The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  A little ridiculous to have to clarify this now—I am the source, I realize, the fons et origo of this ridiculousness—but at the time Jen and I were still buzzed on our recent engagement and Jen’s actual paramour, her Macduff, was more than a year away. On that evening at the table Jen slapped shut the laptop, refusing to show me what it was she’d been copying down. It made me wonder. I teasingly asked about it several times in the following days. She only assured me there was nothing to worry about, they were only good things, but they were private, bound for her journal…The next time I caught her compiling the notes I abandoned all subtlety and snatched the computer away from her. I promised a full-body massage if she’d let me read, holding the laptop at stiff arm’s length (negotiating from a position of strength). And I didn’t mean the half-assed foreplay massage, either, but the real, arduous thing, the kind of massage that would make us both sore. More and more Jen complained of the knots that formed near the graceful wing-bases of bone in her upper back (Neruda: “fever or forgotten wings”) and that came from sitting upright at the piano, her arms outstretched, hour after hour, day after day.

  I did the lower back too that night, the backs of her arms, glutes, hamstrings, calves, the sensitive soles of her feet. And eventually I did get to see in e-mail form a long run of compiled text messages that read like sloppy unguarded haiku, or the transcript from some blissed-out surrealist trial.

  Hey there bear. Just sitting here and missing you.

  Do you swear?

  Didn’t your boy Jesus say you must NOT swear?

  You’re my only boy!

  Correct answer

  Ach, gotta go

  Raymond giving you the lipless smile again?

  Talk soon, mon amour

  Mon cher?

  Here!

  I really miss you today

  Early period or late period Cher?

  The one with the tone warbling. My voice is boxy with love of you.

  Hurry home to me then! I’m dead inside in this empty apartment

  Soon!

  Fuck if I can put a single sentence right today

  It’s all right, sweetie. Come back to it later

  Actually it’s all wrong. Aye, there’s the rub.

  I’d like to rub you a little later on

  Deal

  Miss my heart

  Ditto! A thousand dittoes!

  These are reconstructions, of course, earnest best guesses. It soothed and distracted me to write them down in the marble-covered notebook I’d labeled “Notes on Something, Anything Else.” Later, I changed this simply to “Notes,” a placeholder title for a project that felt at once more and less meaningful, more and less urgent, more and less confused. What was I writing about? What was I writing for? I filled several of these notebooks, eventually, with stories, scenes, recollections, meditations, litanies of regret, things I thought I might be able to make some end-run sense of, but to what end? What good could understanding do me anymore? Here were unbudgeable facts: Life had changed irrevocably, once and for all. Nothing and no one could be brought back from the dead. Not a man with a field of blooming red flowers for a chest. Not a relationship you’d killed.

  Yet it soothed me, it did distract me to make my notes, sitting at the kitchen table late into the night or at the red-lit desk upstairs, always writing privately, surreptitiously. I got down all the text exchanges I could remember, some of them specific, miraculously recalled, most loose and representative. I tried to get down some of the late-night conversations, too, all the talks about music and literature and politics we’d had, Jen and I, in those first heady weeks. You’re trying to find out if this is a person you can find rest in, and give rest to yourself, that vital shelter. You’re trying to find out if this is a person you can make a life with. Very much contra Engels and his anti-monogamy arguments, of course, but who really cared about those anymore? I certainly didn’t.

  Other details, other realities that cut through the overgrowth of theory—

  Jen had a pattern of small orange freckles across the bridge of her nose and onto her cheeks that sometimes looked constellatory, little suns lit up and burned brighter by the light of the sun overhead.

  There was something slightly waxy in the skin of her face, not false, not over-tight, just a certain paraffin sheen at the shelves of her cheekbones, the curve of her forehead. It may have been the soap she used, a brand I’d never heard of—Newpeau, something like that. How oddly touching it could be to see the blue-and-white squeeze bottle sitting squat on its cap beside the electric toothbrush—Jen swore by that, too—in the bathroom. You felt you’d penetrated some mystery, or really that some vital door had been opened to you: Here was true intimacy, quotidian, routinized, unembarrassed.

  “I used your foaming face wash,” I told Jen one day.

  “You what?”

  “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Why? Your skin is perfect.”

  “I wanted to feel what it was like—those little scrubbies are like microbes or something? Or what’s in there?”

  “Who knows. I’ve been using it since I was thirteen, fourteen. Force of habit.”

  A decade of the same face soap! More! At the time I figured that boded well and I went about inspecting other signs and talismans in the bathroom Jen shared with Mallory. This was the two-bedroom place in Astoria, where the air conditioner dropped a shimmering bead curtain of condensation down the front of the building. I learned Jen had fierce opinions against antiperspirant—not just sticky and gross but cancerous—and that she took a rather French view of deodorant in general: A little went a long way, she said, even in a New York summer. More than once she came home to my ravenous, rooting embraces and kisses that sought out her breasts, of course, but also the faint musty resin on her inner arm and armpit, the hint of salt there that I licked with bovine earnestness and languor. At first she squirmed under these caresses, giggling, but soon she must have sensed what they did for me, and real passion ensued. It’s difficult to describe. The body is equipped with so many delicate buttons and levers, wondrous and variable. But this was more than bodily, certainly more than a mechanical reaction. I think the real excitement lay in the mutual taking down of barriers, guards, insecurities, uncertainties, hesitations, fears.

  It was around this time that Jen told me about the handsome young priest she used to masturbate to, the thought of him sitting there perversely aroused in the latticed darkness of the confessional. These had been the last days of her observance—eighteen years old, a new freshman at Randolph, and like most of us she’d borne the accidents of birth through her childhood and into young adulthood, the dying sparks of them anyway, the last scuds of momentum. Within a year she’d made peace with her agnosticism (“Taking off God was like taking off my clothes at night,” she said. “It felt natural and honest”), but for now she was still a confessee, a penitent. In the darkened box she said the words she had to say, mentioning the sins of the flesh she and her first college boyfriend had shared in. I knew very little about this boyfriend and never found out much, never asked much. These were the limits of my own inhibitions—and to think that in exchange for this comforting ignorance I took a measure of pride in my sophisticated restraint! (My faults have been obvious enough, I suppose, but here I confess them outright. Let the four corners of this page, and the next and the next, make up my belated confessional.)

  Jen knew her confessor by voice and by sight, the thirtysomething recent seminarian sent to palliate the Gospel to the college set. Father Otto’s sermons floated down from the pulpit like wafted balloons, lightly, religion as self-help and inspiration, but in the confessional booth his manner changed. He asked Jen how many times, how often, and how recently. He asked if and how often she’d initiated the sinful encounters.

  “He really asked you that? He called them ‘sinful encounters’?”

  �
�Yes.”

  “So much for softening the Gospel.”

  “He was a Ratzinger disciple, soft in tone, hard in everything else. You learned that youth was no guarantor of progress. Or not in any predictable way. Sometimes you need whole generations to die out before it’s safe to come up for air.”

  “And what did you tell this guy? What did you say to him?”

  “About my boyfriend? I told him everything. It was dozens of times, sometimes two times, three times a day, and I initiated plenty.”

  “And he was titillated? You could hear it in his voice?”

  “Oh no, no, I doubt it. Not like you,” Jen said, “Mr. Raring to Go.” She cupped her hand around me through the bedsheet and pretended to downshift, dropping her voice. “We’ll take care of this in just a minute. Let me finish my story, okay?”

  “I know, I wasn’t trying to…I couldn’t help it.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to. But in a minute.”

  It wasn’t until several months later that Jen came back to the image of the young priest sitting straight-backed and tempted on his side of the filigreed partition. Jen and her boyfriend had tumbled out already, not much to say to each other in the postcoital moments, or ever. When she pictured Father Otto sliding his hand under his habit, it was a conscious blasphemy, and this is what titillated. It was all about her, though, it was about her and for her, a gesture of freedom. And this freedom was now in everything she did—how she thought, how she talked and wrote, and how she played, with a new looseness, a new dynamic boldness, a new disregard for the inevitable small mistakes (or big mistakes) that marked the way to real progress.

  For her senior recital Jen called on Father Otto to let her use the beautiful white-pewed chapel for her performance. She remembered the low-hung crystal chandelier, like something out of a European great house, and the Art Deco flair of the white-and-black-checkered linoleum at the front of the space, the inverted bowl of a ceiling, the white balcony that circled not far underneath it like the upper tier of a wedding cake. It was a little girl’s fantasy of a wedding cake set down in the darker, stranger dream space of a Lewis Carroll story—she could think of no better place to hold a recital. The acoustics, too, were surprisingly good, though this was almost an afterthought. I pictured Jen as the little dark figurine planted plastic-feet-first in the cake’s lower tier, a little stiff and nervous-looking in her long black scoop-necked dress, her hair in a brassy chignon, her hands clasped together at her front as she made the littlest bow after her Liszt piece, still early days. The grand piano was behind her with its broad black wing stuck up in the air and threatening to whirl up like a wind-borne maple pod (we called them “helicopters” when I was a kid and stuck the split sticky ends to our noses). The concert grand was something Jen had to master, tamp down, and at the beginning of the concert and from my vantage at the back she looked slight to the task. At the keyboard, though, something changed. She seemed to grow and grow, Alice-like, filling the room with huge confident sound, sitting straight-backed and commanding at the bench, her arms outstretched and moving hypnotically. Watching her play like that again in my mind, I realized how this slight pale frame could hold enough brazenness to approach Father Otto after her private desecrations of him, and after four years of absence.

  “It wasn’t quite four years,” Jen said. “I’d turned up once or twice more for sentimental reasons—Easter, Advent, the high pageantry stuff. I hadn’t actually spoken to him, though, and I’d never gone back to confession.”

  “What did you say to him when you asked about the recital? He was at the concert, wasn’t he? Salt-and-pepper hair, cool-guy goatee?”

  “You were sitting in the row right behind him. Handsome, wasn’t he?”

  “Wow,” I said. “It’s masturbation as thought murder.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Eli.”

  “You killed his relevance. You’d killed his magical authority over you.”

  “All I said was that I wanted to play beautiful music in a beautiful space and he said of course. He didn’t hesitate. Father Otto was a nice enough man with the keys to a beautiful building. It was that simple. No more magic than you brought to it yourself.”

  It was that simple. We lay in bed naked and simple and conducted our lives for each other, our pasts, our desires, everything—or almost everything. We didn’t go in for total disclosure, honesty as blood sport. We weren’t foolish enough to think that the heart’s dark corners look good under a klieg light. Some secrets you carry around forever, like scar tissue. Later on, of course, there were secrets I could have unburdened her of if I’d been paying better attention, if I’d been present in mind as well as body, and later there were secrets I could have unburdened her of if I’d been present at all. Jen was right about that too.

  These were secrets that wouldn’t have needed to be secrets, I wrote, that wouldn’t have existed at all…And here I stopped my note-making, checked my pen. I was at the edge of another counterfactual no-man’s-land, a field littered with what-ifs. What good did it do to imagine how things would have been if they’d been different than they were? The body was there now, irrevocable, unbudgeable. It wouldn’t be reanimated. It wouldn’t move again.

  In the last of the kitchen cupboards there were half-empty bottles of cumin, chili powder, coriander, onion powder, nutmeg, and cinnamon stacked in a maladroit pyramid. There were two cans of Campbell’s bean and bacon soup in another cupboard, a folded packet of taco seasoning at the terminus of a red powdery trail through the sawdust and filing-small cockroach droppings. There was an old roach motel in another cupboard, dry and ineffectual. And that was it. Nothing to speak of in the refrigerator or freezer—greasy condiment bottles, frozen peas hard as rock salt, a box of stale Cheerios on top of the fridge. No bread, milk, meat, cheese, nothing to sustain a person past dinnertime last night, and it was breakfast now, on the third morning, and there were six of us.

  At the breakfast table behind me Greg Baxter sat folded forward with his head in his arms, his shorn, affronting head. He’d come down by himself while I was surveying the food, grunting a hello and slumping down into his seat, and it was then that I noticed the disappeared hair.

  I placed a quarter-full bowl of dry Cheerios in front of him, wordlessly, and sat down with my own bowl.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking up bleary and unfocused, unshowered. When he saw me staring he said, “I needed a change. We’re also out of shampoo.”

  The caterpillar brows looked starker than ever in the sudden moonscape of his upper face and head, pale white, with only the faintest shadow of former hair, the sloping forehead running up into an almost geologic baldness. It gave him a startled look.

  “What?” he said.

  “Did you Bic it or something? It’s impressively smooth.”

  “Not much else to do around here, is there?”

  I thought I might have heard an accusation, a tremor of fear in Greg’s voice, but I ignored it.

  “The skinhead look,” I said. “Very classic.”

  “Don’t be so predictable,” Greg said.

  I set to my bowl of stale Cheerios, but slowly—you had to make it last.

  “A king in the morning, a pauper at night,” I said. “Do you know that phrase?”

  Greg didn’t answer me.

  It was the dietary folk wisdom of some Latin American country—Peru, maybe, or Venezuela. You ate heartily in the morning and lightly, poorly at night, if you wanted to keep thin. And solvent, of course. This was the political subtext some writer had picked up on and expounded. “It might have been Trotsky, or maybe not,” I said, holding forth to Greg in his waxing, weighing silence. He could see the object lesson in ideology, though, couldn’t he? Out in the rural hinterlands where bread and milk and coffee cost less than the typical dinner foods, you learned to do your real eating in the morning, and you learned to valorize this, looking
down on the fat late-dining rich in the big cities. In the same way, medieval Catholics learned to look up to Lazarus, wretched on earth, like them, but now rich and sitting at a heaped heavenly banquet—Ave Lazarus, patron saint of political quietism. In certain moods I could almost admire the elegance of this sham thinking—

  “This is sand,” Greg interrupted me. “These Cheerios just collapse into sandy sludge the second they hit your molars. I can’t eat this shit.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I said. “It’s no good.”

  “Why are you sorry?” said Greg, taking me in squarely now.

  “Huh?”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  A long silence filled the kitchen.

  “Why don’t we just go out and buy some more food?” Greg said. “There’s a novel idea.”

  “Do you think we should? Alex is probably right that we should be lying low, don’t you think?”

  “Do I think we should starve? No. I don’t think we should starve.”

  “Well, how much money do you have? Because that’s the other thing. I’ve only got twenty-eight dollars to my name, and twenty of it is in an account I can’t access without an ATM.”

  “We can go to my ATM,” Greg said. “Are you coming? I could use the help carrying the bags.”

  Outside, I squinted with what felt like my entire face—I felt the warmth of the sun on my teeth. I shook at the knees, sometimes dipping like a lunge stretcher when a step didn’t hold and I had to struggle for balance. An instant oil was covering my face, and the eye flutter was back, sudden grabs and contractions that I couldn’t predict or control. We made it to the Chase ATM, Greg and I, and continued on toward the Korean grocery in the blue shadow of the 7 train’s hulking tresses. I found I kept calmer with my eyes on the sidewalk, the sun skittering off the little deposits of shine in the cement, going dull at the gum spots, in the sudden shade of a box tree. I saw the people of the city from the waist down: suit pants, jeans, shorts, skirts, a color-wheel menagerie of bony knobby hairy lower legs ending in running shoes, high-tops, loafers, sandals, high heels, boat shoes. One lower leg in particular arrested my attention, pale and hugely swollen at the ankle, the white sock stretching to hold its bulbous load. I left the ankle behind at the edge of a crosswalk, following Greg’s New Balance trainers until a bass voice shouted, “Hey, hold it! Stop right there!”