PRESENT DAY
The car hugs the edge of a snaking mountain road. I roll down the window and inhale the sea into my lungs. Monaco. If it weren’t for my job, for Medovsky’s invitation, I would never find myself in a place like this. We pass by a long street with intimidating shops, their white façades, gold letters. Rolex. Cartier. Louis Vuitton. Then back to the hills, fern and lavender on one side, on the other the expanse of turquoise horizon.
My first time in Monaco, I was not at all prepared for the pristine beauty of the coastline at sunset, crisp like a white satin sheath. The undulating blues and whites, toes of yachts wiggling in clear water, the yellow eyes of the hotels, the rectangles of private pools and faces of hotels and glass rooftops. The sight of it, the largeness of attention it demanded. The disparity between my life and that of my clients.
There were my clients, with their hundred-million-euro villas spread out over four floors, shimmering hot tubs right in the middle of living rooms framed by Grecian columns, the rooftop helicopter pad, Turkish spa, 1920s movie theater, a rooftop water slide curved into an infinity pool that gave the impression of falling into the Mediterranean. What a difference from where I grew up! And there were my parents in northern New Jersey, with their two-floor Colonial, their clunky but reliable Volvo from 1999, their gym membership where they snuck in as one another in order to battle senior citizens over empty pool lanes. They could never shed their Soviet tactics of self-preservation. They bought an extra packet of cookies for their friends if there was a two-for-one sale, logged on to their neighbors’ open-access Internet, and packed brioche rolls from Russian restaurants into their bags for the following breakfast. How could I reconcile the lucky, middle-class lives of my parents with these people in Monaco, who graduated from the same Soviet public schools, attended the same universities, but here they were with their villas and chunky Winston emeralds and private dancers flown in from Buenos Aires.
How abhorrent my clients appeared to me at first. Women as foreign as aliens, wives confiding while condescending to me: Tanyechka, talk some sense into him, will you? Do we really need the headache of owning a yacht? Does my daughter really need Taylor Swift at her bat mitzvah when that Selena Gomez would do just fine? Do we really need a custom Lamborghini Veneno? How Carl laughed when I described the awkwardness of bumping into the singer George Michael in one of the bedrooms trying out a few sentences of Russian in preparation for a bat mitzvah concert.
I take in the Côte d’Azur, the air’s orange sweetness and the magnificent view, pushing aside this image of Carl, his funny way of laughing as if only his mouth were involved in the act. He’ll be back soon, he’ll be back very soon. The tablet is open to the profiles of potential clients I’m here to meet—Medovsky’s buddies Oleg and David. Their rumored purchases at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, their trinity of homes in Moscow, London, and Monaco. Their photographs revealing thick necks, crisp collars, hair cropped close to the head. But my mind wanders.
We pull up to a structure that seems to sink into its landscape, seems to be sculpted out of the very rock around it. The wide iron gates pull back to engulf the car into the complex.
From what I hear, Medovsky paid five hundred million euros to tear down a perfectly luxurious villa and build a riad in its place. A Moroccan riad on the Côte d’Azur! Only my clients would think of something like this. The exterior is a plain fortress of mud-brick wall so you think you’re about to enter a modest, simple home. In the oligarch’s case, the riad’s is a useful structure for privacy, but the interior is far from modest.
Stepping into the atrium, through the horseshoe arches and past the interior courtyard, I find myself in front of a fountain that looks suspiciously like a miniature replica of Rome’s Trevi Fountain complete with Neptune’s chariot with sea horses, the general Agrippa, and the papal coat of arms. The floors are lined with terra-cotta tiles etched with Hebrew, rather than Arabic, calligraphy. Lemon trees in full bloom garnish the voluminous red walls.
I can barely take it all in when the doors swing open and in clicks a tall blonde, the kind who’s used to pausing a room with her entrance. She’s wearing a floor-length jersey dress speckled with flowers. Her neck is evenly bronzed and a gold clutch is tucked beneath her arm. I should have known Nadia Kudrina would be here.
My former assistant is twenty-five years old and knows next to nothing about Russian or any other art history but her father is PYOTOR Oil chairman Arkady Kudrin, and many powerful men who do business with Kudrin have no choice but to consign with Nadia at Christie’s.
She heads immediately for my cheek. “Privet, Tanyechka. How are things at Worthy’s?”
“Great, Nadia. You?”
“Normal’no. Too busy. As usual.”
There’s no competition on any level with a Russian woman like this: hair ironed flat and combed over one shoulder, robust breasts in danger of escaping her Etro gown, a porcelain leg emerging from an impossibly high slit, unmarked face professionally applied. A pair of expensive sunglasses perch on top of her head. This is the woman whose Facebook profile photo shows her lying on her stomach in a purple lace teddy, heels crossed like daggers behind her, her head tilted to the side, lips glistening purple. Who posts languorous photos of herself on European bridges with men thirty years her senior. Who appears at art openings in head-to-toe fish netting, pens an advice column on how to oversee an armada of domestic staff in Tatler. Who’s been named by a British gossip magazine as the Russian Kim Kardashian.
“What a treat to see you here.” I try to sound genuine but I’m instantly on my guard. Nadia always manages to make me feel like the help she is always hiring and firing for one of her global homes. “Your last sale was pretty impressive. I really love those Chagalls you got. Congratulations.”
“The synagogue ones, you mean? The rare oils?”
“I love the stained glass of the Vilna one.”
“It’s the one always singled out in press. But the others are more interesting, no?”
“I actually prefer the one that’s singled out.”
I’ve detested Nadia since she first set foot in Worthington’s dressed inappropriately in a white Hervé Leger bandage dress and strappy gold pumps for her first day of work as a summer intern. The girl was everything I dreaded, a lithe, sexual creature, an entitled exhibitionist posting pictures of herself dancing at some Art Basel party or on a yacht in the Maldives or at Reese Witherspoon’s wedding. Her very presence announced her as Nadia Kudrina, enfant terrible, fulfilling her global Russian destiny, and no one would stand in her way. When she left the company, I was relieved, assumed Kudrin whisked her away to an internship in fashion or public relations. Except Nadia emerged as the head of Russian art at Christie’s and her first auction, a terribly uneven selection from her father’s personal collection, raised fifteen million dollars. “The one that got away” is how Marjorie referred to her in my presence. A rueful glance at me as the one who stayed.
“It’s a mess out there, isn’t it? Are you still managing to pull together auctions? I barely unloaded that Serebriakova for six mil.”
“Actually, I’ve got a great Nesterov for the fall,” I say.
“Oh, Nesterov.” Nadia takes out a compact, does a quick assessment. “I know the one. Overcleaned, right? After the restorers were done, nothing left of the original.”
“And Grigoriev.”
“The one that’s not an oil?”
I’m so angry, I decide to take the risk. “And, of course, the centerpiece lot. Catherine the Great’s Order of Saint Catherine. It’s authentic. We’ve got it confirmed.” That is at least partially true.
Nadia looks up from the mirror. “Oh? And where did that come from? How come I haven’t heard anything about it this late in the game?”
“Trust me, you will.”
A trio of men in hooded dishdashas gesture for us to follow and I eagerly line up behind them. This may be my first moment of triumph with Nadia Kudrina.
“Anyway,” Nadia says, swaying behind me, “I am surprised you’re even here. I thought I left a message with your assistant, to save you a trip. Maybe it slipped my mind.”
“That’s thoughtful.”
“Tan’. It’s like you don’t believe I’m sincere. I respect you. There might just not be enough business for both of us. That’s a fact.”
We’re being guided down elaborate open galleries, past the steamy door of the hammam, through sumptuous rooms filled with treasures—vases, tapestries, European masterpieces, rugs—underneath the coffered wood ceilings and drooping lanterns. Palaces like this terrified me at first, but now I appreciate the treasures independent of their owners. We step out onto a garden the size of a city block, through a snakelike trellis, past olive groves and lemon trees, and before a set of gold double doors. We’re bidden to take off our shoes and slip on silk babouches.
My first impression is the rose flash of illumination, a room exploding with light. Women wearing elaborate caftans with silk strappy heels and heavy chandelier earrings. Dashing between them are the black spots of occasional tuxedos. The women call out to Nadia, fold her into their circle. I’m free of her, but then there’s that moment at a party where you’re aware of being very much alone. The klezmer band launches into a new song and, at its head, I recognize the famous violinist Itzhak Perlman.
When I enter parties like this, my initial instinct is to flee, but now I slap the widest of smiles on my face and look approachable. I kiss familiar, nameless people on the cheek, compliment the women on their appearances. I raise myself to my full height and stalk to the bar. But once there, I’m intercepted by a chalky face topped by a beret. It grimaces at me with a wide pair of black-rimmed eyes. Its painted red lips seem to be murmuring something. I try to move away from its mouth but the crowd at the bar pins us together. The sound resembles muzh. Muzhmuzhmuzh, the creature is mouthing.
“What’s with you?” someone asks, because what must I look like? Frozen, wide-eyed. All I can see is the red mouth, elaborately outlined. But then it’s moving away from me and toward a woman in a long silver gown who’s stuffed most of a Pomeranian into a Gucci clutch.
I notice there are more of these white-painted men on stilts and unicycles, bending over to tap guests on their shoulders, drawing them into elaborate pantomimes. Mimes. For God’s sake, they’re only mimes. I try to still the rattling in my rib cage and pretend to enjoy their pranks. I can already imagine Medovsky’s wife, Lena, in that brittle way of hers, saying, “But the Soltukovs had a skating rink and penguins! We can’t let them throw the better party.”
A glass of pink champagne is eased into my hand and I wander outdoors by the pool where the laser light show is streaming neon onto the Olympic-sized pool and groups of people lounge on cushions under caidal tents. A few of the guests are watching the interplay of light, and I press between them for a view. A pair of tightrope walkers are traversing a taut string over the pool, stacked Louis XIV chairs balanced on top of their heads. This is exactly the kind of lunacy Carl would be fascinated by.
In those days before the book, he would invent day trips for us to Roosevelt Island, to the Cloisters. Inside a basket he packed for us, I would find the strangest things: hummus and sliced turkey bacon, dried currants and shaved ginger and pitted olives. I loved his wacky lunches. When I prepared our meals, they were carefully compiled, a sandwich, a vegetable, a dessert. Practical and composed.
It was that afternoon at the Cloisters that I told him I would take the job. If I don’t step up, who would do it? I was the best specialist in a burgeoning field, a field increasingly littered with fakes. Who else will separate the authentic from the forgery? Who else will see to it that Russian art has a future, that the world so wary of Russian politics won’t be suspicious of the Russian market?
“Sure, if you love it,” he said, as I knew he would.
Follow your passion, live your dream, all those heady American myths. I loved that Carl believed them all.
“My job’s so safe now.” I was thinking out loud. “That’s why I’m not sure. But it’s finally the step up in the company I’ve been waiting for. It’s my chance to be a vice president.”
“But do you love your job like I love teaching?” He made the question sound so simple. “I can’t even tell how much you like what you do. You’re always stressed. I can only imagine how much more stressed you’ll be after you take this job.”
“Being the head of a department’s no joke. You’re really expected to pull off these insane auctions. And all that travel. But it’s an opportunity that won’t come by again.” I pause, consider, and decide to plunge ahead. “Anyway, it’s not like we can afford to turn it down, right? We don’t even know if Ditmas will hire you.” Carl looked crushed. He took one more bite, then put his sandwich aside. There was the twinge of regret but I wasn’t used to the role of breadwinner; there was no room in Russian culture to accommodate it. Each week, my parents asked, “Did Carl get job yet?” and I was never brave enough to say I earned for the two of us.
The Monacan sky has not fully darkened over the Medovsky compound, the smudge of color still a vivid purple. Among the tables laden with food, I catch sight of my client, and next to him are Oleg and David, easily recognizable from their online photos. Before them is an elaborate presentation of shashliki in the shape of a dartboard. They slide the meat off with their teeth, then use the skewer for target practice.
“Gentlemen,” I say, hands light on the backs of their chairs.
“Tanyechka, welcome.” Medovsky kisses me on both cheeks, exuding genuine pleasure. He is springing with good spirit, the fabric of his Italian shirt already wrinkled, his hair escaping its pomade and poking in every direction. His is a messy energy, the kind that relies on women to contain it. Still, I forget how much I like him, his warmth and eagerness to provide pleasure for everyone around him. He’s also Jewish, and there’s this link of outsider culture between us—to Russians, we’ll always be considered Jews, not Russians.
“Sash, thanks so much for hosting me in this marvelous place. And what a good cause.”
The men are rising to greet me, pulling me a spare chair, loading my plate with grilled lamb. I should be glad for the opening; all I have to do now is run the pitch on the steam of all this goodwill. But I’m still shaky from the mimes, as if they were warning me of something. Muzhmuzhmuzh. Nadia steps out onto the pool area, surveying the scene, probably preparing a predatory lunge in our direction. I feel my heart zipping again. There’s no time to reel them in, to close any deal.
“This is not only a beautiful woman, but an extraordinary art specialist,” Medovsky is saying about me. I can hear him praising my eye to his friends, my graduate degree, my learned expertise. Magic, he calls my ability to put forth the most interesting of auctions, items culled for historical importance and also the kind of items not easily found elsewhere. But all I hear behind me is the advance of the stunning twenty-five-year-old Nadia and it seems to me that I’m being annihilated in her wake. Her heels are meant to stamp me out, make me irrelevant.
(“Does he have another woman?” my mother asked, delicately. “He’s definitely cheating,” said Alla. “You don’t want to admit it, but it’s the most obvious answer.”)
I interrupt Medovsky’s eulogy with a hasty fanning out of the catalogues, pointing out the most interesting of the lots, chattering nervously about the Order of Saint Catherine, about Larionov, Nesterov, and Archipenko, and even the fake Shishkin from Ramsdale. I’m engaging in an amateur’s trap, displaying an overeagerness that will distance the men from me, but I can’t stop. Nadia’s aura of sickly bergamot is advancing into our space, consuming us all with its aggressive scent. The men sink deeper into their seats, clicking off. In vain, I try to slow down, to bring them back around with my usual tactics.
“Oleg Alexanderovich, do you own a home nearby?”
But it’s too late: Nadia is bending over them with her jerseyed breasts and long strands of highlighted hair, her gold snake cuffs gripping her upper arm, and they awaken to her presence. She may be no art specialist, but she knows how to hold attention. They bid me to sit down, step aside, enjoy the show. Relax. Life is not all work, is it?
“Hey, Tan’.” Medovsky pulls me aside. He’s annoyed. “We save our business for tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I say, shaky.
He taps me in the direction of the party. “For God’s sake, at least go enjoy yourself.”
I don’t know where to turn. Slashes of neon dance across my skin, Céline Dion is singing “If You Could See Me Now” either over a very clear loudspeaker or in person somewhere beyond the lemon groves. The mimes are undulating around me, obscuring me in the final hours before dusk.
* * *
Saint-Tropez by helicopter is a blur of land and water. We’re escalating ahead of the clouds, shredding through them one at a time. The engine’s too loud, the seat belt is flimsy. The dips and jolts of the cabin are wild and erratic. This was not what I had in mind when Medovsky suggested we do business, but you don’t argue when you’re being led up to the rooftop helicopter pad, and eased into an open door of a whirring chopper.
Of course, now I wish I’d had the courage to opt out of this little trip. After assassinations, polonium poisonings, acid attacks, and murders of journalists in their lobbies, the next most popular method of wreaking vengeance on enemies in this dangerous world is tampering with victims’ transportation. How many times have I received the ominous news that a client was shot while getting into his armored car in Luxembourg or died in a private jet crash or simply “expired with no known cause”? How many times have I received phone calls from brand-new widows to cancel the preempt or to suddenly ask me to fly out to estimate estate property?
Outside there’s sky, immense and vacant. In the tight compartment, my legs brush against the bare, sculpted calves of Medovsky’s mistress—what’s her name again? Milla? Malvina? A fair-skinned, red-haired, freckled thing—as she flips through photographs of opulent estates. The stout Realtor with a short, no-nonsense haircut, her neck zigzagged by layered gold necklaces, has been talking the entire time in frilly, pattering Russian. Once in a while, we bend down to earth to circle a property the size of a town in New Jersey.
The Realtor continues, “A professional dance studio can easily be installed if we build into the atrium. And you said you liked fish? An aquarium would be on point right now.”
“If we could just do a quick perusal of these other lots,” I interrupt, pushing forward the auction catalogue, but the mistress has her head against the windowpane, asking, “Is that fountain the Florentine one pictured here?”
“Yes, yes, the very same. A tycoon from Singapore, I think. One of those rich Asians. He’s had the place for eight months and he’s fixed the place right up.” The Realtor ignores me because she recognizes in me a person in the same position as herself. A supplicant, a salesperson. An outsider.
“I do love a labyrinth,” the mistress says, pinching Medovsky’s cheek. Medovsky seems hardly the kind to tolerate pinching, but he’s grimacing into his laptop, that sloping eyebrow that lends him a darkly quizzical look.
“Then I would love for you to look at a couple of the most exclusive items we have coming up. The Goncharova especially would look great in that space here, and should you decide to donate to a museum show, for example, we can swap in another piece that’s exactly the same size.”
“I’ll worry about furniture and let Sasha pick the art,” the mistress says to me sweetly. She’s all waves and iridescent hair, a pinprick of a girl. Eager to please and grateful, with flimsy shoulders. I try not to linger on the mistresses for too long; until they turn into wives, mistresses come and go.
Medovsky chides me. “Donation to a show? Getting a little ahead of yourself, are you, Mother Teresa of auction houses? You should have gotten to know the guys last night, Tanyush. I told them you were the real deal. But they liked Nadia because she didn’t throw catalogues in their faces.”
“Somehow I doubt that was the reason they liked her.”
“Are you referring to her tits?” Medovsky laughs. “What do you expect? They’re art collectors. Shouldn’t they admire the female form?”
I can feel it rising inside me, the same swell I had at my parents’ house with the Shishkin. That’s all I need, to break out crying ten thousand feet in the air with an oligarch, his mistress, and a Realtor. “Sash, you know I’m an actual expert and she’s not, right? Her knowledge of art is as sophisticated as … I mean, she’s twenty-five and has never even taken an art history course as far as I know. I have a master’s degree and years of experience, Sash. I know this stuff.”
“Of course you do. That’s why when that classless Kudrin ribs me about why I’m not with Christie’s, I just tell him that his daughter’s a sweetheart but you know your shit. But my friends need a little more connection before they do business.”
“I didn’t have a chance with Nadia breathing down my neck. Those mimes.” I manage to reel in the tears.
“Hey, did you like the mimes? Pretty special. Brought them down from Paris. God, I used to love Marcel Marceau as a kid. Didn’t you? I used to cry watching him in that pisshole of a kommunalka.”
Despite myself, I continue to like him. A softie. I taught Medovsky that English word and he uses it in the press from time to time. “Success depends on personal relations with power, and if you are on the wrong side of this, there are limits to what you can achieve,” he told one British reporter. “But I’m not like those other Russian guys taking over your city. I have soul, I am softie.” I e-mailed him: “Bravo!” Strangely proud that a word I personally inserted into this man’s mouth would find its way into the pages of The Guardian.
He closes shut his laptop. “Listen, you’re getting me that Order, right?”
The transition in tone is abrupt. This is a command. As if to underline this point, the wings overhead flap a little less vigorously. “You’re getting you that Order, Sash.”
“Okay, okay. I just want you to tell my competition to look elsewhere. This is no game. You-know-who is expecting it. I made a solemn promise and there is no going back.” But then he flashes a charming smile as if to say he was kidding, how could he be angry with me?
“Are you sure you won’t consider donating it after all? How great would it look in the Tretyakov across from the portrait where’s she’s wearing it?”
“Tan’. We’re not having this conversation again, yes?” Husky darkness swirls around in his voice.
The Realtor clears her throat nervously. “Now this one right here is terribly sweet and worth a look around. Shall we?”
The domed house below us sprawls along the edge of the water; on the port, a yacht is docked. “Smaller than the last one, but a great view of the sea,” the Realtor says. Then begrudgingly, with a sour nod in my direction, from one salesperson to another, “And you’ll find plenty of room inside for your art.”
* * *
“What was all that about, Tanyush? Donate, donate, donate. Why are you on my case, nu? Do you get some kind of special tax break or something?” Medovsky is smoking outside the pillars of the villa in a series of rapid huffs. The private beach is speckled with pebbles so white and unblemished, they might have been flown in to populate the shoreline.
“Of course not! It’s just one of my goals; you know, more Russian art where people can see it. It’s none of my business.”
“That’s right. It’s none of your business. Leave that shit to those bored socialites, the Zhukovas and Kudrinas. You concentrate on doing what you do best.”
The mistress’s oohs of appreciation waft from somewhere deep inside the house. I’ve seen enough mistresses to know the phase of the relationship. These women think if they’re ensconced in something concrete with walls, their positions will be secure.
“I’m sorry, Sasha. I won’t bring it up again.”
His shoulders seem to be relaxing, his posture less guarded. I feel bold enough to slip off my sandals and bury my toes in the sand but the texture is not as soft as I expected. Medovsky is inscrutable behind his tinted sunglasses.
After a minute, he speaks. “You have idea why marriage is so hard? It makes no logic, yes? She liked you once. You liked her. Both of you just want to enjoy life and finally have the means to do it. Why do we create this unnecessary drama? Remember when we were in Soviet Union? We had so little but we were happy.”
“I was seven when we left. I was a kid.” Normally this amuses me, my clients waxing philosophical. They like when I protest that I have a Russian soul just as they do, and I indulge them in their what-does-it-all-mean ruminations. But not now, not on this topic.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you. We had nothing. We shared apartment with ten other people including babushka who would always pick up phone and hang up on our callers. We could shit only between ten and ten-thirty. If we had an emergency and failed to clean the kitchen on appointed schedule, we would be forced to do it all month. Take a dirty bath two times a week. We couldn’t make joke about our country at a house party without getting a phone call from the police next day. But we were happy. And now, world is all upside down.”
A pink, delicate bird tiptoes into the water at the edge of the property. Even after everything I’ve seen, I can’t help but stare. “Is that a flamingo?”
Medovsky doesn’t turn to look. He flicks the cigarette to the ground, grinds pebbles on top of it with his toes. “Greater flamingo: pink legs, pink bill, black tip. Imported from Zoo Basel. It is listed in amenities.”
The bird submerges its jaw into the wet sand, and it retains the perfect S-shape of the neck.
Medovsky says, “Women are complicated. So many moods. You give and you give but they are not satisfied.”
I bristle, defensive. “I’m sure she gives too, probably even more. It’s a partnership, isn’t it?”
“Marriage? Partnership? Tanyush.” He laughs. “You are so American, it’s charming. I forgot that about you. Since when is marriage partnership? Even your business partner’s not partnership. For God’s sake. It is two lonely people who exist in same home sometimes. Hopefully they diddle each other once in a while. Maybe they laugh.”
“Isn’t that a little … depressing?”
“Don’t tell me your marriage is partnership. Woman like you who wears pants in family? I don’t believe it.”
I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly cold. “What makes you think I wear the pants?”
“Anyone can see. You think you are superior. Maybe you are, but let me give you word of advice. Don’t let your man know this.” He kicks off his shoes too and wades into the water.
Wears the pants. CEO. I’m used to people assuming I’m the alpha in my marriage. Yes, I am more competent, more efficient; taking care of others comes naturally to me. Faster to have me accomplish something than Carl with his lack of attention to details, his indecision. It was during our honeymoon that the terrible thought occurred to me. Weak.
We had just arrived in Turks and Caicos. We flung open our French doors to be confronted with the aquamarine perfection of the water, the long stretch of near-empty beach. Our first time in the Caribbean and we were giddy with the transparency of the water. A slick shoreline free of seaweed, free of human detritus. Free of our families and the lives that clung to us in New York. That first day, we ate conch salad tossed with orange slices in our tiki hut resort, treated ourselves to raspberry daiquiris. It was the kind of day that unspooled along with a single narrative in my head—this is perfect. How did I get this lucky? Everything Carl said was interesting to me, and I would catch him in the Look.
“We just got here and you’ve already got sand on your forehead,” he would say, brushing it off, his fingers lingering in my hair where I would capture them with my own.
Then we proceeded to the beach. But there were no chairs for us. A shrugging employee explained that the resort ran out of beach chairs and umbrellas by mid-morning. The competition for chairs, we discovered, was early and fierce. We watched jealously as the protectors of their chairs reclined in sweeping shade while we spread our towels on the sand, and shielded ourselves from sun rays with hats.
“Here, take my hat, it’s got a bigger brim,” Carl said. We kissed, but the furrow between his eyebrows deepened. A vine of anxiety was starting to coil around him.
“Tomorrow, we’ll be the ones on the chairs,” I promised.
The next day, we woke at first light and ran to the beach to claim our chairs. Too scared to leave them even to swim, we crisped ourselves past the point of sanity, until the sun and reading books brought on migraines and our hungry stomachs growled in protest.
“This is ridiculous, we’re trapped here,” Carl said from under a precious umbrella as we watched couples like us prowling the sand in search of vacancy.
As the week progressed, we grew bolder, daring to mark our places with towels while we ate breakfast. We consumed eggs and toast in three bites, gulped down coffee and dashed to the beach. It worked, our chairs were left alone. Our places held.
But one morning, a woman was reclined on Carl’s chair, reading a paperback against the slash of sun. Carl’s towel and mine lay on the sand next to her feet in a crumpled pile. The second chair held the detritus of a companion a pair of flip-flops, a Hawaiian shirt. The woman had the air of neither guilt nor complete ignorance of the situation, her hips flat against the stripes, head propped on her own rolled-up towel. The umbrella we had wedged into the sand was shielding her sun-mottled skin. On the cover of the paperback she was reading was a girl’s ponytail, pulled together by a turquoise sash.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I think you’re in our chair.”
“Did you buy it? Does it belong to you?” The woman’s voice rose in agitation but she didn’t look up from her book. She was prepared for the confrontation, her pose still and defensive. Probably a seasoned vacationer at this resort, accustomed to the morning tussle for resources.
“We saved our place just a half hour ago. My bag’s right there.”
The woman glanced down. “Shall I reach it for you or will you get it yourself?”
I was aware of Carl at my side, silent, his pale skin scorched by sun or embarrassment or both. He wasn’t used to confrontations of any kind. In his world, this simply didn’t happen. Yet a Russian part of me, the part ensconced in that patriarchal world, thought, Isn’t this a man’s job?
“Actually, we’d prefer the chairs, if you don’t mind,” I said when it was clear Carl would not be getting involved.
A field of tanning witnesses turned in our direction, raised on their elbows. This was the show they’d been looking forward to all week. All of them waiting to see how far I would push this, if I would upend the Lord of the Flies rules of this resort.
The woman yanked our tote bag off the sand with two pincer fingers and tossed it to me like a football. “Let me give you a little tip, guys. It’s yours when you sit in it.”
I wondered when Carl would step in. By her logic, we could have claimed the second chair. Even the woman was scanning him, daring him, poised for his response.
“Let’s go, Tan,” was what he finally said, guiding me away by the elbow. “It’s not worth it.”
Of course I knew this was the best solution, a clearheaded, practical end to the impasse. What were we going to do—get into a fistfight over chairs? But it took me by surprise, my disappointment in him. I thought I was more American than this. But the thought wormed into my head: weak. I had the rest of the vacation to forget this instinct, the rest of our lives.
Now Medovsky tosses his shoes to the side, wincing as he tiptoes over the sharp points of rocks. The flamingo has disappeared down the shoreline. “Tanyush. Be honest. What do you think about Marina?”
“Marina?”
So that’s her name. The kind of girl who bruises easily, a peach that can be thumbed with just a little force. The victim of a practical Russian mother who had pushed her toward men like Medovsky since puberty. In a few years, she’ll grow cold and wise. The bitterness of being a woman washes over me.
“She seems like a darling.”
On the balcony, the Realtor is sweeping at the view for Marina’s sake, her hands wafting the landscape as if painting a picture of the future in the air.
“I can’t go back, you know,” Medovksy says. The water is lapping at the cuffs of his rolled-up pants. “My only desire is to see Russia again, but I’ve been barred. Do you know what it is to be stranded from home?”
“I thought you were originally from Ukraine?”
“I can’t go back there either.”
Marina’s gold lamé pants provide a focal point for the sun. Her pants may as well be the sun itself. I don’t want to know the particulars of Medovsky’s exile and it’s safer that way. Enough to know that the relation between my client and the president seems to be one of extreme caution bordering on paranoia.
“You were a Jew but you left us,” he says. “That’s normal. But now at least you can go back if you want to. But I have to buy back in. And even that might not work. I’ve got some serious enemies, Tanyush. He can fend them off if he wants to, he can keep me safe. But he is not easy man to sway. He has ear of people who hate me, former partners, people I thought were friends. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Sash, please don’t feel like you need to tell me any of this.”
“The Order might be my last chance. You know he has a weakness for Russian history, for making himself a natural heir to Russian aristocracy. He aims to be a Romanov, to pretend the end of Soviet Union never happened.”
“Well, for your sake, I hope this will convince him to let you back. I really do.” If the Order’s really hers, I think. It better be. But I don’t say any of this.
Something in the Turks and Caicos memory is continuing to tug at the edges of my mind. Weak. I never wanted to be in that position again, of watching my husband fail. I would rather rescue him than experience that moment of vulnerability. Carl was so used to others propping him up, an entire network of name and money coming to his aid. As his wife, how could I not be one of them?
“Of course, there are a few other pieces I hope will interest you.”
“Women,” Medovsky says, turning back to the water as if he expected more sympathy from me. “Lena drinks my blood, always dissatisfied. In a woman I prefer simple. But can I divorce her with our two children and properties? Look, Tan’ka, you know men don’t leave their wives. It’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, and we are creatures of convenience.”
“They don’t leave their wives? That’s an interesting theory, Sash. I wish that were true.”
The sun sears high overhead, the blazing heat of it. I feel parched, my tongue the consistency of paper.
He turns back to me, his eyes secreted behind the density of those eyebrows. “It’s not too late for you. You are newly married and have no kids, no assets, it looks like. Here’s more advice for you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing … otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.’”
“What do you mean, Sash?”
“I didn’t say this, Tolstoy did.” Medovsky grins. “Don’t look so scared. This advice is useless. Tolstoy had no clue about marriage. He was a dick to his wife at the very end. And not that it worked for me.”
I laugh and the very act of it loosens the tension between us. For the first time since Carl left, I’m filled with a new expansiveness. We will find our way out. We have to. How could there not be a happy ending when a view like this exists in the world?
“We’re alike, you and I, don’t you think?” Medovksy says, playfully splashing some sea water in my direction.
“You think so?” I shield myself, happy to submerge my ankles in warm water, happy to be back in Medovsky’s good graces. “Hey, watch the suit.”
“Don’t forget there’s a little dinner on the yacht tonight. Maybe you’ll be more charming to my friends this time.”
“I’ll do better, I promise.”
A series of pattering taps across marble and Marina flies into his arms. I move away, discreetly. They kiss, a long, precise stamp of mouths. “I think this is it,” she says. “The one.”
* * *
The “little dinner” numbers forty people around a geometric white table on the yacht’s deck. On the table: morel custard, grilled lobster with ginger vegetable stew, Beluga caviar sushi rolls, Uzbek pilaf with apricots and chestnuts, vintage Château Lafite-Rothschild. I can’t help but notice the formality of the setting, the white tablecloth, two glasses centered directly above my plate, the prongs of the fork facing down. A fluttering staff in livery bend next to me with tray and tongs, and off to the side stand three sommeliers: one for wine, one for champagne, and the last for vodka.
The klezmer band with Itzhak Perlman is playing Erwin Schulhoff, Medovsky’s friend Oleg is informing me. As a Jew, do I know who Schulhoff was? I’m too careful about making some mistake in protocol to care that I am being singled out as a Jew. We are facing away from the unbroken horizon toward Medovsky’s riad built into the cliff, a row of black cars lining the twisted road like ants.
Before he was chairman of an energy investment group, Oleg was a theater director under the Soviet regime, fighting to stage a banned production of King Lear.
Do I know the play? he asks me. He begins to recite the Cordelia monologue, and ransacking my memory of AP English, when we had to memorize passages of Shakespeare, I help him finish it. (“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth. I love Your Majesty/According to my bond; no more nor less.”)
“Bravo,” he says, clapping.
“I have no idea where that came from.” The champagne sommelier refills my glass.
At times like these I feel seduced by the setting, by the men pouring me wine, by the air cosseting my skin. I always go through multiple emotions during a dinner like this: envy, deep intimidation, sadness. But tonight, the world shimmers with beauty as long as I manage to tune out the conversation (“Hey, Tanyush, did you see Larissa hired Damien Hirst to preserve a bust of her in formaldehyde?” “When you’re entertaining in Kensington, do you prefer Ruski’s Tavern or Chakana Club?” “She did pick up the gold wallpaper in Dubai, I was with her myself.”) and concentrate on the view. I settle into the dulcet tones of their laughter and the morels are delicious and I think there may be no place more beautiful than Monaco at twilight: the cobalt of the water, the reflected lights of other houses, the distant snapshots of fireflies.
“Why isn’t your husband joining us?” Oleg leans over. “A lovely woman like you traveling alone? It’s not right.”
I’m aware of being drunk, of having the weightless feeling of a Chagall figure, flying high above these people. A tray of sour cherries is being passed, and I heap a cluster of them on my plate. “This isn’t really his scene, if you know what I mean.”
A female voice inserts itself from across the table. “Tanyush, what’s wrong with you? You think you’re better than us?” Lena has always frightened me, with her shiny skin-toned lipstick, pursed lips, her spiky, highlighted haircut, her complicated couture combinations: Bulgari and Jason Wu, Chanel and The Row and Topshop. The sharpness of Lena’s tone reminds me that I spent the day being an accessory to the Marina affair, the cover, the decoy. The pleasant haze of wine is receding.
“Len’ka, let her alone. That’s not what she meant,” Medovsky says. Now for some reason the table is strangely silent, even the lapping water seems to have been muted.
But the woman’s voice carries over the music. “Not his ‘scene’? How dare you judge us?”
The world returns to jarring focus. “I’m sorry, Lena, if it came out sounding that way. I really didn’t mean anything by it.”
“What do you really know about our scene anyway? You left the country as a child.”
“I think you misunderstood.”
“You see, you don’t remember. You grew up in America so now you can look at us from your lofty perch,” Lena says. “Do you know what it’s like to be at the mercy of whatever is on the shelves that week? Do you know the feeling of fear that your parents won’t be able to feed you? Or the fantasies of wearing a yellow sundress the way they do in the West? Or what about finding out that your favorite pair of shoes, the unique tan ones you splurged your entire paycheck on, were actually shoes they put on dead bodies during funerals?”
“No, she has no idea, she was raised on Cheerios,” someone says in the hopeful way of switching the topic.
Memory wriggles to the surface, from the other place, from my childhood. The sickly green walls of the communal apartment, the long hallway where I tricycled back and forth, the dinner parties on one side of the room, my cot on the other. The ice-skating rink in the back of the building, the feeling of your scarf flying about your cheeks, an adult hand sure in your mitten. The first day of school, a day so glorified in books and on television that I stayed up all night staring at the uniform draped over my chair, half expecting it would come to life.
“I remember my mother coming home with a pile of Swedish bras. That was exciting. She left work early because she heard some lady was selling them out of her house. And she waited on line half a day, spent her whole paycheck. But when she tried them on, they didn’t fit. Not a single one of them. She had to give them all away to her friend,” I say. I have no idea why this is the story I tell.
Again, laughter. “I think I bought one of those bras,” says a woman at the other end of the table. Despite the heat, the woman’s shoulders are swathed in fur.
“It’s funny now, but do you know what it’s like when your mother sends you to wait on line for four days because the rumor is they are selling children’s coats from Denmark?” Lena says. She gestures to the wine sommelier. “You remember that horrible winter, Ol’ka? We were ordered to buy eight coats when we got to the front of the line. We each got one, and my mother sewed four together to make a single winter coat for herself. Food and clothes, clothes and food, how to get it, trade it. That’s all we thought about every day.”
Olya says, “I remember. I remember. Who can forget?”
“Come now, we’re depressing our guests.” Medovsky is looking down at his lap, at the starched napkin draped across his knee.
“And what about when there is no milk for your baby? What about when your baby is hoarse from hunger, your breasts are tapped of all its paltry reserves and there is not a single can of condensed milk in the store?” Lena continues. She takes a few gulps of her wine, striking the table with her index finger for emphasis. The women around her are no longer smiling.
Medovsky waves it all away. “Let’s talk of something more cheerful.”
“No, she really should know. And what about Sasha? Do you know how he became who he is today?”
“Lena, please forgive me. I didn’t mean to offend you.” I’m thoroughly sober now.
“Imagine what a hustler you have to be just to survive. Sasha took great risks with a cooperative business at a time when any whiff of capitalism was treason, the KGB breathing down his neck. He didn’t know a damn thing about aluminum or business, nobody did. But Sasha never even got a college degree. He was a construction worker, for God’s sake, twelve-hour days building dachas for stinking politburo.”
“Len, what’s wrong with you? This is old news. Are you trying to make me some kind of uneducated Soviet hero?” Medovsky says with a forced laugh. He wipes his mouth with a napkin, methodically, as if to shield from view his mouth. I can see the shame in him, the effort of concealing it.
“No, I would like everyone to know.”
“They know, they know.”
“Not her. She thinks we’re monsters.”
I rise from my seat and go over to Lena’s chair. The glitter from Lena’s eye shadow has speckled down, dusting nostrils and her chin with silver.
“Never. I swear to you, you misunderstand me,” I say, searching for the right words. “It’s because my Russian is stuck at the seven-year-old level. Can we embrace?”
Lena’s jaw loosens somewhat but her eyes remain hard.
“My wife, friends. How did I get so lucky?” Medovsky raises a glass. His face is flushed with wine. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, a dangerous storm has bypassed us. “To wives. We do not deserve them. I would like to quote a little man you may have heard of. His name was Vladimir Vysotsky. He was an okay singer and songwriter. We all know this personage, I presume?
“Just do it already,” people call out. “Turn down the music.” Someone whispers into Itzhak Perlman’s ear and he lowers his violin. They all strain against the sound of the tide sweeping the shore, and Lena turns to her husband, expectant, a kind of hopeful weariness in her features as if daring him to surprise her after all this time, to gladden her.
“Here we go.” He strums an air guitar, affects a growl. He launches into Vysotsky’s famous song “I Love You Here and Now.”
I do not want the past, the future I don’t know.
I love you here and now, with tears and with laughter.
“Beautiful, not half bad,” the men exclaim, palms pounding on tables. “Gor’ko!”
The staff rush to refill glasses while Medovsky and Lena’s kiss unites in the middle of the table.
“We say gor’ko—bitter—so the kiss turns it to sweet,” Oleg explains, unnecessarily, as if to a foreigner.
My throat feels full. I’m overcome with something I can’t pin down—nostalgia, longing, anticipation of loss? “Excuse me a moment.”
I lean over the stainless steel of the yacht’s railing. Here, away from the stare of the company, the breeze floats cool, the moon shaved to rind. Water laps against the swimming platform at the stern. Up on the sundeck, the glass-walled gym is illuminated, the outline of a man in a very different kind of tracksuit than my father’s is walking the treadmill. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt this alone in the world.
The band, without warning, bursts back into song, Itzhak Perlman’s fiddle reverberating up to the heavens. The sea is draped with night, patches of water illuminated by yachts like this one. “Tanya! Tanyusha!”—I’m being called. Time for dancing!