The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  But it turns out he doesn’t offer her a ride because when Vee opens the door a dog is there, its tongue out, its tail wagging, waiting to be let in. “Good girl,” the man says, kneeling down to hug her, and Vee runs until she is out of sight.

  * * *

  The house is empty when she returns, Rosemary out picking up the older kids from school, and Vee goes straight into the shower. When she hears the children’s voices she doesn’t bother getting dressed, just wraps her robe around her and heads downstairs. She is ready to talk now. Something has been knocked loose and she needs to talk, to tell Rosemary what just happened and everything else that has happened and how terrified she is not to know what will happen next.

  “Oh.”

  It’s not Rosemary who has brought the children home. Philip stands at the kitchen counter, slicing an apple. Without looking at her, he says, “Doctor’s appointment,” and Vee, clutching her robe, turns to go back upstairs.

  “Where were you?” Philip asks in his odd, blunt way, sounding neither angry nor kind.

  “Walking.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Let me change.”

  “It won’t take long. Kids!”

  The kids gather quickly, as they never do for Rosemary, and Philip, handing out the apple slices, says, “Go outside.”

  The children look at their father, then at Vee, and go. Only the girl hesitates for a few seconds, peeking back at Vee through a frizzy shock of bangs, then putting an apple slice in her mouth and following her brothers out the sliding door. At four o’clock, it is already dusk outside. Philip offers Vee an apple slice. She declines. She wants him to release her before Rosemary gets home, not because Rosemary mistrusts her—Vee has to believe that Rosemary does not mistrust her—but because a woman in a robe with a husband is not something any woman, let alone a pregnant woman, needs to see.

  Philip takes his time washing the paring knife and the cutting board, then drying both. Vee has never seen Alex wash anything, so though she’s impatient for Philip to speak, she is also fascinated. Philip swings the dish towel over his shoulder and it’s as if he has performed a kind of dance—that’s how impressed Vee is, despite herself. He puts each item away, opens the refrigerator, and, with his back to her, says, “You should go home.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s time. I got a call today, at the office.”

  “From?” She wonders if the reporters have at last tracked her down, wonders why they continue to bother—are the Enquirer and its lookalikes really so short on copy?

  “Your husband,” he says.

  Vee waits.

  “He wants you back.”

  Vee’s elbows sink to the counter. She is shocked by the relief that floods her.

  “He says to tell you his chief of staff … Harold? Humbert? … doesn’t want him calling. He doesn’t want you to go back yet, he thinks it will make him appear weak. These people.” He shakes his head. “You people.”

  Vee could be insulted but focuses on her relief. Why not? this relieved part of her asks. Why not go back? Why not shrug it all off, as she might have done in the first place, go along with his request and get back to her life? This would be in keeping with a string of things she has argued to herself before: If she had stripped that night, it would not have killed her. She would still be in her marriage. She would not be so confused. Maybe they assumed she would do it because it was what she should have done. Etc.

  She thinks of the house in the woods, the man above her, their urgent coupling. A thrill pulses in her wrists, and she imagines going back to Alex with her knowledge of this thrill, the secret of this afternoon. She imagines it would help, getting to have that and keep it. She used to be above him, at least in the ways a woman could be above a man. She was the one with the money, the one with the background. Then he flipped it all inside out. He doesn’t need her background anymore; he is in the house they bought with her money; even if she goes back, she will have been a nutty, drug-addicted probable lesbian. But to have made him a cuckold … it would be something.

  “You should go back.”

  Philip can’t know that Vee has been thinking the same thing, or that his saying it out loud, commanding her, has the opposite of his desired effect. She feels herself harden, feels her back rise into a line. Why should I listen to you? She does not say this, of course. He can still kick her out; she must not make him mad. Instead she picks the one remaining slice of apple off the counter, puts it in her mouth, and chews. She can’t go back, she knows. She couldn’t go along and she can’t go back. Yet she wants to be able to. This is the problem. It’s as if Vee herself—who Vee is, at her core, what her father and grandfather would have called her character, if she had been male—has not caught up with the life she’s meant to live. She has always had questions, granted, niggles of ambivalence that kept her from being as good as Rosemary or her mother: her little secret with the Pill, her women’s-group habit. But she never wanted to cause trouble. She wanted to go along—certainly it’s true that she wanted to want to go along. That night at the women’s party, remember? She decided she was ready to give up the women’s group, decided they were ugly hippies and that she was done with them and ready to claim her place, her power, as one of the wives. But then, well, she had not gone along. She had not stripped. She had caused a great deal of trouble. And now, it seems, she is a woman who causes trouble.

  She swallows what’s left of the apple’s pulp, looking not at Philip but out the sliding glass door to the yard, where the boys are running and throwing leaves in the near dark. Where is the girl?

  “It’s getting cold out there,” she says.

  Philip sets a pot on the stove.

  “I need a little more time,” she says.

  “We’ve given you time.”

  “I have to figure some things out.”

  “It’s not good for Rosemary.” Philip is doing nothing now but looking at her. “Having you here. She’s got the pregnancy. The kids.” Me, he adds with his eyes.

  “Did you tell her about the call?”

  “Not yet.”

  Vee watches him. Her robe has loosened slightly, but she doesn’t clutch at it now. She simply stands there, looking at him as he looks at her, watching as his eyes drop, knowing what she’s doing even as she didn’t intend it. Half a minute passes. Then the door slides open and the kitchen fills with cold and shouts, the kids throwing off their hats, Philip ordering them to pick them up, and Vee slips out. Her robe is tightly wrapped again by the time she reaches the stairs. But Rosemary, who is sitting on the third step to take off her shoes, notices the fact of it—she scans Vee from top to bottom before returning her gaze to her shoes. Vee could explain. But to explain would sound like a defense, which would suggest she’s done something that needs defending. So she kisses the top of Rosemary’s head, says, “Welcome home,” and goes around her and up the stairs, to change.

  * * *

  Later that evening, after the children are in bed and Philip is in his office at the back of the house, Vee and Rosemary sit on the living room couch. Vee drinks bourbon. Rosemary drinks wine. She says the doctor told her no hard alcohol. And no more cigarettes.

  “Why?”

  Rosemary shrugs. Her feet are pulled up under her, swallowed by a flannel nightgown that makes her appear at once like a little girl and a much older woman. She looks very tired.

  “Was it just a routine visit?”

  “I think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve been spotting a little.”

  “Like, getting your period?”

  “No. Just a little spotting. It comes and goes,” Rosemary says again, with maybe a hint of impatience, and for a moment Vee wonders if what Philip said to her in the kitchen, about how Vee isn’t good for Rosemary, is something Rosemary said, to Philip. She wonders if Rosemary is thinking about the robe. But then Rosemary takes a long sip of wine and says, pointing at Vee’s pack of Rale
ighs on the coffee table, “You can smoke. I don’t mind. I like the smell,” and Vee relaxes.

  She drags the pack toward herself with a socked foot. “Are you worried?” she asks.

  “There’s not much use in worrying. Right? He said bed rest might help. But I’m not doing that.”

  “Are you going to tell Philip?”

  “What.”

  “What the doctor said.”

  “No.”

  Vee lights a cigarette.

  “But I can’t be intimate,” Rosemary says. “And I have to tell him that. According to the doctor.”

  “Which part is according to the doctor?”

  “Both. I mean, he hasn’t come near me in a month. So it may not be necessary to tell him.”

  Vee nods. She waits. Maybe this is when Rosemary begins to talk. Certainly it’s not turning out to be the night for Vee to tell Rosemary about the lumberjack man, as she’d planned to. But Rosemary can tell Vee about her marriage. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, Vee can tell.

  But Rosemary is quiet, sipping her wine. Vee pours herself more bourbon. She is drinking quickly tonight; she can’t help it sometimes, this urge toward oblivion. She is frightened by Rosemary’s spotting. She feels guilty about the robe and the kitchen encounter with Philip, though nothing happened but a bared sternum, a hint of bone. She drinks for a little while, then ventures, “So … it sounds like the doctor’s a little worried. Even if you’re not?”

  Rosemary groans. “Have you ever been able to tell what a doctor thinks?” She finishes off her wine, sets the glass on the coffee table, then leans her head back into the couch so that she’s staring at the fireplace across from them. Vee looks at it, too: a classic colonial fireplace lined with black bricks, big enough to cook in and to heat the whole house. The house is chilly. Philip keeps the thermostat at 67.

  “Should I build a fire?” Vee asks.

  Rosemary says, “Nah. It’s too late.”

  “Good. I don’t know if I could even do it anymore.”

  They laugh. But Rosemary still seems sad. She seems unlike Rosemary.

  “Do you hang stockings?” Vee asks, waving her cigarette at the mantelpiece. “Do you put up a tree?”

  Rosemary shakes her head.

  Vee grabs a throw off an armchair and spreads it across her friend, and Rosemary sinks further into the cushions. “Thank you,” she says. Then: “I want to lie down.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll just finish this cigarette and head up myself.”

  “No, I mean on this couch. Right here. I’m too tired to sit up.”

  Vee stands up so Rosemary can stretch out, then, when Rosemary pats the space next to her, she lies down, too, with her head on the armrest and her glass on her chest. They look at the ceiling together.

  “Will he not allow it?” Vee asks after a while. “The tree?”

  “He hasn’t said that.”

  “I thought it was the mother. If the mother’s Jewish, then the kids are Jewish, and if she’s not, then …?”

  “I’m converting.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Vee turns to look at Rosemary, but she’s too close to see her clearly. What she notices are Rosemary’s hands cupping her belly.

  “Did he ask you to?” she asks.

  “No. He’s not religious. He doesn’t care about any of it.”

  “So why?”

  “We’re a family. So we should be a family.”

  Vee, on her third bourbon, is finding the idea preposterous. “What about the cross?” she asks. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “The cross is even more reason. A unified front. I’m not going to hide.”

  “But you wouldn’t be hiding. You’d just be being. Yourself.”

  Rosemary doesn’t say anything for a minute. Vee slides her glass onto the coffee table, then maneuvers until she’s on an elbow, looking at Rosemary’s profile, which appears entirely unperturbed. She starts to wonder if Rosemary is asleep with her eyes open. If everything she’s been saying is not quite what she means to say.

  Then Rosemary says, “It’s okay if you don’t get it.”

  Vee stands and lights another cigarette. She walks to the mantel, then to the window, where she bumps into a little side table. A strange sculpture—is it made of pewter?—sits atop it, a thing she hasn’t really looked at before, dismissed for its abstractness. She doesn’t look at it now, only labels it in her mind—Philip’s—and walks back to face Rosemary.

  “Is it what you want?”

  Rosemary sighs, drawing the throw up to her chin. “I find it fascinating, actually. It’s very different. Nothing like Episcopal. Obviously. His mother—I really like her—she invited me to this CR thing in Cambridge. I think I’m going to go.”

  “CR?”

  “Consciousness raising.”

  “Oh. I’ve been to one of those. Or something like it. In DC. I wrote you about it.”

  “But this is Jewish, too. I guess they talk about the stories, and how … She says it’s really empowering.”

  “Rosemary. How can you go to this group and also convert for your husband? It sounds like a new height of hypocrisy. Is it even allowed?”

  Rosemary turns to look at Vee. “Solidarity is always allowed.”

  “You can’t be in solidarity with everyone at once,” Vee says, even as she knows exactly what Rosemary means. Rosemary means you stand with your man; she means in the end it’s all anyone cares about. How, Vee thinks, can she not be talking about Vee herself? Irritation flames in her gut, followed by longing. She longs to tell Rosemary everything, right now, not just the outline she offered her first night here—the part about Alex demanding she strip—but what happened in the town house kitchen before the party, and what he may have done to Suitcase Wife, and what Vee thought and felt.

  But she is afraid, too. Isn’t Rosemary saying that it makes no difference what Vee thought or felt? What’s to stop Rosemary, when she hears that Alex called, from telling her to go back, as Philip did?

  Rosemary sits up. She looks like herself again, friendly, open faced, optimistic, an optimistic pregnant woman heading to bed. “Do you want to come?” she asks. “To the meeting? Everyone is welcome.”

  “Maybe,” Vee says. She is thinking of the women’s-group women, and of the wives, and of how Rosemary has always belonged, with Vee, to the latter. Wasn’t it all bullshit, though, if you could move around at will? Preppy to hippie, Episcopal to Jewish, polished to buffed and back again? She is also thinking that she does maybe want to go to the meeting, if only to do something, and spend a few hours in the city, and that she will have to convince Philip to let her go, and of how demeaning that will be, to ask another woman’s husband for permission to go out. She is thinking that she cannot stay here forever. She is thinking of the argument she’ll make to Philip: if Alex wants her back, he is going to want to protect her; Hump is not going to send the tabloids after her; no one is going to come beating down Philip’s door. The more Vee thinks of the argument she’ll make, the more she wants to go to the meeting. She’ll tell him she won’t talk, only listen; she’ll act like a reporter, interested but not implicated.

  She likes this idea. Interested but not implicated. As Rosemary says good night and heads upstairs, Vee thinks maybe, after what happened to her, she is not meant for solidarity. Maybe she was never meant for it—hence her ambivalence about babies, and her judgments of everyone: the wives, the women’s-group women, Alex. Poor Alex. Maybe Vee has never been on the right path. She climbs the stairs, her legs woozy with bourbon, her mind suddenly, startlingly clear: a vision of the wooded road to the man’s house; a recognition that she will walk it again tomorrow.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  Her New Scheme

  The idea comes to her as she’s walking in one of the far courtyards. It’s almost dusk, the time in the camp when the fires are lit, and Esther sniffs the air, thinking she smells the tang of the first smoke, a hint of sumac and rice. She im
agines the shout that might have a chance of reaching her aunt or Nadav, then feels its possibility trickling back down her throat. Her voice can’t possibly be strong enough. Even if it were, by the time she got one word to them, the guards would haul her inside. She would not be let out again.

  They stand in the corner now, tracking her. She still isn’t sure who they work for exactly, whether they answer to the king himself or to the wicked minister who acts as the king’s puppeteer. She used to think knowing this would help her somehow, but now she understands that it doesn’t matter.