The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  I had just watched Jen lead Macduff down the stairs to the nondescript entrance into Cafe Mogador.

  Cafe Mogador! It took the air out of my lungs to see it—Jen, with this interloper, casually entering what she knew was my favorite restaurant, the one Hahn had first taken me to, the one I’d introduced Jen to, and my parents, and all my friends, the few remaining to me, anyway. I couldn’t quite believe I’d seen it. I set up at a spot on the patio with my back to the restaurant’s large picture window, not quite daring to look inside. For a long time I watched the mysterious switchboard of the opposite buildings activate, permutate, the lights blinking on and off, shifting, sending mysterious signals. Halfway through a bottle of pinot I couldn’t pay for I started to mourn each window light as it went out, each quick soundless fade. I felt no corresponding joy or relief at the windows newly lit. Nightlife was beginning, carving itself out of the ageless dark. At my next backward glance I picked the two of them out of the far corner of the restaurant, the lighted patchwork insubstantial and glossy on one side of the glass and on the other, at a shrunken candlelit table, Jen and Macduff leaning over their plates, stretching their necks like sunflowers. When they kissed again, I stood abruptly and a little unsteadily, rattling the untouched plate of tagines at my place. I passed down the steps and through the tinkling front door and into the close field of tables, past friends and colleagues, couples laughing and talking unawares, into one such couple with a wayward lurching step, the loud scrape of a bald man’s chair—I apologized quickly, slurring my words, but it was too late. Jen had looked up with the noise.

  In no time she was at the bar side, intercepting me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Her eyes gleamed in the candlelight fiercely, her face distorted by the shadows, and she said again, “What are you doing here, Eli? You need to leave. You need to leave now.”

  “What are you doing here?” I said, but weakly. Jen and the rest of the room looked shrunken down in the wrong end of binoculars.

  “Go home, Eli. Eli? I’m not talking to you like this.”

  “Our home?”

  “I’m done talking. I’m going back.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to join you two? I’m a famous wit.”

  “Famous shit,” she muttered as she turned away—or something like that. I couldn’t quite hear her.

  Really, I can’t be sure she said anything at all—she was turning away from me, in a loud restaurant—but here again “memory” fills in the gaps: Let it be one last punning exchange between us, however sharp. I turned to the bartender at the bar, the big-bearded Dodgers fan I’d seen when I was here with Hahn. He nodded familiarly and with kindness in his eyes. I ordered a shot and drank it down and brought the glass smarting loudly to the bar, like an Old West chump.

  “Add that to my tab, will you?” I said, and turned and headed back out to the patio and out into the night.

  At breakfast the next morning, at the Phoenix House, Alex asked, “And where have you been lately?”

  Tiffany was at the table too, looking listlessly into the face of her instant coffee, a toaster waffle untouched on the plate beside it.

  I told them everything—or almost everything. I left out Macduff. I left out my private junkets following Jen through lower Manhattan. Alex asked about the money I’d stopped contributing to the House.

  “All gone,” I admitted. “All of it. I didn’t even have the money for the train fare out here—jumped the turnstile like a punk.”

  “That’s great. That’s great to hear. Take more stupid risks like that,” Alex said.

  “You sound like Sam,” I said. “We all do. Where is Little Lockjaw anyway? Sleeping in?”

  Alex told Tiffany to go upstairs and get me some “train money.” Alone in the room with her now, smiling fatuously, I told my ex how much I admired her talent for mixing business with pleasure. A column of gray moted light leaned in from the little window above the kitchen sink, spotlighting the small table, warming the tips of Alex’s hair that slanted artfully down around her cheeks, like the flaring jawbone guards on a Roman soldier’s helmet. Apparently Tiffany could cut hair, too.

  “Take the money,” Alex said, “and use it to get more money. You need to contribute to the House if you’re going to live here.”

  “On the double, captain! Yes, captain!”

  “So this is the Jen situation talking?” Alex said. “That’s your moodiness lately?”

  Tiffany returned to the kitchen with a timeworn, almost velvety twenty-dollar bill.

  “I thought you were wrapping that up,” Alex said. “I thought that was the deal.”

  “Yup,” I said. “Yup. Yup.”

  With House money in my pocket I wandered around for the rest of the day, eating by-the-slice pizza, ducking into used-book shops. I jumped a pair of turnstiles to get over to Greenpoint that evening, using the rest of the cash to buy a supermarket bouquet of drying-out irises, a hint of brown at the delicate tongues, the purple of the petals a fading memory of purple—the best I could do.

  I put the flowers in a vase on the high kitchen table and waited for Jen. I went to the piano, playing through the first fragile sections of “I Am Lost to the World,” singing along where I could, recalling Mal’s advice. I wasn’t sure where Mal was at this latish hour. When she did come home I was already in bed, reading in the placid yellow light of the bedside table, like one half of a long-married couple. I remember perking up, puppyishly, until I heard that it was Mal moving around in her room on the other side of the apartment.

  Then it was later, the room was dark, and I was vaguely aware of Jen getting under the covers beside me.

  “Oh,” I said, rousing. “There you are.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Did you see the flowers?” I said. “I got you flowers.”

  Apparently she hadn’t seen them.

  “Can I ask where you were tonight?” I said.

  “I don’t think you can, no.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t think you should, Eli. Not anymore.”

  “No?”

  I saw now that she was lying not under the covers but on top of them, fully clothed, her dark hair spread over the pillow as if it were floating there—Ophelia-like, lake-borne. She looked straight up at the ceiling.

  “What am I doing in your bed, then?” I asked. “Why do I still have a key to the apartment?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Why do you?” Then she said, “Do you remember my roommate with the boyfriend who crashed on the couch with her? The green couch that the green cushion comes from?”

  “I remember.”

  “What was he still doing there? What was either of them doing there?”

  “You’re just trying to hurt me now,” I said. “If you really felt that way you’d have said something—you’re not twenty anymore. You’re just trying to hurt me.”

  “Maybe,” she whispered.

  She took a long breath—and something in it wanted out, I sensed. I sensed the magnitude of this moment rising up around me, suddenly, another of the tiny white open-topped rooms that made up the rat maze of Experience, Memory, Sea Change. You stood inside the little room and above it at the same time, watching yourself scrabble desperately around.

  “I brought you flowers, Jen. I came with my hat in my fucking hand.”

  “Thank you for the flowers,” she said.

  “But what—my presence isn’t required anymore? I should just drop them off and leave? Out the servants’ entrance?”

  “If you’re going to be ridiculous you should just leave.”

  “Why am I being ridiculous?”

  “And I’m not doing the talking here, Eli. I’m not the one who needs to explain things.”

  “What should I be explaining?”


  “Please leave, Eli. I’d like you to leave.”

  “You mean the PhD stuff? The Tommy’s stuff?”

  “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore. Please just leave.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I am sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you about that stuff, but it’s just—I don’t know…You have a calling, Jen. Do you know that? You’ve been lucky. Sometimes I think you don’t realize how lucky you’ve been.”

  “Sure. A calling to play I-IV-V over and over again for strangers. To have my first and probably last collaboration just absolutely tank.”

  “Speed bumps,” I said. “I promise you—speed bumps. You’re brilliant, Jen, and you’re beautiful and you’re driven and you have something to drive toward, something to get you out of bed in the mornings—and that makes you lucky.”

  “And you don’t have that? Is that really what you’re saying?”

  “I think I do now, but it takes me away from you sometimes.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Why is that bullshit?”

  “Because it’s bullshit! Who proposes to someone and just disappears? Who does that?”

  “Sweetie.” I reached across the comforter for her hand. “Sweetie, please.”

  She allowed it to be taken. “I’m going to miss you a lot,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to miss you, Eli.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true,” she said.

  At some point you start to lose, and lose, and lose again. You become practiced at it, connoisseurial. What’s the line again? The art of losing isn’t hard to master? Yet it’s mastery without any of the feelings of mastery—there’s no pride in it, no point to it, nothing pointed at all. It’s a numbness that comes to you, a muted, white-noise, wandering-through-the-airport-at-midnight kind of feeling. Your skin begins to harden like a mold, and underneath it, moldering, wasting away, Pompeian, is your personality, your little lode of certainties and plans, and your backup plans, too, every one of them, the last handholds on autonomy. You begin to grope, you flail at things. You surprise yourself with the force of your sudden demands. If Bonnie and Clyde are going out on another of their nighttime junkets, you sure as shit are going along. You’re not asking. You’re tired of sitting around and waiting for the pearls of wise direction to fall from their lips. You’re more than a bystander.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Sam said. “It’s just a grocery run.”

  “You’re taking the car on a grocery run?”

  “Who said we’re taking the car?” Alex said.

  I slapped my cupped hand over the spidery bulge in Sam’s jean pocket—a metallic chirring.

  “We’re out of everything,” said Alex. “It’ll be more than we can carry. How’s the money search coming, speaking of expenses?”

  “You’re out of bullshit?” I said. “You’re going on a bullshit run?”

  Sam laughed a little, shrugging his shoulders. “Do you need to use the bathroom before we go?”

  Only a few miles north on I-87 and the high-rises of the city start to sink behind you. The row houses thin out and disconnect, the land spreads out, becomes land. Green within green rises around the highway, mounding into the lower air, hemming in the view. A thick apron of grass rolls up to the tree line like a dais. You see neon golf links flash through the gaps, country clubs, small flickering lakes. Past Yonkers, past Bronxville, past Tuckahoe, Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington, past White Plains off to the east, past Elmsford and Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow—all these soothing names on the square green exit signs, their letters faintly glowing as the sky’s fader drops, a gray sky going grayer with the promise of night and rain. The towns themselves tick by invisibly, always out of reach, out of sight behind a screen of trees. Only when you turn off the small highway to seek an address—it is a hamlet within a hamlet—do the white clapboard stores crop up awkwardly, belying the wealth of the people who shop there, or have their shopping done there. Stoplights droop from wires hung like holiday festoons, the telephone lines disappearing into the trees. A gravel shoulder skirts the road, replacing sidewalks. The light fixes milky and nacreous to the low-hanging sky—late light, summer light, though at the bottom of this well of woods it’s hard to tell.

  Now the mansions begin to arrive, slowly, at long stately intervals. They break through the trees with the bore of a driveway mouth, a place for a mailbox, a fleeting glimpse at a mini Versailles, a mini Buckingham, a faux Parthenon—“old wine in nouveau riche bags,” Sam remarks, glancing at me in the rearview. “These people are not imaginative.”

  Alex rests her tapering hand on Sam’s long thigh and I see that the fingers of the hand, the arched fingertips, shake a little.

  “Still light out,” she says to him.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Since when is it okay?”

  We drive on. The road narrows and turns, dropping down into a gully with the dark ferns and saplings and low branches scratching the side of Sam’s Buick. The light is weak except by contrast with the dark teeming trees spinning by, a strobe effect, chiaroscuro, and suddenly the road and the tree scrim swing around close to an open, lighted space beyond it.

  “We’re at the lake,” Alex says. “We’re already at the lake.”

  Through the whirring dark branches the lake comes to life, stop-start, like the action in a flipbook. It shimmers and turns with the road like a great gray disk.

  “We need to slow down,” Alex says. “We need to pull over somewhere and wait till it’s darker.”

  “We’ve come at this time before.”

  “Not at this time of year, though, Sam. Sam, please.”

  Sam lets off the gas a bit but motions with a careless sweep of his hand to the overgrown roadside spinning like a slot machine, no shoulder at all. Another turn sends us reeling against the door panels like parts in a centrifuge. Finally, with the road straightening, a break in the trees gives on to a little inlet of gravel, a makeshift small parking lot—the slow pop and groan of rocks under our tires. Cutting the engine and the lights, we adjust our eyes to the blue-gray evening. A stand of maple and oak crisscrosses in front of Bosch’s Lake, as Sam and Alex call it, though they’ve seen other mansions spaced generously along the water’s edge. From here we can’t actually see Bosch’s property, that sprawling Austen-scape, but it can’t be far. A narrow dirt trail with tree roots like protruding veins feeds into the parking lot at the right side, feeding back out of it and into the woods at the left side, curving away toward the lake. Trees rise all around us, shielding us from the road. Traffic is sparse—only a few cars hum by as the Buick’s engine ticks down and the sounds of birds and the night’s first crickets fill the car. Alex’s hand has relaxed on Sam’s ropy thigh, I notice, but now the leg itself bucks and tenses.

  “That’s him,” Sam whispers. “Fuck, I think that’s him.”

  “What?” Alex says. “Where?”

  “That’s fucking him.”

  An old man with his pale bald head uncovered, a brown mackinaw hanging open down past his knees, just now emerges from the trail mouth at the right of the lot. He glances up at our car—the same short gaunt face, the freeze-wrapped former jowls, the little eyes. He turns back toward the trail, whistles pure and high. A compact yet long-haired tawny dog trots out of the gloom, unleashed, his old belly swinging low and close to the ground. At the trail mouth the dog pauses to sniff and piss on a cluster of ferns. A hot-dog collie, if a collie at all.

  “Yup,” I say, “that’s him all right. I pictured the dog being taller.”

  “Look down,” Alex says. “Don’t look at him. Look down.”

  Bosch is crossing at the front of the gravel lot, heading for the trail connect. He trails
his coated arm behind him and snaps his fingers, whistling again. It occurs to me that the mackinaw is overkill in this warmish weather, an old man’s habit. Not ten feet from our hood he gives the car a once-over, notices us, pauses, another up-and-down glance, then he turns down the lakeward trail. When the dog catches up to him, Bosch bends a little stiffly to rake his fingers in the collie’s fur.

  “He recognized us,” Sam says. “We were just sitting here looking suspicious and he saw us.”

  “Let’s go,” Alex says. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “How do you know he recognized us?” I say. “Why would he recognize us?”

  In the front seat Sam is silent, still, the white tonsure of his bald spot showing above the headrest. He stretches out his arms on the steering wheel; his right leg starts going, bouncing fast and tight like a jackrabbit’s.

  Alex puts a hand out to calm him. “We really should go,” she says.