Russian Winter (4 page)

“In the meantime, our appraisers are going to do their best to confirm the provenance of this additional piece and make sure to
corroborate what the owner has suggested. It seems likely, with such atypical mountings. And if the appraisal is sound, we’d like to include the pendant in the catalog. With a note, of course, that this is a last-minute addition that appears to belong to, but was not part of, your personal collection.”

Nina remained silent.

“Our appraisers are really very good.”

“I do not doubt they are well trained. But I know also that people make”—she paused to formulate—“innocent mistakes.”

For a moment Drew said nothing. But then her voice was suddenly bright. “It’s a remarkable piece, you know. As uncommon as your bracelet and earrings, to be set that way. And with a particularly stunning inclusion. It’s sure to draw not only jewel enthusiasts but specimen collectors as well. Which broadens our bidding pool significantly. Not to mention that something this rare could bring in quite a bit more money. For the foundation, I mean.” She waited for Nina’s reaction. “And I don’t need to tell you that the fact that the donor wishes to remain anonymous…well, it’s just the sort of thing the public finds intriguing. It’s certain to bring more attention to the auction. And more bidders, of course. Which, again, means more money for the foundation.”

Nina understood what this girl was doing. “Yes, of course,” she said weakly, and then, as quickly as she could, “Good-bye.”

H
EARING THE DIAL
tone rude in her ear, Drew replaced the receiver, took a long slow breath, and wiped a drop of coffee from the lip of her mug in a small, instinctual motion. She knew better than to take any of this personally.

Yet it was difficult not to. The Revskaya project meant more to her than most, not only because of how she loved the ballet. There was also that one haphazard branch of her lineage that to this day
remained something of a question mark. And so it did not bother her so much that as usual all of the work (yes, all of it) would fall into her lap, while Lenore floated along unburdened. Drew rarely complained of it; such things weren’t worth risking her job for. And as long as she continued to love her work, she found she was able to step back and, from that slight distance, view the job’s more irritating aspects as simply amusing. In fact, she found this technique worked well in many of life’s circumstances.

Now she looked down at her checklist for the day, the hastily penciled objectives, deceptively brief. Really some of those items might take weeks. As for confirming the provenance of the amber suite, Drew knew that such things moved incrementally, step by step. And of course the directory of Russian goldmarks was temporarily “lost” somewhere in the auction house; Drew had had to order another copy from a special library. Though Lenore had said that an approximate date of manufacture was perfectly fine, Drew hoped the marks might be traced back to a specific production batch. Perhaps then she might be able to say with certainty that the pendant was part of that same set. There was nothing quite like the satisfaction of uncovering a difficult answer, proving something concrete. So much else in the world was vague and impossible to pin down.

As if aware of Drew’s thoughts, Lenore poked her head in. Hair in a loose, wispy chignon, a few faded strands framing her face. “How’s my lieutenant?” She still called her that, though nearly a year had passed since Drew’s promotion to associate director.

“I just notified Nina Revskaya about the amber pendant.”

“Good, good.” Already Lenore was turning away, a dreamy, distracted expression as she caught her reflection in the glass. Who knew if she had even heard Drew’s reply? And yet Drew had to admire—had in fact, in her time here, absorbed—Lenore’s poise, her effortless aplomb. She liked watching her at the auction block, her
gentle command and easy, swift delivery, her slight accent as if from an overseas boarding school, and the way she nearly flirted with bidders, teasing out their interest, their paddles nervously raised past their avowed limits. “Whenever you’re able to start getting some text together for the supplemental, I’d love to see what you come up with.”

“I’m on it.” Drew had in fact already begun drafting an introduction to the brochure that they would be producing in addition to the biographical notes in the catalog. She gave a small ironic salute, as Lenore drifted out the door like a breeze.

When she first took the job, four years ago, and Lenore called her “my lieutenant,” Drew had still been in her twenties. But she was now thirty-two, had little lines at the outer edges of her eyes when she smiled. In the past month something had even happened to her voice: a distinct, if subtle, breaking sound at the back of her throat, that biological shift to some horrible new maturity. The other day the girl behind the counter at the Dunkin’ Donuts had called her ma’am. Drew had gone straight to Neiman Marcus and purchased a minuscule tube of the face lotion her best friend, Jen, swore by, some clear, sticky substance that had ended up costing twenty-five dollars. Jen was knowledgeable about that kind of thing. A few months ago she had rubbed some cream that smelled like bubble gum through Drew’s hair “to soften your look,” taken a photograph, and, without asking Drew’s permission, opened a subscription in her name on a dating Web site.

Drew mostly found the ruse humorous—after all, Jen meant well, and had found her own fiancé that way—and had even gone on a few dates, though really she wasn’t looking for a husband. The one love she had known had been ephemeral and naïve, perhaps even a trick of self-delusion. And though four years had passed since her divorce, only in recent months had Drew’s guilt finally begun to lift. Not that she felt any better about having hurt Eric. But she was growing
impatient—with her family, who even from a distance continued to treat her with faintly spiteful pity, and with herself, for continuing even now to feel shame at having made a mistake and hurt someone, when really lots of people made such mistakes, and found themselves exiting relationships they had sworn to remain in forever.

It helped, too, that Eric had finally moved on. After two years of angry silence, and a brief spate of resentful letters, he had written an e-mail to say that he had fallen in love. In yet another reference to the notion he had clung to, that only some sort of insanity could have caused Drew to forgo their marriage, he described his new woman as “a solid person” who had “her head on straight” and “all of her ducks in a row.” Then last month Drew’s mother—who through sentimentality as much as love remained in touch with her former son-in-law and every so often accidentally released some tidbit of information—let slip that Eric had changed jobs and was moving to Seattle, and that the woman with the ducks was going with him.

And so Drew was all the more aware of time having passed, of having completed, without quite noticing, the passage from “girl” to “woman”—if without any great improvements or new wisdom to show for it. Since her move to Boston she had lived in a diminutive Beacon Hill apartment whose rent continued to rise in small increments, like a slow bleed, despite there being each year a few more splintered floorboards, and smudges on the walls, and cracks in the ceiling. When she first moved in, the ancient building had felt like a fresh start, so different from the sparkling Hoboken unit filled with wedding gifts: 1,200-thread-count sheets, thick towels of Egyptian cotton, Laguiole knives, a cappuccino machine she and Eric never used. Drew’s “new” furnishings were secondhand and giddily sub-standard: stocky chairs of nicked wood, a table with one of its edges faintly splattered with gray paint, an assortment of mismatched cutlery she had found bundled together in a rubber band at a garage sale. She no longer possessed a television, an automobile. This
pared-down life suited her, was proof to Eric and the others that there really was no one else, Drew had not left her marriage for some other, better draw. Proof to herself, too, that she had been right to leave; she did not need anyone else, did not need much at all. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, of being able to replace the fuses herself, just as she was proud of her spartan crockery, her found-on-the-sidewalk bookshelf, her yard-sale tea towels and wineglasses.

Jen called it self-punishment. But Drew liked the simplicity of her downsized life, this quieter existence. One needed, she saw now, only a few belongings, just as one needed only a few close friends, and a single passion—it need not be a person, necessarily. Though when she moved in she had purchased a thick cotton bedspread in a deep shade of violet, really she had little hope in that realm. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in love; but she no longer believed in it for herself. And while she had, in her first years here, shared her bed with some perfectly nice men, she had gradually come to view her room as a place of solitude and silence. The bedspread had faded to a dusty purple. Every time Drew changed the linens, she told herself she should buy a new one.

The truth was, she always felt a bit separate from most people. Even in her marriage she had never felt, as she had yearned to, that she was part of a team, that she and Eric were partners. Though they had shared many friends from college, after the breakup Drew had given most of them up. Even now, at certain moments—nudging herself onto a seat on the T, or eating lunch at the narrow counter in the sandwich shop, or taking her leisurely twice-weekly (except in winter) run along the Charles—she looked at the people around her and felt not just that she was surrounded by strangers, but that she herself was strange, somehow, that something kept her from ever fully bridging the gap between who she was and who all these other people, making their way through the very same day, were.

According to Jen, this was due to Drew’s being an only child,
independent and accustomed to doing things on her own. She had not grown up with the closeness of siblings, of secrets and shared genetics. And though she and her mother had once been close, her father was a quiet man who had never been terribly communicative; only when Drew graduated from college and became a member of the workforce did he seem comfortable conducting in-depth conversations with her, asking lots of detailed professional questions, as he might of a lunch companion or someone sitting next to him on an airplane. For all these reasons—Jen put forth in her matter-of-fact way—Drew possessed, or revealed, little need for companionship. Well, Drew thought to herself, perhaps that was so. She turned back to her computer screen.

Backdrop: History and Circumstance
behind the Jewels

By Drew Brooks, Associate Director of Fine Jewelry

Drew waited for the next words to come to her. The problem was that she did not know where to start. She suspected there was much to say—despite the fact that Nina Revskaya insisted she had no more information to offer. It was laughable, really. Especially when she herself said that dancers had such good memories, that she could remember entire ballets…In her mind, Drew could hear the rising intonation of her voice, the hard rolled
r
’s and nasal vowels—though her accent was really not so strong, and her English
nearly perfect. For that reason too her unwillingness to talk, paired with the sudden appearance of Grigori Solodin’s matching amber pendant, made Drew suppose that there was something more to Nina Revskaya’s story.

Not to mention that Grigori Solodin, too, was a bit of a mystery. A big man, tall and slim yet weighty somehow, with a wide thoughtful brow and pensive eyes. Thick hair slightly messy like a boy’s. Even now Drew could picture his firm, even tense, jaw, the definition in his face and around his mouth. He had an odd, light accent, not Russian so much as something else Drew didn’t recognize. When she asked if he had any documentation to support his assertion that the pendant had belonged to Nina Revskaya, Grigori Solodin had pursed his lips almost as if he were biting them, so that his jaw tightened toward the back of his cheeks, where he had something like dimples. “I am sorry to say that I have no documentation.”

But Drew was accustomed to this sort of tricky situation. It was part of what she loved about the auction house, the mysteries and dramas, who originally made that piano, who really painted that portrait, the conflicting versions of family histories from sisters selling their dead aunt’s collection of perfume bottles, or a father’s humidor full of sought-after cigars. What was it, though, that prevented Grigori Solodin from explaining anything more about how the necklace had come into his possession? When Drew tried to ask him, gently and without insinuation, as they sat in one of the little one-on-one meeting rooms, he said only that the pendant had been handed down to him. “I’ve owned this necklace my entire life. But for various reasons, and particularly after seeing Nina Revskaya’s amber earrings and bracelet, I’m convinced that it too once belonged to her. Or, rather, to that same amber set.”

Drew wondered how old he was—late forties, early fifties? Not of Nina Revskaya’s generation. She found it intriguing, perhaps even somehow suspect, that besides having a Russian name and living
here in Boston, Grigori Solodin, like Nina Revskaya, was reticent, holding something back.

If Lenore sensed that there was anything to all this, it was nothing she would make time for. Her priority was not the hidden details but outward appearance: putting on a successful auction, running a solid business and a good show. Drew, though, loved the stories behind the objects, gossip she heard from clients auctioning off a relative’s estate, or of a little-known muse to one of the Group of Eight painters, or the jazz musician who owned a trumpet Miles Davis once played.

The fact was, she hadn’t at first had much interest in jewelry. As an art history major she loved paintings and drawings and once had dreams of becoming a museum curator; after graduation she had worked in a gallery in Chelsea and interned at Sotheby’s before finding a better-paid position. The job at Beller was simply the first one she found when her marriage ended and she wanted to leave New York. She had revised her professional fantasies accordingly, into a new vision of herself as one of the experts on
Antiques Roadshow
, cheerily informing people that the watercolor they had found in their attic was a rare one worth thousands. Her first opportunity for advancement, five months later, had been as Lenore’s associate. And so Drew had refashioned her dream once again, and begun studying for her gemologist certificate through a correspondence course.