The Imperial Wife (10 page)

“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!)

“I don't care. I would never talk to him again. He broke the law.”

“You do realize you're dating a Russian, don't you? We're not known for our morality.”

“You, my dear, are the grandest of the Russian spirit,” he says between kisses, and I absorb them even if I wonder if he's simply naïve, unworldly. I couldn't tell him about the bag of cherries I never paid for at Whole Foods: they never charged me and I said nothing. Or a few bags of cherries after that. Those were forgotten on the cart's lower shelf until after checkout.

“You could use a piece of art here and there. We can probably get you some photographs for under three hundred dollars,” I suggest, fingers flat against his white, rented walls.

He brings me one of his mongrel wineglasses, the rare expensive-looking one with his initials bezeled into its side, clears a pile of papers from a wobbly metal chair. We are both mostly naked as we so often are. Covering our bodies seems an act of cruelty to the other person.

“I'd love it if you'd be my decorator,” he says, artfully avoiding the subject of money. He's wielding that new-couple voice, one octave too low, suggestive. Stretched on the couch in need of fresh upholstery, an odalisque among student papers feathering his feet. He pats a small, uncluttered space beside him. “And I'd been meaning to get art, but had no idea where to begin. The only paintings my parents buy are these depressing Dutch portraits.”

“I'll scout around for you. I just saw a lovely one of early spring buds in the ground.”

“Would you? But none of your fakes, please. Originals only.”

“You deserve nothing less than authenticity, my dear.”

The kisses are intense, spontaneous, indifferent to audience. His arms, so long, as though they could wind around me three times. So what if I prefer settling in the hazy zone of grays while his world shines in impassioned black-and-whites?

“Tanya. Tanyusha. Tanyechka,” he breathes late into the night, tracing the contours of my face with those delicate fingers. I wonder if he has read way too much Pushkin in translation, if he has internalized the intensity of Dostoevsky a bit too literally. How can I impose my messy, amoral Russianness on someone so entrenched, so unsullied, someone who chose me against all odds of logic? And there is the charm of that Upper East Side street his apartment overlooked, squares of forgotten New York where even the night's silence emits a genteel quality. And if I crane my neck from the bedroom window, the East River makes itself available to me, flashing mercury in moonlight.

*   *   *

The thing, the book, makes its first verbal appearance at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. We're seated at a corner nook, a location deemed “intimate” by a hostess who led us to the table with an air of spontaneous generosity, as if to say, you will thank me for this when you're married. The place itself seems erected for nights whirling with snow flurries and brutal wind, when inside is brick and fireplace, candle and dark wood, low Tudor ceilings. We slide inside, bent over a single menu (“They're printing more across the street as we speak”). A breathlessness of novelty, of being in a faraway borough, sitting so close to a creature still more myth than man. Inhaling long tendrils of pappardelle, the second bottle of red newly opened. His smell so clean, it engages with the spice of each dish, morphing from lamb ragù to the lemony spice of green beans. Then there's the symmetrical perfection of his features, his Ralph Lauren handsomeness enhanced by a cable-knit sweater straight out of a preppy catalogue, the delicate slenderness of those fingers as he expertly maneuvers wine into glass. He's a man thoroughly at home in his skin, slowly working on his pasta, pleased with anything I share about myself. And then, of course, there's the Vandermotter name that hovers over us, sprinkling pixie dust of fascination.

It's over the final glass, the glass that was two glasses too many, when I lean over and say, “Tell me more about your work at the foster care agency. I think that's so incredible that you do that.”

“I love it. I'm not a trained social worker or anything. I just help my mother with administration. She's on the board.” A pair of dessert menus are placed before us, the printing problem resolved. Carl helps the waitress clear the last of the cutlery, wiping the table for crumbs. When she's gone, he leans closer. “Actually, I've started a novel.”

“That's great.”

“I didn't want to say anything, but you're Russian, so…” He speaks quickly, that vivacity exploding in his eyes. He doesn't seem to notice that the restaurant has become bottlenecked with people waiting for our table. “So get this. No one's written the book focusing on Catherine the Great, before she was Catherine the Great.”

“Is that right?”

“Not a good one anyway. So this young Prussian girl comes to the Russian court, marries this buffoon who can't even get it up for her. And she winds up with the crown. The queen of the entire Russian kingdom with no dynastic right to the throne! Not as regent, not as consort, but as empress and, to top it all off, one of the greatest monarchs in history. A foreigner.”

“And?”

He's taken aback. “Doesn't that seem incredible to you?”

“Sure.” Except it doesn't, not even remotely. Of course she would wind up with the crown if her husband was a useless
razmaznya,
I think. An immigrant like her with all those ambitions? But my instincts tell me not to say any of that out loud.

The door blows open with a fresh gust of wind and a large group files in. I'm aware of women blowing on their hands, coned in birthday hats, the hostess gesticulating in our direction. The servers are hovering around us, waiting for a decision on dessert so the table can be released.

The last thing I want to explain to Carl is the inner life of the immigrant. By now, I'm sick of mining my tale for narrative curiosity. I'm tired of my “exotic” story. Yes, it was very hard to not speak the language. Yes, for a long time, I had no friends and American kids tormented me for my accent and granny clothing. Yes, I cried myself to sleep most nights, afraid I would never belong here. Yes, my parents cried too because they were afraid they had made a terrible mistake. That a language was already dissolving on their tongues, that they would never lay eyes on their home again. I knew enough to make it easy on them and stuck to zoned schools, close and cheap schools. That I wish I were a Vandermotter instead, a path of privilege spread wide open for me. But what is the point of going into all this in an insanely busy, sexy restaurant on a Friday night, when the main choice is tiramisu or
pot-de-crème
? Our table, the server reminds us, has been promised.

Carl's face is still steaming from the heat off his plate, a perfect Nordic face crafted by angels. “Anyway I've been working on this thing forever. If something comes of it, they might hire me full-time at Ditmas College.”

“I'll help with the Russian parts, if you like.”

“Wow. I don't want to essentialize and say there's something unique about Russians, but I think you're amazing,” he says. He's used that hyperbolic word before—“amazing.” It thrills me almost as much as it worries me. Is he seeing me or some heroine out of
Doctor Zhivago,
a fur stole around her shoulders, melancholy blue eyes staring deeply into the expanse of icy steppes? Does it matter? “I could tell from the minute I saw you studiously naming those frankly ugly paintings behind your desk. This girl, I thought, is the opposite of complacent. She glows with fire. I have to tell you, I was pretty drawn to it.” Reaching over the corner of the table, his hand is warm on my wrist. It burns a hole in its center. There's that Look I can't define, filled with reverence.

How grateful I am for that Look. How much my wobbly confidence needs the fire of all that admiration. I place a trio of fingers on his forearm. “Hey, you know what? I want to read your book when it's ready. I'll love it. And I can help you with any Russian words.”

“Would you? It's kind of getting killed in this workshop I'm taking right now, but the only thing people understand in workshop is short stories. It's a waste to even put it up for workshop.” He bends his head to mine in an arc of conspiracy. “But I've got a feeling you'll inspire me.
Moi kotenok
. Am I saying that right?”

The restaurant has more people standing than sitting, waiting their turn. All that waiting makes me feel at the cusp of uncultivated possibility. “Tiramisu and two forks,” he tells the waitress. How confident he sounds ordering for us both. A sprinkle of cocoa powder, the moistness of rum, two forks meeting in the center. The last time I was this happy was when I won the third-grade spelling bee and overheard parents whispering that I'd only arrived in the country nine months ago.

When the bill arrives, the tiramisu not reflected on the final tally, Carl makes sure to call the server back and inform her that she forgot to charge for the dessert.

“Your man is an honest one,” the woman says, and brings us a decadent complimentary bread pudding even though it will enrage the hostess and all those hungry people, and extend our stay here together, indefinitely.
Your man.

*   *   *

Eventually, the day arrives when he says, “Are you ready to meet the Vandermotters?”

It's an invitation for which I've spent years at Worthington's preparing. I know only this much: his mother likes to be called Cece, she will expect a thank-you card after the dinner, and I'm to eat as much as possible before heading over because there will probably be little food on offer.