Vee waits until they have emptied their first glasses. She reaches across the table to wipe a bit of brie from his lip, then, catching his smile at being babied, she dives in. “I’ve been thinking … maybe I could move in?”
For a time, she tells herself. Don’t scare him. But she can’t add the words. Benjamin is looking at her with a new expression, his eyes tense at their corners, his mouth pitched at a hard angle.
She has prepared for him to hesitate, of course. He has come here to live alone, away from bricks and crits and people. And he won’t want to ruin the charge between them, which relies at least in part on their strangeness to each other—they have yet to exchange even their last names. But Vee has an answer for both of these problems. For the first, she planned to inform him that even Thoreau depended on his mother and sister to do things like his laundry, and for the second to argue that they can have it both ways, that she, at least, does not need to know anything more about him. All she wants is to live forever in a new house on old land with a man named Benjamin and a dog named Georgina as a woman named Vee without any titles or papers marking them.
But this look he is giving her is not about living alone, or about sex.
“I’m married,” he says quietly. “Back in Cambridge.”
It takes Vee a full minute before she can talk. By then she is scavenging around the bed for her clothes as Benjamin follows and dodges her at once, apologizing and trying to convince her not to go.
“Get away,” she says. “Please get away from me.”
“I’m taking some time off,” he says. “But I can’t stay here forever. I have a son.”
Vee would cover her ears if she could but she must pull on her dress, her coat, her hat. She stuffs her stockings into her bag and her bare feet into her boots. “Nothing has to change,” Benjamin says, and she remembers him musing just yesterday about how this land wasn’t his family’s to claim, how it belonged to the Indians and how someday there would be proper reparations made, remembers how even as he said this he rested back in his bed, clearly unprepared to go anywhere or give anything up. She runs, for the second and last time, away from the beautiful house.
An hour or so later, Vee opens Rosemary’s front door as silently as possible. She would prefer to stay outside forever, walk the miles to the nearest coffee shop, walk until she reaches another planet, but she is without scarf or gloves, both of which she left at Benjamin’s in her rush to flee, and her bare feet feel close to frostbite inside her boots. She doesn’t want to see Rosemary, not yet. She has told her about a man named Benjamin up in the woods, told her enough to make Rosemary smile, and though Rosemary has not asked for more—Rosemary has been distracted, Rosemary has seemed more and more often not quite herself—she knows enough that Vee cannot now tell her that Benjamin has a wife and child. Vee is not a woman who sleeps with married men.
Yet she is, apparently.
She hears the children playing outside, on the other side of the house.
She will slip upstairs, lie down, pull herself together.
“Vivian.”
It’s Philip calling her, as no one calls her.
“Just a minute,” she calls, her voice shaking. She bends to untie her boots, a process mercifully slowed by her numb fingers, so that by the time she is following Philip’s voice into the living room she has managed to take a deep breath. Her chest vibrates painfully, and she realizes, as she enters the room to find Philip lying on the couch with one forearm flung across his eyes, that what she is, more than angry, is hurt. She and Benjamin joked a few times about both being on the lam, but now it turns out he really is, of his own choosing—Vee is alone in having been sent away.
“Are you okay?” It’s almost comical, hearing herself ask these words even as her body longs for a private place in which to cry. She tries not to look at him, in his wrinkled shirt, no tie, and gold-toe socks. She has never seen him without shoes on. Alarm sings in her ears, telling her there is danger here and her hurt must wait, though of course the danger is not unrelated to the hurt, the danger is the married man laid out before Vee, Vee who did not intend harm but harmed nevertheless. “You have to leave,” Philip says, his eyes still covered by his arm.
“Where’s Rosemary?”
“Not here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“This is my living room.”
“Yes?”
“So why must I be talking to you right now? Why must you be here? You’re not a good influence.”
“I …” Vee flounders, bewildered. “Do you mean the cigarettes? She hasn’t been smoking anymore. Hasn’t been drinking, either.”
“I mean you. Just you.”
“What are y—”
“You’re a slut. Where do you go, Mrs. Alexander Kent? When you leave here for hours at a time. For whole days now, apparently. Do you think I don’t know?”
Vee didn’t know that Philip knew, but now that she does, she thinks, Of course. “Do you think I don’t know about the cross?” she says. It’s the first insult she can think to hurl at him. Then, seeing his confusion: “They burned a cross on your lawn, Philip R. And apparently your wife didn’t even tell you. She protects you, and what do you do apart from some dishes like you’re the goddamned messiah incarnate and not just another jerk who stares at her friends’ tits and—”
“You have a way with words.”
“You think smut is hard to
