The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  In her simple black pants and vest, a blue blouse, long earrings dangling down beside the red-brown wavy forelocks broken free of the chignon, Jennifer Daugherty resumed her seat at the piano. I scurried up to the third row, behind the goateed priest, who turned to me and nodded a smile and handed me a program. I gathered it was Liszt we’d just heard. A delicate Bach partita followed, sprightly, precise, the voices twining and untwining. The interpretation was obviously indebted to Glenn Gould, not one of my favorites, but the playing was good, very good. The playing was exceptional—who was I kidding? All I’d ever done was dabble in the piano, achieving proficiency at most, learning just enough to know how little I knew compared to a real player like Jennifer, a real musician. Sing, O Muse, and tell of the long-necked, round-faced, auburn-haired girl who nodded her head in time to the allegro section! Her body began to relax into its intricate tasks, first with the Bach piece, then a Schoenberg, no less intricate for its loss of melody. A piece by Scriabin followed the Schoenberg, then a long, minimalist piece by John Adams, “The Radicals,” with its chords like chants, with eerie passages coming to abrupt, silent halts. (The piece was “a musical record and a critique,” according to the program, of the medieval Christian attempts to impose God’s kingdom on earth: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done / On earth as it is in heaven.”) The tempos were slowing now, the pieces getting longer, more contemplative, as if the concert had run from the shore into the foam and the breakers and waded out into deep, dark water, drifting, slowly swelling—the endless sea.

  Out of these depths came the songs I remember best from that night, the songs Hahn had mentioned to me and the ones Jen would later play for me again and again at my request, even teaching me certain sections of them—the Rückert-Lieder by Gustav Mahler. One of the finely dressed young women in the front row had gotten up beside the piano and now began to sing a series of searching, dreamy arias to Jennifer’s deft accompaniment: “I Breathed a Gentle Fragrance,” “Look Not on My Songs,” “At Midnight,” and finally “I Am Lost to the World.” This last song began deep in the bass clef, the same muddy depths where the concert itself had begun. Slowly the music climbed up to ground level, a starting place, and then back down, and back up again. Into this unsteady progress came the mezzo-soprano’s long, sober, beautiful lines, reprising the bass part.

  I am lost to the world,

  with which I’ve wasted so much time.

  It hasn’t heard from me in so long

  it might as well think I’m dead.

  Slowly, slowly, a lento march—each word, each phrase an age. The singer’s thin face strained visibly, her throat tight and striated, to sustain the effortless-seeming notes. This was Mallory, one of Jen’s closest friends, though at the time she was only her voice, the vehicle for that low-flying sound that Jen had provided for us, ceding the stage to this voice and these songs because she loved them so much, she felt grateful just to participate in them, and also, she later admitted to me, because she was struggling to get to an hour of memorized music for her program, as her department required, and needed something repetitive, something verse-based and simple. And lovely, and true. I have died to the world’s turmoil, sang the soprano, and I rest in a silent realm (“stillen Gebiet”), the note stilling on “stillen,” low and perfect.

  It was the kind of music that could make you fall in love.

  Quickly, then—to the summer months. Thirty days had June, thirty-one July and August. I spent most of them with Jen, in her bed or mine, no covers, no cover at all from that forno heat. I couldn’t help but think of Florence from the summer before, my trip with Alex. The thoughts came to me in the languorous times before and after with Jen, every after a before if we waited long enough. Suddenly Alex in her pink frayed hoodie would materialize, and sometimes she wore nothing at all. She was the last woman I’d been with, the woman I’d loved casually, by which I mean easily, effortlessly, like water, and in those moments a certain undercurrent of loss would pull on what was newly found. Jen. Jen with her lithe piano-player fingers, with her stack of music books in a wicker basket by the piano, an electric model, which she played with headphones on as often as not, conscientious of her neighbors through the thin plaster walls. Jen with her HGTV shows—House Hunters International, Property Virgins, Love It or List It. Jen with her Agatha Christie novels, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, and also George Eliot, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, a smattering of books in French and Italian—she claimed to know the languages only as far as dynamic markings and song titles went, but the books were well read, underlined, decorated with a tight looping brand of marginalia.

  Jen and her friend Mallory, the mezzo, and another roommate I rarely saw shared a three-bedroom walk-up in Astoria, Queens. When the heat was killing, which was most of the time, the air conditioners made a glistening beaded curtain of falling condensation down the front of the faded building, the gummed dirty sidewalks spattered with water. Pollock drips, Jen’s copper freckles—on her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose, everywhere, it turned out. The sex was incandescent—of course it was—and slippery, slick, our bodies greased by the heat. One weekend it was just Jen and me in the apartment—the clothes came off and stayed off, bunched into corners as we wandered in our Blue Lagoon innocence. From the bedroom to the kitchen to the little nook where Jen had installed a small green couch cushion beside the piano, the concert perch, she called it. In boxers and bra and panties, respectively, we played and listened and listened and played, taking turns at the piano and the green perch, Jen helping me with the first building sections of “I Am Lost to the World,” the notes halting, heavy in my hands.

  “Don’t think about it so much,” she said. “Imagine it’s easy, move your hands smoothly over the keys, and the tone will follow.”

  “I’d like to move my hands smoothly over your keys,” I said a little absently, almost out of habit, every phrase an opportunity for innuendo. It was a running joke we’d developed, and yet it worked, too—those early days! Soon enough we’d be back in the bedroom or on the living-room couch with a bathroom towel (that respectful towel) underneath us, or in the bathroom itself, or the cramped grimy shower under weak cold water. Anything to cool us off, anything to sate us…Back at the piano Jen would sway histrionically to Fiona Apple ballads, but the words came out pure, high, in her plaintive, unvibratoed voice, because all this sex made her melancholy, Jen said, smiling her red-lipped, natural smile. Her lips held color in a way I’d never seen before, as if pacing her hair, and at first I didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t use lipstick, didn’t care for it. I chalked it up to some reflex of female modesty, the light deception that says no lipstick when what it means is a little lipstick. But now we were into our third day together, a long weekend of nonstop seminude time together, and we’d showered together and done what little dressing there was to do together, and the lips still shone pinkish-red, like the cool smooth lining on the inside of an oyster. Or the cartoon idea of an oyster, anyway. With her cartoonishly perfect pink lips Jen sang to me—

  And you can uuuuuuuuuse my skin

  To bury your seeeeecrets in…

  “And you’ll settle me down?” I said.

  “I’ll settle you down all right,” she said, and back to the couch.

  How is it that so much sex isn’t tedious? How is it that the body can store so much appetite for so much of the same thing—well, slight variations on the same thing. I’ll dispense right now with any misput suggestion that I’m much of a bedroom artist. We talked a lot, Jen and I, laughed a lot during lovemaking, rolled around, groped, joyously struggled, but we weren’t breaking records, weren’t innovating the genre.

  And yet we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sex felt necessary, essential, like breathing.

  During one of our after breaks Jen told me about the mint green couch to which the cushion I sat on once belonged. It was in her first off-campus apartment,
in Alphabet City, full up like a punk house, except most of the musicians were classical and baroquely averse to mess and sprawl. Too bad for them. The place was overrun with roommates. “The indignities of capitalism, right?” said Jen. I nodded my head, a little smile to match hers, though I knew I was being teased.

  “Don’t you wish you could take back that C plus now?” she said. “I was a diligent student.”

  “People in your line of work don’t care what you got in Poli Sci 110.”

  “Not true, not true! Raymond looked at my transcripts that first day and shook his head—he had this very disappointed look in his eyes. The only B plus I ever got in a college class and it comes in the last semester? He must have known I was on a slide. I’m sure it’s affected my pay.”

  This particular Raymond was the musical casting director who’d hired Jen to accompany the vocal tryouts of Broadway actors, aspirants and old pros. Jen liked the job, she said, but considered it a stopgap. It kept her sight-reading sharp, and it was money for music, a rare thing, but it was also a lot of repetitive I-IV-V stuff, a lot of camp. Jen’s real ambition was to go on to graduate school in musicology, but her first round of applications in the spring, before I’d really gotten to know her, hadn’t panned out. Perhaps the B plus was a genuine sore spot. In my defense, I hadn’t actually graded her other two papers, but it was likely that my first hard over-swift evaluation had spoiled the pot for her. Jen seemed to sense I sensed this and took pains to keep the B-plus jokes away from the higher-voltage lines of the grad-school question. When she did talk about the applications she talked about luck of the draw, hypercompetitiveness, a crapshoot. She said she hoped a year of real-world experience in the music industry might help her chances, and that she’d apply to more fallback schools next time. In the meantime there was “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “Mack the Knife,” “I Dreamed a Dream,” etc.

  But back to the mint green cushion. Jen described roommates everywhere, seven roommates in a three-bedroom two-bathroom apartment, and sometimes it was eight roommates, effectively, when the couch-crashing friend of a friend had her boyfriend stay over, the two of them sleeping head to toe on the green living room couch. Jen was the girl’s name—she’d forgotten the boyfriend’s. The other roommates started referring to her as “bad Jen.” Pretty soon she’d taken over a corner of the living room; her toiletries stood brazenly on the crowded bathroom sink alongside those of paying roommates.

  “And nobody really knew this girl all that well,” Jen said. “I think she’d been in a sorority with one of the roommates, but it was more like a favor you didn’t know how to refuse. Bad Jen and her boyfriend were there more and more, and their stuff was there, little piles of clothes and whatnot surrounding the couch and in the corners of the room. Every day looked like moving day. It was getting out of hand. Six girls, two bathrooms, and now we didn’t even have a common space we could use? The squatter was amazing if you think about it, her shamelessness—I was sort of in awe of her. How could she just keep smiling at us like that? Hi, how are you, how was your day? If she had a job, we didn’t know about it. If her boyfriend had a job, we didn’t know about it. The boyfriend’s stubble started speckling the sink—you could see where he’d tried to wipe the hairs away with his hand, in a pass or two. It wasn’t enough. It was getting totally out of hand. But we couldn’t rat her out to the landlord. It wasn’t any nobility on our part, we just didn’t want to implicate ourselves in hosting a squatter for most of the semester. One day we came home and Jen or her boyfriend had hung a sheet from the ceiling with thumbtacks—it divided off the sofa, it claimed half the room. When we confronted her about it she started crying and said she was just trying to create a little privacy for herself. She said she’d just broken up with her boyfriend and was looking for work but it was impossible in the city, unless you wanted to work crap restaurant jobs, and even then. She promised us she’d leave soon and said she was really grateful for all our help. We were all really good people…

  “Fast-forward a week. She’s still there. The sheet’s still up. We haven’t actually seen the boyfriend, but the little black hairs are still showing up on the sides of the bathroom sink. We could have had the locks changed, but how to explain that to the landlord? We could have just owned up to the landlord, but we weren’t that brave. What we ended up being was incredibly passive-aggressive. If bad Jen got in the shower, one of us would take down the sheet, another would stuff her clothes into shopping bags. The next day the sheet would be up again, the bags unpacked. We’d try again. All of us were involved by the end, even bad Jen’s former sorority sister. She’d get in the shower or leave the apartment for some reason and she’d come back and all her stuff would be packed and ready to go. She must have been getting the hint, she’d stopped smiling at us and saying hello and how was your day, but she still found a way to stay there. It was incredible. Finally she left the apartment one evening and we moved the green couch out of the living room and locked it in one of the bedrooms. We were so paranoid and frightened—I think we were scared of her by now—that we distributed the cushions throughout our different closets, like a mob kill. And that did the trick. Her stuff was gone in the morning. We kept expecting her to come back, but she never did. We ended up getting rid of the green couch, but I kept the cushion in my closet for the rest of the time I lived there, like a weird souvenir. It turns out it’s a very comfortable concert perch.”

  “This very cushion?” I said.

  “That very cushion. Unspeakable things were probably done on it.”

  “It does feel a little stiff in places—call it ‘character’?”

  Jen guffawed, hid her face behind a curtain of wavy auburn hair. If she washed it and left it to air-dry, it kinked and waved like lasagna noodles. From behind this wavy curtain she said, “Oh Lord. I did wash the cover, but maybe not well enough.”

  “I’d like to do some character-building exercises with you—bad Jen.”

  She unparted the hair and smiled a wondrous smile—blessings on those fuchsia lips, those straight white teeth, the cheekbones with their copper freckles. “If anyone ever heard us talking like this, you know I’d die, right?”

  “I’d be mildly embarrassed myself, but I think I’d survive it.”

  “Well, just so we’re clear—Naughty Professor,” said Jen, and she tugged me back to the couch by the band of my boxer shorts.

  In my defense, Jen had turned twenty-three that summer—only five years separated us now, and we’d never once touched during the semester. When people asked us how we’d met, we said “in school,” vaguely. I said I was just starting into a PhD program, which was of course the biggest lie of all, and Jen said she was working a little before grad school. The story worked just fine, for what that’s worth. Maybe little. Would it help to add that we didn’t really think about it much—our accidents of meeting were mostly a joke now, a bit of goofy role-play, foreplay. Anyway, it’s not really my purpose here to try to defend myself.

  This was the summer of Soline.

  One of the brag points of wonky business journalists in those days was that only wonky journalists, and the fraudulent insiders themselves, stood a chance of understanding what was then coming to light about the multibillion-dollar energy company. Nonsense. Read Marx in The German Ideology, read Luxemburg, Gramsci, Jameson, or just open your eyes—it’s already there in front of you. It was there in 2008. It was there with Enron, of course. (From an article in Forbes: “If Enron, operating in a deregulated market, was calculus, Soline and its many-fronted micro-frauds was a kind of multivariable calculus.”) It was there in the history article I read in my senior year of high school, when I was far from a math whiz, but I didn’t need to be, did I? The article described the British land enclosures that yanked the common fields out from under the peasant farmers, the first wave of proto-capitalist consolidation, with wave on wave coming in behind it, a new ocea
n, a new reality. Rather miraculously, I’ve rediscovered this article in a social-studies reader in the library here, among the primers and tech manuals, the expurgated novels, old water-warped copies of Scientific American, the donated refuse of a hundred other collections arranged sparsely on the blue metal shelves. In the article is an old protest poem from the days of King Henry VIII, a piece of light verse that once wrought heavily on me:

  The law locks up the man or the woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common,

  But leaves the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from off the goose.

  Five hundred years later, and what’s really changed? The instruments of oppression may have digitized, they may blink and scroll and refresh to the millisecond now, but they’re still the same shrilling vacuum hoses that suck from the many and give to the few, and more often under the law’s protection than its suspicion. Soline was remarkable in how cleverly it stole, how completely it ended up erasing the livelihoods, the retirements of its workers—but in this it was only an outlier, a sinner in degree, a good citizen in kind. This was capitalism being capitalism. Let the notebook-dumping journalists self-flatter about the arcana of deception, let the Wall Street experts talk a technocratic blue streak about “depreciation timelines,” line costs, loans as revenue, “mark-to-market” valuations—it was still some asshole who set the detonator, another asshole who okayed it, and the assholes had a choice. That’s the point. That’s the real point. It’s what the Group was saying all along, I think, or trying to: There’s a choice. It isn’t always easy, or easy to spot: Predatory capitalism has never been more invisible, more inevitable-seeming, more adept at impersonating nature. And how can you fight against cyclical “Nature”? How can you fight a degenerative disease that passes itself off as a mere tremor, an “instability in the market,” or worse, a kind of weather system, a system no human hand can control since no hand set it in motion to begin with? The unmoved mover, or some such bullshit.