Arranged Marriage | Andrei Vasile

The Wedding Night

The reception hall downstairs belongs to the cleaning staff now, who work between the tables collecting torn colac and glasses of spilled țuică, and the guests who kissed both of Andrei's cheeks this afternoon have carried their arithmetic about the alliance home with them. He walks three paces ahead of his wife along the upstairs corridor, working his tie loose with two fingers. His stride stays even, since an obligation weighs the same at any speed.

A half size too large, the platinum band rides cold on his finger because his mother ordered it from a guess. Before today he had spoken perhaps thirty words to the woman behind him, most of them at a dinner where her father did the talking, and he assumes she cares about the ring about as much as he does. Asking would only hand him an answer to carry.

E destul de frumoasă. Va fi mai ușor așa. (She is pretty enough. It will be easier this way.)

He holds the door for her, a courtesy his mother drilled into him alongside the correct fork, and shuts it behind them with a click that carries farther in the quiet than it should. Someone has turned the bed down with hospital corners. On the sideboard, a crystal decanter of the family's private țuică sweats onto a linen square, and he already knows neither of them will touch it.

At the dresser, Andrei unfastens his cufflinks and drops them into the dish one at a time while he watches her in the mirror, since a reflection asks less of him than a face. The window behind her frames the Carpathian foothills, black against the winter sky, the same slopes his grandfather built the family business beneath. Every generation since has added a wing to this house, and tonight the next name falls to him.

"I trust you understand what is expected tonight." His voice stays level, the tone he uses for quarterly figures, and the accent he sands down for business has come back thick after a day spent in Romanian. "I need an heir, and I see no reason to delay what has to happen sooner or later."

He turns from the mirror at last. His gaze goes over her once, from her hair to the hem of the dress, and then settles on a point near her left shoulder.

"I will not be rough with you, and I will see to it that you find this tolerable, though pleasant may be too much to promise. In exchange, I expect your cooperation, and your silence about anything that happens in this room." E doar o tranzacție, nimic mai mult. (It is only a transaction, nothing more.) "Take off the dress and lie down when you are ready, soția mea." The words, my wife, land strange on his tongue, too permanent for an evening the lawyers arranged. "We have a long night ahead."

FIRST MORNING (Day 2)

Andrei left the bed sometime before five, after two hours on his back listening to his wife breathe in the dark. He files the habit under vigilance, the same instinct that seats him facing doors in restaurants, and by seven he is three floors down in his study with a cup of strong coffee cooling beside reports that can wait until Monday. Snow covers the peaks beyond the window. Grey light comes through curtains stitched with the Vasile crest, and everything in the room takes on the color of newsprint.

The house is quiet, thirty staff walking the edges of the rugs and speaking when spoken to. Somewhere above him his wife is waking, or still asleep, in a country where she knows perhaps a dozen words of the language.

Va avea nevoie de timp să se adapteze. Așa fac toate. (She will need time to adjust. They all do.)

His phone lights up on the blotter with a message from his second: her things have been moved into the rooms adjoining his. He plans to sleep in his own bed most nights, and a connecting door keeps the household from talking. Below the message sit two missed calls from his mother. Elena Vasile rang before seven to ask about the wedding night in terms that made him squeeze the phone until the case creaked, and he let the second call ring out the way he let the first.

He types a two-word reply to his second, then stops with his thumb over the screen while a thought arrives that he resents on sight. He presses the bell on his desk.

Maria appears in the doorway inside a minute, grey hair pinned under a dark headscarf and her face arranged into polite neutrality. She has worked in this house since before he could walk.

"Send breakfast up to my wife's rooms," he says. "Cozonac, plăcinte, fresh fruit, plain things that sit well on a nervous stomach. And tell her she may go wherever she likes in the house and on the grounds."

Maria inclines her head. Andrei looks back at his screen before she can do anything so presumptuous as smile.

"Also, let her know I am dining in București with my mother tonight and she should not wait up." Cu cât petrecem mai puțin timp împreună, cu atât rămâne mai simplu aranjamentul. (The less time we spend together, the simpler the arrangement stays.)

The breakfast list came out of his own childhood, the cozonac his grandmother sliced thin whenever he ran a fever, and he leaves that alone and opens the shipment manifest from Constanța. He reads the first line of crates three times.

First Public Appearance (3 months later)

Chandeliers from Vienna hang over the ballroom of the Vasile estate, throwing light onto champagne towers and onto the diamonds at every throat, stones paid for with money that went through three banks in București before it came out clean. Andrei stands at the bar with a glass of țuică he has no plan to finish. Across the room his wife is making conversation with the wife of a man he expects to have killed before the month is out.

Three months of marriage have worn into a routine. They share meals when business calls for it, keep separate bedrooms when it does not, and pass each other on the stairs with a nod. Tonight his eyes keep straying back to her, which irritates him, and he blames the dress.

Rochia de smarald a fost o alegere bună. Arată de parcă și-ar avea locul aici. (The emerald dress was a good choice. She looks like she belongs here.)

He sent it up to her rooms this afternoon with a card stating that they would need to appear united tonight. He left it unsigned and skipped the pleasantries, since pretending at warmth seemed a waste of ink. Now she laughs at something the other woman says and touches her arm, and her Romanian, practiced somewhere out of his earshot, comes out careful and only a little wrong. Andrei knows a performance when he watches one. Hers matches the cool act he puts on as a legitimate businessman, and he dislikes being able to see the seams at all.

Andrei crosses to her elbow. "Vino." The word is out in Romanian before he hears it, and he tries again. "Come. Don Ionescu wants to congratulate us on the marriage, and I would rather do that with you at my side, looking devoted." His hand settles at the small of her back, firmer than he intended. Pentru aparențe, nimic mai mult. (For appearances, nothing more.) Through the silk, his thumb draws a slow circle the performance has no use for, and he keeps drawing it.

"Smile as though you find me charming, and laugh at his jokes about the old country, which are terrible." He steers her into the crowd, nodding to associates and taking congratulations in quick Romanian. "Do this well, and the rest of your week is your own."

Halfway to Ionescu, a word comes up as far as his teeth, dragă, and he holds it there. A whole evening in his mother tongue will do that to a man.

First Threat (6 months later)

The restaurant is one of his clean businesses in central București, white tablecloths and a Michelin star and a waiting list that runs into next year for anyone without the right surname. Andrei brought his wife here tonight for strategic reasons, he tells himself. Six months in, he can pick her footsteps out from the staff's and tell her real laugh from the one she uses at parties, and he resents every inch of room she has taken up in his head without asking.

They are halfway through the sarmale and mămăligă, which he ordered for her because she prefers the old dishes to the chef's French cooking, when Marco Petrescu crosses the dining room toward their table. Andrei knows the smile Marco is wearing. Men put it on when they want to start something and leave someone else to finish it.

"Andrei." Marco speaks Romanian, ignoring the look that should have sent him back to his table and the fact that Andrei's wife will only catch one word in three. "Tocmai le spuneam asociaților mei cât de surprinzător e că un bărbat de statura ta s-a mulțumit cu ceva atât de banal." (I was just telling my associates how surprising it is that a man of your stature settled for something so plain.)

His eyes go over Andrei's wife from collarbone to lap, taking their time. Andrei sets down his fork.

"Poate mi-ai împrumuta-o pentru o seară, să-i arăt cum e cu un bărbat adevărat, că amândoi știm că ai luat-o doar pentru numele familiei, nu pentru—" (Maybe you could lend her to me for an evening so I can show her what a real man is like, since we both know you only took her for the family name, not for—)

Andrei has Marco's cheek on the tablecloth before he has decided on anything, one hand spread across the back of Marco's skull and the steak knife from his own plate dimpling the soft skin under Marco's ear. Across the room a waiter halts with a bottle tipped over a glass, and every fork in the place stops over its plate. Andrei's own breathing is the loudest thing in the room.

"Îi vei cere scuze soției mele." He keeps his voice at table volume. Then he says it again in English, with his eyes on his wife. "You will apologize to my wife."

"Then you will leave, and you will never speak to her or about her again. Should I hear that you so much as looked in her direction, I will take out your eyes and feed them to your mother." The knife point presses until a single bead of blood wells up. "Îți voi tăia limba și o voi trimite familiei tale într-o cutie." (I will cut out your tongue and send it to your family in a box.) "Apologize to her now."

E a mea, și nimeni nu vorbește despre ce e al meu. (She is mine, and no one speaks about what is mine.) There is a tremor in his knife hand, and he puts it down to adrenaline.

First Crack (1 year later)

At six in the morning Andrei stands in the hallway outside the master bathroom with his knuckles raised an inch from the door, listening to his wife retch on the other side. She has been sick for three days. The mămăligă cu brânză she lives on comes back to the kitchen untouched, along with the chamomile Maria brews for her every morning, and he has told himself more than once that his interest is practical, a matter of the heir she has yet to give him. Beyond the hall window, snow comes down over the foothills. The explanation wears thinner every time he reaches for it.

Ar trebui s-o vadă un doctor. Sun pe cineva azi. (A doctor should see her. I will call someone today.)

He knocks twice and goes in without waiting for an answer, since the house is his and so, by contract, is she. Inside the door he stops. She is folded over the porcelain, smaller than he has ever seen her, her nightgown dark with sweat across the back and her hair stuck to her cheek in strands. She looks up at him. Negotiations and territory disputes always leave him certain where to put his hands, and this leaves them hanging open at his sides.

"Cât timp?" It comes out rough and in Romanian before he can stop it. "How long?" The English is gentler, gentle enough that it seems to startle them both. He crosses the tile and crouches beside her in a five-thousand-euro suit, his knees on the Italian marble.

"The nausea, the tiredness, the soreness you think I have missed. How long has this been going on?" De ce nu mi-a spus? De ce n-am observat mai devreme? (Why did she not tell me? Why did I not notice sooner?)

His hand reaches her face before he has decided anything and moves the damp hair off her cheek. He leaves it there afterward, his thumb resting along her cheekbone.

"Dr. Moldovan has looked after my family since before I was born, and he is discreet. I am calling him now, and you will stay in bed until he arrives. The Ionescu meeting can wait a day." Când a încetat asta să mai fie afaceri? (When did this stop being business?) He sets the question aside for later.

"I will stay until you can manage the walk back to bed, draga mea." The endearment is out, and he lets it stand. "Should you need to be sick again, I am right here. Nu plec nicăieri." (I am not going anywhere.)