The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  Through a series of internships and interventions by Slavophile professors, I’m lucky enough to be hired in the Nineteenth Century Impressionist and Modern Art department, the bastion of respect. Who can argue with the perfection of water lilies and ballet dancers, the sun dappling on flexing swimmers, mothers toweling off rosy, bathed infants? My parents are thrilled: all dutiful Russians, cultured Russians, know their Degas and Monet and Mary Cassatt. And I am breathless with the desire to work among such beauty, the art that I idolized on trips to museums every weekend, the landscapes I admired on overhead slides in the courses of my art history major. I naïvely imagine placing the art where it will be most appreciated, where it will give its viewers joy.

  But if my parents ask what my work actually entails, I have to admit that I see few Monets and Cassatts. I admit that my interaction with art is not allowed to be worshipful but monetary, tuned in to the needs of the market, the company shareholders, and the fickle client. Mostly, I have to invent titles for paintings with no titles, titles that will fill buyers with a fuzzy sensation of yearning and transport them to bucolic landscapes and cozy domestic scenes. The mother sponging that baby in a tub could be named Bath Time with Mother and Child, a couple strolling down a wooded lane, Lovers in the Forest, a vague blur of hyacinths next to a broken loaf of bread: Rustic Supper, with Flowers. I long to sit with a few of the paintings, to examine the artists’ intentions, their strokes of genius, but there is no time for that. I measure canvases, pore over catalogues raisonnés and type condition reports until late into the night, until the last train to New Jersey. And still the inner world of Worthington’s remains inaccessible to me.

  Lonely, I try to befriend my colleagues, fresh out of art history M.A.s from Williams and Columbia and auction house certification programs. I think they may share my awe for the objects in my care. They are friendly, but eye me through the gauze of their separate lives. They sport American settler names like Martha and Edith and are pert and blond, hair falling in long, expensive layers. From time to time, they include me in drinks gatherings after work, midtown wine bars and Upper East Side Irish pubs, and they seem fascinated by my tales of arriving in New York with four suitcases and no English, my entire family crammed for a year into a cousin’s living room on Avenue I in Brooklyn. But eventually, they lose interest in my incomprehensible past and swap stories about the mutual acquaintances of their cosseted lives, they reminisce about boarding schools in Connecticut and New Hampshire, about escapades at farms and house parties where parents disappear for months and horses wait for them in stables.

  “Oh, sorry, Tanya.” They remember me, that pathetic smile on my face, unable to share my own memories of drug-fueled parties on inherited estates or drunken hijinks at equestrian camp. I dare not admit that I received my education at Forest Hills High School and Rutgers College and, until I moved to New Jersey, worked evenings slicing salami at Monya’s on 108th Street, cutting at an angle, into white globules of fat. I feel depressed, as if I might as well quit.

  Then one day, Edith is standing over my desk with a tall, elegant-looking guy with expressive shaggy eyebrows, his overgrown blond hair threaded with red. It is his face that arrests me because it may as well have emerged from one of my untitled paintings: hazel eyes with a smoky clarity of quartz, a dash of bangs, the hint of sideburn. He may as well be the protagonist of my prep-school fantasies, the ones culled from old 1980s movies I watched with such fascination as a teen—sensitive boys with logos of eagles and mysterious Latin phrases sewn onto their blazers, clean, scrubbed boys out of movies like Class and School Ties and Dead Poets Society, who were full of passion and rebellion but were cruelly held back by rich and distant parents, tucked away in cavernous Westchester mansions.

  “You’re going to love how she names paintings. It’s like a talent,” Edith says, not bothering to introduce me, as if my purpose in her life is one of performance.

  “Really,” he says. He runs slender fingers through his bangs, as if unconsciously, but the hair makes a beeline for its original position. To my surprise, he doesn’t exude arrogance or entitlement, but a guileless curiosity. He’s encouraging me with a smile, and I try to focus on the painting placed on the floor beside me. In it, a woman is haggling with a blind merchant at a Turkish bazaar, while a group of men watch in amazement.

  “What should we call it?” he says, an interesting use of pronoun. His clothes display the confidence of that fetishized privilege of my imagination—a rumpled, expensive-looking button-down with real cuff links, the shade of pink only investment bankers and members of his class can wear with any confidence, pressed khakis, black Docksiders. But one of the cuff links is missing, the shirt somewhat messily tucked inside his waistband.

  In my attempt to return to reality—because those prep-school boys may as well be phoenixes or firebirds for all their foreignness—I scan the image. “Haggling with Blind Man at Turkish Bazaar?”

  “Not so sexy, don’t you think?”

  “Woman Does What Men Cannot?”

  “Don’t forget the buyer is male.”

  “Hand Over That Goddamn Rug?”

  “Something soothing. Can you see your Nigel with that stamp of a gavel, announcing, ‘And now on the floor, Lot Four thousand forty-four, Hand Over That Goddamn Rug’?”

  I laugh at his mock British accent, which is actually pretty decent. “How about we try for simple. At the Bazaar?”

  “Perfect.”

  Edith watches the back-and-forth with bemusement, the iconic “Rachel” shag I envied feathery and effortless and perfectly, expensively executed. She whisks away the painting, along with the boy, and I assume I’ve seen the last of him. But at the end of the day, he’s leaning over my ledge, cocking his aquiline nose in profile, a trench coat open at his waist. “So what would you name me?”

  My body is humming, then palpitating. I want to say something cheesy: “Hottie in Burberry?” But I’m terrified of his disgust, his condescension. Instead I offer a breezy, “Portrait of an Ambitious Man?”

  For a minute he looks elsewhere, blinks rapidly, then returns to meet my eyes. “You’re good, Kagan. Is that what I’m reading on your tag? Am I saying it correctly?”

  My face turns plum, the way it does when the First Settler Girls pronounce my name as though it were an ethnic food, vaguely distasteful.

  “Kay-gan, yes.”

  He says, “Do you happen to hail from the former Union of the Soviets? I don’t detect a Boris and Natasha accent but your name certainly implies such a provenance.” He is being arch, I understand that much. But there is still a fear of a knife wiped of evidence. Where are your people from?

  “Why, yes, I do hail from the cold steppes of Russia. Unlike Boris and Natasha, who, I should point out, hailed from Pottsylvania. And may I ask how you are related to our dear Edith Rhinelander-Jones?”

  “Hey, listen, I hope you don’t think that I’m Othering you or anything. I’m actually a scholar of sorts, of Russian history. It was my major in college and I’m doing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures. That’s why I asked if you were Russian. No offense intended.”

  “A Russian doctorate? Why on earth would you do that?” I ask, lowering my armor of self-protection. I’ve never considered the beautiful prep-school boy out of Dead Poets Society holding anything but T. S. Eliot or Walt Whitman, much less Gogol. As I’m packing up for the night, Carl tells me about his obsession with Russian writers. That when he cracked open his first Dostoevsky, he finally felt understood. That early Tolstoy made him cry because of his deep well of empathy. That Nabokov’s wordplay inspired him to try writing in the first place. His green eyes are set unevenly and close together, which lends him a raffishness among all that symmetry.

  It turns out his last name is Vandermotter, a name shared with a wing at Beth Israel where my forehead was once sewn back together after a kid tripped me on the stairs of the yeshiva. So he does hail from the unlikely world of the Settler Girls. As the office winds
down for the day, I can almost glimpse a hand reaching from the other side of the Worthington’s wall, a door creaking open to a place beyond the Irish pubs and wine bars, to a world where people populate Beaux Arts town houses in the East Sixties, where they smoke alongside stuffed moose heads in brown-paneled libraries, where their faces are recognized at the kinds of clubs that serve exorbitantly mediocre Cobb salads. As Carl talks, it is as if America itself is welcoming me inside.

  * * *

  I’m a tense, pessimistic, anxious person with a one-track mind for single-minded success, until my friend Alla brings me to a yoga center in western Massachusetts. It is to be a weekend of yoga and hiking, girl-bonding over kale salads and lentil daal, sneaking out to town for glasses of wine. On the bulletin board hangs a daily schedule and a lecture title catches my eye: “Harnessing the Power of Optimism to Achieve Your Dreams.”

  The main lecture speaker is a professor of something called positive psychology and he is at the door summoning us inside. Alla laughs it off and heads to yoga class, but I pull up one of the chairs in the back of the auditorium. The man is tall and clearly Jewish, familiar. His eyes are transparent blue. He is armed with PowerPoint presentions packed with research. And in a breathless hour and a half, it is as if he tells me about myself. I create narratives of negativity, I perpetuate my reality because of my pessimistic perceptions of the world. Deep down, I think I’m undeserving of a happy life. Optimistic people are healthier, happier. They get what they want in life and they enjoy it more. The only thing that holds us back is the narratives we construct about ourselves.

  “What’s your narrative?” the professor asks each of us, and I flash to the girl in pigtails, a girl who had once excelled in chess and math, lost in Queens. The girl who stole soap and was now being outperformed at work by interns. “Don’t you see that the narrative can be reframed, that your life can take a new course?”

  As soon as I return to New York, I screw up my courage to call Carl Vandermotter.

  I bring Carl to a gathering of the First Settler Girls at O’Grady’s, and they size me up anew, as someone by Carl Vandermotter’s side, someone they would have to reconsider. Gin and tonics and margaritas appear and disappear, and with Carl as my cultural translator, I feel a greater intimacy with them. For the first time, I speak up. Betsy Rankin admits she found me self-contained and strikingly alien, that she was sometimes intimidated by me. Edith Rhinelander-Jones says all the girls know which painting descriptions are written by me because of how I manage to bring the particular essence of any painting to life in words. The girls are newly kind, the circle opening to accommodate me. The bar turns wavy as the night wears on, their compliments press past my barriers and doubts, my outer-borough immigrant insecurities. Curtains part to reveal verdant landscapes pocked with golf and cricket and polo and other sports foreign to me. I allow myself to drink a bit more than I normally would and relax into the shorthand of their conversations. When they talk about attending a wedding in Newport with a robber baron theme, I reveal that when my own parents married, my maternal grandparents arrived on an overnight train from Ukraine to Moscow with a wedding gift of two dozen freshly killed bloody chickens. At the time, chickens were a huge treat, not a single chicken to be found in Moscow, and the guests feasted on them for an entire day. But a few chickens had to be set aside for bribes. After a secret ceremony officiated by a rabbi, my parents gifted neighbors with chickens so they did not turn them in for holding an illegal religious ceremony. I’m aware of speaking too much, of saying the word “chicken” too often and too loudly, my voice catching with emotion.

  “Wow,” Betsy Rankin says, tilting a mojito in my direction as if in salute. “That’s wild.”

  The entire night, I’m sure Carl Vandermotter will be leaving with Betsy or Sutton or the one who calls herself Gigi. But then I remind myself to expect more from the world. Reframe the narrative. He will stay with me, I repeat in my head. And he remains by my side, unmoving.

  * * *

  There are long weekend afternoons in museums, in cavernous wine bars with tall candelabras, cold ferry rides to Staten Island and back. I find myself stealing sideways glances to affirm his presence by my side, am aware of being careful around him, of presenting myself in a proper fashion. I’m acting more confident than I feel, not at all the girl who never made the first move with guys she found attractive, who performed dutiful lap dances cellophaned in absurd lace teddies for my first boyfriend because he asked me to and because I liked his frayed IRON MAIDEN T-shirt and his cocky smirk. For Carl’s benefit, I edit my life story for its most laudable moments; I imagine that guys like him with lineages to protect, long strings of names affixed to family trees, eighteenth-century jewels passed on from mother to daughter to marrying son, expect a certain deportment in suitable partners. After all, what am I contributing to the relationship? An absence of history, an American invention. My jewelry dates back one generation at most, and even that I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing—a thick Soviet ring inscribed with ruby hammer and sickle. A shoebox contains sepia-toned photos of murky, unknown ancestors, dark, stern shtetl-dwellers that populate an erased family tree. But he doesn’t seem to mind, peppering me with questions about the singularity of the Russian people. Is it true they distrust you at first but then embrace you for life? Is it true that they’re funny and melancholy and can recite Akhmatova by heart? They really are brilliant, passionate people, aren’t they? How he wants to go to Russia and find out for himself, he says. I’m charmed by his earnestness (my parents having long ago abandoned Akhmatova for Real Housewives of New Jersey), by the inferno in his eyes that would ignite whenever the topic of “Russians” was raised. And he seems amused by the way I elbow to the front of a line for coveted tickets, when I point out discrepancies in service to managers.

  “I guess I’m the kind of guy that stands in line like everyone else,” he says, hanging back. The way he looks at me. He seems to take in all of me, the crown of my head, my overripe breasts, the curve of my hip. I feel like an animal of wild plumage, flown in for a special viewing. Under his gaze, I burst into bloom.

  And he always pops by the office holding catalogues with paintings for me to name.

  I point at each one. The Harem. Barren Tree. Piscine Plunge. Sultan and His Tiger.

  “You’re amazing,” he says, flashing a hand with rolled-up sleeve, long fingers the color of heavy cream.

  “Feel free to elaborate on your argument.”

  “I’m serious. It all comes so easy for you. You should probably write my thesis. I bet you’d finish it over the weekend.”

  “I’d need at least three days for a dissertation. Can I have one of the long weekends? Columbus Day? Memorial Day?”

  I’m not yet used to acknowledging any talents, but I’m working on it. I am still very much a junior cataloguer trainee, sharing a desk with two half-day summer interns, one of which is Nadia Kudrina.

  Carl Vandermotter becomes such an integral part of the group that to celebrate his dissertation defense, the First Settler Girls throw him an after-hours party in the gallery. Bottles of rum and single-malt scotch and mixers are snuck into the office, streamers, noisemakers. The girls stretch party hats over their heads. It’s my first time at the auction house at night, and the space takes on a new, friendly valence free of the people I fear. The art glows gold in ornate frames, the pieces showing themselves intimately, free of artifice. All the imposing elements—the long, walnut tables of the greeters, the library of Worthington’s catalogues going back seventy-five years—grow friendly, accessible. We drink like party-throwing teenagers with out-of-town parents and mingle underneath paintings of seaside bathers and fields of irises. As the night progresses, stylish friends show up with more drinks and I clap and turn up the music and try to whistle. I grow bold and climb on top of a conference table to rattle off a toast to Carl entirely in Russian. Most of it would have been incomprehensible to a native Russian (before my transfer to the Russian department,
my grasp of my own language is still crude, unpracticed). But after my speech is over and I stumble with little grace to the relative safety of the carpet, Carl swings me into a sloppy dip. When I unbend, head pounding from the rushing blood, his lips are pressed against mine.

  “Aww,” the girls say in a single envious voice.

  * * *

  He’s as eager and adventurous as I am to explore this city together, to walk around the Brooklyn everyone is moving to, catch underground performance theater, dance in underground nightclubs, try the street food cropping up all over town. I sense that for him—a native Manhattanite, nose-to-the-grindstone student of Trinity, then Princeton, then Columbia—these activities in the city’s hidden craters are as novel and as transgressive as they are for an outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel former Soviet defector.

  I even like his careless way around sex, one day methodical trial and error, the next uninhibited and creative. A scientist microscopically examining tiny strands of DNA or a teenager making exuberant discoveries. Cheerfully, he brings in bondage and then forgets about it, his messenger bag stuffed one day with silk scarves, the next with lingerie, the following with fleece socks and a cotton nightgown. I realize that before Carl, I approached sex like a good student eager for As, and with him I allow myself to be selfish, to take and moan and giggle. Afterward, I love tackling the mechanics of a Saturday together with its individual compartments of pleasure. Coffee, paper, walk to the park, dinner. I start to relax, grow bolder. I buy Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life and a bag of similar books. I underline them, hide them.

  Of course, I notice chinks in my boyfriend’s perfection, but there are ways to caulk them over until they become invisible. For example: he judges people who make lapses in moral judgment.

  “But what if it’s your best friend who needs the money? Wouldn’t you want him to know about a good opportunity?” I would tease after we watched a news segment about a disgraced insider trader. (In any case, my Russian family never could wrap their minds around this as an actual crime; of course you’d pass along to your loved ones any useful financial information!)