The Book of V.: A Novel(47)

But it turns out he doesn’t offer her a ride because when Vee opens the door a dog is there, its tongue out, its tail wagging, waiting to be let in. “Good girl,” the man says, kneeling down to hug her, and Vee runs until she is out of sight.



* * *



The house is empty when she returns, Rosemary out picking up the older kids from school, and Vee goes straight into the shower. When she hears the children’s voices she doesn’t bother getting dressed, just wraps her robe around her and heads downstairs. She is ready to talk now. Something has been knocked loose and she needs to talk, to tell Rosemary what just happened and everything else that has happened and how terrified she is not to know what will happen next.

“Oh.”

It’s not Rosemary who has brought the children home. Philip stands at the kitchen counter, slicing an apple. Without looking at her, he says, “Doctor’s appointment,” and Vee, clutching her robe, turns to go back upstairs.

“Where were you?” Philip asks in his odd, blunt way, sounding neither angry nor kind.

“Walking.”

“We need to talk.”

“Let me change.”

“It won’t take long. Kids!”

The kids gather quickly, as they never do for Rosemary, and Philip, handing out the apple slices, says, “Go outside.”

The children look at their father, then at Vee, and go. Only the girl hesitates for a few seconds, peeking back at Vee through a frizzy shock of bangs, then putting an apple slice in her mouth and following her brothers out the sliding door. At four o’clock, it is already dusk outside. Philip offers Vee an apple slice. She declines. She wants him to release her before Rosemary gets home, not because Rosemary mistrusts her—Vee has to believe that Rosemary does not mistrust her—but because a woman in a robe with a husband is not something any woman, let alone a pregnant woman, needs to see.

Philip takes his time washing the paring knife and the cutting board, then drying both. Vee has never seen Alex wash anything, so though she’s impatient for Philip to speak, she is also fascinated. Philip swings the dish towel over his shoulder and it’s as if he has performed a kind of dance—that’s how impressed Vee is, despite herself. He puts each item away, opens the refrigerator, and, with his back to her, says, “You should go home.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s time. I got a call today, at the office.”

“From?” She wonders if the reporters have at last tracked her down, wonders why they continue to bother—are the Enquirer and its lookalikes really so short on copy?

“Your husband,” he says.

Vee waits.

“He wants you back.”

Vee’s elbows sink to the counter. She is shocked by the relief that floods her.

“He says to tell you his chief of staff?…?Harold? Humbert??…?doesn’t want him calling. He doesn’t want you to go back yet, he thinks it will make him appear weak. These people.” He shakes his head. “You people.”

Vee could be insulted but focuses on her relief. Why not? this relieved part of her asks. Why not go back? Why not shrug it all off, as she might have done in the first place, go along with his request and get back to her life? This would be in keeping with a string of things she has argued to herself before: If she had stripped that night, it would not have killed her. She would still be in her marriage. She would not be so confused. Maybe they assumed she would do it because it was what she should have done. Etc.

She thinks of the house in the woods, the man above her, their urgent coupling. A thrill pulses in her wrists, and she imagines going back to Alex with her knowledge of this thrill, the secret of this afternoon. She imagines it would help, getting to have that and keep it. She used to be above him, at least in the ways a woman could be above a man. She was the one with the money, the one with the background. Then he flipped it all inside out. He doesn’t need her background anymore; he is in the house they bought with her money; even if she goes back, she will have been a nutty, drug-addicted probable lesbian. But to have made him a cuckold?…?it would be something.

“You should go back.”

Philip can’t know that Vee has been thinking the same thing, or that his saying it out loud, commanding her, has the opposite of his desired effect. She feels herself harden, feels her back rise into a line. Why should I listen to you? She does not say this, of course. He can still kick her out; she must not make him mad. Instead she picks the one remaining slice of apple off the counter, puts it in her mouth, and chews. She can’t go back, she knows. She couldn’t go along and she can’t go back. Yet she wants to be able to. This is the problem. It’s as if Vee herself—who Vee is, at her core, what her father and grandfather would have called her character, if she had been male—has not caught up with the life she’s meant to live. She has always had questions, granted, niggles of ambivalence that kept her from being as good as Rosemary or her mother: her little secret with the Pill, her women’s-group habit. But she never wanted to cause trouble. She wanted to go along—certainly it’s true that she wanted to want to go along. That night at the women’s party, remember? She decided she was ready to give up the women’s group, decided they were ugly hippies and that she was done with them and ready to claim her place, her power, as one of the wives. But then, well, she had not gone along. She had not stripped. She had caused a great deal of trouble. And now, it seems, she is a woman who causes trouble.