The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  Parents believe they have such an impact on their children’s lives, yet I knew, from the moment I had set foot on Mac’s campus, that I’d become a different person, unfettered from whatever gravitational influence they had tried to extend. I’d moved beyond them. They only served now as proscriptive examples.

  One afternoon, while my mother slipped freshly laundered, neatly folded briefs into my chest of drawers, I asked her, “Why don’t we have any books in the house?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t you read to me as a kid?”

  “That’s what school is for. Do you want something to eat?”

  “How come you never sang any lullabies to me?”

  “What?”

  “It’s like I was in a coffin of sterility and cultural deprivation, growing up.”

  She stared at me, baffled. “Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something.”

  I drove to Laguna Beach and walked up the pathway bordering the ocean to Heisler Park. It was a weekday, but there were plenty of people about, playing volleyball, basketball, jogging, rollerblading. I passed by a group of twenty or so adults of various ages, sitting in a circle on the grass, and I caught a snippet of what was being said. Only in California would they hold, outside like this beside a beach, in full view and earshot of the public, an AA meeting.

  What I mainly noticed, though, and what made me ache, were all the couples. They seemed to be everywhere, cuddling on benches, spooning on towels, strolling with arms encircling each other, all smiling goofily, brazenly in love. They repulsed me. I despised them, because I knew now the full range of things that couples did behind closed doors, and I was beginning to suspect that Didi might be doing those things with someone else. I wondered if she had lied to me that first night in my dorm room: perhaps she had had another date after all.

  She did not love me—not like I loved her. How else to explain the fact that she did not seem to miss me one iota, that more and more she wasn’t home in Chestnut Hill when she said she would be, and then did not return my messages right away?

  “Where were you tonight?” I asked.

  “Oh, we went to see a movie in Cleveland Circle.”

  “Where?” I wasn’t familiar with the geography of Massachusetts. As far as I knew, she could have flown to Ohio for the day.

  “Nearby. On the edge of BC,” she said, not clarifying anything for me.

  “How far away is Chestnut Hill from Cambridge?”

  “Twenty minutes driving, forever on the T. Why?”

  It was much closer than I had thought, not a distant suburb. “You could go visit Joshua. His parents’ house is near Harvard Square.”

  “Why would I want to visit Joshua? He hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you,” I said, although Joshua had never expressed anything but indifference or disdain for her.

  “What would be the point?” Didi asked. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything.”

  I didn’t know what the point would be, exactly. I supposed I was desperate for something to ground her, connect her, to me again. She seemed so removed from me.

  “I called twice tonight,” I said. “Didn’t your mother give you the messages?”

  “I was going to call you back tomorrow,” she said. “I’m beat.”

  “Did you go somewhere after the movie?”

  “Hey,” Didi said abruptly, “I was wondering, where were you born? I’ve never asked you. Were you born in Korea?”

  “What?” The question befuddled me. “No. I was born here, in Mission Viejo. At Sisters of St. Joseph.”

  “Do you speak Korean or English at home?” she asked.

  “English,” I said, even more flummoxed. “I don’t know Korean. I thought I told you.” I had explained to her that I was a sansei, third generation. I had assumed she understood. All this time, had she been thinking of me as a fobby, an immigrant fresh off the boat? Was that how she saw me?

  “What about your parents and sister?” Didi continued. “Do they speak to each other in Korean?”

  “Why are you asking me these things all of a sudden?”

  “No reason. I was just wondering.”

  “Did someone in your family ask?”

  “No, not really. Well, maybe the subject came up.”

  “When you told them I’m your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know if I used the word boyfriend,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “They’d pester me endlessly!”

  “So what? They’ve got to know what’s going on—I call you every day.”

  “You don’t know my family. They’re always in my business. They never leave me alone. Nothing’s ever private. I can’t ever get a moment’s peace around here. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “It doesn’t seem to bother you that much. From what I can tell, you’ve been having fun, a lot of fun, being back home.”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.” She yawned. “What time is it? It’s late. That movie sucked. We should have walked out halfway.”

  “Who’d you go with?”

  “Abby and Michael.” Her younger sister and brother.

  “Just you guys?”

  “We met some people there.”

  “Yeah? Who?” I asked, noting the original omission.

  “Nina and Sean. Friends from Milton.”

  “Is Sean an old boyfriend?”

  “Sean? Sean Maguire?” She laughed. “No.”

  “He’s not the guy you lost your virginity to?”

  She laughed again. “That’s so screwy to even suggest. So to speak. Naw, Sean’s like a cousin to me. That was Kurt, at music camp in Lake Winnipesaukee. He was from Montpelier. I don’t know where the hell he is now. Oh, my God, for a moment I forgot his last name.”

  “Sean never had a thing for you?”

  “Pamplin.”

  “What?”

  “That was his last name. Kurt Pamplin. I wonder what ever became of him. He was a really hot guitarist. I bet he’s up in Burlington, in a band or something, playing at Nectar’s. That’s where Phish got their start, you know. They went to UVM. God, I could go for an order of their gravy fries right now. If you ever go to Burlington, you have to go to Nectar’s and get their gravy fries. But you have to get them from the little window outside and eat them standing on the sidewalk. And you have to be drunk, and it has to be, like, two a.m. and wicked cold out. If you eat them inside, it’s not the same thing.”

  I did not want to hear about Kurt the hot guitarist, or the band Fish, or the club Nectar’s and the culinary delights of eating their fries al fresco. “Tell me about Sean,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “Where’s he go to school?”

  “Princeton.”

  The fucker. “Have you been hanging out with him a lot?”

  “My mom’s best friends with his mom. He’s like my brother.”

  First a cousin, now a brother. “I bet he’s always had a thing for you.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Did you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

  “I told him I’ve been seeing someone, yeah.”

  “ ‘Someone.’ Not anything more definitive than that, huh? Why won’t you tell people about me?”

  “I just explained.”

  “Are you ashamed of me?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

  “Why do you want to keep me secret, then?” For the first time, I thought there might be something to Joshua’s lemon-sucker theory.

  “I’m really tired,” Didi said. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

  We didn’t talk about it, though. She kept skirting the topic, and our conversations devolved into prickles of irritation the rest of the vacation.

  Nevertheless, when I got back to St. Paul at the end of January, I had hopes we could somehow go back to where we’d left off at the end of the fall semester.

&nbs
p; I met Didi at the airport, flowers in hand, reenacting our reunion after Thanksgiving. She looked wonderful. Gone were the pallor and dark circles and emaciation from finals week. She radiated health—well rested and well fed. I had a surprise planned for her: I had bought new sheets for us, exquisitely soft, with a thread count of four hundred and fifty. But Didi demurred when I tried to take her to my dorm room.

  “I have a yeast infection,” she told me.

  “A what?”

  “The doctor said maybe it has something to do with my sugar levels. I’m not feeling that great. You mind if I sleep in my own room tonight?”

  I was certain now that she had been cheating on me. Yeast infections were from sex. Too much sex. Not for nothing was it called the honeymoon syndrome.

  The next morning, as I knew she would, Didi broke up with me.

  “It’s Sean, isn’t it? You’ve been fucking him.”

  “Sean has nothing to do with this,” she said, packing the belongings she had stored in my room.

  “That’s not a denial.”

  “I haven’t been fucking him, all right? I haven’t been fucking anyone. This is what I mean. I can’t breathe around you. I feel suffocated by you. You’re always all over me. All we ever do is have sex. Have you noticed we never talk about anything? I can’t remember a single conversation we’ve ever had. We don’t have anything in common.”

  “You never loved me, did you?” I said.

  “This is what I mean. All this talk about love! For God’s sake, we’re eighteen! Why couldn’t we have just enjoyed ourselves and, you know, been casual about it? Why’d you have to get so serious and obsessive? You want too much. You wrecked it.”

  “You were just slumming.”

  “What?”

  In the liberal protectorate of Mac, she had felt uninhibited, free, but once she went home, she had woken up to our outward differences, and had lost her nerve. She had begun to envision my life on the opposite coast, and had been terrorized by the specter of a bunch of strange Orientals sitting on the floor in hanbok, eating live octopus and hot chili peppers, speaking in unintelligible barks and yips. “People like you,” I said, “when it gets down to it, you’ll always stick to your own kind.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s that even mean?”

  “It was all a lark to you. A little walk on the yellow side. You used me.”

  “If anything, Eric,” she said, “we used each other.”

  I brooded and cursed and cried in my room in Dupre, alone, the entire weekend, and then went down the hallway to Joshua’s room.

  I walked in without knocking and sat down on his battered beanbag chair. There was detritus all over the floor: books, clothes, CDs, magazines, squashed cigarette boxes, food wrappers, an old guitar missing several strings. A red bandanna was draped over a lamp, batiks and posters of Sartre and Iggy Pop were tacked to the walls, and a black surfboard, inlaid with the prism design from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, hung down from the ceiling, held aloft by a fishnet. “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes was playing on his stereo.

  For reasons unknown, Joshua was wearing a green Bavarian alpine hat with a tassel and feather and puffing on a big, curved calabash tobacco pipe. He was hunched over his desk, gluing together an arched, three-foot-long bridge, made wholly of toothpicks.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “These are catenary trusses,” he said. “Check this out.” He propped up the bridge so it spanned his file cabinet and desk, then, to a middle strut, he hooked a rope that was tied to a cinder block. Suspending the heavy, slowly rotating block, the bridge did not give. It did not bend. “You believe that?” Joshua asked, admiring his handiwork. “Fucking toothpicks.”

  “You were right about Sourdough,” I told him. “I should have listened to you.”

  He nodded. “I’ve missed you, bro.”

  6

  It was a school for the bookish and nerdy, for geeks and losers, for kids who liked to study, who actually wanted to learn. During our four years at Mac, we would read Foucault, Hegel, Derrida, Saussure, Gadamer, Lacan, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari—never the full texts, mind you, just xeroxed scraps and smidgens that still we would not understand, but from which we could lap up the lingua franca of pseudo-intellectualism. We’d sling around words like synecdoche and hyperbole, ontology and eschatology, faute de mieux and fin de siècle. We’d describe things as heuristic, protean, numinous, and ineffable. We’d discuss Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Plato’s cave and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Laffer’s curve and Schrödinger’s cat. We’d embrace poststructuralism and existentialism and epistemology, semiotics and hermeneutics. We’d see everything as an allegory or a metaphor for something else, and ultimately we’d deconstruct everything as divisive or patriarchal or sexist or homophobic or racist or neofascist—a product of heteronormative exclusivity, a metanarrative propagated by the oligarchy. We’d answer almost every question by decrying it as a syllogism, or a trope, or tautological, or phallocentric, or reductive, or hegemonic (undoubtedly our favorite buzzword). We’d come to believe that any text—be it Shakespeare or a comic book or a supermarket circular—had the same intrinsic value, and we’d insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed. We’d argue and rant, we’d foment for empowerment and paradigm shifts and interstitial hybridity, we’d make grand, sweeping pronouncements about subjects of which we knew nothing. We would become articulate, well read, sensitive, open-minded, totally insufferable twits. We would graduate as nihilistic, atheistic, anarchistic, moralistic, tree-hugging, bohemian, Marxist snobs. We would love every minute of it.

  All of this we did without a trace of irony. Only Joshua, ever the devil’s advocate, would call us out at times (although, on the whole, he tended to be the most pretentious and reactionary of any of us: “Hemingway was a racist.” “Flannery O’Connor was a racist”).

  “Look, this is all just intellectual masturbation,” he said once in class. “The fact is, no one here will ever be poor. In ten years, what do you think you’ll be doing? Maybe the best-intentioned of you will be working for a nonprofit, but you’ll be living off your trust funds. More likely everyone will have caved in and become corporate attorneys.”

  That spring semester of my freshman year, I took Problems of Philosophy, Metaphysical Diasporas, Faith and Doubt in Nineteenth-century Literature, and Introduction to Creative Writing. Jessica was in the first class, Joshua in all four. Our education began in earnest, and so, too, did our friendship, Joshua and Jessica working assiduously to lift me out of my funk over Didi. (I’d see her now and again on campus, and each encounter would fill me with heartache. I could not imagine then that, after a year, we’d reach a rapprochement of sorts, born mainly out of disinterest, since we’d both be involved with other people, and that eventually, when I left Mac, I’d forget about her almost entirely.)

  Jessica got me to start running with her on the treadmills in the Field House. To counteract such a frightening aspiration for health, Joshua got me to start smoking cigarettes. We watched reruns of Magnum, P.I., of which Joshua, peculiarly, was an aficionado, and for each viewing in the lounge, he’d make us wear Hawaiian shirts and drink mai tais. We visited the Walker Art Center. We spent hours browsing in Cheapo Records and Hungry Mind Books, inhaling the musty acid odor. We ate greasy fish fries (made with the ever-present walleye) at the St. Clair Broiler. We listened to live jazz at the AQ. We rolled frames at BLB, the Bryant-Lake Bowl, a combo restaurant-coffeehouse-performance space-bowling alley. We rented snowshoes and clumped up Summit Avenue, past the Victorian mansions, and trekked along the Mississippi. We had long bull sessions about the meaning of life (“Do you see the world as mean or sublime?” Joshua would ask, and he’d shake his head pityingly when we answered sublime).

  We spent so much time together, people began referri
ng to us as the three musketeers, the three amigos. “No,” Joshua said, “you know what we should call ourselves? The 3AC. The Asian American Artists Collective.” And thereafter, especially when we were drunk, we’d use the acronym as a rallying cry, a toast to our solidarity: “To the 3AC!”

  Mostly what we did, though, was study and read (I entered college with 20/20 vision and left needing contacts). My grades had suffered the first term, and I was determined to do better overall in the spring. Nonetheless, the only course that I truly cared about was Intro to Creative Writing.

  In the class, we started by reading selections from a poetry anthology and then taking a stab at writing our own poems. This was, without exception, a ludicrous exercise. None of us were poets. We didn’t understand poetry. We didn’t know what to write about. There were sixteen students in the class, and the majority were not English majors. Intro to Creative Writing was considered a Mickey Mouse course at Mac, and it fulfilled a fine arts requirement.

  So we presented weepy elegies for our grandmothers and family dogs, self-pitying monologues about teenage angst, hackneyed pastorals about meadows and fluorescent moons, angry apostrophes to divorced parents, soaring heroic couplets about unrequited love, mawkish paeans to pain and sorrow, and fiery sonnets about loneliness. It was the most wretched stuff. Everything alliterated and rhymed. Most of it was incoherent drivel. There were repeated appearances of tears and rain, usually in combination. But, true to the ethos of Mac, no one in the class laughed or disparaged any of these sorry efforts. We were supportive and kind. We made gentle suggestions. We lauded the intentions.

  The poetry part of the class didn’t matter to me. What I was nervous about was the second part of the course, when we would write fiction. For all my ambitions to be a writer, and for all the encouragement I had received in high school, told by more than one teacher that I possessed a creative flair, I had never written an actual short story, just unfinished vignettes or scenes.