The Book of V.: A Novel(71)

What no one would believe is that she prefers this to the alternative. No one ever did believe it. When she first made friends in New York, and hosted a number of baby showers, there would always come a moment when she realized that her guests were sliding her looks of pity.

Even the analyst Vee saw could not believe Vee did not want a husband and children. This was the year she turned thirty, when the people she spent time with talked about their “shrinks” as breezily as the people from Vee’s old world talked about their boats. She went to a woman another woman recommended, and this woman, Dr. Monmouth, helped Vee create a story out of her life. Everything Vee had done, according to Dr. Monmouth, made sense. She had come from power; she had married a man who above all wanted power. She had come from a family in which sexuality was not discussed; she had married a man who was intensely sexual. She had liked sex and also found it shameful. She had been confused even before that night about her own desires. And then her sexuality had been used against her. Of course she felt lost. Of course she went after Benjamin. Dr. Monmouth believed Vee must have known on a subconscious level that Benjamin was married, and though Vee knew this not to be true, she let Dr. Monmouth believe it because it was easier and did not disrupt the rest of Dr. Monmouth’s story, which Vee found comforting. Of course she tried to appear attractive to her friends’ husbands, said Dr. Monmouth. All she could do was try to correct for her initial mistake; to stay, she believed, she must seduce. And now, well, now she was living in a way that guaranteed no one would ever throw her out again.

This was not sustainable, according to Dr. Monmouth. Vee would eventually want to have children. She would want a partner, “a lifelong relationship of depth and substance.”

After a year, when Vee still did not want these things, Dr. Monmouth continued to insist that she wanted them, until one day Vee said, “I really don’t think I do. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I did not really want the men so much as I wanted to be the men.”

Dr. Monmouth stared at her.

“I want to live alone.”

Dr. Monmouth leaned forward, elbows to her wool-slacked knees. “This is so sad,” she said. “It’s just heartbreaking to me.”

Vee leaned forward, too, elbows to her stockinged knees. “Why?”

“You’ve given up. You met your moment of disillusionment too early. We all have them, but for most of us it’s a gradual process, an easing in. Yours, your trauma, and your isolation now, the walls you’ve built up around yourself?…?Vivian. Just because you’ll never be able to worship a man again doesn’t mean you can’t love one.”

Vee sat for a long moment, staring up at Dr. Monmouth’s high, white ceiling. Her heart was thudding loudly, because she knew it was time to be done with therapy, and because what Dr. Monmouth had said reached beneath her ribs and squeezed. She said, “I don’t think that’s true for me.” Then she thanked Dr. Monmouth and asked her—She’s the age my mother would be, she thought, which made it both easier to dismiss her and harder to leave—to put a final bill in the mail.

Even now, more than forty years later, she can summon the queasiness she felt walking out of Dr. Monmouth’s office that day. Quickly, it had turned into giddiness. Another spring had come. The leaves in Washington Square Park had unfolded and were sifting a puzzle of light onto the paths and trash and benches, bathing the students and homeless people in a kind of glow. The arch looked brighter than usual, adding to her sense that she had been transported.

In the hallway, Vee summons a deep breath. It fills her. She is fine. She calls to Georgie, and together they go into the bedroom. The room soothes her, as always. There is her bed, and her writing desk, and the art she has chosen, and the drapes—her love of bare windows was short-lived, it turns out—and the old dresser of her father’s, one of numerous pieces she got back from Alex once she was finally settled and knew she would not be moving again. She was nearly middle-aged by then, and had come to be grateful that he’d done what he’d done. She would never have found out what she wanted otherwise. She would have had children. Alex would have become more violent. She is certain of this though she has no proof, though Suitcase Wife’s charges against him—filed some months after that party—were dismissed. Vee had dismissed her, too, had called her Suitcase Wife instead of Diane Fiorelli, though Diane was her name, though clearly Alex did something to Diane that Diane did not want. Now, Vee suspects, young women would not put up with such behavior from men. Look at them, carrying mattresses around and going into combat—soon Hillary would be president and men would be chastened. But Alex won his reelection, then won again, and again, and now he’s the senior senator from Rhode Island. Vee sees pictures from time to time. In a few, Alex, still handsome, is standing with his family, three kids and his wife, the same one he married a couple years after Vee left, or after he banished her and then she refused to come back. The wife wears sweater sets in aqua and peach, but she is beautiful in an understated way, tall and olive-hued. Vee studies the woman’s face, but it gives nothing away.

The top drawer of her father’s dresser sticks, as it has for years. She tugs left, jiggles right, then reaches into the back for her sew-on-the-go box. Rosemary’s daughter, she thinks, is also a second wife, but a different kind, of a different era, with a face that shows everything. It showed Vee that the girl is sad, and confused, and possibly having an affair, and that she is unlikely to take the fabric for her daughters’ dresses to a tailor, as Vee suggested. Above all, it showed that she misses her mother. Surely she wanted Vee to offer her something, care for her in some way. And the closest Vee came was rote advice about a dry cleaner, a little tea, and a monologue about how the girl had scared her. Vee snapped at her about not needing company. That was only because it had taken her so long to grow out of needing it—mostly. But how could the girl know that?