The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  Finally Sam gestured to the iPod dock on a bookshelf behind me and said, “Why don’t you choose a little music for us, Eli. Anything will do. And turn it up.”

  In the iPod’s artist list I came almost immediately to Fiona Apple, perhaps Jen’s all-time favorite pop artist. I hesitated, then chose one of Jen’s favorite songs—“I Know.” Let it serve as a reminder. The flat porous speakers began pouring out the buzzing piano line and the canny unsentimental voice—

  So beeeeeee it, I’m your crowbar—

  If that’s what I am so far…

  “You guys know I have a girlfriend, right?” I said. “A fiancée.”

  Leaning back on the bed, Alex raked her hand across Tiffany’s hair like a chime. She laughed. “You really thought you were being seduced, huh? I give you the bedroom eyes and you obey, hey?”

  “Here we go,” Sam said, “okay.” He carried his chair and another nearby to the bedside, motioning for me to sit next to him. We were close around the lower bunk, leaning our heads in like the conspirators the rest of the House probably still suspected us of being, speaking under cover of Fiona Apple’s rainy love songs.

  “I can trust everyone in this circle,” Sam said. “I do trust everyone in this circle. All right?”

  “Me too,” Alex said.

  “Me too,” Tiffany said.

  Now they were looking at me. “Sure, yes,” I said. “Sorry, I do too.”

  “Okay, good,” Sam said. “I’m not sure about anyone else, though. Or not sure enough. Are you guys?”

  We started working through the others one by one—what we knew about them, how they’d come to us, how much exposure we felt they could bear. A slow, methodical probe, a little too slow, perhaps, since after several minutes Sam started getting noticeably twitchy.

  Alex laughed at him.

  “What?”

  “You want to show Private Lentz your new toy, don’t you?” she said.

  “I think we’ve made a good start, don’t you?”

  “Very.”

  “We can come back to this, of course. We will.”

  “Of course.”

  Alex toed out from under the bed the worn navy blue backpack Sam used for his cell-phone trawling. Once again it dipped tellingly when Sam held it upright. Fiona Apple was still going on the player, jazz brushes on a snare like rain against a window. It wasn’t a squeal of zippers this time, just a slow, careful reaching into the bottom of the bag’s main compartment, Sam’s arm half gone, as if he were birthing a calf. When the gun came out it was wrapped in a white linen kitchen towel. Sam displayed it on his lap, the pointed ends of the towel like the blooms of an opening flower. The gun looked that much blacker and blockier—it looked fake, shining a little too brightly along the barrel and stock, or handle, or whatever you called it, a fine waffling down the side of the grip. Only when Sam offered it across to me on tray-like hands, like a deadly hors d’oeuvre, did I feel its authenticating heft. It was real all right. I didn’t touch the trigger—I didn’t dare to.

  “It isn’t loaded,” Sam said. “And it won’t be. But we need it.”

  “We need it?” I said.

  “We need it.”

  “And this is what you were really doing last week?”

  “I really was at my sister’s in Pennsylvania. They live out in the sticks, hunting country, not far from a truck route, and they’re paranoid. They’ve got three or four of these things. I doubt they’ll miss one for a while. Anyway…”

  He went off into other talk, shop talk—about the gun, its make, how to use it, how his brother-in-law had taken him out shotgun hunting and told him always to aim low, always lower than you think. And how different could one of these be? He was looking at the pistol resting heavily like a talisman in my palm. We were all looking at it, falling to silence now. It was mesmerizing.

  One other thing we discussed that night around the lower bunk: my sleeping situation. I was made to understand that I would now be a visitor to the apartment in Greenpoint, a mere checker-in, a keeper-up of appearances. This was one of the conditions of my remaining in the leadership group, or at the House at all—I had to commit. I had to be all in. I can’t pretend that at the time I really struggled with the decision.

  Within a few days Adam and Jason had quit the House and only Greg and, to everyone’s surprise, Jamaal remained. Sam and Alex set Greg to more cell-phone trawling, with Jamaal and Tiffany continuing to help with the wiping and posting—cell phones, iPods, tablets, laptops, whatever Greg could lay hands on. The Group needed the money more than ever, Sam said, but he and Alex needed to concentrate their energies on planning. Not the old plan, we said, but the new plan, which needed to remain secret until it shaped up more. It was grunt work for Greg particularly, and also a loyalty test. Why the long-faced former bow-tie wearer insisted on passing it, his bushy brows unbent, I still don’t know.

  As for me, I made good on an offer to pick up the rent slack Adam and Jason had left. There went November, December, January. By the end of February I’d drawn down my checking account to eight hundred dollars, all the tough-minded generosity of my parents gone to seed my double life. I’d stopped paying more than token sums to Jen and Mallory, claiming my hours at Tommy’s had been slashed. I was afraid I might get fired, I said, but then again who cared, right? Good riddance! Maybe getting fired would jolt me out of my complacency and depression, send me back to my dissertation, or to a better job, or something, anything!

  It was after one of these performances, all variations on a theme, the sputtering fugue state of my life with Jen, that Mallory patted me on the shoulder and said, “ ‘Good riddance!’ Right!”

  The obvious sarcasm in her voice brought me up short. It was just after work hours, late evening, with a dandruff of snow falling out of the blue-black darkness through the window. I realized I’d forgotten to ask where Jen was.

  A moment later Mal emerged from her bedroom still in her heavy peacoat, moisture glistening on the coarse sleeves. She emanated the cold she’d brought from outside, sitting beside me on the piano bench. Up close I could see that the chill-deepened circles of red at her cheeks and nose tip, around the curve of her ears—she looked suddenly like a Raggedy Ann doll—were not pure but mottled, points of white and red in minute alteration, like a Seurat painting. Her wide-set eyes were long and brown and the wedge of forehead skin between them, the thin incurving brows, the top of the long nose sent your attention swinging out into the ski-jump air in front of her face. Mal was looking at the score I’d stopped playing out of shyness.

  “ ‘Lost to the world,’ huh? I’d say that’s appropriate. Play this part again,” she said, underlining the section with a long rosy fingertip, the nail unpainted.

  I did as I was told.

  “Now sing along to it.”

  Hesitantly, very quietly—

  “Louder.”

  I did as I was told.

  “Yup,” she said, “yup. That’s what I heard. This passage here,” and she sang it herself with soft, brilliant clarity, a low-to-high figure, effortless. “Do you hear the difference? It’s not a trombone slide. Mahler’s not crooner material. Move up crisply to the next note but hit it soft—transition with dynamics, not your hammy glissando. You try,” she said.

  I tried.

  “Better. That’s a little better. You have a decent voice, you know that? You’ve got a decent mid-tenor. You could do something with it if you took some initiative.”

  “Thank you?”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You want some more advice? I know you didn’t ask for any, but do you want some more?”

  I could hear in her voice that it wasn’t really a question. I might have been squinting, bracing myself.

  “You’re really fucking up with Jen, you know that,
don’t you?”

  “I know,” I said, “I know it. It’s all this stuff at work, and some other stuff—”

  “Shut up, stop it. Just stop. I know you’re lying.”

  “What? I’m not lying.”

  “Last month Jen went by your work to surprise you. She was going to take you out on a date—remember dates? It’s this thing where two people who love each other, who are still technically engaged, go out and spend time alone together? Anyway, she talked to your friend Marco, got the whole story. He said you’re lucky he hasn’t pressed charges yet. What are you doing, Eli?”

  I took this in for a minute. “When last month?”

  “I don’t know. Pretty early.”

  “Early? So she’s been sitting on this for six weeks—more than six weeks?”

  “Look, I don’t know what your deal is, I don’t particularly want to know, but I can tell you that you’re fucking up royally. Do you know where Jen is right now?”

  “I was going to ask.”

  “If you tell her I told you this I’ll kill you. I’ll never talk to you again.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s out with a guy she met through work. Some random guy auditioning late in the day, doesn’t make the cut, but sticks around to ask your fiancée out for coffee.”

  “She’s seeing him tonight?”

  “This isn’t the first time either. I’m telling you this because I like you—I’m not sure why. You’re a ghost lately, but you’re a friendly ghost—how’s that? Anyway, that’s my advice.”

  “I’m not sure I caught the actual advice.”

  “Stop fucking up.”

  This was the intelligence I’d received from Jen’s closest friend. For several days I carried it around with me like a secret scar—a secret of a secret. It was a button I could push to make my heart go tight, instantly pinched and smarting. It was a kind of penance to push it; I pushed it often. I thought of it that way, too, that Sam-like way—evacuated religion, a giving in to the forms, the temptations of dogma, as I think Derrida puts it somewhere. Sam had influenced all of us, of course. He was the common virus we’d all caught.

  I didn’t like myself for being jealous, regretful, mournful, whatever I was. I didn’t like to think that Mal’s information had activated feelings in me that had lain dormant for months, that competition could do what love and loyalty could not, that pitifully ordinary machismo sat so near the seat of my motivations. And I think this is why I did nothing for several days, then a week, then two, staying away from the apartment more and more. On nights when I did stay over Jen came home late, sometimes very late, never disclosing the details of her night—and I was careful never to ask her to. We acted like casual friends more than lovers now, unfailingly polite, a little distant, closed off to each other brick by brick—though it was true we sometimes still made love, sometimes held each other as we had before. This was my resolution: I would do nothing different. With Mal’s insider information, with this pen-tip hole in the ceiling that gave on to Jen’s double life, I would still play the hand I’d been dealt; I would honor the ignorance that should have been mine. Each day I put on Mal’s secret to me like a hair shirt. I pushed the button again and again.

  But plot caught up to me. Plot, as they say, is character—which means I might do better to say simply that character caught up to me. I sat in the melting weather on a flight of stone steps stained white with the memory of winter salt, like a recessed sea. The sky over the narrow mid-rise buildings was gray, uncertain, wispy—you could see the atmosphere slipping the lower clouds under the higher ones like sheets of paper. This was Tribeca, not far from Canal Street and Chinatown, where the commercial rents were cheaper, apparently. You had to go downtown before you could go up, Jen liked to tell people about her work—downtown to the light-filled hot creaking hardwood loft they used for auditions, uptown to whatever Off-Broadway venue the lucky few would start rehearsals in. Jen always talked about luck, never talent, as if talent were simply assumed and assumed to be copious, vast, sprawling, hanging out undirected most of the time in the gutters of modern capitalism. Luck mattered more, or unluck—of course they did. How lucky had some striver been to show up for an outside chance and leave with the phone number of a woman like Jen? How lucky had I been?

  Well, but here she came. I could hear the freight elevator being drawn back into the raspy lungs of the building as Jen made her way out of the black steel door and down the steps, Raymond following. I was a ways off, but I recognized Raymond’s slight frame with the square shoulders, the bleached boyish hair that swirled upward like a cap of soft-serve ice cream. Jen wore her shorter, lighter peacoat with the white Amelia Earhart scarf loosely coiled around her neck, one end of it hanging off the back of her shoulder like a casual hand. Her hair was up in a loose ponytail—she was proud of her cheekbones, I’d learned, justly proud, and easily annoyed with the auburn strands that broke free of her ears and fell into her face. At the tail end of winter the hair had returned to its natural red-orange, much starker than the strawberry blonde it lightened to in the summer months. I liked it better this way—sui generis. Here was a woman you could pick out of a crowd.

  If Jen had turned left, in my direction, I was prepared to stand up from the stoop all smiles, surprising her. We would go out for dinner. I would press out the dregs of my bank account to pay the tab at a noodle bar, or whatever she wanted. In a way I wanted this to happen—in one version of these memories, this is what happens: Jen and I hang our faces over steaming white porcelain bowls of ramen, talking little but sitting close, side by side, as if the steam could heal us. In one version it does heal us.

  But now Jen and Raymond turn right toward Lafayette Street and the uptown trains, and I have to follow.

  From the far corner of a 6 train car I watched the two of them reflected in the glare-warped window, my hat brim pulled to my eyebrows, my love with her face tipped delicately down at her cell phone, looking up and smiling at occasional comments from Raymond. She left him at the Union Square stop with a squeeze of the hand, getting off into the throng of rush-hour bodies that I swam in gratefully, anonymously, until Jen cut out of the current that pushed us toward the L train connection. Upstairs in the streets I nearly bumped into her—she’d stepped into the leeward draft of a newsstand just past the railinged maw of the subway stairs. It was another text, I assumed, her thumbs dizzying the screen, that saved me. I took cover under a Best Buy awning across the street, pretending to check my own phone as the glass double doors ejected shopper after laden shopper like tottering clay pigeons into the open air.

  The white tents of the green market lined the perimeter of the square, gray-green in the waning light, wet-looking, tentative. People moved in twos and threes, coats open, inspecting the wares piled bounteously, colorfully on the folding wooden tables. The hemming-in buildings looked down on the scene with mute dull faces, blank-window eyes. It was a few weeks since thousands of protesters and activists, some of them our old ISO comrades, filled this square in a show of outrage over the latest in a pile of black bodies that New York’s finest had heaped into the mortuaries: a stop-and-frisk gone bad, or worse than usual, a twenty-year-old breaking for his Bronx apartment entrance, reaching for his keys, five bullets in the back. Initially the police made much of the fact that a dime bag of weed was found on the body. Our group chose not to participate in the march—too much exposure, and what was the point? Marches and protests were the release valves a militarized state let the people pull. That was our position then, anyway.

  When I looked through a break in the traffic at the spot where Jen had been a moment before—empty air. I found her on a bench in the center of the tent market, recognizing her from behind, that spout of orange-red ponytail. Just then she put her phone to her ear; she stood up, turning all the way around once, twice, smiling, raking her happy gaze past me like a lighthouse beam. Finally she found him. He�
�d snuck up in plain sight behind a woman with a double-wide stroller and a green puffer vest—Macduff in the moving grove. A kidder. I hated him instantly.

  This particular kidder, this interloper (I couldn’t help thinking of him in that way) had longish dark hair that swept messily over his ears and low over his forehead, curtain-parted—Al Pacino circa Serpico, slightly. He might have looked a little like me, if I’m honest, but of course I couldn’t be honest. I couldn’t be expected to be, could I? Objectivity is too heavy a cross to lay on the jilted.

  The next several times they met up it was more of the same. They’d find each other at Union Square and set off for a meal or a drink somewhere within a few blocks. They were forming routines, traditions, memories, the kind of things you’d tell your kids about when they slid one after the other into your neat and ordered lives: Your father used to sneak up on me every time we met here, and the thing is I knew it was coming, I knew to expect it, but he always found a way…I remember the day Jen got off the 6 train early, at Astor Place instead of Union Square, and by the time I’d poked my head aboveground they were kissing. The repeating arches of the Cooper Union building stretched off behind them, dull pink in the late-winter light, or early-spring light—I couldn’t have told you the difference just then. Young Macduff with his carefully messy hair had joined his stupid face to Jen’s, his stupid fingers lifting the hair around her temples out of place. Jen’s hands were on his hips, lightly, a little awkwardly, I thought—I hoped. I followed them onto St. Mark’s Place, passing the high cluttered brownstones with the fire escapes like strange zippers down their fronts, ready to open up the buildings in zigzags and spill their privacies gruesomely into the street. I couldn’t have noticed this at the time—memory labors to fill in the scene. What I noticed was that Jen’s new boyfriend had taken her hand. More gradually I became aware of the near darkness, the last light clinging with stubborn fingers to the luminous strips of crosswalk paint, the serpentine coil of graffiti down the side of a corner mailbox, the luster of the stone in the white-stoned apartments. When we passed Hahn’s building, blue-white in the gloom, I saw that her living-room light was on, the yellow glow in a window set half below street level. How the mighty were fallen—though I didn’t have time to think about Hahn now, either, or dying Stephen.