The Radicals Read online

  ALSO BY RYAN MCILVAIN

  Elders

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Ryan McIlvain

  Excerpt from Elders copyright © 2013 by Ryan McIlvain

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McIlvain, Ryan, author.

  Title: The radicals : a novel / Ryan McIlvain.

  Description: First United States Edition. | New York : Hogarth, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032393 | ISBN 9780553417883 (hardback) | ISBN 9780553417890 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C535 R33 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017032393

  ISBN 9780553417883

  Ebook ISBN 9780553417890

  Cover design: Rachel Willey

  Cover photograph: Glenn Glasser/Gallery Stock

  v5.2_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Ryan McIlvain

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Elders

  FOR SHARON

  It didn’t feel quite right that Sam should be there in the first place—Sam Westergard, clearly fish out of water in our graduate course in Marxist theory. He didn’t look the part, anyway. He wore stretched-out polo shirts to class, or old road-race T-shirts, an almost constant smile. He intrigued me. On the night Sam showed up in an oversize Roger Federer shirt, I rustled enough to pay him my compliments on it. I was a fan myself. “Hey, really? Hey, cool,” he said, with startling enthusiasm.

  Pretty soon Sam and I were playing tennis together most Friday mornings and whenever else we could get away from the city and classes, the teaching, underpaid, the life, underpaid. Tennis was a balm and a crucible all at once. We each wanted to win, obviously, very badly, but we also wanted to maintain the illusion that our “practice sets” were only that—a little practice, a lark, a pair of pale intellectuals disgracing the game with our play…It wasn’t an easy false premise to keep up: The sweat started pouring off me usually in the first game, or else I’d notice Sam’s jaw, strangely squarish for his face, jutting out like an old cash drawer after he sent a ball into the net or sailing long. I started calling him Lockjaw. Or Little Lockjaw—a reference to his tall, lordly stature. I probably didn’t know Sam well enough to joke with him like this, not at first, but what else could I say? I couldn’t have known I was standing across the net from a murderer, and neither could he.

  “M or W?” I said one morning in April, the cruelest month, apparently. I had my Wilson Pro pinned, head down, to the grainy green of the court, the frame making its thin crackling music as I rotated the handle between thumb and forefingers, ready to spin it loose.

  “No, no, no,” Sam said, smiling at me. “Do the thing.” He saw my face and said again, “Do the thing. From last time? The one about the revolution—right, comrade?”

  In the last few outings he’d started calling me comrade. I didn’t know how to read it, or what he wanted from me now. His face was simple and expectant, eyes gray—neutral eyes. A little curl still hung around his light brown hair at the sides and bottom, but at the top, all wispy like smoke, all you saw was the sun on his broad forehead.

  “ ‘Up with the revolution, down with capitalism’?” he said. “Wasn’t it something like that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, so you know it already.”

  The racket spun and clattered to rest, the white W of the Wilson logo pointing up. “Up with the revolution it is,” I said.

  “I forgot to call it,” Sam said, looking guilty.

  I let him serve first, suddenly impatient to be back at the baseline. Was I a performer to him, a bearded lady? I couldn’t read his smile. We played to four–all in the first, all my slices coming back with interest. I’d noticed Sam was weak coming over his two-handed backhand, so I swallowed my pride and kept it high and to the ad side, looping the balls high over the net, Nadal-like, the yellow orbs rising and falling like suns. At the zenith of a shot you could see the ball freeze-framed against the Hoboken trees, tall beeches, and the power lines beyond, the rich brownstones with the wrought-iron balconies and the zigzag of fire escapes—the playground of the gentry, and we were crashing it. Anyway, we were graduate students, de facto experts in our contradictions: squeamish adjuncts, fake-casual athletes, complicated atheists. Sam was once a Mormon, he’d told me, and come to think of it he still looked the part—blond, looming. For my part I looked like my Russian Jewish father—dark hair, easy five o’clock shadow, a certain basset hound wariness about the eyes. And the old man’s paunch, too. Tennis was supposed to be my exercise.

  By the second deuce of the four–all game, our play had devolved into clay-court bullshitting, lob after yawning lob, a game of chicken more than tennis. A pair of seniors warmed up on the next court over, looking askance at us in their golf shirts, high shorts, stinging white socks, their rally balls ticking back and forth metronomically, and low over the net, like grown-up shots. The next ball to land at all short I took early, ginning myself up for a crosscourt screamer. Good knee bend, snapping the racket up and over, the ball buzzing the net cord—I was in my prime again. I followed the shot to net, split step, lunge, and fuck if the ball wasn’t by me. The passing shot landed an inch from both lines; I stared dumbly, panting, my racket puddled at my feet.

  On the next point, advantage Westergard, I sent a flat serve halfway to the back fence. The second serve came off my racket like a badminton birdie, floating to the middle of the service box, sitting up a foot above the net for Sam to angle easily away.

  “Fuck,” I said, loud enough for Sam to hear me across the net—his sudden chagrined downcast look, the disapproving stares of the men on the next court.

  Sam held to love in the next game to take the set. When he started his lope toward the water bottles sentineling the net post, I intercepted his path with my outstretched hand. I was done for the day. Tapped out.

  “You’re sure, comrade?” he said, and that same gnomic smile again. He held my handshake a beat too long, my hands wet and red at the extremities. A crescent of sweat glued my shirt to my upper chest, a spidery network of perspiration lines ran down my forehead and into my eyes. Yes, I was sure. And why did he keep calling me comrade? What was that about?

  “You okay?” Sam said.

  I was staring at him.

  “ ‘Comrade’?” I said. “Am I a comrade to you?”

  Sam’s face changed so suddenly, eyes wide and adrenal, I knew I’d
let in my Trotskyist street voice, my meanness. I hadn’t meant to.

  “I wasn’t trying to offend,” Sam said. “I was just kidding.”

  “I’m not offended.”

  “Oh…good…I just—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I just wasn’t sure what you meant by it.”

  I went over to my racket bag, arranging my gear just so: spare balls, grip tape, shock absorber, keys, phone, wallet. Tinkering, really. Sam stared at his feet as he fingered loose the laces of his tennis shoes, taking out of his bag the faded brown loafers he usually shuffled into class in, like moccasins he’d worn them so thin. Tall guy, tiny shoes—at least in that he followed the uniform of the day.

  “I mean,” Sam finally said, his voice upcurling in a gesture of détente, an olive branch, “I guess I thought I was using the word like you use it when you talk about your friends, your ‘comrades’ in the East Village? Not much of a proletariat around NYU, I wouldn’t think.”

  “You’d be surprised. You can have a trust fund and still care about social justice,” I said. “And most of my comrades live on the Jersey side or in Queens.”

  “You’re serious, then? You’re a believer?”

  I bristled at Sam’s choice of words—it wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last—but yes, I said, I was a socialist. You couldn’t sit through hours-long ISO meetings without a certain conviction to gird you, and you sure as hell couldn’t stomach five years of reading in abstruse Marxist polemics. It did matter to me. It mattered a lot. It took up a lot of my time, but I gave it gladly.

  Sam Westergard blinked at me. He looked chastened and sensitive, his pale face rounding into some kind of recognition, but I wasn’t sure of what, and I don’t think he was either. He looked like he wanted to ask me something but stopped short, tentative now.

  “Take last month,” I said. “Some of my ISO comrades at NYU—that’s the International Socialist Organization, by the way—do you know it? Well, they were organizing a sit-in to put pressure on the university administration. The university wouldn’t disclose their real estate holdings, didn’t want to admit to the embarrassingly large swath of lower Manhattan they either own or have investments in. Classic sign of corporate excess: Shut the blinds, turn the lights off. The monopolist doesn’t take kindly to people asking about his monopoly—cramps his style. The sit-ins were entirely peaceful, laid-back, no destruction of precious NYU property, nothing like that, but they weren’t going to move until their demands were met. Finally the campus security got called in, people got dragged out of the building by their hair in the middle of the night. It got ugly. The administration showed their true colors, and it was all on TV. Anyway, those were some of my comrades.”

  “Did it work?” Sam asked.

  “Did what work?”

  “Did the university disclose its holdings?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  We passed out of the park on the west side, where Sam’s tan spreading Buick sat in the canyon shade of more apartment buildings, more wrought-iron balconies, dappled shadow high up on the dun-rose brick—it was a beautiful spring morning. I didn’t like the thought of going into the city that afternoon, descending into the close fetid caverns of the PATH, rising up into the noise and hurry of Sixth Avenue. Is it heresy to say that I sometimes tired of New York? That the streets and crowds and great vanity of the place could jump-start the blood as well as sap it? Not to mention the ungraded papers that waited for me in my office, the endless papers…It was still early—too early to think about the city, the papers; I supposed I could grade them over the weekend if I needed to, or early Monday. In the clear morning light you could see why the earliest baseballers took their city game across the Hudson, crossing over to the relative green and space of Hoboken, getting away for a few hours. Somewhere nearby was the home plate they’d laid for that genesis game. A monument now. I’d never seen it.

  In the car I rode on a towel, over Sam’s objections. He really didn’t care, he said. What did he care? His upholstery dated to the Reagan administration. I’d heard these protestations before, kind, gentlemanly ones—Sam was often a gentleman around me—but I suppose I knew enough not to take them at face value. Sam had a new pine-tree air freshener twirling from the rearview mirror, for one. And I think I’d begun to notice other cross-hatchings, the little complications that shaded Sam’s gentlemanliness. He drove aggressively this morning, as he always did, riding the bumper of a tall black Range Rover, rushing a pair of yellow lights. Warehouses, gas stations, abandoned grassy lots shot by my window. When another car inched out from a side street, Sam hit the brakes to let a woman in a hijab pull slowly, slowly out into the opposite lane—a little selective in his doing unto others, but I did note it. It was one of the few things he’d held fast to when he jettisoned the faith of his fathers, he’d told me. I’d noted the phrase: hold fast. Something antique about it, touching. He was quoting Paul. Myself, I’ve always preferred Hillel’s negative version of the Golden Rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” More realistic, more manageable. More humane. It’s never been clearer to me that the lessons of history and economy combine to shout: Modest, be modest! Baby steps, baby steps! All we can hope for, really. The human stuff is too fragile, too fallible.

  “These lights,” Sam said under his breath, stopping short at a clear red. A sudden jolt threw us forward, the whole car, with the dull staccato crunch of broken glass coming from behind us. Behind us, a dark-haired wide-eyed boy, late teens at most, stared openmouthed through the broad scuffed windshield of a brown Jeep Cherokee. The car couldn’t have been more than a few years newer than the ancient Buick we rattled in. Sam asked if I was okay. He put his right blinker on, pointing largely and elaborately for the teenager’s benefit to a garden center’s parking lot to the right of us, nosing the Buick right.

  “The fucker’s making a run for it!” I said.

  The Jeep whirred in reverse and pinched high on its back tires, pivoting and peeling out into the left-turning traffic of the opposite lane. I tried to get the license plate but a gray sedan, honking and braking, blocked the back of the Jeep as it sped away.

  “That little fucker,” I said.

  “Did you get the plates?”

  “I was about to but—”

  Sam whiplashed the car around into the oncoming lane. Another horn was blaring, a quick, bending Doppler howl as a car ran up behind us and just managed to swerve around. Sam spurted away after the teenager, separated now by the gray sedan and the other car, a low-slung black sports job that didn’t appreciate Sam’s jockeying and tailgating. The car flashed its brake lights in warning when we came up too close on a turn, the brown Jeep hinging visible three cars ahead like a boxcar that segments and breaks from a turning train. When Sam got to a little turnoff in the lane, he threw the car left and floored the gas, the big beleaguered engine responding like a crazed bathroom fan, slingshotting us forward. We split the two lanes for several hundred feet—corridor of cars, horn fanfare—then jerked back into the right lane, cutting off the black sports car and its mutely shrieking driver. I realized from the mounting pressure in my forearms that I was squeezing either side of the worn leather seat, my veins rippling and cording, corrugating. Up ahead was one of the lights Sam had rushed a few minutes before, and now as the gray sedan braked at the end of another yellow, Sam threw us left and right again, button-hooking the sedan and shooting the intersection just ahead of crossing traffic.

  “Jesus!” I said, almost laughing for fear.

  Sam was silent, his gray serious eyes straight ahead, his sickle jaw slicing the air, pointing avant, avant! With the fan of the engine whirring crazily, factories gas stations abandoned grassy lots blurring by, we managed to get within tailing distance of the Jeep. I kept one hand anchored to the leather seat and with the other snapped a cell-phone picture of the license plate, blurry but discernible.
r />   “I got it,” I said. “Got it.”

  “You got it?” Sam said.

  Up ahead another traffic light loomed, stubborn red, with a line of three or four cars brooking no escape. When we pulled to within rear-ending distance of the Jeep, I took another picture of the license plate for good measure. We sat there idling, watching the teenager’s dark motionless head through the glass.

  “Well, this is awkward, isn’t it?” I said.

  Sam put on his right blinker again. He rolled down the window and hooked his pointing hand over the roof. He honked the horn once, a restrained, staccato beep, almost polite, continuing to gesture with his other hand.

  “I can only assume he’s hard of hearing and seeing,” I said. “Wait, what are you doing? I got the license plate!”

  Sam was up and out of the car, striding up to the driver-side window of the rusted brown Jeep. My breath caught in the sudden dinging, in the wan overhead dome light of the Buick. Sam, in reed-thin loafers and baggy shorts, a pair of stork-like pasty legs stretching in between, Sam in his sweat-grayed tennis shirt, the incipient tonsure of his bald spot catching the light—Sam knocked slowly and deliberately on the teenager’s window. He spoke in a loud, slow voice. “Excuse me, but you hit my car back there. Will you please pull over to the side of the road so we can talk?” Then he stepped back a pace, held both hands up, palms out, at shoulder height, as if to show the young man that he wasn’t armed, or maybe to baptize him into the proper repentance. In any case, it worked: The Jeep’s right blinker lit up, ticking audibly, and the car rolled over to the shoulder of the road.

  Sam trotted back to the Buick’s open door, slid into the seat and into gear. Somehow the light had stayed red—no angry honks pierced the air, no sounds at all, really. The air inside the car felt close and gauzy as we pulled up behind the Jeep, and Sam’s sly voice sounded distant as it said, “Good, right?”