The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “You like when they treat you bad,” Jen said. “Don’t you?”

  We sat at the high table on high wooden stools in Jen and Mallory’s kitchen alcove. I didn’t place myself on the possessive deed after three months of living there—I wouldn’t after four months, five, not even after another round of lowlier applications finally turned up a job at Tommy’s Pizza and Subs in Astoria and I started paying something, meager somethings toward the rent. I knew I was an impostor no matter how much Jen tried to reassure me to the contrary.

  “Well, maybe I like it a little,” Mal said. “I do like a few spanks from those paddles they’ve all kept from their prelaw fraternities.”

  “Sororities too.”

  “Of course. They hit the hardest. More to prove.”

  “On your bare ass, I hope.”

  “Where else? Undies at my ankles, bent over one of those big, hard, ergonomic chairs—”

  “Wow,” I said, “you’re really going for this, aren’t you?”

  “You’re uncomfortable? He’s uncomfortable again,” Mal said to Jen, with her sideways smile, the knowing look that at once acknowledged and excluded me from the long-held rhythms of their friendship. I didn’t begrudge them these moments—I understood them, took a certain comfort in them. Why shouldn’t they feel comfortable enough to look around me at times, through me?

  Our tri-sided dinners became little islands, little points of reprieve for all of us soon enough. In the evenings I was now coming home with the smell of flour and marinara sauce like some aural tattoo on the inside of my nostrils. This is still the abiding impression of my time at Tommy’s: burnt flour, the insidious, crystalline spread of it, an unstoppable osmosis. It mixed almost festively with the red sauce on my pine green apron, speckled and spattered—Pollock comes to mind too, and again, except that here the artistry consists of mindlessly circling sauce onto eight-inch disks of personal pan pizza dough. Better that, I figured, than working the firing range at the front of the kitchen. It wasn’t just that the range sat in plain view of impatient customers, or that the stinging bits of boiling cheese and meaty grease jumped up and bit your soft inner wrists, the feel of fire ants—it was also Marco, it was mostly Marco, the beak-nosed ponytailed manager who ran the register and policed the grill like an Iron Guardist. From behind, the short gathered rump of his ponytail looked like a cowering rodent through the gap in his pine green hat. Then snapping around, he’d bark at you about the order on your left, the order on your left was burning, it was drying out, and the one on your right, you’d forgotten the cheese, and the one in front of you you were taking off already? Hold it, hold it, here, wait, and he’d motion for Rodney with the tattoos like smudges on his thin black arms to take over at the register. He’d shoulder me aside, literally, with a line of customers looking on, scoop up the offending brown sizzling mass of meat and vegetables and cheese, flip it, redice it in expert time, the spatulas blurring, drop one of the spatulas to grab a squeeze bottle of water to prime the grill, drop more cheese, prime again, and scoop up the salvaged sandwich into its waiting roll, just so.

  “Impressive,” I said once.

  “It’s not that impressive, Stopgap. Mix the ingredients together, heat them up, put them in a fucking roll, and fast. It’s not rocket science. You don’t even need a PhD to do it.”

  “Good thing, too, since I don’t have a PhD.”

  “Shut up, Stopgap.”

  By the time I got home from a shift and showered and dressed, and went out for pickup perhaps, I could feel a little of my humanity beginning to return, like the skin of my fingers that eventually smoothed and re-plumped when I’d been on dish duty. (I still carried the sharp smell of burnt flour in my nostrils, though, always, always, as if I’d been snorting the stuff.) After dinner Jen usually retired to the piano and I took up my spot on the brown suede couch under the gooseneck reading lamp. I read Beckett or Melville or one of Jen’s mystery novels, whatever I wanted now, reading to the sounds of Jen’s evolving score for June vs. Hurricane. After the modest Off-Broadway success of the Kiss Me, Kate reboot, Raymond had secured enough funding for an original musical comedy that he and Jen had now collaborated on for a year: Raymond was the words man, Jen the music. It had taken no small effort on my part, but finally I’d convinced Jen to unplug the headphones and let the apartment listen in. She was in the final stages, she said, fine-tuning, which was the only reason she’d agreed. And we shouldn’t get used to it: In the blank-page phase of composition she’d rather sit stark naked on the piano bench than unplug her headphones. In that case, I said, I wouldn’t mind.

  One night Jen was playing and playing again through a spare but rising, plaintive recitative section. I asked if recitative was the right word for it in a musical.

  “Good question,” Jen said. “Let’s say yes? Why not? Wagner called his operas ‘musical dramas.’ He didn’t mind mixing terminologies.”

  “Shall I get you a Wagner bust for your electric piano?”

  “Have him scowling maybe.”

  “My frowning baby’s frowning muse.”

  She showed the real thing at this, or a hammy simulacrum of it: the pursed mouth, the diving brows…

  In truth her composing face looked less like a frown than an all-face furrowing, an intense gathering in of the features as if by some inward centrifugal force. She didn’t like me watching her as she worked, but I’d done enough surreptitious observation to get to know and love this muscular squinch. I think she may have needed glasses, too.

  Jen returned to the music, waiting music, spare but rising, quietly yearning. In Raymond’s draft of the libretto (why not?) the main character, June, wanders a Jersey Shore boardwalk as the light fades. (Raymond, like Jen, was a New Jersey native, and this was another point of bonding between them.) The music rose only to drop down again, wavering, foraying down into the muddier depths of the piano as something brooded, something took shape. It was Hurricane Sandy. On this particular evening Jen had Raymond’s lyrics up on the stand, sometimes singing them under her breath. What can I do when there is nothing to do? What can I say when there is nothing to say? A little moody for a romcom, I said from behind her. I’d moved over from the couch—hovering, yes, but then the words weren’t her words. I hadn’t realized that the title of the musical referred to a literal hurricane, but there it was looming up in the stage directions: [storm sounds rise, winds, rain…whatever the budget can manage!]. I made a comment about this too and drew a swiveled rebuke from Jen—her pressed-lip smile, an abridgment of a smile.

  “How’s Beckett coming? Or Melville? Or who is it you’re reading for your dissertation these days? How’s that coming along?”

  It wasn’t. I’d abandoned my dissertation once and for all, as I’ve told you, and I’d been meaning to make this clear to Jen for weeks now, months. For now I said, “I know I’m being annoying—I just thought it was lighter fare, a sort of coming-out comedy.”

  “It’s light and it isn’t,” said Jen. “I don’t know. Raymond’s changed things around a bit.”

  “June’s still in high school, though, still struggling to tell her parents and her boyfriend?”

  “On leave from college now. Her father’s sick.”

  “Her father’s sick?”

  “Colon cancer.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, people get sick.”

  “Does she still come out to them?”

  “It’s harder now. There’s more at stake. They’re strict evangelicals.”

  “Strict evangelicals on the Jersey Shore?”

  “Please, Eli. I’m trying to do this.”

  “It’s too much,” I said. “Sexual repression, religious fanaticism, colon cancer, a devastating hurricane…Are you guys sure about all this?”

  “Sure, we’re sure about it,” Jen said, suddenly fierce and reaching for her headphones on the s
tand.

  It was around that same time that I started meeting up with Sam again, too.

  It’s a kind of admission to say it, to recall it, and almost as unflattering to me as the ham-handed incursions I’ve showed myself making into Jen’s evolving musical. (It wasn’t really hers to evolve, I soon saw.) But the truth is I enjoyed seeing my old friend again. He’d somehow found out where I worked and was now coming into Tommy’s on Tuesdays and Fridays, our ancient tennis days, buying Gatorades from the little counter refrigerator and sitting at a table with Flesh as Collateral, say, or Us vs. Us: Corporate Schismatic Strategies and How to Combat Them, or some such awfulness that he’d diligently read and take notes on as he waited for my shift to end. For my part, I’d started bringing a duffel bag to work.

  Into the back comes Marco one slow afternoon, the shop cavernous in its post-post-lunch-rush silence. I was washing the counters, the dishes done. Rodney was on his phone in the break room, really an alcove with a mini fridge and a stool. When I heard Marco’s step, I turned around and tried not to grimace. He was smiling nose-first, as he always seemed to do, his close narrow lips curling up and around the crooked totem so that it looked like the nose had leveraged the smile, winched it up by pulleys. His eyes were small and dark brown. With his hat off, the pulled-back slick of his hair looked flat and dully grooved, like a record.

  “Your boyfriend’s here, Stopgap. Looking hornier than usual, I must say.”

  “That’s good. Very good. That’ll do nicely in the harassment suit.”

  His smile widened.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “why ‘Stopgap’? Have I ever said anything about this job being temporary?”

  “Your face says it, Stopgap, your slow-ass work says it, the way you talk—everything about you says it.”

  “I see.”

  Marco mocked the phrase back at me Britishly, then lifted his chin at the wall clock and told me I could finish up the counters and head out at the top of the hour. Some thirty minutes early.

  “Let no one say you’re not a broad-minded, magnanimous man,” I called after him.

  “See you tomorrow, Stopgap.”

  At the top of the hour I went to the back room to change into my tennis gear and retrieve the personal effects Marco made us store in a bank of blue lockers the size of several shoe boxes stuck together. An old-school gesture. He didn’t want us out front with our phones, zombie-eyed and head-hung as customers came in. I found the rule equal parts repressive and endearing, a bit old school myself, obviously, but now I found it merely tempting, especially in my present mood, since managerial Marco, efficient Marco, stupid Marco had somehow left his locker’s padlock unfastened in its catch. The little arm of the lock hung free just above the joining place. Was this hubris or accident on his part? Was it a cosmic Dare? Inside the locker I saw a wallet and a Samsung phone—I took both of them, leaving only a pair of keys behind.

  Outside, I followed Sam toward the subway, shaking. Summer lay heavily on the city, the damp heat and the sick-sweet garbage smells rising, the sheets of light coming off the mirrored buildings. At an intersection a crosstown breeze brought a moment’s relief—the sun went behind clouds, the glass storefronts revealing their wares again. For a moment people seemed to speak softly on the sidewalks, soothingly, for my benefit, but my hands still shook. I told Sam I was quitting my job at Tommy’s.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “What happens after you quit? You got something else lined up?”

  I pulled out the cell phone and the wallet to present to him—a puppyish gesture. I’m embarrassed of it now.

  “What’s this?” Sam said.

  I told him.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?”

  “How fucking stupid are you?”

  “From your glass house you throw stones,” I said.

  Sam started back the way we’d come. “Come on, we’re going back.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “We’re going back, moron! Come on! Do you know how traceable you are? Hurry!”

  We walked double-time back to Tommy’s, where Marco was manning the register with a bored, slack expression that wavered into a smirk when he saw me. I’d just be a minute, I’d forgotten something in the back room.

  “Couldn’t keep away, eh?” he called after me. “You like us that much, Stopgap? Awww, Stopgap…”

  Morose Rodney was still on his cell phone in the back, still on break. He looked up as I passed into the little room with the lockers. “Forgot something,” I said, half choking on the word as I saw with an all-body clench that I’d shut up the padlock, or someone had. I pulled down on the lock and nothing happened. I yanked down—quietly, quietly, but I yanked—and nothing happened. I rotated the first of three crenellated number strips and pulled down at steady intervals. Nothing. Hot breathlessness filled my body. I could hardly hold the lock for shaking. How long had I been in here? Shaking, I tried the leftmost strip again, forcing myself to go slow, stopping at each crenellated break in the silver number line, rotating, stopping and pulling, rotating—

  Pure liquid feeling broke open in me as the catch fell suddenly open.

  “You okay?” Rodney said from behind me.

  I whirled around—“Shit!”—feigning shock, tearing wallet and phone from my pocket and throwing them clanging into the locker, falling against it. My shock was genuine enough, come to think of it—only the laugh I faked.

  “You scared the shit out of me!” I said.

  Rodney stood in the doorway. He made no response, only slid his eyes left toward the sound of approaching footsteps.

  “Where’d your boyfriend go?” Marco said. “I’d hate to think we offended him.”

  I grabbed my duffel bag and started for the door. I said I’d accidentally taken my phone charger with me the first time and decided to come back to drop it off. Bad battery on the phone, probably needed a replacement—

  “Your locker’s open,” Marco said, nodding.

  Idiotically I followed his eyes to where the blue metal door gaped open and dark as a mouth.

  “Wait, isn’t that my locker? What the fuck is my locker doing open?”

  He looked from me to Rodney, moving quickly to his property, checking his phone, rifling through his wallet.

  “I saw him throw something in there.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I don’t see any cell-phone chargers,” Marco said.

  “It was an accident. You can stop looking. I didn’t take anything from your fucking wallet, Marco.”

  “And I should take your word for it?” Marco said, suddenly turning on me, chesting into me. “The fucking thief?”

  “Am I? What kind of thief brings the stuff back, asshole?” I tried to sound angry, affronted, but my body backed sheepishly toward the door.

  “Don’t you dare move. Rodney, keep him there. Who do I even call for this? Do you call 9-1-1? Jesus God—Rodney, keep him there, keep him while I find a fucking number for the cops.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect: ‘Yes, hi, 9-1-1? I wish to report that nothing at all has happened. Nothing was taken from me. I’m just a paranoid bigoted piece of shit.’ ”

  Rodney grabbed halfheartedly at my forearm, but I broke past him into the open store.

  “You don’t think the cops care about attempted robbery?”

  I was backing through the dining room, hip-checking tables, ready to run if Marco pursued me out of the back.

  “I’ve got your name, I’ve got your address,” he shouted, “I’ve got your work address, you fucking thief! Where you used to work—”

  I crashed out of the store and fell into a jangled run-walk, a jittery dance that could have fooled no one. Sam stepped out from under his prearranged awning, his face like a moon reflecting mine, white and taut. �
�Good Christ, are we running?” he said. “Should we just run?”

  By the time we got out to the courts in Sunnyside and into our warm-ups, we’d mostly calmed down. We tried out a few lame jokes to prove to ourselves we could joke about it. Our second warm-ups. I remember how fast the court played that afternoon, notwithstanding all the cracks and weed patches that made me pine secretly for gentrified Hoboken. I felt loose-limbed and live-armed with the racket, unusually loose, unusually alive. Free and uncalculating. Did I litter up the stat sheet? I must have. Did I lose? Of course. But I remember I also hit several clean winners past Sam charging hard at the net—he was experimenting with serve-volley tennis of late. I felt invigorated, rattling with angles and possibilities, the air wet but clean in my lungs. Sam looked like a wrestler at the end of his sweat-suited training run, a large oval of dark gray dropping down from his neck and spreading through the middle of a Randolph Athletics T-shirt almost to the navel. I hadn’t realized those shirts were for sale: I recognized its kind from the Randolph locker rooms, recalled its stiff itchy embrace. You handed the gym people your student ID as collateral, they handed you a graying T-shirt made from burlap.

  “Not exactly for sale,” Sam said, “but I wanted a little souvenir of my time there. They could keep my student ID. What did I care?”

  “So when you steal it’s a souvenir and when I steal it’s, what, suicide?”

  “That was a suicidal move you pulled back there, yes.”

  Onto the grass now, drinking our Gatorades and stretching. The grass felt stiff and crabby under my thighs, sparse, like patchy stubble on the underlying dirt that turned to mud with the sweat seeping into it, but at least we were cool in the shade of a courtside oak. Sam was getting abstract now, moving from the particular to the general, like a good Marxist. I watched his face as he spoke: Little colonies of silvery sweat beads still perched on his narrow upper lip, on the high jutting cheekbones, rosy with sunburn, and all along the long jutting jaw. His eyes were more recessed in their sockets than they’d once been—he too had lost weight—and his tall slick forehead stood in the shadow of a black Federer hat, a new addition. He looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. (We were all that, of course, but lately Sam reminded you of it more.)