The Imperial Wife (19 page)

“My job's so safe now.” I was thinking out loud. “That's why I'm not sure. But it's finally the step up in the company I've been waiting for. It's my chance to be a vice president.”

“But do you love your job like I love teaching?” He made the question sound so simple. “I can't even tell how much you like what you do. You're always stressed. I can only imagine how much more stressed you'll be after you take this job.”

“Being the head of a department's no joke. You're really expected to pull off these insane auctions. And all that travel. But it's an opportunity that won't come by again.” I pause, consider, and decide to plunge ahead. “Anyway, it's not like we can afford to turn it down, right? We don't even know if Ditmas will hire you.” Carl looked crushed. He took one more bite, then put his sandwich aside. There was the twinge of regret but I wasn't used to the role of breadwinner; there was no room in Russian culture to accommodate it. Each week, my parents asked, “Did Carl get job yet?” and I was never brave enough to say I earned for the two of us.

The Monacan sky has not fully darkened over the Medovsky compound, the smudge of color still a vivid purple. Among the tables laden with food, I catch sight of my client, and next to him are Oleg and David, easily recognizable from their online photos. Before them is an elaborate presentation of shashliki in the shape of a dartboard. They slide the meat off with their teeth, then use the skewer for target practice.

“Gentlemen,” I say, hands light on the backs of their chairs.

“Tanyechka, welcome.” Medovsky kisses me on both cheeks, exuding genuine pleasure. He is springing with good spirit, the fabric of his Italian shirt already wrinkled, his hair escaping its pomade and poking in every direction. His is a messy energy, the kind that relies on women to contain it. Still, I forget how much I like him, his warmth and eagerness to provide pleasure for everyone around him. He's also Jewish, and there's this link of outsider culture between us—to Russians, we'll always be considered Jews, not Russians.

“Sash, thanks so much for hosting me in this marvelous place. And what a good cause.”

The men are rising to greet me, pulling me a spare chair, loading my plate with grilled lamb. I should be glad for the opening; all I have to do now is run the pitch on the steam of all this goodwill. But I'm still shaky from the mimes, as if they were warning me of something.
Muzhmuzhmuzh
. Nadia steps out onto the pool area, surveying the scene, probably preparing a predatory lunge in our direction. I feel my heart zipping again. There's no time to reel them in, to close any deal.

“This is not only a beautiful woman, but an extraordinary art specialist,” Medovsky is saying about me. I can hear him praising my eye to his friends, my graduate degree, my learned expertise. Magic, he calls my ability to put forth the most interesting of auctions, items culled for historical importance and also the kind of items not easily found elsewhere. But all I hear behind me is the advance of the stunning twenty-five-year-old Nadia and it seems to me that I'm being annihilated in her wake. Her heels are meant to stamp me out, make me irrelevant.

(“Does he have another woman?” my mother asked, delicately. “He's definitely cheating,” said Alla. “You don't want to admit it, but it's the most obvious answer.”)

I interrupt Medovsky's eulogy with a hasty fanning out of the catalogues, pointing out the most interesting of the lots, chattering nervously about the Order of Saint Catherine, about Larionov, Nesterov, and Archipenko, and even the fake Shishkin from Ramsdale. I'm engaging in an amateur's trap, displaying an overeagerness that will distance the men from me, but I can't stop. Nadia's aura of sickly bergamot is advancing into our space, consuming us all with its aggressive scent. The men sink deeper into their seats, clicking off. In vain, I try to slow down, to bring them back around with my usual tactics.

“Oleg Alexanderovich, do you own a home nearby?”

But it's too late: Nadia is bending over them with her jerseyed breasts and long strands of highlighted hair, her gold snake cuffs gripping her upper arm, and they awaken to her presence. She may be no art specialist, but she knows how to hold attention. They bid me to sit down, step aside, enjoy the show.
Relax. Life is not all work, is it?

“Hey, Tan'.” Medovsky pulls me aside. He's annoyed. “We save our business for tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I say, shaky.

He taps me in the direction of the party. “For God's sake, at least go enjoy yourself.”

I don't know where to turn. Slashes of neon dance across my skin, Céline Dion is singing “If You Could See Me Now” either over a very clear loudspeaker or in person somewhere beyond the lemon groves. The mimes are undulating around me, obscuring me in the final hours before dusk.

*   *   *

Saint-Tropez by helicopter is a blur of land and water. We're escalating ahead of the clouds, shredding through them one at a time. The engine's too loud, the seat belt is flimsy. The dips and jolts of the cabin are wild and erratic. This was not what I had in mind when Medovsky suggested we do business, but you don't argue when you're being led up to the rooftop helicopter pad, and eased into an open door of a whirring chopper.

Of course, now I wish I'd had the courage to opt out of this little trip. After assassinations, polonium poisonings, acid attacks, and murders of journalists in their lobbies, the next most popular method of wreaking vengeance on enemies in this dangerous world is tampering with victims' transportation. How many times have I received the ominous news that a client was shot while getting into his armored car in Luxembourg or died in a private jet crash or simply “expired with no known cause”? How many times have I received phone calls from brand-new widows to cancel the preempt or to suddenly ask me to fly out to estimate estate property?

Outside there's sky, immense and vacant. In the tight compartment, my legs brush against the bare, sculpted calves of Medovsky's mistress—what's her name again? Milla? Malvina? A fair-skinned, red-haired, freckled thing—as she flips through photographs of opulent estates. The stout Realtor with a short, no-nonsense haircut, her neck zigzagged by layered gold necklaces, has been talking the entire time in frilly, pattering Russian. Once in a while, we bend down to earth to circle a property the size of a town in New Jersey.

The Realtor continues, “A professional dance studio can easily be installed if we build into the atrium. And you said you liked fish? An aquarium would be on point right now.”

“If we could just do a quick perusal of these other lots,” I interrupt, pushing forward the auction catalogue, but the mistress has her head against the windowpane, asking, “Is that fountain the Florentine one pictured here?”

“Yes, yes, the very same. A tycoon from Singapore, I think. One of those rich Asians. He's had the place for eight months and he's fixed the place right up.” The Realtor ignores me because she recognizes in me a person in the same position as herself. A supplicant, a salesperson. An outsider.

“I do love a labyrinth,” the mistress says, pinching Medovsky's cheek. Medovsky seems hardly the kind to tolerate pinching, but he's grimacing into his laptop, that sloping eyebrow that lends him a darkly quizzical look.

“Then I would love for you to look at a couple of the most exclusive items we have coming up. The Goncharova especially would look great in that space here, and should you decide to donate to a museum show, for example, we can swap in another piece that's exactly the same size.”

“I'll worry about furniture and let Sasha pick the art,” the mistress says to me sweetly. She's all waves and iridescent hair, a pinprick of a girl. Eager to please and grateful, with flimsy shoulders. I try not to linger on the mistresses for too long; until they turn into wives, mistresses come and go.

Medovsky chides me. “Donation to a show? Getting a little ahead of yourself, are you, Mother Teresa of auction houses? You should have gotten to know the guys last night, Tanyush. I told them you were the real deal. But they liked Nadia because she didn't throw catalogues in their faces.”

“Somehow I doubt that was the reason they liked her.”

“Are you referring to her tits?” Medovsky laughs. “What do you expect? They're art collectors. Shouldn't they admire the female form?”

I can feel it rising inside me, the same swell I had at my parents' house with the Shishkin. That's all I need, to break out crying ten thousand feet in the air with an oligarch, his mistress, and a Realtor. “Sash, you know I'm an actual expert and she's not, right? Her knowledge of art is as sophisticated as … I mean, she's twenty-five and has never even taken an art history course as far as I know. I have a master's degree and years of experience, Sash. I know this stuff.”

“Of course you do. That's why when that classless Kudrin ribs me about why I'm not with Christie's, I just tell him that his daughter's a sweetheart but you know your shit. But my friends need a little more connection before they do business.”

“I didn't have a chance with Nadia breathing down my neck. Those mimes.” I manage to reel in the tears.

“Hey, did you like the mimes? Pretty special. Brought them down from Paris. God, I used to love Marcel Marceau as a kid. Didn't you? I used to cry watching him in that pisshole of a
kommunalka
.”

Despite myself, I continue to like him. A softie. I taught Medovsky that English word and he uses it in the press from time to time. “Success depends on personal relations with power, and if you are on the wrong side of this, there are limits to what you can achieve,” he told one British reporter. “But I'm not like those other Russian guys taking over your city. I have soul, I am softie.” I e-mailed him: “Bravo!” Strangely proud that a word I personally inserted into this man's mouth would find its way into the pages of The
Guardian.

He closes shut his laptop. “Listen, you're getting me that Order, right?”

The transition in tone is abrupt. This is a command. As if to underline this point, the wings overhead flap a little less vigorously. “You're getting you that Order, Sash.”

“Okay, okay. I just want you to tell my competition to look elsewhere. This is no game. You-know-who is expecting it. I made a solemn promise and there is no going back.” But then he flashes a charming smile as if to say he was kidding, how could he be angry with me?

“Are you sure you won't consider donating it after all? How great would it look in the Tretyakov across from the portrait where's she's wearing it?”

“Tan'. We're not having this conversation again, yes?” Husky darkness swirls around in his voice.

The Realtor clears her throat nervously. “Now this one right here is terribly sweet and worth a look around. Shall we?”

The domed house below us sprawls along the edge of the water; on the port, a yacht is docked. “Smaller than the last one, but a great view of the sea,” the Realtor says. Then begrudgingly, with a sour nod in my direction, from one salesperson to another, “And you'll find plenty of room inside for your art.”

*   *   *

“What was all that about, Tanyush? Donate, donate, donate. Why are you on my case,
nu
? Do you get some kind of special tax break or something?” Medovsky is smoking outside the pillars of the villa in a series of rapid huffs. The private beach is speckled with pebbles so white and unblemished, they might have been flown in to populate the shoreline.

“Of course not! It's just one of my goals; you know, more Russian art where people can see it. It's none of my business.”

“That's right. It's none of your business. Leave that shit to those bored socialites, the Zhukovas and Kudrinas. You concentrate on doing what you do best.”

The mistress's oohs of appreciation waft from somewhere deep inside the house. I've seen enough mistresses to know the phase of the relationship. These women think if they're ensconced in something concrete with walls, their positions will be secure.

“I'm sorry, Sasha. I won't bring it up again.”

His shoulders seem to be relaxing, his posture less guarded. I feel bold enough to slip off my sandals and bury my toes in the sand but the texture is not as soft as I expected. Medovsky is inscrutable behind his tinted sunglasses.

After a minute, he speaks. “You have idea why marriage is so hard? It makes no logic, yes? She liked you once. You liked her. Both of you just want to enjoy life and finally have the means to do it. Why do we create this unnecessary drama? Remember when we were in Soviet Union? We had so little but we were happy.”

“I was seven when we left. I was a kid.” Normally this amuses me, my clients waxing philosophical. They like when I protest that I have a Russian soul just as they do, and I indulge them in their what-does-it-all-mean ruminations. But not now, not on this topic.

“Well, then, I'll tell you. We had nothing. We shared apartment with ten other people including babushka who would always pick up phone and hang up on our callers. We could shit only between ten and ten-thirty. If we had an emergency and failed to clean the kitchen on appointed schedule, we would be forced to do it all month. Take a dirty bath two times a week. We couldn't make joke about our country at a house party without getting a phone call from the police next day. But we were happy. And now, world is all upside down.”

A pink, delicate bird tiptoes into the water at the edge of the property. Even after everything I've seen, I can't help but stare. “Is that a flamingo?”

Medovsky doesn't turn to look. He flicks the cigarette to the ground, grinds pebbles on top of it with his toes. “Greater flamingo: pink legs, pink bill, black tip. Imported from Zoo Basel. It is listed in amenities.”

The bird submerges its jaw into the wet sand, and it retains the perfect
S
-shape of the neck.