The Book of V.: A Novel(15)
“She couldn’t bear children, is what I heard.”
“That’s not rumor, it’s true.”
“Then maybe it’s also true that the king doesn’t have a cupful of royal blood. Vashti was the noble. He worked for her father, a high-up something but still a something.”
“If that’s true, why would anything be up to him?”
“Where did Mother Mona hear this about the crown, anyway?”
As the girls veer into another story, Esther nudges Lara’s knee again. “You awake?”
“Mm.”
“Is it better?”
“Mm.”
Esther removes her hand from Lara’s face. “I think she knew everything,” she whispers. “She knew he wanted her naked and she knew what would happen if she refused. She refused anyway. She got away. We’re going to get away, too.”
Lara shrugs. “If us getting away looks like her getting away?…”
“No, silly! I didn’t mean that. I meant—”
But Lara is rolling over. She nestles her backside into Esther’s front and lets out an emphatic, silencing sigh.
WASHINGTON, DC
VEE
He with Gourds and His Wife with Cucumbers
Dusk here, too. The senator and his wife preside at the top of their front steps in the weirdly warm November air, kissing and shaking, directing: men downstairs, women up. No one appears irritated by this arrangement, or even surprised, though in a crowd of professional expression-hiders it would be hard to tell. The light on the northern side of Dumbarton Street is fading. Vee watches the women’s powdered faces absorb the purple hue and her heart falls a little further. It’s already fallen from her earlier, button-snipping high because at the last second she faltered and knotted a white kerchief around her neck, and now it tumbles to a new low as she hears herself call Hello, good evening, hello! The women’s-group women will be gathering soon with their hard embraces. There will be none of this restrained smiling, no lacquered hair or painful shoes or chit-chat, just a headlong launch into self-realization. If Vee were there, they would applaud her button flushing and cringe as she described the women at her party.
But soon, Vee forgets. The greetings complete, Alex goes inside, unsubtly chasing the suitcase man—did he even notice her missing buttons?—and Vee goes up and the rule, after all, is, Drink! and Vee’s upstairs parlor has been transformed with drapery and flowers and a jazz trio playing in one corner and golden-haired boys serving gin and tonics and punch on golden trays, and within half an hour Vee is floating around feeling just fine. The party is more charged than she imagined, the women smoking and circling each other like boxers, their dresses shorter, she thinks, than at the last party, and one woman, the wife of a congressman from Dallas, is wearing a white pantsuit and clearly a new kind of underwear, if she wears underwear at all, and four-inch heels when she’s already as tall as many men, and it’s scintillating, this pantsuit—it knocks something loose in Vee. She unknots her kerchief and drapes it over the curved elbow of a sconce and just like that, the familiar fixture is made exotic and Vee feels powerful again, like a queen. She accepts a lit cigarette and explores her altered realm, enjoying the prerogative of the hostess not to settle anywhere for long. Excuse me, she says, when she is bored by a conversation, excuse me, and moves on. A golden-haired boy takes her empty glass and hands her a fresh one, and she drinks deeply and laughs out loud, then finds that she is listening to a debate about the ERA, not about whether it will ever make it into the Constitution—that is the men’s subject, the tally; someone’s husband has heard that Maine may be next to ratify—but what difference it will in fact make. One woman contends that Roe v. Wade was far more consequential and the ERA merely symbolic, another that symbolic change comes first, a third that the opposite is true, that symbolic change placates the oppressed and precludes any real progress. Vee, drifting on, is lifted on a current of joy. It’s not only the gin, she thinks—though she must pause for a second to touch a nearby chair. It’s the fact that the women are arguing. It’s the way they jab and paw at each other as their cigarette smoke swirls through her parlor. This is where she belongs, she thinks, not among the women’s-group women with their circle talk and their red wine and unmade faces. They seem impossibly distant to her in this moment, as gauzy to her as their skirts, as ineffectual as their marijuana. Ugly, too. Vee floats past two more women in heated debate and thinks of the first time she met them, at a welcoming luncheon hosted by the Senate Wives Club. Vee was twenty-five, the other two older but as meek as she was; together they sat through the afternoon as quietly as dolls. Look at them now, wiggling at odd moments to the music and yelling to be heard. They are dazzling, these wives of politicians and company presidents, these tigresses who openly disagree with each other. They don’t protect each other’s feelings or pretend they don’t love their power, their direct means of manipulating the leaders of the free world. Vee’s grandmother was a governor’s wife and her mother was a senator’s wife and Vee is a senator’s wife. Why should she think she might be anything else? She drifts from one argument to another, stirred to a smoke-swirled paroxysm of pride and satisfaction, thinking, perhaps aloud, Look at these women! They are not cross-legged on couches talking about liberation. They are already liberated, and she is one of them.