“Vee—”
But she is gone, fully sunk. Alex’s voice beyond the water sounds like a distant foghorn, and Vee, holding her breath, thinks of her childhood friend Rosemary, who lives year-round now in an old, comfortable house on the water and who might be feeding her children dinner at this moment, or drawing their bath. Vee, her lungs aching, is startled by the longing she feels for her friend. She pops out of the water and sees Alex’s hands gripping the side of the tub. He is leaning over her now, saying something about how the president of the suitcase-manufacturing company is known for being unfashionably on time to parties, how it’s a Rhode Island thing, and what would she, from distant Massachusetts, know about that?
She giggles, but he doesn’t join her. In another moment, in the time before he was a senator, Alex might have laughed at his own nonsense. Instead, his voice keeps pouring onto her, along with a faint, sour scent, and as she gives in and looks up, she knows what she will find, beyond the freshly shaven jaw and the Roman nose and rich brown eyes: he’s afraid.
He sees her see it and walks out. Then he returns a moment later, flinging the door into the sink again. She would like to mention this, the door-sink situation, because she finds it funny that after a $4,500 renovation the bathroom door slams into the sink, and she would like him to find it funny, too. The money came from her family, after all, just as her family’s money had paid for them to buy a place on Dumbarton, three short but significant blocks east of Wisconsin. But Alex does not like to talk about this, she knows, and he is pacing the length of the tub. “You have to get out now,” he says. “I’m not leaving until you get out,” and Vee thinks, the poor boy, the frightened king, with his nervous, bad breath. Perhaps she has been unfair to him. She rises from the water, and lets him stare, and wonders at how easy it is, to give him what he wants. Why does she make it hard, then? Why resist and demand? Why make him touch her as she did, when he so clearly disliked it? Why keep going to the women’s group? She’d been cajoled the first time, by a fellow Wellesley alum, but no one pressured her to go back. Why not be more like Rosemary, who didn’t hem and haw over whether to have children; who no longer indulges herself with late-afternoon baths, let alone uses them to purge and hide from her husband; who is soft and glad in her warm house? Or like Vee’s mother, who until she died kept clipping her favorite columns from Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal with titles like “Five Ironing Secrets You’ll Wish Your Mother Taught You” and “How to Please Your Husband.” That was the title, on numerous occasions. Vee chose Alex for reasons that are still apparent to her. He was smart, ambitious, a dignified drinker, a great kisser. He could give her what she’d always known, forever. He was like home. She liked home. Why not be like Rosemary, or her mother, and be content?
Could it be so easy? As if in answer, Alex salivates audibly. For a moment, just by standing here, she has relieved his fear. It should make her glad, or proud. It does, in part. His hormonal response dominates him, and she dominates his hormonal response. But in another part, a drawer deep inside, Vee vibrates with anger, and something harsher: she hates that her power has nothing, really, to do with her; hates that it’s a passive, humiliating power; hates that she uses it anyway.
Coldly, she says, “Hand me a towel.”
Alex’s spell is broken. He obeys, then goes to check on the party, leaving Vee staring at herself in the mirror. She drops the towel and looks at her white breasts, her flat stomach, her thick whorls of pubic hair. The hair is dark now but will fluff out a reddish blond when dry, the same as the hair on her head. Her waist is a little thick, her hips a little narrow, the overall shape a little straight, boyish. The longer she looks the plainer she appears—a body, made of the requisite parts, each with its own function. She sees one hip bone, and another; two fleshy knee joints; two feet with their ten toes. From the knuckle of each toe, she sees, grow a few wisps of hair, like grass from a hillock. The wisps of toe hair match her pubic hair, which matches her head hair and her armpit hair, and all of that probably matches her nose and ear hair, though she has never bothered to investigate.
Vee tilts her head back to see if she can see inside her own nostrils. This behavior should repulse her, she knows. But she finds it oddly comforting: herself before the mirror, divided into crude parts, inspecting herself with dispassion—perhaps because none of what she sees in the mirror at this moment correlates with sex, and sexiness, and all the problems they cause.
She’s working to find the right nose-to-mirror angle when a crash returns her to the thing she’s meant to be doing. A tray of silverware, from the sound of it.
She moves quickly
