The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  But Seryozha’s carriage is gone.

  * * *

  The labor stretches deep into the night, the mattress on the floor pointy as rocks. In her pain she is alone, forgotten. I am giving birth to the heir of a great empire and nobody cares, she thinks in a kind of numb disbelief. The midwife has left long ago but has not returned. Her call for water is ignored. The pain starts in a single toe, then sears its way up the leg, exploding in her midsection. She holds her focus on a single ceiling plank.

  When the child, a beautiful, slippery boy, is born, he is instantly whisked away, exchanged for a pouch of money, a hundred thousand rubles and second-rate jewelry brought to her by a businesslike chamberlain. She hears her son is to be named Paul.

  “May I see him?” she asks, but the message never seems to reach the empress. Day after day, there is no sight of the child. In the immediate aftermath, she is celebrated. Sumptuous furnishings are wheeled in for congratulatory visits from the court—a pink daybed embroidered in silver, upholstered French armchairs, fresh brocade curtains fringed in gold. She eyes them indifferently. Which is a good thing because a few days later, the footmen return to sweep it all away, and collect what is left of her money when the last of the visitors depart. Outside the window, she hears fireworks, the splashing water of a fountain. The midwife told her it sprayed beer.

  Apart from performing the necessary ceremonial rites, the empress has sent not a single kind word, and there has been no missive from Sergei, who is busy packing for his Stockholm post. Her son is far away, sequestered somewhere close to the empress. Her breasts leak, throb, then dry up. Peter has moved on to the least attractive and most repulsive of the maids who hates her. Most of the day, she faces the wall; when the door opens and shuts, she does not care who enters. Alongside this deadening of nerves, she feels a smoldering anger.

  Then one day, she rises. She asks for her books, her Voltaire and d’Alembert, and her maps. She sits in her dressing gown, tracing a line from the Caspian to the Black Sea, following a possible route of trade. She finally puts ink to paper: “I would like to feel fear, but I cannot; the invisible hand that has guided me along a very rough road will never allow me to falter.” In the distance, she hears a low, insistent cry, but by now it sounds to her like the drumming of grouse, nothing more.

  Tanya

  PRESENT DAY

  “How can you not know the reason your own husband left?” Alla says. “Unless you don’t want to tell me, which is completely understandable.”

  We’re the first to arrive in the boardroom, waiting for the other members of the Jewish Community Center committee to file in: the topic of the day is how to market Judaism to cynical Russian-Americans. A Regina Spektor fund-raiser concert is at the top of the agenda.

  She’s immaculate as usual, my best friend, sporting a pale pink manicure, her hair a refreshed blond. On the days she meets me for lunch at the office, the old-money codgers do a double take.

  I flip through our agenda. The downside to good friends is the way they keep poking at your most tender spots. “Carl’s the kind of guy who needs to think. I’m trying to give him space.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me. Space? Who gives her husband space?”

  “Maybe he’s angry,” I concede. “Maybe he has new-husband buyer’s remorse. I don’t know. He’s not talking.”

  “If that’s true and something’s going on with that Hermione woman or someone else, then you hope it’s a phase. There are worse things in a marriage than affairs. But be ready to find out something you don’t want to know.”

  Alla’s speaking from experience. She discovered one affair by accident (by picking up Greg’s phone after a text), and one on purpose (her brother hacked into Greg’s work e-mail), but she never confronted her husband about the information. This last time, she went on a covert domestic attack, booking them for theater around town, dropping the kids off with her parents so they could launch into spontaneous vacations. When they returned from a trip to Sardinia, she announced to me that the other woman was definitively gone.

  Before us is a tray consisting entirely of carved melon: honeydew, cantaloupe, and some kind of Persian variety with a dark green rind. Their surfaces glisten with slimy veneer. On the wall is a series of photographs of hip Jewish bands singing to appreciative seated audiences.

  “He’s so moral, so black-and-white. I knew that marrying him. He judges me.” With a twinge, I think about the Order displayed in luscious four color, in ARTnews, Artnet, Vidimosti, and the New York Times.

  “Moral? I thought he would have grown out of that by now.”

  “Maybe he’s right. I didn’t even want him to see the Order.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. The book, I guess. It might bring all that back.”

  “His book? About the queen? I thought it did well. Though I don’t blame him for moving on. Between you and me, I couldn’t finish it. Be honest, it was boring, no?”

  A few dutiful JCCers file into the room—privet, privet—take their seats. It’s a good excuse to drop the whole subject.

  “Oh God,” Alla says, flipping through the mimeographed packet. “Russians are never, ever going to become better Jews, Regina Spektor or not. This agenda is a waste of our time.”

  “Why? I think it’s possible. There’s got to be better outreach. We’re just people who’ve been taught to be suspicious of organized religion, to be suspicious of God. Marketing spirituality is like marketing anything else. There have to be incentives.”

  “And Regina Spektor’s our incentive?”

  “Sure, why not? She’s one of us who made it. It raises morale.”

  Alla puts on the breathless, squeaky voice of the Kultura anchor. “‘Regina Spektor is just one of our people on the move.’”

  The new president of the organization is getting started at the front of the room, booting up the computer. A diamond-studded Star of David is dangling between her breasts. “Thanks, everyone, for being here so early in the morning. And I want to thank Tanya Vandermotter again for arranging for us to use the Worthington’s galleries for our Spektor event.”

  “They’re clapping for you,” Alla reminds me. Now, the woman is calling up a PowerPoint presentation on the projection. Myth no. 1: Russian Jews are not spiritual people. Myth no. 2: Russian Jews are resistant to organized religion. Myth no. 3: Russian Jews have negative associations with Judaism. Myth no. 4: We don’t need volunteers to spread the message.

  Alla leans over. “Please tell me you will not be the one to spearhead this initiative.”

  “Why not? I think they need me, don’t you?”

  “My God, haven’t you got enough on your plate? You’ve got to work on your marriage.”

  “Okay, I get it. I’ll let someone else run this show. I’ve got to be back in the office anyway.”

  “My point exactly.”

  The most powerful New York Russian-Americans are seated around the long table. All the varieties of melon and minimuffin are consumed and the meeting begins.

  * * *

  Instead of returning to the office, I stop in front of a squat, airless building near Penn Station, take a key out of my bag, and unlock the front door to the Urban Writers Space. The application had been easy, a few questions, a deposit, and Hermione Tarling, lovely and vague and completely disinterested in my identity as Carl’s wife, handed over the code to the building.

  Earnest heads bow before flickering screens at each cubicle. There is the languid mewl of music expelling from someone’s earphones. I scan one body after the other for the particular shape of Carl’s back, for his narrow shoulders, for his classic profile. For all the things that were recently so beautiful and foreign and self-contained and reliable, like the flamingo I saw with Medovsky. But he’s nowhere. The kitchen is occupied by a trio of commiserating writers sipping tea and comparing overburdened teaching loads.

  Incomers choose cubicles, and when they are full, the overflow writers pile on the couch in f
ront of the offices. Several lean their heads back to sleep. The ridiculousness of what I’m doing—playing hooky from work by pretending to work—doesn’t elude me. But I boot up my computer anyway and wait for the familiar step. A jasmine scent curls down from ducts in the ceiling. Hermione Tarling checks on us all, a queen surveying her domain.

  All those words being written, I think, looking around. All those books on laptops struggling for the light of day. The tormented tap of keyboards, solitary struggles waged in every cubicle. Soaking in the neurotic air of all these writers, I wonder if I should have listened to Carl’s struggle more, acknowledged the difficulty of the creative enterprise. I wonder if I couldn’t stand the idea of him being diminished, less than I needed him to be. That maintaining his proper role in our relationship meant doing whatever it takes to get that book written and published.

  For the first time in almost a year, I Google Young Catherine. It takes some effort to retrieve the memory of how the book’s publication stirred our household. It was a time of great tension, like right after a glass is flung from the table but before it explodes. It was a time when neither of us said what we meant, when we awaited the next piece of news with stilled hearts. Each day, reviews of the book were forwarded to us by Carl’s agent, and they were mostly good and I tried to massage into Carl some sensation of joy. They praised the male author’s insight into the emotions of a girl forced to adapt to a foreign culture, the disappointments of romantic love, the pressures from different factions and the way young Catherine adroitly navigated them. I read one of the more glowing reviews to him out loud but he begged me to stop, saying he couldn’t even listen, and what did I think I was proving by reading each customer’s online assessment? (I’m not sure I even liked her all that much or wanted to follow an entire book about her. She was not as likable as I wanted her to be. The history stuff was slow going.) Nothing, I’m not trying to prove anything. Even when his department chair called with the long-desired job offer, he wasn’t thrilled.

  The book’s unexpected triumph unsettled Carl and he began losing sight of daily details even more than usual. Slips of paper fluttered about unorganized, items of clothing were professed missing, meals were forgotten. Just when I hoped that everything that arrived with the book’s success would lend Carl the validation he’d been waiting for, he surprised me with an uncharacteristic shortness of his temper, his fruitless pacing, his rejection of all interviews and prizes. He took the job at Ditmas College but only after much convincing from me.

  He would flare up without warning, on the subway, in bed, wandering through the Central Park Zoo. “My editor’s already asking for the next book,” he would suddenly blurt out, apropos of nothing, koalas calmly blinking at us from wobbly branches. “What the hell am I supposed to do about that?”

  “Honey.” I would try to soothe him, my arms around his body as if I had the power to eradicate his pain even when a part of me wanted him to stop his wallowing. “Just focus on this one. On enjoying this one.”

  Even his agent called me on the sly. “Is it me or is he losing it? Talk some sense into him. It’s a real shame to squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’ve got authors like that. Can’t handle success and their careers die on the vine. Tell him to call me.”

  So again, I was forced into action. Late nights after work, between trips to visit estates and research potential inventory, I worked a second shift in service to Carl’s exploding career. Translations accepted, e-mails answered, permissions decisions made, requests for blurbs rejected in Carl’s name.

  Hadn’t my parents insisted that being an immigrant taught me to handle things, be the kind of person who has her life fully under control? How often has it been made clear to me that when you immigrate as a child, you cease being a child? You suddenly realize your parents are struggling while you’re gaining in power. The new world makes more sense to you than to them, who are still dripping with the dew from the former life. You start to separate friends from enemies, dangers from safety, you start to understand the limitations but also the license granted to you as a foreigner.

  Your parents begin relying on you in large ways and small until your competence is assumed. You become the person who sets up phone service, who negotiates directions with pedestrians, orders Chinese food, explains odd American customs like wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day. Once you do it long enough, others start to depend on you too. In school, your less academically diligent friends expect you to know the homework assignments. Later, they’ll assume you’ll be the one to book vacations, walk up to the maître d’ and ask about tables, host the bridal showers. And it gives you a tingle of power to take care of things for others, to be relied upon so completely. The world is an easily negotiated field of logistics to you, but to others it’s a quicksand of unpleasant duties where impossible decisions must be made every day.

  “You are so great at this, Tanyechka,” my parents said. An expert who so easily can figure out where to eat, how to take out a mortgage, find an accountant, an orthopedic surgeon, a lawnmower, a handyman, the proper dress for a birthday party.

  “Don’t worry, this is only temporary,” they said from their patriarchal perch of the Old Country. Once you marry the right man, he’ll take over the responsibilities of handling, ease the burden of your competence. I said I didn’t need any of those things—the American model is about the division of labor, not about the protector and the protected. There was Carl, who from outside was so perfect for the task, his family name thrusting him into the former category. What my parents didn’t know was that he didn’t mind my aggressiveness in the world. He preferred it.

  Carl liked my booking restaurant reservations and vacations. “Two tickets, please,” I’d say at the movies, and he would linger back, allow me to take the tickets and lead us into the theater. He liked that I ordered food for both of us, organized our birthday gatherings, told him exactly what I wanted for a gift, surprised him on our anniversary. He tried to please me a few times in the very beginning, buying me a chrome watch or gifting me a subscription to a magazine I’d never read. But after a while, he was happy to give up the effort and allow me to manage the minutiae of our celebrations.

  There was only one area in his life where he wanted no input, no direction. It was his one zone of mastery, and since I knew nothing about creative writing, barely wrote a thing apart from painting titles and descriptions, it was a relief to abdicate expertise, to allow him jurisdiction over his one circumscribed domain.

  That novel.

  He finally placed his completed manuscript on my pillow one evening as I was rushing to dress for the company holiday party. When I emerged from the shower, I could see the pile of paper neatly held together by leather string, a sprig of thyme plunged between its coils. It felt as though my husband had plucked out his own heart, wrapped it in a bow, and nestled it in the cotton of our bed. I was too afraid to lift it, to touch it. A quick perusal told me that there would be some heavy history right up front and that he had got some Russian expressions wrong.

  “I want you to be honest,” Carl said. He was wearing a tuxedo, on his way to a fund-raiser for the Foster Children’s Alliance. He was so elegant, so easy in tuxedos.

  “Hey, did you hear me?” he teased, grabbing me on my way to the closet. His mouth tracing the hollow between my breasts, then playfully pulling away.

  “I’ll tell you the truth. I’m sure it’ll be great.”

  But I didn’t want to talk about the book, the pressure of judging all those years of work. I hoped it would all somehow be resolved without me, that he would take command of his area of expertise and leave me out of it for once.

  I returned his mouth to where it began its journey. “I think you missed a crucial biographical detail right here.”

  “Seriously, tell me. Have I got any talent?” He flipped me onto the bed, hair falling diagonally over the tip of his nose.

  “You definitely have talent,” I murmur.

  “I mean it.
No joke. You’ll tell me, right?”

  The bridge of that nose was burnished pink by the sun. And how could he not have talent? It was times like this I was reminded of how easily he slipped into the coils of my projections.

  “Of course I will,” I said, losing myself in the way he looked at me, suffused with all that adoration.

  By the time I close the Web browser at the Urban Writers Space, the praise for Carl reverberating through my head, it’s midnight. The offices are dark, empty of people. There’s no way I’m returning to an empty apartment and another anguished night.

  Luckily the time translates to eight in the morning in Moscow, a respectable start to the workday. Scrolling down my phone’s history, I find the right number. Igor Yardanov picks up on the first ring.

  “Good timing, Tanyechka. I just landed at JFK.”

  * * *

  The company allows us to sneak high-profile clients into Worthington’s after hours, but there’s still something illicit in entering the dark monolith of your corporation at one in the morning. Considering how many billions are cloistered within these walls, the act of penetration is made surprisingly easy. A single revolving door is kept open, the two security guards on duty trust you and never check in your guests.

  Igor and I breeze by one of my favorites from the overnight shift—Juan—who blows me kisses. “That one is a special lady, my friend. Cherish her,” he calls after us. Igor looks bemused, his hand on the curve of my back. He’s a man accustomed to entering empty buildings in the dead of night, of being whisked by security to spots available only to him. In a cashmere sweater and shoes that make no noise on the parquet, he glides toward the elevator with the nonchalance of an employee.

  “I imagine you are adored by many men,” he says.

  “Juan’s nice to me because he doesn’t have to live with me,” I joke.

  Igor looks down at me from all that height, that curved precision of his features. “I’m sure he is very, very sorry about that.” And my heart springs forward.