The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  She would say that she was on the run, could she call me back, then wouldn’t. She would make plans to get together with me, then renege.

  “You’ve been canceling on me a lot,” I’d say.

  “It’s been a rough week,” she’d say.

  I knew full well what was going on, but I wanted it not to be true. She had gotten back together with David, or she had met someone new altogether. Someone older, with money, in AA. Someone who could relate to her in ways that I never could. A father figure.

  I thought about her every moment of the day—wondering what she was doing, imagining her going on dates with anonymous men, having impersonal, degrading sex with them. I was in torment, yet I had such pity for her, for her horrible childhood, for being so sad. I wanted to continue seeing her somehow. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that I cared about her, that no matter what, we’d find a way to remain friends. I called to tell her all of this. She wasn’t home. She didn’t return my message.

  In the morning, when she picked up the phone at her office, she was laughing, in the midst of a conversation with a coworker. She never laughed like that with me anymore. “Can I call you back?” she asked me.

  “Will you promise to call tonight?”

  “I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be up late.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She never called.

  Three nights later, we met for dinner at Pho Pasteur. She was uneasy, nervous. At last, she said, “I have something to tell you. Something big.”

  “I know already,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “You’re seeing someone else.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been afraid to tell you.”

  “Who is he? Where’d you meet him?”

  “At the office. He was a temp there.”

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “A couple of weeks,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you as a friend.”

  “So you tortured me instead.”

  “I should have told you. It’s stupid I didn’t.”

  “The worst part,” I said, “is that you deceived me. You lied to me that you were busy or tired when really you were going off to see him. You only called me when you needed me for something.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m disgusted with myself,” Mirielle said. “I thought of killing myself last night.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t make this into another excuse to feel sorry for yourself.”

  She took a folded check out of her purse. It was for the money I had lent her to buy her plane ticket to Tortola.

  The waiter brought us the bill, and Mirielle and I split it down the middle—the first time I had ever let her pay for her share of a meal.

  “Do you think we could stay friends?” she asked. “I’d like to.”

  “Is he white?”

  “What?”

  “Your new boyfriend.”

  She nodded.

  “I knew it,” I said. “A yellow cab.”

  “What?”

  “All the crap about not wanting to jump into another relationship, how difficult it is for you to get close to people—it was all bullshit. It wasn’t that at all. It’s just that you didn’t want to be in a relationship with me.”

  “Can’t you be my friend?”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  She wouldn’t look at me, stared down at the caddy of sriracha and hoisin sauce on the table.

  “I never thought you were capable of something like this,” I said. “I thought I knew you, but I guess I don’t. You’re a stranger to me,” I told her. “You’re a bad person, Mirielle.”

  Joshua was home, sitting in the dining room, eating sandwiches of pan-fried hot dogs, cheese, sauerkraut, and barbecue sauce on raisin bread, paired with a bottle of dolcetto.

  “What the hell was I thinking the entire time?” I asked him. “What did I expect? I was a fucking fool. I was pathetic. How could I have been so blind, so fucking weak?”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I’m sick of being such a fucking pussy. I’m pathetic.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “How come you never fall in love, huh, Joshua? What are you? Totally heartless? Do you ever feel anything? Is there nothing inside?”

  He stood up from the dining table. “Let it out, Eric. You want to hit me? Go ahead, hit me.”

  I sagged and began to mewl, and Joshua embraced me. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “This will pass. Everything passes eventually.”

  “The fucking thing is,” I said, “all I can think about right now is Mirielle, what she must be going through. I’m worried she might jump off a bridge. She must be so depressed tonight.”

  I waited months to deposit Mirielle’s check. When I did, it was returned, the account closed, and the bank charged me a fee for the voided transaction.

  14

  Suddenly Palaver was flush with money. In the fall, Paviromo had had me spend weeks on an application for a new program sponsored by the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund (coming full circle with Mac’s major donor), and in February, we were miraculously bestowed a grant for $100,000, almost double our entire annual operating budget. I got a bump in salary. We bought new computers, and I was able to appoint a part-time office manager to assist me, Sandra Tran, a graphic designer in the 3AC who had previously worked at Granta. (Despite her qualifications, Paviromo was initially wary of hiring her, no doubt thinking that having one Asian in the office was good for the diversity checklist, but having two might be an Asian invasion.)

  The two-year program was for audience development, or, in plainer terms, marketing, and involved fifteen magazines. It was an experiment of sorts. The Lila Wallace foundation wanted to see if literary journals, given the resources and the know-how, could actually find readers. They hired a group of professional magazine consultants to educate us at a series of seminars. Yet at the first panel session in San Francisco, it became clear that the consultants might need some educating themselves.

  “Why do you print in this format and not in standard trim size?” one of them, Lester Dillenbeck, asked. He picked up a trade paperback journal from the stack on the table and thumbed through it. “There’s just so much text.”

  The program allowed two people from each magazine to attend the seminars, and Paviromo accompanied me to the first one, but only the first, too exasperated with these “philistines” and “charlatans” and “apparatchiks” to return. “Do you recall James Carville’s famous slogan during the ’92 campaign, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’?” he said to the consultants. “Well, in our field of endeavor, quaint and stuffy and bizarre as it may seem to you, it’s what we print that is paramount, indeed sacrosanct”—and here he paused and stared directly at Dillenbeck—“stupid.”

  Paviromo liked the money we were receiving and the possibility that Palaver might gain a wider audience, but he didn’t really want to change anything or do any work himself, and he couldn’t have cared less about the nuts and bolts of the program. He left all the details to me.

  I threw myself into the project. I began to learn the lingua franca of marketing, which was strangely fetishized, creeping into the realm of BDSM, with terms like bind-ins and blow-ins, branding and penetration. I was assigned two consultants, Dillenbeck and another fellow named Ryan Hickel, and they came up with a plan. They decided that the Fiction Discoveries issue was an ideal marketing opportunity. They wanted me to embark on a subscription acquisition campaign—more commonly known as direct mail—and coincide the drop date with the issue’s publication in June.

  My period of leisure was over. My novella would have to wait. I taught myself how to do projections and budgets on spreadsheets, segment lists on a relational database, and put together RFPs and consolidate bids. I was busier than I had ever
been in my life, in the shithole until late every night, working on weekends as well, but, still hurting over Mirielle, I was grateful for the distraction, and I was even, to my surprise and embarrassment, sort of enjoying myself. I was learning things, getting things done. The work was tangible. You set goals, deadlines, and there was an end result. I realized I had an aptitude for number-crunching and strategic planning, and, for the first time, I felt like a grown-up.

  At Filene’s Basement, I bought a blue blazer, khaki trousers, wingtips, and a couple of button-downs and ties, in addition to a rollerboard. I took the US Airways shuttle to D.C. for the next seminar, spending three nights at the Marriott, not far from the Capitol, where the Senate was wrapping up Clinton’s impeachment hearing. When I got back to Cambridge, Joshua took a gander at me in my outfit, wheeling my rollerboard behind me, and said, “Dude, what is happening to you? What are you turning into?”

  Since I was working much of the time, Joshua had been hanging out with Jimmy Fung, whose business at Pink Whistle had flourished for a while, largely due to the 3AC’s extended network. The thing about Jimmy was that he knew Asian hair, which was different from Caucasian hair—thicker, heavier, coarser, harder to cut, more prone to cowlicks. Moreover, like Asian faces, the backs of Asian heads were broader and flatter, and needed extra volume. When Asian hair was cropped ineptly, every mistake was magnified. After childhoods of mothers giving us bobs and bowl haircuts with square bangs (the China doll, the Caesar, the Cleopatra, the Stooge), after being butchered at salons with white hairdressers, it was a relief for Asians to find someone like Jimmy, who used texturizing scissors and razors to chop off some of the bulk before styling, then could layer and shape and soften the hair so it was feathery and light, so it fit the face and skull, so it had some brio and élan. “You have to conceive it like art,” he would say. “It’s like doing sculpture.”

  Jimmy was, actually, very good at what he did. Clients came in, asking him to replicate the styles of Asian pop and movie stars, and he could readily turn them into Faye Wong (Chungking Express), Norika Fujiwara (CanCam model), or Chow Yun-Fat (the coolest actor in the world). I myself got my hair cut by Jimmy at Pink Whistle, partial to the Yun-Fat.

  For several months, the place was hopping. Jimmy renovated Pink Whistle, making the interior slick and flashy, with several TVs continuously playing music videos, Cantopop blaring all day long. He hired another stylist, a colorist, and a manicurist. But then things took a downturn. Clients failed to return, and new ones weren’t materializing. He had to fire all his help and now worked alone again. The problem was, Jimmy Fung—ever the hustler—was also a lecher. He kept hitting on his female clients, as well as his staff.

  “He’s an inveterate sleazebag, isn’t he?” I said to Joshua.

  Joshua, who had been acting as Jimmy’s pro tempore advisor, said, “He’s not so bad.”

  Only guys continued going to Pink Whistle, lured in by the increasingly salacious videos, but men’s haircuts weren’t nearly as profitable as perms, body waves, color treatments, and highlights. Jimmy was in trouble. He had overextended himself with the renovations, for which, Joshua told me, he had borrowed money from a less than savory source. Jimmy was trying to think of what else he could do to bring in more income.

  I went into Pink Whistle for a trim one day, and noticed a change. There was a girl in the salon—a very young Asian girl, possibly only sixteen or so. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and tight capri pants, and she was feather-dusting the bottles on the shelves.

  “Is Jimmy here?” I asked. “I have an appointment for a haircut.”

  She was pretty, although her appeal might have been that she was so young, and therefore illicit. Normally I would have censured this kind of pedophiliac impulse, the mere thought of it, but she was staring at me in an openly provocative way, eyes unwavering. They were dead eyes, though—disdainful, sullen.

  “Jimmy come back fifteen minute,” the girl said, her voice nasal and grating. “You want shampoo?”

  “I’ll just come back later.”

  “I give you shampoo!” she shouted shrilly.

  I sat down in the chair. She wrapped a vinyl cape around my neck, attaching the Velcro much too tightly, yet I was too cowed to complain. I leaned my head back into the basin, nestling my neck into the curved cradle, and she sprayed water (much too hot, but again I kept quiet) onto my hair, then lathered it up, leaning over me, her arms squeezing her breasts—not large, but perfectly contoured—together so they distended and contracted inches from my face. She was rough, raking her fingers against my scalp, yanking on my hair. I doubted she had had any professional training as a shampooist at all.

  “You want massage?” she asked me as she rinsed. “I give you massage.”

  I thought she meant a scalp treatment, one that would undoubtedly require paying for an expensive oil or conditioner. “No, thanks, that’s all right,” I said.

  “I give you massage!”

  “No! Thank you, but no.”

  “Why no massage? You gay? You like boy?”

  Then I began to comprehend what was going on. Sitting in the stylist chair while I waited for Jimmy, I looked up at the mirror and saw a new sign Scotch-taped to the top corner: Pink Whistle special massages now available. Many varieties. Fifteen minutes, half hour, full hour.

  By the time Jimmy returned, my hair was already dry. The girl had sat in the room with me for a while, slapping aside pages in a magazine, occasionally glaring at me, then had disappeared into Pink Whistle’s antiques store/art gallery section.

  “Hey, man, sorry about that,” Jimmy said, spritzing water onto my hair. “I was sitting in the Dolphin, getting lunch, and I was having a coffee, thinking, Man, the day’s going so slowly. Then I realized my watch had stopped. Believe that? It’s a fucking Rolex. Okay, it’s a knockoff Rolex, but a good one. It’s lasted me years.”

  “You got it in Hong Kong?”

  “What? No. New York, mate. Canal Street.”

  He clipped away at my hair, tousling strands and switching between the scissors, shears, and razor. “The girl washed your hair?” he asked. “Yeah, course she did. Don’t expect you did it yourself.” He had on a vintage paisley shirt, unbuttoned nearly to his navel, dzi beads dangling from his neck. He was the only one among our group who had gotten a 3AC tattoo, on his upper left arm, just like Joshua’s. “What’d you think of her?”

  “She’s Chinese?” I asked.

  “Thai.”

  That figured. “I don’t know, seems competent enough.”

  He snipped and whittled. “You’re not going out with anyone right now, are you?” he asked near the end of the haircut. “You and Mirielle broke up, right?”

  “Almost a month ago.”

  “You haven’t hooked up with anyone else?”

  “No,” I said. Then I added, ridiculously, maybe out of machismo, “Been too busy.”

  “Understandable, understandable. What do you do again? A science magazine, is it?”

  “Literary journal.”

  “Right, right. As I was saying, a lot of guys I know are in the same position, too jammed to even breathe these days. Can’t stop to take a goddamn break and relax for one minute, am I right?”

  “I guess so.”

  He flipped a can of mousse up into the air and deftly caught it nozzle-down, oozed out a dollop onto his comb, and threaded it through my hair. “So I bet a soothing massage would be just the ticket, right? I’m trying to build word of mouth, you know, so how about I give you a massage on the house?”

  “I don’t really need a massage.”

  “No? You sure? You seem tense, mate. Think about it. On the house. I converted the old office in back for privacy. I’m telling you, the girl’s got some talent, mate.”

  In his attic room, Joshua plunked on a geomungo, a six-stringed zither usually reserved for Korean folk songs, that he had been teaching himself how to play. He was trying to accompany Hendrix’s “Little Wing” with the inst
rument—not very successfully.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” I said to him.

  “What? What’d I do now?”

  “The ‘massages’ at Pink Whistle.”

  “I don’t want to take all the credit, but I might’ve mentioned to Jimmy that they could be a boon to his business.” He was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a traditional Korean gat, a black, wide-brimmed, cylindrical hat made of horsehair. “What, you didn’t like the girl?”

  “You guys think this is a lark, a game,” I said, “but it could land Jimmy in jail. You, too, if you’re getting a cut of the action.”

  Joshua put Hendrix on pause. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I looked at the piles of books on the floor, the strewn clothes and CDs, the pig piñata dangling from the ceiling and the collection of swine postcards on the bulletin board. “You and your fucking prostitutes.”

  “You think she’s a prostitute?”

  “Obviously she is.”

  “Is it because she’s Thai or because she’s a masseuse that makes you assume that?” he asked. “Because they’re equally dim-witted, loathsome stereotypes.”

  “Come on, you’re actually going to deny it?”

  “She’s a licensed massage therapist. She’s a health professional. Just because she’s a masseuse and/or from Thailand does not make her a sex worker.”

  “Is she in the country legally?”

  “She must be if she got licensed.”

  “How old is she?” I said. “She can’t be more than sixteen.”

  “Nineteen. She’s nineteen.”

  “That’s been verified?”

  “What are you asking me for? I don’t have a stake in this. But yeah, Jimmy says he checked it out.”

  “Like he’s such a trustworthy source.”