Life, though, is not as difficult as the voice. And the voice is not as difficult as the words. Can a bird utter human words? It takes Esther two months to figure out a method. By the time she does, by the time she has filled the bird with sounds and pulled them out as forms—Esther says, Go—she knows she is carrying another child, but she is so elated by and focused on her work, she barely notices. If she has trained it correctly, the bird will fly directly to Nadav’s mother, because she is the one it already knows and because Esther has deemed her, after Itz—who may be inaccessible, hiding in the tent—the one most likely to listen to a talking bird. Esther fine-tunes the bird’s Hebrew until it cannot be misheard. Esther says, Go. Esther says, Far. All that’s left is for her to teach it the smells that will lead it to the camp.
GLOUCESTER, MAVEE
Other People’s Husbands
Every afternoon for twenty-nine afternoons, Vee walks up the hill and sleeps with the man in the woods. He is not a lumberjack or quarryman, as his clothing and truck first suggested, but an architecture student at Harvard taking time off to “investigate” himself. His name is Benjamin, and Vee has fallen in love with his house. She loves the plain wood of the walls and the silence of the sunlight that falls through the large windows. She loves that they are new windows, not divided into panes like all the windows Vee has ever lived behind but plain faced and unfussy, and she loves that not everything here is new. Benjamin’s family has owned the land for centuries; they claimed it when Dogtown was still an active settlement, after the Indians were pushed out and before the place was abandoned to witches and feral animals. There is history here and there are modern windows and all of it makes Vee feel as if she is at once regaining something from her own past while also wriggling loose from its hold. For the first time in her life she has experienced pangs of actual desire to make house, and because she and Benjamin are alone, unwatched, with no one to see or remark or expect, this desire does not seem suspect; it does not seem perhaps to be someone else’s desire. With Alex, anything she did was not merely something she did but something she did to confirm or dispel an idea of herself. In Benjamin’s house, she moves freely between activities without self-consciousness, chopping onions, or poring over his plans for a vegetable garden with genuine interest, or making love, or reading on the window seat or in his bed. Benjamin does not interrupt her, as Alex did, as if her reading were merely a placeholder as she awaited his next communication, and after she closes a book, Benjamin asks her to tell him about it. About herself, he asks little. Vee has told him only that she is recently divorced, which she considers a lie only in a technical sense, and living with a friend nearby. And Benjamin is fine with this; Benjamin calls himself a “counterstructural.” God is he glad, he says, not to be in Cambridge now. Vee agrees. She went with Rosemary to the Jewish consciousness raising group in Cambridge and is glad not to be there now. She might be done with cities altogether, she sometimes thinks. Which is yet another reason to love Benjamin’s house in the woods.
On the thirtieth day, Vee spends the night, and on the thirty-first, she does not go back to Rosemary’s. Instead, she drives Benjamin’s truck into town and returns with bread; cheese; two bottles of wine; a bone for Georgina, Benjamin’s dog; and a palpitation beneath her sternum. She plans to stay the night again and, tomorrow, to ask Benjamin if she can move in with him.
The next afternoon, after a shower, together in their underwear—for Benjamin has overfed the woodstove—they set the kitchen table and sit down before their second picnic. A moment spreads out in which Vee cannot quite believe that this is real. To have lived that life on Dumbarton Street with her vanity and Senator Kent and now to be here, wearing almost nothing, her stomach folded in the open, across from this lanky, weathered-faced, pale-chested man who always waits for her to speak, in a house without a single window covering, is almost too great a transformation to bear. She is happy, however unknown the future might be. The palpitation begins again. She has dithered over the phrasing—for a time? or for a while? She knows she must not frame her question as a need, though it is in fact the case that she needs a place to live. The room she has been sleeping in is slated to become a nursery to Rosemary’s new baby, and though Rosemary is too polite to say that she would like Vee out in advance of her due date, she has begun putting up wallpaper samples on the wall behind Vee’s bed. Living in Benjamin’s house would mean being close enough to Rosemary but not in her way, and away from Philip who, since the day in the kitchen when she stood with her robe a little too loose, has stopped hectoring Vee to leave but now regularly stares at her breasts. Rosemary, Vee believes, must see this. She is not stupid. But does she also see how Vee waits a beat, lets him get his look, before turning away? And if she
