The Imperial Wife
Page 17
Everything in the state bedroom is red. Scarlet walls, the sheets draped with rich burgundy velvet. A huge crown with red emeralds is affixed above the canopy. She holds her breath while Katya and two of the younger girls are unfastening the lace cloak. It takes two of them to carry it away to the silver room next door. One by one, the weight is removed, the brocade dress, the corset, the crown. She feels light but also bare, unprotected. The armor is gone and so is the power she felt in the church. The girls are all giggling in a frightened way, either a shared ignorance about what is to come or a modest withholding of their own salacious experiences.
“He will probably kiss you first,” Zhenia says, when the empress is gone, and the other one, Evdotya adds, “Or maybe he will bow before you, or give you a gift.” Katya says nothing, but hands to her the rose nightgown, shipped from Paris for the occasion. It is silk in the latest style, fringed with scallops of ruffled lace. Catherine caresses the fabric. It has the power to make any girl beautiful, even her.
The undressing takes almost no time compared to the dressing, as if she is being stripped of all that made her valuable earlier. The revelry of the remaining guests rises from somewhere beneath the floorboards. She tries to call up Maria-Theresa and Francis again, the love story everyone comforts her with. He is her confidant, her advisor on matters of the state. Many unlikely royal matches end in love, she thinks. But she is afraid.
“Stay with me a while,” she begs Katya.
“For a little bit, if you like.” But the empress is outside the door shooing the girls out.
“You too, girl,” the empress chides. “Do you want the grand duke to find you here instead of his bride?”
A squeeze of the hand and her friend slips away. Catherine is alone. To stand or lie down on the bed? She resolves to try both positions. If she were Peter walking in, which would be the more enticing vision? She decides to recline, then props herself up on one elbow. She wonders if anything in the act will surprise her; she had heard it favorably compared to bloodletting. Pain, she can handle, she has proven that. The initial act will probably end quickly, with the initial sting of a needle’s insertion. She leans back against the pillows. The ceiling is a simulacrum of a blue sky, sloping upward into the heavens. George is with her by the lake, hiding behind her favorite elm. She can feel him pressed against the other side of the tree, about to frighten her when the time is right. He is ready to pounce, to collapse her in his arms.
Footsteps slice through her reverie, and her body tenses in preparation for Peter’s entrance. But no, it is only her headache, the dull pounding of it from the removal of the crown. The steps, if they existed at all, dissipate. Downstairs, the merriment grows rowdier. Glass shatters. She sinks back down and returns to the lake, the carefree feeling of being young, when nothing much is expected of you apart from a few hours with tutors and your governess. When you are resplendent in grass and sky. From time to time, she glances at the shade of the evening light. An hour passes, probably two. George had this way of kissing her, engulfing her lower lip with his own, pressing stray hairs behind her ears.
She startles to a presence standing above her, outlined in the murk. It is the gentle curve of Katya. “Are you awake?”
“My dearest.” Catherine’s voice is hoarse from sleep, from the mental travel to another time. She reaches for her friend’s hand. “Is everything all right?”
“I was told to inform you that the grand duke has just ordered supper in his rooms and he is waiting for it to arrive.”
She nods, slowly, still confused. Her pink nightgown is creased with her sweat or the August dampness.
“He is probably nervous with anticipation,” Katya says, untangling the twisted curtains around the bed. “I would be if I were him.”
Here she is, a queen-to-be, and her friend pities her. Her heart turns solid. “You’re probably right,” Catherine says. “Go to bed.”
“Leave you?”
“Yes, of course.”
The girls embrace, and Catherine feels a larger gulf between them. Despite everything she has shared about Peter, her friend is envious. Oh, to be simple Katya, would that not be preferable? She returns to the softness, a state of half dreaming, half dread. George jumps out from behind the elm and she screams. Babette calls out from beyond the slope of the field, “Figgy! Where in the world are you ambling to?”
It is the smell that wakes her, not the footsteps. “So be a man, stick it to ’er,” someone is saying in the hall, a chorus of rough laughter. Around her gathers a cloud of wine and smoke. Peter is standing at the room’s entrance. He is free of his heavy garb, his blouse stained with blots of red. He continues to hold a goblet. She wants to cover herself, hide her nightgown out of sight.
“Wife,” Peter says, moving toward the mantel. Then he doubles over with laughter. “Isn’t that funny?” The sour reek of wine.
She gathers herself into a pose of dignity, having forgotten which position she has chosen as the most seductive. “Why is it funny?”
“Imagine if they could see us now? My servants would get a kick out of this. You and me in bed. Isn’t that amusing?”
The silence is long and heavy. He looks up at the imperial relics. “Ha. The crown, that’s funny too. Watching us like some kind of hawk.”
He is nervous, bravado layered over trembling. Neither of them moves, waiting for something to happen. Her heart pulps at the base of her throat, taking away breath or voice, a patient at the mercy of an apprentice doctor. Just let it be concluded quickly, efficiently.
“Welcome, my husband,” she says. Welcome? The word hangs between them, a heavy cloud. In one flowing motion, he climbs into bed, fully clothed. She takes his goblet away and reaches over to extinguish the candle. When she turns back, she finds him splayed lengthwise, asleep.
Tanya
PRESENT DAY
As the train plunges deeper into Brooklyn, the population changes. Suits and slacks and blouses give way to families, nannies. Immigrants, just like we were thirty years ago. This is Carl’s route every day to his newly full-time job at Ditmas College. A pair of Bangladeshi women are hysterical over some picture on their phone, an Orthodox Jewish family loops around a bag of chips, an older woman, face pulled back by a too tight bun, completes a crossword puzzle. I follow the weave of female high schoolers in backpacks and neon-colored hot pants as they rotate around the center pole.
Tan’ka, you know men don’t leave their wives. It’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, and we are creatures of convenience.
He’s not cheating. The very idea is still ridiculous but I’m here to placate my mother and Alla. He’s been gone over two months now. Two incomprehensible months. The way he used to look at me.
The train slides into its final station and, outside, I navigate the dangerous constellation of Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand, cars whipping by from all directions. The Ditmas College campus is shoved into an urban mass of Target and Applebee’s, its gates high and fortressed, as if protecting its square of education from the danger of its surroundings.
Once past the security booth, I emerge onto the wide expanse of the quad where two pairs of Georgian-style buildings face off over a lily pond dappled by elm trees. Students, coffees in one hand, linger in circles, a sprinkling of booths are advertising petitions for protests—budget cuts, politically contentious speakers. The campus is a bucolic pocket tucked behind gates, the English department housed in a gray-winged façade closer to the pond. There have been few improvements to the building since I was here last. I recognize the faded tread of the staircase, the utilitarian hallways of a former public high school. Carl’s office is the first on the right, shared with two colleagues, their books heaped on one another’s desks, coats jumbled on a broken rack, a yellow rotary phone passed around on the rare occasion a student calls. What was once scruffy and romantically academic, I now clearly see as the shabby fringes of budget cuts, a stripped-down battle for supplies.
Suspect number one for any affair i
s, of course, Victoria Henriques, Carl’s eternal graduate student. She first arrived as a Ph.D. student in the history department, then, because of her interest in the Soviet Union, was introduced to Carl and creative writing. “Troubled” and “brilliant,” and “probably too thin-skinned for the profession,” was how Carl described her. She was a mélange of Dominican and Jewish, a prodigy unable to meet deadlines, whose work erupted out of her in unreliable spurts. He would often be reading her drafts, red pen in hand, slashing entire sentences, writing “Vivid!” in the margins.
There was a shorthand between her and Carl, an intimacy of hidden scholarship once she decided to ditch history texts and the Soviet Union to write an updated, wildly ambitious feminist version of Fathers and Sons. Long afternoons of advising, of poring over ideas and sources, Turgenev in Russian and English splayed everywhere. He never avoided the topic of her, but there was an implied intimacy in the way he said her name, the long drawn-out vowels of it—Vic-to-ria.
She was in the audience during Carl’s lecture on “Catherine the Great and the Case of the Russian Female Sovereign.” The talk was smart and confidently delivered, about how foreign diplomats, and even Catherine herself, would attribute her successful rule to possessing masculine characteristics like force of mind and ability to carry through a plan. It was the first time I saw him perform like this and the vision was thrilling. It was Carl as I meant him to be, forceful and knowledgeable, making deliberate eye contact with the smattering of academic types in the rows of the auditorium.
“Ironically, compared to its Western counterparts, eighteenth-century Russia was comfortable with its female rulers,” he was concluding. “Hard to imagine this kind of matriarchy in the contemporary context, of course. But for Russians, a gosudarina, or empress, was an extension of the Motherland. Nevertheless, Catherine the Great felt she had to publicly align herself with a male predecessor like Peter the Great rather than associate herself with the less than impressive accomplishments of Empress Elizabeth or Empress Catherine the First.”
My heart burst with pride for Carl. I was in the throes of that new wife’s awe of one’s spouse as an intoxicating stranger on an upward trajectory. In the lecture’s drier moments, I scanned the faces gazing at my husband. Victoria was sitting in the first row, wrapped in diaphanous silk scarves, their skeins rippling over bare shoulders. Once in a while, she shook out her hair, thrust her hand into the density of her curls as if to air-dry them. An empty notebook lay open before her, but she took no notes.
After the talk, Carl was besieged by questions. Once the crowd thinned, we exited to a city immobilized by snow. Flatbush Avenue was eerily empty of cars. Outside the gate, we saw a hooded form smoking in the dusk, a series of loose black curls, languorous limbs over forlorn eyes. It might as well have been Anna Karenina herself.
“Is that Victoria?” Carl said. Of course, I thought, this would be Victoria.
“The very one.” She turned to us, her bright red mouth open, exhaling steam. The vintage coat she wore was thin, fraying. She was clearly frozen in it, this big luscious head on top of a pair of hunched shoulders. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl. “That was brilliant, Carl. Your novel’s probably amazing. You have a way of making all that dry history so accessible.”
“Thanks, V.”
He was pleased. I could see him hiding the extent of it in the swirl of the snow. He introduced us.
“What are you doing standing out here in the middle of a storm?” he asked her.
“Nothing. Breathing.”
“Breathing, huh?”
“That’s right. Just breathing. Call me Lady with a Lapdog.” The girl punctuated the answer with an actual breath. She was blinking furiously against the torrent of wind, her Persian scarf undulating at her throat. She appeared lost and very much alone.
I could feel Carl’s reluctance to leave, his body poised to continue the conversation. Jesus, I thought. Breathing? Lady with a lapdog? But something alive wormed in his voice, an attraction maybe or a terror of being left behind. Victoria was me once, the dreamy, younger, exotic me before I could no longer afford to be dreamy. (“You’re making a mistake by letting men see your strength. Men like helpless women,” my mother used to say when I was entering my late twenties and was still unmarried. “Look at Alla. Does she ride the subway at night? Does she pick up her husband at the airport? That’s right. Because she knows it’s the man’s job to take care of her.”)
“We should go,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
Carl tightened the scarf around his neck. His cheeks were red from the cold. People were waving to him from the gates, calling out, “Great talk!” “Russian Review will want it.”
“Yeah, thanks for coming. I’m sure I’ll get your usual candid opinion on Monday.”
“You always do, Carl,” Victoria said with a theatrical wave. The way they kept saying each other’s name for no reason saddened me, all that clichéd young female effort and men too susceptible to flattery. I felt oddly robbed of my own time as the subject of impossible longing, but I was busy climbing, achieving, becoming. And when we were out of earshot, I said, “So that was the famous Victoria.”
“She casts quite a figure, doesn’t she?”
Is it possible to see your husband whole by the longing in his voice? To hear in it desire for what you no longer are?
Now that I’m outside his office at Ditmas College, I don’t know what I expected to learn. Did I think I would catch him with Victoria in erotic abandon? The door is firmly shut, Carl’s office hours scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper. I rap lightly. Out from the main office, young women exit with forms and manila envelopes. They are unformed, with gangly limbs, hair knotted messily with rubber bands, striped V-necks over low-slung jeans, or encased in childlike rompers. They move easily from conversation with each other to tapping on their phones. The overhead lighting turns their complexions yellow, not at all the young beauties I imagined Carl intertwined with behind his desk.
“Mrs. Vandermotter? Waiting for Carl?” Out from the main office, as if conjured out of air, comes Victoria.
She appears to be eight months pregnant and, by his wrist, she holds a toddling boy in a broken-in baseball hat. An adjustment takes place in my mind, realigning the romantic heroine in the snowstorm with the tired mother before me. But there’s no doubt; it’s Victoria Henriques in her early thirties, her curls gathered into a practical ponytail, her face bare of makeup, filled out. The gaunt, faraway look (“Just breathing”) is gone, replaced with an exhausted directness.
“I know,” Victoria says, glancing down at him. “He’s why I’m on the twenty-year plan. You know classes ended last week, right?”
“Right, right.” Of course. It’s already May. My mind hasn’t worked on an academic schedule since school.
“You don’t take my job seriously,” Carl said once, when I’d joked about his cushy summers off while I toiled toward auction deadlines. “You think I don’t even work.”
“That’s not true,” I’d protested, even as I tried to quash the thought, Does he even have a job? Then, I will always work harder than he does.
Victoria is resisting the boy’s tug of her hand. “I’m almost done though. Defending next week, then I’m finally out of here. M.F.A. and Ph.D. Didn’t he tell you?”
“Congratulations, Victoria.” I can afford to be generous. Tired mother or not, the ingénue will finally be gone.
“I want Wheels on the Bus I want Wheels on the Bus I want Wheels on the Bus.”
“Okay, Smith, I heard you,” she says. I can’t help but smile at the equalizing power of age; the ethereal beauty with an unruly child named Smith. “You’ve probably already checked Urban Writers offices? He might be there.”
“Urban Writers?”
Victoria is being jerked down the hall. She calls back, “Urban Writers Space. In Manhattan. He’s always there these days. Our theory is he’s moonlighting in another teaching gig,” before disappearing around the corner.
Outside by the lily pond, administrators unwrap sandwiches from parchment, purses resting against their thighs. The fish bob to the surface, mouths ready for an influx of crumbs. I watch them compete for food, glide over one another in their eagerness to be first.
The Urban Writers Web site is sleek and popping with color. It promises a communal working space, private offices for meetings, a fully stocked kitchen with tea and coffee, and a small library. The photos show serious people huddled around tables, stacks of paper spread out before them. They are staring intently at the gray-curled leader at the head of the table who is articulating her comments through elegant flourishes of the hands. None of it makes any sense to me. When I’m at work, Carl had our apartment to himself, not to mention the Queens apartment and his Ditmas College office. And why would Carl take an extra teaching job that probably pays nothing?
But the woman who runs the operation looks out from the screen with her oceanic eyes, soft black hair caressing sculpted eyebrows. She is stunning in the same mysterious way as young Victoria and her name is equally offensive: Hermione.
“Medovsky,” Regan says, and I snap back to my desk at Worthington’s, to the ringing of the telephones, the hallway kitten-heel patter of the interns.
“Sash.” I pick up. “Privet.”
“Listen, can I can buy it before sale? Preempt it, or whatever that’s called? I can’t go into details, but situation is urgent.”