The Imperial Wife (22 page)

At the chapel, she and Peter are bent at the waist, going through the motions of the rites as the empress is handing them their rings, as the archbishop intones chants and vows. At last, after three hours, a meek little official reads the decree pronouncing her grand duchess. As the church bells ring and the doors to the cathedral swing open to the square, she feels herself floating and porous and weightless with happiness. She is wed to the cheering faces outside. Not to the tiny figure next to her sweating under all that empty regalia and moaning in her ear, “I'm famished. Aren't you?”

*   *   *

At the banquet afterward, she is beyond hungry, but is forced to consume slivers of duck breast on the sly, even if it is the last meal she craves in this weather. She is interrupted in her shoving of the greasy meat into her mouth by congratulations. In order to survive this hot, endless day, the only solution is to uphold an erect carriage and enter into discourse with anyone who desires it. In the far corner, she sees the furrowed mass of Bestuzhev, deep in conversation, and is tempted to interrupt him, to tell him that she has won. She is grand duchess now. But then she is led away to meet some Finnish dignitary, the remains of a solitary grape warm in the palm of her hand. She is aware of words pouring from her, a crinkling, manic laughter. How she dances, tirelessly, from one corner of the hall to the other. Her ladies are worried for her, shepherd water and wine from hand to table. She showers smiles on everyone. For the first time, she feels the surge of being everything she hoped—beautiful, intelligent, witty, worthy of love. But a quick glance about the giant hall ascertains that Peter is nowhere to be seen (could he have already been deposited in the robing room? Could he already be waiting for her in the state bedroom?).
Byt po siemu,
she thinks.
So be it.

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 is, 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.