Page 16 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Yeah. Like any good portrait painter would—like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud. But painters have it easier. They can work for hours, days, weeks, to get under their subject’s skin. We have a split second.”

“Did you take these in Moscow?”

She nodded. “My dad goes back to Russia every once in a while, and sometimes I go with him. My mom lives there.”

He took a sip of Scotch, felt the pleasant burn. “Aren’t there tribes in Africa or wherever that think that if you take their picture, you’re stealing their soul, their spirit?”

The dog settled at Tatyana’s feet. “I think so. I mean, I’ve read some critics, like Susan Sontag, who say that photography is an aggressive act. You know, youtakepictures. You’re exploiting your subjects. It’s voyeuristic. But I feel like I’m looking at them with compassion. With empathy. It’s like a caress. A way of touching someone. The best portraits come out of love. I mean, Walker Evans used to sneak pictures on the subway with his camera hidden in his coat. But I always ask permission. I talk to them first. I get to know them. I love thesebabushki, these grannies. I treasure them.”

He felt a swell of affection for her. They stepped toward each other at the same time. He closed his eyes and inhaled the lavender scent of her hair, then leaned in and kissed her, his arms sliding low around her narrow waist. She pressed against him, and he felt her heartbeat through her breasts. He was aware of the hard, quick thudding of his own heart. As he kissed her, he slid one hand down around the curve of her buttocks. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, gently first, then with a powerful urgency. She clearly didn’t abide by some antiquated three-date rule.

Then she pulled away, murmuring, “Let’s go to the bedroom.”

Light filtered in across the airshaft and into the darkened bedroom. Paul took her in his arms and whispered, “Tatyana,” just to hear the sound of her name. He loved that name. His arms around her waist, he slid his hands under her sweatshirt, felt her warm skin.

She helped him pull the sweatshirt over her head and unfastened her bra, stepping away briefly before pressing himself against her as the bra fell to the floor. She was perfect, silky and strong, and he actually shivered at how wondrous she felt to him now. He slipped his hand across the front of her lace panties, as her hips shifted to make room, heard her moan with pleasure as his fingers slipped inside her.

Outside the bedroom door, the dog whined.

*

They lay, afterward, on her bed. She didn’t pull a sheet up to cover herself. She traced a pattern in his chest hair with her index finger.

“What did you mean when you said you lost everything?” she said.

“My dad . . . Well, after Vietnam, he graduated from MIT, taught at Caltech—he was an early computer genius. The world could have been his oyster, you know? But he despised the culture of the modern university and inevitably picked fights with his department chairmen. Lost job after job that way. Eventually, he wound up at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, where he managed to get fired again—this was when I was little—and this time, something happened with him. Something snapped in his brain. He moved out of the house and into a hovel in the woods, the North Cascades. Leaving my mom and me without any income.”

“So how’d you guys survive?”

“Mom took a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and we scraped by. Even working as hard as she did, she never stopped making art. Every spare minute she could find, she’d paint. She used to put things in her paintings, like burlap and string and flowers. Glitter.”

“So, like, collage? Mixed media?”

“Some of that, yeah. I don’t really know what ‘school’ her work might have been classified as—abstract and expressive, I guess? All I know is, she was really gifted.” He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Her long, slow death had overwritten his earlier memories of her. When he thought of her, he saw her in her terrible cancer-ridden last days, her scraggly white hair sticking up from her nearly bald head, her bruised eyes. “You told me you left Russia when you were six?”

He could see surprise, or maybe a little disappointment, that he was changing the subject so pointedly—but also an innate awareness not to crowd him if talking about his mother was too painful. She nodded gently. “Yes. We’d been in Moscow.”

“Do you remember what it was like?”

Now it was Paul who noticed a shift in her. Like a veil had come down over her face.

“Not really,” she said. “Little things, I guess. We had a dog, I remember that. Big white fluffy dog. A Samoyed named Zeus.”

“Always wanted a dog, but my dad was opposed.” Paul didn’t particularly want to think about his father, either.

“My papa used to tell me about how bad Moscow was before I was born. He’d go to banquets at work, and everyone was stealing bottles of wine and hunks of cheese. Famous people, powerful people—it made no difference. There wasn’t enough food. Like, it was a big deal when bananas suddenly showed up in the market one year. I remember hearing about that.”

He was looking at her face, wondering why, when he first met her, he’d thought she wasn’t “conventionally beautiful.” Deep blue eyes. Arched brows. Lying there immodestly, her breasts on display, she was gorgeous. A painting.

“And then we moved to America. And then I met you at a fund-raiser for liver cancer, and you stole three glasses of champagne from me. And here we are.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead. “You said you don’t have brothers and sisters?”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Was that lonely?”

“Sometimes.”

“You said your father lives in the woods somewhere. Like, in a tent?”

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