Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Vanessa clenched her teeth. “Okay.” She rubbed her arms.

  “Great,” Sharon said, coming up from behind. The doorbell had just rung for the third time, and she turned to Tom with a strained face. “Now, Tom! The guests are arriving, you need to greet them with the champagne!”

  “Showtime!” Marlene said, expertly popping open the second bottle of champagne, then quickly filling the flutes on Helen’s tray.

  Sharon heard only brief snippets of conversations as the servers moved in and out. Each time a server leaned into the kitchen door and walked into the hallway, it was like the brief roar of the ocean in a seashell. Then, when the door closed, it was as if the shell had been placed back down in the sand. She did get news that Felix Epstein was late due to some crisis at the office, which made his wife furious. Marsha kept coming into the kitchen and talking to Sharon, who was madly trying to carve the lamb into individual chops and plate it with the potatoes, while Marlene did whatever slow and ridiculously perfect thing she did. The vegetables, of course, the medley of spring vegetables.

  “Would your husband ever do such a thing? On a weekend? What if Mondale comes, and Felix isn’t here yet?” Marsha Epstein complained. “Not that there aren’t plenty of people here already he should be here for. Senator Mathias is here. Ross Wilson is here, the brand-new consul general to—”

  “I know them both,” Sharon said, placing a chop on a plate. “Charles Mathias lives around the corner from us. He’s got the most adorable golden retriever.” She smiled to think of the senator trying to stay dignified as he walked the insanely playful dog. “And Dennis works with Wilson.” Sharon and Marsha had actually been to many events together, both as guests, which was how Marsha had found out about Food Matters in the first place. See? Sharon had thought to tell her mother. Good to navigate both worlds.

  “He’s so young!” Marsha said. “Twenty-five years old, I hear. From Minneapolis, like our friend Mr. Mondale. Very interesting. Felix really should be here. It’s appalling.”

  “It’s the nature of the job,” Sharon said, as she wiped blood from the plate with a dish towel. “Fritz will understand!” she joked. “Everyone understands. Besides, Mondale sees Felix all the time. Listen, Dennis didn’t even show to his own daughter’s birth.”

  “Really?” Marsha looked over at Vanessa, who was holding a tray with both hands as Marlene loaded it with individually portioned salads.

  “He was in Moscow. Actually my mother was angrier than I was, at least until I had to actually give birth with my mother in the delivery room.” Now Sharon added potatoes, about five a person, she thought, quickly doing the math as she garnished with chopped parsley. “She was convinced he was a spy.”

  Vanessa turned toward Sharon as she spoke, but she said nothing.

  “Really.” Marsha’s eyes were trained on the closed kitchen door, as if she could see through it to the other side and down the hallway, to the front door, or beyond that to Capitol Hill, where her husband sat in some office, a phone to his ear. Or worse, Sharon thought as she watched Marsha Epstein grow more anxious, there he was in a room at the Willard Hotel, the long, impossibly slim legs of some Spanish diplomat wrapped around his neck. Who, after all, had nothing to hide?

  “She still thinks so.” Sharon imagined Marsha paying some man in a trench to sit in a car on Pennsylvania with a long-lensed camera, waiting for Felix to emerge with the brunette beauty, arm in arm.

  “Well, screw him,” Marsha said, as if she’d read Sharon’s mind. She turned back to Sharon. “But you know there is a lot going on about the spies lately, my God. Felix has a friend at State who says there’s this project called Venona, which has been decoding Soviet secrets for thirty-five years. And they’re shutting it down! There’s still a war on, you know.” Marsha leaned in as if to whisper a secret, but maintained her normal decibel level. “Supposedly they’re holding on to some cases from the forties and fifties, just to go out with a bang. Maybe one of them is Dennis!”

  Sharon put down her towel, stained with lamb juice, and watched her daughter back into the door, heading out to the party with a tray of salads, just as Tom came in holding a platter filled with smudged, empty champagne flutes. Sharon looked back at Marsha. Even in January she wore coral lipstick, and her diamond and emerald earrings set off her olive skin. Her bangle bracelets jangled as she moved her hands, still talking.

  “Not even in jest, Marsha,” Sharon said. “Truly. And anyway, how old do you think Dennis is?”

  Marsha laughed. “Right. Right. But can you imagine? People who may have slipped secrets to the Soviets à la Julius and Ethel could be right outside that door.” She covered her mouth, and her bracelets clanked together like money.

  “Oh, come on, Marsha, that was all such BS.”

  “BS? Oh, you come on! I bet the Venona transcripts will say differently; I hear there was plenty of traffic back and forth.”

  “Hear from whom?” Sharon asked, trying to get back to her plating. “I’ve never heard of Venona.”

  “I may look stupid, and Felix might think I’m stupid as well, but I’ve got my sources. I hope Felix is aware.”

  Sharon nodded at the plate she was wiping. Perhaps Dennis was gathering intelligence on her right now. “No one thinks you’re stupid, Marsha.”

  Marsha popped a leftover fish ball, on a platter by the sink. “Delicious.” Clank clank went the bracelets. “You want to know something? The Soviets, they’d find one another at designated hotels, and you know how they figured out if the person was correctly identified? Greetings from Fanny, the guy would say, the guy from the KGB—though then I think it was called something else—”

  “The NKGB.”

  Marsha looked at Sharon and nodded. “Right. The NKGB guy would say, Yup, just like that, greetings from Fanny, and if they had the right guy—or girl—they’d respond, ‘Thank you. And how is she?’”

  “How very civilized of them,” Sharon said.

  “I’m sorry, but who knows. He, Julius, was definitely involved, Sharon, no question. No question. At. All.”

  Sharon shrugged and again resumed running the towel along the plates. There was her father again, banging the television, cheering for the Americans. Thank you, and how is she? How many times had he said that into the phone? How he’d cheered when the Rosenbergs went down; it never left her, his glee in these two people’s deaths. Send them back to Russia! COD, he’d said, brushing his hands together, as if he were washing them of the whole affair. They had looked so regular to her.

  “Who knew you were such a lefty!” Marsha said.

  Sharon looked up from the plate. “Of course I’m a lefty—we all are, no?—but what does that have to do with it?”

  “Now come on, Sharon, we’re Democrats, not communists!” Marsha laughed. “I heard there were some cover names still unidentified. Ethel’s brother went by Bumble-Bee. Can you imagine?”

  “I can’t, no.”

  “Oh, forget it, please, my God, let’s save the politics for outside this kitchen, no? I’m headed back out there. By the way, your canapés were delicious, ladies.” Marsha trilled her fingers next to her head as she went to the door. “Those fish balls are light as air!” she said, then the roar of the ocean was again upon them.

  The dinner portion of the meal had been tremendously successful. Not transcendent by any means, but Marsha seemed happy with it, and the lamb had been perfectly cooked. The servers, including Vanessa, had been in and out quickly, and nothing had sat too long in the kitchen. Nothing dropped or broken; no one had been spilled on. This in and of itself was an achievement.

  Sharon thought about Elias as she heated the cherries; even when cherries were in season, canned always worked best. She added a little arrowroot—far better than cornstarch—to thicken the sauce. What was he doing right now? She saw Elias lying back on the hood of his car, waiting. She thought he might have left a message for her at work, which was where he always called her; he, with no house and no job, was unreachabl
e.

  Sharon had halfheartedly tried to end the affair, but the pressure from LEAP! to see the training through was now all tangled up with her relationship, or more her dalliance, with Elias. It became so difficult to tell which was helping and which was not. Which part, if any, Sharon wondered, was the self-actualizing part? Barring the fact she had no way to reach him, seeing Elias had been absurdly easy. Dennis was always away, or were he not, she simply claimed she was out at an event outside the Beltway and so would be staying the night. Her husband never questioned her, nor did her children. Did no one think her able? The ease of it made Sharon think often about what had been there before Elias had surfaced. Meeting Elias had happened, and her life moved in and around the event to accommodate it, like a sponge. Sharon imagined him carrying his guitar case, a blade of grass singing between his teeth, as he turned to head out West. He had often spoken about an Indian reservation in Taos, outside Santa Fe, where he’d once been to a sun dance. Perhaps he would head there and sing and eat fry bread and camp on the reservation until some Indian woman took him in with her stories and her long black braid and her big big love.

  Because Elias would not be staying long with a woman like Sharon, she knew, not someone so tethered to materialism, so unattached to a colonized narrative, and whose sole involvement in politics was cooking for Democratic fund-raisers. Every time—including the one just two nights ago—felt like the last, just the way it had been that first night. She was both haunted and liberated by the feeling that he might leave and not return, and that perhaps she would be grateful to have him do so. Perhaps my life is Dennis after all, she’d thought those two nights ago, remembering her honeymoon in France. They had stayed in a château in Sarlat and eaten breakfast on a terrace, a blue peacock dragging its feathers in the garden below. She had buttered her brioche then and thought, This will be my life, and she had turned to see Elias roll onto his side in the unmade bed; she had heard the door click so loudly behind her as she left him there.

  What she needed was a sign from Dennis, and this was why she’d entreated him with her call this morning. Call it a test: she thought of her mother-in-law and her talk of curses and hexes and omens. If Dennis said yes, yes, I will visit Ben at school with you, then things would not forever be undone. She had trembled dialing his office, and when he’d answered, she realized her voice was shaking as well. Then Dennis had said yes, he had tried to put her off, as he always did, but the answer had been yes, and he had unknowingly said yes to the prospect of their becoming whole again, a family, and so here she was once more, that girl on the terrace, and the peacock was about to spread its feathers in the garden below; there was nothing but possibilities.

  Now Marlene helped her prepare the rolling cart with a green tablecloth, the copper flambé dishes atop the two small burners they used for these occasions. Sharon—it was always Sharon, Marlene was far too self-conscious for such work—would add the brandy tableside, then light it. Tom and Helen would follow with trays of vanilla ice cream in crystal goblets, Leslie with trays of linzers and shortbread for the table, and as soon as the flame went out, Sharon would spoon the warm cherries and liquor over the ice cream at the table, which they would pass one by one to the guests.

  If Mondale did come to the party, he didn’t stay until the cherries. Everyone clapped when Sharon emerged from the kitchen wheeling the cart, and in addition to cheering the prospect of the grand display they were about to witness, they were also clearly applauding the meal. She bowed to the guests, two tables of thirty apiece, to Marsha at the head of one table, and to Felix, who had finally arrived at his own dinner party—before or after the Spaniard, who could say?—and was now seated and waving at the end of the other. She saw Senator Mathias, and the man—more boy—Ross Wilson. She wheeled her cart to their end of the room to nudge herself in between the two tables and turned to face a bay window with a view onto the large garden. She nodded hello to the guests she knew, then smiled down the long tables as she poured the warmed kirschwasser into the cherries. She stirred the mixture, then took a matchbox from the cart drawer, a lovely box that featured a pink swan, one that Dennis had brought back from Moscow. Sharon lit the long match, then touched it down to the copper dish. Instantly, the spectacle made this the most rewarding part of the meal for Sharon; the cherries were aflame in a ring of fire and a blue halo of the alcohol. The guests oohed and aahed. Oh, Sharon! someone, Marsha probably, exclaimed, and Sharon turned to her and smiled, thinking already about her next party, how she would prepare a more complicated crêpes suzette.

  In this moment out of the corner of her right eye, she caught sight of Vanessa. Her daughter stood out in the garden in the freezing cold. She wasn’t wearing that old coat. What was she doing? Please tell me she’s not smoking out there in the middle of the garden for everyone to see, Sharon thought. The tables continued to cheer and Sharon turned to view Vanessa in full and was met by the image of her stuffing herself with lamb Provençal and potatoes. The pockets of Vanessa’s serving apron were bursting with food, and Sharon watched her move behind the leafless trees, crouching down now as she tore the meat from the chops like a wild dog.

  But Vanessa is a vegetarian! Sharon thought.

  Sharon closed her eyes. Then she thought of her anchors: I have chosen to love you. She remembered Elias just then, cross-legged on the hotel bed, his nakedness covered by his guitar: Asking only workman’s wages, I come looking for a job, but I get no offers . . . Sharon had lain on her back running the tips of her fingers over her belly as she listened to him play. I am returning, I will return, I have returned to you. Li la li, li la li la li la li.

  Vanessa looked so cold out there, alone and primitive, and Sharon could feel her own heat, a huge warmth crawling into her, such a contrast to her daughter’s state. She remembered the medieval castles rising along the banks of the Dordogne; it was a setting for a fairy tale. But it wasn’t hers. She and Dennis screamed at each other as they’d tried to canoe upstream beneath the beating sun. They paddled and paddled—each claimed the other was steering—but the boat only moved sideways. Sharon had already begun to think of their marriage as something from the past. Now Sharon heard more screaming, and she thought of the hostages, all in a room together being tortured, and she wondered what would become of Jimmy Carter in the upcoming elections. She would serve peanut brittle for dessert at her next fund-raiser, or perhaps her next fund-raiser should be for something entirely different. Women’s health issues, she thought as a great white heat began to overtake her. What is Venona? she imagined demanding, turning on the light quickly and questioning Dennis in the middle of the night. Why was she so warm, safe and inside, when her daughter was freezing? There was a rancid smell, like tires burning. And then Felix Epstein, Mondale’s advance man, was upon her, there was a terrible crash, and then the night went black.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Witch’s Mask

  March 22, 1980

  On the night before they left to visit Vanessa’s brother for parents’ weekend, the Goldstein house was toilet-papered. Vanessa watched it happen. She was smoking at her window, and blacking out the Government Issue lyrics she’d written weeks ago on the rubber strips along the insteps of her Chuck Taylors, furious that her mother had insisted on dragging her along, citing the Epstein “episode” as the reason Vanessa could not stay in the house alone. Joni Mitchell’s Blue played softly on her tape deck—I wish I had a river I could skate away on. This was not frilly Joni, but a gateway into an interior life—Vanessa’s perhaps—that ached with want and celebrated it.

  I wish I wish I wish . . . I’m selfish and I’m sad . . . This song was a journey, a feeling Vanessa was after, and she didn’t need to scream and raise up her fists and stomp her feet to match some unknowable part of her precisely. Jason could play her 107 tracks of a Ramones bootleg, listening for new information, a breath, say, a pause, anything that would reveal something different about a song and so about the men playing it. He and Sean Flaherty traded tapes and
obscure Buzzcocks and the Damned LPs the way Ben had once swapped baseball cards. Vanessa understood the desire to search for more than what you are merely given in a studio album; she could listen to any number of versions of “River,” just to hear the way Joni Mitchell’s voice seemed reshaped, saddened in new places, the way her voice lifted, paused, rejoiced. Tom Waits, too. Vanessa had found a recording of a radio program in San Francisco in ’74, and the way he had sung “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” more jagged by its live nature, played faster, and sung with irony—it had changed it from a sorrowful song about missed opportunity to one about perhaps. Love had a chance in the live version, which made it less devastating than the one on Closing Time. Vanessa listened to that album over and over, wondering as it spun, would that be it? Life, a series of fumbled chances, and of wanting only what cannot be had.

  Music had a purity, and Vanessa agreed with Jason on the reverence they should have for it. But for the most part the music they saw at shows depended on being there in the room with it; it was contingent on reaction and that feeling of being present, alive with intensity. This got lost and not deepened on all the recordings. Other than a stunning bootleg of the Clash in Leicester, England, where Joe Strummer actually belted out, Let’s kiss to another Clash love song! the live punk stuff didn’t hold much interest for her.

  Vanessa turned off Joni Mitchell when she heard the skateboards against the road making their way down the block, then the squeak of the stopping wheels, the scrape of wood against asphalt as the boards were lifted. Flicking off the light and looking out, she was met with the sight of four kids lifting their boards at the side of the house. Then there was the near silence of their treading on the lawn.