The Book of V.: A Novel(49)

“Will he not allow it?” Vee asks after a while. “The tree?”

“He hasn’t said that.”

“I thought it was the mother. If the mother’s Jewish, then the kids are Jewish, and if she’s not, then?…?”

“I’m converting.”

“Are you serious?”

Vee turns to look at Rosemary, but she’s too close to see her clearly. What she notices are Rosemary’s hands cupping her belly.

“Did he ask you to?” she asks.

“No. He’s not religious. He doesn’t care about any of it.”

“So why?”

“We’re a family. So we should be a family.”

Vee, on her third bourbon, is finding the idea preposterous. “What about the cross?” she asks. “Aren’t you scared?”

“The cross is even more reason. A unified front. I’m not going to hide.”

“But you wouldn’t be hiding. You’d just be being. Yourself.”

Rosemary doesn’t say anything for a minute. Vee slides her glass onto the coffee table, then maneuvers until she’s on an elbow, looking at Rosemary’s profile, which appears entirely unperturbed. She starts to wonder if Rosemary is asleep with her eyes open. If everything she’s been saying is not quite what she means to say.

Then Rosemary says, “It’s okay if you don’t get it.”

Vee stands and lights another cigarette. She walks to the mantel, then to the window, where she bumps into a little side table. A strange sculpture—is it made of pewter?—sits atop it, a thing she hasn’t really looked at before, dismissed for its abstractness. She doesn’t look at it now, only labels it in her mind—Philip’s—and walks back to face Rosemary.

“Is it what you want?”

Rosemary sighs, drawing the throw up to her chin. “I find it fascinating, actually. It’s very different. Nothing like Episcopal. Obviously. His mother—I really like her—she invited me to this CR thing in Cambridge. I think I’m going to go.”

“CR?”

“Consciousness raising.”

“Oh. I’ve been to one of those. Or something like it. In DC. I wrote you about it.”

“But this is Jewish, too. I guess they talk about the stories, and how?…?She says it’s really empowering.”

“Rosemary. How can you go to this group and also convert for your husband? It sounds like a new height of hypocrisy. Is it even allowed?”

Rosemary turns to look at Vee. “Solidarity is always allowed.”

“You can’t be in solidarity with everyone at once,” Vee says, even as she knows exactly what Rosemary means. Rosemary means you stand with your man; she means in the end it’s all any one cares about. How, Vee thinks, can she not be talking about Vee herself? Irritation flames in her gut, followed by longing. She longs to tell Rosemary everything, right now, not just the outline she offered her first night here—the part about Alex demanding she strip—but what happened in the town house kitchen before the party, and what he may have done to Suitcase Wife, and what Vee thought and felt.

But she is afraid, too. Isn’t Rosemary saying that it makes no difference what Vee thought or felt? What’s to stop Rosemary, when she hears that Alex called, from telling her to go back, as Philip did?

Rosemary sits up. She looks like herself again, friendly, open faced, optimistic, an optimistic pregnant woman heading to bed. “Do you want to come?” she asks. “To the meeting? Everyone is welcome.”

“Maybe,” Vee says. She is thinking of the women’s-group women, and of the wives, and of how Rosemary has always belonged, with Vee, to the latter. Wasn’t it all bullshit, though, if you could move around at will? Preppy to hippie, Episcopal to Jewish, polished to buffed and back again? She is also thinking that she does maybe want to go to the meeting, if only to do something, and spend a few hours in the city, and that she will have to convince Philip to let her go, and of how demeaning that will be, to ask another woman’s husband for permission to go out. She is thinking that she cannot stay here forever. She is thinking of the argument she’ll make to Philip: if Alex wants her back, he is going to want to protect her; Hump is not going to send the tabloids after her; no one is going to come beating down Philip’s door. The more Vee thinks of the argument she’ll make, the more she wants to go to the meeting. She’ll tell him she won’t talk, only listen; she’ll act like a reporter, interested but not implicated.

She likes this idea. Interested but not implicated. As Rosemary says good night and heads upstairs, Vee thinks maybe, after what happened to her, she is not meant for solidarity. Maybe she was never meant for it—hence her ambivalence about babies, and her judgments of everyone: the wives, the women’s-group women, Alex. Poor Alex. Maybe Vee has never been on the right path. She climbs the stairs, her legs woozy with bourbon, her mind suddenly, startlingly clear: a vision of the wooded road to the man’s house; a recognition that she will walk it again tomorrow.





SUSA


ESTHER


Her New Scheme



The idea comes to her as she’s walking in one of the far courtyards. It’s almost dusk, the time in the camp when the fires are lit, and Esther sniffs the air, thinking she smells the tang of the first smoke, a hint of sumac and rice. She imagines the shout that might have a chance of reaching her aunt or Nadav, then feels its possibility trickling back down her throat. Her voice can’t possibly be strong enough. Even if it were, by the time she got one word to them, the guards would haul her inside. She would not be let out again.