The Book of V.

by Anna Solomon

  They don’t approve of what has been done to the queen’s body, but they are moved by it. Even Itz. Itz is moved as a rebel and he is moved as an adolescent boy. He confers with his father.

  It is easy, after that, to spread word among the other tents. It is easy—they are experts—to pack. They are gone within an hour, leaving only footprints, and these too, are gone by sunrise, when the breeze turns into a wind that sweeps low and fast across the sand.

  MANHATTAN

  VEE

  Summoned Forth, She Kept Her State

  The windows need cleaning, Vee thinks, as she follows Georgie back into the apartment—the sun’s angle highlights the soot. Can it be three o’clock already? She did not plan for the girl to stay so long. She makes a note about the windows, then sits at the table to take off her shoes. Her arches are tired. Her whole body is tired. She rises to clear off the table, then sits back down, attempts a halfhearted stacking of dishes and cups, and looks elsewhere. Her plants need watering. Windows. Plants. The tea has made her hands shaky. She sits, looking out through her sooty windows at the building next door. She should go sit on the couch so she can look at the park. But just as she knew she should say something to somehow cheer Rosemary’s daughter, and then failed to actually do it, she stays seated in the chair.

  It had been a bit of a shock, at the memorial service, to find that the girl looked nothing like Rosemary. Her brothers shared her friend’s fair hair and good tanning skin, but Lily looked like her father, and this disappointed Vee more than she could explain. Today, though, as they talked, Vee began to see pieces of Rosemary in the girl, not in her features themselves but in the way she used them. A slight tilt to her head when she listened. The completeness with which her mouth pulled back when she smiled. The way she moved her eyebrows. Rosemary’s had been thick, and Lily’s were less so, but they emoted as Rosemary’s had, furrowing and lifting and falling as if not quite in her control.

  When Rosemary told Vee she needed to leave, it was her eyebrows that betrayed her regret.

  What was it Lily said exactly? Did you ever think to reach out to her? As if Vee hadn’t thought it all the time. Even in recent years, every so often a longing would swell up in her, for Rosemary. But it was not her place, as she said. Alex had asked her to come back; Rosemary had not. And it was apparent from the way Lily’s brothers regarded her at the reception that she had not been spoken of with any fondness in their house, if she’d been spoken of at all. To those boys, clearly, Vee had been ruinous.

  Vee waters her plants: her jade, her just-emerging amaryllis, her Christmas cactus on its iron stand. She puts away the watering can and crosses out Plants. Then she stands in her stockinged feet, picking at a little scale that has grown back on the jade’s lower leaves. She steps back. It’s a beautiful plant, Vee’s for more than twenty years. She has trimmed its branches to encourage breadth over depth, so that it fills the window without claiming too much space. When an individual branch goes rogue, she clips it and gives it to one of the doormen in a mug of soil. The oldest, Mikel, has shown her pictures of his, now two feet tall on a windowsill crammed with figurines of children dressed in some style of Old World European dress. The jade appears to be providing them with shade.

  In Vee’s palm the black bits she has scratched off the jade form a little hill, which she carries to the kitchen, Georgie following at her heels. On a usual day, they would go to the park around now, for their longest walk of the day; sometimes they go as far as the Met. But today is not a usual day. She feels at once exhausted and agitated by Lily’s visit, overwhelmed by how insufficient her own answers seemed, dropped anew into the shock she experienced the morning she saw the obituary. She had been estranged from Rosemary for longer than they had been friends. Still, it was as if some solid ground had been pulled out from under her, a piece of earth she hadn’t realized she’d been walking on. Vee is not a crier, but she took off her glasses and wept, and now, standing in her kitchen with her palmful of scale, she has an urge to weep again. To learn that Rosemary loved her. Or loved Letty Loveless, at least. It made no sense, on the one hand, and it made all the sense in the world, for although Rosemary was consistently loving and kind, she was also consistently curious and open. Of the many memories that have come flooding back to Vee since her death, one has played especially vibrantly: a summer afternoon on Rosemary’s porch when they were teenagers, with women’s bodies and children’s skin, skin that imprinted easily but also rebounded quickly—Vee remembers this because she remembers the lines the porch wood made in the backs of Rosemary’s legs and in her palms. They were sixteen; Vee knows because her father was recently sick; this is what she was telling Rosemary on the porch. Rosemary, unlike Vee’s mother and everyone else, did not try to reassure Vee that her father would not die. She moved closer to her, so that their hips were touching, and said, That’s rotten luck. That’s what it is. Then, after a while, she said, Come on, and pulled Vee up and led her through the lanes to the dank market that smelled of beer and bought two lemonades and stripped Vee’s straw and put it in for her, bent in the particular way that Rosemary bent her straws.

  Maybe Vee should have told Lily about that. A nice memory of her mother, instead of telling her how much Lily had scared her. That was even worse than telling her about the cross. Always a little afraid of you. Why had Vee said such a thing? Because it had found its way out. It was true. But Lily had not come for Vee’s story.

  Vee tips the scale into the trash. She rinses her hands and dries them in Georgie’s fur, though she knows it’s a disgusting habit. It’s time for a nap. A nap instead of a walk—later, she will take him down to the ugly cabbage bushes to have a pee. In the hallway, she pauses. She has long stopped noticing her old columns, but they strike her now as oppressive, the sheer mass of them, the thousands of words she wrote, never quite as herself. Letty Loveless had been a lark at first, an experiment, a chance she was given through one of the women in the Jewish consciousness raising group, to whose meetings Vee had gone twice more after leaving Rosemary’s. Vee was staying at that point in Boston with another old friend, Hannah, whom she’d met at riding camp in Vermont. Hannah had two children and an extra room, and while they weren’t especially close, Hannah was sophisticated enough not to believe tabloids, and so it was an easy arrangement, at least as first, with Vee coming and going independent of the family’s schedule. At the “CR” meetings—which Vee went to mostly for company, and perhaps a little bit for entertainment, telling herself she would only go until Rosemary was recovered and well enough to rejoin herself—she was warmly welcomed, even by Rosemary’s mother-in-law, because Rosemary had of course said nothing disparaging about Vee. Vee was like a pet for the women, an unwitting Vashti they could educate and encourage, and she encouraged them back, telling them what they wanted to hear about her final night in Washington, letting them shake their heads and mmmm. They were more serious than the women’s group in Washington had been; there were scholars and mystics and even a rabbi among them who spoke of Judith and Dinah as if they’d been her fellow students at Radcliffe. “Radical empathy” was their thing, and in moments, Vee let them bathe her in it. She would be back in that other bath, after Alex pinned her to the kitchen floor, and feel herself floating up and out of it, held by a web these women spun among them. But most of the time, she could not buy in. She felt as if barbed wire had been strung around her. She stayed fundamentally separate. And soon enough Hannah’s husband wanted her to leave, and Hannah said why didn’t Vee go live in a hotel while she figured things out, and Vee had plenty of money, so she did and was very lonely.

  She began to hate the city then. It was spring and everyone seemed to be kissing someone along the Charles. Part of her missed Washington, where more lies were tumbling down around Nixon each day—she knew it would be an excitement to be in the middle of that. Mostly, though, she missed Rosemary. While she knew other people, old classmates, parents of her friends, people she could have asked to stay with for a whil
e, the barbed wire held her back. Her shame by then felt as visible as a second skin. There weren’t just the articles she would have to explain away, there were the things no one knew that sat inside her, things that seemed to her bad, even wicked: nonmissionary sexual acts she had performed with Alex, which may have suggested she’d be willing to do anything; her seduction of the married Benjamin with his house and dog and books and bare windows and the way their sex over that month had worked her shame out of her body; the other husbands. Rosemary’s husband. Hannah’s husband. Vee had not slept with these men. She had not even kissed them. But she had done other things, unprovable yet palpable things like tying her robe a little loose, or standing by a window as if lost in thought for a beat longer than necessary, or offering extraneous praise for coffee well made, or going barefoot when it was too chilly for bare feet. She had asserted her sex, wanting it to save her. Beyond all this, there was her loneliness now, which was its own failure. So she did not seek out more people. And she did not tell anyone in the CR group that she was living in a hotel. Someone might take her in, as Philip had suggested, and she did not think she could live up to that. Her skepticism would fall out at some point. It would be as if she’d stabbed them.

  Then one of the women from the group connected Vee with a woman in New York who was starting a magazine called The Inez, after Inez Milholland. The magazine woman loved Vee’s story, too, and wondered if she might write something for them?

  So she did. Not as Vivian Kent, of course. She called herself Elisabeth Pewter, and she wrote a story about Vivian Kent, comparing her to the biblical Vashti. The woman in New York loved it and published it and said that many of her readers were indeed Jewish, but she also wanted to appeal to a broader range of women, and might Vee have anything else to say?

  Vee went to New York to meet with the woman. On the train she wrote down what felt like every thought she had thought for a year. She filled a notebook and then read what she had written and out of it she created Letty Loveless. Letty Loveless would steal everything Vee had thought and seen and done. She would steal equally—from the women’s groups and from the senators’ wives and from the housewives and from the husbands—and she would judge equally. Manicures and empathy exercises and ugliness and beauty and dish-doing blowhards and pantie girdles versus open-bottom girdles versus no girdles and infidelity and babies and submission and toe hair and booze and hunger and bodies and anything else women needed to talk about. She would not take sides and she would take all sides. She would be only honest.

  The magazine woman, who was called Linda Hart, was not sure she liked this idea. But The Inez was still nascent; the world was wide open; she was willing to let Vee try.

  Vee did not go back to Boston. Rosemary would be well soon—the CR group would be hers alone. The hotel sent Vee’s belongings, and she holed up in a different hotel, near Gramercy Park, and wrote her first columns. Linda Hart published one. Then, when new subscription requests flooded in, she published another. Women loved Letty Loveless.

  Vee rented an apartment, a studio in Gramercy. She liked its limits; she furnished it sparsely and splurged only on a writing desk and nice sheets. She bought a typewriter and wrote and walked around the city. She became friendly with a woman from the magazine, who introduced her to other women, and to men—there were gatherings, parties, trips to hear music or see plays, men in her bed. Some people recognized her name, so she dropped Kent and went back to Barr, but even those who knew who she was did not interrogate her. People in these circles were curious but only to a point. They were all from somewhere else. Many had been someone else, too.

  She felt despair less frequently now. More often she felt determined—to write well, to not be lonely. She succeeded on both counts. The more people she knew, the more she liked being alone. What she liked, she realized, was to know there were people out there, available, should she want to see someone. This was solace enough—often it was better, it turned out, than actually being with people—and usually she chose to remain alone. Sex she could find when she wanted it, either with men after they passed her interrogations vis-à-vis their singleness, or with herself. Her self-sufficiency on all fronts delighted her. She bought an apartment near the one she was renting—dilapidated but with all the original moldings and hardware intact—and managed its renovation. Letty Loveless became wildly popular, and with her earnings, however modest, she was able to cover her daily expenses without dipping too often into the cushion her family had left behind.

  Vee received a couple letters at the magazine from the CR-group woman who had introduced her to Linda Hart. Was Vee all right? Did she need help? The letters said nothing about Letty Loveless. If the woman guessed Vee was the author, she might have felt betrayed, or even duped, but as far as Vee knows, she never told anyone.

  If Rosemary had known, wouldn’t she have tracked Vee down?

  The thought hurts—it makes her stop in the hallway and press a hand to the wall. A ripple through her abdomen. A metallic taste under her tongue. There are moments, of course there are, when she feels lonely. She still throws dinner parties, and takes turns with a few others hosting a monthly salon where poets and artists and musicians share their work—Vee herself has written two poetry chapbooks—and she meets friends to see art or theater. But afterward, there is a depression, a literal indent in her mood that even Georgie can’t fix.

  What no one would believe is that she prefers this to the alternative. No one ever did believe it. When she first made friends in New York, and hosted a number of baby showers, there would always come a moment when she realized that her guests were sliding her looks of pity.

  Even the analyst Vee saw could not believe Vee did not want a husband and children. This was the year she turned thirty, when the people she spent time with talked about their “shrinks” as breezily as the people from Vee’s old world talked about their boats. She went to a woman another woman recommended, and this woman, Dr. Monmouth, helped Vee create a story out of her life. Everything Vee had done, according to Dr. Monmouth, made sense. She had come from power; she had married a man who above all wanted power. She had come from a family in which sexuality was not discussed; she had married a man who was intensely sexual. She had liked sex and also found it shameful. She had been confused even before that night about her own desires. And then her sexuality had been used against her. Of course she felt lost. Of course she went after Benjamin. Dr. Monmouth believed Vee must have known on a subconscious level that Benjamin was married, and though Vee knew this not to be true, she let Dr. Monmouth believe it because it was easier and did not disrupt the rest of Dr. Monmouth’s story, which Vee found comforting. Of course she tried to appear attractive to her friends’ husbands, said Dr. Monmouth. All she could do was try to correct for her initial mistake; to stay, she believed, she must seduce. And now, well, now she was living in a way that guaranteed no one would ever throw her out again.

  This was not sustainable, according to Dr. Monmouth. Vee would eventually want to have children. She would want a partner, “a lifelong relationship of depth and substance.”

  After a year, when Vee still did not want these things, Dr. Monmouth continued to insist that she wanted them, until one day Vee said, “I really don’t think I do. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I did not really want the men so much as I wanted to be the men.”

  Dr. Monmouth stared at her.

  “I want to live alone.”

  Dr. Monmouth leaned forward, elbows to her wool-slacked knees. “This is so sad,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking to me.”

  Vee leaned forward, too, elbows to her stockinged knees. “Why?”

  “You’ve given up. You met your moment of disillusionment too early. We all have them, but for most of us it’s a gradual process, an easing in. Yours, your trauma, and your isolation now, the walls you’ve built up around yourself … Vivian. Just because you’ll never be able to worship a man again doesn’t mean you can’t love one.”

&nbs
p; Vee sat for a long moment, staring up at Dr. Monmouth’s high, white ceiling. Her heart was thudding loudly, because she knew it was time to be done with therapy, and because what Dr. Monmouth had said reached beneath her ribs and squeezed. She said, “I don’t think that’s true for me.” Then she thanked Dr. Monmouth and asked her—She’s the age my mother would be, she thought, which made it both easier to dismiss her and harder to leave—to put a final bill in the mail.

  Even now, more than forty years later, she can summon the queasiness she felt walking out of Dr. Monmouth’s office that day. Quickly, it had turned into giddiness. Another spring had come. The leaves in Washington Square Park had unfolded and were sifting a puzzle of light onto the paths and trash and benches, bathing the students and homeless people in a kind of glow. The arch looked brighter than usual, adding to her sense that she had been transported.

  In the hallway, Vee summons a deep breath. It fills her. She is fine. She calls to Georgie, and together they go into the bedroom. The room soothes her, as always. There is her bed, and her writing desk, and the art she has chosen, and the drapes—her love of bare windows was short-lived, it turns out—and the old dresser of her father’s, one of numerous pieces she got back from Alex once she was finally settled and knew she would not be moving again. She was nearly middle-aged by then, and had come to be grateful that he’d done what he’d done. She would never have found out what she wanted otherwise. She would have had children. Alex would have become more violent. She is certain of this though she has no proof, though Suitcase Wife’s charges against him—filed some months after that party—were dismissed. Vee had dismissed her, too, had called her Suitcase Wife instead of Diane Fiorelli, though Diane was her name, though clearly Alex did something to Diane that Diane did not want. Now, Vee suspects, young women would not put up with such behavior from men. Look at them, carrying mattresses around and going into combat—soon Hillary would be president and men would be chastened. But Alex won his reelection, then won again, and again, and now he’s the senior senator from Rhode Island. Vee sees pictures from time to time. In a few, Alex, still handsome, is standing with his family, three kids and his wife, the same one he married a couple years after Vee left, or after he banished her and then she refused to come back. The wife wears sweater sets in aqua and peach, but she is beautiful in an understated way, tall and olive-hued. Vee studies the woman’s face, but it gives nothing away.