Is it possible that Lily should try harder? She did not take the tenure-track job, after all. She took this. Is it possible that the line she seems to have drawn—lingerie, yes; utter attentiveness to Adam’s palate, no—should go? Vira, and perhaps Lily’s mother, would say no. Vira would say Adam wants Lily to fulfill some dream he has of being a man coming home to a wife and family—a dream a man like Adam is not allowed to talk about in 2016—but that he also wants Lily to resist his wanting this. He wants her to go further than sneering, as she did about the olives; he wants her to take a stand, say No, go screw yourself, and while you’re at it, uncure this! That’s what Vira would do. Based on what went unsaid in Adam’s stories—back when he used to talk about Vira—resistance was his first wife’s main mode of turning him on. And she did turn him on, Lily thinks, in a way Lily never has. There was an energy to that marriage, an electric fence between them, charged by their fights.
Between Adam and Lily, there is something else.
And no, not just the children.
Another kind of fence shared, this one around them. A determination to be people who stay.
Also, and related: comfort.
Maybe Adam wants everything. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this. He wants Lily to behave like she’s married to a deputy director and he wants her to skewer him for his shriveled idealism. He wants her to tidy herself with a razor and he wants a full bush. He wants her to be Lily and Vira at once.
Asleep now, on his back, lit by the city’s perpetual glow, he appears peaceful. With each breath, his nostrils whistle; the shock of hair at his brow quivers. An old scar on his cheek glistens. It’s from his childhood, obtained during a sandbox altercation with a shovel, and usually it’s invisible, or at least blends in with other wear, but from where Lily lies at this moment it appears as if still wet. She nudges him, so that he rolls away from her, and wraps her arm around him. She noses his smooth back, digs her feet under his warm calves. She is glad that they are hairy and that his back is not, and glad that he is always willing in the morning to stay a few minutes late while she runs down to get the laundry. She won’t have to haul the girls down with her, fighting about who gets to clean the lint screens. Her toes are warm, and deep within she is warm, and Adam’s back is smooth and smells good and she is glad for all of this, and grateful. She can continue living the life she already has. Second wife. Mother. Seamstress in training. Esther.
As her eyes close, Lily does not think about the fact that Esther is an orphan. She hasn’t once thought of it—there are too many orphaned heroines for their orphanness to be notable—let alone wondered what it might mean for her. When her phone rings in the kitchen, she decides to wait it out, then, thinking of the shrill, penetrating beep that will follow once whoever is calling her at 11:30 has left a message, she scuffs down the hall and grabs her phone to switch it to vibrate. But it’s her brother Lionel calling, her oldest brother, who almost never calls and always texts beforehand when he does. “Li?” she says, instantly understanding, so that when he says, “Sorry to wake you, I just got a call from Mom,” she is already thinking about driving north tomorrow, to her mother, who must be dying. Never mind that their mother lives in Lily’s city now, a twenty-minute walk away, in Prospect Heights. Years ago, when Ruth still lived in Massachusetts and Lily told her she hadn’t gotten the job and was quitting academia, her mother had hung up, 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.
SUSA
ESTHER
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.