The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  * * *

  The children eat and the women eat, and then the children are served brownies and led back into the playroom, where the table is pushed out of the way and music is turned on and the children begin, miraculously, to dance. The women are served brownie bites. Lily is eating her fourth when a woman comes up to her, wearing a glow. “I’m Jace,” she says, reaching out a hand.

  Lily shakes. She has too many questions—Are you a cowgirl? Where did you get that glow?—so remains silent.

  “I think your older daughter goes to theater class with my son,” Jace continues. “Hudson? He says they’re friends?” Then, at Lily’s blank response, she adds: “He’s got red hair?”

  “Oh!” Lily cries. “Yes!” She flushes, realizing that Hudson must be the son of none other than Hal the fisherman, of the reddish beard and strong hands, which makes Jace the wife of Hal the fisherman, of course. Lily puts down her brownie bite and says, as casually as she can manage, “I met your husband, I think. At pickup one night? Remind me his name …?”

  “Hal! Yeah, he does pickup most of the time. He’s a fisherman, so he’s out and back really early.”

  Lily laughs. “For real? He’s a fisherman?”

  “Uh-huh.” Jace giggles. “He’s not, like, what you think of. He grew up in Larchmont. But then Wall Street wore off, you know? And he got hooked on tuna. Ha ha.” Jace babbles on, as if she doesn’t know her luck, and Lily, with time to take in how tiny this Jace is, her jean-clad thighs barely bigger than Lily’s arms, starts to picture Jace and Hal screwing. Jace is saying, “Maybe we can all pick them up together next time. If your husband can get off work early? I’m a lawyer, but I have some flexibility, like today … We could go out for pizza? There’s a good place near there …” and Lily nods, thinking, Never. Remember the laundry, she tells herself, to quiet the unvirtuous thoughts in her mind. Remember the laundry, and once the kids are asleep, make a real dinner for Adam. Jace—a lawyer! A pencil-thighed lawyer who still makes time for playdates—is still talking about the pizza place, but Lily buries her mind in her cupboards. Make him a real dinner and put on some nice lingerie and give all of what you’re feeling for Hal to him, she thinks. Screw him! Last Thursday night, when Ruth was over, she told Lily about a friend who’d just been left by her seventy-three-year-old husband because she wouldn’t have sex with him anymore. She said this as nonchalantly as her mother says anything that might shock the person listening, as if to show off her own lack of shock. That seems harsh, Lily had said, but Ruth shot back, Well? Isn’t it part of the deal? Lily didn’t have an answer. After she gave up the Grinnell job, she and Adam had made their own deal, she supposed. He would make the money, she would raise the family, at least until the kids were in school. It had felt honest, mature. Post-everything. They knew they were white, heteronormative, and privileged, and they would do their best to be good people while being that. Sex had not been discussed, then or at any point. Making sex part of the deal would suggest … what? A kind of servitude, at best. Prostitution, at worst. Still, she knows her mother is right. She also knows that although she and Adam have more sex than her friends do—once a week, usually? maybe?—that it is not enough, and not only in a Cosmo sense but in a very personal, Lily sense. She needs more catharsis in her life.

  “So, Thursday?” Jace is saying. “We’ll meet you outside class?” and all Lily can do is nod. Why is she thinking about her mother again? Why is she thinking of Hal? She is supposed to be where she is, be good and gracious. But in the next room, the music has been turned off and the children are starting to disassemble, turning into rags and beasts. The windows have gone dark. Kyla calls out to her, “So you’ll come back next week! Same time?” and Lily takes out her phone to check her calendar but Kyla has turned away, busy gathering people’s coats, and Lily drops her phone back into her bag and soon she’s stumbling with the other mothers and children down the stairs to the street, the mood jovial and warm as everyone calls good-bye and the family units scatter, each toward its own shelter. Lily, trying to outpace the sadness that laps at her heels, points out to the girls how beautiful the sycamores look on Third Street, lit by the streetlights. But they’re already focused on what comes next, whether they will have their dresses soon, and whether they can have screens at home or just a book, and if it’s a book it must be Esther, and Lily, after making a halfhearted plug for The Paper Bag Princess or Ferdinand, her favorite—how utterly the bull embraced his anti-ambition!—says, “Fine, okay, alright,” and walks the rest of the way listening to the girls talk and thinking of Adam, wondering what she will cook for him, and of her underwear drawers, wondering what she has to wear.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  The Original Pageant

  She is in the bath when the girls are called. A procession, she’s told, a parade before the king, and instantly the number of days she has painstakingly stored is yanked from her mind like a thread. One hundred twenty- … what? It doesn’t matter now, she tells herself, as she is wrapped and shoved toward the oiling room. Tonight, she will fail to become queen, and tomorrow she will be released. Her grip on Baraz is advanced now, what he has seen of her near replete. A heat is rising in him, like a fever. Esther is confident he’ll do what she asks if she offers him more—which is to say, everything.

  Is she willing? She is. She is both certain of and disgusted by her willingness. But Nadav won’t have to know. The trick for that is so simple it can barely be called a trick.

  Esther has seen more, too. Like a plant growing new roots, the night station gains hallways. Esther walks in a direction she has walked before only to find a new tunnel to a new place. Her recent discoveries include one distant room outfitted with eye hooks and ropes where certain girls go to be stretched and whipped, and another outfitted with cages in which girls—often the same certain girls—are locked and prodded. Both rooms are equipped with viewing windows, holes cut into the wall so that a passerby in the hall can stop and watch. Esther stops and watches. It is something to see. It is—be honest—fascinating. Sometimes a eunuch enters a cage with a girl. Other times he stays outside and watches as she puts on a show. Esther—still only kissed—is surprised by the apparent dignity of the proceedings. The girls come to these rooms of their own volition as far as she can tell: unshackled, chins high. Perhaps they are rewarded, or imagine that they will be, in the future, or maybe they’re simply bored. They step into the cages as gracefully as birds. They flit and shake and sometimes shimmy like fish, and sometimes they turn without warning into tigers, clawing at the bars, growling. Esther feels heat in her legs but not revulsion, not the shame she would have expected. She remembers her mother picking up speed as they passed the women who stood around behind the market, dragging Esther by the hand with sudden force. Esther remembers thinking that those women were a different species from people like her and her mother, made of a different substance, more like jackals or vultures, but now she thinks the line between them is more porous than she imagined, if it exists at all. In the linen room with Baraz, Esther feels an astonishing ease, an almost out-of-body calm, as she squeezes her breasts and rubs between her legs. She is outside herself, looking on. She waits for the eunuch’s moan as if waiting for water to boil, and in this way, like a kettle, he becomes a kind of object for her, domesticated and possessed. He obeys and doesn’t touch, though recently he brought her gifts: a square of silk, a fan of peacock feathers, a bone necklace. The necklace nearly destroyed her, a garland of tiny vertebrae sanded to the smoothest white, so clearly the work of Nadav’s mother that Esther had to grip her thighs to stop her hands from reaching for it.

  In the end, she touched none of Baraz’s gifts.

  But she did tell him where she’s from, and began squeezing him for information. He has told her that the raids on the camp continue, now with an official title: the king’s cleanse. He says more men, and more violent men, have been recruited. More fire pits have been destroyed, even as other fires are lit, b
urning tents and tools. The clay vessels her people make to sell are smashed.

  Are they leaving yet? Esther always asks, when Baraz is done cataloging the damage. But Baraz’s answer is always no. It seems impossible that the camp would have believed Marduk’s promise that Esther will somehow save them. And yet—why won’t they go? Even her aunt and Itz and Nadav, none of whom would want to abandon her—can’t they see by now that it’s hopeless?

  A part of her, of course, doesn’t want them to see. She wants for them to stay. Wait for me! she wants to tell them, even as she wants them, for their own sakes, to flee.

  Jostling for space in the dressing room now, she slips on her aunt’s prized muslin. Other girls laugh, prompting eunuchs—none of them Baraz—to rush over and strip the cloth off her. Esther waits, naked, for whatever robe or dress they’ll bring, trying to ignore the battles around her over powders and combs and who will walk first and who last. The smell of balms and oils and cinnabar mixes with the frenzy and heat to produce an overpowering stench. She breathes through her mouth and looks for Lara. And Baraz—where is he? Other eunuchs return to wrap her in a white silk robe; they tie the robe with a gold sash and push a brush into Esther’s hand. Her hair is grown out past her shoulders now, a thick, ink-colored curtain that months ago overcame her chop job. She ties it back with a leather string and abandons the brush on a nearby table. Every surface is covered in brushes and paints and pots and somewhere, probably, the pomegranate paste she carried with her that first day. There is enough kohl and cinnabar in the room to paint the girls inside and out, every day, for the rest of their lives. But thankfully Mona and the eunuchs are overwhelmed now, too busy to notice Esther and force her, so she will go before the king as she hoped to go, in her bare face.

  * * *

  A new room. She’ll remember it as gilded, and cold, even when she enters it frequently in the years to come and learns that it is neither. The girls walk single file. Esther still hasn’t spotted Lara and worries. Has she been punished in some way? Did her eunuch betray her furtive tea drinking? Or maybe Mona, at last facing the day of judgment, has locked her away, not wanting to offend the king with Lara’s hairiness, which he would discover if not now then within hours. Esther turns to look, but she is walking somewhere in the middle of the line—the positions deemed least advantageous by the girls’ collective logic—and can only see the girl immediately behind her, a Syrian so thickly painted her skin gives off a grayish hue. Esther feels a stab in her thigh, Mona snapping her with her famous forked nails. She faces forward. The hall appears empty but for a stage, the stage empty but for two chairs. The chairs are strange, elaborately adorned with gold tassels and brown leather and tapered legs carved into cat’s feet, yet oddly small, as if built for children. When the girls are lined up facing the stage, Mona moves the leader to the rear and the rear girl to the middle, and then she taps and directs the rest of the girls so that soon they’re all lined up again in a new order. Esther steals glances left and right, knowing Lara would appreciate the joke, but she sees only girl after girl like the one who walked behind her. They are so shellacked in paints they would be visible from a great distance, maybe even in the dark, but soon they’re close enough to the stage that they could spit on it, close enough that when a man mounts it, they can see two parallel creases between his eyebrows, a hint of silver in his beard. He is notably short, with a waddlish style of walking, and for a moment, as he sashays toward them, Esther wonders who he is. A servant, maybe, or an entertainer? But then Mother Mona gives a sharp clap and goes down on her knees, and Esther drops with the rest of the line, understanding. She studies the floor’s mosaic. When she hears Mona clap again and looks up, she sees why the chairs are so short: the king, now seated, appears to be a man of significant stature. This trick of perspective is so effective as to be frightening, for Esther saw him standing not two minutes before, saw that he was shorter than the tallest girls, yet already she doubts. She inspects him more carefully: his troubled brow, his pointed slippers, his thickly layered robes, black and purple and blue and finally red, to puff his chest and shoulders. His fingers, curled like sleeping lizards atop the armrests: how very small. On either side of him, a wall of men has formed.

  Mother Mona walks the line, prodding the girls from behind. Each is given her moment: she steps forward, turns before the king in a wide, almost laughably slow circle, until, her moment squeezed dry, she steps back. The king wears a mild, steady grimace, impossible to read. His walls of men move only their eyes, raking the girls from top to bottom. As her turn nears, Esther lets her shoulders sag. She rehearses in her mind ungainly steps, dull eyes. At the prodding of Mother Mona’s stick she hunches out, her gaze resolutely stuck on the king’s tassel-toed slippers. She begins to turn her circle. She moves faster than the others, trying with all her might to erase herself, leave behind no impression. Her circle is almost complete when, facing the line, she sees Lara—or rather, she sees the girl Lara was, now buried beneath a costume. Pounds of hair have been added to her head, heavy earrings have been pushed through her earlobes, oil has been slathered across her face so thickly that the pores from which her moustache grows, opened wide in their freshly shaven state, stipple the smooth facade from beneath. For an instant Lara looks at Esther, her black, kohl-rimmed eyes seemingly depthless, then Esther hears sk!—Mother Mona’s nearly silent snarl, like a dog whistle for girls—and steps back into line. Her temperature rises as if she’s been set on fire, then rises further as she watches Lara turn her turn, a languorous, graceful sweep, as if she might be any of the girls. She might be, Esther understands. Her friend is gone, a stranger. Esther scolds herself for the salt rising in her throat, but her grief is as sharp as when she was ten, being told that her mother was gone. She longs to be knocked out.

  Esther is closing her eyes against her tears when she becomes aware of a scratching at her arm and Mother Mona standing beside her. Mother Mona, tall as a man, with her painted jowls and her forked fingernails—the source of the scratching—and her silver eyes that travel Esther now, everywhere but her eyes. “You,” she murmurs, in a voice Esther hasn’t heard before. “He’s calling for you.”

  WASHINGTON, DC

  VEE

  The Queen’s Offense

  She is still swaggering when she enters the room. She stops when she sees Alex’s face, his inflamed eyes and pinched nose. On either side of him, men stand, as if part of an audience. They’ve removed their jackets. Some have removed their ties. They are clearly, as a group, very drunk.

  “Vee.” Alex smiles. He walks toward her and, for an instant, she relaxes. But his smile is for the men—it dissolves the instant his mouth reaches her ear. “I can explain later,” he murmurs, “but I need you to do something. I need you not to ask questions.”

  “But—”

  “Sh. No questions.”

  The men are talking, fidgeting, glancing at Vee and Alex, glancing away.

  She waits. This is some kind of game, she thinks. Alex has made some kind of bet.

  “Take off your clothes,” he whispers.

  Vee giggles; she can’t help it. The alcohol is drifting downward now, leaving her head sober, her stomach sick. “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not joking. I need you to take off your clothes, all of them, and walk in a circle around the room. That’s it. That’s all I’m asking for.”

  “Alex.”

  “Vee.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Just the opposite. I know you can do that.”

  “Not in public.”

  “This is our home.

  “Alexander.”

  “Vivian.”

  His hand is on her thigh, lifting her dress. She stops it by taking it in her own and squeezing. She is afraid to swat him away.

  “What’s going on?”

  “No questions. I’ll explain later.”

  “Explain now.”

  “Please.”

  Please. His icy voice merging w
ith his sex voice. Vee’s head seems to depart her body, float upward into the haze of cigarette smoke. She is all animal. She smells Alex’s breath, alcohol gone sour with panic. She sees that the velvet drapes have been hastily drawn, their tassels left askew on the carpet. She sees two choices: play dead, or run.

  Alex looses himself from her grasp with one swift pull and he moves around to her back. He breathes in her ear: “Don’t think I didn’t notice what you did with your collar. Come on, baby. Come on, my little slut.”