The Imperial Wife

by Irina Reyn

  “Let’s just discuss this on Monday. Make an appointment with Karen. But smile, will you? It’s a promotion. Don’t pretend it’s not what you wanted.” Regan slides past with catalogues and Marjorie follows to flag her down.

  Tiny sparks of light invade the edges of my vision. I can barely linger on the prospect of living in Moscow, much less visiting the compounds of Azerbaijan billionaires. Medovsky, Medovsky. Sasha. I picture his purple body, strangled, in the bathtub, a rope he never used dangling over the porcelain rim. I picture Lena sobbing, doubled over.

  The faces of the guests glow grotesque in the greenish-silver light of the slanting windows. All those white teeth, the manes, the veneer of powder.

  “Do you like the teapot?” It’s Frances, face shining, hair slicked back behind her ears. Without her ubiquitous sunglasses, her face looks exposed, kinder. This time her Chanel suit is paired with a somber navy top.

  I look down at the object in my hands. “I was wondering what that was.”

  “Darling, it is a very good reproduction of a Paul Revere teapot crafted in 1762. Well, don’t look so stunned. I remember you admiring the silverware when you first came with Carl all those years ago. This is a little tribute, or just call it a promise. You know, one day the Paul Revere will be yours. And your children’s.”

  I raise up the teapot again, the inscribed TV—Tanya Vandermotter. The two words together don’t make sense at first. The light sharpens into full focus and I feel something melting, then expanding in my rib cage.

  I embrace the woman, a long grateful squeeze. “Thank you, Cece. You can’t imagine how much this means.”

  “And don’t your people like tea? Think of it as a samovar.”

  “Yes. ‘My people’ drink tea. You’re so thoughtful.”

  “Nothing to keep thanking us for, dear. You are a Vandermotter. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I’m a Vandermotter,” I repeat.

  Miggy appears to pull Cece away. “Can I grab this lady? We’ve got another possible donor out here.” They’re swallowed into the milling crowd. I make my way to the bar for a drink. The air is fragrant with a frenetic kind of gulping, scent and manicures and the steady din of networking. Through the lattice of my thoughts, I’m aware of being smiled at, approved. By the rim of the motionless pool, Alla is gesturing meaningfully at her empty glass.

  “Please jump ahead,” someone says, ceding his place in line. “You’re the star of the night.”

  I encounter the bottles of vodka, the pitchers of juices, the curling tails of lemon peel.

  The bartender waits for my order, then prods, “Can I offer you a beverage? One of our herb-infused vodkas?”

  “Okay,” I say. A burning engulfs me, a grasp of an idea that has eluded me until now. Now the immensity of it is distilling into a kind of clarity. Medovsky’s wife was right after all. I’m no different from my clients, no different than Marina and the other mistresses. I ate their caviar, drank their expensive wines, dined on their yachts, and yet I thought myself different from them. If Carl didn’t know me, wasn’t that my fault? Hadn’t I transformed myself long past recognition? I was Tatiana Kagan once, letters written in a careful first-grader’s Cyrillic.

  I’m aware of a long line of people waiting for my response, a glass ready to be filled in the bartender’s hand.

  “Actually, I’ve changed my mind, thanks.”

  His face relaxes, and he leans forward. “Hey, don’t let these Russki cocktails intimidate you. Let me make you something more familiar. I bet you just want an old-fashioned martini, don’t you?”

  A commotion is rattling in my head. There’s no Sasha now, no job, no Carl.

  “Gin and tonic?” he persists.

  Okay, I think, turning away. Okay, okay.

  I find Alla and wordlessly hand her the teapot. “Hold on to this for me, will you?”

  “But where’s my drink?” she calls after me.

  Igor’s fake girlfriend is standing by herself next to the pool, immersed in the screen of her phone, hair falling over the perfection of her sloped cheekbones. She’s taller than me, yes, but the Order is surprisingly easy to yank over her head. It slips off willingly as though it were waiting for me. All I can see before stuffing the Order in my purse and running for the exit is that pair of dreamy eyes, the round globes of them. No one calls after me, no security guards block my way. It’s probably taking the girl time to process the theft. She’s paid by the hour, probably thinks it no more than a novelty trinket. By the time the girl calmly relays the news to Igor, I’m flying down the red-carpeted steps of a museum that was never meant for me. Now I grasp what my mother meant by keeping me away from this: a palace is something you earn.

  I’m hailing a screeching taxi, giving the driver instructions to midtown. My calls are being forwarded to Carl’s voice mail, but I redial every couple of blocks just in case.

  As we leave the borders of Central Park behind to plunge into the maelstrom of Times Square, I allow myself to muse on Nadia’s idea, the possibility of a quieter life in a gallery. Where a specialist is most needed, where my client relationships would be meaningful. No more juggling people’s fates at auctions. And no more nudges in the “right direction.” Me and Nadia. Who knows? It might work.

  * * *

  “What do you think of this much-ballyhooed novel your husband’s working on,” Carl’s department chair asked at his Christmas party. “Between you and me. Is it as brilliant as we think it is? I’m on the personnel committee, you know. I’ve got to know if we should offer him the tenure-track job.”

  The entire drive to this town in western New Jersey had been confusing, with contradictory directions, and Carl was your typical New Yorker—a terrible driver. He lurched us from lane to lane in search of the right exit. Once off the highway, we drove by the main streets of adjoining towns, men smoking outside bodegas, shuttered movie theaters, dollar stores. A sign directed us back on a highway and we were plunged into the smudged neon of chains: Hooters and Fuddruckers and Outback and Loews movie theaters.

  I’d tried to keep the tone light. “Let the Jersey girl drive.”

  “They’ll ask about the novel.” He squinted at the splitting road, green signs of incomprehensible highways: ONE, NINE, ROUTE FOUR.

  “So why don’t you tell me what you want me to say?”

  “That you love it, of course. Darling, you know my whole life depends on publishing this thing. As it is, my parents think I’m this massive disappointment.”

  I was trying to look at the bright side of an expanding pool of dread. Carl’s zigzags of self-confidence depressed me and I hated the contours of that feeling. I couldn’t understand all those tortured nights Carl spent staring at a blank screen, deleting and adding, pouring himself countless cups of coffee, complaining about the agony of the craft, of the ticking tenure clock and his own lack of talent. His protests of how soul-racking writing was, how I could never truly comprehend the extent of his torment. Privately, I hoped his anguish pointed to some kind of authenticity as an artist. What I was ignoring was a transformation before the prospect of failure, my placid, life-coasting husband shrinking before me. But it was clear that the months I remained quiet about his manuscript were slowly chipping away at him.

  “I can do that,” I said, cheerfully. “I’ll say you’re brilliant.”

  The house, when we finally pulled up to it, was at the end of a country road. Elegant but deteriorating, chipped slate tiles on the roof, frowning stone fireplace, ironic posters of Mao. The department chair’s original specialty had been Chinese literature before he settled into the English department. It still amazed me, these academic parties, how different they were from Worthington’s functions. The brown loafers, corduroy dresses layered over turtlenecks, dog-eared hairstyles. Even the parsley garnish wilted on silver trays, the sparse food already gone and the crowd still hungry.

  “So what do you say, Tanya? Is it a masterpiece?” The beginning of the night, and the Ditmas Colleg
e department chair was already swaying on alcohol, with heavy eyelids.

  “You should have no problem getting behind the project. I’ve read it and it’s brilliant,” I said, cool and confident, indignant on my husband’s behalf that his career was always up for scrutiny by this scruffy crowd. There was Carl across the room, his paper plate of cheese cubes, a kindling pile of toothpicks at one corner. He was laughing with Victoria, who was dressed, for some reason, in a bright fuchsia sari. The whole sight infuriated me.

  “That’s what we thought. We’ve all got such hopes for him. We all have a novel in a drawer, of course. But I’m sure with Carl it’ll be different. He’s a real thinker, an intellectual. But we need name recognition to hire, you know. Everything’s about undergrad enrollments these days.”

  The department chair gravitated away, his duty of conversing with me completed. One relief of being a faculty spouse was the assumption that my career was too foreign to be comprehensible, and I was often left alone at these functions after the most cursory questions about my profession. I proceeded with drinking.

  “You look great,” Victoria slurred to me from her protégée’s pose on the carpet. “Always so polished. So perfect. So voluptuous. So Russian. I hope I look like you when I grow up.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You are grown-up.”

  “Just give us some pages.” The chair managed to return to Carl’s side. He was sloshing the mouth of the beer bottle in my husband’s direction. “A chapter?”

  “Oh, no, you’ll just have to wait,” Carl said, straightening. “It’s a complicated project that covers forty years. I’m trying to tease out the history so it’ll be comprehensible to the layperson.”

  “We won’t be waiting too long, right?”

  “Hey, I’m all too aware you’ve got pressure to do a national search. Don’t you worry, Mike.”

  “Not too long, Carl. Just get a contract and you know the job’s yours.”

  We returned from the party too drunk to gossip, to do much of anything but drape ourselves across the couch. Downstairs, on Broadway, a car was blocked in by a double-parked van, the horn emitting a series of resolute gasps. I toyed with the idea of initiating sex or at least tossing off a few e-mails to my Moscow clients, but then looked up to find Carl staring at me. The way he looked at you.

  “Why don’t you just say it. You hate it.”

  I’d hoped never to have this conversation. I figured if I didn’t say anything, it would be skimmed past, avoided. “No way. I love it. It’s almost there. I mean, another draft might be necessary. But it’s really very strong.”

  “‘Very strong,’ oh, please. That’s how you describe one of your fakes before you break the bad news to your clients. Let’s just get it over with. You hate it. I wish you’d just speak the words. God, do you know what a relief that would be?”

  I felt instantly sobered by this unusual display of directness. There would be no skimming then. I steeled myself, and plunged. “Okay. It’s boring. It has no life. No suspense.”

  “Great. Thank you. At least now you’re not avoiding me.”

  I tried to soften the damage. “Look, it’s no big deal. You just wrote it like a historian and, I hate to say it, from a man’s perspective. Why don’t you just turn it into an academic book or history text or something? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  “I don’t want to write an academic book. You know that. I’ve been working on this novel for so many years. It’s got to work.”

  I took his hand. “You know what? We can get it in shape.”

  “We?”

  I warmed to the idea. “Sure. I’ve got some thoughts on how to bring it more to life. I’ll help you.” Our eyes met and I thought he recognized my sense of purpose.

  “It’s pointless,” he said. I’ve never seen his face so collapsed, so blurred with panic. “I’m not a writer, I guess. I don’t know what I am, actually.”

  I knew it was the wrong thing, but said it anyway. “Honey, you’re a Vandermotter.”

  Carl leaned his elbows on the table. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “No, it’s not.” I grasped my husband’s palms, pulled them away so his eyes were visible. “We can do this.”

  How often have I seen this expression in my parents’ eyes? Fix it, Tanya, fix it. You speak English so much better than we do. The plea in their eyes for me to weave the seams together, to close the gap. To translate the new country for them. The expectation that I can make any crisis go away to keep a family together.

  He inhaled. “Unfortunately, this is one thing you can’t take care of.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is my field, my specialty, my issue, okay? This is a novel, not naming a painting. Just let me handle it, no matter what the fuck it means for my job.” He took a beer into the bedroom and slammed the door. Whatever he was doing was drowned out by the television, a hysterical exchange between reality show contestants. My head ached, but a solution was pushing its way to the surface.

  His laptop was charging on our coffee table, light blinking green. I struggled to remember the dull beginning of his novel, a history lesson about eighteenth-century Russia. The document floated on the desktop like a disengaged limb. I opened it. A few details of the book contained interspersed wisps of interest. There was a famous comet, wasn’t there? Wouldn’t the young Sophie have seen it on her journey to Russia? I saved a new version of the document, and moved the comet section to the front of the novel. A young girl arriving in a foreign land. A young girl who imagined herself selected for an extraordinary purpose.

  I started to type.

  * * *

  I presented my version for his birthday a few months later like an ornate gift, slipped him the wrapped, bow-tied package across the table. We were celebrating at the same Brooklyn restaurant of our early dates. What had once been the sole fine-dining destination of a grizzled block in south Carroll Gardens was now surrounded by newer places, trendier ones, glass awnings stenciled in black and gold, reams of people waiting their turn on the sidewalk. Our restaurant, on the other hand, was settled into its dotage, the menu unchanged, the bricks above the fireplace chipped, the booth that was once so romantic and enclosed, now drafty by its wood-framed window. There was a smattering of couples drizzled between bar and dining room; no one would be waiting for our table tonight.

  “We should get the tiramisu for dessert. It was good that time, wasn’t it?” Carl said, scanning the menu, and when I didn’t immediately answer, “Kotenok? Did you hear what I said?”

  I reached into my bag for the present, set it on the rickety table. “Surprise. Happy birthday.”

  He accepted the wrapped pages with a grin, perhaps mistaking it for something else, thumbing at the corners while skimming the lines. “You’re so goddamn sweet. What’s this?”

  “I did a little work on the book,” I said, pretending to examine the wine list. A quick skim confirmed that the bottle of wine from our last visit was still on the menu. I ordered it.

  “What? My book?”

  As a deep part of me feared and dreaded, Carl didn’t seem pleased with my gift. He kept turning the envelope around as if this were a gag gift and a real present would be hidden within its folds.

  “Most of the novel’s completely unchanged,” I lied. “I just perked up a few places.”

  “Perked up,” he said. “In other words you rewrote the whole thing. My novel.” The bread arrived, cold under a shroud of napkin. I dug into it with relish.

  “I wouldn’t say rewrote, that’s a huge overstatement.” In reality, after consulting some self-help books on writing fiction, and getting carried away with the story, I turned my attention to it during lunchtime at work. Once I began, with Carl’s research as the foundation, words flowed freely out of my own memories of those early years in America. The foreign streets of Rego Park, the kids at school who detested me for being geeky and Russian. That endless solitude of my room with the fantasy of a single best frie
nd, a beloved confidante. All those disappointing boyfriends of my twenties who never grew up, never stepped up to the plate, who were never strong enough for me. Didn’t I also believe I was destined for greatness merely because I was transplanted from one place to another? Wasn’t I surrounded by incompetence? Wasn’t I also considered my parents’ salvation, great-but-not-too-great things expected of me? The bread was as cold and dense as it looked, but I made a show of enjoying it.

  “Let me get this straight,” Carl says, looking at me in that rare dangerous way he had, an unblinking glare. “You just rewrote in five months the novel I’ve been working on for six years. And you think this will get me a job.”

  “I told you. Whatever I did was minimal. You really did most of it.”

  I didn’t tell him that for me, there was nothing tormenting about funneling a life story through this marvelous woman. I found the words streaked across the page as if by their own design, carried forward by my anticipation of Carl’s relief. There was the feeling of satisfaction at solving a problem, at jiggling a key into a recalcitrant lock and hearing the click.

  “That’s totally fucked up,” Carl said, picking up the pages. “I have a doctorate in Russian literature. And you just decide to write your own version of my book?”

  “Sometimes a doctorate gets in the way. I just pruned some of the hedges, or whatever. Make your intentions clearer.”

  Our lamb arrived, congealing between us on a plank of potatoes. He flipped through the manuscript, skimming it through to the end.

  “Oh, and I see in your version, she has him killed. I never wrote that. No texts verify with absolute certainty that she was responsible for Peter’s murder.”

  “She’s not, she didn’t,” I said, flushed. “The Orlovs killed him on their own. In my tweak, they just took her silence to mean she was onboard with the plan. I can make it less ambiguous if you don’t like it. Or you should. I mean, it’s yours now.”