The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  “I’ve known you for ten years, Jessica.” I looked at the small mole on the side of her neck, and I thought of when she’d told me that, as a child, she used to rub the mole over and over, trying to expunge it.

  “We’ve been friends,” she said, “but we’ve become different people. Or at least I have. Really what’s kept your glorification of me alive is the idea of conquest, but you don’t actually want to achieve it. You’re in it for the longing and the yearning. The culmination of it, having a relationship with me, wouldn’t really interest you. So let’s just get this over with, once and for all.”

  “Okay,” I said, expecting she would now make me promise to cease and desist.

  “Let’s just fuck,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s just do it once and get it over with.”

  “Are you insane?” I said. “Just like that?”

  “Why not? Do you need more foreplay? More courting and romancing?” She slid her fingers down the lapels of her robe, unveiling the inner halves of her breasts, her stomach, the mound above her pubic bone. “From what I’ve seen, men don’t need a lot of foreplay. We’ll just have sex this one time and satisfy your curiosity, and then maybe we’ll be able to move on. It won’t mean anything.”

  This was a cruel trick, I thought. She was taunting me. “This is crazy.”

  “I’ll admit, there have been times I’ve been curious myself. This will be good for us. We’ll feel stupid afterwards, and it’ll be awkward for a while, but then we’ll be fine. I don’t suppose it’d do any good to say we shouldn’t tell Joshua.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Stop?”

  “Can you cover yourself up? I can’t talk to you this way.”

  She tied her robe together. “You’re going to deny me now,” she said, “after all those years of hangdogging? You’re going to pass up free pussy? There are no strings here, Charlie.”

  “But don’t you see?” I said. “I want there to be strings. I want this to mean something. Jessica, I’ve been in love with you from the moment I saw you.”

  “Okay, this was a terrible idea,” she said. “Idiotic.”

  “You’ve been curious at times. Haven’t you ever felt more than that for me?”

  “I’ve always seen you as a friend.”

  “You just said we’re not even that, really.”

  She scooted to the edge of the futon and put her feet on the floor and stared at them. She needed to cut her toenails. “I’m sorry, Eric,” she said. “I don’t feel anything for you. Not in the way you want.”

  “Why can’t we try and see? Maybe it could work out between us.”

  “I really don’t think it could.”

  I went to my room. The next day, we felt stupid, and it was awkward, and it didn’t seem at all like things would ever be fine between us. Even Joshua noticed it. At the kitchen counter, he watched us avoiding each other, then asked me, “What’s up with you two?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you finally crack the walnut, pogo her pachinko?”

  “No. We had an argument.”

  “About what?”

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “She said you’re a user,” I told him. “She said you’ll take advantage of anyone or anything if the opportunity presents itself. She said you don’t give a fuck about anyone except yourself.”

  “Huh,” Joshua said. “That’s hurtful. Probably all true, but hurtful nonetheless. She really said all that?”

  “Yes,” I told him, and then regretted it.

  I was full of regrets. I should have taken Jessica up on her provocative if misguided offer, because, regardless of what she’d said, if she had been attracted to me enough in that one spontaneous moment to fuck me, her feelings were malleable, and had the potential to become larger and more substantive, given time and familiarity. This is not to say I thought my powers of lovemaking would have made her swoon, but I believed that if we had gone ahead, it would have been more than a flyby. I think eventually I would have won her over. Why had I turned her down? What kind of a limp-dick wusswank was I? I wanted to say it had all been a mistake. I wanted to tell Jessica that I had changed my mind.

  Cautiously, I worked to get back in her good graces, trying to act as relaxed and nonchalant as I could around her, trying to make her trust me again. As she was coming down the stairs and I was going up a few days later, I said, “Listen, we’re all right, aren’t we?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I am if you are.”

  “Let’s forget about it, then, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  My plan was rather pedestrian. I was hoping to go out with Jessica one night, get her a little tipsy, and, once home, trundle up to the second floor with her, and into her bedroom. My chance came at the end of the week, when Jessica invited Joshua and me to tag along with her to an opening in the South End, a special group exhibition featuring Asian American artists called Transmigrations. “I think you guys should come,” she said. “It’s an important show.”

  Joshua, normally so opposed to going across the river, offered to drive us in his parents’ old car, a blue Peugeot 306. The show was at Mills Gallery in the Boston Center for the Arts, and by the time we found a spot to park on the street, it was in full swing, filled with more Asian Americans than I had ever seen in one room in Boston. And these were no ordinary Asians. They were young, hip, good-looking, fashionable.

  “Can you believe this?” I said to Joshua.

  “Where the hell have all these people been hiding?”

  The art was a mishmash. There was a pair of videos projected onto a wall, side by side, the one on the right showing white people on a city sidewalk sampling a slice of honeydew melon, the one of the left showing, in synchronicity, the same white people eating a piece of bitter melon—an Asian staple. On the right, the faces expressed pleasure. On the left, they winced, they scrunched, they gagged, they spit the melon out onto a napkin.

  There were steel boxes stacked on the floor that resembled the balconies of an apartment building, with miniature pieces of laundry hanging from lines. There were two wigs on Styrofoam stands of faceless heads with elongated necks. One wig was blond, the hair gathered in a tight bun, secured by lacquered chopsticks. The other wig was Oriental black, the hair in the same tight bun, but secured this time by a sterling silver fork and knife set from Tiffany’s.

  There was a series of large-format color portraits of Asian women in various nail salons, all from the vantage point of the photographer getting a pedicure from them (I saw Jessica lingering in front of the photos, no doubt thinking about the years her mother had had to work as a manicurist in Flushing). There was another set of portraits, this one of human skulls, evoking the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. The skulls were embedded in a white wall of the gallery itself. The artist had cut out pieces of the drywall with a keyhole saw, distressed the edges, then reinserted them with glue so they protruded out toward the viewer. It seemed the wall was bulging and cracking with rows and rows of hollow socketed bone, made even eerier by the holes for the eyes, noses, and mouths exposing the dark recesses behind the wall, punctuated in places by splintered studs of wood.

  In the middle of the gallery was a performance piece. Two men, dressed as peasant farmers with coolie hats and their pants rolled up, stood in a shallow twenty-by-fifteen-foot pool of mud and water, planting rice seedlings. They worked methodically, staying bent over for the duration of the opening. Every so often, a woman in silk pajamas and sandals, carrying a bamboo yoke over her shoulder with two baskets, came out and replenished the men’s supply of seedlings. All three were silent, solemn. A sign said the audience was welcome to participate—a tub of clean water, a stack of neatly folded towels, and a stool awaited the intrepid—but no one dared.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the performance piece, and none of the art, excluding the skulls, had the visceral brilliance of Jessica’s paintings, but for me the sh
ow still radiated an invigorating buzz—just the idea of it, the esprit de corps.

  Jessica knew some people there—a couple of classmates from RISD and a Chinese American woman named Esther Xing who had been a fellow with her at the Fine Arts Work Center. “Esther’s a fiction writer,” Jessica said as she introduced us, then left to corral someone else across the gallery.

  “I think I read a story of yours in Bamboo Ridge,” Esther told Joshua.

  “Yeah?”

  “I thought it was groovy,” she said.

  He chuckled, bemused by the turn of phrase, but was pleased. “That was an excerpt from my novel, Upon the Shore.”

  “Have you finished it?”

  “Almost. What are you working on?”

  “A collection.”

  “Eric is, too.”

  “Oh, yeah? How’s it coming?”

  “Good,” I said. “Pretty good.”

  “Have you had stories from it published anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “You were in that venerable Minnesotan journal, Chanter,” Joshua said.

  I couldn’t decide whether he was trying to be facetious or helpful. “I don’t send my stuff out much,” I told her. “What about you?”

  “I had a thingie in Salamander and a few other small places.”

  Instinctively, I did not like Esther Xing. I wasn’t certain why. She hadn’t uttered a single unpleasantry, yet she came off as snooty and disagreeable. It might have been that I had yet to see her smile or do anything other than glower. Moreover, I found her ugly. She was short, and, though not overweight, her body was shapeless and disproportioned, her arms and legs too stubby for her torso, her head seemingly enormous. She had a choppy pageboy and no makeup, her features bland and flat. She wore a quirky outfit that was not at all becoming—a black halter dress over another dress, a gray sweater jumper, and white leggings and black platform boots.

  After the show, we had been planning to have dinner together, but Joshua started chatting up Tina Nguyen, the Vietnamese American artist who had done the skulls, and Jimmy Fung, the Australian/Hong Kong transplant who had assembled the wigs, and Joshua told me, “Hey, I’m thinking of going with this crew to the Franklin Café. Want to join?”

  “You go on ahead,” I said. “Jessica and I want to go to the DeLux.”

  The DeLux was a tiny neighborhood restaurant on the corner of Chandler and Clarendon, with maybe just ten tables and a small bar, but it had a kitschy, retro-cool vibe—dimly lit and smoky, the music running from Louis Armstrong and Sinatra to Astrud Gilberto and Petula Clark. The food was exceptional yet cheap, no entrée over ten dollars. While everything else in the South End had become chic-gentrified, the DeLux had remained a hole in the wall—my favorite hangout when I’d lived in the Back Bay. After hearing me talk it up, Jessica had been eager to try the place. And now, with Joshua gone, it would almost be as if we were on a date.

  She invited Esther Xing.

  “Does she have to come?” I asked.

  “You don’t like her?”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “You just need to get to know her,” Jessica said. “She comes off as dippy at first, but she’s actually whip-sharp—like, Joshua-sharp. You should ask to see one of her stories. She’s really good. I think you’d be surprised.”

  The DeLux was jammed. We squeezed to the end of the narrow room, left our name with the lone waitress for a table, and then waited near the little Christmas tree that twinkled on top of the bar (a year-round decoration).

  “This is cool!” Jessica yelled to Esther. They gazed around at the Elvis shrine and the collage of posters, postcards, and record album covers stapled to the pine-paneled walls. The crowd was boisterous, a mix of local artists, yuppies, and bike messengers. Brenda Lee was blasting from the stereo. “I love this place!” Jessica said to Esther.

  I bought a round of Schlitz tallboys, as well as shots of Bushmills Black label, for the three of us. I was aggravated. I should have been the one receiving credit for introducing Jessica to the DeLux, not Esther, who heretofore had never set foot in the bar.

  We were seated at a table, a two-top with an extra chair, and the waitress eventually returned to collect our orders: the salmon potato cakes and a bowl of chili for me, the grilled cheese with arugula pesto and sweet date spread for Jessica.

  Esther was torn between the quesadillas with black beans and the vegetable pie made with puff pastry. “They both sound so yummy. I just can’t decide,” she said. “This is too much responsibility.” Defeated, she leaned her head on Jessica’s shoulder.

  “How about the quesadillas?” Jessica said.

  “Perfect,” the waitress said, turning to walk away.

  “Wait!” Esther said. “I think—oh, maybe the vegetable pie might be better?”

  As we drank and chitchatted, Esther divulged that, after spending the summer in Italy, she had just arrived in Cambridge for a Bunting fellowship—a very prestigious yearlong appointment at Radcliffe College that came with a hefty stipend, an office at the Bunting Institute, and a cut-rate apartment on Brattle Street.

  “I thought you needed to publish a book to get a Bunting,” I said.

  “You do, usually,” she said, “although you need just three stories in magazines to apply.”

  “Did you know someone?” I asked, and Jessica knocked her knee against mine under the table.

  The girls talked about the show, concurring that Tina Nguyen’s wall cuts of the skulls and Annie Yoshikawa’s pedicure photographs had been the best of the lot. But Esther had qualms about the fundamental premise with which the exhibition had been organized.

  “What’s Transmigrations supposed to mean, anyway?” she asked, abruptly shifting into highbrow mode. “Okay, it’s a play on transoceanic and immigration, I get it. But that’s precisely what I object to. None of those artists are immigrants, yet in order to have a show with Asian Americans, there always has to be a rubric, a theme about crossing borders or bridging the diaspora or whatnot, even if it has nothing to do with the works or the artists themselves. It might as well have been called We’re All Oriental Fuckers.”

  It sounded exactly like something Joshua would posit. I agreed with the overall sentiment, but didn’t want to say that I did. “I happen to have liked the show,” I told her. “It felt good, seeing so many Asian American artists in one place.”

  “The camaraderie’s great, I agree, but it was such a hodgepodge of stuff, a free-for-all. Like Annie Yoshikawa, I’d love for her to be included someday in a show with Rineke Dijkstra and Sharon Lockhart—okay, maybe that’s a stretch, she’s got a long way to go before she reaches that level, but you know what I mean—included not because she’s Japanese American, but because she’s an interesting photographer, period.”

  I didn’t know who Rineke Dijkstra and Sharon Lockhart were.

  “What do you think of all of this?” she asked Jessica. “You’re not saying anything.”

  “I don’t have an opinion, because a part of me agrees with both of you.”

  I had lost the thread myself. It was one of those pointless arguments you enter without any strong formulations, but then, by dint of the opening parry, find yourself heatedly defending a position in which you don’t really believe, yet from which you can no longer withdraw. “Where’d you go to school?” I asked. “Did you get an MFA somewhere?”

  “Yeah, Cornell,” Esther said. “You went to Walden College, right? How was it? I’ve heard some bad things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve heard it called a trust-fund MFA. They’ll let anyone in if you have the money.”

  This was basically true, but still, it was an appallingly rude thing to say.

  “Eric just got promoted to managing editor of Palaver,” Jessica said.

  “Ah, Palaver,” Esther said. “Evan Paviromo’s written me a few notes about my stories. What’s his deal? He seems kind of full of himself.”

  “He’s a terrific editor. He wa
s great as a teacher, too,” I lied.

  “But Palaver is, like, so old school, you know. It’s kind of become stale and moribund, don’t you think?”

  Would this woman stop at nothing? Never mind that her assessment had some validity.

  “Although I will say,” Esther then told me, “if I had to be absolutely honest, that I’d kill to be in it,” and finally she smiled, exposing a mouthful of bucked teeth. “Do you have much to do with the editorial process?”

  At last I could claim a measure of superiority. Esther Xing was as susceptible as any young writer to sycophancy. “Some,” I said, lying for the second time in succession. She waited. I knew she was hoping I’d ask to read one of her stories. I let her wait. I went to the men’s room to take a leak.

  When I returned to the table, our food had arrived, each dinner plate different, like the flatware that did not match. Esther tasted her risotto (she had nixed the vegetable pie after the order had gone to the kitchen), and her face wilted.

  “What’s wrong now?” Jessica asked.

  “Miss? Miss?” Esther said to the waitress. “I don’t want to come off as a pest, I know you hate me already, but could you ask the kitchen to reheat this a little?”

  “I don’t know this person,” I told the waitress.

  We managed to get through the rest of the meal without incident, although the girls talked interminably about people they had known at the Fine Arts Work Center, shutting me out. As Esther left for the women’s bathroom, Jessica picked up Esther’s pack of American Spirits.

  “You don’t smoke,” I said.

  “I do once in a while now.”

  “Since when?”

  “There wasn’t much to do in Ptown. Yoga saved me from complete dissolution.”

  “Your friend’s a piece of work,” I said.

  “Sometimes she doesn’t think before she speaks—a lot like someone else we know. I wish you two would get along. We’ve become really close.”

  I didn’t gather how close until dessert. Jessica and Esther ordered a chocolate-chip pound cake to share, and, forking bites, they burbled and purred about its scrumptiousness. At one point, Jessica had a smidge of whipped cream on the corner of her mouth, and Esther delicately scooped the cream up with her index finger and deposited it into her own mouth. Smiling moronically, they stared at each other—finger still hooked between Esther’s lips—and held the pose for a second too long, in which all was revealed. I didn’t know how I had missed it, Esther always hovering close to Jessica, touching her arm and back, sitting so their bodies adjoined. They were lovers—former, current, soon to be, or all three.