* * *
The mood shifts. Vee’s ribs ache for food. Her thoughts paddle around: If gin is to ecstasy as food is to joy as a baby would be to … Where have the golden boys gone? Some of the women are outright dancing now, but Vee can’t join in; she is too hungry, and maybe drunk, and starting to feel claustrophobic. She feels a cramp in her abdomen, close to her groin. Fear ripples through her. She knows what the woman said about Roe is true, knows two women who since January have ended pregnancies not in hotel rooms or in New York but in doctors’ offices nearby. One a congressman’s wife, one a woman from the women’s group. But legality is not the only problem for Vee. The problem is that Vee would not permit herself to do it. She has a husband, money, health, no children—she has no excuse. A glass breaks behind the bar and a golden boy comes running, but he holds no tray of food. Vee spins aimlessly. She stares at the boy’s ass as he prances away, feeling like she might pass out, and coaxes herself to remain upright with a promise: later tonight, when she’s sober, she can write to Rosemary and turn this evening into a tale.
“Hello.”
Vee smiles, then turns. Standing in front of her is the wife of the suitcase-company president, the man who might be Alex’s undoing. Vee smiles harder, horrified to find that she has forgotten the woman’s name. She and Alex rehearsed. Mark Fiorelli and his wife, so-and-so. She is tiny in a blue dress, her white-blond hair a shining helmet. Vee holds the little hand for a long beat, still empty on the name front, baring her teeth with what she hopes looks like warmth and not hunger. “Thank you so much for coming!” she cries.
“We wouldn’t have missed it,” the woman shouts back. “Congrats on the ERA!”
“Yes!” Vee cries, raising her glass. She clinks, and drinks, and tries to focus on the woman—who is attuned, evidently, to Alex’s platform—though in Vee’s peripheral vision she searches desperately for a golden boy with a tray of appetizers. “Yes! My husband is very committed to equality … He’s ready to go to the mat …” A tray of food floats by and Vee lunges. Quince tartlets. She grabs one, then another. “For women,” she continues, trying to talk, smile, and eat all at once. “You know. Ready to go to the mat for women.”
“Mmmmm,” says Suitcase Wife, and Vee feels a flush of anger. Why didn’t this tiny woman reintroduce herself? That’s what people do at these parties, say their names over and over. You assume people forget, assume they’re drunk. You play the game. This woman is playing some other game. Vee opens her mouth to ask about this woman’s family—she is 82 percent sure the suitcase man has three children, though it might be two—then thinks of a rule her mother used to have: Policy before person. She said if you asked people about their kids and dogs right off, they would call your bluff and think you insincere—you had to go straight for the gullet, reveal your agenda, to get them to trust that you weren’t merely politicking. It was a tactic of reverse psychology of which she was proud.
Vee beckons the boy with the tartlets—though another rule of her mother’s was never to eat at one’s own party—and says to Suitcase Wife, “I understand your husband is having second thoughts?”
The woman’s face seems to shrink as she looks at Vee. “I don’t think he had first thoughts.” She speaks more quietly now, so that Vee has to lean in close to hear. “There’s a very strong candidate, an up-and-comer from Westerly—”
“Sounds promising,” Vee says sharply as she grabs another tartlet. Dried up a little, she’s feeling more capable of thought. “What makes you think he can win?”
“He’ll win if my husband wants him to win.”
“I see.” Vee taps on a nearby golden boy and gestures for a napkin, using the moment of nonengagement to consider what is happening. Why is this woman threatening her like this? And if her husband wants to endorse Alex’s opponent, what is Vee supposed to do about it? Vee wipes her mouth slowly, stalling, taking in the room. White Pantsuit is leaning against a wall, talking with the wife of Congressman Haskell. The wife of the ambassador to the United Kingdom is shaking her cigarette at the wife of a UN guy. A golden boy is circling with another tray of drinks. Suitcase Wife is quiet for long enough that Vee thinks the conversation might be over. She begins thinking of how she’ll describe this exchange in her letter to Rosemary. She started out with that kind of sweetness you can’t tell is syrup till you’re stuck in it: “We wouldn’t have missed it! Goo!”
Then the woman says, without looking at Vee: “A long time ago, I knew your husband.”
“Okay.” Vee is not surprised. Alex is from Rhode Island; this woman is from Rhode Island. It’s a very small state. “Did you go to school together?”
“No.”
Vee waits. The woman looks elsewhere, blankly. They had some kind of fling, Vee thinks. Okay. It’s not news to her that Alex had girlfriends before he married her. It would not be particularly shocking to learn that he had a lover now. It would hurt—but she wouldn’t be able to pretend not to have known it came with this territory. Vee’s father had affairs. Her grandfather must have, too.
“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.