Excerpt from The Book of V. by Anna Solomon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Among these men was one, Senator Alexander Kent of Rhode Island, who gave no fewer than five parties in one month, displaying his home, his wife, and his good taste in scotch. To the fifth party, which would be his last for a very long time, Senator Kent invited not only those colleagues and donors he counted among his friends but also one man who was obscure in the capital but famous in Rhode Island for the suitcase-manufacturing empire his family had built. Kent invited this man to address a quickly spreading rumor he hoped to learn was untrue: that Suitcase Man was planning to endorse Kent's opponent in the following year's election.

And so to the fifth party the senator added a live band, Rhode Island scallops and littleneck clams on the half shell, as well as a conceptual twist: a second, concurrent party upstairs, for the women only. His reasoning, as he told it to his wife, was that such an arrangement would feel at once traditional yet fresh, old yet new, comfortable yet enticing, and would give him a chance to talk plainly to Suitcase Man. His other reasoning he did not tell his wife: it happened that once upon another time, when Kent had still been called by his father's name, O'Kearney, of County Offaly across the ocean, he had known Suitcase Man's wife.

Senator Kent's wife, Vee—born Vivian Barr, daughter of the late Senator Barr of Massachusetts and granddaughter to Governor Fitch of Connecticut, as well as great-granddaughter to a soft-spoken but effective suffragette, all of whom, though dead, would be helping to pay for the party—protested: Weren't separate events antithetical to the spirit of the Equal Rights Amendment, which Rhode Island ratified one year ago and which Senator Kent claims in his official platform to support?

A sound enough question. The senator had responded by giving her a foot massage, a rare offering, and Vee had yielded.

And so in the year 1973, on the second day of November, a day as mild as June, Senator Kent returns from his affairs of state to find the house crawling with caterers and cleaners, bartenders and a flower arranger, and, deeper still, in the kitchen—all the old, noble town houses of Georgetown had their kitchens in the deep, dark backs—his wife, on her hands and knees, working at a spill with a ragged beach towel.

It is the towel, striped red and blue and white like a barber pole, faded and frayed yet still festive, the towel he had in his dorm room when they first met and which they kept for sentimental reasons and continue to use for any and all things unclean. The senator loves this towel. He steps on it now, the toe of his shoe grazing his wife's hand. "Excuse us," he says to the caterers rushing around, and they jump quick as sand fleas and are gone.

He locks the swinging door, hook to eye.

"Why hello," he says.

She looks up at him slowly, bangs in her eyes, blouse hanging open to reveal the shadows of her bra.

And though everything about the moment—the towel, the bra, the reluctant, obscured gaze—seems to him a calculation, her end goal being his seduction, in fact Vee moves slowly because she is tired from a day of list checking and directing and emptying the second floor of personal effects for the women's party that she doesn't want to give in the first place; and her bangs are in her eyes because she still needs to shower; and her blouse hangs open because it is not a blouse at all—that is only what he sees—but a stretched-out T-shirt from a Jefferson Airplane concert Vee went to with her girlfriends before she and Kent got serious.

"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."

Excerpted from The Book of V. by Anna Solomon. Copyright © 2020 by Anna Solomon. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.