“Vanessa,” Benji said, kneeling down. He unzipped and removed his sweatshirt. “Sweetheart.” He turned her over from her side and tried to cover each part of her nakedness, the tiny breasts and sunken belly, hip bones protruding, the sparse brown-haired triangle of her crotch. A line of fuzz ran up from her pelvis, bisecting her stomach. “Vanessa.” Benji tried not to cry as he propped her up from behind and wrapped her tightly in his sweatshirt and then in his arms, and then, even his head, tucking his chin over her shoulder. There she was crying on her bed, the wooden figures of her Russian doll in chaos before her on the wrinkled brown and pink bedspread. I think I lost the littlest one! she’d sobbed. “Come on,” he said, lifting her now. She turned toward him in the driver’s seat, tanned and freckled, a space between her teeth revealed only as she laughed, the Volvo jerking out of the driveway. And there—just there; smoke through a keyhole, it was true—they were together, side by side on the hammock, hands outstretched in the heavy netting as the soft lights in each room of that red-brick house clicked off one by one. One day we will live in a city, they’d said, looking up at the variegated suburban night. So many years and yet here on this field that seemed to be gathering its own light she weighed nothing. “I’m sorry,” Benji said, shaking off many burdens. Still he heard the song. If you should stand, then who’s to guide you? “I’m so so sorry.” His focus here was clear. If I knew the way . . . He wondered, just as he said it, what it would mean exactly, but still he told his sister, his little sister, “Vanessa,” he said. “Let me take you home.”
CHAPTER 15
Eat Your Heart
March 23, 1980
The phone woke them both suddenly, and Dennis, weary from sleeping hard, a hangover slowly emerging at the tip of his skull and at the bottom of his throat, momentarily unsure as to where he was—what country, what state, what town, which hotel, what room—reached over to pick up the line.
It was four o’clock in the morning and he sat up and leaned against the headboard in the dark, the phone to his ear.
Sharon rose slowly, also misplaced, her eyes adjusting steadily to the dark. The moon had moved on, perhaps to bless another couple with its otherworldly light, and she began to see her husband, a ghostlike shadow beside her, nodding in the dark.
“Yes,” he said, sitting straighter. “This is he.”
“What?” Sharon whispered. No one but Ben knew they were here! How could anyone be calling? “Who is it?”
“Gary.” He put his hand up to stop her from talking.
“I see.” He paused for a while. “But I’m in Boston now.”
There was another silence, and Sharon contemplated her husband’s face.
“I’d like to drive, if that’s all right. But I won’t be there until afternoon.” He looked out the window. “And my father?”
He listened for a bit, then took the pad of hotel stationery and the pencil on the night table, and without turning on the light he wrote something down. “Got it. Yes. I’m leaving now.”
Dennis hung up the phone but did not move. Sharon watched him turn from shadow into man as he sat, not breathing, for several moments. Tonight, she waited.
He knocked his head several times against the headboard. He took a deep breath. He let it out. “Sharon,” he said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
Dennis watched his wife turn away from him, wrapping herself up in the sheets, hugging the bedding to her stomach. He turned on the light on the nightstand. He had not told her everything because he didn’t know much more, but also because he could not have borne it. He told her that Gary had been kind to call. Terribly kind, and he had remembered Gary pulling the jib and tying it, then pulling at it again to make sure it was secure, then describing his daughter’s shock therapy, his fingers pressing his temples in empathy, and Dennis had felt heartbroken by that image. He rubbed his own temples now and told Sharon that he was leaving for Washington immediately. We were very fortunate to have this chance, he said. Most people don’t get a warning, he’d said.
“Boy, we’re really lucky, Sharon,” he’d said, and she had snorted.
His bones felt creaky and brittle as he got up, and he thought of his father, hands on his knees, taking a deep breath before getting up from the couch. Dennis wondered if he was seated at the table now, a knife and fork poised upright at each side of an empty waiting plate, readying to eat his red heart.
“So I have to go now,” he said, going to his bag. “I’ve got to drive down now.”
Sharon lay in the fetal position. The white sheets were knotted around her body, her white hip, striated by stretch marks, exposed. She didn’t stir.
“Do you hear me, Sharon?” For a moment he stood, observing her. Because let’s not forget his wife had also committed a crime here. “Are you coming?” he asked, when she still did not reply. He went to the bathroom for his toiletries. He remembered the Bay Bridge opening, as if just to let them in their little boat through. Had it been Gary? Dennis had been so careful with Gary. Yes, my mother is from Russia, but she never goes home. She has never been back, he’d answered, feeling terrible for her, so far away from home. My only relative is a musician from Moscow, Uncle Misha. He’d laughed, trying to remember, as he’d said it, what instrument his uncle had played.
“I’m not coming with you,” Sharon said when he came out of the bathroom, flicking the light off behind him. She held the sheet at her waist, and her small breasts hung lightly, only slightly pendulous, the pinkish nipples pointing out from the center. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were shot with red lines and puffed beneath, dark with shadows. But she looked just like the girl with a hangover who used to drag herself out of bed to cook them popovers, before Vanessa and Ben were born.
“Okay.” Dennis knelt down to place his Dopp kit in his bag. “Just have the concierge get you a taxi back to Waltham. You can get a bus with Vanessa from there then.”
He zipped up his bag and swung it over his shoulder. Again he paused at the bed and leaned over, kissing Sharon on her head. “This could not be helped.”
Sharon was silent.
Dennis opened the door to leave.
“Dennis?”
He turned toward her.
“Good luck, Dennis,” she said, before lying back down and placing the pillow over her head.
Morning was just breaking over the Commons as Dennis pulled onto Newbury Street, where the shops were preparing for the long day. A young man with a large mass of curly black hair and a full apron tied twice at his waist came out from the back of a bakery with a tray of rolls he set down on the glass counter case. Dennis paused for a moment to watch him draw the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a faint trail of flour.
Lights clicked on in a coffee shop as he drove down Newbury Street on the way to the highway. A girl was taking down wooden chairs stacked on top of small wooden tables, her long blond hair swinging from side to side. Dennis slowed the car and peered out from his window to look inside the café, its brick walls decorated with brightly painted canvases. The girl turned to lean on the counter and looked into the street, her chin on her elbows, her legs shifting weight, swaying a little from side to side with bored languor.
Oh, to be bored! thought Dennis, who sped up as soon as she looked out the window and met his eye.
Youth! Coffee shops! Hot rolls! Dennis actually put his hand over his heart. How at a time like this he could think merely of his own aging, he didn’t know. Yet he was cut off from every image available to him: he could no more be that kid in the bakery than he could be the one sauntering into that café to talk up that girl.
Had the call this morning never come, would he still have this nearly existential feeling of regret? Because now Dennis felt overwhelmed by the what-ifs: What if he had stayed in San Francisco and waited for the summer of ’67, waited for revolution, so what if he was already too old? What if he had never entered Sharon’s Georgetown apartment that day when her roommate was out of town? Then, as he�
�d tried to make love to Sharon, the spider-plant leaves spilling out from a planter on the sill above the couch and practically crawling up his ass, he had thought even then, this should not be so ridiculously difficult.
He went over it again. It overlapped and looped around the past. His father walking ahead of him on the busy street; it always felt as if he were trying to lose Dennis. Then his father would wait at the doorway of Yonah Schimmel’s, the heat streaming out from the small, brown shop, the woman screaming in Yiddish, Zei nit kain vyzoso—Don’t be a fool! She’d gesture wildly for them to come in and close the door against the cold, and Dennis would give in to the comfort he was about to receive from biting into a hot knish. Me ken lecken di finger, his father would tell the woman as he peeled back the napkin. One can lick the finger.
It was like following Misha as he wound through the crowds and the police in Red Square. We’ll take this one, Misha had said, pointing at a shelf lined with wooden babushkas. That one there, he’d said, pointing to a red doll with a purple kerchief. For the girl, he had said when Dennis questioned him. Of course it will be a girl, and Dennis had thought of Sharon’s belly; she was carrying high with this pregnancy, and craving sweets. It’s a girl for sure, Tatiana had said as she watched Sharon inhale chocolate after chocolate. Girls like the sweetest things, she’d said, rubbing his wife’s back, and she had not been wrong, had she?
Dennis quelled the rising thought of his mother, her hands in her lap, her head down, being questioned, as he headed down the Mass. Pike. His father stood outside the door working the brim of his hat with his fingers. Dennis saw Ethel Rosenberg, her round, fat face, her unshakable pride, and he thought of her children, rabid as dogs along his block, their grandmother barely noting their escape into the street. It still amazed him that she had been brought in because of that bumbling fool husband of hers. Because he had been. He had been so obvious. In the end, he was an awful spy, but Ethel was murdered because she had said nothing. Yet how would she have lived with herself—and her children—if she had?
She would have been that woman who turned her husband in, and her children would have hated her. Because now those two boys, who grew up nice in the end, who seemed sort of normal, if intense, they fought every second for their parents’ innocence.
Dennis thought of his mother in the kitchen, a mixing bowl filled with egg whites, and the way she brushed her hair from her face and pulled back the checkered curtains—they had blue-and-white-checkered curtains!—and looked out onto the street when those two boys were taken by the state.
I’m in for a long drive, Dennis thought, lifting the wooden box of tapes up from the floor onto the passenger seat. This was Sharon’s car, and he bemoaned not having his own music, his music, not his daughter’s screaming crap, this indecipherable headbanger shit, and please, not Sharon’s Stories of Transformation, or that sulky Billy Joel album Sharon must have taken from Ben’s room. One hand on the wheel, he picked up a tape and fed it to the tape deck, which swallowed it hungrily: Well . . . it’s closing time . . .
Tom Waits, also his daughter’s. But this was a song he had always loved. The song marked one of the few moments in recent memory that his daughter had sat still with him, playing him the song. I search the place for your lost face . . . Dennis hoped he had not lost every opportunity. Even loving his wife; he hoped it had not eluded him. He had not wanted any of it, a wedding in a temple, a reception at a hotel, Jesus Christ, but he had gone along, gritting his teeth; he had signed the ketubah and walked to meet her beneath the flowering chuppah, then—and then!—he had lifted Sharon’s veil and there she was, her freckled face. Then he’d gone willingly.
Dennis longed for his own music. Harry Chapin! Dennis used to twirl Vanessa in the den as they played his record, the wall of books rising before them, and as he’d held his daughter at her chest, her legs flailing behind her, he had yearned for each one of those books to reach her; to grab her and take her into knowledge. He had wanted to hold her up to them and shake her a little, say, Learn! It is what we do in this family, this side of the family anyway, and he had thought this as Harry Chapin sang, The girls were told to reach the shelves while the boys were reaching stars . . . That was Sharon’s generation maybe, and Tatiana and Helen’s, yes, but thank goodness, he had thought, keeping Vanessa clasped to his heart, my daughter was born in a time when women could be exactly whom they wanted to be. So be everything, please! he had thought. Now is your chance to be everything.
His music was Harry Chapin, and then he thought of Stravinsky, his mother’s records, Rite of Spring playing on the turntable just as soon as spring tipped its bright felt hat in the direction of Orchard Street. Not even a day of good weather before that street began to stink of piss. His father and his friends! But his mother, she only had Boris. Sometimes Dennis would come home from school, and the two of them would look up suddenly, as if, though he came home at the same time each day, his mother hadn’t been expecting him. Even as a child, Dennis knew nothing romantic could pass between them: Boris was a cow. How could he—a Russian!—have been her only confidant? Were there no other Russian women to go trundling along Brighton Avenue with? She would take the train out there with his sister, then head straight back in. I feel sorry for them, Tatiana said on one winter day when the four of them walked the beach at Coney Island. An old man jogged by slowly, his chest bare and red, his mustache frozen at the tips. Several women in furs held their kerchiefs on their heads against the wind. Who comes to this country to be with the Russians? It makes no sense, she’d said, reaching for Sigmund’s hand.
It makes absolutely no sense, Dennis thought now, remembering his mother bringing out her meringues with those cherries, American cherries, she reported, hard as stones, for his birthday. The kids sat around the table with crooked little paper hats and nearly broke their teeth on those cookies.
Today the beginnings of spring were already evident; a few of the trees planted along the highway boasted diminutive green buds, and as morning came on in full, he could feel it warming up, even in the car. Despite the rush of the highway he considered opening the windows. It had been such a long and terrible winter; one could almost call it spiteful.
Dennis pulled into the Roy Rogers parking lot off the highway for some coffee and breakfast. The biscuits reminded him of his father-in-law, and as he got out of the car and slammed the blue door shut, he imagined a young Sharon at dinner with Roy Rogers in a ten-gallon hat.
Dennis made good time; he pulled up to the house just before one o’clock and parked the Volvo on the street so he could take his own car. His little red Beetle. God, he loved that car. He walked up the steps, leaning down and picking up stray bits of soggy toilet paper, and glancing up to the roof to make sure the gutters were clear, he went in through the front door. He dropped his coat across the banister at the landing and went to change into a suit and tie. After pulling back the curtains and peering out onto the street, which for the moment appeared empty but for the neighborhood Dodge Darts and Pintos, the wood-paneled station wagons, he took a look around his bedroom. How silly he was being; it was not going to end this way for him after all—it simply couldn’t.
He considered phoning Len, even though he was sure it was Lenny who had insisted Gary call him and give him this unorthodox opportunity. There would be security, of course, which is the only way the CIA operates. The CIA! How had Len become this man? He thought of Annie, her head thrown back, her bare shoulders exposed, her chipped painted toenails. She was so loose. This was not whom a CIA man married. And how have I become this man, Dennis thought, knowing he had no one to rail at now; he was grateful this was the path his old friend had chosen. Gary had been kind to call him. He had been kind to tell him they’d been sitting on this awhile now, gathering information. There had been a long lull, then, when the activity had started up again, well, they’d had no choice but to stop it for good. Venona was ending.
Len knew more, Dennis understood this, but he couldn’t make that call, n
ot even if he pulled off the highway and called from a pay phone as he’d thought to do in Milford and Fairfield and Port Chester. He was grateful—he was—but as bureaucratic as this town was, there were always favors; everyone fucked up sometime. Dennis couldn’t count on both hands the number of times he’d “accidentally” thrown a memo away or let something slip in a briefing. Looking at that black phone on Sharon’s night table, the rotary dial with its numbers like hands of a grade-school clock, it occurred to him that this phone was undoubtedly tapped. When had they come in? he wondered, picturing slim men in ski caps prying open the front door and slipping into his bedroom to slap a tap beneath the phone. He remembered the bug found inside the Great Seal that hung on the wall in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. The Thing, they’d all called it. It was inside the replica of the U.S. seal that had been presented by Russian schoolchildren, and it had hung on that wall gathering information through radio frequencies for nearly fifteen years until the baffled Americans finally figured it out and shattered it.
What he needed was a bug detector. One of those briefcase-size receivers that could isolate radio waves, and he had to laugh to think of opening such a contraption and locating the source in his own bedroom.
He thought of his mother meeting his gaze that day the agent followed him home from the bookstore. When he had come inside, she’d returned to her timid self and asked him, Where did they see you, Dennis? She’d grabbed his wrist. What is your job, really, Dennis? And he had turned to her and said, How do you know who was in that car, Mother? She had raised her head and released her arm. I am Russian, she said. And you work for the government.
The extent of Dennis’s wiretapping knowledge came from government myths and James Bond movies, which made him go downstairs and run his hand over the lock to the front door, checking for forced entry. He tried the lock several times, the dead bolt shooting out and in, out and in, but aside from making him think of one of those hollow dead drop bolts that he knew were used for stashing information, he noticed no difference. Ella Larson from across the street, who looked a lot better since she’d gone away and, according to neighborhood gossip, kicked the pill addiction that had started when her kids were in school, waved to him from the sidewalk. Dennis waved back before slowly closing the door. Then he turned and took the stairs by twos, running back up to the bedroom.
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