Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  It was just whom she’d expected: at least Sean Flaherty was. He was accompanied by George from the now defunct Tellers, and two Georgetown Day School boys, Georgetown punks whose parents were all high up in the administration, or at State, not exactly from the broken homes she had once imagined. They wore backpacks and pulled them off and swung them to the ground, at their ankles, then bent into them to remove rolls and rolls of toilet paper. Now Vanessa wanted to play something loud enough—White Boy maybe—so she could hold it out the window as these assholes made their way across the yard.

  She could hear them laughing as they crossed the lawn like soldiers, their large white arms swinging toilet-paper rolls, little grenades, into the sky. Sean’s shaved head was a negative silhouette, and a darker black seemed to outline him, setting his skull against the blue-black of the night. Sean Flaherty was wound tight; he’d already grown into himself, and his muscles were carved, made more of stone than flesh. The smooth head was an extension of his taut body, waiting to be sprung. Vanessa watched as they pitched roll upon roll over her father’s prized dogwood, the massive oak, even the hydrangea, bending beneath the assaults. As the arc of one roll traveled by her window, followed by a stream of paper, a shooting star, which then caught and broke on a single branch, she wondered at their meaning, Sean’s meaning, as she reveled in spying on them. Come in! Boys. They glowed over the dark as Vanessa wondered at the way they moved so stealthily along the periphery of the house.

  Watching the toilet paper loop over the trees, Vanessa thought of climbing up the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin with Jason. After a Tiny Desk Unit show at d.c. space in November (Tiny Desk Unit: kind of a new-wave jam band that Vanessa liked because the lead singer, Susan Mumford, was sort of a cool, striking girl), they’d parked on Independence Avenue and gone over to the Tidal Basin, and Vanessa was shocked to see Jason scramble up into the interwoven branches instead of staying below, with her, pushing urgently against a trunk and pressing against her, the way he had so many times that summer. She’d never been to the Tidal Basin at night, and she followed Jason, climbing carefully so as not to step on the delicate limbs as she made her way up. It was cold, and Vanessa remembered the stripped branches, slippery with frost. She’d looked up to Jason on a stronger, higher branch, wrapped up in his parka, and had wondered then, What does this person want from me? A web of blossomless boughs was in front of her, a cross-hatching against the backdrop of sky, and Jason had looked terribly white and frail, as if he were caught inside it. Why, Vanessa wondered, does he still take me along with him?

  Then, bizarrely, she had thought of the Mills scandal her father had delighted in several years previously. Wilbur Mills, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had been discovered drunk, in an altercation with an Argentinean stripper, and when the police arrived, he’d jumped into the Tidal Basin. Or perhaps it had been the stripper who jumped. Right here, Vanessa had thought then, imagining the splash, the putrid Potomac surrounding the body in slime. She wondered just how much had been thrown into that basin. Sometimes people in this town can be fun, her father had said. But they always get punished later. Trapped in the network of cherry branches with Jason, Vanessa looked out to the Jefferson Memorial, a round dome shining with light, and she thought about what lay at the bottom.

  Vanessa knew why Sean was here. Not three weeks ago Jason and Vanessa had gone over to his house intending to get him to go downtown with them. They’d pulled up to his house, then tiptoed through the side door, into the kitchen. A large wooden table stood on the other side of the Formica counter strewn with papers and folders, all stamped with the round green-and-blue seal of the U.S. Department of Energy. Vanessa noted how much more kicky this seal was than her father’s, which looked like a children’s-book rendition of dried corn, some kind of wheelbarrow stuck in the foreground. She had such fond memories of parking at her father’s office before they went out to a museum or ice-skating on the Mall, and her father always made them run upstairs for a few minutes so he could pick something up or return a file. She and Ben used to swipe correcting tape and Wite-Out from the supply closet. Once, Tatiana had been with them, and Vanessa and her grandmother had stolen a few sheets of her father’s letterhead, giggling, while he was out at the copier. Tatiana loved to be in her father’s office; she was so proud to have a son who worked so high up in this city, this country. She had come from this faraway land, a place Vanessa would never be able to truly imagine as real, no matter how many dolls and music boxes she stacked on her bureau, or how many photographs her father showed her of lit squares, a building shaped like an ice cream.

  At Sean Flaherty’s no one was at the table or in the living room they passed through, the blue velvet drapes tied back with golden stays, with a gleaming black grand piano, silk flowers and family photos framed in silver placed neatly on the sparkling surface.

  Vanessa and Jason had quietly walked up the stairs, shushing each other, a painting of an elephant in an Uncle Sam hat, seriously, hanging from the brown walls above them. They crept into the hallway, toward the door leading into Sean’s attic room.

  She had been up here before, after Sean had driven her to Annapolis last September, to get fake IDs so they could get into eighteen-and-over shows. Jason already had his, and it was the first time Vanessa had ever been alone with Sean. They went out to the place everyone went to—run by two Arab guys who didn’t give a damn how old you were just as long as you didn’t say you were Jewish—after school one afternoon, and they’d been stuck in so much traffic, they’d turned right around and driven back in silence, their new laminated IDs still hot in their hands. Vanessa tried to think of things to say that were not necessarily what she would ask Sean when in the presence of others.

  “Are you really a Republican?” she asked.

  “Fuck yeah.” Sean hadn’t been playing any music at all, which seemed in that moment connected to his Republicanism.

  Sean Flaherty Junior, she thought.

  Vanessa didn’t know many kids who were named after their father, and she didn’t know many Republicans; the arguments she heard in her house, as she wove in and out of the tiki lights during her parents’ patio parties, or even as she listened to her grandfather and her father, were the arguments between liberals.

  “I don’t even know what that means really,” Vanessa said.

  “It means Carter is the best thing to ever happen to us,” Sean said. “What a joke!”

  She did not ask what he did believe in. The draft, the death penalty, no money for the arts or education, tax breaks for the rich? Nixon?

  “So what does it mean to be a Democrat, then?” he asked as they drove toward Bethesda.

  If she said the right thing, she knew she would be going to Sean’s. “It means you’re against the closing of Varsity Grill, where non-desirables hang out.” She laughed ironically. “It means you do something when Madam’s Organ is shutting down.”

  He scoffed. “That place smells like shit. And if a bunch of punks can’t come up with three hundred and fifty bucks to pay the rent, then they don’t deserve to use the place anyway.”

  Vanessa was silent. She had thought there was a universal point of view, at least among the kids, on the terrible injustice of the impending closing of Madam’s Organ. The place was disgusting; really, it was dirty, and it stank of beer and sweat and something unnameable that Jason and she thought was the smell of insects having sex, but still she had thought keeping it open was a sure position.

  Sean turned onto Wisconsin Avenue toward his house anyway, and soon they were in his driveway and heading upstairs to his room. His room! He had pushed Vanessa against the wall in the stairway to the attic, where a large Anarchy poster, a white symbol on stark black, a Stiff Little Fingers show poster, and a photo of a punk singer Vanessa didn’t recognize, shoving the chord of a mike into his mouth, hung by clear pushpins and silver thumbtacks from the flowered wallpaper peeling away from the stairway walls. He took Vanessa’s hand and led her up the ste
ps to the bedroom, the ceiling sloped so much at one side they both had to tuck their chins before stumbling onto Sean’s unmade bed. As soon as she’d hit the mattress, Vanessa had reached up and pulled off his shirt, revealing the tattoo below his collarbone at his left shoulder of a kid gripping a skateboard, knees bent to his chest, jumping out of flames, an image she’d previously seen only from afar.

  Sean took off her skirt and her underwear and they did it quickly. She had held on to him, her ear to his chest as if she were listening to his heart, and she had not felt sad. When it was done, she’d dressed and he’d pulled on his boots to take her home, and as they had shifted back to who they had been, Vanessa tried to be the girl who could just do it herself, play the bass, goddamn it, start a band! or at the very least fuck the bass player. But Sean wasn’t in a band—and he was a Republican. And he was also Jason’s best friend.

  Creeping up those same attic stairs, sneaking up on Sean with Jason, she looked up from the stairwell to the slanted ceilings, and the exposed wooden beams she’d seen as she’d leaned back sideways on the bed.

  “Boo!” Jason said as he hit the top stair.

  Then he turned around so fast he bumped into Vanessa, pushing her down several stairs.

  She caught herself on the banister. “What the hell?”

  “Sorry, man,” Jason called up to Sean over the banister.

  “What?” Vanessa peered over to see Sean seated, naked in his bed, sheets pulled over his very erect dick. She stared at him. As she turned away, Jason in front of her heading down the stairs, she caught sight of his rumpled bed, strewn with magazines.

  Vanessa let herself be pulled all the way downstairs by Jason, fast and loud, offering evidence that they were getting farther and farther away.

  “Should we wait?” Vanessa said, breathless, in the dining room. She was both disgusted by the idea of Sean masturbating and delighted that she’d been spying and caught Sean exposed, merely the mortal boy he was. Whom had he been thinking about? she wondered, remembering the feel of his muscled back, and how she wished she didn’t bite her nails just as Nana Helen had always told her, so she could scratch them along it.

  “No way,” Jason said. “We’re leaving.”

  “I feel bad, though.” Vanessa looked at the table of papers. “This seal is kind of cool, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t really think. It’s a fucking government seal.”

  “It looks like a 1950s textbook.” She took a few sheets. She folded them and put them in her pocket. “It could be some retro album cover.”

  “Vanessa. Come on.”

  “Don’t you think we should wait until he comes downstairs?”

  “Believe me, we should not be here when he comes downstairs. It looks like we’re spying on him!” He took Vanessa by her elbow and led her down the driveway, and she didn’t resist.

  She got in the car and turned to Jason, in the driver’s seat. She could eat lunch with him at school each day, she could spend afternoons in the back room of his house listening to the comforting sounds of his mother preparing dinner, she could drive with him all over town, speeding along the Potomac, past Watergate and beneath the awning of the Kennedy Center, over to the Lincoln Memorial and around the Washington Monument, momentarily breathless for the beauty of this town, and never once would she think about having sex with his friend. “So do you?” She pointed upstairs.

  “My God! No!”

  “But don’t all guys do it? I mean, all the time?” If he wasn’t having sex, what was he doing? Because for several months now, sex, as in doing it, had rarely come up between them. Or Vanessa now didn’t bring it up and Jason never instigated it. Never. She began to wonder if he hadn’t forgotten to tell her he’d sworn off sex as he had drugs, as so many of the kids she saw around were vigilant about being sober, and disconnecting from the earlier punks who got so heavily into drugs. Detaching themselves from the dirty hippies who fucked each other so recklessly. You took drugs; that’s what you were. A smelly goddamn hippie. And also a total cliché. All these things, they alter us, Jason told her. We need our wits about us, he said. It’s all a way for the government to keep us down, Jason had said, and Vanessa had cocked her head and looked at him to see if he was serious.

  He was serious, and Vanessa could subscribe to the idea of being a pure self. She wanted to be righteous and uncontaminated. With all this recent talk about cleaning up the Potomac, that’s what she imagined she would be: purified. Now Jason and she spent nights lying on the couch in his parents’ den, a blanket draped over them, disguising all that was not passing between them. They listened to music. When Vanessa played the live Tom Waits on KPFK in Los Angeles, Jason had listened so thoughtfully, nodding his head. “I get it,” he said. “I totally get it. He’s so the real thing, you know? Like Ray Charles or something. And this is us.”

  But there was no missed beat, nothing lost, only Vanessa convincing herself she could stop wanting anything else, all those things that had once both defined and polluted her: beer, pot, burgers, the sticky, sweet spareribs from Hunan Village on Georgetown Road. The more she gave up for political reasons, the easier it was to do so, and her body reflected this, waxing and waning depending on her dissent. She was relieved also to let sex go.

  “Maybe,” Jason said now. He started the car. “But not me.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Vanessa asked. “Ben says guys do it all the time. Like they have to or they’ll die.”

  “That’s ridiculous. That’s what your brother tells girls so they’ll fuck him.”

  “Is it a Catholic thing?” Vanessa asked, ignoring the comment. Perhaps she and Jason were both boycotting sex. Vanessa remembered the wet leaves against her legs and back, the feel of earthworms crawling around at her ankles, the leaves whispering into the summer sky on those first few nights at Valley Hill with Jason. She remembered the vestal beginnings of sexual desire, then the stifling heat and sticky floor of some kid’s basement, the great roar of an out-of-tune bass, and the anticipation of waiting for the singer to stand up and scream them all down. Was there something awful about wanting? When had she become so terribly herself, conscious of her awkward positioning, the soft cushion of earth beneath her, the tires humming along the highway, her body grown ungainly and graceless flung against the cold, damp earth? Her own longing—for most anything, it seemed—had been burned away, like fog. It was replaced by the comfort of Jason’s unthreatening presence.

  “Please, Vanessa.” Jason put the car in reverse. “It’s not a Catholic thing. It’s just no big deal.”

  “Why are you making it seem like such a big deal then?”

  Jason shrugged. “Please. Can we just go?”

  “I think it must be a Catholic thing.” She crossed her arms and sat back in the seat.

  “Fine!” He put his long arm over her seat and looked out the rear window, reversing out of the driveway.

  “Whatever.” Vanessa shrugged, realizing that Jason may have been just as drawn to Sean as she was. She remembered Jason watching Sean fling himself off the rocks at Great Falls. Looking at a guy like that was not Straight Edge. Sean’s arms and legs circled in the air, his chest puffed up toward the sky. Vanessa had been so sure, as he dropped down, that before hitting the water he would rise up, his feet pointed, arms together over his head, heading toward the sun.

  She watched Jason shift gears from reverse to first, then second, with ease as he drove fast, toward Wisconsin Avenue. She remembered him patiently trying to teach her to drive stick and how she rode the gearshift of Mrs. McFinley’s Corolla evening after evening in the high school parking lot. He was so assured at some things, such as driving, and directions, and who was playing where and all their bootlegged recordings, and exactly how to get downtown to see them. Vanessa thought of Bee’s talk of rim jobs and blow jobs and the many boys she’d fooled around with. What made Bee need sex, or male attention, while Vanessa needed food or the inceptive warm feeling food proffered? She looked over a
t Jason, rewinding his 30 Seconds Over DC tape to hear the Slickee Boys again. His fingers tapped along the gearshift when “Attitude” came on.

  She reached over and mussed his hair. “It’s no big deal at all.” She would accept it, she thought. Because it let her off the hook too? Because this way she would not have to be Bee; she would not have to be one of those brave girls who made their own way, or one of those who just picked up their guitars and drumsticks and screamed. This way she could be no one.

  Jason smiled, looking straight ahead. He nodded his head faintly to the music.

  She had this strange desire to be experiencing anything before now, for her body to be made small again, before it had curved and ballooned, grew dangerous and disappointing. It occurred to her that people made a choice: they lived for the past or they lived for the future, and only now did she question why she would choose the former. What had been so fucking great about the past? It was easy, she supposed. The future had not yet given way to the present, which felt so leaden and irremediable.

  Vanessa thought of the near past, her mother, on fire, and knew she would never shake the mental picture, however old she became. Vanessa had risen that night from her crouch in the Epsteins’ garden, and she had watched her mother through the window, calmly, as if she were looking at something incredibly beautiful and unusual, a solar eclipse or a low-hung harvest moon. It took several moments for her to translate the image into fear.

  The paramedics would not cut away her mother’s clothes, and her shirt was charred against her singed skin. Felix and Marlene had gone in the ambulance, and Vanessa had taken a taxi with Marsha Epstein, whom she barely knew and who was hysterical. On the ride there, Vanessa thought about her mother’s shirt, burnt black, and also how she would rid herself of all that food. All that meat that had been wrong to eat. She could feel the stone weight of the potatoes, the fat and gristle from the lamb in between her teeth and at the back of her throat. Her father had been called and was on his way, and so it was the Epsteins and Marlene and she, all in the sitting area at the ER at Sibley, hoping for the doctors to come out soon with news. Vanessa couldn’t help herself; she’d gone to the bathroom off the waiting room. She had tried to be quiet, but in the end she hadn’t really cared if anyone heard her.