The Imperial Wife (27 page)

In Moscow, she tries to discuss the matter with Sergei, to seek his counsel, but these days he extricates himself with dainty excuses. When she enters a room, he swears his days are suddenly filled with meetings. His appearances at the palace have become erratic. When she manages to ensnare him in private counsel, he admits everything about court life has begun to irritate him. Travel to the palace is becoming inconvenient, Bestuzhev is against him, his political viewpoints are not being taken seriously.

It is weeks until Catherine finally catches him alone. He is rushing from the palace with a sheaf of papers in hand, probably inserting himself into meetings where he is not invited or agitating for jobs he does not deserve. She surprises him behind the wooden pillar, leaps out at him with a roar, and his terror equals that of encountering an actual lion.

“You frightened me.”

For a minute, she just wants to gaze at those eyelashes, the way they quiver nervously at her.

“I have news,” she finally says.

Sergei is impatient. He had clearly hoped for an undisturbed exit. “Must we discuss it now? The carriage has pulled up.” The hall is not empty, far from it. The British ambassador is exchanging pleasantries with a young Russian officer, a housekeeper rushes up the stairs with fresh linens. But she must seize her moment.

“I'm afraid so.”

“What is it then? You know how I hate all this secrecy.”

She has practiced this but the silkiness of the words elude her. “It is not unexpected. A natural consequence, shall we say. But the doctor says only a few months remain.”

Her Seryozha blanches; even his nose is drained of color. A servant carrying a tray of raw pheasant shuffles past them. They wait until the man is out of sight.

“My God. You know what this means.”

“That we can be together?” She allows herself to hope. That she has misinterpreted his coldness, that he has been yearning for the simple life of a real marriage. Will he ask her to leave the palace with him? They could erect a modest country home for the two of them, the baby sleeping on top of duck feather pillows. The first Peter and the first Catherine, the cabin, the twelve children, the great city of St. Petersburg built in their shared vision.

“We will have to arrange for his surgery then. Immediately.”

The country house, the wrinkled baby on a blanket, the easy bustle over a simple masonry stove. All of it is gone. A blade spirals inside her and she steels herself for this new reality. “Will he consent to it?”

“The fool will be relieved! At last, the world will trust the problem has been solved. He will be let alone, his blasted task fulfilled to satisfaction.”

Madame Krause emerges from behind a pillar. She is an unexpected vision with her wide hoop skirts, her too wide face framed by girlish ringlets. “May I speak with you?” She directs herself to Catherine, ignoring Sergei.

“Farewell, then.” He rushes away before anyone can stop him.

Oh, Madame Krause with her impeccable timing, with that twisted face of intrigue. She affects a martyred air for playing a crucial role in the royal drama. Catherine wants to slap her for interrupting them. “I will be straightforward, my dear Catherine. I am privy to some delicate information.”

“What is it?” She feels it again, lower this time, a churning.

“I do not doubt that you fancy someone. Someone that is not the grand duke.”

Catherine sighs. “What makes you say that?”

The woman rushes on, a handkerchief wrung between her hands. “You may think I am here to reprimand you but you will see that I will not make difficulties for you.”

The last of Sergei's footsteps disappear in the front hall. She forces her attention back to Madame Krause. “I do not understand. What is it you are implying?”

“I believe you fancy one of the Saltykov brothers, I am not sure which. What I am saying is that the empress has decided not to put obstacles in the way of such a relation. If I am making myself clear.”

“No. Not exactly.”

“An heir is an heir after all. Her Majesty is very eager after all this time. If it is to be him”—she nods in the direction of Sergei's departed form—“no one needs to be the wiser.”

The woman does not even bid her farewell, as if she wants to spend no more time than necessary on an indecorous task. She is on to the next errand, a dressing-down of the forgetful housekeeper. When her wide back recedes, Catherine runs toward the entrance, the wide-open doors. “Seryozha, come back.”

How he will laugh when he hears this: they are free, they are free. They can do as they like, undisturbed. The baby nestled between them. A samovar boiling water in the kitchen. Their own small bedroom fragrant with the heat of love and warm milk. They can erect a wooden house on the grounds of one of the lesser-used palaces (Oranienbaum?) and no one can stop them. An heir is an heir, and Peter has taken himself out of the picture.

But Seryozha's carriage is gone.

*   *   *

The labor stretches deep into the night, the mattress on the floor pointy as rocks. In her pain she is alone, forgotten.
I am giving birth to the heir of a great empire and nobody cares,
she thinks in a kind of numb disbelief. The midwife has left long ago but has not returned. Her call for water is ignored. The pain starts in a single toe, then sears its way up the leg, exploding in her midsection. She holds her focus on a single ceiling plank.

When the child, a beautiful, slippery boy, is born, he is instantly whisked away, exchanged for a pouch of money, a hundred thousand rubles and second-rate jewelry brought to her by a businesslike chamberlain. She hears her son is to be named Paul.

“May I see him?” she asks, but the message never seems to reach the empress. Day after day, there is no sight of the child. In the immediate aftermath, she is celebrated. Sumptuous furnishings are wheeled in for congratulatory visits from the court—a pink daybed embroidered in silver, upholstered French armchairs, fresh brocade curtains fringed in gold. She eyes them indifferently. Which is a good thing because a few days later, the footmen return to sweep it all away, and collect what is left of her money when the last of the visitors depart. Outside the window, she hears fireworks, the splashing water of a fountain. The midwife told her it sprayed beer.

Apart from performing the necessary ceremonial rites, the empress has sent not a single kind word, and there has been no missive from Sergei, who is busy packing for his Stockholm post. Her son is far away, sequestered somewhere close to the empress. Her breasts leak, throb, then dry up. Peter has moved on to the least attractive and most repulsive of the maids who hates her. Most of the day, she faces the wall; when the door opens and shuts, she does not care who enters. Alongside this deadening of nerves, she feels a smoldering anger.

Then one day, she rises. She asks for her books, her Voltaire and d'Alembert, and her maps. She sits in her dressing gown, tracing a line from the Caspian to the Black Sea, following a possible route of trade. She finally puts ink to paper: “I would like to feel fear, but I cannot; the invisible hand that has guided me along a very rough road will never allow me to falter.” In the distance, she hears a low, insistent cry, but by now it sounds to her like the drumming of grouse, nothing more.

 

Tanya

PRESENT DAY

“How can you not know the reason your own husband left?” Alla says. “Unless you don't want to tell me, which is completely understandable.”

We're the first to arrive in the boardroom, waiting for the other members of the Jewish Community Center committee to file in: the topic of the day is how to market Judaism to cynical Russian-Americans. A Regina Spektor fund-raiser concert is at the top of the agenda.

She's immaculate as usual, my best friend, sporting a pale pink manicure, her hair a refreshed blond. On the days she meets me for lunch at the office, the old-money codgers do a double take.

I flip through our agenda. The downside to good friends is the way they keep poking at your most tender spots. “Carl's the kind of guy who needs to think. I'm trying to give him space.”

“Sounds like bullshit to me. Space? Who gives her husband space?”

“Maybe he's angry,” I concede. “Maybe he has new-husband buyer's remorse. I don't know. He's not talking.”

“If that's true and something's going on with that Hermione woman or someone else, then you hope it's a phase. There are worse things in a marriage than affairs. But be ready to find out something you don't want to know.”

Alla's speaking from experience. She discovered one affair by accident (by picking up Greg's phone after a text), and one on purpose (her brother hacked into Greg's work e-mail), but she never confronted her husband about the information. This last time, she went on a covert domestic attack, booking them for theater around town, dropping the kids off with her parents so they could launch into spontaneous vacations. When they returned from a trip to Sardinia, she announced to me that the other woman was definitively gone.

Before us is a tray consisting entirely of carved melon: honeydew, cantaloupe, and some kind of Persian variety with a dark green rind. Their surfaces glisten with slimy veneer. On the wall is a series of photographs of hip Jewish bands singing to appreciative seated audiences.

“He's so moral, so black-and-white. I knew that marrying him. He judges me.” With a twinge, I think about the Order displayed in luscious four color, in
ARTnews,
Artnet,
Vidimosti,
and the
New York Times
.

“Moral? I thought he would have grown out of that by now.”

“Maybe he's right. I didn't even want him to see the Order.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. The book, I guess. It might bring all that back.”

“His book? About the queen? I thought it did well. Though I don't blame him for moving on. Between you and me, I couldn't finish it. Be honest, it was boring, no?”

A few dutiful JCCers file into the room—
privet, privet
—take their seats. It's a good excuse to drop the whole subject.

“Oh God,” Alla says, flipping through the mimeographed packet. “Russians are never, ever going to become better Jews, Regina Spektor or not. This agenda is a waste of our time.”

“Why? I think it's possible. There's got to be better outreach. We're just people who've been taught to be suspicious of organized religion, to be suspicious of God. Marketing spirituality is like marketing anything else. There have to be incentives.”

“And Regina Spektor's our incentive?”

“Sure, why not? She's one of us who made it. It raises morale.”

Alla puts on the breathless, squeaky voice of the
Kultura
anchor. “‘Regina Spektor is just one of our people on the move.'”

The new president of the organization is getting started at the front of the room, booting up the computer. A diamond-studded Star of David is dangling between her breasts. “Thanks, everyone, for being here so early in the morning. And I want to thank Tanya Vandermotter again for arranging for us to use the Worthington's galleries for our Spektor event.”

“They're clapping for you,” Alla reminds me. Now, the woman is calling up a PowerPoint presentation on the projection. Myth no. 1: Russian Jews are not spiritual people. Myth no. 2: Russian Jews are resistant to organized religion. Myth no. 3: Russian Jews have negative associations with Judaism. Myth no. 4: We don't need volunteers to spread the message.

Alla leans over. “Please tell me you will not be the one to spearhead this initiative.”

“Why not? I think they need me, don't you?”

“My God, haven't you got enough on your plate? You've got to work on your marriage.”

“Okay, I get it. I'll let someone else run this show. I've got to be back in the office anyway.”

“My point exactly.”

The most powerful New York Russian-Americans are seated around the long table. All the varieties of melon and minimuffin are consumed and the meeting begins.

*   *   *

Instead of returning to the office, I stop in front of a squat, airless building near Penn Station, take a key out of my bag, and unlock the front door to the Urban Writers Space. The application had been easy, a few questions, a deposit, and Hermione Tarling, lovely and vague and completely disinterested in my identity as Carl's wife, handed over the code to the building.

Earnest heads bow before flickering screens at each cubicle. There is the languid mewl of music expelling from someone's earphones. I scan one body after the other for the particular shape of Carl's back, for his narrow shoulders, for his classic profile. For all the things that were recently so beautiful and foreign and self-contained and reliable, like the flamingo I saw with Medovsky. But he's nowhere. The kitchen is occupied by a trio of commiserating writers sipping tea and comparing overburdened teaching loads.

Incomers choose cubicles, and when they are full, the overflow writers pile on the couch in front of the offices. Several lean their heads back to sleep. The ridiculousness of what I'm doing—playing hooky from work by pretending to work—doesn't elude me. But I boot up my computer anyway and wait for the familiar step. A jasmine scent curls down from ducts in the ceiling. Hermione Tarling checks on us all, a queen surveying her domain.

All those words being written, I think, looking around. All those books on laptops struggling for the light of day. The tormented tap of keyboards, solitary struggles waged in every cubicle. Soaking in the neurotic air of all these writers, I wonder if I should have listened to Carl's struggle more, acknowledged the difficulty of the creative enterprise. I wonder if I couldn't stand the idea of him being diminished, less than I needed him to be. That maintaining his proper role in our relationship meant doing whatever it takes to get that book written and published.