The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

He starts to unzip her dress.

  Vee’s eyes lose focus. The bank of men in front of her wobbles. Her dress begins to drop from her shoulders—the fabric peels away, still molded to her shape. The shape of shoulders, the shape of breasts. She is aware of air on her skin, between her breasts. She imagines turning the moment over on him now, walking out of her dress freely, and with grace.

  “Yeah,” Alex breathes. “Yeah.” His voice all sex now, his confidence back; not only will he make her do it, he’ll turn her on. She sees her back hitting the kitchen floor, feels his knee between her legs, hears Suitcase Wife’s voice, not a gentleman. Who is this man? He is everything she’s known him to be and he is a stranger. Something snaps in Vee—the deer realizing its camouflage can only go so far, understanding that its life is at stake. She feels her spirit stretching toward the ceiling, reaching for the women upstairs.

  In the moment that divides this life from the next, Vee spins out of Alex’s reach. Go fuck yourself, she says, so quietly she only hears it in her heart. Louder, to the room, she says, “Go fuck yourself.” She sees the pull to her zipper dangling in Alex’s hand. It’s over. She will not wear this dress again.

  BROOKLYN

  LILY

  Another Marriage

  Later, when the girls are finally asleep and a puttanesca is simmering on the stove, Adam gets home. He sniffs the air and kisses her. They sit down to eat. She has set the table with adult placemats, the better wineglasses that require handwashing, matching cloth napkins. She is happy with the meal, not only because she was able to pull it off in fifteen minutes and it tastes good but because puttanesca means “the whore’s pasta,” a fact she knows but suspects Adam doesn’t. She lights candles, and Adam laughs.

  “What, are you trying to seduce me?”

  “Yes,” Lily says, laughing back, though their laughter, his and hers, like old matching robes, deflates her. The fisherman wouldn’t laugh, she thinks. Hal wouldn’t doubt. He wouldn’t even eat. He would push back his chair, carry her to their bedroom, and screw her whether she thought she wanted it or not. Ugh. Apparently it’s a bodice-ripper she wants, a man who will lay claim to her, do to her as she will one day warn her daughters not to let men do to them.

  They eat. Lily works to regain her optimism. Adam’s beard is already thick from that morning’s shave, and she thinks about how she will enjoy that, and how, tomorrow, she’ll carry his roughness around with her, a raw cheek, a scrape down her stomach, and enjoy the charge she gets, not only from the lust-memory but from the secret—it’s the secret that will arouse her, the secret of the beard burn her husband gave her. Her husband’s secret danger. He might look gentle and sensitive, he might be a nonprofit guy who can’t say the word seduction without laughing, but he leaves a beard burn that lasts for days.

  Between bites, Adam asks, “Did you forget I don’t like olives?”

  Lily looks at him, thinking this is a joke. But what would the joke be? “Since when do you not like olives?”

  “These kinds of olives. These wrinkly ones.”

  “They’re cured.”

  “They’re wrinkly.”

  “Okay.”

  “I thought you knew. I’ve said so.”

  “You mean you’ve looked at me and said, I don’t like these wrinkly olives? I don’t think I’ve cooked with them in over a year.”

  “At restaurants. Wherever. I never order cured olives.”

  “And I should have noticed that?”

  Adam’s expression, as he looks at her, is not that of an asshole. He is not patronizing or even bemused. He is hurt, she realizes. And somehow this, the profound need in his eyes for her attention, for her to attend him, like a mother, enrages her far more than if he were simply acting like a jerk. And her anger is big and quickly blossoming; it extends beyond him to his mother, and to all the mothers of sons.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I did leave out the anchovies, Adam. It’s not as if I don’t think of you. But I’ll add olives to my list. I’ll develop a new system. I’ll make a note in my phone whenever you express a preference for one thing or another—or when I observe a pattern of distaste, as with the olives. Maybe I can set up a reminder, so that if my phone ever senses me going for a jar of olives, Siri will stop me with her sultry robot voice: Wait. Adam does not like olives. Put those olives back! I like olives, Adam, and I thought you did, too. I’m sorry. I will never cook with them again.”

  Adam shakes his head. “It’s okay. I can pick them out.” And he does. Then he wipes his fingers on the cloth napkin, as Lily, thinking, That’s more laundry, thinking, Quell your anger, woman; calm this shit down, asks about his day, and Adam tells her about a contentious meeting he ran about a new aquaculture initiative he’s trying to spearhead in a Rwandan refugee camp. Camps in Zambia have built fish ponds, he says; he sees no reason refugees in Rwanda shouldn’t benefit, too. They’re from Congo and, more recently, Burundi. They eat fish. And the camp has been consistently short on food, underfunded since the media stopped paying attention. Fish ponds, Adam explains, not only produce food; they produce fertilizer for fields, which then produce more food, and he thinks the novelty of it could draw attention from new funders. But his colleagues are pushing back. Aquaculture in camps isn’t common enough yet, they worry. There are too many technical challenges; health concerns; questions of ownership, training, oversight, etc. He’s been hearing it from his own organization and from partner groups, too, from NGOs and usually supportive UN staff alike. They still won’t accept that the camp situation has become protracted, he says, that the refugees there will not be repatriated in the next twenty-four months or even in the next decade. Adam tells Lily that he’s managed to push a demonstration pond through, for training and breeding, but they’ve run into logistical problems—boys from outside the camp stealing fish out of the pools before they can reach full size. A fight broke out between the local boys and refugee boys, and one kid had to be driven to Kigali to have his eye socket reset.

  Lily’s brain hurts when she hears this, it’s so terrible. And yet it’s so far away, too, and she realizes, as she’s listening, that she forgot the laundry again, when she and the girls got home. She wails inside but waits for Adam to finish talking, because she doesn’t need to tell him about her failure and because how can she be thinking of laundry as he talks about kids who might die of hunger, or malaria? Why doesn’t it make her heart clang and break? Why doesn’t she ever do more than donate money? Vira did more than donate money. My heart isn’t hard, Lily thinks. It’s only stretched, and a little faded—often there is only enough space for her own kids’ shit and string beans.

  By the time Adam is done talking it’s 10:04 and the laundry room has been locked—the super will have tossed their wet clothes into a wire basket. He’ll have recognized the girls’ Wonder Woman briefs, purchased by Lily’s mother in an attempt to bring “some representation of female strength, and even then …” into their underwear collection, which until her intervention consisted of princesses from Target because, face it, princesses from Target were convenient. He will have ticked off another tick on his mental checklist of all Lily has gotten wrong. Lily fears that one day, if Adam and she can finally afford to buy in their building, it will be the super who stops them. She keeps meaning to Google whether this is possible—superintendent influence co-op board—but then, as with the laundry, she forgets.

  She says none of this to Adam. She restrains herself from nagging him about his not asking about her day; she does not insist on telling him the storyless story of the sewing party; she turns off that self and brings up another. This is what men hate about women, she thinks, that we are actors, that between our urges and our actions there are these layers, this angling and scrim. Yet aren’t they, almost always, the beneficiaries? She guides him to the bedroom and strips to the red lace underwear-and-bra set she managed to put on while cooking dinner and not doing laundry. She zips on high-heeled boots, knowing, as she does so, that her order is off�
��she should have gone to the bedroom first and stripped and zipped before letting him in. But it works out. Adam smiles, not in a nervous way but in a sexy way, and says, “Oh,” and takes off his own clothes. The sex is good. Lily comes without a great deal of effort. No one told her in her twenties that although she was having sex in fair quantity, her orgasms were like sad nubs compared to what she experiences now. No one told her that the homestretch could be unvaried, even mechanical, and totally transporting. She is transported. She is wrung. Adam has had something to do with it. Lily didn’t think once of the fisherman. Does she really need anything more than this?

  But Lily’s awareness, mid-postcoital embrace, that she didn’t think of the fisherman reminds her of the fisherman, specifically of the fisherman’s hands, which might after all do something differently than Adam’s hands, something astonishing, something that would transport her further, or more completely, or maybe even transform her, into …? And then into her mind drifts the moment Adam first got home and sniffed the air, and she realizes that in that instant he smelled the olives and she is angry again, though at what she isn’t sure. Is she secretly angry at herself, for not taking note of her husband’s aversion, and angrier still that a little part of her cares? Vira wouldn’t have cared, she thinks. Vira was a killjoy feminist, the kind of ragey, righteous woman Lily’s mother became for a while around the time that Lily’s father had his affairs and left, presumably in part because his wife had become a killjoy feminist. (A Well-Kept House …) Vira was worse, maybe, coming a generation later and marrying in the awkward ’00s, when feminism was uncool. She had an idea about “natural states,” according to Adam. Lily’s red lace getup would make Vira smirk. But Lily likes it. Adam liked it. He likes it when she takes control and dominates him. This is empirically true. Yet it’s also true that he wants her to know, as if by osmosis, that he doesn’t like olives.

  Is it possible that Lily should try harder? She did not take the tenure-track job, after all. She took this. Is it possible that the line she seems to have drawn—lingerie, yes; utter attentiveness to Adam’s palate, no—should go? Vira, and perhaps Lily’s mother, would say no. Vira would say Adam wants Lily to fulfill some dream he has of being a man coming home to a wife and family—a dream a man like Adam is not allowed to talk about in 2016—but that he also wants Lily to resist his wanting this. He wants her to go further than sneering, as she did about the olives; he wants her to take a stand, say No, go screw yourself, and while you’re at it, uncure this! That’s what Vira would do. Based on what went unsaid in Adam’s stories—back when he used to talk about Vira—resistance was his first wife’s main mode of turning him on. And she did turn him on, Lily thinks, in a way Lily never has. There was an energy to that marriage, an electric fence between them, charged by their fights.

  Between Adam and Lily, there is something else.

  And no, not just the children.

  Another kind of fence shared, this one around them. A determination to be people who stay.

  Also, and related: comfort.

  Maybe Adam wants everything. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this. He wants Lily to behave like she’s married to a deputy director and he wants her to skewer him for his shriveled idealism. He wants her to tidy herself with a razor and he wants a full bush. He wants her to be Lily and Vira at once.

  Asleep now, on his back, lit by the city’s perpetual glow, he appears peaceful. With each breath, his nostrils whistle; the shock of hair at his brow quivers. An old scar on his cheek glistens. It’s from his childhood, obtained during a sandbox altercation with a shovel, and usually it’s invisible, or at least blends in with other wear, but from where Lily lies at this moment it appears as if still wet. She nudges him, so that he rolls away from her, and wraps her arm around him. She noses his smooth back, digs her feet under his warm calves. She is glad that they are hairy and that his back is not, and glad that he is always willing in the morning to stay a few minutes late while she runs down to get the laundry. She won’t have to haul the girls down with her, fighting about who gets to clean the lint screens. Her toes are warm, and deep within she is warm, and Adam’s back is smooth and smells good and she is glad for all of this, and grateful. She can continue living the life she already has. Second wife. Mother. Seamstress in training. Esther.

  As her eyes close, Lily does not think about the fact that Esther is an orphan. She hasn’t once thought of it—there are too many orphaned heroines for their orphanness to be notable—let alone wondered what it might mean for her. When her phone rings in the kitchen, she decides to wait it out, then, thinking of the shrill, penetrating beep that will follow once whoever is calling her at 11:30 has left a message, she scuffs down the hall and grabs her phone to switch it to vibrate. But it’s her brother Lionel calling, her oldest brother, who almost never calls and always texts beforehand when he does. “Li?” she says, instantly understanding, so that when he says, “Sorry to wake you, I just got a call from Mom,” she is already thinking about driving north tomorrow, to her mother, who must be dying. Never mind that their mother lives in Lily’s city now, a twenty-minute walk away, in Prospect Heights. Years ago, when Ruth still lived in Massachusetts and Lily told her she hadn’t gotten the job and was quitting academia, her mother had hung up, driven the five hours down without stopping, and burst into the apartment warning of regret. And boredom! she cried. Children are more boring than you can imagine, even ones you love! Lily had been caught wearing a robe and flipping through wallpaper samples for the kids’ room—now that they were having a second and she was not going to be a professor, she had decided wallpaper was called for. It was 2:00 p.m. on a weekday. It’s 2:00 p.m. on a weekday! her mother had pointed out. But this was when Lily was fully absorbed in the new pleasure of flipping through wallpaper samples and not looking for jobs or writing unctuous emails to former advisors. More than pleasure, she felt relief, a relief so vast it seemed to alter the color of things in her path: the begonias halfway up Montgomery Place turned a hot, saturated pink; a cup of coffee swimming with cream was almost perverse in its beauty. It was the no longer trying so hard that drove her in those early days to near ecstasy; it was the decision to simply be a very pregnant woman that gave her the confidence that afternoon to answer her mother with a blasé shrug and offer her a sandwich of meats and condiments that Lily had procured earlier from three different shops on a long, slow, beautiful walk past signs promising designed + crafted objects, as if there were another possibility, even as her mother was frantically driving south. Now, as she leans into her kitchen counter and waits for her brother’s next words, thinking of that dismissive shrug makes Lily want to fall at her mother’s feet.

  Lionel says, “It’s not an emergency, but things can go bad quickly …” and the tenderness of his parsing—for her sake, she knows, smoothing the way for his baby sister—deepens Lily’s despair. “I know,” she says, trying to stop him, but he goes on, “All those cigarettes she smoked, after Dad left …” so that Lily has to say it again: “I know. I remember. She smokes now, you know. Two a day. First thing in the morning and after dinner each night. She never stopped.” Her voice is sharp. Lionel stops talking. Lily is seized by a vertiginous swaying. Lowering herself to sit against the dishwasher, she squeezes her eyes shut until she can speak. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. A teary inhale comes from Lionel and without effort Lily matches it. For a while they breathe their ragged breaths together. Then they begin to make their plans.

  SUSA

  ESTHER

  Her Stunning Marriage

  A smaller room. A bedchamber, dripping with silks, dim, the drapes drawn. A bed. Esther wakes here, unsure whether she has fainted or been drugged. She touches herself. Everything is where it was, sash tied, robe closed, string tied around her hair. She rolls to sitting and a mirror confirms: nothing has been done to her. There is a door. She moves toward it.

  “Esther.”

  She turns, wishing she had not sat up. She should have feigned
sleep, meditated until she had a plan, a map in her mind: escape. The man is sitting in the room’s far corner, on a stool—a very short stool. His voice is not what she would have expected. It’s a soft voice, for a man, and produces, in concert with the tiny stool, a disorienting impression. Esther wonders—hopefully, desperately—if she was right when she first saw him, on the stage, if maybe this man is not the king but some kind of performer. However insane this line of thinking may be, it’s hardly more insane than the reality she’s being asked to believe: that the king of Persia has just spoken her name. That he has chosen her to be his queen.

  The man, still watching her, rests his head on the wall behind him. The wall is covered in reeds, Esther sees, reeds like the ones in the river by the camp, except these have been dipped in gold, so that the whole wall appears like the side of a glintfish the moment it’s hit by the sun. If he were a performer, she thinks, he would not rest his head on such a wall. He wouldn’t allow his head to rock slightly, as he does now, as if giving himself a scratch.

  And so her insane hope falls out her feet, replaced by a surge of fear and heat that rises through her so forcefully she begins to shiver. The king’s hand is reaching for the wine bottle. The king’s voice is saying, “Come.” Esther is walking as slowly as possible, drawing out her chance to think. There must be a solution. But what? She thinks of stories she knows in which impossible things take place. Sarah. Eve. Isaac. Dinah. Her father told her these and all the other stories until she could tell them back to him. They had to be told to be remembered, he said. They had to be remembered so you knew how to live. But Esther, beholding the dwindling distance between her and the king, doesn’t see how they can help her now. The story she is living is nothing she has heard. In this story, the king of Persia is carefully, perhaps ceremoniously, filling two goblets: one for him, one for her. In this story, she takes one and realizes that it, too, like the stool and the throne, is undersized, meant to make him appear larger than he is. She wonders if he will stand now, to welcome her, and then, when he does not stand, she wonders if this peculiarity could work to her advantage—if the king is so determined to maintain the aggrandizing artifice of his set pieces that she could run now and he would not leap up to catch her.