The Book of V.: A Novel(70)

She began to hate the city then. It was spring and everyone seemed to be kissing someone along the Charles. Part of her missed Washington, where more lies were tumbling down around Nixon each day—she knew it would be an excitement to be in the middle of that. Mostly, though, she missed Rosemary. While she knew other people, old classmates, parents of her friends, people she could have asked to stay with for a while, the barbed wire held her back. Her shame by then felt as visible as a second skin. There weren’t just the articles she would have to explain away, there were the things no one knew that sat inside her, things that seemed to her bad, even wicked: nonmissionary sexual acts she had performed with Alex, which may have suggested she’d be willing to do anything; her seduction of the married Benjamin with his house and dog and books and bare windows and the way their sex over that month had worked her shame out of her body; the other husbands. Rosemary’s husband. Hannah’s husband. Vee had not slept with these men. She had not even kissed them. But she had done other things, unprovable yet palpable things like tying her robe a little loose, or standing by a window as if lost in thought for a beat longer than necessary, or offering extraneous praise for coffee well made, or going barefoot when it was too chilly for bare feet. She had asserted her sex, wanting it to save her. Beyond all this, there was her loneliness now, which was its own failure. So she did not seek out more people. And she did not tell anyone in the CR group that she was living in a hotel. Someone might take her in, as Philip had suggested, and she did not think she could live up to that. Her skepticism would fall out at some point. It would be as if she’d stabbed them.

Then one of the women from the group connected Vee with a woman in New York who was starting a magazine called The Inez, after Inez Milholland. The magazine woman loved Vee’s story, too, and wondered if she might write something for them?

So she did. Not as Vivian Kent, of course. She called herself Elisabeth Pewter, and she wrote a story about Vivian Kent, comparing her to the biblical Vashti. The woman in New York loved it and published it and said that many of her readers were indeed Jewish, but she also wanted to appeal to a broader range of women, and might Vee have anything else to say?

Vee went to New York to meet with the woman. On the train she wrote down what felt like every thought she had thought for a year. She filled a notebook and then read what she had written and out of it she created Letty Loveless. Letty Loveless would steal everything Vee had thought and seen and done. She would steal equally—from the women’s groups and from the senators’ wives and from the housewives and from the husbands—and she would judge equally. Manicures and empathy exercises and ugliness and beauty and dish-doing blowhards and pantie girdles versus open-bottom girdles versus no girdles and infidelity and babies and submission and toe hair and booze and hunger and bodies and anything else women needed to talk about. She would not take sides and she would take all sides. She would be only honest.

The magazine woman, who was called Linda Hart, was not sure she liked this idea. But The Inez was still nascent; the world was wide open; she was willing to let Vee try.

Vee did not go back to Boston. Rosemary would be well soon—the CR group would be hers alone. The hotel sent Vee’s belongings, and she holed up in a different hotel, near Gramercy Park, and wrote her first columns. Linda Hart published one. Then, when new subscription requests flooded in, she published another. Women loved Letty Loveless.

Vee rented an apartment, a studio in Gramercy. She liked its limits; she furnished it sparsely and splurged only on a writing desk and nice sheets. She bought a typewriter and wrote and walked around the city. She became friendly with a woman from the magazine, who introduced her to other women, and to men—there were gatherings, parties, trips to hear music or see plays, men in her bed. Some people recognized her name, so she dropped Kent and went back to Barr, but even those who knew who she was did not interrogate her. People in these circles were curious but only to a point. They were all from somewhere else. Many had been someone else, too.

She felt despair less frequently now. More often she felt determined—to write well, to not be lonely. She succeeded on both counts. The more people she knew, the more she liked being alone. What she liked, she realized, was to know there were people out there, available, should she want to see someone. This was solace enough—often it was better, it turned out, than actually being with people—and usually she chose to remain alone. Sex she could find when she wanted it, either with men after they passed her interrogations vis-à-vis their singleness, or with herself. Her self-sufficiency on all fronts delighted her. She bought an apartment near the one she was renting—dilapidated but with all the original moldings and hardware intact—and managed its renovation. Letty Loveless became wildly popular, and with her earnings, however modest, she was able to cover her daily expenses without dipping too often into the cushion her family had left behind.

Vee received a couple letters at the magazine from the CR-group woman who had introduced her to Linda Hart. Was Vee all right? Did she need help? The letters said nothing about Letty Loveless. If the woman guessed Vee was the author, she might have felt betrayed, or even duped, but as far as Vee knows, she never told anyone.

If Rosemary had known, wouldn’t she have tracked Vee down?

The thought hurts—it makes her stop in the hallway and press a hand to the wall. A ripple through her abdomen. A metallic taste under her tongue. There are moments, of course there are, when she feels lonely. She still throws dinner parties, and takes turns with a few others hosting a monthly salon where poets and artists and musicians share their work—Vee herself has written two poetry chapbooks—and she meets friends to see art or theater. But afterward, there is a depression, a literal indent in her mood that even Georgie can’t fix.