The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  * * *

  The mood shifts. Vee’s ribs ache for food. Her thoughts paddle around: If gin is to ecstasy as food is to joy as a baby would be to … Where have the golden boys gone? Some of the women are outright dancing now, but Vee can’t join in; she is too hungry, and maybe drunk, and starting to feel claustrophobic. She feels a cramp in her abdomen, close to her groin. Fear ripples through her. She knows what the woman said about Roe is true, knows two women who since January have ended pregnancies not in hotel rooms or in New York but in doctors’ offices nearby. One a congressman’s wife, one a woman from the women’s group. But legality is not the only problem for Vee. The problem is that Vee would not permit herself to do it. She has a husband, money, health, no children—she has no excuse. A glass breaks behind the bar and a golden boy comes running, but he holds no tray of food. Vee spins aimlessly. She stares at the boy’s ass as he prances away, feeling like she might pass out, and coaxes herself to remain upright with a promise: later tonight, when she’s sober, she can write to Rosemary and turn this evening into a tale.

  “Hello.”

  Vee smiles, then turns. Standing in front of her is the wife of the suitcase-company president, the man who might be Alex’s undoing. Vee smiles harder, horrified to find that she has forgotten the woman’s name. She and Alex rehearsed. Mark Fiorelli and his wife, so-and-so. She is tiny in a blue dress, her white-blond hair a shining helmet. Vee holds the little hand for a long beat, still empty on the name front, baring her teeth with what she hopes looks like warmth and not hunger. “Thank you so much for coming!” she cries.

  “We wouldn’t have missed it,” the woman shouts back. “Congrats on the ERA!”

  “Yes!” Vee cries, raising her glass. She clinks, and drinks, and tries to focus on the woman—who is attuned, evidently, to Alex’s platform—though in Vee’s peripheral vision she searches desperately for a golden boy with a tray of appetizers. “Yes! My husband is very committed to equality … He’s ready to go to the mat …” A tray of food floats by and Vee lunges. Quince tartlets. She grabs one, then another. “For women,” she continues, trying to talk, smile, and eat all at once. “You know. Ready to go to the mat for women.”

  “Mmmmm,” says Suitcase Wife, and Vee feels a flush of anger. Why didn’t this tiny woman reintroduce herself? That’s what people do at these parties, say their names over and over. You assume people forget, assume they’re drunk. You play the game. This woman is playing some other game. Vee opens her mouth to ask about this woman’s family—she is 82 percent sure the suitcase man has three children, though it might be two—then thinks of a rule her mother used to have: Policy before person. She said if you asked people about their kids and dogs right off, they would call your bluff and think you insincere—you had to go straight for the gullet, reveal your agenda, to get them to trust that you weren’t merely politicking. It was a tactic of reverse psychology of which she was proud.

  Vee beckons the boy with the tartlets—though another rule of her mother’s was never to eat at one’s own party—and says to Suitcase Wife, “I understand your husband is having second thoughts?”

  The woman’s face seems to shrink as she looks at Vee. “I don’t think he had first thoughts.” She speaks more quietly now, so that Vee has to lean in close to hear. “There’s a very strong candidate, an up-and-comer from Westerly—”

  “Sounds promising,” Vee says sharply as she grabs another tartlet. Dried up a little, she’s feeling more capable of thought. “What makes you think he can win?”

  “He’ll win if my husband wants him to win.”

  “I see.” Vee taps on a nearby golden boy and gestures for a napkin, using the moment of nonengagement to consider what is happening. Why is this woman threatening her like this? And if her husband wants to endorse Alex’s opponent, what is Vee supposed to do about it? Vee wipes her mouth slowly, stalling, taking in the room. White Pantsuit is leaning against a wall, talking with the wife of Congressman Haskell. The wife of the ambassador to the United Kingdom is shaking her cigarette at the wife of a UN guy. A golden boy is circling with another tray of drinks. Suitcase Wife is quiet for long enough that Vee thinks the conversation might be over. She begins thinking of how she’ll describe this exchange in her letter to Rosemary. She started out with that kind of sweetness you can’t tell is syrup till you’re stuck in it: “We wouldn’t have missed it! Goo!”

  Then the woman says, without looking at Vee: “A long time ago, I knew your husband.”

  “Okay.” Vee is not surprised. Alex is from Rhode Island; this woman is from Rhode Island. It’s a very small state. “Did you go to school together?”

  “No.”

  Vee waits. The woman looks elsewhere, blankly. They had some kind of fling, Vee thinks. Okay. It’s not news to her that Alex had girlfriends before he married her. It would not be particularly shocking to learn that he had a lover now. It would hurt—but she wouldn’t be able to pretend not to have known it came with this territory. Vee’s father had affairs. Her grandfather must have, too.

  “Well,” Vee says. “It was lovely talking with you—”

  “The ERA isn’t much of a commitment, you know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The ERA. It’s not much of a commitment.” The woman enunciates as if trying to cut air with her teeth, and Vee sees that what she took for skepticism is hostility.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vee says. “It’s a constitutional amendment.”

  “Sure. A piece of paper.”

  Vee is unprepared. All the arguments she’s listened to garble. She watches White Pantsuit sliding down the wall and Haskell’s wife moving closer and then they’re kissing. Vee is almost certain, in the aftermath, that it was a kiss. It was brief. It couldn’t be called passionate. But it wasn’t merely salutary either. Their lips touched. Their bodies were very close. They remain very close. Vee’s blood thumps. Suitcase Wife waits with her tiny glare. You’re the hostess, Vee reminds herself. You can walk away. “Excuse me—”

  The woman grabs her arm. “Put it this way: your husband—back when we met? Back when we knew each other?” Her grip tightens. “He was not a gentleman.”

  * * *

  How could Vee know that downstairs, the senator is in a corner with the president of the suitcase manufacturing company, sweating? He has given the man cigars, and kept his glass full of thirty-year Glenlivet, and snapped numerous times for one of the circulating golden-haired girls to bring more scallops. He’s been chatting him up for almost an hour, but still the man, Mark Fiorelli, is cold, barely speaking. Alex is superior to him in every way: trim where Fiorelli’s gone soft under his suit; half-WASP, half-Irish where Fiorelli is half-Irish, half-Italian; a member of the United States Senate where Fiorelli’s greatest claim to fame is as one-time president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. Smallest state in the nation, and he’s going bald in that inarguably pitiful way where the top goes first, before the bangs even, so that he’s looking a little like a monk. And yet it’s Alex who’s throwing adulations at the guy as if suitcases were life-saving drugs, as if the man’s two hundred employees produced their own GDP. He hates how desperate he sounds. He never lets himself sound desperate. Even when Vee told him she’s on the Pill, he didn’t let her see his surprise. He was hurt, sure, but where did that get you? Get caught up in feelings and you forget to act, forget the point is what you’re going to do about it.

  He tries a new tactic. “Have you thought about expanding? Know some of those old mill buildings up in Pawtucket? I can’t promise free, but I could definitely talk with—”

  “Let’s be straight, why don’t we.” Fiorelli has come alive. His jowls light up red, his eyes narrow. He places a palm on Alex’s chest. Alex flicks it off. Fiorelli puts it back. “You screwed my wife,” he says.

  Alex’s lungs feel like they’re departing his body. Why did he imagine the guy’s anger was about something else? But who told her husband that sort of t
hing? “I don’t—”

  “And if you ask her, she’ll tell you it wasn’t what she wanted.”

  One of the girls stops with a tray, imploring, and Alex has the urge to hit her. They are not gorgeous, not up close. This one is pancaked. She had acne as a kid. Alex shakes his head and she is gone. He doesn’t remember Fiorelli’s wife not wanting it. Blond, petite, good nails. Diane. Wasn’t it what she wanted? She wasn’t half as pretty as Vee, wasn’t even nice. But Vee wasn’t around yet. They met at a hotel, he thinks. Doesn’t that mean she wanted it?

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Hey.” Fiorelli’s in his face now, a finger tapping Alex’s nose. “Enough with the bullshit. I never got involved in politics before. My old man didn’t, his old man didn’t. Not our place. Now I’m involved. People wonder what I’m after, what’s my angle. My angle is: I don’t like you.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, more women have started to dance. One sits on the knee of the saxophonist. Vee lounges on the sofa. More food has been brought up, at her request, and her stomach is happy now, full of cocktail shrimp and cheese puffs. Out one corner of her eye she watches Suitcase Wife’s shoes, but Vee refuses to look up. She has no idea what the woman is so hung up about. Not a gentleman. What did Alex do, stick his fingers up her ass? Choke her a little as she sucked him off? Vee doubts it’s anything he hasn’t done to her. If she isn’t always willing, she usually gets into it. More worrisome is what the whole mess might mean for Alex.

  Vee smokes a cigarette, drinks another gin and tonic, and talks about nothing with Congressman Flint’s wife. Only when Alex’s chief of staff kneels on the floor next to her and leans in close does she realize a man has entered the room.

  “Mrs. Kent?” His voice is low.

  Vee finds herself pinching his cheek. “Yes, Hump?” At thirty, he is her senior, but so cute, she thinks suddenly. A towhead. Freckles. So cute! Hump. Short for Humphrey Sumner III.

  “Mrs. Kent, the senator has requested your presence.”

  Vee laughs. “So formal!”

  “That’s what he told me to say.”

  “He wants all of us, I presuuuume?” Her accent is vaguely British. She giggles. “All the madames?”

  “Only you, Mrs. Kent.”

  She hands him her cigarette. “Well!” she says, and heaves herself up off the couch. She rocks for a moment, lightheaded, then sees Suitcase Wife staring at her and pulls herself straight. “It does make one curious,” she hears herself say. And then, “Well,” and again, “Well,” as her grandmother used to say. Well well well, her grandmother said, as she moved around the house making the beds, or preparing supper, or—as she got older—looking for something she was ashamed of having lost. Well, like a verbal banister. Vee’s mother achieved the same effect by humming: hummm as she bent for carrots from the refrigerator, hummm as she rose, as if to accompany herself through her tasks.

  Vee passes her drink to Mrs. Flint. “Well.” She meets Suitcase Wife’s eye, then, emboldened, crosses the room with a swagger. “Here I go!” she calls. “Wish me luck, ladies! If I’m not returned within an hour, promise you’ll come to my rescue!”

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  A Different Kind of Party

  Atop a kitchen island gleams the party’s centerpiece: a massive turquoise sewing machine from the 1960s. The hostess, Kyla, repeats the vintage as each guest arrives, explaining that the old machines are superior, if you treat them right. This one was her grandmother’s, she adds, and all the women ooh and ahh at this, Lily included, though the machine fills her with fear. She imagined this would be a needles-and-thimbles kind of sewing party. She thought she might cut out some pieces of cloth, maybe learn to sew the edges to prevent fraying, then wrap them toga-style around the girls and call it a day. But Kyla has laid out patterns, which as far as Lily can tell—who knew sewing patterns were in code?—appear to be for dresses that entail sleeves, and necklines, and in one case a pocket. Lily wants to whisper: Since when did Esther have a pocket on her dress? But she doesn’t know any of the other women well enough to trust they’ll take to her snarkiness, and she’s realizing, as they begin to pepper her with questions, that they know each other very well. It’s palpable, the togetherness of women who’ve stood around like this on countless other occasions, in other kitchens. They are a group. Lily, too, has a group, but she and her friends have never invited a stranger into their midst, their wine isn’t as good, the atmosphere they create isn’t as cheerful, and they don’t have dedicated playrooms like Kyla. On the other hand, Lily’s group includes women of various shapes, colors, and hair textures. And they are skilled at using all these facts, from the mediocre sauvignon blancs that ostensibly allow them to spend money on more important things to the squished apartments to the au naturel hair, to make them feel superior—more authentic, somehow? more real?—to women like these. These women, a couple of whom appear no older than thirty-three, which would make them thirteen years younger than Lily, ask Lily with near jubilance how long she’s been in the neighborhood, and how old her kids are, and whether she works, and what her husband does, and Lily, overwhelmed and self-conscious, answering as best she can, wonders at how easy it would be, if you mixed up these women and Lily’s women and stood them in a line, to tell which ones belong to which group. It’s a depressing thought, because it suggests that they are all basically in permanent uniform and that their superficial differences—these women’s blown-dry hair and diamond rings, etc., as opposed to Lily and her friends with their chunky bracelets and scuffed boot-clogs like something out of Heidi—actually portend deeper ones, like what they do with their pubic hair, and deeper ones still, like what they think and feel. One of the women, upon hearing that Lily used to teach at the city colleges, says, “That’s so cute!” and Lily, feeling mean and small, excuses herself to go check on the children, half hoping one of them will be sick so that she’ll have to take them home, but she finds them cheerfully rolling and cutting homemade Play-Doh with the other children at a low, large table probably made in Finland. Ro looks up first, then June, both girls with almost absurdly happy expressions on their faces, and Lily feels the kind of deep, unadulterated love for them that she experiences when they are asleep, or when she cups the fat arch of June’s foot in her palm, or when Ro lets her hold her as they read. This feeling, in this moment, feels as if it could be felt eternally, if only she lived in this apartment and had this table and this particular bespoke Play-Doh. Lily smiles and waves until, in unison, like happy Finnish cows, her daughters turn back to their work.

  In the kitchen, Kyla asks Lily to give everyone a brief primer on Purim—Poor-eem, she pronounces it, like Adam used to—which causes Lily, who feels at once defensive of and embarrassed by her tribe, and unreasonably irritated by being, apparently, its sole representative at this gathering, to issue forth a brief and conflated account of the holiday and the story that sounds something like “lots of drunkenness and misogyny but also female worship, which you could argue is a form of misogyny, and a so-so king and good queen and evil side guy, celebrated with a play and a big carnival and a pageant and triangle-shaped cookies, and also there’s a thwarted genocide of the Jews …” By the end, Lily is so turned around she adds a final, ambiguous punch line—“It’s kind of a burlesque?”—and then Kyla, undaunted, begins introducing the women to the machine, identifying its various parts and what they do. Lily is hungry. In her nervousness she has drunk too much wine. But the food—cheese and crackers and nuts and something that looks like pickled broccoli—has been laid out at the opposite end of the kitchen, so that to get to it you must walk away from the group and make a thing of wanting it.