He sat down on his wife’s side of the bed and put his hands in his lap. He hooked the handset on his neck, then, pressing the receiver buttons down with his palm, he turned the phone over. There was nothing he could see; perhaps the tap was inside the phone, he thought, peering over it. Or maybe it was on the den phone, or the kitchen, though he wondered how they would manage to get into a phone fastened to a wall. Dennis set the phone right side up and placed the handset on the cradle. He might not be able to find it, but it had to be there.
He thought of his parents making their way down to Washington separately. Was his father here yet? Where were they keeping him? He had no way of knowing. Dennis saw his father so clearly now; he stood alone, and he saw his father’s face gone slack, weakened and unsettled. Sigmund looked as if he were trying to speak but had realized that no one was listening any longer. What must that feel like, Dennis wondered now, to become aware of your irrelevance? And Tatiana. He wondered was his mother broken yet.
Dennis slid open the drawer of Sharon’s night table. He did not know why he did this; he had never before looked inside this drawer. Her diaphragm sat in the front left corner, and as soon as he saw it, he heard that click of the case opening, the barrier emerging, the click click of it closing. She had not brought it to Boston, and last night they had done without it. The evening had come back to him in waves on the ride home—the lightness of drinking at the bar with his wife; it had felt as if he were shot through with light, that finally his insides had become hollow, so easy now to carry. And in the room later, the moonlight had shone off her face, and he thought of the gentle way the past had come to sit with them. A plastic container of pens was in the drawer, and a lint brush, several fine, light hairs clinging to the red velvety fabric. I’m sorry, Sharon had told him. He picked up a stack of green Food Matters business cards and placed them back in a straighter pile next to the hand lotion and gobs of wax he soon realized were the earplugs she wore in the early mornings on trash days. Sharon could not take back what she had done. Dennis thumbed through a stack of photos that he recognized as photo-album rejects: there was Sharon grinning, a huge turkey on a platter in her outstretched arms, her eyes two red points of light; Ben running down the field, his body blurred in motion. Dennis had seen more perfect versions of these same photos—Sharon’s real eyes staring down at the perfectly browned turkey with affection, Ben dribbling on a green field, his leg muscles as defined as those of Michelangelo’s David. A wrinkled envelope, folded in half, the unsealed flap tucked inside, sat atop two thick, well-worn paperbacks, and Dennis picked it up. He unfolded it and turned it around in his fingers. Two green guitar picks slid onto his lap.
CHAPTER 16
Perilous City
The shades were still pulled back in the hotel room, and Sharon could see the city spread before her, alighting as the dark blue of the sky clouded over into morning.
She crossed her arms over her bare chest as she listened to Dennis speaking, his voice a ringing she couldn’t answer. It was difficult to focus on what he was telling her, and she saw his mouth forming words, but couldn’t quite make out their meaning.
He paused, and Sharon said, “Yes,” even though he was not asking a question. “Okay,” she said at other silences. When he reached out his hand to her across the bed, she did not take it.
She’d registered enough to know that it was shameful. Caught. One day those Venona transcripts would be leaked, and she would be able to see for herself how it had happened. How long had it been happening? How long had it been kept from her? She did not know those things yet, but she knew it was appalling, reprehensible, and, yes, shocking. It was disgraceful that her husband had sat naked in the dark and disclosed it: a spy in the family.
The details were not of interest to Sharon now because she realized that their whole lives had been condensed into this single secret. And Sharon seized on this. This, this spying could have been the cause for everything that had gone wrong for them, that had taken them from the bright moment when they’d stood staunchly on the Mall, their fists raised with such conviction—and at this word, Sharon stifled a sob, because she had always thought that above all it was what they had shared. They had always believed that what they would pass down to their children was not the good fortune their parents had fought for and handed them readily, but the intangible splendor of hope and dreaming.
How, she wondered, would she ever explain this to her father?
These secrets were ours, he’d said as he strung up the American flag. Those two got exactly what they asked for.
And as Dennis had gotten out of bed slowly, like an old man, she remembered her father watching the flag snap in the wind, then standing on the front lawn with his hand over his heart like some asshole, she’d thought then. Theirs was a town torn to bits over what that flag meant and who would carry it. How many times had she heard her father say it? They’re more commies here than on Hester Street, he’d said, to any producer or script doctor who came over for cocktails. What, he’d implore, pointing his finger toward the door, is happening out there?
And maybe he had been correct, Sharon thought now. Because this was a great country. America is a great country; where else on earth would she rather be a citizen? Nowhere, Sharon thought, tearing up again. There was nowhere else. Maybe the Rosenbergs had not been heroes after all. She saw them frying at Sing Sing—is that what would happen now, all these years later? She tried to imagine it, though she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that perhaps the Rosenbergs had gotten precisely what they’d deserved.
Her husband turned on the light on the nightstand and she blinked several times.
“Okay,” she said to Dennis because there was silence.
Sharon watched from the bed as he dressed in the half-light.
“So I have to go now,” Dennis said.
She had expected this when, last night, she had given her blurred, feeble apology about Elias. Just a murmur before they fell asleep; he might not even remember it. She had thought Dennis might leave and that she might have to fight for him to stay, but this morning it had become irrelevant and so Sharon offered nothing.
“I’ve got to drive down now. Are you hearing me?” He turned to look at her. “Are you coming?” he asked, when she neither moved nor made a reply. He passed the bed and went to the bathroom for the toiletries he’d set by the sink last night.
But all Sharon could see for this moment was arrivals: her in-laws trudging up the stairs to Dennis and her new home. Sigmund was in his dungarees, creases as sharp as corners. Tatti was so quiet. She barely said a word. Dennis stood behind them, waiting impatiently at each step. Just picturing her mother-in-law enter the hallway was heartbreaking. Oh, Tatti, she thought now. Dear sweet Tatti chomping on a hot dog from a street cart; it always looked so big, so obscene, so American, clasped in her thin, white Russian fingers.
“No,” Sharon said when Dennis came out of the bathroom.
“No what?”
“I’m not coming with you.”
He bowed his head and placed his toiletry kit in the corner of the bag.
Sharon watched her husband pack as she had watched him for their entire marriage. Who cares that it was dramatic: can’t a city be like a lover? Dennis had been leaving her for Moscow for over a decade. She thought of that perilous city as she had as a child; the incarnation of all things threatening, as if the country itself would bring its infamous fist down and execute them all, that this was what they’d practiced escaping in those air-raid shelters, beneath the tables at school, the drills rehearsed each morning just after the Pledge of Allegiance. She saw the mushroom cloud in the sky. There was no other way to describe it because that’s what it was. That was the A-bomb; it was no other thing. She felt fatigued by the threat of the Soviets, which had bled into her life, now in every aspect.
“I have to get Vanessa, Dennis.” As she said it, she felt a pang of remorse for last night’s selfish thought. Because their children had provided them
with untold joys. The sinews that had connected her to Dennis for all these years could so easily have snapped without Ben and Vanessa, just gone brittle and cracked in two. Their children had not come between them; if anything, they had kept their marriage elastic and fit and sutured and worthy.
He nodded.
“And say good-bye to Benjamin too.”
“Okay,” Dennis said. “You should order room service. Something nice.” Dennis tried to smile.
Sharon laughed, imagining morning light stealing into the room, shining off the silver tea service, and silver plate cover, a single rose bobbing in a crystal vase, and Dennis already on the highway to D.C.
Dennis zipped up his bag, and though she had become inured to their constant parting, the abrupt sound of departure still caught her by surprise. He went to kiss her on the head, which felt gentle and fatherly in all the best ways.
At the door he didn’t hesitate, but just as he turned the knob to leave, Sharon said quickly, “Good luck, Dennis.”
She watched his back straighten as he breathed in, his shoulders rising, then she saw his back round, his shoulders fall just as they had at the window in the château when the bat had finally been coaxed out of the room. She had imagined that bat was headed straight to the moon.
“I’ll see you at home,” Sharon said, just after he’d slipped out of the room.
CHAPTER 17
Doughnuts
March 23, 1980
A radio alarm went off, and Vanessa woke facing the wall, curled up between two teddy bears, one dressed in a sailor suit, the other as a cowboy. Her first thought was of camp, that it was reveille exploding over the campus speakers, blasting the campers out of sleep. She felt the same cold of those early-July mornings and remembered rising from her metal cot and pulling the sheets up tight before marching to the camp center for flag-raising and breakfast. She thought of the trail to the waterfront, past the gum tree—the trunk of a pine covered with the campers’ chewed gum, forbidden during swimming. She felt the burn in her ears from the alcohol drops, hot from the sun, all the campers lined up, heads turned ear to the sky after swimming.
Vanessa soon realized she was not at summer camp, but at her brother’s school. The radio blared with a program discussing the usual: the hostages. Day number one hundred and forty, the reporter stated. One hundred and forty, he said again, carefully pronouncing each syllable.
Swimming. Vanessa remembered her last time at the beach with Bee and Heather and Jessica. She had woken in a car in a hotel lot at the beach, the sun rising—she’d understood only then that it does rise in the east just as she’d been taught—and a darkness had come up from within. She had felt it come from in her, and it had stretched its jellyfish tentacles around her heart, squeezing tight. Bee had come back from the beach with a handful of broken shells and a headache; Heather had run up to the car from the slots, hands cupping a small heap of coins. But Vanessa—lying next to Jessica, who had woken up laughing, laughing—had come up without effect. Bee drove them all home that night, debunking myths about how great sex on the beach was. No one tells you about all that sand! she’d said, slapping the wheel and cackling. It gets in everywhere. And I mean everywhere. They’d sat in traffic for hours on the Bay Bridge, and Vanessa had looked out on the Chesapeake, its surface infused with the gray of twilight, the quiet stirring of a still evening, and she had felt deprived of absolutely everything.
Now Vanessa placed her palm on the wall, and the deep cold of the cinder block felt refreshingly cool. She turned over and saw Ben asleep in the next bed. Ben’s dorm, she thought, watching him breathe, unfazed by the radio alarm that must have been set for classes. She remembered a rainy day at camp, campers lazing about in their cabins, sitting Indian-style, braiding each other’s hair. Someone played guitar: I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again . . . When was the last time a song made her feel the way that song had? She remembered the camp songs at Hill Valley, all those little-girl voices rising up so sweetly into the hazy, humid afternoon: Ri-ise and shi-ine and sing out your glory, glory. Hard-core music was only about now. Was that because it had no history? Ri-ise and shi-ine and [clap] sing out your glory, glory, children of the Lord. Last night the altogether different drumming through her body had recalled what she had felt for years, which was like a piece of softening fruit, exploding beneath the sounds of all that music, ripped and split apart from the inside. Once she had listened to music to feel all the things she could not. That morning at camp, rain pouring down outside, while she was dry and secure, she felt she was precisely where she wanted to be.
Ben. He was curled on his side and facing her, his lids fluttering, lashes touching and lifting from the tender skin below his eyes.
How long, the radio host continued, can this hostage crisis continue? Call in and let’s talk it out!
She tried to shake away the image of Schaeffer setting down that red bong and moving over to her. It had not felt bad. It was warmth and color and light for several moments, but then again, so, she’d heard, was a seizure. Ben’s friends wore so many accoutrements: long hair and ripped jeans and ratty tie-dyes and LSD tabs in their pockets, stamped with cartoon characters; it was a cliché, about as radical as their father had been with his Make Love Not War T-shirts, and his beat-up red Beetle he drove as if it would save him from something, the Whirled Peas sticker stuck crookedly on the back bumper. That, my dear, her father had told her when she’d asked why he didn’t have a sticker that simply said World Peace, means more than you can ever know. Food, he’d said, sends a more powerful message than guns. Food, he’d told her, is running out. But there are always enough guns now, aren’t there?
Okay, we have a caller who thinks the hostages will be freed soon! Tell us what you think, caller.
“Who set the fucking alarm?” Ben lifted his head from his bed.
Vanessa pushed down the teddy bear with its navy blue sailor’s cap, as straight and stiff as the paper planes she and Ben once made, to see her brother without the frame of bear fur.
“Oh. Yeah.” He let his head fall heavy onto the pillow.
Vanessa held her breath and tried to zip up the sweatshirt she wore—her brother’s, she assumed—but it was already fastened up to her neck. She felt the hems of a soft pair of boxer shorts skimming her thighs. “Hi.” She curled into a tight ball and used the soft stuffed animal as a pillow.
She had seen her brother coming toward her out of the morning mist, and seeing his face, also her father’s face and her mother’s, and her own too, and despite her nakedness, or perhaps precisely because she could not arm herself, she had welcomed his strong hands, hands that, she knew, as they lifted her, had experienced so many women’s bodies. As he had sat her upright on the field, she had felt the contrast of her own inexperience; few men had lighted upon her. There was an imbalance, as there always had been with Ben and her; Vanessa would never catch up. Yet as he’d lifted her by her armpits, she’d felt safe, so tremendously secure in his arms in a way she had not felt since those rainy days at camp, since coming back from the beach with her family, her hermit crab nestled beneath a lettuce leaf in her little cage, her father carrying Vanessa up to her bedroom after the long, dark drive. Wait for me, she’d thought, as her brother lifted her to her feet on that field, and she had felt the soft, wet grass beneath her, realizing that this—love, she supposed, security—was a terrible thing to go without. Who could have told her she was in between these moments of girlhood and womanhood when there is no one on earth who can carry you? Wait for me.
The caller was going on and on about what an idiot Jimmy Carter was, and all Benji could do was imagine his friend mounting his sister. He felt sick to his stomach, which could, he decided, also be because he hadn’t eaten since the pizza with his parents. Because maybe Schaeffer had done the kind, right thing and had just taken good care of his sister.
Benji looked at Vanessa. “How are you feeling?”
Just the word feeling, and Vanes
sa thought she would disintegrate. “I’m okay,” she said.
Benji sat up and ran his palm and fingernails across his scalp. “I’m really sorry about last night. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was just such a stressful day, you know?” He shook his head. It had been a brief and stunning moment, then it was gone. “I really shouldn’t have taken drugs in front of you, you’re only a kid. I mean”—he cleared his throat—“you’re not a kid anymore, but I didn’t need to force you into making that kind of a decision, is all.”
Vanessa pet the teddy bear. “It’s all right,” she said.
“You ended up at Schaeffer’s, didn’t you?”
Vanessa nodded and sat up. “Yeah.”
Benji bit the inside of his cheek. “Did you two . . . ?” He pointed a finger from side to side.
Vanessa scrunched her mouth into a crooked bow.
He looked down and shook his head. “God,” he hissed. “I can’t believe that guy.”
She shrugged, picking at the stuffed-animal fur. She removed the sailor cap and sat the bear on her lap.
A new caller was on the line. The U.S. needs to just go in there and get those poor people! The woman had a high voice, and she sounded desperate. Does anyone know what’s happening to them? Those poor, poor families.
“V,” Benji said. “Can I just ask? Was that your first time?”
Vanessa knew she would cry if she spoke, so she just shook her head.
“Well, that’s good, I guess. Because the first time, it should be nice.” Benji thought of little Erin Mackaby, a flesh-colored square, naked but for that strand of winking pearls clasped around her thick neck, waiting for him on her parents’ four-poster bed. “Really nice, I mean. You know that, right? It shouldn’t be while you’re tripping on acid.” He tried not to think of his sister as one of the girls he’d had but had not wanted. “So you’ve been sleeping with Jason, then?”
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