The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  “You must come by this weekend, Tanya. No excuses. Armand is making old-fashioneds. A few of the ladies of the Foster Children’s Alliance should be coming later to discuss business. We’re in terrible financial shape. Terrible. We might have to close. I don’t know where we can get money on short notice.”

  “Let’s discuss that more this weekend. I might have an idea,” I say. I’m thinking faster than I’m talking. But in noting the shift in Cece’s expression, a warmth melts deep into my stomach. I’m worthy of them means I could be one of them.

  “Tanya, that’s incredible, I don’t know what to say,” Frances says after I made my insanely bold promise.

  “It’s really no problem. A client might be looking for a cause.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that be the eleventh-hour salvation? I’ll call Miggy. She’ll be thrilled. We all are.”

  How frail Carl’s mother looks, how reedlike under the muscle of her strength. All our years of marriage, she has alternated between drawing me in and keeping me at a distance; I never knew if she was friend or foe. I guess I’m about to find out.

  * * *

  In the evening, Carl and I emerge onto a busy stretch of Queens Boulevard. There must have been some kind of parade or concert because we pass real Russian women resplendent in their belted coats, walking arm in arm with their families. As we pass them, I feel their eyes flickering in judgment. They are all whispering to me at once, a harmony of female Russian voices in my head. They are chiding, affectionate, maternal. You failed, but maybe it’s not too late, they seem to be saying. How did you overlook the most obvious thing Russian women have known for centuries?

  They walk, these true ladies with lapdogs, swollen with power, fueled on memory, swathed in fur and Lycra, dreaming. How romantic they still look to me, these women, full of secrets and longings. Queens—in its sprawl, its anonymous brick high-rises, its confusing tangle of streets—hides their secrets well.

  “So this is where you’re living.”

  “I like it here actually,” Carl says. He seems to have undergone a physical transformation in the months we’ve been apart. His style has become younger and hipper, a faded T-shirt peeking out from an open short-sleeved button-down, low-slung jeans and sneakers as opposed to his neat chinos and loafers. The overall look of this change strikes me with a blunt force.

  “The place hasn’t changed at all.”

  The old Rainbow store, the same crappy city supermarket that used to house Waldbaum’s, Uzbek bodegas, Bukharian shish kebab joints, Russian pharmacies. We are walking awkwardly, arms out to our sides. Usually, I would link my hand through his arm. Evening is a time for strolling, the genders divided. Men walk in front with their friends, women behind. Both groups laugh and talk about their own concerns. Once in a while, the men turn around and address the women. Once in a while, the women pretend to gossip about the men as if they weren’t in hearing range. It occurs to me that the world I sometimes occupy is more fluid than I’d assumed. I had dismissed it, latched myself on to the new world with the assumption that what I was leaving behind was already dead.

  “You look great,” I add. The trick is to always flip your fears into their opposite, to unearth the kernels of confidence.

  “You do too. But you always do.”

  “Have you been hard at work on the book?”

  “I’ve been thinking mostly,” he says, rolling his lower lip back and forth between his teeth. I have no more dominion over these small habits. “I’m trying to figure out why I’m so angry. No, more like surprised. You know?”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me.”

  The man next to me starts to blur. Almost to ascertain that he’s still there, still my husband, I stop him so he will face me. We’re in front of a Bukharian restaurant, the communal tables noisy with merry toasting. It’s started to rain, a thin spitting kind of rain, almost imperceptible on the skin. Once in a while, the door opens and the smell of smoking meat is expelled into the air.

  Carl reaches over to pluck some feathery substance from my hair. “I think I need a few more weeks, actually. I feel something different every day. I’d like to get it all sorted in my head.”

  “Why?” I say the word. There comes a time when the word must be said. I watch him flick away the speck, the instinctive husbandly act still wired into him. “Honey, talk to me.”

  Carl squints down the street as if he is hoping there is some wormhole through which to vanish. Talking about feelings was never his strong point; he would contort himself in order to avoid it.

  A couple leaves the restaurant, exclaims at the turn in the weather. The man leaves the woman under the awning, promising to return with the car.

  “At least come with me to your parents. While we’re still ironing things out. Do we need them asking questions?”

  “You’re right. For now, we should keep up appearances for our families.” He looks miserable, creased and in pain.

  So many wives passing us, in groups and alone. In too tight sheath dresses with high heels or baggy housecoats and high heels, their hair dyed and pulled back, gossiping or staring ahead, rushing forward with purses and satchels and granny carts.

  A Russian anecdote: A wife is training a new puppy. Her husband looks on dubiously. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re not getting very good results.” The wife says, “Don’t you worry. It’s a matter of patience. It’s not like it was easy with you at first either.”

  I take Carl’s hand. “Can you tell me if you still love me? I still love you.”

  A car is slowly parallel parking in front of us. The man turns off the ignition and comes around to the passenger side to open the door, then guides the woman from her place beneath the awning, shielding her hair with his jacket. My mouth fills with something gritty and pebbly.

  “Of course I love you. I’m just trying to figure out a way to be seen. Does that make any sense?”

  “A way to be seen? No,” I say, sadly.

  Then I point out that we’re late to his parents’ house.

  * * *

  We trample into the Vandermotter apartment, disheveled, wet, and out of sorts.

  “You certainly look like you’ve dressed for the occasion.” Frances greets us in a sleeveless white shift, cherries decorating its borders.

  Today I realize that the Vandermotter apartment no longer holds magic for me. The items within it have lost that foreign mystique: that dreadful Puritan portrait inherited from Aunt Vivian’s Virginia horse farm, the framed Yale fleeces from Armand’s alma mater, the schooner proudly displaying the date 1793. The splashes of orange everywhere as a testament to Dutch heritage. The Vandermotter and Mortimer framed family trees extending their fruitful branches through generations.

  Over time, the deterioration of the Vandermotter home became more and more evident, the sleights of hand to give it the veneer of polish while hiding its fissures. Cece sorted her décor into two categories: the items displayed for guests and those slated for daily use. Antique Limoges china and good silver in the armoire and Target plates and Broadway Panhandler cutlery on the table, Tiffany lamps on view but Crate and Barrel lamps actually ignited, pressed lace bedding in the cupboard, Bed, Bath, and Beyond sheets on the bed.

  When I first met Carl, I thought it all terribly prudent, the flashy taste of my own parents coarse and undiscerning by comparison. At least an immigrant has a healthy relationship with stuff, my mother said once after a tense dinner party at the Vandermotters’ where we ran out of conversation before the entrée was plated. We know it’s all expendable, that we might have to abandon it at the drop of a hat. These people are just holding on to ugly things.

  But maybe it was just self-protection, having been forced to part with heirlooms, disentangle yourself from the objects that define you. Leaving the Soviet Union, my parents had to winnow all their belongings to suitcases weighing a ton. Precious room was made for toilet paper and homeopathic textbooks, items they were convinced did not exist in the new country. Left behind was my
father’s stamp collection, valuable and lovingly collected over a lifetime, a passionate hobby he never did take up again in America. My mother feared her gold Soviet jewelry would be worthless but those phantom necklaces and rings still loom large in her mind. How she would love to see that one ring again, embedded with the tiny sapphire sickle.

  My parents’ Ramsdale house also displays this lack of reverence for tradition. Furniture is moved from room to room depending on my mother’s moods, new cheap rugs are bought and the old discarded, curtains alternate with the seasons. Everything is bought on discount. Nothing too precious or valuable, nothing that would ever tug at my mother’s heart again if she were forced to part with it.

  By contrast, the Vandermotter residence remains perpetually unchanged over the sixty years it has belonged to the family. There’s the sepulchral feeling of being inundated by furniture, the sense that none of it belongs in the same room together, that the paperweights and other knickknacks are only ever moved by the cleaning crew. If one slides aside a painting or the leg of a desk, one will find the imprinted blankness of its original piece of wall or floor, the certainty that you’re the first person to have dislodged this item from its eternal rest.

  Carl brushes past me to the kitchen and there’s the lament of an open beer. How I want to touch his back, the soothing measure that works so well when we visit his parents.

  Armand strolls in, drink in hand, Miggy by his side. Miggy is an incomprehensible creature to me, birdlike with a craning neck, the kind of expression that either signals confusion or a need for eyeglasses. She is divorced, the state evoking such exaggerated sympathy from the Vandermotters that she’s always invited over in the evenings. “Did Frances tell you about Santorini?”

  We’re forced to sit down and endure a detailed observation of Greek islands, the particular minerality of the white wines, the Cycladic island landscape, Byzantine monasteries. They’d prepared for the trip by reading Aeschylus. Miggy nods owl-like from having heard it before, but gives a convincing impression of renewed interest.

  “How are things going at the alliance, Cece?” Carl has even less patience for vacation recaps and I slip him a conspiratorial smile.

  “Terrible. If our new round of fund-raising doesn’t come through, the agency might have to be shut down,” his mother says, stacking plates for the crackers.

  Over the years, it became apparent that this charity is the one cause Carl and his mother have in common, their one source of bonding. In planning its galas, sending cards to the kids, and attending meetings with its president, mother and son have unleashed their quiet love for one another.

  In the early phases of courtship, I was Frances’s enthusiastic pupil, accompanying her to meetings and fund-raisers and luncheons. From the outside, it all looked so exclusive and important—I’d seen those photos in the New York Times Style section, those slick, floral people gathered in museum clumps, wearing elaborate hats at garden parties. I was fascinated with how unattractive the people were given license to be, how pleased they appeared in one another’s company, how their ease probably came from this status they were born or married into, and I wished this ease on myself.

  “You have to make an effort. People just need to get to know you,” Frances counseled at one of those luncheons, where I was seated among Miggy, Clara, and another woman with smooth, slicked-back hair who took turns disclosing in great detail their meals for the day. The conversation was mind-numbing.

  “I find if I combine avocado with a sprinkle of lemon juice, my body can really absorb that monounsaturated fat,” Miggy was saying.

  “Oh, I never touch avocado. As silly as it sounds, I’m scared of it.”

  “But that’s absurd. It balances your potassium-to-sodium ratio. You should really rethink it. I eat an entire avocado every day.”

  “I know. I know. My nutritionist says the same thing. It’s irrational.”

  “At least you recognize that.”

  My mind would wander in the middle of their chatter, grateful that Carl didn’t require this life of me, that he’d shunned it for himself. He loved the kids but never the parties, and when I described my evenings at the functions, embellishing them for comic effect (The Attack of the Killer Avocado!), he would say, “Poor Tanya, what a bore.” In any case, there was never a way to penetrate those round tables with drooping orchids, their plates with slivers of raw fish drizzled with a complicated oil foam. Now that I’ve appeared in the Financial Times, and those women have been e-mailing me nonstop since the article was published, it seems even more silly to have tried.

  I realize Frances has been talking for some time. “It’s been an uphill climb since the financial troubles. In fact, I’ve had to pare down on other demands so I could concentrate on the organization alone. I’m treasurer now.” Armand bends down to serve what I now recognize as Eastsides, lemon rind contorting around the rim of the glass. I can picture an entire closet consisting of multiples of that navy jacket with gold buttons that he wears.

  Miggy pulls the flaps of her cardigan tighter. “Cece’s understating it as usual. We’ve had a change in board leadership. It’s actually been a mess. No matter what we try, we can’t get our numbers back to where we were in 2008. And those poor kids! We’ve barely got enough caseworkers to handle half their load.”

  “It’s tragic is what it is,” Carl says. “We should do another fund-raiser. I’m up for helping in whatever way.”

  “I think two in a season is a bit much, don’t you?” Frances says, eyebrow raised. “It’s diminishing returns after the first.”

  A flutter of terror—he’s talking about himself in the singular—and a long-hewn instinct kicks in, the need to preserve, to stop a client from defecting.

  I clear my throat. “I may have someone interested in contributing to the organization. I was telling Cece.”

  “Really?” Miggy sits up straight, her neck elongated, at attention. Carl raises his chin. “Isn’t that great news?”

  I can tell my husband’s listening, and this inflates me with fresh courage. “A new client actually. He’s interested in one of my lots—the Order, Carl—and I think the cause would really speak to him. A lot of my clients are becoming important philanthropists.”

  “Yes, so this has been the one spot of hope,” Frances says, brightly.

  “You don’t want their money. They’re criminals,” Carl says.

  “Why not, darling? We could use it and they’ve got it.”

  There have been encounters between her world and the oligarch world, but they’ve been brief and bumbling. My clients have a perverse desire to inject themselves where they’re not wanted, but then grow bored with the protocols of other social systems. They like to be wholly themselves, certain that those “sticks up their asses” will loosen up eventually after a few resounding toasts. Meanwhile, the “sticks” are allergic to an overt display of money; like repelling batteries, the two groups occupy opposite sides of any fund-raiser.

  I sit back, confused. Carl’s never said he had moral objections to my job.

  “I agree with Cece, Carl,” Miggy says. She appears energized by the news, raising her glass in the air as if in Russian-style salute. Za zdorovie! “If they’re willing to help, who cares what their motives are or where the money comes from? There’s no point turning away donors when children are at stake.”

  “Well, I for one would be happy to meet the man,” Frances says. “I don’t care what people say. One has to do what’s right.” This is definitely not her first drink of the evening. She crosses her leg, heel dangling. What never fails to astound me is how different these people look from anyone else I’ve met, less the result of the decent clothes as the indifferent way they’re worn on tapered shoulders.

  “Great. I’ll set it up.” I’m still holding the drink in my hand, but I notice it trembling. I will have to call Regan and check in where we stand with the Catherine historian. We should have had some preliminary word on the final authentication. “And my cl
ients have really changed, honey. They’re not the same guys from the nineties. They’re discerning. They’ve developed an eye. They want to make a positive impact with their money.”

  Carl examines me, inscrutable. I’m sure this is an elaborate test he’s forging for me, and I refuse to fail it. It’s only a misunderstanding of what I do. A misunderstanding. I wrap my tongue around the word until it develops its proper shape.

  “You guys are so attractive together, have I ever told you that?” Armand says. It’s his way of sending private messages to Carl, addressing us both, broadcasting his love in public announcements. “We were like that once, weren’t we?”

  “Oh God, not again.”

  “I’m serious. We were damn attractive. We just lit up a room, you know? Everyone said so.”

  “Were we attractive?” Cece smiles. “I can’t remember. It was just so long ago.”

  Catherine

  JULY 1752–1754

  “Are you so hard-hearted that you do not believe in love?” Sergei repeats.

  Catherine squints around for elusive hares. They are riding side by side, the others far ahead of them. The earth is mottled with the debris of summer, trees drooping like canopies. All around them is lushness, fecundity, an endless field peeking white with daisies. Even her dogs are indifferent to the chase at hand, sluggish and drooping as if tuned in to the sumptuous cloud of torpor that surrounds them.

  “Who says I am hard-hearted?”

  Catherine knows she should drive her horse onward, join the others as soon as possible. But Sergei Saltykov’s horse is lingering beside hers, perilously close, his scent redolent of fragrant, dying petals. His voice gently rides the breeze. “If I am not being impertinent, may I ask if you have known the pleasures of love?”