The Imperial Wife Page 2

  Before returning to one of the many clients who always seems to need me, before leaving the girls with their cardigans, their pearl earrings, their diamond engagement rings, among whom I will never, ever belong, I quickly drain my glass and grab the cell phone. In case Carl calls me back sooner than I expect him to.

  * * *

  “It looks like it’s Catherine the Great’s. Ekaterina Velikaia.” As the sparkling water is being poured, I’m wondering if I hadn’t been hasty arranging the foursome in a spontaneous spurt of pride. My parents are not restaurant people, have never grown comfortable with fussy service and the constricted nature of a meal among music and noise. My mother is wiping a perfectly clean knife on her napkin while my father pushes away the bread basket and asks for raw vegetables to dip in olive oil.

  The lighting is too dark, so they’re squinting at the picture of the Order, passing it from one to the other. As usual, I fixate on their approval, their excitement. I’ve never understood why I still need them to be impressed with me, as though in order to repay them the immigration freight of passage, I had to prove my successes justified their decision to uproot us to America. For as long as I can remember, from grade school to my marriage to my job, I’ve been repeating ever-escalating versions of “Look, Ma, look, Pa, look what I’ve done!”

  “And what is this I’m looking at?” my mother asks.

  “An order. You know, like a medal she’d wear.”

  “Catherine the Great wore this?”

  “Peter the Great established this honor for women marrying into the royal family or as gratitude for some great accomplishment. I think his wife got the first one. Catherine got hers when she committed to marrying Peter’s grandson. There aren’t many of them around, much less one that has been proven to be Catherine the Great’s.”

  “It looks like an ordinary necklace.”

  “How can you say that? Look at that sash of scarlet moiré, the silver star encrusted with diamonds.”

  “And people actually believe this trinket was really Catherine the Great’s? Americans are so gullible,” my mother persists, fully enjoying herself.

  “Are you ready to order?” the server says.

  “We’re waiting for someone.” I turn back to my parents.

  My father is the mediator as usual. He has finished reading my profile in the paper. “Your mother is joking. We are very happy. This means your auction will be good, yes? You were worried.”

  My father is spreading butter on a roll. He hands it to my mother. For himself, he dunks a carrot in oil and bites off a chunk. Olive oil and protein and a regimented eating schedule are his secrets of eternal youth. I like seeing them together, the way my father takes care of my mother, the tiny acts of making sure she is lacking for nothing.

  “Well, of course we’re happy for you,” she says, taking the bread as if challenging the idea that eternal youth, if it means forgoing rolls and cookies, is not worth it. Her fingers are a pianist’s, an eagle’s. “I just don’t know why anyone in their right mind would pay millions for this thing. Are you sure it’s not a fake? Did they say it was definitely hers or did someone just make it in their basement? But either way, it is very nice that you can finally show that Kudrina a thing or two. She is very annoying on television, always showing off how she is the only Russian expert in this country. As if my boopchik doesn’t even exist.”

  Why must my mother also bring up Nadia Kudrina? But I work very hard to flash an insouciant smile, then fold away the digital scan in my tote. Carl walks in. He is wearing an eye-popping coral button-down that rarely makes it out of his closet, his blond hair still wet from a shower. His breath is unhurried.

  “You’re always late,” is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it. Better to be encouraging, praise the victories, not the shortcomings. Four years of marriage have taught me this. “Nice shirt,” I say instead.

  “Thanks.” He kisses my parents hello, then me. He smells of the shampoo he favors, a barklike lemongrass. I still can’t believe a Jewish girl like me married someone this light-haired, this at ease with the world’s accommodation of him. The servers flap about him like butterflies.

  “Kak dela?” he asks, unfurling his napkin. The question, in his charming secondhand Russian, seems to be directed at all of us at once. My mother beams. In the end I wonder if this isn’t my greatest success in their eyes. Not my job, my education, my apartment. But to have married someone this American, this effortlessly charming.

  “You heard about Tanya’s great coup?” my father asks.

  “Papa, let’s order first, okay?” I flag down the server. My mother and I decide what healthy dish my father will order, and settle on the poached trout.

  “Coup?” Carl turns his calm, almost hazel eyes to me.

  “The Financial Times came out. Hey, it’s not as horrible as we thought it would be. Isn’t that great?”

  “Oh, well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  I pass him the newspaper. I’m not ready to tell him about the Order after all. This is Catherine the Great we’re talking about and there’s still this tension around us after the book. When something awkward and unsayable enters a marriage, it plants its feet right in the middle, folds its arms and refuses to budge. Our voices are still unnatural in each other’s presence. Too high, too friendly, too easygoing.

  I imagined the restaurant would eventually turn bustling and jammed with people’s voices, but other than a single couple tucked into the back near the kitchen, we occupy the only other table in the dining room. There are all these hopeful pale blue candles flickering on empty tables, illuminating decapitated heads of hydrangeas. My every word is magnified.

  “But what is really exciting is the auction,” my father says. “Why aren’t you telling him?”

  Carl finishes chewing. Unlike us, he observes strict protocols of mealtime decorum. “That’s great! Did the Burliuk come in?”

  “The Burliuk was a fake.” I make way for my salad. The plate drops before me with a ceramic thud, a gnarled mess of arugula. “But we did get validation of something else from the Hermitage’s curator of eighteenth-century Russian decorative arts.”

  “Ekaterina Velikaia! Just like your book!” my father proudly interrupts. “Wasn’t she wearing it on your cover, Carl? This is romantic coincidence, yes, Vera? They are both … how we say it? Catherine-heads?”

  “Romantic,” my mother repeats, her eyes more observant. I can tell she is worried. She knows I don’t summon them from New Jersey to eat at restaurants on random Friday nights. But I’m continuing to smile, to ride the swell of celebration.

  A mother and son walk in, and are seated near us. A family of four is right behind them. Now the door is revolving, voices pervading the empty air. The weight of my choices lightens.

  “Oh, yeah? What’d you get in?” Carl asks. His interest is so sincere, so well-meaning.

  “It’s her Order,” I say. I keep my voice high and bubbly, an extreme version of the recent me. “Isn’t it exciting? We’d be looking at seven million at least, and that’s just the guarantee.”

  A slight smile crosses my husband’s lips. I want to read it as genuinely pleased for me—for us—laced with nothing more ominous. My entire body swells with hope that the worst is over, the last of the new marriage wrinkles are ironed out. I do something uncharacteristic in front of my parents. I reach over his grilled squid and kiss him on the lips. I linger there for what feels like hours longer than necessary. In case he can focus solely on me.

  * * *

  At home, we are incredibly kind to each other. I brew him a cup of decaf without his asking, and settle next to him on the couch with my glass of wine. We watch his choice of show, then rinse our glasses in the sink. He gets to wash up first, tolerates my checking my e-mail in bed without complaint. I keep smiling; studies show pessimists give up more easily than optimists. Optimists see minor hiccups for what they are, temporary and surmountable.

  “You should wear bright colors more oft
en, you know,” I say, watching him peel off the pink shirt. “They suit you.”

  “You think so?” His finger brushes my cheek slowly. I close my laptop. That’s how he usually initiates sex, a light touch somewhere on my face or neck. But he has found on my chin an eyelash. It’s one of the smaller ones, black and curling. It rests in the middle of his index finger.

  “Make a wish.”

  I do. Then I watch it blow away. But instead of disappearing into some mythical eyelash paradise of fulfilled wishes, I can see exactly where it comes to rest, on top of the sheet. The eyelash’s reappearance unnerves me. Does he still want sex? That was one of the victims in that blip early on in our marriage. For Carl, sex is the direct expression of his feelings. For me, sex is an escape from them. It’s where I allow myself to get obliterated, to neither think, nor, for once, to lead.

  “Hey,” I joke. “Can you make a second wish on the same eyelash? How does that work anyway?”

  “I don’t think so. You get only one chance at a wish.” Carl leans back against the pillow, his Grecian profile dipping into his book. Then, just as abruptly, he shuts it. His lips outline the rim of my ear and I allow him to diffuse my entire day, a day more stressful than I can admit even to myself. I try to sink into feeling only, but the mental collage is of a frowning Marjorie, Mr. Reed Brooks seeking rescue from the submarine of the viewing room.

  “You’re so beautiful,” I breathe as if my words will transport me where it matters.

  “And you,” he says. “And you.” But in it I detect a mournful spiral.

  * * *

  The next day, the Museum of Modern Art is less crowded than usual because of a dripping March rain. Carl and I run in soaked and dump our jackets in the coat check. Since I’m a corporate member, we enter the museum for free, two tickets handed to me once I flash my Worthington’s ID. I hand one to Carl.

  I love museums the way my husband loves libraries, for their civilized silence, the generosity of their gifts, that they can make you see familiar work in a new way depending on the curatorial point of view, the angle of the historical context. I love being surrounded by thousands of strangers yet encased in our own cocoon, the sound of our wet shoes tapping the floor in rhythm, the murmur of self-confident opinions around us. I pay partial attention to the show, but mostly it’s about the pleasure of ambling, of peaceful interaction with Carl. No demands from clients, no pressures from Dean’s office. A rare Saturday with my husband.

  “Okay, so I’ve got the new novel all mapped out,” Carl says, veering me around dutiful scrutinizers of section labels. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production.

  “Really? Tell me.”

  “Okay, so picture this. It’s set in St. Petersburg in 1911 at the Stray Dog Café. You know, the one where Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva argued and read poetry and drank red wine. It was a famous hangout for the greatest poets of the era. Before the Revolution. It’ll be like a Russian Cabaret.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you think? Does it sound viable to you?”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, but pretend I do. It’s always sobering how much more Carl knows about my own history. He pulls back each finger, chapter by chapter. “It’ll open in the 1960s with Robert Frost visiting the elderly Akhmatova in Leningrad and move back in time.”

  “That sounds amazing,” I say, probably too loudly because a few people without headphones look up at me, irritated. We are all standing in front of a map that links people and countries, slashes of red connecting Picasso to Liubov Popova and Vanessa Bell.

  “It’s just in the research stages right now,” he insists. “But doesn’t it sound fascinating?”

  “I can’t wait to read it. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “I might show it to someone else first. If that’s okay.”

  I pretend that the suggestion of this arrangement is perfectly acceptable, even as it stings.

  Carl is letting his hair grow longer, the preppy 1980s way it looked when I first met him. That impossible golden flax, pin-straight, straining over his ears and collar. I note that he’s made the style decision without sharing it with me. When we first got together, he would ask for my feedback on the most minute things: loafers or the Top-Siders? The paisley or polka-dotted umbrella? Even matters of diet: should I eat this late if we’re having an early dinner? Should I skip the fries? Will the salad fill me up, do you think?

  I suppose after four years of marriage, it’s natural that our minds will take turns back to an independent consciousness, occasionally skipping over the needs of the other. But it’s striking. I flap out some of his hair between my fingers, air-drying it. I imagine his students—that Victoria, in particular—focusing on the way that my husband’s hair moves during a long lecture on fiction craft or one of his digressions on the Acmeist poets. He’s the kind of good-looking that takes itself for granted, that even at thirty-four doesn’t fully understand the extent of its power. Even now, women linger on his face as they move past him to get to the corner with all the watercolors.

  We move deeper into the show.

  “Seriously. Tell me more. Where’s the love story?” I pull him out of the way of a guided tour bent on its systematic survey of the art. But he’s already thinking of something else, I can tell by the distracted way his mouth slacks open.

  “Hey, I think I really need to see it for myself.” He leans down, hand around my shoulder. He pushes a fistful of hair behind my ear. “Can I come in to the office?”

  I pause, genuinely confused. “See what?”

  “The Order. It’s incredible, right?”

  My heart stumbles, trips. “Yeah, it kind of is.”

  “So it exists. God, to touch the thing. That she wore it. Ekaterina Velikaia.”

  “But what do you need to touch it for? I’ll show you a digital.”

  On the wall behind Carl, I read out loud a Kandinsky quote: “‘Must we not then renounce the object, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?’”

  “Seriously, Tan. A digital is hardly the same thing. I just feel like I have to touch it with my own hands.”

  “Of course. But the consignor was very adamant that no one but a serious buyer should even breathe on the thing.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I also have an incredible Goncharova, just stunning. A very rare Spanish Dancer?”

  “Jesus. Why am I even surprised?” He brushes by the art with barely a glance and for a moment submerges into the sea of the tour group. I feel a numb devastation, then perform my cognitive tricks to recover. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. A bad situation is a momentary setback, nothing more.

  I look for him on the other side of the crowd. “Look, you should come to the preview. You can see it then. It’ll be behind glass and there’s going to be so much great art. You’ll love the Archipenko too.”

  “You don’t want me to touch it. You don’t even want me to be anywhere near it. You want to keep me apart from it. It’s yours. It’s all yours.” Before I know it, he’s an entire room ahead, staring neither at the Kupka nor the Picabia. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his pressed khakis, then takes them out. His hair is still wet, stubbornly wet.

  My friends warned me about the beginnings of marriages, like clumsy fumblings of any new skill. “Those first years are the worst, believe me,” my best friend Alla warned me. “You think you made the biggest mistake and will want to run from it every single day.” But her statement seemed so counterintuitive that I dismissed it right away. What about its opposite, the wearing off of bliss, the slow understanding of the person you married?

  “That’ll never happen with us,” I assured Alla. Carl was perfection. Exotic, voluminous, firebird perfection. I had somehow managed to trap it, convinced it to fall in love with me.

  As I’m deciding on how best to approach my husband�
�s mood, I glimpse a client’s shock of gray hair. My first thought is to try and avoid him, but he’s already seen me and is steering his wife over. A specialist is a salesperson first; she can’t be seen ignoring her clients. This man happens to be one of my favorites too, a grandfatherly bon vivant who reminds me of my own grandfather, who once wore suits and bow ties and effusively greeted random ladies on the streets of Rego Park (“Ciao, beauties”) as if he were Marcello Mastroianni or a flaneur in Malta. He had not lasted long in America.

  I’m forced to summon Carl over for introductions. Come, honey! Meet Jeremiah Gruber. The man’s wife is a petite, fragile-looking woman with a fit physique and two gold knots dotting her ears. Carl hesitates, but then obeys.

  “You wrote a novel, didn’t you?” the wife asks Carl. She is looking at him with an admiration I’m used to by now. My husband belongs to that species of handsome, tall male writers. “I’m almost positive I read about it in People. Catherine the Great, wasn’t it?”

  “We just got the news that it’ll be translated into Italian.” I pull my husband closer, offer his hand a brief, conspiratorial squeeze. There’s no response. I feel only bones surrounded by a film of flesh.

  “I can speak for myself, thanks, Tanya,” he says in my general direction.

  “Maybe we can entice you to come and meet with our book club,” the woman says to him. She is rooting around in her snakeskin handbag for a pen or card. “We often have writers drop in and answer questions about their inspiration.”

  “She’s in three book clubs,” my client says.

  “That’s wonderful,” I effuse, filling in the space. “I wish I had time for reading.”

  My husband folds his museum guide, signaling an end to the conversation. He’s gotten more polite at deflecting requests like this, but people are always unpleasantly surprised when he refuses to take part in self-promotion. He’s a classic pessimist like my mother, convinced everything good that happens to him is a mistake and everything bad is part of an unshakable narrative. “I don’t think so. Thanks for asking though.”