The Altruists Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Ridker

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpt from “Apology for Want” from Apology for Want by Mary Jo Bang (A Middlebury/Bread Loaf Book, University Press of New England, 1997). Reprinted by permission of The Clegg Agency.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Ridker, Andrew, author

  Title: The altruists : a novel / Andrew Ridker.

  Description: New York, New York : VIKING, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018041553 (print) | LCCN 2018043699 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525522720 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780525522713 (hardcover)

  Classification: LCC PS3618.I392246 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.I392246 A79 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041553

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

  Version_1

  For Paul and Susan Ridker

  Among animals, we’re the aberration:

  want appropriates us,

  sends us out dressed in ragged tulle, but won’t tell

  where it last buried the acorn or bone.

  —MARY JO BANG, “Apology for Want”

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part IOne

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part IIEight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part IIITwenty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Alter family was beset by fire. All autumn there were flare-ups, happenings, the kind of uncoordinated auguries that look ominous only in retrospect. In September, Ethan singed his thumb trying to light a cigarette. Three days later, a faulty burner caused the range in the kitchen to malfunction; the igniter made an anxious sound, a string of desperate ticks, before sparking a flame that caught Francine’s cuff. And at Arthur’s fiftieth birthday, a modest gathering on the back lawn of the house, a trick candle fell from the carrot cake and set a few dead leaves alight, which Maggie stomped out with her foot.

  The largest of that fall’s infernos occurred one Thursday evening in November. Francine was in her office with Marcus and Margot Washington, a pair of married intellectual property lawyers with a boutique firm. It was their first session—they had been referred to Francine by a mutual friend—but the couple’s reputation preceded them. The previous April, they had successfully defended an emerging peer-to-peer file sharing service against a hip-hop crew behind a popular song with an unprintable title. But the Washingtons did not look like two people at the peak of professional success. Margot’s foot bounced restlessly in place. Marcus stared at his lap. They had come to Francine in need of mediation.

  “You understand the delicacy of our situation,” Margot said, clutching the handle of her purse. “We can’t have anyone knowing about this.”

  Francine understood clearly enough. Margot’s roots in St. Louis were deep, her family history a veritable fable of inheritance and birthright. She was said to be descended from the French grandee Pierre Leclercq. According to legend, Leclercq, a fur trader with a million acres in colonial St. Louis, freed one of his concubines, Bathsheba, and put land grants in her name in order to protect himself from creditors. But Bathsheba flipped the property and took Leclercq to court, inspiring generations of lawsuits over his estate. For years Leclercq’s descendants were the embattled, flamboyant characters at the forefront of the city’s aristocracy. The Washingtons were visible figures in what remained of St. Louis society, and all the more so for being one of two black couples who lived on Lenox Place, a gated street near the Central West End.

  “Of course.” Francine nodded.

  Margot scrutinized the room. “Do you always work from home?”

  “Since we moved in,” Francine said. “Four years ago.”

  “Four years,” Margot said. And then repeated it, “Four years,” weighing the measure of that time.

  Before Arthur moved the family west from Boston, the space that was now Francine’s office had been a sunroom, a structural addition on the western end of the house. One wall was made almost entirely of glass, through which Francine watched the scorched leaves of red maples fall one after another all season long. On the office door, facing out, an engraved brass nameplate insisted on its present function. Arthur had protested the cost of the plate, as well as the acoustic panels on the walls, but Francine ignored him. She understood the value of discretion, and of putting up a solid front.

  The home office was a consolation of sorts, the primary condition in her agreement to move. She needed a place in which to foster her career, having left behind a well-paid appointment at a private clinic in Newton. Though she had been reduced to working out of a small room in her house, her name was gradually coming to mean something in the suburbs of University City, Clayton, and Ladue.

  “I haven’t had any complaints yet,” she added.

  Margot nodded decisively and set her bag beside her. “All right,” she said, “I’ll begin.” She moved herself back on the couch and squared her shoulders. “If you must know, and I suppose you must, my husband has lately cultivated something of a habit, a proclivity, which I refuse to indulge and which threatens to undo our marriage.”

  “I’d like to hear it in Marcus’s words,” said Francine. “Marcus? Are you comfortable sharing with me?”

  Marcus squinted into the tangerine dusk light shining through the panes.

  “He won’t tell you.”

  “Marcus?” Francine tried again.

  “He refuses to engage,” said Margot. “But something must be done.” She paused. “So here it is: my husband likes to play dress-up. He finds this erotic.”

  Francine looked again at Marcus, but he was silent. She pinched the inside of her cheek between her teeth. “All right,” she said. “Marcus, it would really help if you could say something.”

  “He says he likes the feeling. The confinement. He says the rubber’s like a second skin.”

  “The rubber?”

  “Latex, actually. Yes. He likes to dress up in a bodysuit and pretend that he’s a household pet.”

  “So—okay.” Francine shifted in her chair. “Marcus likes to dress up like a dog.”

  “Not dog. Household pet. Sometimes he’s a dog; sometimes he’s a cat. And sometimes he’s a hamster,
which is ridiculous, because hamsters live in cages and run on wheels, whereas Marcus, Marcus, is a well-regarded trial lawyer with a firm to run.” Margot dipped her head inside her bag and rooted around until she emerged with a black face mask, two long ears drooping from the top. “Put it on,” she demanded.

  “That’s not necessary,” said Francine.

  “He likes it so much, he can show you what he looks like. Put it on, Marcus.”

  Before Francine could interject, the mask was in Marcus’s hands. She watched as he eagerly pulled it over his head and adjusted it until his eyes were aligned with the holes.

  “Do you see? Do you see what I’m dealing with here?”

  Francine nodded. She was beginning to get a sense of things. By and large she saw two kinds of clients in the well-heeled suburbs where she made her living: those with legitimate issues to work through, and those whose neurotic temperaments had them convinced that even the slightest change of mood was cause for alarm. That a dose of unhappiness was surely depression, that a swell of panic was no less than clinical anxiety rearing its twitchy head. The Washingtons, she reasoned, likely fell into the latter camp. They were probably just looking to be reassured that they were normal.

  Francine had been doling out a lot of reassurance lately, and it bored her. She wanted something she could invest in. She had been preoccupied all day, nervous as she always was with new referrals, eager to make a good impression—and for what? A little midlife kink? Life, with its routine skirmishes, was difficult enough.

  Take Maggie. She was throwing a fit over her role in the Thanksgiving pageant. She’d wanted to be an Indian—that nomenclature, however incorrect, still persisted at Captain Elementary in the year 2000—and had been cast, instead, as the cornucopia. Ethan, meanwhile, had taken to locking himself in his bedroom. He had removed himself from the family and replaced them with a computer he’d been cautious enough to purchase only after Y2K turned out to be a whole lot of worry over nothing. He bought it with his own money, which he’d saved toiling each summer at the JCC in Creve Coeur, and this defense—“It’s my own money, I can do what I want with it”—had successfully foiled Francine thus far. And on top of everything, earlier that week the university had dismissed Arthur’s request to be considered for a tenure-track position. He’d been a visiting professor in the engineering department for four years now, though he hardly felt like a visitor. He taught more courses than any of his colleagues, sat on innumerable committees, and most importantly had, perhaps too hastily, taken out a hefty mortgage on the house. Despite all this, his dean of faculty, Sahil Gupta, informed him that nothing could be done until the budget resolved itself. For days now Arthur had been stomping around the house, cursing under his breath and periodically stating, like a mantra, “Budgets don’t resolve themselves.”

  Marcus spoke from behind the mask. “Do you smell that?”

  “Stay on topic,” Margot snapped.

  “Hold it—” Marcus sniffed through the mask’s snout holes. “Something’s burning.”

  “Dr. Alter, he’s ducking the issue. Isn’t he?”

  Francine cocked her head. “He’s right. I smell it too.” The air inside the office grayed. “Okay,” she said. “Everybody out.”

  Francine and the Washingtons stepped out into the hall, where they found Arthur, Ethan, and Maggie, and soon both families stood in a semicircle on the front walk beneath a rapidly purpling sky. The elastic hoot of sirens could be heard somewhere beyond the walls of Chouteau Place.

  “Who’s that?” Maggie asked, pointing at Marcus.

  Margot’s eyes narrowed. “Take off the mask. You’re scaring the girl.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  The sirens grew louder. Arthur began to pace. “What did you do?” he asked, of no one in particular.

  “Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything,” rushed Ethan.

  “I was practicing my lines,” said Maggie.

  “I thought you were a cornucopia,” said Arthur. The block was overtaken with blinking flares. A fire truck pulled up behind them. “Cornucopias don’t talk,” he muttered to himself, hustling to confer with the men climbing out of the truck.

  “I talk!” Maggie shouted after him. “I have lines!”

  “He knows,” Francine cooed. “He knows.”

  Lynn Germaine, who lived in the craftsman next door, took a tentative step out of her house. “Everything okay?” she called helpfully from underneath the eaves. “Something burning?”

  Francine waved her away. “We’re fine, Lynn,” she said, cheeks flushing with every passing minute that her life stood on display.

  Margot sent Marcus to start the car. He sighed and shuffled off. Margot fixed her gaze on her husband, then on Arthur. She turned to Francine. “So,” she said, nodding at the fire truck. “How long have you been married?”

  Before Francine could answer, Arthur was back by her side. Three of the firemen were already storming the house. Two others unfurled a long hose and made for the hydrant in front of the Germaines’. Francine’s heart stuttered as she watched them rush her home.

  “What did you do?” Arthur asked again. He chewed his cuticles, and looked back at the truck and then at the house. “I should go in there.”

  “Let the men do their job,” Francine said.

  “They don’t know their way around. They won’t know how to triage our valuables.”

  “They’re not going to triage anything,” she said. “They’re going to put out the fire.”

  “Oh, look!” said Margot. “You can see the smoke rising up through the window!”

  Arthur made a break for the house. Francine leapt and snagged his collar. Her grip was firm, and held him in place. She was used to this. This is what I do, she thought as she restrained him, ashamed to be doing so in front of Margot, ashamed to be holding Arthur back, preventing him from certain death while her life went up in flames before her, thinking all the while: What would this man do without me?

  PART I

  ONE

  You’re coming with us.”

  Maggie had known Emma since braces, but the awkward girl who’d played saxophone in their high school jazz band with enough enthusiasm to redeem the instrument—and, for that matter, jazz—was now in her second year of law school. A dozen of her classmates stood clustered in Emma’s living room, hands hooked around significant others or planted confidently on their hips. In the kitchenette, handles of vodka with frosted-glass insignia shared counter space with plastic jugs of Simply Orange. Maggie swore she knew the song piping through the apartment, but each time she came close to identifying it, an incoming text would ping through the phone that was hooked to the speakers and throw her concentration. “You always show up at the start of things,” Emma continued, “but then you sneak away like no one’s going to notice.”

  “No I don’t,” said Maggie.

  “Well, good. Because you’re coming out with us tonight.”

  Maggie ground her teeth and stared at the orange ring of residue at the bottom of her Solo cup. Across the room, a toothy boy in fashionable glasses was doing an impression of someone Maggie didn’t recognize.

  “There are a lot of interesting people here,” Emma added, gesturing to a huddle of her classmates.

  Maggie scowled. The whole scene felt staged. Everyone was too put together, too self-assured. A jolt of paranoia seized her. Had this party, this Lower East Side gathering of marketing associates and financial analysts and almost-lawyers, been arranged for her benefit? Maggie couldn’t shake the feeling that this conspicuous display of upward mobility was intended to send her a message.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  Emma put her hands up. “I’m not trying to say anything!”

  Maggie relaxed her shoulders. She was doing fine, after all. She made rent working for the good people of Queens. Her only boss was her conscience.
Most days this meant running errands, or babysitting, or liaising with city government on behalf of her Spanish- and Russian- and Chinese-speaking neighbors. Odd jobs. Over the course of five months she’d cultivated a small network of clients, mostly immigrants who considered her US citizenship to be a marketable skill. It was satisfying work, though it didn’t pay particularly well. She was always a little bit hungry.

  The toothy boy sidled up to them. “We were talking about Ziegler,” he said.

  “Oh my god,” said Emma. “Ziegler!”

  “Who’s Ziegler?” Maggie asked.

  “He’s one of our professors,” said the boy. “Torts.”

  “What are torts?”

  “It’s when an injured party—”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  The boy looked hurt. “Okay,” he said.

  Emma introduced them. “This is Maggie. We went to high school together.”

  “What do you do?” the boy asked, squinting.

  Recently, a Polish woman on Himrod Street hired Maggie to talk at her newborn son. She was told she could say anything she liked, as long as she said it in English, the idea being that the baby would assimilate the language into its burgeoning subconscious and grow up fluent. But on her first day, once the mother left the room, Maggie blanked. She muttered erm and um and uh the whole session, paralyzed at first by nerves and then by guilt at the prospect of making ten bucks an hour without having earned it. “I can’t take your money,” she told the woman at the session’s end. “But I’ll be back next week with a lot to say. I promise.”

  Okay, so the hunger wasn’t dire, but to be honest? Denying oneself a full belly kind of felt a little bit saintly. Maggie kept enough money on hand to afford to feel saintly, to afford to turn other money down. She regulated her spending with scrupulous discipline, consuming only what she needed, only what she felt she deserved. The problem was that her body couldn’t differentiate between self-inflicted hunger and the other kind. It, a body, knew only “hunger”—the nutritional deficiency, not the ideological assertion—and, accordingly, she’d slimmed. Six pounds over two years. Which wasn’t nothing, especially when you weren’t much to begin with.