Read Online The Imperial Wife by Irina Reyn - Free Book Online Page B

glory. It makes my heart constrict for Russia, for the brilliant minds that have lived and been destroyed by it, for all that suppressed risk and innovation, the lines, the colors, the earthly and the sublime. Each year, I feel Russia slipping away, growing more dangerous and foreign. Once, as a Russian, I was the enemy in this country too.
    Interns are dispersing printed catalogues to newcomers, iPads displaying the downloaded catalogue are tacked to walls. The preview is important because it allows buyers a firsthand glimpse of the art in person. The art is hung as though in a museum, whetting buyer appetites and attracting the kind of press we need for a decent turnout. And our job is to parse the serious buyers from the party hoppers, to entice the uncertain into bidding at the actual auction. Marjorie, clueless to guest hierarchies, is wasting her time on celebrities and nonbuyers from the Upper East Side who come to these parties to be photographed in structured dresses and coral lipsticks, while Regan is smartly occupying the art bloggers from Art World Salon, passionate art-historians-in-training who actually appreciate the significance of the show.
    My parents arrive and are hovering next to the Archipenko bronze at the entrance, pretending to scrutinize its patina. They look uncomfortable here among the coiffed, the self-assured, the multigenerational New Yorker buyers. An Archipenko bronze is as foreign to them as penthouse apartments overlooking Central Park, but aware of their role as my parents, they move stiffly, with studied admiration, among the art. I’m relieved that my father’s not wearing his tracksuit, my mother having forced him into a short-sleeved shirt. I hug them, inhale my mother’s perfume. She is wearing all black, as if the very color will protect her from the intimidating crowd.
    She feigns confidence around the sculpture’s amorphous body. “Nice piece.”
    â€œIsn’t it amazing?”
    â€œThis one I like,” she admits. She once asked me regarding a Rothko, Can you explain to me why this is art?
    â€œBut I want to show you something really special.” I lead them to the glass case, to the Order of Saint Catherine. “This is what I told you about at dinner.”
    How lovely it looks preening in the center of the room, her tiny oval alone in all that space, the diamond-encrusted cross, the staunchly seated woman surrounded by symbols of faith and martyrdom.
    â€œThat barokhlo a queen wears? It’s even shabbier in person,” my mother says, squinting into the glass.
    â€œIt’s not so bad,” my father says. “It’s old, that’s for sure.”
    â€œYou’re kidding right, Yash? I saw something very much like this at Century Twenty One in the jewelry section.”
    I try not to take offense. My mother is pessimistic in the way she sees both herself and the world. Good things happen by accident and bad events come about due to personal shortcomings. She’s a classic Russian Jew. Which is a shame because my mother is beautiful, the luxuriant hair she crops too short, cobalt eyes never handed to me, a sorrowful Modigliani face. I think my mother is more beautiful than Isabella Rossellini, who is now in front of the Goncharova laughing with Jeremiah Gruber and his wife in a voluminous shawl draped over a pair of complicated dungarees.
    â€œWhoever buys this ugly thing is idiot,” my mother continues. “Do these rich people really think this belonged to that queen? The Hermitage probably hired someone last year to forge this.”
    â€œShh, Ma, please keep your voice down. It’s not fake.”
    â€œHow much you want to bet that Hermitage person was paid off to say that?”
    As usual, my mother injects the proper amount of fear into me. I’ve been trying not to think about that possibility, but how could you not with the world I’m navigating? If it’s discovered to be fake, my