“Get up,” he says.
“I’m almost done,” she says.
“Then I’ll get down.”
She smiles, understanding. “Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
“It’s almost five o’clock.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Our guests are …”
“Not for a while yet.”
He drops behind her and starts to unbutton her jeans.
“Alex—”
“Vee …”
“Alex.” She flips over and wriggles backward. “Stop. I forgot my pill yesterday.”
He walks on his knees to her, laughing. “What pill?”
“Sh.” She eye-points toward the door.
He grins and stage-whispers: “What pill?”
“The Pill.”
She expects him to stand, walk out, go cold on her as he does when he’s insulted, as her father used to do to her mother and her grandfather to her grandmother. They will finish the conversation tomorrow, after the party has been a success. But Alex is on a roll. He is the youngest senator in the US Congress, if not elected exactly—instead appointed by the governor after Senator Winthrop died—then popular, and deemed likely to win his seat legitimately next year, assuming no twists like Suitcase Man standing against him. Today he aced his first high-profile press conference, at which Ted Kennedy announced he’ll cosponsor a bill that Alex introduced, then he left the Hill nearly skipping and walked the four miles home, paying homage to Mr. Lincoln on the way. He is on fire, on pace to rise. He pushes Vee back onto the floor, holds her by the wrists, and presses a knee between her legs. In her ear he breathes: “I thought we were going to make babies.”
Feet shuffle outside the door. Vee nods. A twinge of heat splits beneath his knee—a kind of revving she can’t control. Words spin uselessly in her gut—Of course, just maybe not yet—words she has managed to say only to a doctor, and even then her eyes averted, her face blazing. This was a few months ago, when Alex stopped using condoms. They waited years longer than most of her friends because of his political ambitions, but now, as far as Alex knows, they are no longer waiting. Vee is twenty-eight, thinking of waiting until twenty-nine, maybe thirty, not for any particular reason, nothing she can argue for, even to herself, only a want, to wait, a barking inside: Wait!
In her ear: “Weren’t we going to make babies? Wipe up their spit with this towel? Maybe you’d sew the ends up a little, make it nice for them, yeah?”
The caterers’ shuffling grows louder. In the sweetest, sexiest voice Vee can conjure she says, “Let’s reconvene tonight,” but already Alex is loosening his belt, then Vee’s back hits the floor and he is inside her, and she doesn’t fight him, not because within her in some squishy feminine core she is all right with having a baby (she isn’t) and not because she knows her fighting him wouldn’t matter (spousal rape—if that’s even what this is—being legal in those days) but because his not listening to her, his force, turns her on. She will hate herself for this fact as soon as it’s over. She will think how ashamed she would be to admit such a thing to the women’s group she has been attending once a month. But for now, her pleasure grows, she a caught thing, and now, because at the last meeting of the group a radical thing took place, a lesson in female orgasm, now, once Alex is done, she makes him do what she learned to do herself: she grabs his hand and guides him into place. He looks quizzical. She repositions his fingers. Like this, she thinks at him. Like that. She watches his confusion turn into annoyance but refuses to stop—instead she moves his hand faster and turns her face to the side so she won’t have to look at him. In his place, though, filling her vision, is the towel, with its faded stripes and tangle of threads. Goddamnit, I’ll sew it! she thinks and closes her eyes. She must concentrate. But girls’ voices trill in her head, a thing they used to say at Wellesley, Vee included, feigning courage and pep: You can’t be forced if you don’t resist! Other voices hiss back, the women’s-group women: Tsssk. Vee shakes her head and returns to Alex’s hand, and to the point between her legs, but as her pulse starts to quicken and her thoughts relax, the point is also a sewing needle, its eye glinting in the sew-on-the-go box her grandmother gave her when she turned ten, its point shoved deep inside a pink foam cushion in the box, the box shoved deep inside Vee’s stocking drawer, unopened for years. Vee has softened on Alex’s hand—she has lost her channel. If she loses, he wins. Again, she shuts her eyes. Alex is giving off an impatient heat but she steals it and drives his hand until at last the heat flares and she is satisfied. Then she pushes him out of the kitchen, wipes up his mess with the towel, and lets the help back in.
SUSA
ESTHER
The Shapely and Beautiful Maiden
The camp is as you imagine—which is not to say that it is as it was. Heat and sand and rock. Bare feet. Brown tents. Sand. What grass grew in the low swells has been ripped up and woven into pallets. A damp, dark track shows the way to and from the river, trampled to a sheen by heels and hooves. They are hundreds, but not a thousand. They drain the red river mud to clay, bake the clay into brick, use the bricks to mark their fire pits. They attempted a wall once but gave up within a day, understanding that if it could save them, it could also be their trap. So their only wall is the one they threw the camp up against when they first arrived: the outermost palace wall, a tree-high, tongue-pink slab of boundary that curves away infinitely—like any circle—in both directions.
In summer, when the sun is so hot a pebble can burst into flame and the far sands send up smoke, they wake and begin to walk. They walk slowly, following the palace wall and its shade. They carry their water and wares and infants, working as they walk, returning, by sundown, to where they began. Each time a crude place is left and returned to it appears a little less crude. In this way the camp begins to settle in their bones, not as home—they are not that naïve—but as a place they will stay for however long they can.
Some hunt, while others grow fruit in groves a day’s distance away. A few dozen keep sheep, at a farther distance. Most stay in the camp, making things out of the clay, which they sell at the city market; a select few, like one woman who makes necklaces out of bird and fox and mole bones, sell to the palace. A small group makes magic, but it is crude magic—each time they are banished from a place, their strength is diluted, so that the granddaughter of a woman who could grow a shade tree in a month now takes six times as long. And so on. This generation can make two yolks grow in one egg, they can spin twine out of sand and water, they can summon a goblin from his hole in the river.
The goblin is not a sure bet. Sometimes he spits up true Persian coins and sometimes he spits up counterfeit, and it takes a sharp eye to know which is which. But he answers their summons and allows them to play master and what choice do they have? He is their goblin. They bury the counterfeit in the sand.
They have been here for decades, some say a century. Sometimes they send two boys to climb up the wall and tie a tarp to the jagged fort. The boys throw the tarp down and the people, arms raised, walk backward until the tarp’s limit. The tarp is many tarps sewn together. They stake it into the sand with daggers and twine and luxuriate in their pitch of darkness until a palace guard severs the boys’ knots and throws down the tarp. Often this occurs within minutes, but occasionally they get a few hours of reprieve. Years ago, when a new king and queen were named and the guards fell over, sick with wine, the people remained in the tarp’s shadow a full week.