it, I only make it slip away faster. I wait—let the dull, painful punch of ignorance form a crater in his head, then I point to a crowd and say, “Where’s everyone going?”

People are ascending a white staircase that coils into the second floor, and I move catatonically toward them. He follows me. Our ascent is slow, ponderous, conversations shut down as we stare at each other’s backs, and I feel him in my hair—his breath weaving around my neck. The second floor is rectangular and claustrophobic; the lights are dimmer, sharper like pencils pointing at haphazard angles at black-and-white images. There, hanging on every wall, are parts of me. My collarbone leading up to my profile stretches for close to six feet and is the centerpiece of his collection. Disheveled hair is arrayed across a naked back. A torso cut between breasts and pubic hairs lies on a black sheet, capturing a quiver in the navel. A profile of one breast dominates a wide expanse of wall, the nipple protruding into space, pointy, aglow. Legs are spread apart as two male hands reach seductively over bent knees. A view from above reveals a naked body arching on a wooden floor, candles between the legs, inside the armpits, lighting up the back of the head, which is tilted backward, revealing a set of parted hungry lips. He took these pictures of me in Maine, all shot in a matter of hours, but to me they’re cryptograms of his nature, resurrections of his vindictiveness and cruelty the last night I laid in his bed. His anger fills every image: the black shadows, crisp silver lines, excesses of light delineating and dissecting my skin—how my body parts scowl at me like recriminations!

I want to bury myself inside an industrial-sized garbage bag but nothing big enough presents itself. I feel the onlookers staring, judging, connecting me to the images on walls, and yet my mind is lucid enough to see that the photographs are vague, even universal, that they can be said to comprise an exegesis of a woman. The visitors are unaware of me; their eyes scan over my body parts in wonderment and stupor, reminding me of the wonderment and stupor of my own shows. Unhurriedly, their collective gaze travels to the opposing wall where—I can barely look, barely breathe—grim images of Russia assail me from every corner. Stalin’s shattered bronze head, a vandalized Jewish cemetery with Nazi swastikas emblazoned on my ancestors’ headstones, the entrance door flung open to the Moscow synagogue where I had once danced “Hava Nagila” in a circle of ecstatic Jews, guarded by soldiers and the KGB. At its epicenter, I’m confronted by an image of a street: a narrow sidewalk luxuriates in poplars and lavender trees, marking a path between a dense nature park and a red-brick building cast against a cloudless white sky. An arch opens at the entrance and there, directly above, a child beams from a balcony where I had once stood, her right hand pinned diagonally across her face—the pioneer salute. I recognize her at once; the proud hopeful gaze is mine.

“How did you do this?” I ask. “That’s my street—that’s Usiyevicha—is that me?”

“The picture you gave me when you were eight—I inserted it into this photograph of your building.

“First thing I did after I left Norton was travel. There were so many places I wanted to see—China, India, Israel, Russia. But when I got to Russia—to Moscow, especially, I found myself only wanting to find you.” He glances at the photograph of the child and murmurs, “but you weren’t there.”

“I’m confused. Why did you expose me like this?” I say and bite my tongue.

“I needed to understand you—to feel—to feel what you felt—to feel your powerlessness—to feel everything I couldn’t,” he says, smiling strangely. “I couldn’t touch or see you but I could recreate you in my mind. That’s what I did here—there’s no proof these images are you. But to me—they probably capture you more than—”

“Than the real me—”

“Only in the sense of what it meant for me. These images are as much about me as you—my gaze into myself. God, this is such grandiose bullshit—the truth is—the thing is that I needed to find a way to see you again.” He grows silent, his lower lip trembles, but when he speaks again, his voice exudes strength. “I went to the Moscow synagogue and prayed. I prayed with the Russian Jews. I couldn’t understand a word, but I bowed my head out of respect. People cried. I—I’ve wanted to see you for the last four years so that I can finally tell you—I had so much to tell you.

“I tried to contact you. Three years ago I came to your building and waited on the steps till ten or eleven o’clock. But you never came out. I left messages with your family. They were very gracious, by the way—”

“I know.”

“One of the paintings I bought—is of a pregnant woman, her stomach transparent. Inside a child smiles, playing with the cord wrapped around its neck, while the mother weeps—is this about us?”

I’m confronted with an image of four arms—our arms—how had he managed it?—entwined on the opposite wall. I catch sight of a small empty room beyond the one we’re standing in and I grab Eddie’s arm and pull him there and close the door. The room is entirely white and empty, nothing stands, hangs, lives on its walls.

“Your mother is our puppeteer—our invisible master of ceremonies!” I say, with a shrill sadistic laugh. The two of us face the pristine white surfaces in the enclosed square space. I think in wonderment of all the secret rooms and bathrooms and galleries Eddie and I have used as our battlegrounds in love and war. “My mother?”

I feel calm again, the inner deadness spreading through my center, cooling my blood. “I don’t want to say anything now unless it’s the truth. The night we were together—the night of the drying and washing machines—” My voice winds down and I look at him, wondering if I should go on. “I got pregnant.”

“You got pregnant,” he repeats mechanically, as if he somehow knew.

“Of course, it took me a while to figure it out. I’d start vomiting every time I’d take out a tube of acrylic paint. But I figured it was because I couldn’t get you out of my system. Literally, of course. When I went to the doctor, I thought he’d say, you’re dying, your asthma is acting up; instead he said, ‘you’re not ill, my dear, just pregnant.’ There was no one else—it was yours. My family went haywire. They were ready for another grandchild, but for me to have the baby alone was outrageous—a sacrilege. What would people say?” I erupt with sudden joy at the thought of their simplicity.

“Grandmother said that if I still wanted Alex, he’d take me back. No one wanted to hear my proposal: that I have the baby on my own as a single mother. It was the ultimate expression of my feminist ideals. I’d deny myself men altogether, I’d become an ascetic. Pregnancy made me strong, invincible, gave me the courage that my stupid single life never could.

“There were other men, Grandmother insisted, that we could fool; if they fell in love very quickly, that is, we could fudge dates of my conception. It was December 24th, Christmas Eve that I got pregnant, it was surreal. I even went on two or three blind dates, but at the end of each evening I would announce, ‘I had such a lovely time, and I want you to know—by no fault of your own, I’m pregnant.’

“By then I was sporadically dating Aaron. He was so in love with me he didn’t care that I was pregnant. He wanted to take care of my baby, to marry me instantly. But part of me was terrified—part of me kept thinking, if I have this child with Aaron, I’ll be locked in, forever locked in—” I stop myself, fearing I’ve said too much, then keep going.

“But instead of making a decision,” I go on, “oh, you know how I am: I procrastinated, and with pregnancy that’s as good as saying I do. So by virtue of doing nothing I reached five months. Five months, Eddie—by then I was so in love with the baby I talked to him every day, and that’s when—” I pause, and Mrs. Beltrafio appears as she was then, her serene face superimposed upon Eddie’s.

“That’s when I saw your mother at the Calm, on the Upper East Side. I went to get a prenatal massage—my back was already killing me—and of course it turned out to be your mother’s favorite spa.” It was the best place in the city for microdermabrasion, glycolic resurfacing, Botox. “If you think about it, it was inevitable that out of the thousands of spas in Manhattan I would pick the one that was your mother’s.”

The moment rushes at me with sudden hysteria and grit. I see her again: naked, confident, unembarrassed by her small breasts and bulging manly thighs, but her body is taut, young, perfectly sustained like her face. An air of satisfaction emanates from her gaze, exposing her signature smugness. Lavender oil glows on her stomach and forehead, and I’m bewilderingly drawn to her polished surfaces, imagining that if I peel them away, I’ll discover a magical cave containing all the secrets to my soul. Why, why, I wanted to ask her, why didn’t you like me? It was so simple and childish, this desire of mine, that I felt my whole being perspire with the need to know, with the shame of having been rejected by her. I tried to recall what Eddie said that night when he came to offer me his truth and salvation: “she liked you, she just doesn’t like Jews.” But it made me feel the rejection even more strongly, like a spear rammed deeper in my stomach, a warning to my baby that the world is callous, and without heart. The child kicked me as if he already knew.

“I hid behind the locker like a guilty teenager,” I say, turning to him after a long pause. “I in my underwear, and your mother—in all her naked glory.”

He stares at me with open lips that fail to emit sound.

“Your mother dressed slowly, methodically; she seemed in no great hurry until she saw me. Our eyes met and then she caught it—my protruding belly. But she looked only for an instant—an instant of recognition between us—and then, with that kindly smile she wears, she turned her head away.” I breathe, I remember. “‘Mrs. Beltrafio,’ I cried at last, ‘Cynthia, Cynthia.’ I ran after her, hugging my towel to my chest, but she had vanished into the incense-thick air and I wondered if I had merely imagined her.

“But I couldn’t have, you see, I couldn’t have!” I keep talking even though it’s becoming more difficult to enunciate words, thoughts. “She was everywhere, you see, her scent, her face—I felt her on me—did we speak? I can’t remember now. Did she say, ‘Oh Emma, what a surprise to see you here. Congratulations are in order! How many months?’ I could feel the baby grow so still as if he had already guessed his future. The pain of having lost you came back to me—and it stung again and again—how unfair life was, how stupid we were, how this baby was bigger than that, bigger than us. The magnitude of it all overcame me and I held my head in my hands with a full understanding of what I—then someone tapped my shoulder and asked if I needed a glass of water—I was dizzy—so dizzy with all these realizations—”

“But why didn’t you come to me? Why did you let her in?” he cuts in, but I only see a stranger trying to cough my entire life out in one breath.

I begin to speak but my voice cracks and tears cloak my eyes. I want to tell him that this skin, my skin isn’t skin but gauze—permeable silk that doesn’t sheathe my body but acts as a conduit for the world outside, letting it stream in: there are no barriers or blockades here. There’s fear too, my curse—my truest Russian emotion, palpitating in red, so grotesque and hidden, so deep-rooted that I don’t recognize it anymore. Like a stingray, it sits dormant in my blood and when it strikes I’m unconscious, unable to intercept its deadly sting. Only later do I understand, only later do I imagine a different life.

But I suck my tears in and with sudden calm I explain away this, this unchangeable life: “What’s done is done.”

“Where’s the child?” he asks.

“Child?” I tap my tongue on “d,” hoarsely, barely. “Oh, Eddie. That night there was a terrible wind—a typhoon, really. It was June, a warm summer storm had descended on the city and I wanted to walk a little. I always loved rain, you know. But suddenly trees started to bend and trashcans flew through the air and the tiny drizzle turned into blinding rain. I couldn’t see anything—a yellow cab came out of nowhere and I was lifted off the ground, I was flying … then I looked up and I was splayed on the ground in spectacular pain, bleeding. That night I lost the baby.” I pause for a moment to let him absorb it, then without tears I sum it up. “Who knows why it happened! Was it my weakness—my weak fucking mind? Grandmother blames the cab driver, my mother your mother.

“I’ve gone over it a thousand times, but it doesn’t change the fact—the pain—”

Pain contracts my stomach with the intensity and horror of that night, and I’m losing it again. The white walls of the hospital reappear and I’m there again in the emergency room, on the operating table, suspended in my comatose sleep. When I opened my eyes, they tell me it was a boy.

The wind blows at me now and the cab I never saw honks and Mrs. Beltrafio cradles my head in her immortal arms, and I blame them all for the cell, the embryo, the child I lost out of frailty and weakness, out of the powerlessness of youth. But most of all I blame us, him and me, for the pain we couldn’t put aside. Hatred curdles upon my gauze-like skin. He meets my gaze without flinching, and only when I see his pain, crawling like black tar over his gleaming pupils, do I forgive him with a kindness and ease I’ve never known before.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. His head hangs and his entire torso collapses, sliding against the wall. “I had no idea.”

“I wanted it that way,” I say. “I couldn’t have borne it—first you returning to me out of guilt, then even worse, out of pity.”

“Is that why you turned me away at your showing—because you thought I didn’t truly love you?”

“Why couldn’t you love me just for me, not the Russian-Jewish-me but for the Americanized-me—for the Emma-me, for what we alone had between us?”

“How can you say such a thing—I loved you for all of you—I still love you.”

“It doesn’t matter”—my voice splinters—“it doesn’t matter now because I’m here—I’m here only because I know nothing of you remains.” I point at my heart.

“Are you painting now?”

“In a sketchbook, I make notes, paintings I’m planning—planning as I plan the wedding.”

“Back to your old cage?” he thunders. His eyes lift for an instant, then retreat to the floor. “Why are you marrying this person—this person who has zero insight into you?”

I clear my throat. “I came to you once—to your building. It was after you had come to me. I had a perverse curiosity.”

I recall the whiff of the sultry spring air as I pried my window open and saw him approach. At first I imagined he was lost, but he sat down directly beneath my window, three floors up. He remained in a perfect stillness, as if gripped by some apocalyptic epiphany. Only minutes passed but they felt like hours before he rose and faced our buzzer. He pressed the button next to my last name, scrawled next to Aaron’s. The sound rang through the apartment like an ambulance, its persistence smothering me. I couldn’t move, couldn’t lift my arms or legs, couldn’t pick up the phone—Aaron was on call—I was alone and alone I neither ate nor drank; I sat at the window watching him till he left.

The next day I broke up with Aaron. “I’m too wild,” I announced, “I can’t commit—I can never be the wife you need or want.” “You’re being preposterous,” Aaron repeated again and again as if my resolve had turned him into a drone. I packed my bags and went to stay with Stone, and during that week when my very breath seemed to have been allotted to my body in stingy rations, I went to Eddie’s building to see him. I only managed to touch the glass door with my nose when I saw him with another woman in the lobby. She had brilliant, fiery red hair, the sort of red that appears flammable, that’s all I remember of her. They were laughing and leaning coquettishly into each other, and he appeared to my stunned eye to be unapologetically happy—happier, I thought bitterly, than me. No, he had not come for me! He had come for more forgiveness, more truths, for yet another salve to lay across the ancient wound between us; only his was still festering and bloodied by guilt, the guilt his mother wrought and that he now bore on her behalf because she had none.

He was engaged again, or perhaps he was married, I berated myself, and ran from the lobby. I didn’t want to ruin it for her the way I had ruined things for Melanie, ruined it for Sylvia, and within a few short hours, I had returned, breathless and contrite, to Aaron.

“Who was the redhead?” I reveal myself, wearing my jealousy like a turban on my head.

“What redhead?”

“I saw you with her in your lobby—after you had come to me, only a week later, only a week later you were with someone else,” I accuse him now despite a renewed commitment to calm, “and you looked so happy!”

“Redhead, redhead—I can’t even remember—I didn’t date anyone for a while after that. I was happy—happy because I was finally free—free to be with you. I wanted to run and tell you everything. I finally confronted my mother and my brother—we fought and yelled and said all the things people never recover from. Then I left and haven’t returned since. I’ve never breathed easier, never felt better. You were right—to liberate me.” He steadies himself as anger overtakes him. “Did you ever consider the possibility that this redhead was just someone who lived in my building? Or someone else’s guest? Why didn’t you come up to me? Why didn’t you ever trust me? For God’s sake—your stupid pride!”

“Yes, I thought the worst—”

“Because you always think the worst—because—because—why couldn’t you see that I loved you—why were you so blind?”

“Doesn’t matter anymore, does it? None of it matters. I’ve come tonight to say goodbye.”

“You’ve come because you want me to let you go,” he says with sudden rage, “you want me to say I am moving on.”

“You owe me that.”

“For what—for having kept the most important fact away from me, for not giving me a chance to make a life with you—to have that child? I would have wanted our child!”

He’s on the verge of something more, but nothing comes—nothing but a groan, some kind of strange animal sound that I can’t name. I rush at him as he manages, “Why—I—I—” and pin his wrists against the wall. My mouth is on his lids and lashes. I drink his tears as they swim over my nose and cheeks and like transparent serpents run down his neck. I can’t see him anymore; I only feel his moist breath permeate my skin. And our lips, from habit, from memory, from ancient longing, find each other with alacrity and ease. We cling to each other in agony. And as we sway in the airless white room, I see in my mind my own eyes glaring at me from the empty walls—accusatory pools of black—and pull away. “My sweet Ignatius,” I say, pulling further and further away, “we’ll be all right.”

“We’re past everything, you and I”—he speaks with urgency as if I might dissolve—“guilt, marriage, family, even—what did you once call it—our little spheres of suffering! We’re past everything, Emma, and that’s why we can do anything now—”

“You’re free, but I’m not,” I say quietly.

“Because you’re engaged again,” he reproaches me, laughing brokenly.

“I have to go,” I say, my heart drumming. I open up the door of the small square room and burst out into the white purified space of the gallery, where my body parts—legs, breasts, pelvis, mouth, hair—stare at me from walls. I nod at myself and run out and down the corridor, down the winding staircase, I tip-tap-tip-tap-top down in my red stilettos, hoping not to tumble or fall. He runs after, his feet are tapping too, echoing my footsteps. We’re downstairs where we began, in neutral corporate space, squashed between people.

He stares at me with defiance. “Can’t you see that we’re stuck in a circle—we keep repeating our mistakes—” He grabs my hand and, on the invitation that seems to have been welded into my palm, writes out an address. “After the show, meet me here—it’s my new place. I don’t live in the loft anymore. I’ll be waiting.”

“Waiting—how long is that?”

“We’ve been given another chance. It wasn’t closure you sought, it was me. Tonight is our chance to rewrite the past.”

“To rewrite it? No, that’s not possible!” I protest. “Why would I even want to—these are my scars to wear upon my face—”

“You’re even more beautiful now than I remember,” he whispers.

But I’m immune to flattery now—it only glides on the surface but doesn’t penetrate my heart. I take a breath and end it. “Nothing you say will make a difference. I will not hurt Aaron. I’m getting married in a matter of months.” A debilitating melancholy cuts off my speech and the black-and-white images dissipate into a blinding grayness. I smile at him and shift unsteadily and click my heels with sudden resolve and walk across the wooden gallery floor and out the glass doors I run. I’m on the dusty street and trucks honk and cabs swerve maniacally and he is behind me, here, catching his breath.

I stop and turn to look at him and listen.

“It doesn’t matter if you marry Aaron or anyone else because ultimately you will always be with me. The year we met something incredible happened and it has bound us for life—”

“Your mother would have sent me to the gas chambers if she had a chance! Can’t you see how that makes everything still impossible?”

“Haven’t I made it clear? I’ve cut my mother off. You will never need to see her again. I will always, always protect you!”

“You don’t get it. I don’t want your protection. Do you know what I didn’t tell your mother at that lunch? My favorite Shakespearean play is actually The Merchant of Venice. ‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions … If you prick us do we not bleed? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?’ What babkus! What about the end, the fact that Shylock’s daughter is marrying the guy who wants to ruin him, and a gentile at that. As if Shylock would feel honored by such a match! What supercilious, superiority-ridden gentile bullshit! Shylock wants to be merely acknowledged as being human but by no means equal. That’s not enough for me—that’s a pittance if you ask me. I don’t want these degrading sympathies! I want to be the one wearing the crown and the armor. I am the queen and the soldier all in one, choosing my life, my path—I am no one’s servant girl in need of proving myself—”

“Are you sure about that? This new blissful domesticity you’ve mapped out for yourself—with this Aaron character—does he know any of this about you? You’ve withheld and manipulated and sugarcoated for him—you’ve told him nothing! What a fantastical creature you’ve given him! You’re lying once again on a large scale—by omitting the truth.”

“No, I’ve merely laid down my weapons. I’ve said yes to simplicity, contentment, to the normal life.”

“Ah, again the fear of humanity—of trust—rears its ugly head! Is this your so-called reign? As far as I can see you’ve indentured yourself for life.”

“At least it’s an honorable prison.”

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

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

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

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

“Too painful,” I reply.

“With me you’d still be painting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eddie,” I say. “You’re here?”

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

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

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

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

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

“But still you wanted me to see you?”

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

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

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

“There is always sadness in me.”

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

“It aged, that’s all.”

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

“Because it is a wall.”

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

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

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

I laugh.

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

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

“You ‘were’? As in past tense?”

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

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

“Moment to moment.”

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

Tears spring to his eyes but he holds them in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He simply nods.

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

I smile.

“You finally learned what it means.”

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

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

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