The Imperial Wife by Irina Reyn Read Free Book Online Page A

within it follow the careful exchange of objects.
    â€œSash, don’t worry. I’ll be on the phone personally making sure you’re as informed as possible.” I try harder for maternal this time. They like that, my clients, the feminine touch, the myth of a warm, female bosom to cushion them. Physically, I fit their ideal of a “real Russian woman,” not too tall, demure, slender wrists, voluptuous. “You know how to wear that dress,” these clients tell me. If they must work with women, the aura must be pleasant, topiary.
    â€œI know you will, Tanyechka. I have absolute faith. You’ve earned it.”
    I consider: ask about the wife or the mistress? By now, I’ve met both. The former, Lena, is an intimidating powerhouse of spiky, asymmetrical hair with impressively toned biceps, the latter, a reddish-haired waif barely out of gymnasium with tiny lips and practically no eyebrows. In the end, it’s always wisest to settle on the wife. “How’s Lena? Did she get her boutique up and running? Anything I can afford?”
    Medovsky laughs, but in a distracted way that tells me his attention has already clicked to another piece of business. “I doubt it, Tanyush. But you should see store anyway. Right smack on New Bond Street. Gorgeous things. Stop by next time you’re in town.”
    â€œAbsolutely. Give her my love, will you?”
    â€œAnd you to that Vandershmotter of yours.”
    â€œThanks,” I say brightly. “I’ll pass it on.”
    Alexander Medovsky may be one of the reasons I’ve remained head of the Russian art department rather than one of the many specialists in the womb of the nineteenth-century Impressionist and Modern Art department where I spent thirteen lovely years, floating among the reliable stability of the sun-dappled landscapes and flushed domesticity. My former boss was as placid and vibrant as the paintings, and I bobbed on the surface of his clear expectations, happily checking off one task after the next, writing endless reams of catalogue copy. (“The present lot underscores the artist’s talent for depicting the atmospheric qualities of the treacherous sea and man’s struggle against nature.”)
    I was grateful for the job, for the surprising tenderness I felt for the pieces that appeared and disappeared from the office. At times, I could feel the artist’s beating soul, could transpose myself into his (because it was almost always a “his”) century. Through his brushstrokes, through his eye on the world, I sensed his celebration or ambivalence of industrialization, a fear of nature destroyed, naïve wonder of foreign cultures, of Tahiti, or Japan. I thought I would never get any further, that my immigrant success story would end right there, as a respected, invisible member of a large team.
    But then one morning, the pavement still steaming on the soles of my shoes, armpits damp with subway exertion, jittery Marjorie Carlyle called me upstairs into her office, unveiled something masquerading as a Larionov, handed me an ultraviolet light, and said, “Who’s this anyway? And is this fake or not? Now that Kudrina quit with zero notice, you’re the only Russian we’ve got.” I didn’t miss a beat: “This piece is in Larionov’s Rayonist style, dated 1905. Which is impossible since Larionov created Rayonism in 1913.” Marjorie said, “Fine. How do you feel about working with your people?”
    And what could I say? The fierce oligarch’s daughter was finally gone. And no one else at Worthington’s knew Russian art like I did. On the other side of the world lay a vast country in turmoil and, like it or not, it was the country of my birth, the country that shaped my first seven years. And I felt it needed me to save its art in this volatile time, to return it to the place it once belonged before it was sold off for tractors by Bolsheviks and Stalin.