The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  My parents arrive and are hovering next to the Archipenko bronze at the entrance, pretending to scrutinize its patina. They look uncomfortable here among the coiffed, the self-assured, the multigenerational New Yorker buyers. An Archipenko bronze is as foreign to them as penthouse apartments overlooking Central Park, but aware of their role as my parents, they move stiffly, with studied admiration, among the art. I’m relieved that my father’s not wearing his tracksuit, my mother having forced him into a short-sleeved shirt. I hug them, inhale my mother’s perfume. She is wearing all black, as if the very color will protect her from the intimidating crowd.

  She feigns confidence around the sculpture’s amorphous body. “Nice piece.”

  “Isn’t it amazing?”

  “This one I like,” she admits. She once asked me regarding a Rothko, Can you explain to me why this is art?

  “But I want to show you something really special.” I lead them to the glass case, to the Order of Saint Catherine. “This is what I told you about at dinner.”

  How lovely it looks preening in the center of the room, her tiny oval alone in all that space, the diamond-encrusted cross, the staunchly seated woman surrounded by symbols of faith and martyrdom.

  “That barokhlo a queen wears? It’s even shabbier in person,” my mother says, squinting into the glass.

  “It’s not so bad,” my father says. “It’s old, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re kidding right, Yash? I saw something very much like this at Century Twenty One in the jewelry section.”

  I try not to take offense. My mother is pessimistic in the way she sees both herself and the world. Good things happen by accident and bad events come about due to personal shortcomings. She’s a classic Russian Jew. Which is a shame because my mother is beautiful, the luxuriant hair she crops too short, cobalt eyes never handed to me, a sorrowful Modigliani face. I think my mother is more beautiful than Isabella Rossellini, who is now in front of the Goncharova laughing with Jeremiah Gruber and his wife in a voluminous shawl draped over a pair of complicated dungarees.

  “Whoever buys this ugly thing is idiot,” my mother continues. “Do these rich people really think this belonged to that queen? The Hermitage probably hired someone last year to forge this.”

  “Shh, Ma, please keep your voice down. It’s not fake.”

  “How much you want to bet that Hermitage person was paid off to say that?”

  As usual, my mother injects the proper amount of fear into me. I’ve been trying not to think about that possibility, but how could you not with the world I’m navigating? If it’s discovered to be fake, my reputation might be ruined, not to mention that Medovsky’s wrath, like so many of my clients, carries in it real mortal dangers.

  I swallow and repeat, “It’s not fake. Why don’t I get you drinks. Champagne?”

  A man standing behind us moves closer to the sheet of glass so his face recedes and refracts between the panels. “Such an incredible, incredible piece.

  “‘The Order was gifted during the Imperial era to what Peter the Great originally referred to as extraordinary persons of the feminine sex.’” He’s quoting the words of my catalogue copy in a Russian accent and, indeed, the tome rests in his hand, one finger thrust deep into its spine. My mother flickers to the man’s bare ring finger, then back to his face, and I realize that all my peppy evasions—Carl’s swamped in midterms, he’s on major deadline—have not been entirely convincing.

  The man is astoundingly tall and tan and attractive, three uncharacteristic traits for your standard Russian male. “I see you estimate it at seven million.”

  I feel a faint sensation of recognition. Have I worked with him before? Have I seen him around the galleries? “Depending on interest, it may go for a lot more. One never knows at auction.”

  “I can imagine. Still, it is a Russian treasure, isn’t it?” His finger, ringless, dappled with curly, black hairs, leaves prints on the glass.

  “You know then that it belonged to Catherine the Great.”

  “Of course, that is precisely what interests me. Nostalgia for the Romanovs has never been my thing, but Catherine was different, wasn’t she? She was a very special kind of monarch. A special kind of woman.” My parents, having long ago lost interest in the conversation, move to the Grigoriev, a risky gouache and watercolor that will probably never make estimate when oligarchs prefer oils.

  I switch to Russian. “Will you be bidding?”

  “Posmotrim.” We’ll see. He exudes a Mediterranean ease, his skin tanned, his body lanky, deceptively athletic, that of a basketball player. So different from the delicate sensitivity of my Carl, but then they all are, hailing from a land where men are men, women are women, everyone slotted in their proper place. Once I resented that old-world patriarchal division of roles but a few years of marriage to Carl have made me rethink its shortcomings from time to time.

  So this particular man is a somebody then. For a minute, I allow myself to hope that this one’s here to repatriate Russia’s art, to do more with it than embellish his own power. “Wonderful. Why don’t we take down your information so you’re in our system.”

  “I would rather it be over lunch. Four Seasons?”

  “Monday?”

  “Perfect. I fly back Monday night. I don’t suppose you can bring the Order with you? I would like to examine it.”

  “You’re welcome to, but here in our offices. The consignor’s clause states it cannot leave the premises without prior consignor agreement.”

  “I thought in my case, you might make an exception. But by all means, vet away.”

  Yet another loopholer who thinks himself an exception. Still, is he flirting? They do that, my clients, their arms sinewing around my waist at these functions, complimenting me on my curvaceous figure, volunteering their hotel rooms after lunches, offering to fly me to their homes in the south of France. At thirty-two, I know I’m way too old for them, their mistresses twenty, twenty-three tops, but they insist they’re enamored with my exoticism. The Russian who is not quite Russian. The Jew who left the Motherland, who can spot a fake in seconds.

  “I’m afraid we cannot make exceptions.”

  “Until Monday then.” He places his untouched glass on a tray and disappears inside one of the elevators.

  “Nice looking.” My mother sidles over, pretending what she just said was a disinterested observation, pretending she was not making an allusion to Carl’s mysterious six-week absence. But now her attention is caught by a man crowned by a shock of white hair striding across the gallery with long confident steps. “Is that Steve Martin?”

  And, in fact, it is Steve Martin, and the fact of it is hard for me to believe sometimes. The Manhattan borough president, Liv Tyler, Isabella Rossellini, Naomi Campbell, Jerry Saltz, all at my party. When I started in the industry, I was a mere witness to all this, a mousy drink-fetcher, a coat-gatherer, a flight-booker. Shyly standing by the wall with a carafe of water and a stack of catalogues, sitting at the RSVP table and marking off names, I dreamed of becoming what I am right now. But when did I ever enjoy the process of becoming? When would I finally be satisfied with what I’ve achieved? At each juncture, there was always more to want. More ways to be the most competent person in the room.

  Near the bar, I notice that wine has spilled onto a pristine white coat. A squeal rings out across the room, a call for me to contain the confusion, to treat the stain with seltzer and a stack of napkins. I’m needed everywhere at once—a collapsed installation, another new client wants to register, the last bottle of red gone, Isabella Rossellini wants to introduce me to a potential client—and I forget my parents’ champagne in the frantic mill of the party’s conclusion.

  “Tanya,” Liv Tyler’s circle greets me when I manage to inject myself among them. “Your dress is gorgeous. So unusual. Did you get it in Moscow?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “I have to get out there soon.”

  When I glance back at my mother, she and my fathe
r are huddled on a trio of folding chairs that belong to catering. They probably wish they were home in New Jersey, among friends, in comfortable clothes, and for some reason the realization carries with it a sting. Once, I imagined my professional successes would bring them the deepest delight, but at some point I realized I’ve gone too far, achieved too much, striven to become too entrenched, American. I needed to take steps to curb all that ambition. Because in overreaching their expectations I’ve turned myself separate from them, foreign.

  * * *

  The party over, tables are wheeled out, and the cleaning crew is collecting trays of lipsticked glasses and balled-up napkins. The colleagues who helped take the heavier pieces off the wall are gone.

  “You sure it’s okay if I get out of here?” Regan asks, already shrugged into a canary-yellow vintage coat. “My girlfriend’s doing that open mic thing with Eugene Mirman at Union Hall. It’ll take me at least an hour.”

  “Go, of course, go.”

  One by one, the lights on the floor are extinguished. I collapse into one of the chairs being stacked by Special Events. Night shrouds the building.

  Across the street, an office floor is still illuminated, lone workers animated by screens. “Would you just look at those corporate drones.” Carl used to point to them when he picked me up for dinner. “What a waste of a life.”

  “Maybe you can afford to think that,” I said, hurt. Wasn’t he implying I was one of those drones?

  I unlock the glass cabinet where the Order is draped. What was it the mystery man said? I don’t suppose you can bring the Order with you? The saint gazes at me with the same unflappable expression, the skies in the background an unperturbed blue: For Love and for the Fatherland. Checking that the gallery is truly empty, I slide the order over my head. It is thick, hefty, not as light on the body as I expected. Just in case, I scan the room for witnesses.

  I’ve not intentionally stolen a thing in twenty-two years.

  Even now, I don’t consider what I once used to do regularly as stealing—it was a child’s logic, a kind of immigrant magical thinking. I was just ten years old, just a few years in America, and allowed to roam alone on the streets of Rego Park. At first, my parents hired a Polish babysitter to pick me up from the bus stop and feed me dinner, but after a few months, Agnieszka started skipping hours and days, and it was agreed that I was old enough to care for myself. My parents, distracted by the need to make money, to learn the intricacies of a new language, sprung me free among thrift stores, worn-down supermarkets, Korean delis, Russian hardware stores, the busy spokes of numbered streets that intersected Queens Boulevard. The extraordinary circumstances of immigration meant I was kind of an adult now, my mother explained when Agnieszka disappeared from our lives. She held my gaze so I understood. In Russia, girls younger than you are responsible for their brothers and sisters.

  It was frightening at first, this sped-up graduation to adulthood, but what was the point of being a child when yeshiva did its best to exclude me, to separate me from the American Jews and the Israeli Jews, when there were no friends with whom to pass the long after-school hours that bled into evening. There was nothing to do but make peace with loneliness, make the best of it.

  Daily life was just me and the city. Plunging into the music of honking cars, the coarse Russian language tossed about on the streets, the gangs of kids prowling Queens Boulevard, the thrum of subway underfoot. I felt the city whispering in my ear. You’re special. The world as through tinted glass, dim and contorted, the neon of bars and movie theaters, stores hawking the silliest, expendable things like greeting cards and coffee, sequined bandannas and fingerless gloves. Wandering through a cacophony of languages that made no sense at all.

  I dipped in and out of local bodegas, appraised their aisles. In Moscow, there was so little to buy, to want, and here, it seemed as though desires were so much greater than one’s needs that there was a persistent ache in the heart. The impulse to take came on suddenly, but naturally. It would be up to me to care for my mother and father and ailing grandfather. At yeshiva, the rabbi droned on about the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and the Hebrew teachers passed me without even a glance at my essays on the mitzvot of the Torah, the foundations for Talmudic life or how to kasher a chicken. At home, my parents counted the dollars between them, ordered ribs from the Chinese takeout place for dinner, and stayed up all night arguing like they’ve never done before or since. My grandfather’s medical bills, applications for services they were not sure existed. My Jewish moral life and real life were split in two.

  I began with candy bars, then rolls of bread, then bags of soup noodles. And those items were easy to cart away, what with my angelic features, hair parted in the middle, enormous bows tethering my ponytails, neat flared corduroys. I never shoved things surreptitiously in my bag, but brought them out of the store in broad daylight, daring someone to stop me. Look, I wanted to tell my parents, I can take care of us all. But instead, unable to admit what I did, I ate the food in private, quickly, with trembling fingers, stuffing my mouth with bread and stale chocolate and unripe pears. Or I would feed it to a grandfather whose head lolled, whose eyes glassed over, and who called the bread “cotton, nothing more,” and spat it all out.

  One day, I targeted a store called Ninety Nine Cent Things. It was smaller than the faceless superstores I preferred, a cluttered hodgepodge of plastic items piled high in metal baskets with no particular order or organization. The inventory seemed to be stocked by a kid barely older than me, his cherrywood complexion and rapid speech on the rotary phone pinned him as hailing from somewhere in the Georgian Republic. I stalked the aisles, calculating, picturing the missing provisions of our bathroom cubby, soap or shampoo. “How thoughtful,” my mother would say when I present the soap, two no-brand white rectangles stuffed into the pockets of my jacket.

  Outside the sun was blinding for April, my eyes adjusting to the dizzying sear of it. There was the satisfying bulge of the soap in my back pocket, and then if I rushed home, I would catch the end of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (“I’m Adam, Prince of Eternia, defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull”). But the kid’s face materialized before me, soft, caramel eyes on mine, his spiraling eyelashes, his hair the flat color of black ink.

  “Young girl, wait,” he was saying, “devushka. Stop.” Why was he calling me young, when I was practically an adult? Couldn’t he see I was special, older?

  He held out his hand. We both stared into that palm, faint lines dividing it into three smooth sections. Then I looked up at the moon-shaped scar above his lip. I could see a different expression on my father’s face now, one of shock and disappointment in me. We are educated people, we don’t do these things.

  Reluctantly, staring at the laces of my sneakers, I placed in his palm the bar of soap. How absurd it looked in daylight, a cheap carton, the glue of one flap coming undone. A diminishment returned to me, the feeling of my insignificance. At school, there was daily talk of punishment and victimhood, of God’s disappointment and Jews’ abandonment of God.

  “Are you going to get me into trouble?” I asked dully.

  On his face was forgiveness. He lifted a finger to his lips and just said, “Shh. Between us,” and he left one of the bars in my palm, pleated my fingers over it, one at a time.

  How could I possibly admit this version of me to Carl? He who loved me as untarnished, buoyant, moral? Corporate drones, he’d said; to him, it was an insult.

  The last of the cleaning crew disappear at the elevator banks. I slowly take off the Order. Before I return it to its tray in the safe, I flip the medal to its back and read the inscription one more time: “Aequant Munia Comparis.” By her works she is to her husband compared.

  Tanya

  2005–2010

  Can you even imagine an immigrant girl who finds herself in a gilded auction house, a junior cataloguer trainee in a palace of glass and white walls, adorned by somber rugs and saucy milkmaids framed in Baroque gold? Just
imagine what it’s like to daily enter a shrine to beauty that gleams with two sides: the spotless external veneer and the hidden heart of it.

  From my first day of work, from my very first interview with human resources, it is made clear that I am a visitor, a tourist, an outsider. This is obvious from my very appearance, the poignant effort I put into its composition while insiders wear their expensive clothes nonchalantly like second skin. I am asked where my people are from, but I know fully well that “my people” are the wrong kind of people, and in any case, any affiliation with “my people” grows more tenuous with each passing year.

  I toil away at my trainee position, but am unable to scratch past the impervious façade: the doorman who directs me through the revolving doors, the greeter in his gray suit and tortoiseshell glasses, the security guard who scrutinizes me head to toe as I slip inside the lobby like a thief. In the elevator, I wait alongside women in flared skirts with matte, unblemished skin, a mysterious group of women flitting in and out of the office whose titles are “special events coordinators,” who spearhead “private event groups”: socialites whose sole job is to publicize Worthington’s events to their Hamptons and Greenwich and Aspen set, a milieu I can only conjure in my mind as wonderlands of outdoor decadence, a string of established connections linked by name and university and pasts already lived and concluded. And above all, the mysterious proliferation of Hermès scarves: casually flung about shoulders, attached to coats, draped on the backs of swivel chairs. Imagine a Russian Jewish girl from the scruffy immigrant shtetl of Queens, who now lives in Ramsdale, New Jersey, with her massage therapist parents, arriving every day to a temple where no one speaks of money but simply exhales it.