The Imperial Wife Read Online Free Page A

back to an independent consciousness, occasionally skipping over the needs of the other. But it’s striking. I flap out some of his hair between my fingers, air-drying it. I imagine his students—that Victoria, in particular—focusing on the way that my husband’s hair moves during a long lecture on fiction craft or one of his digressions on the Acmeist poets. He’s the kind of good-looking that takes itself for granted, that even at thirty-four doesn’t fully understand the extent of its power. Even now, women linger on his face as they move past him to get to the corner with all the watercolors.
    We move deeper into the show.
    â€œSeriously. Tell me more. Where’s the love story?” I pull him out of the way of a guided tour bent on its systematic survey of the art. But he’s already thinking of something else, I can tell by the distracted way his mouth slacks open.
    â€œHey, I think I really need to see it for myself.” He leans down, hand around my shoulder. He pushes a fistful of hair behind my ear. “Can I come in to the office?”
    I pause, genuinely confused. “See what?”
    â€œThe Order. It’s incredible, right?”
    My heart stumbles, trips. “Yeah, it kind of is.”
    â€œSo it exists. God, to touch the thing. That she wore it. Ekaterina Velikaia.”
    â€œBut what do you need to touch it for? I’ll show you a digital.”
    On the wall behind Carl, I read out loud a Kandinsky quote: “‘Must we not then renounce the object, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?’”
    â€œSeriously, Tan. A digital is hardly the same thing. I just feel like I have to touch it with my own hands.”
    â€œOf course. But the consignor was very adamant that no one but a serious buyer should even breathe on the thing.”
    â€œAre you serious?”
    â€œI also have an incredible Goncharova, just stunning. A very rare Spanish Dancer ?”
    â€œJesus. Why am I even surprised?” He brushes by the art with barely a glance and for a moment submerges into the sea of the tour group. I feel a numb devastation, then perform my cognitive tricks to recover. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. A bad situation is a momentary setback, nothing more.
    I look for him on the other side of the crowd. “Look, you should come to the preview. You can see it then. It’ll be behind glass and there’s going to be so much great art. You’ll love the Archipenko too.”
    â€œYou don’t want me to touch it. You don’t even want me to be anywhere near it. You want to keep me apart from it. It’s yours. It’s all yours.” Before I know it, he’s an entire room ahead, staring neither at the Kupka nor the Picabia. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his pressed khakis, then takes them out. His hair is still wet, stubbornly wet.
    My friends warned me about the beginnings of marriages, like clumsy fumblings of any new skill. “Those first years are the worst, believe me,” my best friend Alla warned me. “You think you made the biggest mistake and will want to run from it every single day.” But her statement seemed so counterintuitive that I dismissed it right away. What about its opposite, the wearing off of bliss, the slow understanding of the person you married?
    â€œThat’ll never happen with us,” I assured Alla. Carl was perfection. Exotic, voluminous, firebird perfection. I had somehow managed to trap it, convinced it to fall in love with me.
    As I’m deciding on how best to approach my husband’s mood, I glimpse a client’s shock of gray hair. My first thought is to try and avoid him, but he’s already seen me and is steering his wife over. A specialist is a salesperson first; she can’t be seen ignoring her clients. This man happens to be one of my favorites too, a grandfatherly bon vivant who reminds me of my own