The Imperial Wife (23 page)

I could feel Carl's reluctance to leave, his body poised to continue the conversation.
Jesus,
I thought.
Breathing? Lady with a lapdog?
But something alive wormed in his voice, an attraction maybe or a terror of being left behind. Victoria was me once, the dreamy, younger, exotic me before I could no longer afford to be dreamy. (“You're making a mistake by letting men see your strength. Men like helpless women,” my mother used to say when I was entering my late twenties and was still unmarried. “Look at Alla. Does she ride the subway at night? Does she pick up her husband at the airport? That's right. Because she knows it's the man's job to take care of her.”)

“We should go,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

Carl tightened the scarf around his neck. His cheeks were red from the cold. People were waving to him from the gates, calling out, “Great talk!” “
Russian Review
will want it.”

“Yeah, thanks for coming. I'm sure I'll get your usual candid opinion on Monday.”

“You always do, Carl,” Victoria said with a theatrical wave. The way they kept saying each other's name for no reason saddened me, all that clichéd young female effort and men too susceptible to flattery. I felt oddly robbed of my own time as the subject of impossible longing, but I was busy climbing, achieving, becoming. And when we were out of earshot, I said, “So that was the famous Victoria.”

“She casts quite a figure, doesn't she?”

Is it possible to see your husband whole by the longing in his voice? To hear in it desire for what you no longer are?

Now that I'm outside his office at Ditmas College, I don't know what I expected to learn. Did I think I would catch him with Victoria in erotic abandon? The door is firmly shut, Carl's office hours scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper. I rap lightly. Out from the main office, young women exit with forms and manila envelopes. They are unformed, with gangly limbs, hair knotted messily with rubber bands, striped V-necks over low-slung jeans, or encased in childlike rompers. They move easily from conversation with each other to tapping on their phones. The overhead lighting turns their complexions yellow, not at all the young beauties I imagined Carl intertwined with behind his desk.

“Mrs. Vandermotter? Waiting for Carl?” Out from the main office, as if conjured out of air, comes Victoria.

She appears to be eight months pregnant and, by his wrist, she holds a toddling boy in a broken-in baseball hat. An adjustment takes place in my mind, realigning the romantic heroine in the snowstorm with the tired mother before me. But there's no doubt; it's Victoria Henriques in her early thirties, her curls gathered into a practical ponytail, her face bare of makeup, filled out. The gaunt, faraway look (“Just breathing”) is gone, replaced with an exhausted directness.

“I know,” Victoria says, glancing down at him. “He's why I'm on the twenty-year plan. You know classes ended last week, right?”

“Right, right.” Of course. It's already May. My mind hasn't worked on an academic schedule since school.

“You don't take my job seriously,” Carl said once, when I'd joked about his cushy summers off while I toiled toward auction deadlines. “You think I don't even work.”

“That's not true,” I'd protested, even as I tried to quash the thought,
Does he even have a job?
Then,
I will always work harder than he does.

Victoria is resisting the boy's tug of her hand. “I'm almost done though. Defending next week, then I'm finally out of here. M.F.A. and Ph.D. Didn't he tell you?”

“Congratulations, Victoria.” I can afford to be generous. Tired mother or not, the ingénue will finally be gone.

“I want Wheels on the Bus I want Wheels on the Bus I want Wheels on the Bus.”

“Okay, Smith, I heard you,” she says. I can't help but smile at the equalizing power of age; the ethereal beauty with an unruly child named Smith. “You've probably already checked Urban Writers offices? He might be there.”

“Urban Writers?”

Victoria is being jerked down the hall. She calls back, “Urban Writers Space. In Manhattan. He's always there these days. Our theory is he's moonlighting in another teaching gig,” before disappearing around the corner.

I feel unexpectedly stung. A second job? That's how it begins, Alla warns, men hiding things in sock drawers, materializing in secret locations.

Outside by the lily pond, administrators unwrap sandwiches from parchment, purses resting against their thighs. The fish bob to the surface, mouths ready for an influx of crumbs. I watch them compete for food, glide over one another in their eagerness to be first.

The Urban Writers Web site is sleek and popping with color. It promises a communal working space, private offices for meetings, a fully stocked kitchen with tea and coffee, and a small library. The photos show serious people huddled around tables, stacks of paper spread out before them. They are staring intently at the gray-curled leader at the head of the table who is articulating her comments through elegant flourishes of the hands. None of it makes any sense to me. When I'm at work, Carl had our apartment to himself, not to mention the Queens apartment and his Ditmas College office. And why would Carl take an extra teaching job that probably pays nothing?

But the woman who runs the operation looks out from the screen with her oceanic eyes, soft black hair caressing sculpted eyebrows. She is stunning in the same mysterious way as young Victoria and her name is equally offensive: Hermione.

“Medovsky,” Regan says, and I snap back to my desk at Worthington's, to the ringing of the telephones, the hallway kitten-heel patter of the interns.

“Sash.” I pick up.
“Privet.”

“Listen, can I can buy it before sale? Preempt it, or whatever that's called? I can't go into details, but situation is urgent.”

It takes me a minute. “The Order? I can raise it with my consignor but I know she wants to offer it to as many buyers as possible. Sash, just sit tight. Everything will turn out for the best.”

“How can I sit, Tanyush?” He sighs. “The world, it's speeding up. It changes with every blink. Time, it is fleeing me.” A wild animal growl erupts in the background. I imagine him calling from a rooftop garden of some over-the-top party featuring tigers and their trainers. (“Sasha had those mimes and acrobats in Monaco, remember? Let's bring in a few cats from the zoo.”)

“What do you mean?”

“Even at
gymnasium
he was stubborn, secretive. He's vengeful when he does not get what he wants. You know the man—he starts a war on a whim. He says, ‘I want the Order. Get me the Order.' Or else, or else. One of my old enemies comes to him and says, ‘Do we have your blessing?' and he might say, ‘Well, I didn't get the Order, so why not? Who am I to stop you?'”

“Sash, who are you talking about?”

“The president, of course. Tan, haven't you been paying attention? The president!”

On the screen, I'm examining the curve of Hermione's mouth, the gentle rise of her thin lips. Hermione and Carl stepping out for ramen between work on their ambitious novels, the two of them melding into the midtown crowds.

“It'll be yours. And when it is, I'm sure he'll love it,” I say, vaguely, before hanging up.

“What the hell was that? Lions? I could hear that all the way from my cube,” Regan calls out. Today she is dressed like a prim Dita von Teese, hair curled into a coil, fingernails painted black.

“So I'm not crazy. You heard it too.”

Regan comes around to my desk, leans a chin on her forearms. “We're working for some real creepers, aren't we?”

But I regret having dispatched with Medovsky so quickly and have the impulse to call him back and listen to him. The more he calls, the more it becomes clear that he needs me. And I like his booming voice on the other end of the line, projecting the kind of masculinity I didn't know was lacking in my life.

“Who's that little hottie?” Regan asks, pointing to my screen, and I remember Hermione, Carl and Hermione kissing between bites of ramen. I wipe her face away with a single click.

 

Catherine

MAY 1746

For the third day in a row, she asks for Katya but flinty Madame Krause appears instead. Madame Krause has been making many unannounced entrances lately. She first showed up the morning after the wedding night, flickered over the preserved bedsheets, a delicate, “Have you perchance inspired love in His Imperial Highness?” She appears when the empress is most displeased with Catherine, in order to explore the cause of late-night revelry with her friends or the provenance of a dress that competes too closely with one of the empress's twelve thousand gowns.

“Where is Katya?” Catherine demands.

“Which Katya?” Madame Krause is neat and prim, her darting eyes scan the room for details to fill out her report. “If you have a question about a particular lady, you will want to speak with the empress.”

Wedged into a corner is the wooden leg of one of Peter's puppets, flung over the folds of the covers. Madame Krause takes this in. Everyone at court is engaged in the frenzied question of consummation. Has it happened? Is Peter even capable of it? In some quarters, the joke is that the puppets are fulfilling the grand duke's responsibilities. Of course, the reality is not too far off. Peter prefers puppet reenactments to the sight of her disrobed.

Catherine raises herself to full height, glaring down at Madame Krause. “I would like to see my lady Ekaterina Vassilievna Zhukova immediately.”

“I'm afraid that will be impossible.”

“Must I remind you it is the grand duchess herself inquiring?”

“The lady you are referring to is gone.”

“Where has she gone to?”

“Sent away. By the empress herself.”

An understanding blooms inside her. She can picture it—the hours before dawn, a huddle of men lighting the way with candles, Katya bundled off into a waiting carriage. She would have meekly asked to see Catherine, to simply say farewell. The hairbrushes, pins, and ribbons she left behind were given away to servants. Catherine's eyelids prickle.

Immediately following the wedding, it was made clear that until an heir is brought to term, all distractions of the grand duke and duchess would be excised. Slowly, the empress began prying confidantes away from Catherine. First, her mother was sent packing back to Zerbst.

How Johanna had lingered beside the carriage, arranging Catherine's necklace, smoothing her brows, the mournful way she whispered, “And so it is done.” As the carriage containing her mother pulled away, Catherine realized she would probably never see her family again. And now Katya is gone. She looks down at the Order across her chest, the one she wears daily. The saint is the only friend she has left.

She had expected marriage to lend her security at court. Free of the pressures of her uncertain position, she imagined unfettered hours with Katya and the cheerful Zhenia, the only other of her ladies she truly trusts. But instead she and Peter are confined in a royal prison, their every move monitored by spies. She has heard that Bestuzhev has advised removing the last of her independence and the empress finds fault with her on a daily basis. “Why are you wearing that? Take it off,” she said about a newly commissioned emerald necklace, and Catherine looked up to find the empress's own neck draped in emeralds. She wonders if the empress has informants who know about her empty nights with Peter, when they slumber as far away from each other as possible.

She is not a terrible person, this Madame Krause, and in her eyes Catherine spies sympathy. After she completes the inspection, she turns back to Catherine. “It is no good, you know. Your friend won't be brought back and you will find no news of her. I assure you she is in a hospitable place back with her family. They want it that way, for you to focus on your tasks.” Her tasks, Catherine thinks bitterly. If only they all knew her husband curled back at the thought of touching her. She is pretty sure they have to touch in order to produce an heir.

The woman sits on the edge of the bed, yanks one of Peter's puppets by its ankle. Sniffs: “Your husband is neglecting his duties.”

“Please, Madame Krause. He needs them.”

Despite herself, she feels protective of Peter, of the puppets he loves like his friends, the toys that respect him more than anyone else at court. If they fail to follow military command, they are reprimanded, always with cause. It is the one domain in which he holds any power.

She expects a flinty, a huffy, “We'll see.” These wardens have the ear of the empress, they can wield it to garner favors for themselves. But to her surprise, Madame Krause only smiles, presses a finger to her lips, and says, “Shhh. It will be between us.”

*   *   *

Luckily there are still the other ladies, Zhenia and Vika, who plait her hair and share her suppers late into the night. Zhenia is the pretty but peasanty one with a shadow of dubious paternity, a mother who was once a serf and managed to marry the widowed landowner. Her laugh is too brawny and explodes at inappropriate moments, but she never complains, and these days, good humor is the difference between survival and despair. Vika condescends to Zhenia by speaking only in French and reminding them all that she hails from one branch of the Rostovs, one of Russia's oldest and most noble of families. They are grumpy with each other, but vie for Catherine's attention, Zhenia with her anecdotes and gossip, Vika with her knowledge of European fashion and court intrigue. With them, she can talk girlish things, mocking Bestuzhev's lumpy nose or the strange dress of inexperienced visiting dignitaries. They pull apart the most recent balls, who arrived later than seven-thirty, who bungled their entrance by passing through a door meant for another rank.