The Collective

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 instrument — 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.”

“What is your problem?” Joshua said. “I’m telling you, it’s on the up and up. Don’t worry about it. What’s it got to do with you, anyway?”

As it happened, it would have a lot to do with me, for when I got back from another seminar in New York several weeks later, I walked into the second-floor bathroom of the Walker Street house and barged in not on Jessica, but on the young Thai girl. She wasn’t naked, at least, but she was in a somewhat compromising position, sitting on the toilet with her skirt and underwear bunched at her ankles. “Pai hai pon!” she screamed at me, hunching over.

“Oh,” Joshua said. “She got kicked out of the place she was living in, and Jimmy asked if she could sack out on the couch here for a while.”

“How long is a while?”

“I don’t know, a few days, I guess.”

“Why can’t she just stay with Jimmy?” I asked, although I assumed that he’d been sleeping with the girl all along and it’d gotten messy somehow.

“Jimmy’s got a new girlfriend,” Joshua told me.

“Who? Not anyone from the collective.” After Marietta Liu and Danielle Awano, after his shenanigans at Pink Whistle with his staff and clients, Jimmy was persona non grata with the 3AC women.

“Naw, some random chick he met at the Toad,” Joshua said. “Hey, where you been, man? You’re never around anymore. You’ve disappeared on me. First it was Mirielle, now these business trips.”

“You didn’t think to run this by me first?”

“What?”

“The girl staying here.”

Joshua cocked his head to the side. “I know we operate like this is a co-op, but it’s not really a co-op, is it?”

“You’re fucking her, aren’t you?” I said.

“No way. I have some scruples. I don’t partake in jailbait.”

“I thought you said she’s nineteen.”

“She is!” Joshua said. “What is this? The only times I see you, you just rag on me.”

I was short-tempered with nearly everyone those days, overworked and stressed out and more than a little depressed. Yet Joshua in particular nettled me. All of his antics and tirades and lectures and riffs had become tiresome. Everything I used to admire about him now seemed fatuous. He did nothing all day but attend to his whims. He needed to grow up.

“You swear this is aboveboard?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “You see, the thing is, I don’t think the girl likes me very much. In fact, I don’t think she likes men very much. She likes Jessica, though. She seems infatuated with her, actually. Keeps following her around like a newborn pup.”

“What’s she have to say about this?”

“Jessica? She’s fine with it. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore. Have you talked to her lately?”

Jessica was home less than I was. She had tacked on a fourth job, teaching a beginning painting class at Martinique College of Art as a last-minute replacement for the spring semester, hired on the recommendation of a former RISD professor. Two mornings a week, she would borrow Joshua’s Peugeot and drive up to Beverly to teach, then would rush back to town for her other jobs. The schedule was taking its toll. She was often sick, and she looked terrible — thin and wan.

“Is there any way you could back out of the class now?” I asked her. “The pay’s not really worth the commute, is it?”

“That’s not the point,” Jessica said. “I’m trying to ingratiate myself so maybe I’ll be able to teach there full-time someday or get a tenure-track job somewhere else. I can’t string along these part-time gigs forever. They’re killing me. I need to build up my CV.”

“How’s the installation coming along?”

“You had to ask, didn’t you?”

She had yet to start work on her one-woman show sponsored by the Cambridge Arts Council. The exhibit was scheduled to be shown on the second floor of the City Hall Annex, beginning on May 7, for three weeks. It was almost the end of March.

Nothing had gone right for her this winter. The Creiger-Dane and DNA galleries, after teasing Jessica repeatedly with promises to include her in group shows, passed in the end. She was turned down for every grant and fellowship she applied to. She was delinquent on her student loans. The IRS had nailed her for not paying self-employment tax on an independent contractor job three years ago in New York, and she now owed five hundred in back taxes and interest, plus an additional fifteen hundred in penalties. Her carpal tunnel was flaring up, and she was back to wearing wrist braces while she slept. She’d had a panic attack one day in Bread & Circus, and a shopper had called 911; a phalanx of emergency vehicles had converged on the grocery store, exacerbating the attack even further, and Jessica had to be hospitalized overnight. And, most devastating to her, more than I could have ever imagined, she had been undone, waylaid into dark submission, weeping in her room for days, when Esther had left her.

Jessica had had an inkling something was amiss when all of a sudden Esther was not home when she was supposed to be and didn’t return her messages right away, when she was mysteriously busy on weekends, when they spent fewer and fewer nights together, Esther saying she was tired or coming down with something. Eventually Jessica forced her to come clean. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?” she asked. “Not exactly,” Esther said, then revealed that she had fallen in love with a Strategic Studies Fellow at Harvard’s Olin Institute named Jon Stiegel.

The Tuesday Nighters never met again, and in short order — and not without coincidence, in my view — the 3AC began to lose its fervor and energy. The main problem, actually, arose with the preliminary plans for our website, or, more specifically, the notion that we needed a manifesto, a formal mission statement, to post on it.

First, we affirmed that the 3AC was a not-for-profit organization devoted to the creation, celebration, and dissemination of art by Asian Americans. Simple enough. But then Andy Kim said we should specify art by young Asian Americans, since we wanted to accentuate the hip, the new, not the traditional, and Phil Sudo said that would be ageist, and Annie Yoshikawa said young made it sound like the 3AC was an after-school program for kids, so we changed it to modern, but that word had narrow critical associations, so we settled on contemporary.

We wanted to emphasize the importance of these Sunday night gatherings on Walker Street, so we added that the 3AC was also devoted to creating a foundation to gather and exchange ideas and experiences, but creating was repetitious because we already had creation, so we changed it to building, and foundation was stodgy and made it appear that we were a philanthropic organization, so we changed it to network, and then, because network was too geeky and wonkish and corporate, we changed it to community, and we added that we exchanged resources and information as well. But then Trudy Lun thought this might come off as too insular and cliquey, since we were trying to reach out and disseminate, so we attached a clause that we promoted the intersections between art and audience.

Yet we wanted, too, to declare our commitment to social change, so we modified that to intersections between art, audience, and activism, and asserted that we were dedicated to subverting stereotypes, then decided we should also say we were confronting prejudice and discrimination and oppression against Asian Americans through our art, but scratched the last phrase, since it was something we were trying to do in all facets of our lives, not just through our art, and then we agreed we should also remove Asian Americans there, because weren’t we opposed to the oppression of any group? But then Grace Kwok wondered if this might jeopardize our future 501(c)3 application, since the IRS had restrictions on giving tax-exempt status to organizations that were involved in political campaigns or lobbying, and we thought of deleting the entire sentence, but Joshua said fuck it, this is who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish.

Cindy Wong said she wanted synergy, empowerment, and coalition somewhere in the statement, and Phil threw in diasporic, all of which we liked, but we couldn’t find a place for them. We went back to exchanging ideas, experiences, resources, and information because Jay Chi-Ming Lai said the connotation there was still primarily about networking, even though we’d expunged network, and that wasn’t all we espoused, so we put in that the 3AC was devoted — was there another word? I asked. We’d already used devoted twice, along with committed and dedicated—maybe faithful, no, believed in, no, entrusted with, definitely not — we’d fix it later — devoted to nurturing artistic expression. But what about the collaborative nature of the 3AC? Danielle Awano asked, so we inserted collaborative, but then Jessica objected, since it might seem our art projects were produced jointly as a group, so we changed it to individual and collaborative, and then Jimmy said we needed to highlight how many different types of artists comprised the 3AC, so we slid in multidisciplinary.

We had yet to clarify who our target audience was, Sandra Tran reminded us, who our constituents were, and we wrote down that we sought to engage with other Asian Americans, then had to stipulate on a local, statewide, national, and international level, then reconsidered, since what we really wanted to do was engage with people of all racial, socioeconomic, generational, and ethnic strata, don’t forget genders and sexualities and political affiliations, too, so, unable to come up with a solution, we deleted the entire sentence this time, and replaced it with another that said that we sought to build — no, already used it, I said—foster solidarity with other communities of color, or should that be all communities of color, but why just of color, it should extend to everyone, be more encompassing, so we ended the line, as a compromise, with all communities of color and beyond.

The acronym 3AC troubled Leon Lee. It was familiar shorthand to us, the phrase we all used, and it was catchy, in-the-know, hip, but wasn’t a fundamental principle of organizational marketing to have the name plainly advertise its purpose? We spelled out Asian American (hyphen? categorically no hyphen?) Artists (apostrophe or no apostrophe? singular or plural possessive?) Collective, known as the (cap or lowercase article?) 3AC (space after the number? periods after the letters?).

The real contretemps began when Joshua returned to the original statement, art by contemporary Asian Americans.

“Listen, we should specify that it’s art by and about contemporary Asian Americans,” he said.

I could feel the room curdle.

Although Esther Xing was no longer part of the collective, everyone had heard about my dispute with her, thanks to Rick Wakamatsu and Ali Ong, who now seemed to reveal themselves as converts to Xingism.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Rick said, “especially pertaining to the goals for my own fiction. At a certain point, if we keep rehashing the same themes, always writing about being Asian, it’s going to get stale.”

“So what?” Joshua asked. “Faulkner said every writer has just one story to tell. It’s all in the telling.”

“It’s just that all this race stuff is starting to come off as, well, whining,” Rick said. “Know what I mean?”

“Maybe it’s time to move on,” Ali said. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking of doing with my next story.”

“How many stories have you published, Ali?” Joshua asked.

Startled, she said, “None.”

“You, Rick?”

He shrugged, embarrassed.

“Uh-huh,” Joshua said. “I’m glad we can rely on your combined authority and experience to make such pronouncements.”

“Hey,” Jessica said, “that’s a little harsh.”

Joshua launched into a peroration about being true to one’s race, about not playing into the hands of the WSCP, the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. We’d heard it all before. As much as I agreed with him — more than ever, in fact — I meditated on how monotonous Joshua had become, with a limited reservoir of ideas, some of which he borrowed without attribution, e.g., bell hooks’s WSCP. Nonetheless, it was hard for the group not to be swayed by him. He was the incontestable founder of the 3AC. After all, it was his house, therefore his rules.

There was a general though tepid consensus that we could stick in and about after by, but then we had to pull contemporary, since sometimes we might want to address historical Asia or Asian America. This started a tiff about whether we were being too provincial. If we were going to reference Asia, Jay said, we should include Asian Asians, not just Asian Americans, so we changed it to say art by and about Asians and Asian Americans.

Then another squabble emerged. What did we mean by Asian Americans? Annie asked. We should be specific and say Asian Pacific Americans, Cindy said. But instead of APA, shouldn’t it be APIA, Asian Pacific Islander Americans? Leon wondered. What about splitting the difference, Andy suggested, and using AAPI, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders? But it would confuse the geographic origins further, I said, and by the same token — sorry, a slip of the tongue — what would we then call Asians who were foreigners — no, that had become a pejorative term — okay, nationals? Would we have to enunciate art by and about Asian Pacific Islanders and Asian Pacific Islander Americans? That would be very clunky. What about the biracial among us, or those who were multiracial? Danielle asked. Would we have to adopt a one-drop rule?

Then Trudy mentioned South Asians. Shouldn’t we include them, too? This led to a skirmish about what Asian meant. There was no question that Southeast Asians qualified, even though many were Muslim, so weren’t Pakistanis and Indians and Bangladeshis eligible?

“Russia is technically in the continent of Asia,” Joshua said. “Why not include Russians, too? Hey, man, let’s include everybody! Let anyone in! We can be one big happy multifucking family!”

Five Sunday nights in a row, and we never were able to finish the mission statement, which was revised, elided, diluted, dumbed, appended, particularized, and parentheticalized into incoherence. Slaughtered by committee. After that, fewer people showed up for the meetings. Rick Wakamatsu and Ali Ong dropped out altogether.

We would never fulfill any of our grand ambitions to sponsor exhibitions, showcases, or publications. Although the 3AC would persist as an ersatz organization for seven more years, with the Sunday potlucks rotating to various members’ apartments, and although many of us would remain close friends, the 3AC’s activities would recede into just holding parties, playing poker and charades, singing karaoke, and watching Wong Kar-wai films.

Maybe everything that happened with the 3AC was Joshua’s fault, or even mine, but I would always resent Esther Xing’s intrusion, however brief, into our cozy little collective. She introduced the first kernels of division into the 3AC, and I would forever wish I could blame her for its eventual demise.

In early April, Jessica finalized the concept for her installation, which she would be calling Dis/Orienting Proportions, and she said she would need my help for the project. As she detailed what she required of me, I was certain she was joking.

“Funny,” I said. “Anything to eat in the house?” I had just returned from a two-day road trip to Vermont, meeting with the list broker for our direct-mail campaign in Rutland and the CSRs at our printer/lettershop in Essex.

“It’s not a joke,” Jessica said. “If you do this for me, I’ll buy you dinner at the B-Side.”

“It’d take a lot more than that. Are you really serious?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve gone completely off the deep end, haven’t you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I think it’s going to be great, though. I got the idea after seeing W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism at the Film Archive the other day. Will you do it?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You have to. Who else am I going to ask? Jimmy Fung?” she asked.

“I’m sure he’d be willing.”

“Too willing.”

“Exactly. No one but someone like Jimmy would do it.”

“Joshua did,” she said.

My imagination reeled with lurid scenarios. “When?” I asked, subsumed with jealousy.

“Last night,” Jessica said. “I just need one more. It’s not a big deal. It’s kind of clinical, the whole procedure.”

“I don’t think anyone would ever compare it to a simple doctor’s visit. Not by a long shot. It’s kind of sick, to be frank. It’s fucking weird and totally depraved, actually. Can’t you see that?”

She couldn’t, and after I made us a quick dinner of linguine with shredded zucchini, onions, garlic, chopped walnuts, and parmesan, during which Jessica badgered me continuously, I consented, mainly because I wanted to know precisely what she had done with Joshua.

“Where is Joshua, anyway?” I asked.

“He went to a rave in Northampton. He took the girl with him.”

“Like on a date? That fucking asshole. I knew it wouldn’t stay innocent for long. She was only supposed to be here a couple of days.”

“They went with Jimmy. They won’t be back until morning.”

“Convenient,” I said.

“She keeps stealing my clothes.”

“Joshua thinks she’s infatuated with you.”

“Or it could be that we’re the same size and she likes my taste and she’s a thief.” After we finished washing the dishes, Jessica said, “There’s something I need you to do first.”

“What?”

“Shave.”

“Shave?” Instinctually I rubbed the stubble on my chin.

“Your pubic hair.”

This was a mistake — a terrible mistake. “All of it?”

“All of it. Your balls, too.”

“How can I shave my balls? Don’t I need to get them waxed or something?” I asked, although waxing seemed a more painful alternative.

“I’ll shave them for you, if you want.”

“Have you gotten into S&M? Is that it? You’re getting off now by cutting people?”

I opted to do it myself, although Jessica insisted on standing outside the bathroom door, shouting instructions. First I sat on the toilet and trimmed my pubic hair with scissors (“Crop it as close as you can!”). Then I took a hot shower (“Really steam up the room! You want to soften up the skin and relax the follicles”). Then I had to exfoliate with a cleanser and a washcloth (“That’ll get rid of dead skin cells”). Next, I dabbed on some shaving oil, keeping my skin damp (“It’ll make the razor glide better and prevent razor burn”), and used a brush to apply a special cream called Brave Soldier Brave Shave, which had been originally formulated for bicyclists, swimmers, and bodybuilders, but which was now favored for extracurricular body shaving (“Work the brush in circles!”).

Jessica had given me a new pivoting razor, and, staring at the three sharp blades, I hesitated, questioning the rationality of this entire project, especially my participation in it. I stood in the tub and began with the easiest area, above and around the shaft (“Pull the skin taut and go in the direction of growth! Keep rinsing the blades! You don’t want to clog them up”). The scariest part was my testicles (“Just go slowly! Use this!” she said, and slid a small hand mirror underneath the door, the lock on which I had thankfully fixed three weeks ago). I had never noticed how wrinkly and ugly the skin of my scrotum was. I had never, actually, really looked at my scrotum.

It took forever, but finally I finished, somehow managing not to nick or cut myself (“Now rinse and pat it dry and put that moisturizer on!”). I climbed onto the edge of the tub and examined my newly bared genitalia in the mirror above the sink. It was, I had to say, a very clean look, even a good look — everything pristine, and seemingly larger.

I came out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist. Jessica stood waiting for me in her ratty white silk robe. “Why are you in that?” I asked.

“You might need some inspiration,” she said.

“This is getting too kinky for me,” I told her. “You said it’d be almost clinical. Can’t I just do it myself?”

“It’s very complicated stuff.”

“You could shout instructions to me like just now.”

“Just come in my room. It’ll be over in ten minutes.”

There was plastic sheeting spread over the floor. Jessica had fashioned a work table with a piece of plywood and two sawhorses, and on it was a small combo TV/VCR, a bunch of disposable containers and stirrers, scissors, a kitchen timer, duct tape, measuring cups, and a glass bowl with water in it. On her bed were some porn magazines (Barely Legal, Stuffed, Asian Climax) and porn videos (Doin’ the Ritz, New Wave Hookers 5, Fresh Meat 4). Scattered underneath the table were various boxes that were labeled Casting Willy, Create-a-Mate, Clone-a-Willy, Clone-a-Pussy.

“You’re going to use one of those kits?” I asked.

“No, I experimented with them, but I figured out a better way to do it,” Jessica said. “Okay, let me see.”

Reluctantly, I undid my towel, and she cranked a gooseneck lamp into position for an up-close-and-personal appraisal, getting on her knees to stare at my genitals. “Not bad, not bad,” she said. She lifted my cock to look at the underside, and I became half aroused. “But you missed a few spots.” She grabbed a razor and pulled on the stray pubes for a dry shave — no oil or cream.

“Hey, careful!” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she said, shifting and twisting my penis and testes this way and that for a thorough inspection. “You know, you have a very nice penis.”

“Thanks,” I said. What else could I say?

She plugged in an immersion coil — one of those cheap contraptions to heat up a cup of coffee — and stuck it into the water in the glass bowl. She held up the magazines and videos. “Any preference?”

“No.”

She popped New Wave Hookers 5 into the VCR. “You want a magazine, too? This is a two-part operation. I have to do a fitting first, so I need you to get fully erect for just a minute, then you can relax for a while. Feel free to beat off. Don’t mind me.”

“This is impossible,” I said. “I can’t get a hard-on at will.”

“No? You had no problem the night you walked in on me in the bathroom.” She sighed and took off her robe, under which she was nude, and waited for further developments. “Okay, that seemed to do the trick.”

In spite of her recent weight loss, her body verging on gaunt, no longer hard-yogaed, Jessica remained incontrovertibly attractive to me.

She shot close-ups of my penis with a macro lens and a flash from every angle.

“You’re going to give me all the prints and negatives when you’re done, right?” I asked.

“I’m not shooting your face. Who’s going to be able to tell it’s your penis? I hate to disillusion you, but all penises look pretty much alike.”

“Is that a yes or a no on the prints and negs?”

“Yes.”

“No one will ever know?” I asked. “You’ll never tell anyone?”

“I already promised.” She took what appeared to be a clear plastic report cover and rolled it into a tube. “Is this fully erect for you, or do you still have a ways more to go?”

“This is essentially it,” I said, betraying some deflation of ego.

“That wasn’t a value judgment. I was just asking. You’re pretty big.”

She manipulated the tube, enfolding my erection and balls. “How big?” I asked.

“Oh, come on.”

“Bigger than Joshua?”

“I’m not falling for this.”

“Bigger than Loki?”

“This is exactly what my installation’s going to be about, these kinds of insecurities.” She cinched the width of the cylinder with duct tape, marked it up with a Sharpie, and removed the tube.

Over the table, she cut the tube with scissors, snipping curves on the bottom end and a triangle on the top end. She then capped the upper opening with a section of rubber and tape and checked the fit on me. The tube slotted over the shaft of my penis and had a flap that went under my scrotum and between my legs. She made a couple of more cuts on the tube, measured the temperature of the water in the bowl with an oven thermometer, unplugged the immersion coil, and turned around.

“We’re flagging a little,” she said, looking at my wilting erection. “Once I mix this stuff, we have to go really quickly, and I’m going to need you to be absolutely still and maintain a full erection for at least four minutes.” She inserted another video, Fresh Meat 4, into the VCR and laid the Asian Climax magazine open on the table. “Do you think you can do that?”

“I’m not sure.”

She walked over and began fondling me.

I put my hands on the small of Jessica’s back and drew her to me and tried to kiss her.

“No,” she said. “This isn’t sexual.”

“How’s it not sexual? Everything about this is sexual.”

“I can’t have sex with you. I can’t go into those emotions.” She squatted down and took me in her mouth.

“Jesus,” I said. “Jessica.”

She worked her head back and forth, her tongue stud rubbing the underside of my penis.

“Maybe Bill Clinton wouldn’t define this as having sexual relations, but I do.” I should have been elated — fulfilling multiple fantasies I’d entertained for years — but it didn’t seem right, or really even erotic. It felt, as Jessica had posited, clinical.

She said nothing, concentrating on the task at hand.

“Did you do this with Joshua?”

“No,” she said, taking a breath.

Once I was rigid, she applied a rubber cock ring around the base of my penis, behind my testicles, cutting off the circulation and making me harder.

“Is that too tight?” she asked.

“Where’d you get this? How the hell do you know about these things?”

She snapped on a pair of vinyl gloves and mixed alginate powder with the water, which was precisely at ninety-eight degrees, in a disposable tub. The alginate, she told me, was usually used by dentists to make impressions of teeth.

“Did you give Joshua a hand job?”

“No,” she said, stirring robustly. “He didn’t need any encouragement.”

“Were you naked with him?”

“No,” she said.

“Have you ever fucked Joshua?”

“For God’s sake, no, all right? I’ve never jacked him off or kissed him or done anything with him,” she said. “What is this thing you have with Joshua?”

She had me hold the tube around my penis with both hands while she poured the pink alginate into the triangular hole she had clipped. The mixture was soft, wet, warm. It oozed down the tube, enveloping my cock, and pooled around my balls, then seeped between my legs and down my thighs and dripped onto the plastic sheeting on the floor in clots.

“Can you move around a little?” Jessica asked. “Just a little. Like you’re doing a shimmy. But keep the tube in place. I want to get rid of any air pockets. Otherwise we’ll have to do this again.”

She pulled out a woman’s vibrator from a drawer and turned it on, and I felt a wave of momentary panic, thinking she had nefarious intentions for it, like lodging it into my anus to create an internal shimmy, or purely to attach an evil, twisted subtext to the whole endeavor in the name of art. But she simply held it against the tube in various spots, letting it clatter, plastic to plastic, to rid the alginate of microscopic bubbles. She set the kitchen timer for three minutes. “You’re not losing your erection, are you?” she asked. “Is there something you want me to do?”

I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to make love to her. “I’m okay,” I said.

When the timer dinged, there was an unexpected problem. I couldn’t get out of the tube. Jessica snipped off the rubber cock ring, put her robe back on, turned off the TV, and tucked the magazines away, yet I stayed priapic. “Can’t you get it to go down? Just shrink out of it.”

“It’s not a voluntary thing,” I said. “I can’t mentally switch it on and off.”

“Such a mysterious organ.”

The alginate had gotten cold and firm, and I stood there, holding the tube, my legs cramping, Jessica waiting for me anxiously. At last, after a few minutes, I was limp enough to extricate myself.

“Gently, gently,” Jessica said. She tipped the tube up and looked inside at the mold of my penis and balls.

“I’m not doing this again,” I told her, wiping myself with the towel and the bucket of water she had set aside for me.

“I don’t think you’ll have to. It looks pretty good,” she said. “Here. Rub this on if you start getting itchy the next few days.”

I covered my groin with the towel with my left hand, and with my right I accepted the small tube of cortisone cream.

“You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said.

Her name was Noklek Praphasirirat. Once she had moved from the couch in the living room to the master bedroom, which had its own bathroom, she was hardly visible. Sometimes I would forget she was staying in the house. She didn’t interact with us at all, never talked to us or ate with us. I never saw her in the kitchen. I didn’t know what she did for meals. She didn’t keep food in the refrigerator. It didn’t seem she used the washing machine or the dryer in the basement, either. She never made a sound. Perhaps she did everything in the dead of night, when we were all asleep.

The only conversation of substance I had with her was in mid-April, when I came home from work just before twilight and, through the sliding glass door, saw her on the back deck. She had gotten her hair chopped off. It was now spiky and streaked, just like Jessica’s. She was also, it appeared, wearing a pair of Jessica’s cargo pants.

She had assembled a shrine on the deck — three small Buddhas, one brass, one stone, one faux-marble, surrounded by candles, incense, two vases of flowers, and framed photos of a Buddha and of a man, woman, and girl. She was kneeling in front of the shrine in a posture of prayer.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You sit?” she said. “You pray with me?”

I knelt down beside her. It seemed disrespectful not to.

“This my father, mother, sister,” she said. “This Gautama.”

Noklek lit the candle on the right side of the Buddhas, then the candle on the left, followed by three incense sticks. She sat stiffly upright, her palms pressed together, then bowed down, forehead on the redwood boards, and I followed suit. She chanted, “Annicaˉ vata sankhaˉraˉ, uppaˉda vaya dhammino. Uuppajjitvaˉ nirujjhanti tesam vuˉpasamo sukho,” and bowed three more times.

She pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket. “Your mother, father alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You have brother, sister?”

“One older sister.”

“You love sister?”

“I suppose so,” I said, “even though she represents every bourgeois SoCal value that I despise. Southern California — that’s where I’m from originally.”

“My home, very far. Chiang Mai. You know Chiang Mai?”

“In Thailand, right?”

“Yes. Thailand.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Miss, no miss, no different. I no go home. This my home now. My sister dead. My father, mother dead. Everybody dead. This paper, my sister, father, mother name, my family name, ancestor name.”

I wondered how and when everyone had died. In her photograph, her sister was in a school uniform and looked no more than ten years old. The photographs of her parents seemed to have been taken a long time ago, when they were still in their late twenties. No one was smiling. They were rather grim black-and-white portraits, formal head shots, as if for passports. Yet I didn’t ask about the particulars, for without warning Noklek flicked a lighter and lit the corner of the paper with the names of her family and ancestors, holding it over a plate until it was completely enflamed. I was unsettled, assuming there was bitterness in her memories of them, not understanding until later, after I had researched Theravada Buddhist rituals, that this was a tribute to the dead, a passing of merit to their spirits.

She chanted some more, then lifted a bowl of water with flower petals floating on it. Jasmine. I breathed in the sweet scent. Where she had gotten the jasmine, I did not know. I gazed around the backyard. None of the perennials or bulbs that Jessica and I had planted late last summer had bloomed just yet.

Noklek gently sprinkled a bit of the water over the Buddhas and the photo frames, catching the runoff in another glass bowl — the same one, I recognized, in which Jessica had stuck the immersion coil for the alginate mixture. With the collected water, she doused the ashes of the paper. Then she startled me by tipping some water onto my shoulder, down my back.

“Hey!” I said. I was wearing a new button-down, and the water was cold. It was barely fifty degrees outside.

“Luck!” she said. “Songkran! New year!”

This was, I remembered then, a rite of the Songkran festival in Thailand, a three-day new year’s celebration in April. The tradition of pouring cleansing water had degenerated into a national water fight, caravans of celebrants driving down streets with water guns and cannons, drenching bystanders, who would retaliate with buckets and hoses. I had seen videos on the news.

“You water me?” Noklek asked.

I dribbled water onto her shoulder, and she momentarily shuddered from the chill.

She mixed a white powder, maybe chalk, in a small bowl with some water, then dipped her fingers in the white paste and daubed her face — a consecration, vertical lines on her forehead, swirls on her cheeks. She handed me the bowl. “You paint?”

I rubbed the chalk onto my face, mimicking her design pattern.

“Sawatdee pee mai,” she said, pressing her palms together and bowing to me. “Happy New Year.”

“Sawatdee pee mai,” I said, bowing.

“Suk-san wan songkran,” she said.

“Suk-san wan songkran,” I said, bowing again.

When I rose, she squirted my face with a tiny water pistol. “Hee hee hee hee,” she hiccupped in childlike squeaks. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh.

“Now you’re going to get it,” I said, and I jumped up and grabbed the larger of the bowls and whirled around and threw the water at the same time she tossed the contents of a bucket into my face. I had been errant in my aim and missed Noklek completely. I, on the other hand, was soaked. We ran on and off the deck, into the backyard, fighting over the garden hose, filling bowls and buckets and trash cans from the utility shed, screaming and laughing, the chalk smearing and streaking down our faces, until dusk fell and we were exhausted and deluged and shivering, yet blithe.

We never really spoke again. I think of that evening, of Noklek, our abbreviated conversation and gestures of communion, every now and then. I think of the jasmine petals she had spread in the bowls of water. I think of her youth, how alive and joyful she was in those few minutes we had shared — for once, carefree. I think of the Thai Buddhist beliefs of renewal and rebirth, of the Songkran custom of washing away misfortune and receiving the blessing of protection, the making and passing on of merit. I think of the practice of commemorating the dead by writing down their names, and then incinerating them. I think of devoting myself to more acts of kindness and goodness, as you are supposed to do during Songkran, and of dedicating those acts, in part, to Noklek Praphasirirat, wherever she may be now.