The Book of V.: A Novel(27)

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.

The king lifts his glass to her and waits. What would he do if she turned and fled? His voice is soft, she thinks, but he banished his queen. He banished his queen, but he is very short. All she can read in his face as he looks up at her is waiting. No clear pleasure or displeasure in his eyes. No ripple in those lines between his brow. Even his mouth appears oddly neutral, neither open nor fully closed. He is not a man primed for a chase. Yet even as she calculates, Esther knows she is fooling herself again. She knows there must be guards on the other side of that door, with sharpened lances taller than their heads.

The end of another idea feels like a death; her shivering grows more pronounced. Gripping the goblet to steady herself, she begins to drink. She drinks as she walked, letting a trickle drop back into the cup with each sip, trying to prolong the activity, to think. But her thoughts are scraps that go nowhere: an awareness that the glass she’s holding is pressing ornate shapes into her palms, a vision of her mother threading a needle, an image of Nadav’s mouth, his brown, unbearded face. Soon Esther is drinking quickly—she drains the rest of the wine in two gulps.

The king, his eyes on the empty goblet, smiles. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “You were the only one who didn’t try to hide yourself.”

Esther watches as he fills the glass again. Her throat stings. Her trembling limbs are very warm.

“Do you come with a voice?” he asks.

She lifts the glass to cover her mouth. I shouldn’t drink any more, she thinks. Then she drinks, quickly, beckoning courage, and soon her stinging throat begins to hurt less, to open, and the king is still smiling up at her, without cruelty, she thinks, and without falseness, and she thinks, wildly, I will ask for what I want.

“May I go home?” she says, holding out the empty goblet.