The Book of V.

driven the five hours down without stopping, and burst into the apartment warning of regret. And boredom! she cried. Children are more boring than you can imagine, even ones you love! Lily had been caught wearing a robe and flipping through wallpaper samples for the kids’ room—now that they were having a second and she was not going to be a professor, she had decided wallpaper was called for. It was 2:00 p.m. on a weekday. It’s 2:00 p.m. on a weekday! her mother had pointed out. But this was when Lily was fully absorbed in the new pleasure of flipping through wallpaper samples and not looking for jobs or writing unctuous emails to former advisors. More than pleasure, she felt relief, a relief so vast it seemed to alter the color of things in her path: the begonias halfway up Montgomery Place turned a hot, saturated pink; a cup of coffee swimming with cream was almost perverse in its beauty. It was the no longer trying so hard that drove her in those early days to near ecstasy; it was the decision to simply be a very pregnant woman that gave her the confidence that afternoon to answer her mother with a blasé shrug and offer her a sandwich of meats and condiments that Lily had procured earlier from three different shops on a long, slow, beautiful walk past signs promising designed + crafted objects, as if there were another possibility, even as her mother was frantically driving south. Now, as she leans into her kitchen counter and waits for her brother’s next words, thinking of that dismissive shrug makes Lily want to fall at her mother’s feet.

Lionel says, “It’s not an emergency, but things can go bad quickly …” and the tenderness of his parsing—for her sake, she knows, smoothing the way for his baby sister—deepens Lily’s despair. “I know,” she says, trying to stop him, but he goes on, “All those cigarettes she smoked, after Dad left …” so that Lily has to say it again: “I know. I remember. She smokes now, you know. Two a day. First thing in the morning and after dinner each night. She never stopped.” Her voice is sharp. Lionel stops talking. Lily is seized by a vertiginous swaying. Lowering herself to sit against the dishwasher, she squeezes her eyes shut until she can speak. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. A teary inhale comes from Lionel and without effort Lily matches it. For a while they breathe their ragged breaths together. Then they begin to make their plans.

 SUSAESTHER

Her Stunning Marriage

A smaller room. A bedchamber, dripping with silks, dim, the drapes drawn. A bed. Esther wakes here, unsure whether she has fainted or been drugged. She touches herself. Everything is where it was, sash tied, robe closed, string tied around her hair. She rolls to sitting and a mirror confirms: nothing has been done to her. There is a door. She moves toward it.

“Esther.”

She turns, wishing she had not sat up. She should have feigned sleep, meditated until she had a plan, a map in her mind: escape. The man is sitting in the room’s far corner, on a stool—a very short stool. His voice is not what she would have expected. It’s a soft voice, for a man, and produces, in concert with the tiny stool, a disorienting impression. Esther wonders—hopefully, desperately—if she was right when she first saw him, on the stage, if maybe this man is not the king but some kind of performer. However insane this line of thinking may be, it’s hardly more insane than the reality she’s being asked to believe: that the king of Persia has just spoken her name. That he has chosen her to be his queen.

The man, still watching her, rests his head on the wall behind him. The wall is covered in reeds, Esther sees, reeds like the ones in the river by the camp, except these have been dipped in gold, so that the whole wall appears like the side of a glintfish the moment it’s hit by the sun. If he were a performer, she thinks, he would not rest his head on such a wall. He wouldn’t allow his head to rock slightly, as he does now, as if giving himself a scratch.

And so her insane hope falls out her feet, replaced by a surge of fear and heat that rises through her so forcefully she begins to shiver. The king’s hand is reaching for the wine bottle. The king’s voice is saying, “Come.” Esther is walking as slowly as possible, drawing out her chance to think. There must be a solution. But what? She thinks of stories she knows in which impossible things take place. Sarah. Eve. Isaac. Dinah. Her father told her these and all the other stories until she could tell them back to him. They had to be told to be remembered, he said. They had to be remembered so you knew how to live. But Esther, beholding the dwindling distance between her and the king, doesn’t see how they can help her now. The story she is living is nothing she has heard. In this story, the king of Persia is carefully, perhaps ceremoniously, filling two goblets: one for him, one for her. In this story, she takes one and realizes that it, too, like the stool and the throne, is undersized, meant to make him appear larger than he is. She wonders if he will stand now, to welcome her, and then, when he does not stand, she wonders if this peculiarity could work to her advantage—if the king is so determined to maintain the aggrandizing artifice of his set pieces that she could run now and he would not leap up to catch her.

The king lifts his glass to her and waits. What would he do if she turned and fled? His voice is soft, she thinks, but he banished his queen. He banished his queen, but he is