The Imperial Wife (4 page)

“How can that be when it's my husband's,” I say. “My number is for both our coats.”

“Sorry.” The lanky young girl has wide, apologetic eyes, overwhelmed by the long line behind me. “The guy said he lost his number so I gave it to him.”

My phone vibrates inside the purse. Carl has written:
I'm at TJ's empty place. In Queens.

“All right, sure,” I say into the phone, as if he can hear me, as if he had only informed me of a late night's work. A coat I recognize as mine is handed to me.

I step out onto Fifty-third Street in a daze. The city ebbs and contorts, a discordant jumble of zigzagging bodies in yoga pants and floral blouses, baseball hats and suits. A row of vendors in fingerless gloves hawk reproductions of van Goghs and tribal masks to the last of the day's customers. The sky is a hazy, noncommittal blue. Down in the subway, the faces are heavyset, too bundled for the weather, feet encased in tall rubber boots, entranced by screens of their phones and tablets and oblivious to their neighbors. An angry swell rises like heat through the car, a series of jabbing purses and elbows, when the lurch of a long-awaited train heaps bodies against one another.

When I emerge at my stop, even my own block doesn't look familiar, and it takes me several minutes to realize I was heading in the wrong direction, on Amsterdam and not Broadway. I pass stands piled with bananas, mangoes, plums, and other impossible fruit yanked too early from the warmth of its homeland. When my building rises before me it may as well have been summoned there by magic.

I want to walk in on indulgent laughter at the punch lines of Russian anecdotes, Carl and my father gorging on pickled tomatoes, spreading out a newspaper with the peeled skin of dried fish. I can almost hear Carl's voice, his impressive idiomatic Russian.

“Where'd you go?” I'd chide, but in a nonjudgmental, loving way.

Carl might laugh, enfolding me in his arms. “Did you really think I went to Queens? Did you really think I'd leave you?” Husband. In Russian:
muzh.
Short for
muzhik,
a man, a wise, noble man.

*   *   *

The next morning, I'm woken by a repetitive thumping sound in our alcove.
Oh, good
, I think.
He's home
. He's had a night away but now he's home. I throw on a robe and pad barefoot to the alcove.

“Hey, that you?”

I peek around the corner to see Carl's tossing his Russian history books and a smattering of mismatched clothes into duffel bags. It's a useless array of items he is carting—staplers and belts and shoe polish—like a college kid moving to a dorm room. His face is slick and shiny, his shirt wrinkled.

“What are you doing?” It is a numbed shock that spreads through me, the kind that separates mind from body. I'm dimly aware that outside it continues to rain. “Honey?”

Carl looks older. His haggard exhaustion is centered about his eyes. He doesn't pause his packing, the entire bit emerging from him as if he's been preparing for this confrontation and has memorized his lines. “You know what? I realized in Queens that I need more time to think about us. That's all this is. Okay?”

I find myself standing between him and the bags, pulling closed the sash on my robe. “Wait a minute. We should see someone, right? I'll get a referral to a therapist. All we need to do is approach this with the right attitude.”

Our eyes meet in the long static of silence. “The way he looks at you,” my best friend Alla used to say, enviously. “I wish someone looked at me like that.”

And it was true. He used to look at me as though the world turned gauzy around me, placing me in relief. We would be in a room full of people, but I'd feel the force of his attention. He might introduce me to someone at a party—“This is my wife, Tanya”—and it came out sounding as if he were the trusted caretaker of some magical force he didn't fully understand. At night, we read his favorite poetry out loud—Brodsky or Blok—until one of us grew too sleepy to continue and neither of us remembered the gist of what we read in the morning. In public, Carl called me
kotenok,
his Russian kitten. We held hands past the time our friends had dissolved their own intimacies in favor of their newborn children. Children. We had originally planned them for a year ago, when I was thirty-one, and he thirty-three. It seemed like the ideal age, not too early or late. Sometimes, I worried that he loved me too much to see my true self, that he saw my character through rose-colored glasses. But I liked his interpretation better and who even knew what my true self was anymore?

The Look is not entirely gone in his eyes, but it's flagging, tired, focusing on the tasks before it. “It's temporary, a place for me to work.”

“You can work here. I'm gone all day.” From his face, I see I have to approach it from a different angle, so I take his hand, feeling my way around the inner pouch of his palms. There is a small bump on his thumb, a callus or wart he never got around to checking out. “If we communicate, we can easily pull through. But you have to talk to me.”

“I know. I hope so.” He leans over to kiss me. A real Russian woman would have taken advantage of this kiss. She would have opened herself like a flower, kept him tethered under the guise of vulnerability. She would have stopped at nothing to keep him—phantom pregnancy, guilt, threats. A real Jewish woman would have decided this was the end of the world. A husband taking time to think would be nothing less than disaster because life makes the most sense through a lens of fear, caution. But in being both of these women, I am neither.

“Babe, I'll make us an appointment with someone who uses positive psychology approaches in marital conflict.”

He flings the duffel back over one shoulder, a tote bag filled with books over another. “Tan, think about it. How can you love someone you don't respect?”

“Oh my God. Is that what this is about? I totally respect you.”

He shakes his head.

It is filling my mouth, getting ready to erupt.
Why?
But I can't utter the word. If he tells me right then, something irreversible will be made real. Isn't it better to take him at his word, to treat whatever this is as time to regroup while I come up with a solution?

In the kitchen, I surreptitiously blow my nose.
Live like you expect miracles,
I think.
One foot in front of the other.
“You want some tea?”

He's leaning against the lintel, the Look flashing and receding. He displays the hesitation of changing his mind, like he might collapse me into his chest at any moment. But then he gives up. “All right. Tea. That would be great.”

We drink it side by side at the round kitchen table, two steaming mugs of Earl Grey all the way to the bottom. He is staring into the watery depths of his cup while I keep chattering away, drinking liquid that tastes of wood. I tell him about what Regan wore the other day—a purple wig, frilly apron, fishnet tights, and combat boots. How Marjorie looked her up and down but said nothing. I refill our cups. I tell him about a client of my father's, a ninety-one-year-old man who gets a regular massage. When my father tries to slot him in for the following month, he always says the same thing, “But how do I know I'll still be alive a month from now?” “You can't die because if you miss an appointment with me, you'll get charged for the visit,” is my father's response.

The kitchen clock ticks on, merciless, while the preschooler twins who live above us are loudly evading their mother's efforts to dress them. I set out a plate of leftovers from last night. What Russians call “bird's milk” but is actually a version of yellow marshmallow covered in a crisp chocolate veneer. It's usually his favorite treat.

Finally, he gets up. “The car's by the hydrant. It's packed with stuff. I should probably go.”

Why?
I want to say again, and again, I swallow the word. The toddlers are gone and the quiet is more terrifying than the noise had been.

After he leaves, the apartment has never been so deeply vacant. It's as if all the items I once took such pride in—the swan-necked lamp I found at Housing Works, the Lucite coffee table I bought cheap on eBay, the Art Deco–style bar I unearthed at a flea market—have been stripped of their essential essence. Fingers trailing the surfaces of things, items I thought we had amassed together when, in retrospect, it had been I who'd picked up tapestries and vases in bazaars. Furnishing our lives. But it's what he wanted, wasn't it—me making the decisions?

Eventually, I make my way to the bookshelves, an entire array of left-behind Russians on what I call Carl's shelf: the Bunins, the Brodskys, the Babels. And an entire untouched row of
Young Catherine
s. I take one out, run my thumb along the decorative edges, the portrait Carl insisted should be its cover. The grand duchess in the yellow dress trimmed with white lace, ears draped with heavy chandelier pearls, the Order of Saint Catherine proudly slung across her slim torso. By Carl E. Vandermotter. I turn to the first page:
Sophie glimpses the comet's head, a blaze of fire rippling across the vastness of the sky, and implores them to stop the carriage. The entire procession comes to a halt.

 

Catherine

FEBRUARY 1744

Sophie glimpses the comet's head, a blaze of fire rippling across the vastness of the sky, and implores them to stop the carriage. The entire procession comes to a halt. Word of the famous sight had been spreading throughout Europe. “Maybe we will glimpse it on the road,” her mother had said while they were packing. But none of the rumors adequately described the agitated beauty above her.

The comet appears to hover close to the ground, like a folding fan imprinted onto the night. It flashes six fingers out of the frozen, snowless earth before its tail is swallowed by blackness. She pulls the fur of her collar closer around her throat, not for warmth or out of any fear, but in rapture. Even though the horses tip their noses toward the stars, the view exists for her benefit alone, a private performance mediated by God.
The comet is me
, she thinks. Nature sends signs to the chosen ones. It is that simple: this journey, the comet, is me.

“Isn't it marvelous, Mother?”

“I see it, I see it. It's marvelous.” Her mother is already back in the carriage, having taken a sideways peek by her side. “You'll catch your death. Get in, Figgy.”

Sometimes she wished her mother were in possession of an affectionate tale for how the family nickname had been conferred, but Sophie guessed it meant nothing more profound than a shortening of the Fredericka in her name. Sophie Fredericka Augusta. Figgy. “Coming.”

It is colder than cold, the wind whipping her head back and forth, drawing its force through her hair. She can see her mother huddling under the blankets, her face dipped under layers of sable. She is either beckoning in Sophie's direction or shuttering the curtains, her face a mask of perpetual grievance. But Sophie cannot look away from the sky. She sees the comet as a summons from above: fingers beckoning for her to come closer, to merge with this explosion. When the light bows and recedes, in its residue she sees a covenant, a confirmation. What she is undertaking will be a one-way trip, and there will be no return to Prussia: not to her father, her beloved governess, Babette, the siblings she never needed, and yes, even George, with eyes that never settled on a definitive color between sleet and grass and arms that had so recently formed a rim of love around her.

“You were meant for greater than life with your uncle,” George said by way of farewell, pressing a perfumed letter into her palm. His eyes were rimmed with red, threaded by its pathways. His nose was buried in her hair. Just a fortnight ago, they stood by the lake, gray with early frost. She wept then, pummeled the slope of his shoulders, promised him an eternal identity as his true wife. When she arrives in Russia, she will suffocate him with correspondence, she promised.

He yanked out an errant curl near her ear as a keepsake, wound it around his thumb, then folded it into his coat pocket. His eyes were woolly, filmed over, and she found it impossible to meet them. The excruciating parting seemed to go on for hours.

But it was a relief when the sound of his horses finally retreated from the courtyard and, in her mind, she was packing for the journey. Sophie is not the sort to be sad for long; dwelling on the vanished is not intrinsic to her nature. Sophie is a dreamer, not a nostalgic. George was right. Life with him meant a garrisoned existence close to the bitterness of her mother. What lay ahead was the exotic East, the adventure of a famously lively court, a place where her singular voice would be heard. Also, the companionship of the grand duke, though she hopes he has grown more charming since her first unpromising encounter with him.

George's proclamation—
you were meant for greater
—thrums with truth now against the sky inflamed by a six-tailed comet. She climbs back into the carriage, and they continue their long eastward journey.

*   *   *

She expects a magnificent Russian palace, a Versailles of the East that she has read about in travelers' accounts, but they pull up in front of a sagging wooden building painted in bright, primitive colors. It is foreign, backward. It lacks luster. This oversized hut is Empress Elizabeth's court? Her mother sniffs in disappointment at the sight of it. Half of it is draped in darkness, a few windows illuminated as if in anticipation of unexpected guests, a row of frozen tree stalks framing the entrance, the stairway chipped, the first step already crumbled to dust.

But then the silence of the road is shattered, their carriage surrounded by a flurry of chamberlains. Their doors are flung open, and they are greeted with a jumbled mix of languages, German and the guttural buzz of Russian. Their baggage is being transferred from hand to hand until it disappears into the entryway. Sophie struggles to remember court protocol. Are they to wait for bows? Are they to follow a particular person into the palace? Darkness cedes to candlelight. She feels disoriented, miniature. Young.