Philip takes his time washing the paring knife and the cutting board, then drying both. Vee has never seen Alex wash anything, so though she’s impatient for Philip to speak, she is also fascinated. Philip swings the dish towel over his shoulder and it’s as if he has performed a kind of dance—that’s how impressed Vee is, despite herself. He puts each item away, opens the refrigerator, and, with his back to her, says, “You should go home.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s time. I got a call today, at the office.”
“From?” She wonders if the reporters have at last tracked her down, wonders why they continue to bother—are the Enquirer and its lookalikes really so short on copy?
“Your husband,” he says.
Vee waits.
“He wants you back.”
Vee’s elbows sink to the counter. She is shocked by the relief that floods her.
“He says to tell you his chief of staff … Harold? Humbert? … doesn’t want him calling. He doesn’t want you to go back yet, he thinks it will make him appear weak. These people.” He shakes his head. “You people.”
Vee could be insulted but focuses on her relief. Why not? this relieved part of her asks. Why not go back? Why not shrug it all off, as she might have done in the first place, go along with his request and get back to her life? This would be in keeping with a string of things she has argued to herself before: If she had stripped that night, it would not have killed her. She would still be in her marriage. She would not be so confused. Maybe they assumed she would do it because it was what she should have done. Etc.
She thinks of the house in the woods, the man above her, their urgent coupling. A thrill pulses in her wrists, and she imagines going back to Alex with her knowledge of this thrill, the secret of this afternoon. She imagines it would help, getting to have that and keep it. She used to be above him, at least in the ways a woman could be above a man. She was the one with the money, the one with the background. Then he flipped it all inside out. He doesn’t need her background anymore; he is in the house they bought with her money; even if she goes back, she will have been a nutty, drug-addicted probable lesbian. But to have made him a cuckold … it would be something.
“You should go back.”
Philip can’t know that Vee has been thinking the same thing, or that his saying it out loud, commanding her, has the opposite of his desired effect. She feels herself harden, feels her back rise into a line. Why should I listen to you? She does not say this, of course. He can still kick her out; she must not make him mad. Instead she picks the one remaining slice of apple off the counter, puts it in her mouth, and chews. She can’t go back, she knows. She couldn’t go along and she can’t go back. Yet she wants to be able to. This is the problem. It’s as if Vee herself—who Vee is, at her core, what her father and grandfather would have called her character, if she had been male—has not caught up with the life she’s meant to live. She has always had questions, granted, niggles of ambivalence that kept her from being as good as Rosemary or her mother: her little secret with the Pill, her women’s-group habit. But she never wanted to cause trouble. She wanted to go along—certainly it’s true that she wanted to want to go along. That night at the women’s party, remember? She decided she was ready to give up the women’s group, decided they were ugly hippies and that she was done with them and ready to claim her place, her power, as one of the wives. But then, well, she had not gone along. She had not stripped. She had caused a great deal of trouble. And now, it seems, she is a woman who causes trouble.
She swallows what’s left of the apple’s pulp, looking not at Philip but out the sliding glass door to the yard, where the boys are running and throwing leaves in the near dark. Where is the girl?
“It’s getting cold out there,” she says.
Philip sets a pot on the stove.
“I need a little more time,” she says.
“We’ve given you time.”
“I have to figure some things out.”
“It’s not good for Rosemary.” Philip is doing nothing now but looking at her. “Having you here. She’s got the pregnancy. The kids.” Me, he adds with his eyes.
“Did you tell her about the call?”
“Not yet.”
Vee watches him. Her robe has loosened slightly, but she doesn’t clutch at it now. She simply stands there, looking at him as he looks at her, watching as his eyes drop, knowing what she’s doing even as she didn’t intend it. Half a minute passes. Then the door slides open and the kitchen fills with cold and shouts, the kids throwing off their hats, Philip ordering them to pick them up, and Vee slips out. Her robe is tightly wrapped again by the time she reaches the stairs. But Rosemary, who is sitting on the third step to take off her shoes, notices the fact of it—she scans Vee from top to bottom before returning her gaze to her shoes. Vee could explain. But to explain would sound like a defense, which would suggest she’s done something that needs defending. So she kisses the top of Rosemary’s head, says, “Welcome home,” and goes around her and up the stairs, to change.
* * *
Later that evening, after the children are in bed and Philip is in his office at the back of the house, Vee and Rosemary sit on the living room couch. Vee drinks bourbon. Rosemary drinks wine. She says the doctor told her no hard alcohol. And no more cigarettes.
“Why?”
Rosemary shrugs. Her feet are pulled up under her, swallowed by a flannel nightgown that makes her appear at once like a little girl and a much older woman. She looks very tired.
“Was it just a routine visit?”
“I think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve been spotting a little.”
“Like, getting your period?”
“No. Just a little spotting. It comes and goes,” Rosemary says again, with maybe a hint of impatience, and for a moment Vee wonders if what Philip said to her in the kitchen, about how Vee isn’t good for Rosemary, is something Rosemary said, to Philip. She wonders if Rosemary is thinking about the robe. But then Rosemary takes a long sip of wine and says, pointing at Vee’s pack of Raleighs on the coffee table, “You can smoke. I don’t mind. I like the smell,” and Vee relaxes.
She drags the pack toward herself with a socked foot. “Are you worried?” she asks.
“There’s not much use in worrying. Right? He said bed rest might help. But I’m not doing that.”
“Are you going to tell Philip?”
“What.”
“What the doctor said.”
“No.”
Vee lights a cigarette.
“But I can’t be intimate,” Rosemary says. “And I have to tell him that. According to the doctor.”
“Which part is according to the doctor?”
“Both. I mean, he hasn’t come near me in a month. So it may not be necessary to tell him.”
Vee nods. She waits. Maybe this is when Rosemary begins to talk. Certainly it’s not turning out to be the night for Vee to tell Rosemary about the lumberjack man, as she’d planned to. But Rosemary can tell Vee about her marriage. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, Vee can tell.