Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  The mood had rather abruptly shifted from the gaiety of the bar, the clanking of glasses, music, their drinking and general good cheer, and it felt suddenly as if they’d been on a date, and now that awkward moment that would decide if there would be a kiss, if the evening would continue, or if it would all just end right here.

  There was silence between them as there hadn’t been in hours. Sharon walked to the window, her original destination, and she stood at the side of it, gazing out over the Commons, her body silhouetted against the sky. Dennis watched her face in profile, that long nose reaching down, the static in her hair setting several frayed ends vertical. He imagined taking out his clarinet—something he hadn’t done since the kids were small—his own silhouette bending back, his instrument held high, set over the sky as he played.

  He made his way over to her, and Sharon watched in the glass as he came toward her, his body moving between the lights and the modern buildings, fractured through the branches of the leafless trees. The high from the drinks was already turning into an ache at the front of her head, and she felt overwhelmingly sad for what she had done. She would take it back if she could, take back everything that had come after the day she walked into LEAP! If she could, she’d return to the time when she and Dennis were first married, when the Jews and the blacks sat together, before Selma, before Kennedy was shot, before Vietnam. Everything was happy then, who cared that it was pathologically delusional? What had happened—to them, to the world—in between those two frames?

  “Dennis.” She turned toward him. “Darling, I’ve missed you.” She was sobbing when Dennis took her slowly and silently into his arms, and they stood for several moments embracing beneath the city lights.

  Dennis bent down to kiss away his wife’s tears, first the left eye, then the right, then the cheeks, wet and salty, down to the mouth his lips had not touched other than to peck hello and good-bye and good night for longer than he cared to remember. Her mouth was soft and wet with sadness, and it kissed him deeply, as if it were the first time she was discovering the taste of him.

  As they made their way to the bed—pulling back the comforter that neither trusted to have been cleaned, not even at the Ritz—Sharon imagined that what they were doing now erased what had been done before. Removing Dennis’s shirt and unbuttoning his pants, helping him step out of his briefs, then peeling her own jeans and shirt off and crawling into bed with him, she believed she could obliterate the memory of Elias, his body coarse and spent and enjoyed by many, in comparison to Dennis’s fleshy and pristine skin, which appeared less used. She had certainly slept with Dennis since she’d started up with Elias, but tonight as she crawled into her husband’s body, she felt as if she were going back into her casing, back home, returning to who she was when they’d first met, to that first weekend in Skatesville.

  Her past, the far past, rose to the surface, and as she wrapped a hand around Dennis, already erect, she thought so sadly of those heady days of sexual languor. She saw an open window, sun pouring in the late morning, that focused eastern light, an altogether different feel from the expansive light that fell over Los Angeles. The exquisiteness had even kept jittery Gloria quiet. There had been dinners, the two of them, just pasta and butter and some grated cheese and jelly jars of crappy red wine, and afterward they’d brought their glasses onto the porch and sat on the splintered wooden porch swing, her head in his lap, his fingers tracing her forehead and moving strands of hair from her face, slowly rocking, the trees heavy with the flapping of birds’ wings and the prospect of rain. Once a white-tailed deer had run up to the house and stopped suddenly, as if embarrassed. The deer had looked straight at them. Sharon had risen slowly, to face her, but she had quickly spooked, running off toward the mountains.

  And now as Dennis made his way into her, the two of them facing each other, Sharon saw both their past and the future, whose promise she’d forgotten somewhere in between shopping for farm-fresh produce, ordering minerals by phone, leaving business cards tastefully by the door of every catered affair, and fucking a homeless person. She imagined Dennis as an old man, his eyelids sagging as his father’s had, his fair skin, his mother’s legacy, wrinkling suddenly, one summer of too much sun at Rehoboth, and she imagined fitting into him this way still. This gave her what she had not felt for months now, which was relief.

  She had not realized when she’d marched into the first LEAP! training session that it was this, and not freedom, she was seeking. What was freedom anyway? She had marched for it and had picketed for it, and, yes, she had cooked for it, but what was it? She had not found relief in the arms of another man, nor had she found it on her own personal, if unfinished, journey. A crooked passage. Children, she thought now—still with a pang for Ben’s departure, the day she watched him throw that huge green duffel into the trunk of the Volvo without even a look back to the house they’d raised him in—they bring you closer, yes, but they also separate you. They bring your bodies together, then they insist on their separation. Children divide you, she thought now, though it was not a pleasant thought. Our children have divided us.

  Dennis was inside his wife, and her breasts were sealed to his chest, her legs pulled so tightly around him, her heels gripping his bottom, and he felt that he was going to come. Just like those times when he was still stunned by the warm, pillowy sensations of her body. He stopped for a moment and kissed her ear, then her neck, which made Sharon rock harder, the pressure in him welling. He sucked one nipple, then the other, and she groaned, moving harder against him, and Dennis loved his wife, he did not know how he had forsaken her, and he did not know how he had lived without that love. Perhaps leaving the country as often as possible was a way to alleviate its loss, but here it was before him, around him, and it was also in every memory they’d shared, their bodies young, and now aging, their children, they had children together, and their children would both be gone too, and it would be just them, back to when it had begun, and tonight, Sharon had chosen him. He had not felt his wife, the center of her, which he was touching now, for a long time, and she began to breathe heavily and he could feel her pulsing as she moaned into his shoulder, then finally, as if it were the first time, he had finally—finally!—broken through, he let himself go.

  “We should call the kids,” Sharon said. The curtains had remained flung open to the beckoning city, and the moon illuminated their luggage.

  “Whatever for?” Dennis asked, running his fingers along her forearm. Her hair stood on end and her flesh goose-bumped.

  “So they know where we are,” she said, sitting up. “They’re our kids.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “We always make them tell us where they are. Nice to return the favor.” Sharon reached for the phone and dialed Ben’s dorm room.

  “How egalitarian of you.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled. “And we should make a plan for having a meal together before leaving, don’t you think?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “I’m not going to ask. I’m just going to state it as fact.” Sharon bobbed her head decidedly.

  The phone rang—even Sharon had no illusions that her son would be there—and she got his machine. It was Arnie: You’ve reached Arnie and Benji! He seemed so thrilled to say their names together, which Sharon understood. We’re not here, so leave a message and maybe we’ll call you back!

  Sharon spoke clearly and distinctly into the phone. “Hope you had fun tonight, kids. Let’s have breakfast together before we head home, okay?” She hit her knee with her fist for not making the sentence imperative. Say what you mean and it will be, she thought. “We’ll be by before ten.” She also explained their change of plans and where they could be reached, just to provide an example of considerate behavior. “At the Ritz,” she said, trying not to giggle. “We decided to stay at the Ritz tonight.”

  They lay naked, Sharon sprawled across Dennis’s chest.

  “D, I’m so sorry,” she’d whispered after, and there it was. She had
not planned on saying it, and as it had slipped out, she hadn’t wondered at what her husband would do with it later. But she was sorry. She knew this was really the end with Elias. Somehow she had always kept it in the back of her mind that she could call him, that she might call him. That if she decided to go on to the next phase of her training, she would see him there again. Maybe he would leave PRISM and come back, a blade of grass singing between his teeth, his satchel on his back. But tonight she knew she was done with all of it.

  Dennis was grateful that she hadn’t said more, hadn’t reduced a stereotype into agonizing cliché by telling him, You’ve just been away so much or You didn’t see me or It’s not that I ever stopped loving you.

  He did not trouble himself with the details or with imagining what she had done with someone else, the way her back dipped when she clenched her thighs around this nameless, faceless person. As soon as he tried to picture the man, he could see only himself, and only himself as he appeared in photographs. There he was in a green army parka beneath her; or in shorts and a faded red T-shirt, Capitalism Is Boring printed in black, a hole cut out at his hip where in his imagination Vanessa was excised from the photo as he made his way into his wife from below her. Tomorrow it will be different, Dennis knew; there would be details that would thrust him out of this image, the way someone is pushed from the tight frame of a crowded photograph. He thought of getting off the plane in Moscow, and slipping into the backseat of the car and thinking that life stopped everywhere but here. No one moved when he left them; he only saw evidence of his family in photographic-like images when he was away: Benjamin just after scoring a goal, his arms stretched above his head; Sharon at the kitchen table, planning a menu; his parents eating soup, the kitchen at twilight. He had been ignorant to believe their lives had stopped and only resumed when he returned. He felt Sharon twitch over him, and he made to accommodate her at his neck. Then, as he reached for a new image, one from tonight, the night he found his wife again, Dennis slipped quickly to sleep.

  CHAPTER 14

  Trips

  March 23, 1980

  The harsh ring of the telephone jolted a still-tripping-but-somehow-managing-to-sleep Benji out of bed. At first he had no idea where he was, so he called out to the dark for assistance. Hello? he said to the room, whose walls were caving in, the keys of the typewriter on the desk swirling, a line of books above it dancing on the shelf. The response came from the receiver.

  “Hello,” a man’s voice said. “Hello?”

  The blind that shaded the single dorm window—each plastic slat heavy with dust—was furled open, and the light from the buzzing safety lamps lining the quad cast a blue haze over the room and helped Benji’s eyes adjust to the dark. He soon registered that he was in a dorm room, and that it was, thankfully, his own dorm room. He tried to let himself go. Don’t fight it, he thought, just let it come in. Easy. Slowly the images of the next bed, empty but for two large stuffed teddy bears—Twins! Arnie had proudly said—with which Benji had a vague recollection of trying to copulate came into focus. He’d had the idea they were really twins, hot little girl twins, last night.

  Last night!

  “Yes, hello,” he said into the phone.

  “I’m looking for Dennis C. Goldstein. Is this he?”

  What did the C stand for? Benji wondered. He’d never heard it used before; he never knew his father even had a middle name. “This is his son. Who is this? It’s . . .” The voice sounded so . . . conservative. Benji craned his head to look at Arnie’s clock radio—his had stopped halfway between 1:38 and 1:39 over a month ago, and it was still caught there like an eyelid frozen while blinking. “Nearly four in the morning.”

  Benji’s heart rose in his throat. They’re confused! he thought. They’re coming for me because of my protest, because of that stupid television interview. Because of communism.

  “I realize that.”

  Perhaps this was a joke. “Schaeffer?” Benji said tentatively.

  “No.”

  Benji was still tripping—how had he ever fallen asleep? The teddy bears beckoned him with open arms, radiating blue in the lamplight, and he was momentarily aroused by them. He thought about sex easing the journey into and out of the two worlds and how rarely he had come down from a trip without it. Sex and pot. Perhaps, he thought now, this was due to endorphins.

  “I am looking for Dennis C. Goldstein.”

  “Okay, you said that.” Benji sat up straighter. “Are you a friend of my father’s?” Benji knew his father counted several Republicans among his friends, including Len, who Benji always found incredibly Southern and dangerous. He smoked rolled cigarettes, ignored his two sons, and mumbled lewd comments about Sharon’s mother.

  “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss this. I’ll just say there’s some government business. If he’s not there, could you please tell me where he can be reached?”

  Benji paused.

  “We can just as easily find him ourselves, son. Boston is a very small town.”

  “How do you know he’s in Boston?”

  “We know.”

  Was that a joke? “They’re at the Waltham Marriott,” Benji said, but as the words came out, he had a shadowed idea that this was no longer correct. He remembered coming to his room. He hadn’t been alone but he had heard messages. “Wait. I think they may have left that hotel.”

  Had one of the messages been from this guy? Why would his father switch hotels so suddenly? Perhaps, Benji thought, his father was on the lam? Just as Nana Helen always said.

  Benji stood up. “If you hold on a moment, I can tell you for sure.”

  “All right then,” the man said.

  Benji placed the phone on the bed and went over to the answering machine on his desk. He pressed play. Dude! That was boss today . . . Benji fast-forwarded to the next call. Benji, Rachel said. Hope it went well today. I hope I get to meet your parents later, I . . . The next: You’re on TV right now! . . . Then: Hey, big guy, I just saw you on TV! And finally, his mother’s voice: We’re at the Ritz, she said, giggling. The sound of her laughter—intimate and secretive—repulsed him almost as much as her exhaustive tears had.

  “He’s at the Ritz,” Benji said, finally picking up the receiver from the folds of his bedspread. A roach sat on the table by his bed, and he scanned the table for a lighter. “My parents are at the Ritz.

  “You’re so fucking welcome, man,” Benji said into the receiver when he heard the click on the other end of the line.

  He found a lighter under his pillow and lit up and lay back. Just let it come, he thought, fending off the raw, dirty feeling, his insides scooped out. Easy. Perhaps he should call his parents? Wait, he thought, staring up at the ceiling, peering at the stars pasted in the shape of all the constellations. Rachel had put them up a few days after they’d come back from the all-too-short bus trip with the science grads. She had come in when Arnie was in New Haven with the Madrigals, and Benji had been in class, and not until they turned out the lights and crawled into bed did he see the entire solar system, the stars and planets, the rings of Saturn, and the constellations, her sign of Gemini designated by the largest, brightest stickers, his Scorpio as small and insignificant as the rest of the zodiac. He couldn’t have been asleep long; they were still lit ever so dimly, as if they were dying, Benji thought now, old stars.

  Wait, he thought now, what just happened? The night was vague to him—blearily he tried to focus on how he had gotten home. He remembered walking through a thick fog, aware of each individual dust particle, every single hanging drop suspended, and together as one body, creating the mist he walked through. He had felt as if it were a doorway leading to another world, though he was traveling there alone.

  The phone call had to have been a joke. Schaeffer or Peter Cox was having a belly laugh over Benji’s fear and the way he’d just did his father in right now. But the joke would surely have been that some government official—from the CIA or the FBI, say—was looking for him, not his
dad?

  Benji looked at the phone for several moments and decided to call his parents. He dialed information for the number of the hotel, then promptly forgot the number just as soon as he’d hung up. He picked up a paperback from the night table—Pilgrim’s Progress, from Arnie’s humanities class—and an uncapped pink highlighter and wrote the number down on the inside back flap of the book on the second call to information. When he got through to the Ritz, he was told by the receptionist that the line in his parents’ room was in use.

  Where was Arnie? he wondered, quickly distracted by the thought of how, whenever he might have appreciated his roommate’s absence, he was always in the next bed ready to chat about his day selling textbooks and Mead notebooks and Brandeis Judges! T-shirts and pencils at the campus store. Even if Rachel was with Benji in bed, Arnie would blather on and on about his studies, his drama group, the set list for his next recital. Night, guys, he’d say, before leaning over to turn out the light, and Benji would be unable to keep his hands from at least skimming over Rachel’s warm body.

  Wait. Benji sat up. He looked over at the empty bed. Wait, Benji said out loud. Just wait! He cut the air with his arm.

  Where the fuck was his sister?

  Like Benji, Vanessa had no idea where she was when she was roused by the sound of incessant drumming, punctuated by several shrieks and yelps. A lava lamp—the shape-shifting globs of red and yellow—shed a wan aura of golden light in the room, faintly illuminating a desk scattered with a half semester’s accumulation of books and papers, a luminous typewriter. Balled-up socks, dispelled from the mass of laundry by the closet, littered the room, along with several basketballs and baseballs and an assortment of tapes, some crushed, ribbons unspooling, others flung out of their cassette cases, all glowing, like a range of rare insects crawling throughout a tropical-forest floor. Two enormous bongs—one by the bed, a red cylinder circled by colored teddy-bear stickers and red, white, and blue skull stickers, the other by the closet, a clear shaft marked in gradations from light to dark by evidence of smoke. Smack in the middle of these two anchors, there—here—was Ben’s friend Schaeffer, incandescent in the changing colored lamplight, pacing the room and slicing the air with karate chops, each cut interposed by a grunt or yell.