The Imperial Wife by Irina Reyn

he judges people who make lapses in moral judgment.
    â€œBut what if it’s your best friend who needs the money? Wouldn’t you want him to know about a good opportunity?” I would tease after we watched a news segment about a disgraced insider trader. (In any case, my Russian family never could wrap their minds around this as an actual crime; of course you’d pass along to your loved ones any useful financial information!)
    â€œI don’t care. I would never talk to him again. He broke the law.”
    â€œYou do realize you’re dating a Russian, don’t you? We’re not known for our morality.”
    â€œYou, my dear, are the grandest of the Russian spirit,” he says between kisses, and I absorb them even if I wonder if he’s simply naïve, unworldly. I couldn’t tell him about the bag of cherries I never paid for at Whole Foods: they never charged me and I said nothing. Or a few bags of cherries after that. Those were forgotten on the cart’s lower shelf until after checkout.
    â€œYou could use a piece of art here and there. We can probably get you some photographs for under three hundred dollars,” I suggest, fingers flat against his white, rented walls.
    He brings me one of his mongrel wineglasses, the rare expensive-looking one with his initials bezeled into its side, clears a pile of papers from a wobbly metal chair. We are both mostly naked as we so often are. Covering our bodies seems an act of cruelty to the other person.
    â€œI’d love it if you’d be my decorator,” he says, artfully avoiding the subject of money. He’s wielding that new-couple voice, one octave too low, suggestive. Stretched on the couch in need of fresh upholstery, an odalisque among student papers feathering his feet. He pats a small, uncluttered space beside him. “And I’d been meaning to get art, but had no idea where to begin. The only paintings my parents buy are these depressing Dutch portraits.”
    â€œI’ll scout around for you. I just saw a lovely one of early spring buds in the ground.”
    â€œWould you? But none of your fakes, please. Originals only.”
    â€œYou deserve nothing less than authenticity, my dear.”
    The kisses are intense, spontaneous, indifferent to audience. His arms, so long, as though they could wind around me three times. So what if I prefer settling in the hazy zone of grays while his world shines in impassioned black-and-whites?
    â€œTanya. Tanyusha. Tanyechka,” he breathes late into the night, tracing the contours of my face with those delicate fingers. I wonder if he has read way too much Pushkin in translation, if he has internalized the intensity of Dostoevsky a bit too literally. How can I impose my messy, amoral Russianness on someone so entrenched, so unsullied, someone who chose me against all odds of logic? And there is the charm of that Upper East Side street his apartment overlooked, squares of forgotten New York where even the night’s silence emits a genteel quality. And if I crane my neck from the bedroom window, the East River makes itself available to me, flashing mercury in moonlight.
    *   *   *
    The thing, the book, makes its first verbal appearance at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. We’re seated at a corner nook, a location deemed “intimate” by a hostess who led us to the table with an air of spontaneous generosity, as if to say, you will thank me for this when you’re married. The place itself seems erected for nights whirling with snow flurries and brutal wind, when inside is brick and fireplace, candle and dark wood, low Tudor ceilings. We slide inside, bent over a single menu (“They’re printing more across the street as we speak”). A breathlessness of novelty, of being in a faraway borough, sitting so close to a creature still more myth than man. Inhaling long tendrils of pappardelle, the second bottle of red newly