Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  The zealots, or the batshit crazy Jews, as Benji would call them, won in the end. The day after Benji and Rachel met in front of Sherman Cafeteria, it was decreed that no pork or shellfish be served. Period. Alas, there would be no seafood salad, ribs, or strips of crispy bacon served anywhere on campus.

  Rachel was crushed by the decision—not for herself, of course, as she explained several times—but after several days of letter writing and an expansive phone campaign, she decided it was time to move on to something more important and global, like freeing South Africa, for instance. Or anti-nuclear activism. She was the most passionate little thing Benjamin had ever met.

  And she had gone back to his room with him after that party in Rosenthal. By some wonderful miracle, Arnie did not return to the room until long after Benji had examined her magnificent breasts, also a rich brown that seemed to go down many, many cutaneous layers. Her nipples were dark, the large areolas defined, brilliant suns setting against the sky of her skin.

  After that night, Rachel and Benji spent lots of time in his dorm room when Arnie was at work or at madrigal practice, and after getting each other off without intercourse, they watched the building of an enormous sukkah below his window, constructed of branches and fig leaves and husks of corn. As Rachel gave Benji a spectacular blow job, he could hear the dry husks being nailed to wood, juxtaposed over the sound of Rachel Feinglass’s Grateful Dead bootlegs she carried everywhere in her Guatemalan bag. The drum space was a perfect wall of sound he liked to listen to while nuzzling Rachel’s breasts.

  Benji was proud that they had not yet had sex, though even this brought much debate.

  “This is sex, Benji,” Rachel told him after he had let her know how delighted he was that they had refrained from sex, which, he told her, really changes everything. He had just come between her tits, which she wiped with the corner of his pillowcase. “Are you saying lesbians don’t have sex? You have such a heterosexual view of the world.” Rachel pulled on her sweater, and without her bra, Benji could see her nipples pressed up against the worn navy cotton weave.

  As always, Benji knew Rachel had an inarguable point, and he accepted this and everything else she had to teach him. Still, Benji thought secretly, sex can ruin things. He thought of lying next to Nikol Stathakis and the uncomfortable silence between them, even with the radio playing: Sky rockets in flight. Afternoon delight. Afternoon delight. He thought of Erin Mackaby, with her bobbed hair and that single strand of baby pearls encircling her short neck, her penny loafers and her nearly diabolical dedication to being captions editor of the yearbook. She’d spend whole weekends in the Wildcat office, committed not only to correctly identifying every kid in each photo, but finding a clever way to caption that photo as well. Erin had lobbied for more candids, and she’d won. She’d put in a photo of Ben’s sister sitting in class her freshman year, her feet up on her desk, her head leaning back over her chair—Vanessa’s hair spilled out, long and wavy and highlighted blond from the beach, her giant smile revealing a large space between her teeth. School’s in?! the caption had said. Vanessa looked like a little kid, like such a little sister, Benji thought now, which made him realize that when he thought of his sister at all, he pictured her as a seven-year-old, fighting for space in the backseat of the car, while he, at his current age, towered above her. Benji had always liked her following him around and copying everything he did, from wearing his baseball hats backward to using the same nicknames for teachers, to listening to the same 45s. It made him feel as if his decisions had always been correct. When she lost interest in him, he had sort of returned the favor, he supposed, or maintained the same veneer he’d always had around his sister. But he remembered being stunned by that yearbook photo Erin had found and captioned, most likely as a favor to Ben. Vanessa looked nothing like that anymore, but Sharon had adored the photo and had gone so far as to buy her own yearbook, just to cut out this picture of Vanessa not looking or acting anything like Vanessa and hang it on the refrigerator.

  Ben and Erin had been friends since junior high algebra, where they’d had a teacher who wore a kelly green polyester jacket, used green chalk, and would say things like You can factor this polynomial until Gabriel blows his trumpet . . . And one afternoon in the fall of Ben’s senior year, when he was walking home from soccer practice, he’d run into Erin, whose parents were at their house on the Cape. Erin’s place was at the bend in the road, just before Ben turned off to his, and she invited him in and made a pitcher of sea breezes, then another, and then he’d taken her virginity, which she had given over quite willingly. They’d done it in her parents’ four-poster bed; even now he remembered the eyelet duvet cover and all the pillows she’d thrown off the bed in haste. He’d felt terrible afterward, that he’d robbed his friend of the experience of having sex for the first time with someone who loved her. Her body had no curve or bend to it at all; it was somehow very unfemale, and its squareness made Ben unable to see her after that. He hitched rides from practice or took alternative routes along the train tracks so he wouldn’t pass Erin’s house, and he knew that no matter what Rachel said about heterosexual privilege, had he simply gotten a sweet little blow job from Erin, everything would have been just fine.

  While he explored the creases and crevasses of Rachel’s Rubenesque body and the parallel folds of her incredibly nimble mind, Benji also investigated the limits to his own consciousness, dropping his first hit of LSD, a little tab imprinted with a unicorn. Learning about the different layers of perception, he and Rachel, who had stuck out her tongue and said ahhh at Benji’s mere suggestion, wended through the Brandeis campus on acid. They dragged their feet through the leaves on the many paths, sat on the lap of the Judge Brandeis statue, covered in birdshit, and walked three times around the reservoir. They ended their trip by climbing up to the water tower at dawn and making love below it, in the cold earth, looking out over Waltham, the red bricks of the watch factory growing deeper with the rise of the sun. It was mid-October and a light frost covered the grounds, melting as the sun came up, and Benji felt amazed at the new power sex could hold.

  “See,” he’d said after they’d rolled around on the hill for over twenty-five minutes, he on top and then she on him, then finally he from behind as she lay, her face smothered in his spread-open jacket, arms stretched behind her, his hands pressing earth, sinking into it, four knees brown with soil, as she turned toward him, “I told you.”

  Rachel Feinglass smiled at Benji. “Okay.” She lolled from one side to the other, the dirt, now warmed by the sun, sticking to her ass and thighs. “You’re right.”

  Benji dragged her up and they pulled on their jeans and picked leaves from each other’s hair, then walked shakily down the hill toward Sherman for bagels. Rachel heaped scallion cream cheese onto her onion bagel, and Benji, still jittery from coming down, was unable to eat and watched her as the tip of her nose dipped straight into the cream cheese when she took a huge first bite. And another and another, her image becoming clearer and crisper to him, sharp lines delineating her body from the world she sat on and in.

  Sex had a novel potency for Benji now, but learning, too, took on a new enormity. He had not yet been introduced to the intensity of his own scholarship, had never previously mustered the sort of passion he now found in Professor Schwartz’s American Protest! class. The coveted course was difficult to get into for a reason. Here were ideas: movements leading to movements, and those to changing the way this country did business, radicalism in its purest form, its cycle turning and turning, making America; it had happened here on the very campus where Benji now stood. Then one late-November night at his dorm-room desk, his room filled with a muted yellow light, the scratch of winter at his windows, the image he’d had of himself back in Chevy Chase, Maryland, alone at a desk, was finally fulfilled. Here it was, the text he could never see as he looked so many times over his own shoulder: The Decline of Socialism. Here was Grandpa Sigmund, young then, perhaps twenty, here in blurred black and white,
standing on a street corner in a wool overcoat, his face shaven, arm stretched out, a finger pointing skyward, addressing the gathering of men. Trotskyite Sigmund Goldstein stumps for Socialist candidate Norman Thomas, 1932, it said beneath the grainy photo. Erin Mackaby couldn’t have captioned it any better. There was Grandpa Sigmund, a movement’s vanguard, changing the dynamics of history, and now here he was, Benji Goldstein, his grandson, finally discovering what it really meant to be alive.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Chopping Block

  January 5, 1980

  Dennis thumped the steering wheel as he turned off Connecticut Avenue, and a shock of hair came down over his eyes. It was the Day After, and he knew the office would be in chaos—everyone called in on a Saturday—as it had become more and more clear that Dennis was not the only one Carter’s people had not consulted before announcing the embargo. No one seemed to have bothered to talk to the economists either; the Treasury secretary was on bloody vacation last week. The private exporters had rushed in this morning with some fairly bad news: Monday they’d be dumping all that embargoed grain—to the tune of 17 million tons—on Chicago. The message from the grain companies seemed to be, just cancel the contracts and watch Chicago burn. It made no sense: futures on corn and soybeans were about to nose-dive, and in the end the Soviets would make out like bandits just as soon as they came back into the American market.

  Dennis went over his first briefing in his head, but the rules were changing every moment. And the hostage situation—day sixty-one, Robert Conley had screamed yesterday on All Things Considered—was just going to further complicate their decisions. Suddenly—or not suddenly at all, depending on who was talking—the Soviets’ military aggression in Afghanistan and terrorism in the Middle East had become intertwined.

  Maybe this was his chance to move on. But to what? Worker bee, he thought, Bartleby. Dennis imagined standing in the audience, rapt, during one of his father’s great labor speeches. The worker, the worker, the fucking maimed, dead worker, a slave to Corporate America, wheeling-dealing tools exacting every ounce of blood of the worker, no safety measures at all! Capitalist America is the source of all evil in the world! Sit down! Strike! Boycott! The West was built on the measly shoulders of the Chinese; we all know how the South rose up, rose up, rose up!

  It was a good job though. Far more administrative than he might have liked, but also thrilling: Novodevichy Park, an empty bench in the snow, meetings in the ministry, Stalin’s skyscrapers winking to one another through the cold, long, black Volgas whisking him over the Fourteenth Street Bridge in D.C., confidential meetings with the CIA, he and Len waving to each other in the hallways as if they were merely passing each other on the way to the john in their dormitory. It was a kid’s fantasy, the stuff of movies, this part, and he’d known the package when he’d signed on with the Foreign Ag service. He’d been relieved when, in the sixties, he’d decided—finally—on a career, but now it felt as if possibilities had closed up around him, the red tulips he’d planted last spring smashing shut, beautiful traps that held nothing. But what had those flowers captured? Everything Dennis might have pursued but had not: a career overseas, politics, the intended Ph.D. He felt haunted by the man he might have been, and this made him remember Gloria’s appearance in that bedroom that reeked of sex, her presence in a slammed door, billowing curtains, the tilting of the mirror on the vanity. He had made a choice—to live a certain kind of life, to serve the greater good, a socialist conceit—but he knew there was nothing radical about what his life had become.

  Dennis parked his car in its designated underground space and heard his own footsteps on the smooth concrete, watched his fingers press the lobby button in the elevator. He remembered Vanessa reaching up to press the button on one of the Saturdays she came in with him. Then he saw himself, his mother lifting him up so he could press the button to ride up the Empire State Building, where the CHORD offices were. Her brother, she’d said, was a musical prodigy. Misha. If only he could come and record here, she’d told them. Dennis did not meet his uncle until his first trip to Moscow; he had finally convinced his always reticent mother to give him Misha’s address. Dennis had been sending him little pictures and drawings for nearly thirty years by then. I’ll look him up myself if you won’t give it to me, Dennis had said. His mother unfailingly gave in to this kind of pressure, which, Dennis reasoned, was a throwback to her Soviet childhood.

  He thought of Misha now, barreling through Red Square in his big fur hat, to take Dennis to the GUM department store. Dennis had rung him up from his dreary hotel—he would never get used to those wearisome hotel rooms—and said, Would you like to meet me? Perhaps you can take me to find some presents for my son, he had said, as there seemed to be nowhere to purchase so much as a trinket. He knew this was an American conceit, as there was a shortage of any kind of consumer goods, yet still, if there was a way to bring Ben a gift and meet Misha at the same time, why not? Since that day Dennis had been to Red Square many times, but then he’d never before seen St. Basil’s Cathedral, its colorful domed chapels and cupolas dusted with snow, or Lenin’s stark, red tomb, or the Kremlin and all its towers topped with emerald green spires and red stars that spun in the wind.

  “How many Bolsheviks are buried within those walls?” Dennis had asked Misha as he trailed him winding quickly through the square.

  “Many.” Misha looked down at his feet as he said this and he seemed to be laughing.

  Misha brought Dennis to a raised area, which he now knew to be Lobnoe Mesto, the place of executions. It was perpendicular to the massive department store, and it was fenced off and guarded by sentries who waved them through. Dennis followed Misha up several broken stairs through a short wrought-iron gate that led into a circular area. In the center was a large cylindrical block that stood nearly three feet high.

  “What is it?” Dennis asked, running his hand along the top of the stone.

  Misha slid the side of his hand along his neck, indicating the block’s function. The chopping block, Dennis realized, as his uncle explained in Russian that the raised stone was for the removal of heads that contained evil thoughts about Russian rulers during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

  Then they ambled back into the square, filled with people and police, their olive green uniforms stitched with red and gold piping, their tall hats rimmed in red and gold, the emblem of the Soviet Union golden at the center. The square smelled of sweat and garlic and tobacco, like the rest of Moscow. They went into the massive, ornate department store, which on the inside had the feel of the Paris train station with its glassed, arched roof with cast iron, light spilling in. Looking up the three stories, Dennis had remembered arriving at the Gare du Nord from Dordogne on their honeymoon, carrying his and Sharon’s luggage, and a bag filled with tins of foie gras, through the enormous station. In contrast to the ornamented exterior, GUM’s inside was gracefully utilitarian, like the general feel of the city’s buildings, the floors and facades made of marble and red granite and limestone, the different levels crossed above by walkways, like bridges, throughout the enormous building.

  The department store—resembling a cross between some kind of an oriental bazaar and Macy’s—seemed to be the only place in Moscow where there was not a shortage of things. There appeared to be thousands of stores, and people were lined up outside each one, sometimes spilling out into the square, waiting to purchase goods.

  “When Stalin’s wife committed suicide,” Misha said, guiding him in and out of the queues, “here is where her body was displayed for the people to see.” He pointed to the floor, but Dennis couldn’t tell if he meant this spot or this mammoth building.

  They finally reached the wooden facade of a store, flanked by otherworldly sea-green limestone columns, on the second floor. No one argued when they cut the line and went straight to the front of the store. Dennis looked quickly among the colorful boxes and babushkas that lined the walls behind the counter and pointed to a box with a rooster painted o
n it. Without waiting a moment, Misha pointed to a different box, a troika scene, and without even asking if Dennis liked the choice, which he in fact did, bargained the shopkeeper down to just twenty-five rubles, a little over a dollar. He paid with a check, signing it with a big flourish and throwing it onto the counter.

  Dennis was impressed. The whole country operated in cash—no one used scrip to pay. And for twenty-five rubles? It was a bit ridiculous. “You know this seller?” Dennis asked.

  “We are old friends.” Misha’s nose was small and red and compact, and when he smiled, it crinkled white. “From school. He likes my playing.” Misha’s dark eyes twinkled, just like those of the Santa, ringing his bell beneath the Empire State, whom Dennis, making drawings for him at the kitchen table, his mother pulling burnt meringue cookies out of the stove, always imagined his uncle Misha, so far away in the Soviet Union, resembled.

  “Thank you,” Dennis said, grateful to have a gift for his son on the eve of his sibling’s birth. Sharon would understand once he explained, There is really nothing to buy here. It is worse than you think. But Benjamin would want something, even if it was to appreciate when he was older.

  “For my nephew.” Misha slapped Dennis’s already cold cheeks. “Anything,” he said, before heading off, his gray wool coat flapping in the wind.

  Now Dennis thought of the CHORD offices in the Empire State Building were on the fifty-fourth floor, at the end of the long, cold corridor, and Dennis could see the city laid out before him like a board game. We want to see the tippy top! his sister had pouted. We never got to the top. Instead they’d gone to drop papers off at the tiny office, and Dennis remembered sheet music everywhere, as if a wind had come in from where they stood so high in the clouds and blown things into chaos, old metal file cabinets haphazardly placed around the room, against windows, drawers hanging open like gaping mouths. Boris, his mother’s boss, sat at the desk facing the door, and he stood up to greet them, jiggling change in the pockets of his enormous trousers. They’d gone ice-skating at Rockefeller Center with Boris. Come on now! Boris, such a sure and beautiful skater despite his heft, said to Dennis in Russian before he’d come up from behind in his big, thick coat and swooped him up. Accha! he’d said as they whipped by, beneath golden Prometheus, offering his mythical heat as they made their way through the cold.