The Imperial Wife (24 page)

Their hands are brisk with needlework, their mouths full of pleasing stories. They are available for her amusement, and when the absence of Katya crashes into her, gripping her by the neck, they smooth it away with their silly chatter. Without them, her rooms are hollow—the upholstered French armchairs lack bodies, the dressing table looms ghostly in the corner, the daybed remains undented. They pile on Catherine's new jewelry and imitate the empress's appearance at a ball, her grand, horselike entrance. When her rooms are too quiet, when solitary night descends, they bring with it the music of their voices.

“What a beautiful ring the grand duchess wears, perhaps too beautiful.” Zhenia flutters around in character as the empress, as if to say,
We are safe here, you are among friends.
But the enemy may be stalking the halls, sniffing around for wrongdoing. To avoid her wrath, she may just want to remove that ring.

“I will return it to you as soon as the birthing pains begin,” Vika chimes in. But it is the wrong thing to say. Catherine is all too aware that the empress waits, ready to fly into a rage. It has been almost an entire year since the marriage.

“Be quiet, you fool,” Zhenia snaps, red-faced. “The grand duchess has plenty of time.”

Vika seems to shrink deep into her dress. And they all return to their needlework.

Then Vika is whisked away. With Russia's new strained relationship with France, orders of French brocades have been canceled.

*   *   *

No amusement until an heir materializes!

Even the balls are made intentionally dull. Catherine loves to dance, but the guests are at least thirty years old, moving stiffly and gracelessly around the floor. Out of pointed spite, the empress made sure no young people were invited and Catherine is forced to listen to the dull observations of the ancient countesses and princesses. Will this be a good riding summer? Will Chulgakov win at draughts again? Zhenia and Evdotia are kept at a distance, flirting with ambassadors and officers over glasses of fermented juice.

The entire dance mimics performance, the simulacrum of merriment. It may as well be marriage itself. Catherine wanders around the halls, the smoky card games, the boozy circles of the foreign diplomats, the first flashes of fireworks. There is no one for her to talk to.

She is drawn into a game of spillikin, the ivory samovar handed to her with the hook. Everyone too scared to breathe as she nears the pile of playing pieces, watching her try to remove one without dislodging the rest. Her hand, bored and unsteady, topples the structure right away. She moves on.

The dances are lively at least, the Russian folk dances, the Polish minuets. In the past, she would have acted as centerpiece to the constellations of others, but she can take no pleasure from the watching or the participating. These dances used to be suffused with romance, intrigue, flirtation, the sensation of being nimble and daring, pretty. She is still being congratulated on her marriage, and the men sharp enough to notice her detachment from Peter aim to dazzle her with their attention. But she concentrates on providing the proper, appropriate responses.

She and Peter dance the first minuet, and she is aware of the empress's impatient eyes roaming their forms, as if trying to answer the court's most pressing question: have they or have they not? What is the delay? Rumor at court is that Elizabeth is hoping to bypass the ridiculous Peter altogether, to groom Catherine's future child as heir. In spite of the halfhearted daily guidance of the dance coach, Peter garbles steps, bungles most of the figures, rises when he should plié, missing the beats entirely. The fate of an entire nation rests in her womb.

“You might want to make more of an effort, at least in public,” she says over the music. She is bolder now with her suggestions to him.

“What do you care?”

“Everyone is watching,” she points out. Obviously. She enacts a pretty turn of her heel, to distract the audience from this pitiful lurching.

The dance is endless. On one of the final turns, she thinks she sees the sympathetic eyes of Katya, and whirls her head to find an old crone who looks nothing like her friend.

“Who cares if they're watching? God, why do you?”

“Because we are married now, and there are expectations.”

“So what? You know Zhenia and I are in love. Everyone knows I prefer her. I told Count Devier that one could not compare the two of you. He disagrees. We fought bitterly about this, when it is obvious that Zhenia is much, much prettier.”

She forces her legs onward into the dance, entering the sideways position. There is no sensation in her fingers. It can do that. She can remove the responsiveness from the hopeful valves of her heart, like a surgeon.

“Is that so?”

“What? Tell me you did not guess.”

She is certain that he is no more aware of the intimacies of love with Zhenia than he is with herself, sure that his feelings are the confused fumblings of an adolescent. But still this news cuts her. Zhenia's betrayal, Peter's ability to have companionship, and her own gaping solitude have become snarled together. She gathers the remains of her pride.

“Everyone knows about you and Zhenia? Then I suggest caution in whom you confide.”

“She is beautiful, for one, which you are obviously not.”

The hollow in her throat grows deeper, sharper. His limp hand on her waist is pressing the sharp star of the Order against her hip. Every time she looks at the medal's face, the saint taunts her: for love and for the fatherland indeed. Those saints had high expectations of mortals. And just when she wishes it to be over so she can escape to the privacy of her bedroom, the music spurs them onward.

*   *   *

Is it only a week later? The frost of January. An eternal winter here, the kind that pierces your head and enters your very pores. It seems to her that winters back home were less stinging and gray, cold but not intent on extinguishing a person. They used to have a variety of sky at least, whereas here it plods on, merciless and gray. But the fire warms the room, bathes it in supple glow, and Catherine is in a good mood today. It is one of the few afternoons she has to herself, the empress just risen from sleep and ensnared in counsel with a Scottish dignitary. In the morning, Catherine kept the man company for a while, interested in the exciting details of Bonny Prince Charlie and the failed Jacobite rebellion. But just as the story was reaching its fascinating conclusion with Bonny Prince Charlie fleeing Scotland, the empress's lady-in-waiting interrupted them and sent her away.

Now she is playing herself in chess. At the same time, the Bayle dictionary is open before her as well as the novel
Tirant lo Blanc
, and she moves back and forth between all three when boredom strikes. She makes notes between moves: “Banishing serfdom is inevitable. Man must not live in fear of authority.”

But just as she grows sleepy for the night, sunk into the recesses of her daybed, she hears footsteps. Peter's footsteps are easy to discern from the others by the way they slap against wood, erratic and ungainly. She shoves the books he always views with suspicion under one of the embroidered pillows.

He bursts inside. “You had her sent away, didn't you? You didn't want me to be happy, you selfish girl.”

The news is hardly surprising, but she still feels a stabbing ache of solidarity. She too had so recently liked Zhenia. “You should have been more discreet,” she says. “I warned you at the ball.”

“But we were all friends, at least we thought so. We all played together.” She has never heard his voice choked with feeling, even as his childishness persists. We all played together? What a shame, she thinks, that we experience the same thin isolation yet we cannot take solace in each other. She has lost Katya and now he has suffered his first major loss.

She approaches him in sympathy, but her hand is violently swiped away.

“You betrayed us, and I trusted you,” he says, with a strangled voice. His pupils are dark, eyes bulging. He looks as though he might strike her.

She spits out, “I keep your hateful secrets.”

“Who else would be responsible if not you?”

“Think, you silly child! If your efforts with discretion extended to others, it could be any one of a hundred people.”

The truth drips into his features as they assess each other. For once he has no retort, no sarcasm to offer. A cloudiness leaves his features, and something suppressed and brittle behind them rises to the surface. He understands the full extent of their situation. They are alone, trapped together for life. Outside the window, a frozen, vast nation is to be divided between them.

 

Tanya

PRESENT DAY

“Cece, over here,” I call out, as if running into my mother-in-law on the street is a moment of serendipity. In fact, I know her schedule so well, it's easy to intercept her form glistening in the sun at just the right moment. Frances Vandermotter's gym is around the corner from Worthington's on Second Avenue, and she often power walks past the gold-stenciled revolving doors at around ten forty-five, blond hair tucked away under a cap, eyes hidden behind raccoon sunglasses. “How's Armand's torn meniscus?”

“He's better, much. Well, where have you been? It's been weeks after Greece.” Frances walks into the kiss, arms pumping.

I've been avoiding the Vandermotters' calls. What would I say? Your son left me, at least I think he left me. Do you know anything? Is he coming back?

The rain has succumbed to unblemished sky, the kind of cerulean day that renders even overflowing garbage cans charming. Men in ascots idle by their cars in front of Worthington's, the streets are a blur of suits and hospital scrubs. Exposed legs flash everywhere.

“How was Greece?”

“Oh my goodness, who doesn't love the islands? Everywhere you point the camera, it's utter perfection. And you? How are things in the office? Isn't your auction coming up?”

We step into the tide of lunchtime flurry, women in practical and impractical shoes holding plastic squares filled with kale or leaking containers of soup.

My in-laws' passion for travel is secondary to the pleasure they take in recapping an itinerary. Their hotel, their meals, an elaborate recounting of each attraction, sights that they insist are omitted from guidebooks, hidden gems discovered thanks to pointed questions to locals. It took me some time to understand that Carl's family funneled all their fear, love, and affection into two or three subjects. Travel, the Foster Children's Alliance, Recollections of a Superior Past. Their firm place in the world blinded me to ways Carl must have been unhappy.

“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.