The Book of V.: A Novel(52)

On the thirtieth day, Vee spends the night, and on the thirty-first, she does not go back to Rosemary’s. Instead, she drives Benjamin’s truck into town and returns with bread; cheese; two bottles of wine; a bone for Georgina, Benjamin’s dog; and a palpitation beneath her sternum. She plans to stay the night again and, tomorrow, to ask Benjamin if she can move in with him.

The next afternoon, after a shower, together in their underwear—for Benjamin has overfed the woodstove—they set the kitchen table and sit down before their second picnic. A moment spreads out in which Vee cannot quite believe that this is real. To have lived that life on Dumbarton Street with her vanity and Senator Kent and now to be here, wearing almost nothing, her stomach folded in the open, across from this lanky, weathered-faced, pale-chested man who always waits for her to speak, in a house without a single window covering, is almost too great a transformation to bear. She is happy, however unknown the future might be. The palpitation begins again. She has dithered over the phrasing—for a time? or for a while? She knows she must not frame her question as a need, though it is in fact the case that she needs a place to live. The room she has been sleeping in is slated to become a nursery to Rosemary’s new baby, and though Rosemary is too polite to say that she would like Vee out in advance of her due date, she has begun putting up wallpaper samples on the wall behind Vee’s bed. Living in Benjamin’s house would mean being close enough to Rosemary but not in her way, and away from Philip who, since the day in the kitchen when she stood with her robe a little too loose, has stopped hectoring Vee to leave but now regularly stares at her breasts. Rosemary, Vee believes, must see this. She is not stupid. But does she also see how Vee waits a beat, lets him get his look, before turning away? And if she does, does she trust that Vee does it not proudly but out of desperation, a desire not to be kicked out again? If Benjamin would take her, all this could end.

Vee waits until they have emptied their first glasses. She reaches across the table to wipe a bit of brie from his lip, then, catching his smile at being babied, she dives in. “I’ve been thinking?…?maybe I could move in?”

For a time, she tells herself. Don’t scare him. But she can’t add the words. Benjamin is looking at her with a new expression, his eyes tense at their corners, his mouth pitched at a hard angle.

She has prepared for him to hesitate, of course. He has come here to live alone, away from bricks and crits and people. And he won’t want to ruin the charge between them, which relies at least in part on their strangeness to each other—they have yet to exchange even their last names. But Vee has an answer for both of these problems. For the first, she planned to inform him that even Thoreau depended on his mother and sister to do things like his laundry, and for the second to argue that they can have it both ways, that she, at least, does not need to know anything more about him. All she wants is to live forever in a new house on old land with a man named Benjamin and a dog named Georgina as a woman named Vee without any titles or papers marking them.

But this look he is giving her is not about living alone, or about sex.

“I’m married,” he says quietly. “Back in Cambridge.”

It takes Vee a full minute before she can talk. By then she is scavenging around the bed for her clothes as Benjamin follows and dodges her at once, apologizing and trying to convince her not to go.

“Get away,” she says. “Please get away from me.”

“I’m taking some time off,” he says. “But I can’t stay here forever. I have a son.”

Vee would cover her ears if she could but she must pull on her dress, her coat, her hat. She stuffs her stockings into her bag and her bare feet into her boots. “Nothing has to change,” Benjamin says, and she remembers him musing just yesterday about how this land wasn’t his family’s to claim, how it belonged to the Indians and how someday there would be proper reparations made, remembers how even as he said this he rested back in his bed, clearly unprepared to go anywhere or give anything up. She runs, for the second and last time, away from the beautiful house.



* * *



An hour or so later, Vee opens Rosemary’s front door as silently as possible. She would prefer to stay outside forever, walk the miles to the nearest coffee shop, walk until she reaches another planet, but she is without scarf or gloves, both of which she left at Benjamin’s in her rush to flee, and her bare feet feel close to frostbite inside her boots. She doesn’t want to see Rosemary, not yet. She has told her about a man named Benjamin up in the woods, told her enough to make Rosemary smile, and though Rosemary has not asked for more—Rosemary has been distracted, Rosemary has seemed more and more often not quite herself—she knows enough that Vee cannot now tell her that Benjamin has a wife and child. Vee is not a woman who sleeps with married men.

Yet she is, apparently.

She hears the children playing outside, on the other side of the house.

She will slip upstairs, lie down, pull herself together.

“Vivian.”

It’s Philip calling her, as no one calls her.

“Just a minute,” she calls, her voice shaking. She bends to untie her boots, a process mercifully slowed by her numb fingers, so that by the time she is following Philip’s voice into the living room she has managed to take a deep breath. Her chest vibrates painfully, and she realizes, as she enters the room to find Philip lying on the couch with one forearm flung across his eyes, that what she is, more than angry, is hurt. She and Benjamin joked a few times about both being on the lam, but now it turns out he really is, of his own choosing—Vee is alone in having been sent away.