The Collective

13

On the first Sunday of January, the 3AC resumed its potlucks (I had to explain the scrapes on my face to everyone, and Joshua said, “You should have seen him lay out the fuckwad. It was beautiful”), and two evenings later, the Tuesday Nighters convened for the first time. With Joshua declining to participate, I was the de facto leader of the writers’ group, and I set down the ground rules.

I wouldn’t endure any of the pussyfooting that Peter Anderegg had mandated at Mac. I wanted people to be forthright, speak to the authors directly, address them by name and “you,” and have the authors respond to the critiques at will — peremptorily and contentiously, if warranted. But there were only five of us in the group: Grace Kwok, the immigration attorney; Rick Wakamatsu, who sold windsurfing gear at Can-Am, near the Galleria; Ali Ong, a sous chef at the Green Street Grill; me; and, unavoidably, Esther Xing.

It was too small and unschooled of a group for candor or asperity. Grace, Rick, and Ali did not have MFAs. They had never taken a fiction workshop other than a couple of weekend classes at the Grub Street writing center in Boston. They were complete neophytes, and they were good-humored and ebullient about it. They wrote terrible, cloddish stories, and they loved everything that was presented. They wanted the writers’ group to be supportive and fun, not confrontational — an exercise in boosterism for dabblers and tenderfoots. They were too busy to read the manuscripts ahead of time, preferring to listen to them in toto the night of the meetings, and they didn’t care for the formality of penning commentary or marginalia. It was all impromptu, the pronouncements slapdash and facile. They had nary a criticism for the opening to my novella. The sessions in the living room were bush league, amateur hour. The writers’ group was a waste of my time, without utility or challenge. Until the third Tuesday night, when Esther Xing read her story to us.

“Say What You Will” was about two women, Leona Hood and Caroline Bates, who lived in the former quarry town of Severn Springs, Vermont, in 1954. Leona ran a spa-turned-inn-turned-boardinghouse with her husband. Caroline was the assistant town clerk and a spotter for the civilian Ground Observer Corps, assigned to scan the skies and alert the Air Force to any irregular or unscheduled aircraft. Leona and Caroline were lovers, had been for many years, but in 1950s small-town Vermont, they both knew that such a relationship could never be made public. The story was a subtle portrait of their everyday routines, without sentimentality or opera, culminating in a single touch, or nearly a touch, Leona furtively brushing her fingertips across the sleeve of Caroline’s blouse as they said good night after a town meeting.

“I’m totally blown away,” Ali said.

“You know, I feel honored to have read this,” Rick said.

“It’s really, really beautiful,” Grace said.

It was. It pained me to acknowledge, but it was. The story was haunting, the prose crisp: “She caught a wink of light in the sky, at once bright and flimsy. There was no contrail, nor any sound, none of the typical buzz or hum. She didn’t think it was a spy plane or a drone, yet it had form, movement, and she had a sense that it had come from a place unfathomably far away. She found something comforting in its unexpected appearance and in the fact that she could neither explain nor identify it.”

Esther Xing was a better writer than I was, perhaps rivaling Joshua in the quality of her work. There was a patient assurance in the story, an honesty of emotion, that I had never come close to producing. Sitting there, listening to Ali, Rick, and Grace fawn over her, I knew, no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good as Esther, and the knowledge galled me. There was, however, a conspicuous omission in the story, one that was instantly recognizable to me, toward which I could channel my envy.

“I guess I’ll have to be the lone dissenter here,” I said.

“Oh, no!” Esther said, clamping her hands to her fat cheeks in mock horror. She smiled kookily with her crooked teeth, then pouted. “You didn’t like it?”

“The story’s craft aside, I have a question for you — something more fundamental and profound.”

“Okay.”

“Why are all the characters white?”

“What?”

“Why are you writing about white people in Vermont in 1954?”

“My mom had a friend who grew up in Severn Springs. She told me about these women, and I thought it was so sad they were never able to come out, but it really, you know, touched me that they kept being lovers, till the day they died.”

“Why didn’t you make at least one character Asian?”

She laughed. “There were no Asians in Severn Springs in 1954.”

“You couldn’t have fudged it?”

“I did a lot of research on the town and period. I really wanted to get the historical details right.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Are you ashamed of being Chinese?”

“What?” She giggled. “What are you talking about?”

“I just find it very curious you’d choose to write a story like this instead of something about Asians.”

“Why should I restrict myself to writing about Asians?” Esther asked, becoming more sober. “Why can’t I write about anything I want?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“Because not doing so is denying who you are. Because it’s a form of whitewashing. Because it’s betraying your own race.”

I had to say, it was satisfying being in this position of power, assuming Joshua’s usual role for once.

“That’s ludicrous,” Esther said, then asked the others, “Don’t you think so?”

But Grace, Ali, and Rick, clearly uncomfortable with the emergent direction of the conversation, said nothing.

“Expression should be expression,” she said. “I’m interested in other things besides race, other themes. Aren’t you? Are you planning to write the same identity/racism story the rest of your life?”

“Until things change, I just might have to.”

“Come on,” she said. “Art’s not about being didactic. There’s nothing more boring or tedious than that. Art should simply be about what makes us human. Its only obligation, if anything, is to try to break the frozen sea within us.”

I knew the quote. “Kafka.”

“Look,” Esther said, “if we limit ourselves to the subject of race, it’s equivalent to self-segregation, to ghettoizing ourselves. Like, don’t you remember when you were back in college, and you’d go in the union and see all the Asians at one table, all the blacks at another table, all the Hispanics at yet another? I thought that was such a shame, these groups huddled in self-exile.”

“Whites don’t do that all the time, sit with other whites?”

“The whole victimization motif of minority narratives — they drive me crazy,” she said. “They just end up indulging in the same old tired clichés of romantic racialism that have been around since Gunga Din — characters speaking pidgin English or in that bizarre, singsong, Confucian/koan/proverb-laden Orientalese that’s supposed to pass for lyricism. I mean, if I see one more book by an Asian American with moon, silk, blossom, or tea in the title, I’m going to have to hang myself. At least give me some Asian American characters I can recognize, not just the virtuous or the persecuted, but some freaky, flawed motherfuckers like me. But really, why do we have to follow that path at all? We should be trying to de-label the identities of artists as Asian or African or whatever. We should insist on being regarded as artists, period.”

“And ignore the Asian American experience altogether?”

“What is ‘the Asian American experience’?” Esther asked. “There’s no single way all Asians think and behave and feel. This panethnic identity as Asian Americans is an unmitigated fraud. Besides, everything’s not all about race, you know. It’s more often about class. That’s much more interesting and insidious.”

“You don’t believe in anything we’re doing, then?” I said. “We’re marginalizing ourselves, and the 3AC should disband?”

“No, I like that we have a common bond, artificial as it is,” Esther said. “I just don’t want to be told that being Asian is all that I’m about, it’s all I can explore in my fiction. That’s racist, when you get down to it.”

I looked at the others in the living room. Ali and Rick were nodding, seemingly in concord with Esther’s last statement, and I knew I would not win this argument, especially since, as in the DeLux the first time I met her, a part of me was beginning to side with Esther. “Okay, then, let’s talk about what else is missing in the story,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s.”

“There’s not much,” I told her, “except, oh, I don’t know, maybe wit, and tension, and originality. Maybe one or two other things.”

She smirked at me. “You’re kind of a sexist pig, aren’t you?”

“Now you’re talking, sister.”

“You are a sexist pig,” Jessica told me the next morning in the kitchen. “Esther’s story was good. More than good. Superb. Ad-mit it.”

“I can’t. Not unless you want me to lie.” I opened the cupboard. “Did you eat all the cereal?” I asked Joshua, who winced apologetically.

“You’re being pissy and argumentative out of spite,” Jessica said. “When did you become such a dick? You used to be a nice guy.”

“It was a perfectly reasonable discussion. She has issues being Asian.”

“I thought you were more mature than this. I thought you were above such pettiness.”

“She should be kicked out of the 3AC,” Joshua said. He had come back to Cambridge after New Year’s Day and, as promised, had promptly broken up with Lily, but the BVIs had not, as he’d wished, rekindled his creative juices. He had been moping around the house all month, rarely changing out of his manga pajamas.

“Have you read her story?” Jessica asked him.

“No. Why should I?”

“It’s brilliant,” Jessica said. “If anyone deserves to be in the Fiction Discoveries issue, she does.”

“That was her whole motivation behind the writers’ group, wasn’t it?” I said. “It was just an underhanded way to get me to read her work, hoping I’d push it onto Paviromo for the issue. She was looking for a shortcut. It was so transparent to me.”

“She suggested the group before the issue was even conceived.”

“You know what I mean,” I told her. “She’s a user.”

Jessica looked at Joshua, then at me, grasping that a confidence had been broken.

“Let’s banish her,” Joshua said.

In truth, it didn’t matter all that much to me — my quarrel with Esther. At that moment, the only thing I really cared about was Mirielle, and how I might win her back.

I didn’t hear from her for almost a week after Great Camanoe, during which, despite my anger and disappointment, I missed her terribly. Finally I gave in and called, asking to see her. She granted me lunch. We met at the Harvest Restaurant in the Square, where I learned that, in the short time since our return, she had decisively moved on with her life. She had quit her job waitressing at Casablanca, found another one as a medical secretary at Mount Auburn Hospital, and would be applying to MFA programs in poetry for the fall.

“Wow,” I said, feeling defeated by the developments.

“I know!” she said.

“Where are you thinking of applying to?”

All the schools she mentioned were outside Massachusetts. “Maybe you should apply to Walden as a backup,” I told her.

“I’ve had enough of Walden,” she said. “I want a clean slate.”

We went to Wordsworth so she could buy some GRE prep books. Her grades at Walden College had been spotty, and she would need to do well on the test.

“I could help you study,” I told her.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “Would you have a problem seeing me platonically?”

“It’d be painful,” I admitted.

“This always happens. Can’t you be my friend?”

I told her that I would try. “Are you going to date other people?” I asked. “Have you?”

“No. It’s important for me to be alone right now.”

“I won’t be a nuisance to you, then,” I said. “I’m not going to call you. When you want to see me or talk, you should call.”

She ended up calling me every day, sometimes three or four times a day. Almost immediately, her newfound confidence collapsed. After her first day of work at Mount Auburn Hospital, she was barely able to mumble hello on the phone before bursting into tears. I went over to her apartment. She was slumped in her nightgown, her face swollen from crying. “It’s so demeaning being a secretary again,” she said.

Then, during a thunderstorm, she came home to find water pouring from the windowsills, the ceiling leaking in rills, ruining her bed and sheets and her clothes on the garment rack. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked.

We saw each other just as much as before the BVIs. We went to movies and poetry readings. We dropped by Toscanini’s for ice cream. We drilled through GRE practice tests. I quit drinking again and accompanied her to the occasional meeting. I made her coffee and French toast and omelettes. And we kept spending nights together in my bed, though chastely.

The denial of sex now, however, instead of pushing me further away, oddly intensified my feelings for her. I waited for Mirielle to swing around. At times, it seemed she was coming back to me, but then she would abruptly retreat.

“You never call me,” she said. “I always call you.”

I reminded her about our arrangement, about not being a pest.

“That’s silly,” she said. “We talk every day, anyway. What are you doing Saturday?”

“Seeing you,” I said.

One morning, she told me she was going to the Square to hang out, maybe see a movie. “You want company?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I think we’re spending too much time together.”

“Why’d you call me, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You sound strange.”

Later that day, she appeared at the house, depressed by the movie, throughout which the characters had drunk copious amounts of wine. She had gone to a meeting afterward at the First Parish Unitarian Church but had left early, restless.

I had been about to head out. A jazz combo, Phil Sudo and Annie Yoshikawa’s friends, was playing at the Lizard Lounge, and I was supposed to meet them there. Yet Mirielle didn’t want to go. She had not attended any of the 3AC potlucks since December, and she felt it would be awkward seeing Phil and Annie again with me.

“It’d be like we’re double-dating,” she said. “As if we’re a couple.”

“God forbid anyone would think we’re a couple.”

“We’re not a couple.”

“We’re more of a couple than most people who have sex.”

“We have a weird relationship,” she conceded.

Another night, she was limp with exhaustion — she had been on her feet all day.

“Come here,” I said. “I’ll give you a foot massage.”

“No. You’re too nice to me.”

“I know I am. Should I be meaner to you? Less nice?” I asked.

She shook her head in alarm. “That’d be disastrous.”

Several nights later, we lay in bed. We had gone to see a film at the Kendall and then had eaten pizza at Emma’s. “You’re so quiet,” she said.

“It gets to me sometimes. You know how I feel about you,” I told her. “Do you think there’s a chance things could ever become romantic between us again?”

“I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling romantic with anyone right now.”

I mulled this over in silence, dispirited.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“I can tell by your face. You hate me.”

“No, just the opposite, Mirielle.”

The next week, Planned Parenthood contacted her. Her Pap smear had come back abnormal, and they wanted to schedule her for a biopsy. “Nothing I do makes a difference,” she said. “Another job or another apartment or another city won’t change anything — I’ll still despise myself. This grad school thing is a pipe dream. And now I might have cancer.”

I escorted her to Planned Parenthood, and then, on the morning she was to get the results, I waited for her to call me. She didn’t. I left two messages for her at her office at Mount Auburn, but she didn’t return them. Late in the afternoon, frantic she might have received terrible news from the pathologist, I finally reached her.

“Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“It’s just that I’ve been on the phone practically all day,” she said. She was typing, then I overheard her talking to someone and laughing.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“No one. The new temp.”

“We can talk later,” I said.

“No, I can talk,” she said, and continued to type.

“Well,” I said.

“What?”

“If you’re busy, we can catch up later.”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up.

The following night, when she slept over, I explained how worried I’d been about her the day before. “I always go into a tailspin when you do things like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“When you don’t call me back.”

“I don’t always have to call you back,” she said.

Throughout January and into February, we worked on her applications to MFA programs. I convinced Paviromo to write her a strong letter of recommendation, despite the B-minus she had received in his British poetry class, and I also persuaded a local poet I knew, Liam Rector, to add his own endorsement of Mirielle, even though they had never met. We revised and revised her personal statement, deliberating over whether she should delve into her former addictions. Eventually, we decided she should, since her writing sample was filled with recovery poems.

She read a new one to me about the sponsor, Alice, who had died. I tried to be encouraging.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“No, I do.”

“I can tell you don’t.”

“I think it’s really powerful.”

She was dejected, but then said, “Well, I think I should be proud of myself for at least sitting down and completing a first draft.”

Joshua was more frank about the poem’s merits, or lack thereof. While we were watching the Celtics on TV, I showed him a copy of the poem. I still didn’t trust my ability to judge poetry. Maybe I’m wrong, I thought.

“This is unadulterated crap,” he told me. “Pure excreta. She actually said she’s proud of herself? You see, she comes from the school of the emotionally crippled wherein they pat themselves on the back for accomplishing what people do as a matter of course. We come from the school where only national recognition will satisfy ambition, and that’s the way it should be. What’s this chick’s appeal to you? I know she’s pretty, but why are you so in love with her? Because you can’t have her?”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then? You spend the night together, and what, nothing? No hand jobs, even? You don’t touch each other at all?”

“I give her massages sometimes.”

“You give her massages. Jesus, she’s walking all over you. You’re embarrassing yourself. What she wants is someone to support her and be a slave to her, and you happen to be available. Let’s face it, she feels nothing for you. Either she puts out, or you get the fuck out. You’re making a complete fool of yourself.”

I lit candles. We slow-danced to Johnny Hartman. I gave her a massage. She was wearing her nightgown, lying on her stomach, and I straddled her ass while I kneaded her back.

“This is all very familiar,” she said.

When I finished the massage, I lay down beside her. “Let’s make love,” I said.

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s been almost two months.”

“We’re friends.”

“Will you give me a kiss? Just one kiss?”

She pecked me on the cheek. “What’s gotten into you tonight?” she asked.

“What’s gotten into me? Look what we’re doing. How am I supposed to feel?”

She got up and pulled on her jeans underneath her nightgown. “You know what you should do?” she said. “You should go out to a bar, have a few drinks, get loose, and pick up someone who’ll fuck your brains out.”

“I don’t want to fuck anyone else. Why won’t you make love with me?”

“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have sex with you again.”

“How come?”

“The closer I get to someone, the less I feel like having sex with him — whereas I could probably let some stranger fuck me twelve ways to Sunday.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Mirielle. Why do you feel that way?”

“Because I can only have sex when it’s degrading,” she said.

“That was a mistake,” Jessica told me. “You’re not being sensitive to her at all. You should have gotten it by now. Pushing sex, even playfully, is going to upset her after her history.”

“You’re right.”

“Honor her privacy. Don’t make demands on her. Don’t try to change her or pressure her. If you’re there for her, she’ll come around eventually.”

“Joshua thinks I’ve been humiliating myself.”

“He’s just jealous. He’d love to see you guys break up so he can have you all to himself again. Can’t you be patient?”

I apologized to Mirielle the next time we saw each other, which seemed to mollify her, but something was different. All of a sudden she was mysteriously busy on weekends, and there were fewer nights when she was able to sleep over, worn out or feeling sick or wanting to nest in her own room. More and more, her roommates would have to tell me that Mirielle wasn’t home when I called. I’d leave messages for her with them, and still I wouldn’t hear back from her. Sometimes she’d claim not to have received the notes, and I thought she was lying, just like when she would insist that she had called me back and had left a message on our answering machine, until Joshua confessed to me one night, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. I must have accidentally erased it,” whereupon I installed a code and disabled the erase function on the machine.

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.