The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “I guess that’s good, though, right? That the bank was still open to something? I guess something’s better than nothing.”

  “Well, she has her reward,” Sam said coldly. “God bless, and fuck off.”

  Jen looked at me hollowly now, peering out from behind dark lusterless eyes set into her darkened face. She didn’t acknowledge the story I’d just told about Maria, or half told—the abortive power of her gaze. I laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and felt the strong plane of muscle slip under my touch, a noticeable recoil. Persistent, I moved around behind her on the bed and leaned my weight into a massage that she eventually responded to, leaning back or falling back into my working hands. I slid down the straps of her nightgown and reached for the lotion we still kept on the bedside table. From soft strokes at Jen’s warm, smooth back I moved to the sides of her torso, the sides of her small breasts, pushing the nightgown down to her waist and rubbing to the gentle catch of her hip bones, the hem of her underwear.

  Jen’s voice cut above the white noise of the fan in the window. “They announced the cancellation today.”

  “What?”

  “The cancellation was announced today.”

  “Of the show? Of your show? What happened?”

  “Yes, the show. The money’s gone.”

  “All of it?”

  “Why, do you want to chip in?”

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

  “Are you?” Jen said.

  “What?”

  “Are you really sorry?”

  I could tell she was looking right at me, and I felt convicted in that darkness and silence. It was true I’d looked forward to the end of June vs. Hurricane—I’d looked forward to the mercy kill, I suppose—but I’d never breathed a word of this aloud to Jen. Cautiously, perhaps cravenly, all I’d dared do was mirror her mooning expressions back at her in a weak pantomime of sympathy. When she’d asked my opinion of a rehearsal, or a blunt e-mail from an investor, I’d focused on tone, narrowly, dodging and weaving around content, getting in and getting out with practiced feints, less a boxer than a politician. I told careful half-truths when pressed, general truths. How could the theater establishment expect daring productions, bristling productions, if this was how they greeted them? As if you couldn’t experiment in a one-tier experimental theater on West Fiftieth Street…No wonder Off Broadway was looking more and more like its lumbering overweight parent, predictable, complacent, risk-averse, tired. It might be that failure in a climate like this constituted a kind of distinction, a badge of honor, a better failure, if I could adapt Beckett…But I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have. I’d overplayed my hand.

  In the dark bedroom Jen recalled to me the choicest of these comments. Hadn’t I meant them?

  I said I had—more or less.

  “Then why are you sorry?” she said. “You said it would be a good thing if it failed, didn’t you? And you said it was overstuffed.”

  “I said it was ‘bristling.’ ”

  “A euphemism. An obvious euphemism.”

  Jen slid out from under my hands, replacing the straps of her nightgown. I heard the white voice of the fan murmuring out from the window again, getting louder.

  “Jen, what are you doing?”

  “I’m just trying to understand why you’d be sorry that the show’s called off. You said you’d be glad when it was all over.”

  “I was only agreeing with you!”

  “Good. Okay, good. And what I was saying,” Jen said, “what you were agreeing with was that a piece of work I’d put my name to, that I’d worked on for over a year, was a fucking train wreck. It was a fucking train wreck and I just wanted it to be killed—I wanted everyone to go home. Is that what you were agreeing with?”

  “What do you want me to say, Jen?”

  “Say what you mean for once. Tell the truth.”

  “I agreed with you.”

  “You agree that it was a fucking train wreck of a show?”

  “Sure.”

  “Say it then. Say it.”

  “I agree that it was a fucking train wreck of a show.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Thank you. My dear fiancé.”

  She got up and crossed the room to the small chair in the corner, conjuring a cream blanket from out of the darkness, snapping it up unfurled from the chair, a kind of magician’s trick, as if all the moves had been planned out beforehand.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said.

  “Is it?”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  At the door Jen said, “Good night, dear fiancé, sweet fiancé.”

  “Please don’t go out there, Jen. Sweetie, please come back to bed. You want Mal to know we’ve been fighting again? This is awkward for her.”

  “So considerate all of a sudden.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening right now. I feel like I walked into an ambush.”

  “You don’t think Mal already knows we’re in a fight? You weren’t here for dinner—you think she missed that? Where was my considerate fiancé for dinner? Where was he all night? Why didn’t he call? Why doesn’t he ever call anymore? Mal’s not stupid, Eli. Neither am I.”

  “You don’t have to go out there,” I said.

  “I really do.”

  “No, I mean I’ll go. It’s your fucking bedroom.”

  “How considerate,” Jen said, handing over the blanket as we passed in the doorway, our bodies not touching.

  I once heard an ex-Weatherman say, a penitent, that he and his friends had been downright cultish to go about sacrificing their lives and livelihoods, their relationships, on the altar of some low-level war against the United States, as they thought of their work then. How blinkered they must have been, how beady-eyed to imagine that their cause would inspire others to join it, that with their rallies and their bombs they had set something real in motion, and so on. And this from the same man who’d once said, famously, If I die in a beautiful cause, so be it…From one extreme to the other—a familiar enough tactic, a retrospective tactic. The past is a foreign country and I was a stranger there, a stranger to myself, and so on. This is one of the avenues of interpretation now open to me, I realize, an escape route. Yet the afternoon I’m thinking of now—skipping ahead once again—has me sitting contentedly and a little bored in Sam’s rusted brown Buick. I have no desire to get out, not really. And I can easily recognize myself on that afternoon. I can get from the me who sits here writing now, remembering, to the me who sat there jogging his leg in the front seat, waiting for something to happen.

  Eventually I got out of the car to feed the meter. A quarter only got you ten minutes here, but I supposed we’d been lucky to find a parking spot at all. Lower Manhattan, late September. The air studiously neutral, at last emptied of the humid frenetic energy that had made of the city a kind of particulate snow globe in the last few weeks. There was even a slight cool breeze issuing down this uniconic stretch of Wall Street, so narrow and dark with shade that the breeze might have been a low whistle through a pair of pursed lips. The city moved vertically here, two-dimensionally, with the buildings dragging cornices and pretentious friezes up their long gray lengths, and lower down chunky iron lanterns jutting out like uncovered limbs—again my doomy imagination in these nether realms of the city.

  Two middle-aged men in shirts and ties, black shoes and pants, gelled hair, moved past me under the temporary construction pavilion that hugged the building to our left across its entire length and gave the Buick that much more protection. One of the men gave me a quick incurious look. When he and his colleague were farther down the street I heard a rapping sound behind me and turned, Sam cranking down the window.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Stretching, I guess. Breathing.”

  “Just go feed the meter
, okay, and get back here. The more time you stand there, the more people see you, the more likely one of them is to remember you. Put an hour in, forget the time limits. This is taking longer than usual. And Eli?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hurry? For fuck’s sake?”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay—”

  For a moment I had to stifle a laugh. There was an uprush of pleasure in me (or was it pride? relief?) to think that Sam might be more nervous than I was. People would remember me doing what exactly—standing by a car? And for what reason? And who would ask them to remember? This was the easy part, the least risky element in a hugely risky, evolving plan, a plan that evolved more risk with each after-dinner strategy session at the Phoenix House. Other big-shot businessmen, other deposed kings of industry kept their names in the conversation (Jamaal still talked a lot about O’Bannon, for example), but Bosch and his unpunished crimes, his local address, made him the frontrunner for retribution. One night in an excess of beery courage Greg gathered his pale pinched features under the overhang of his brow and said we should just kill Larry Bosch, shouldn’t we? Make an example of him? The collective intake of breath around the table gave way to nervous laughter, with Greg leading the charge, assuring us he was just kidding, just fucking around—we all knew that, right? Not murder, then, but it didn’t have to be. Political theater could be high stakes enough. If we couldn’t hold our nerve standing outside a car under a plywood construction awning, or use a credit card instead of quarters to secure a parking spot (Sam worried a card would be traceable), then what hope did we have of abducting a millionaire dozens of times over, probably a bodyguarded millionaire, and then holding him—what?—for ransom? For a publicity stunt? For the hell of it? The plan was still evolving, we told ourselves.

  At the green box of a parking meter I slid in the last of my quarters, coming up well short of an hour. We’d been here since two o’clock, it was almost five now, and I’d emptied a bulging pocketful of change into this mute dumb machine. Up ahead on the sidewalk, just past the construction awning, an old-fashioned hot-dog vendor stood under a plain blue umbrella. He was short and compact in a clean white apron, wearing a black Yankees cap and a mustache, working what looked like a large chrome icebox with a grill attached to it. I started toward him, my eyes casually lowered. I remembered the sunglasses parked atop my Mets cap, put them on. At the stand itself I kept my head bowed, pretending to deliberate over the row of prismatic water bottles, sodas, Gatorades, iced teas, the bottles catching the light as the sun leaned into view at the far end of the street. The man’s grill was clean and tidy, with little mounds of white onions caramelizing in one corner. Old Marco from the sub shop, unmissed Marco—I hadn’t seen him in two months though I’d come home to Jen and Mallory with many fabricated stories about his micromanagerial zeal, his Napoleon complex—old Marco would have been impressed. To Jen and Mallory I’d started paying a slightly larger share of the rent, by the way, from my parents’ largesse. (I claimed the money came from the extra hours I was working at Tommy’s.) I’d had a birthday recently, complete with a surprise visit from my parents, a trip to the U.S. Open with Jen, then a chance at a private dinner to lay on my parents a true enough sob story about job-market difficulties, rising rents, falling grad school stipend levels, etc. I came away from that night with a ten-thousand-dollar check—a loan, my parents stressed, though they’d been thinking about something like this for a while. I think they worried I wouldn’t accept the money if it were presented as a gift—I think of this queasily now, guiltily.

  “Two hot dogs with onions, please,” I told the vendor without lifting my eyes to him. I watched the spatula expertly slide under one of the caramelizing mounds, then another, then drop the confetti-like brownish onions along the length of the buns.

  “Actually, add these in too,” I said, taking two Gatorade bottles down from the row and passing along a twenty-dollar bill. “How about three dollars in quarters and you keep the change?”

  “Thanks, boss,” the man said, fingering the coins from his small metal safety box.

  I thanked him for the food and the quarters and started back for the parking machine.

  “You guys don’t stand a chance, you know,” he called after me.

  In my surprise I turned around and took the man in directly, his wide dark face and the high-peaked cap, the darker mustache like a sea creature under his nose, thick and bristled, slightly shining.

  “Come again?”

  “You guys don’t have a chance. Face it.” He gestured at my hat.

  “Oh, the Mets!”

  “You were lucky to get out of the division series. I take Atlanta in four.”

  “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see,” I said, and turned away. I’d all but soaked through the thin waxed paper cradling the hot dogs by the time I got back to the car, my sweat glands stoked at an instant and not to be calmed anytime soon.

  Sam did nothing to hide his anger. “Did you give him your driver’s license? Your Social Security number? A DNA swab?”

  “You could see all that, huh?” I handed over the hot dog and the fruit-punch Gatorade. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  “You learn how to use your mirrors when you do this enough. And how not to be flagrantly stupid.”

  “I figured we needed more change, okay? We need to eat too, don’t we? You’re welcome.”

  “Sure thing, comrade,” Sam said through a mouthful of hot dog, the bite bobbing in his cheek like a mound of chewing tobacco, unmannerly and crude. It would have seemed out of character for Sam, except that lately Sam seemed to be permanently out of character. For now he kept his blue-gray flat eyes trained on the high-mounted small rearview mirror. He wore the same black Roger Federer hat—blackish gray—with the sweat stains wavering along the brim and the faded edges as if the hat had been dipped in salt water. Of course it hadn’t been dipped in any water—that was the problem. Personal cleanliness, like notions of private ownership and space, tended to fall off at the Phoenix House, as if that cliché of communal living had to be cultivated and brought up into pungent bloom. Add to that the House members who smoked—Tiffany, usually opening a window in the second bedroom, but not always. Greg too, I gathered—a sympathetic smoker. My own sympathetic responses moved quickly to squinting and headaches in the presence of cigarette smoke. I was crashing on the sunken gray couch at the House every now and then, but most nights I still returned, gratefully, to the clean cool neutral-smelling uncluttered apartment in Greenpoint.

  Sam’s eyes flinched at the rearview, suddenly straining.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t turn around. Use the side mirror.”

  “Is he in there?”

  A trio of suits, a quartet, young men by the looks of them, paused on the sidewalk in front of an ornately arched entryway not far beyond the hot-dog stand. The men in their fine-cut clothes and the entryway with its inlaid squares of stone carving, a lip of twisted stone running along the inside of the arch to look like mooring rope, the thick morbid lanterns, the large flags—all this announced the grand ambitions and haute airs of the offices inside. And the ambitions and airs of the men who worked there (they were almost all men—in two-plus hours we’d seen only a handful of women emerge from the bank of glass doors). Haute airs, haute heirs—one of the synapses I’d glued together over the course of this long, tedious afternoon. Somewhere in Ortega y Gasset I’d learned that patrician was the Roman term for the man who could afford to make a will and leave an inheritance. The rest were proletarians, the vast remainder.

  Another man had joined the group on the sidewalk and now, decisively, all five of them started away toward Water Street.

  “That wasn’t him, was it?” I said.

  “Assholes in suits,” Sam said, “but not our asshole. What’s taking him so long today?”

  “I kind of have to use the bathroom too—don’t
hate me. How long does he usually stay in there?”

  “This is my point, comrade. You know I love you, but I’m not sure these junkets play to your strengths. You have to be able to sit—still—for a long time.”

  “You don’t have a bladder? Alex doesn’t have a bladder?”

  “You leave my girlfriend’s bladder out of this,” said Sam, suddenly enjoying himself. “You’ve lost all privileges there.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “I think that’s him.”

  “Who? Bosch?”

  “Don’t fucking turn around,” said Sam.

  In the spotted side mirror I watched a small, gaunt man, the top of his pate shining powerfully, step to the same curb the suited quintet had just occupied. In a loose coat, tieless, he lifted a phone to his ear and looked tired, shifting his weight from leg to leg as he talked, listing over to one side or the other of his body’s y-axis. Two other men stood nearby, taller than Bosch, better dressed. None of them looked any bigger than an inch in the conjuring medium of my side mirror—a simple bringing together of thumb and forefinger could have snuffed them all out.

  We followed Bosch’s town car at a length of three or four cars, sometimes more, never less. Sam knew the route well. Up Water Street and onto the FDR with the infinitesimal low river like a diamond slick running off to our right, the Brooklyn Bridge’s giant legs in the rearview and the Manhattan Bridge’s looming up ahead quick and gray. Then the long flat climb to the top of the island, the Art Deco monuments on the Brooklyn side, the low row houses of Queens, ferries on the water, the black whirring freeway rails. At the entrance to 278 Sam split off and let the town car continue on its way. We doubled back into Queens and started for the House.

  “You’re assuming he doesn’t have pressing business in Yonkers,” I said. “Or maybe White Plains?”

  Sam didn’t acknowledge the joke. “Anyway, you know the rest,” he said.

  “He never stops off in midtown for any business?”