“Well,” Vee says. “It was lovely talking with you—”
“The ERA isn’t much of a commitment, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“The ERA. It’s not much of a commitment.” The woman enunciates as if trying to cut air with her teeth, and Vee sees that what she took for skepticism is hostility.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vee says. “It’s a constitutional amendment.”
“Sure. A piece of paper.”
Vee is unprepared. All the arguments she’s listened to garble. She watches White Pantsuit sliding down the wall and Haskell’s wife moving closer and then they’re kissing. Vee is almost certain, in the aftermath, that it was a kiss. It was brief. It couldn’t be called passionate. But it wasn’t merely salutary either. Their lips touched. Their bodies were very close. They remain very close. Vee’s blood thumps. Suitcase Wife waits with her tiny glare. You’re the hostess, Vee reminds herself. You can walk away. “Excuse me—”
The woman grabs her arm. “Put it this way: your husband—back when we met? Back when we knew each other?” Her grip tightens. “He was not a gentleman.”
How could Vee know that downstairs, the senator is in a corner with the president of the suitcase manufacturing company, sweating? He has given the man cigars, and kept his glass full of thirty-year Glenlivet, and snapped numerous times for one of the circulating golden-haired girls to bring more scallops. He’s been chatting him up for almost an hour, but still the man, Mark Fiorelli, is cold, barely speaking. Alex is superior to him in every way: trim where Fiorelli’s gone soft under his suit; half-WASP, half-Irish where Fiorelli is half-Irish, half-Italian; a member of the United States Senate where Fiorelli’s greatest claim to fame is as one-time president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. Smallest state in the nation, and he’s going bald in that inarguably pitiful way where the top goes first, before the bangs even, so that he’s looking a little like a monk. And yet it’s Alex who’s throwing adulations at the guy as if suitcases were life-saving drugs, as if the man’s two hundred employees produced their own GDP. He hates how desperate he sounds. He never lets himself sound desperate. Even when Vee told him she’s on the Pill, he didn’t let her see his surprise. He was hurt, sure, but where did that get you? Get caught up in feelings and you forget to act, forget the point is what you’re going to do about it.
He tries a new tactic. “Have you thought about expanding? Know some of those old mill buildings up in Pawtucket? I can’t promise free, but I could definitely talk with—”
“Let’s be straight, why don’t we.” Fiorelli has come alive. His jowls light up red, his eyes narrow. He places a palm on Alex’s chest. Alex flicks it off. Fiorelli puts it back. “You screwed my wife,” he says.
Alex’s lungs feel like they’re departing his body. Why did he imagine the guy’s anger was about something else? But who told her husband that sort of thing? “I don’t—”
“And if you ask her, she’ll tell you it wasn’t what she wanted.”
One of the girls stops with a tray, imploring, and Alex has the urge to hit her. They are not gorgeous, not up close. This one is pancaked. She had acne as a kid. Alex shakes his head and she is gone. He doesn’t remember Fiorelli’s wife not wanting it. Blond, petite, good nails. Diane. Wasn’t it what she wanted? She wasn’t half as pretty as Vee, wasn’t even nice. But Vee wasn’t around yet. They met at a hotel, he thinks. Doesn’t that mean she wanted it?
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Hey.” Fiorelli’s in his face now, a finger tapping Alex’s nose. “Enough with the bullshit. I never got involved in politics before. My old man didn’t, his old man didn’t. Not our place. Now I’m involved. People wonder what I’m after, what’s my angle. My angle is: I don’t like you.”
Upstairs, more women have started to dance. One sits on the knee of the saxophonist. Vee lounges on the sofa. More food has been brought up, at her request, and her stomach is happy now, full of cocktail shrimp and cheese puffs. Out one corner of her eye she watches Suitcase Wife’s shoes, but Vee refuses to look up. She has no idea what the woman is so hung up about. Not a gentleman. What did Alex do, stick his fingers up her ass? Choke her a little as she sucked him off? Vee doubts it’s anything he hasn’t done to her. If she isn’t always willing, she usually gets into it. More worrisome is what the whole mess might mean for Alex.
Vee smokes a cigarette, drinks another gin and tonic, and talks about nothing with Congressman Flint’s wife. Only when Alex’s chief of staff kneels on the floor next to her and leans in close does she realize a man has entered the room.
“Mrs. Kent?” His voice is low.
Vee finds herself pinching his cheek. “Yes, Hump?” At thirty, he is her senior, but so cute, she thinks suddenly. A towhead. Freckles. So cute! Hump. Short for Humphrey Sumner III.
“Mrs. Kent, the senator has requested your presence.”
Vee laughs. “So formal!”
“That’s what he told me to say.”
“He wants all of us, I presuuuume?” Her accent is vaguely British. She giggles. “All the madames?”
“Only you, Mrs. Kent.”
She hands him her cigarette. “Well!” she says, and heaves herself up off the couch. She rocks for a moment, lightheaded, then sees Suitcase Wife staring at her and pulls herself straight. “It does make one curious,” she hears herself say. And then, “Well,” and again, “Well,” as her grandmother used to say. Well well well, her grandmother said, as she moved around the house making the beds, or preparing supper, or—as she got older—looking for something she was ashamed of having lost. Well, like a verbal banister. Vee’s mother achieved the same effect by humming: hummm as she bent for carrots from the refrigerator, hummm
