The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  Paradoxically, I kept dating white girls, mostly other aspiring writers, but there was a difference now. I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.

  The most recent one, Odette, had been from Atlanta, an assistant editor at the literary journal Agni. Things had been going swimmingly, if a little quickly. Almost right away, she began discussing marriage, kids. “What do you think of the name Genevieve if it’s a girl?” she asked. “I want to have three children, the first when I’m twenty-nine, okay? Do you think your mother will like me?”

  Odette spoke on the phone to her own mother in Atlanta, who asked what my name was. “Is he Asian? What? Korean?” Then her mother shouted to her father, “Did you hear that, Sam? You’re going to have slanty-eyed grandchildren.”

  But we didn’t have children. The relationship didn’t last more than a few months. Out of the blue, Odette’s ex-boyfriend sent me a letter, claiming that every day for the last two weeks he had been fucking her in the afternoon, just hours before Odette came to my basement apartment to fuck me. He added that, according to her, I was lousy in bed and had the penis of a pygmy.

  “That is fucked, man,” Joshua told me. “You are fucked. Why do you keep going out with these rimjobs?”

  By then, the spring of 1998, Joshua had returned from Paris and had moved into his parents’ old house on Walker Street, in Cambridge for good now—or at least as permanently as he could foresee. A few probate issues notwithstanding, he had money from his parents’ estate—their retirement and investment accounts, their life insurance. If he was frugal and sold the house, a three-story Victorian worth well over a million dollars, he could write full-time almost indefinitely and live anywhere. He was in a quandary, unable to decide what to do or where to go, not prepared to put the house on the market just yet. “It’s the only home I’ve ever known,” he said. So for the moment he was living in the house alone, four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms to himself. Again and again, he asked me to move in with him. “Come on, man, I won’t even charge you rent.” It was a tempting offer. Certainly it would have been a welcome financial reprieve for me, but I kept hesitating.

  It wasn’t that the house was inhospitable. Far from it. It was over a hundred years old, gray, weathered clapboards outside, but the interior had been continually renovated, decorated in a minimalist, modern aesthetic that was inviting: Swiss Bauhaus furniture with clean, straight lines and warm blond woods, Max Bill stools, Alvar Aalto bentwood tables. There was an Eames chair and ottoman. There were comfy upholstered sofas, faded red Persian rugs, bright still lifes and black-and-white landscapes on the walls, lots of light and quiet, stainless steel appliances, central heat and air-conditioning.

  And it wasn’t just that Joshua was a slob. It was a given that he wouldn’t pick up after himself, do the dishes, pitch in with chores. I’d have to take care of all of those things if I moved in, I knew. That didn’t bother me so much—an acceptable trade-off if I were living there gratis.

  Rather than domestic, it was more the prospect of emotional servitude that made me waver. I remembered our sophomore year at Mac, when Joshua had gotten a tattoo on his upper left arm that read, in inch-high, mineral-black Futura Bold letters, 3AC. Jessica and I had first thought it was fake—stenciled with a marker. Temporary tattoos were all the rage then, and there had been a fuss when some high school kids in Maple Grove had supposedly been given lick-and-stick blue star tattoos that were soaked in LSD, prompting Mac officials to put out an advisory.

  But Joshua had told us no, it was real. “So when are you guys going to get yours?” he’d asked.

  “No fucking way,” I’d said.

  “Why not? It’s a badge of solidarity.”

  “We’ll probably have a falling-out next week and never speak to each other again,” Jessica said.

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” Joshua said. “This—this thing with us—it can never die.”

  We did not get matching tattoos. A part of me had agreed with Jessica. The three of us had become close at Mac, especially in the wake of the brouhaha with Kathryn Newey, but I hadn’t felt our friendship warranted an indelible symbol of commitment and fidelity.

  Now that Joshua and I had known each other for ten years, however, I had the opposite concern. Although I relished his counsel and company, I was wary of him at times, wary of how critical, noisome, and dogmatic he could be, of his predilection for creating drama and havoc, of the inequity in our roles, and wary, too, of his dependence on me, his neediness. Already there were the phone calls, the panicked intuitions that he might have leukemia and maybe should get a lumbar puncture, or that he might have a brain tumor and maybe should get a CT scan. More systemically, there were the calls, both during the day and late at night, when he thought it imperative to convey an idea he’d had, an epiphany, or to read me a particularly piquant passage he’d just written or read, or calls about nothing, really, just wanting to check in, shoot the breeze.

  There were the spontaneous hankerings for pizza or Bass ale or a movie or a hike, for just hanging out, because he was bored and lonely. There were the favors to help him trim a tree or fix the gutters, to go with him to Tags Hardware or Home Depot, to pick up a prescription at CVS or do some research in the microfiche archives of the BPL for him. He didn’t understand that I had work to do, grading papers and prepping for classes and stuffing envelopes in Palaver’s shithole. He didn’t understand that not everything revolved around him, that I might have a life of my own. The impositions were bad enough living in the same city. What would they be like living in the same house?

  His side of the river, I had to admit, had its allure, namely Wu Chon in Somerville’s Union Square, where we could get our fill of Korean food—bibimbap, kalbi, and jaeyuk bokkeum—and the Porter Square Exchange, which housed the Japanese market Kotobukiya and a handful of small Japanese restaurants that were practically stalls, yet offered cheap and tasty comfort foods.

  Our favorite was Cafe Mami, where we usually sat at the counter, and it was there that Joshua dispensed his latest harangue about my dating habits.

  “All these years, it’s like you haven’t learned a thing,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”

  “I could say the same about you. You’ve never had much luck with the ladies.”

  “By choice, man. It’s by choice.”

  During college, Joshua hadn’t had a single real girlfriend, and the same held true when he was in Iowa and the Bay Area, a fling here and there, never lasting longer than three weeks, at the end of which the women invariably left him. He was lazy, not interested in expending the least amount of effort required to sustain a relationship. He couldn’t be bothered with courtship, with sharing, with being complimentary or attentive or supportive or sensitive. He couldn’t care less about flowers or romantic gestures or fun excursions. He didn’t want to go out on dates or hold dinner parties. He didn’t want to talk to the women on the phone (why would he, when he had me?). He didn’t really want to spend any time with them. He needed to protect his time, for writing and mulling, for reading and pondering. He needed space and sovereignty, not be tied down with commitments and compromises. He needed women only to slake the periodic biological urge. In other words, the last thing he wanted was a girlfriend or a wife, though he could do with a mistress or a married lover, but, barring that, he would settle for a prostitute, which he still employed on occasion.

  He had solicited one not too long ago from the escort pages of the Boston Phoenix. “You know, you should watch out,” I said. “They’re cracking down on johns these days.”

  “It’s so stupid and hypocritical. Everyone pays for sex in one form or another, marriage being the most common and extortionate. It’s all about money. All these laws are designed to oppress women so they can’t take
control of the industry and get their fair share. It’s so parochial and anti-feminist, not to mention inconvenient for people like me.”

  “Somehow I’ve never thought of you as a feminist.”

  “I am, at heart. I’m an equal-opportunity asshole. But you,” Joshua said, “you’d never hire a hooker, would you? Because you believe the concept of love is real and attainable and not merely a myth perpetrated by religious demagogues and prohibitionists and crypto-fascist conglomerates.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then, if you have to go down this path of felo-de-se, at least do one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Look around you.”

  From our perch in Cafe Mami, I looked at all the young, attractive Asian women in the Porter Square Exchange, milling through the passageway to eat at the sushi bar or the ramen place, to buy bubble tea from Tapicha or pastries from Japonaise or cosmetics from the Shiseido kiosk.

  “Why can’t you just go out with a nice Asian girl?” Joshua asked me.

  I had tried. My parents had set me up on a few blind dates, daughters of friends or friends of friends from their Garden Grove church, Korean girls purportedly seeking a nice Korean boy from a good Korean family. By and large, they turned out to be typical KAPs—Korean American Princesses. Stuck up, superficial, very high-maintenance. They had salon hairdos, wore heavy makeup, and dressed to the nines in designer clothes, especially prizing Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags. They expected me to take them to dinner at Biba or Blue Ginger, Mistral or Clio, Maison Robert or No. 9 Park, then go clubbing at Aria, followed by a nightcap at Sonsie, and pay for everything. They were disappointed I didn’t wear a suit—Prada, Armani, Joseph Abboud, or at least Zegna. They were bewildered I didn’t own a car—a Benz or a Beemer, or at least a Lexus. They were flummoxed most of all by my career.

  “I’m working for Palaver magazine and teaching adjunct at Walden right now.”

  “Is there much money in that?”

  “No, but I’m trying to become a writer.”

  “What kind of writer?”

  “Fiction. Short stories. Novels.”

  “Is there much money in that?”

  “No. Not in the type of books I’m interested in writing.”

  “But—I don’t get it—what would be the point, then?”

  Joshua chewed on his tonkatsu curry, and I munched on my yaki donburi, thinly sliced beef with onions and bean sprouts served over rice.

  “Those girls were civilians,” he said. “What can you expect from civilians? Of any color? They can’t understand. They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it’s depressing, whereas we’re fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain. You need to go out with an artist. An Asian artist.”

  “You find me a nice Asian artist,” I said, “and I will.”

  Later that summer, Joshua told me to come over to his house, he had a little surprise for me. He opened the front door and introduced me to his new roommate—Jessica Tsai.

  I broke the lease to my basement apartment in the Back Bay and moved into the house on Walker Street.

  9

  That first month, with just the three of us in the house, was idyllic. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, the master and two smaller ones that had once been home offices for the Meers. Joshua couldn’t bear to sleep in his parents’ old room, although he said one of us was welcome to it. Jessica and I didn’t feel it’d be proper, either, and moved futons into the two smaller rooms, while Joshua encamped in the converted attic upstairs, an expansive, sunny haven with dormers and skylights and its own bathroom.

  Jessica was hired as a waitress at Upstairs at the Pudding. She also got a daytime gig proofreading at the law firm Gaston & Snow downtown. She would look for a third job—her student loans were quadruple what I owed—but none of this employment would start for a few weeks, so she had much of August at her leisure, time to relax and work on her art.

  Serendipity visited me, too. Palaver’s managing editor, a feminist poet who had never gotten along with Paviromo, quit without notice, and he asked me to take over her slot. The salary was shit, and still I wouldn’t have benefits, but it was a full-time job, allowing me to take a leave from teaching freshman comp at Walden College.

  For once, we could all take a breather. We went to the Kendall Square Cinema and Brattle Theatre to watch indie and foreign films, to Jillian’s to play pool, to Jae’s for pad thai and the Forest Café for mole poblano, to Redbones for ribs and the Burren for Guinness, to Hollywood Express to rent DVDs, to the Harvard Book Store and Wordsworth to browse books, to Tower Records, Newbury Comics, and Looney Tunes to scope out CDs.

  Joshua’s musical tastes now leaned toward Fugazi, Outkast, Massive Attack, Beck, and Marilyn Manson, but he was obsessed at the moment with Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a double-disc set of unfinished songs. He played it incessantly. Whenever the opening chords for “The Sky Is a Landfill” wafted down from the attic, Jessica would groan, “God, why does he have to keep playing that thing over and over? It’s driving me fucking insane.”

  It was a strange album, at times soulful, bluesy, psychedelic, and incoherent, filled with weird, discordant riffs, Buckley’s falsetto spooky and haunting, all the more so knowing he had died after recording the demos. Joshua was convinced that Buckley had committed suicide.

  “It was an accident,” I told him.

  “He goes for a dip wearing jeans and Doc Martens?”

  The story was that Buckley, frustrated with the production of his second album in New York, had fled to Memphis and cloistered himself in a cabin with just a mattress, a four-track, and his guitars. He had quit drinking and smoking and was working nonstop. He had just completed writing all the songs for My Sweetheart the Drunk when, enigmatically, he took an evening swim in the Wolf River Harbor, fully clothed. He was last seen floating away on his back, singing Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” at the top of his lungs. The official cause of death was listed as an accidental drowning, the theory being that he had been pulled into the Mississippi by an undertow created by a passing tugboat. Joshua didn’t buy it.

  “He’d finished the album. That’s what he’d set out to accomplish, and he was done. He didn’t have any more reason to live. Writing the songs, not releasing them, was his raison d’être.”

  When we were at Mac, Joshua had once taken us to the Washington Avenue Bridge, from which John Berryman had jumped. Jessica had asked why he’d done it, and Joshua had said, “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” I had thought Joshua was making a general declaration about existence, but it was a line from Berryman’s book Dream Songs. “Who knows why he did it,” he told us. “Most people inclined to kill themselves don’t out of cowardice. That’s why William Carlos Williams said the perfect man of action is the suicide.”

  That summer on Walker Street, Joshua’s other obsession was with Haruki Murakami. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle had just come out in paperback. Previously he hadn’t been much of a fan of Murakami’s—too lightweight and gimmicky, too many pop culture references and cyberpunk sleights of hand—but this novel was a monumental breakthrough, he believed, right up there with Blood Meridian and The Remains of the Day. (Joshua had photos of McCarthy and Ishiguro on his bulletin board, along with Kafka, Jim Morrison, and Thích Quang Đuc, the Buddhist monk who had been famously photographed in the moment of self-immolation on the streets of Saigon, reportedly not moving a muscle or making a sound as he charred and shriveled.)

  Joshua had heard Murakami was living in Cambridge, somewhere between Central and Inman Squares, while filling a titular post as a writer-in-residence at Tufts, and Joshua spent several days crisscrossing the neighborhood, trying to find the pumpkin-colored house that Murakami was reportedly renting. He read interviews in which Murakami said he rose at five a.m. and wrote for six hours and then went running, read for a bit, li
stened to some jazz, and was in bed by ten p.m. He kept to this routine without variation, Murakami said, because the repetition induced a deeper state of mind, a form of mesmerism.

  So Joshua, formerly a sedentary, inveterate night owl, decided to change his schedule and start running himself, and he enlisted me to train him. I had continued running after Mac, doing the loop nearly every day on the Esplanade between the Museum of Science and the Mass Ave bridge when I’d lived on Marlborough Street.

  We bought shoes for Joshua at Marathon Sports. He had in mind two things: first, to emulate Murakami’s work ethic, helping him wrap up a draft of his novel, and second, to possibly spot Murakami along the Charles River, his preferred route, and befriend him, perhaps become running buddies with him, do the Boston Marathon together.

  I thought I’d start Joshua off with an easy jog down JFK Street to the Eliot Bridge, but Joshua—a chain-smoker since high school—was sweating and hyperventilating after a mere quarter mile.

  “You’re going to have to quit smoking,” I told him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, bent over, hands on his knees.

  “And eat better.” At the moment the only meal he was making for himself was a fried egg and bologna sandwich on Wonder bread, slathered with mayonnaise and splotched with soy sauce. He considered himself a gourmand, yet could subsist on the worst junk imaginable.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

  Maybe his dietary habits never improved much, but in time he did become a diligent runner. It was always he who would drag me out on cold or rainy weekends. He would never miss a day. It was one of the few things that gave him peace, he would tell me.

  He never ended up meeting Murakami. We would soon learn that he had left Cambridge three years earlier, in 1995, compelled to return to Japan after the earthquake in Kobe and the sarin-gas attack in Tokyo. Yet before we knew that, Joshua would look ahead expectantly as he puffed along the Charles, and whenever he saw a middle-aged Asian man approaching us, Joshua would say, “Is that him?” It became a private joke between us. In the years to follow, anytime we saw an Asian man with a broad forehead, sunken cheeks, and short bangs, one of us would say, “Is that him?”