The Book of V.: A Novel(21)
Lily tries the pickled-broccoli-like stuff, which is indeed pickled broccoli and is delicious. She tries it on a cracker, then on another cracker with brie, then she finds herself staring at Kyla’s ass as Kyla goes to deliver her genius carrot sticks to the children. It’s not a perfect ass, Lily thinks, not like her cheekbones or hair. It’s not even an especially good one, neither ample nor fit, and Kyla’s jeans, neither snug nor loose, don’t do it any favors. Yet there is something in the way Kyla walks, at once lighthearted and grave, as if her confidence that she’s doing the right thing in the right place at the right time, and her pleasure in doing it, and maybe, too, those unflattering jeans, have imbued her with a kind of holiness. Lily watches until she’s gone, wondering how Kyla got like that, if you had to be born that way or if it was something you could learn, like how to sew, and whether Lily herself could learn it—if not holiness, then maybe a little grace? What if it’s easier than she imagines, if she could simply decide, right now, to be done with the way she is, done with discontent and done with her mother’s voice and maybe done with her friends, too, and their cult of ambivalence? What if she could simply want what she has? Kyla returns, drying her hands on her apron with an ease that makes Lily want to weep. She will get her own apron, she thinks. She will embrace her Estherness. So what if she’s the end of the story, the second wife, the virtuous one? Lily is forty-six. She is too old to still believe that she’s going to somehow wind up being someone she hasn’t already become. She is not a writer or a professor or a singer-songwriter or an adulteress, she is, by choice, a second wife and mother and homemaker. If she is ill equipped to be these things, then she will have to equip herself. If she is not Esther precisely (Esther saves her people; who—whom—is Lily supposed to save???) she will be Esther in spirit. The heroine. The second but lasting queen. A natural, if not terribly sexy, beauty. A virtuous, if not mysterious, wife. A satisfied woman, smiling in her new friend’s kitchen.
* * *
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.