Red Love by David Evanier

he listened to Jack Benny for eighteen years.
    When Sid was in his senior year of high school, his English teacher gave an exam in his class and then asked Sid to remain afterward. He asked Sid to take the exams home and grade them that night.
    Some of the other kids saw Sid take the exams. They surrounded him in the hallway pleading with him to pass them. Many of them had not even bothered to speak to him before. Sid saw many new attractive attributes in them.
    Sid took the exams home and sat up until 5 A.M., erasing wrong answers and filling in the right ones, even faking the kids’ handwriting. When he was through, they had all passed. Sid downgraded his own paper to make things look less suspicious.
    Sid handed the exams in to the teacher. In the afternoon Sid met the teacher in the hallway. The teacher said, “The class did very well, did they not, Sid?” turned his back and walked away. This comment burned into Sid. For twenty-four years he thought of it and considered looking up the teacher in the phone book, apologizing, and explaining why he had acted as he did.
    Each year when the new phone book arrived, Sid looked at the women’s names and wondered what they were like. Stephanie Schnall: a tremulous librarian with suppressed emotions and chestnut hair; Bridget Hart: a vixen who kept a little braided whip in her glove compartment.
    Russ Columbo broke Sid’s heart, and he had a special shot of Grable’s legs in his dresser drawer under his shirts and mismatched socks.
    The seasons came and went; Sid sat quietly on the bus on the way to work watching the young lovers, the cycles. People’s grief gave him strength—he cheered up.
    Later, in Jersey City, when his friend Pete Boston introduced him to the Soviets, Sid was uncertain. He had considered himself a Norman Thomas Socialist. But he saw these were interesting men. The Philadelphia Communists he knew, were weird and shabby losers—libertines, gap-toothed wonders—no way he would join those furry nuts. The Party was their glory. It made them shoot up a few inches, gave them a set of balls. Pete had taken him to their meetings, hoping Sid would join.
    The local Party office had walls papered with drawings of brawny, upright workingmen in overalls with upraised, gigantic muscled arms and capitalists with fat cigars and big bellies sitting on piles of coins.
    The leaders, with their pipes, tweedy vests, and blank faces, had this “You go out and get your heads cracked, it’s only the cops” attitude. He saw a small black woman make a suggestion about a demonstration and the leader coldly respond: “We will decide who we will learn from.” She steadied herself by putting her hand on the chair.
    One angry Greek exploded at the Marxist dialectics (Does the Party shake the workers or do the workers shake the Party?) and shouted, “The hell with this bullshit—give me five good men and I’ll take Rittenhouse Square by storm.” The meetings broke up at 4 A.M. They were dominated by what the Swiss called the ploder sacken, the endlessly boring talkers.
    Sid couldn’t take those pig festivals on the Jewish holidays—the Jewish Communists’ celebration of the pig. Not just spareribs in Chinese restaurants, mind you—okay, that was odd on Yom Kippur, but they thought they were proving they weren’t narrow Zionists. But pictures of pigs on the mantelpiece! Pig recipes! Pig poems! Sex tips! This was excess, Sid thought.
    In his parents’ house he’d lived in the same room since childhood. Sid had sat in the back row in the living room beside his bachelor uncles in the darkening dusk. Uncle Simon was known for his Republican rage. You never mentioned F.D.R. in his presence. If you did, he turned livid red and screamed, then didn’t talk to anyone for days. Whenever Simon sat quietly in his chair, everyone assumed he was thinking about how much he hated F.D.R.
    When Sid was introduced to Alexei by Pete, he was touched by Alexei’s concern. Also Alexei was