The Collective

17

At what point is it acceptable to give up? The years go by, and there might be some validations, a few encouraging signs, a small triumph here and there, but more often than not, failure follows upon failure. You get into your thirties, and every day you wonder if it’s worth it to keep going. How long can you continue being a starving artist? Will it ever happen for you? Very possibly, it will not. Then where will you be? Sometime or another, you have to decide.

The oblique questions and snipes from civilians and your family become a babel in your head, insisting that you grow up, be practical, find a real job, give up on this fruitless dream, because, really, it’s become kind of pathetic. You tried, but it came to naught. It might have been due to a lack of providence, yet more likely, although no one will ever say so outright, it was probably due to a lack of talent. Even among ourselves, there are doubts and judgments. We still go to one another’s shows and exhibitions and readings and performances, rare as they may be now, and afterward we dole out all the appropriate accolades, but secretly we wonder if, perhaps, our friends never quite lived up to their promise — if we believed they had promise to begin with — and if, perhaps, it’s time for them to give up.

We love our friends. We hate them, too. It’s easy to feign support and sympathy for them when they’re failing. It’s much harder to affect elation when they start to succeed. It’s a terrible feeling — a sterling reminder of your underachievement and inertia. This is when the schadenfreude begins, the invidious whispers that maybe your friend’s success is undeserved, when you revel in the publication of an unkind review or the unexpected exclusion of your friend’s work from that year’s major awards. You detest this about yourself. You’ve become exactly the type of person you’ve always despised. It eats away at you. You promise to reform, to be more generous, to focus on your own work with renewed vigor and diligence. Yet it seems that there’s never enough time, or that when you finally do find the time and embark on a new project, you falter right away, feeling dispirited and desperate, knowing that it’s all wrong, that it’d be pointless to continue because the whole thing is misconceived, and even if it isn’t, you know you could never pull it off, anyway.

The thought of giving up gains appeal. People might not change, but situations do. You’ve acquired different priorities, and inevitably some things must be left behind. Your parents always told you that life is about money, and you refused to believe them, but as you’ve gotten older, you’ve begun to reconsider. You wouldn’t mind a few bourgeois creature comforts, a new car, vacations, actually owning property instead of living in rented shitholes, and you start to admit that there is something to having money.

Would it be so shameful to give up? Of course you’d never admit to giving up. You’d say you’re continuing to toil, you’re making great progress, you’re almost finished. One by one, your friends begin dropping out. If they haven’t compromised themselves already, in their hearts they want to, because being true to one’s art, keeping the dream alive, is utterly exhausting.

What stops you is fear — fear that you’ll always see yourself as someone who couldn’t hack it, fear that you’ll become even more bitter than you already are, that you’ll always wonder what could have, should have, and would have happened if you’d kept at it a bit longer. Mainly, you’re afraid of abandoning the sole thing that makes you distinctive, your identity as a bohemian artist, that allows to you be blasé and condescending about your mindless service job or your soul-sapping position as an admin assistant in an office where everyone talks in acronyms.

I hung on for about five more years, until I was thirty-four, although I never finished my novella, never got a story published, never assembled enough material for a book manuscript. I withdrew my story, “The Unrequited,” from Palaver’s Fiction Discoveries issue at the last minute, when the issue was already in final galleys. I told Paviromo that I wanted to earn my first publication, not weasel my way into print through favoritism, and that he should publish Esther Xing’s story in its stead. I will confess that, at the time, I was pretty certain I could get “The Unrequited” taken elsewhere, but I was never able to. A pity, since it really was, as Jessica said, the only good story, the only honest story, I ever wrote. It was about my parents’ courtship, the months that my father went to the post office in Monterey Park to woo my mother, mailing blank letters to phantom recipients.

I stayed at Palaver for another year and a half to finish out the Lila Wallace program, then worked a series of freelance and temp jobs, doing everything from copyediting business articles to writing newsletters for a trade association of bus operators. Finally, in 2004, I accepted a full-time job in downtown Boston at Gilroy Prunier, a boutique marketing firm that catered to investment banks and financial services companies. My primary area of responsibility was direct marketing, i.e., direct mail. I wrote and edited the copy that went on letters, envelopes, slip-sheets, forms, brochures, and postcards.

Joshua told me I was squandering my talent. I was betraying our vow to be artists. I was no longer a believer. I had sold out.

In truth, I felt relieved.

We all moved out of the Walker Street house after Noklek immolated herself. How could we stay there, with the scorched wood on the deck, the soot whispers on the clapboards, the singed patches of grass? And the smell — the smell that could not have possibly lingered, yet that we imagined did.

When skin burns, the blood vessels below begin to dilate and weep. The skin bubbles and blisters. It chars and blackens. As flames eat through the flesh, raw tissue starts to appear. Fat is exposed, and it sizzles. There’s an awful odor. It’s like charcoal at first, not unpleasant, then quickly becomes putrid and vinegary, almost metallic, like copper liquefying. The hair is the worst — sulfurous — but then, mixed in there, there’s a queerly sweet scent, the searing of fat and tissue blossoming into a thick, greasy perfume.

Unlike the monk Thích Quang Đuc, who had remained silent and still while he burned, Noklek began screaming at once. She tried to stand, but her ankles and wrists were tied by the string, and she tumbled, knocking over the shrine and crashing against the side of the house and keeling back onto the deck. I grabbed her and rolled her on the grass in the backyard, using my own body to smother the flames, then, as she shrieked and writhed, I sprayed her with the garden hose until she passed out, steam rising from her flesh and what was left of the white silk robe.

I was burned on my hands, forearms, and chest, the dim scars of which I carry to this day, but of course they’re nothing compared to what Noklek had to endure. She spent over a year in Bigelow 13, the burn unit at Mass General, and in a rehabilitation center. She suffered second- and third-degree burns on sixty-five percent of her body and required agonized procedures of debridement and grafting. More than once it was questionable whether she would survive, in danger of sepsis, renal failure, and infection. I had saved her life, but what kind of life did I leave her? I sometimes wondered, in the brutal light of her pain and disfigurement, if it would have been more merciful to have let her die.

I never told anyone about my conversation with Barboza, which undoubtedly had provoked the police investigation into Pink Whistle. For once, instead of waffling in indecision, I had done something, just as Joshua had always exhorted me to do, and it had been the wrong thing. The guilt I feel over this will never abate, it cannot be absolved.

I couldn’t bring myself to visit Noklek in the hospital very much, as opposed to Joshua, who went to see her every day. He put the house on the market, rented an apartment in Beacon Hill, and paid for the entire cost of Noklek’s hospitalization. He still wanted to marry her (the assistant district attorney had dropped the prostitution charge, and the INS chose not to pursue her), but she said no, and as soon as she could, she left the U.S. for Thailand, where Joshua sent her international money orders for two years, until the envelopes started to get returned, forwarding address unknown.

The Walker Street house was sold at the height of the real estate boom. Joshua, however, did not invest the proceeds very wisely, putting a lot of it in tech stocks, which took a dive during the dot-com bust. He became an itinerant, going from one artists’ colony to another for extended residencies or accepting short-term visiting writer gigs at colleges, only reappearing in Boston for sojourns of one to six months. I missed him. Regardless of what I’d told him that horrible day, I was never really done with Joshua. We would remain friends, though it would be a changed friendship, less urgent, less pervasive, with an unspoken falseness that would stiffen with time, neither one of us able to overcome a niggling discomfort with each other.

He got the attention he wanted from the Fiction Discoveries issue — calls from several literary agents. He signed up with the most prominent one, and the agent sent out his novel for auction when he finished it, but puzzlingly there were no takers. In the end, just before his thirtieth birthday, they were able to sell the book to a small press, a prestigious house as far as noncommercial publishers went, but nonetheless it was a disappointment to him.

Upon the Shore was about the inhabitants of Cheju Island during the rebellion that began there in 1948 and resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of people by the (U.S.-backed) Korean government. Almost universally, the novel engendered stellar reviews, even getting a half-page rave in the New York Times Book Review, yet not much else happened. No bestseller lists, no book prizes, no esteemed fellowships. Joshua complained that it was because he had been marginalized, dismissed, as an ethnic writer. There might have been some truth in this. One midwestern newspaper presumed he was a South Korean writer, that his book had been translated from Korean into English.

His second novel, The Base, was set in the 1970s and portrayed the Itaewon merchants, bargirls, and civilian workers who serviced the American soldiers on Yongsan Eighth Army base. His third novel, And I Will Be Here, was about a drug-addicted Korean American female poet in a wheelchair who was stalking her Cambridge neighbor. The critical reception was less glowing, often dwelling on how unlikable or unsympathetic his characters were (the first line of And I Will Be Here was: “Just so you know, I am a hateful person”), and neither book sold well. They weren’t crossing over. With all the screeds on racism, readers felt they were being preached to. He wasn’t connecting, even, with Asian Americans. The younger generation, he was baffled to discover, wasn’t interested in the subject of race.

To me, each book was more profound and lyrical than the last. All three were beautifully bleak, quietly heartrending. They deserved better. (For years, whenever I went into a bookstore, I would locate the spines of his latest novel, rearrange the shelf, and turn the copies of his book ninety degrees so the cover would face out. I still do that now, though more and more, I cannot find any of his books in stores.)

Obsessively Joshua checked the sales rankings for his novels online. He tortured himself by reading book industry blogs and Publishers Weekly, fulminating whenever he learned about a large advance that was being given to a pretty young white writer. He railed and brooded whenever a contemporary received a rhapsodic review or prize, especially when it pertained to one writer—“our nemesis,” he called her — Esther Xing, who was offered, after her story appeared in the Discoveries issue, a two-book deal from Knopf for a story collection and a novel. The latter, which had all white main characters, became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a first for an East Asian American writer.

The person from the 3AC who had the most success was Tina Nguyen, with her wall cuts. Annie Yoshikawa was also able to make a living from her large-format photographs, although she never reached the stature of Dijkstra or Lockhart. Leon Lee and Cindy Wong did fairly well, exhibiting their paintings regularly and teaching in an art school — a joint appointment they shared as a married couple until they divorced. Phil Sudo started an improvisational jazz band, Avant Garbage, then wrote a book called Zen Guitar and traveled around the country, giving motivational speeches about incorporating Zen philosophy into music, art, everyday life, and business. He died of stomach cancer at the age of thirty-five.

Jimmy Fung served his mandatory two-year sentence in state prison, MCI-Norfolk, then disappeared. I lost track of a lot of people. Jessica withdrew the malicious destruction complaint against Barboza, and, in kind, he dropped the obscenity complaint against her. She moved to San Francisco and then to L.A., and we kept in frequent touch for a while, but talk less now.

After our breakup, I never spoke to Mirielle Miyazato again, but occasionally I checked up on her on the Internet. She didn’t go to an MFA program in poetry. She became a research assistant at a think tank in D.C., then ended up in Miami, where she sold commercial real estate. A few years ago, she married the founder of a sustainable building company. High-res images of their wedding were online, posted by the photographer to market his services. Mirielle looked beautiful, ecstatic. More than once, I clicked through the album. In one photo, she was holding what might have been a wineglass, but I couldn’t be sure what was in it — possibly just water. Her husband was about her age, good-looking, stylish with his short dreads, Afro-Cuban American. Recently they had a baby, I read on her website. I’ve always regretted telling her that she was a bad person.

The last time I saw Joshua was in July 2008, two months before he killed himself, when I drove out to his rented cottage in Sudbury to say goodbye to him. I was leaving Cambridge for good — a relocation, a wholesale life change, that had come about swiftly.

“Unbelievable,” he said as I got out of my car. “You never got rid of your mayonnaise streak, did you?”

Two years earlier, I had gone to the Boston Athenaeum, the private library catty-corner from the State House. The Athenaeum was trying to recruit a younger membership, and they were hosting a mixer that day. These receptions, besides the draw of exceptional wine and hors d’oeuvres, had acquired a reputation as a meat market.

I was already a member. I often spent my lunch hour at the library, and that evening I had gone there after work to get a novel I wanted to reread, not knowing a mixer was being held. After checking the catalog, I wended through the crowd, past the busts of Petrarch and Dante, into the reading room with its leather chairs, vaulted ceiling, and arched windows. A woman was leaning against the very bookshelf I needed to access, listening to a fellow trying to chat her up.

She had an old-fashioned air about her, blond hair parted in the middle and tied into a thick ponytail that ran down her back, a vintage indigo dress with subtle white piping rather than the ubiquitous power suit. She wore little makeup, and had a narrow face.

I waited, not wanting to interrupt their conversation, but finally said, “Excuse me, could I reach behind you for a second?”

She looked at me blankly, then said, “You trying to find a book?”

“It’s supposed to be on that shelf. If I could—”

“I don’t think you understand the parameters here.”

“Sorry?”

“I saw a sign posted at the entrance. You didn’t see the sign?”

“Which sign?”

“The one that said no reading allowed. It was very explicit.”

She grinned slyly, and I knew then who she was. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. “I guess I was misinformed,” I said. “This isn’t a library?”

“Apparently not,” she said. “Which book?” She stepped aside, and I pulled out William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow from the shelf. “Oh, I’ve read that,” she told me.

“You have?”

“Sure, several times. My father went to elementary school with the author.”

“No kidding.”

“He said Billy was a smart kid, but kind of antisocial. The sort of kid who goes to cocktail parties and sits in a corner with a book.”

“I didn’t know elementary kids went to cocktail parties back then.”

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she said. “A different era. They started them young.”

Her prospective suitor excused himself and retreated into the crowd.

“Do you think it was something I said?” she asked me.

“How have you been, Didi?”

I moved in with her less than a year later. “Why’d we break up at Mac again?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”

In many ways, it was as if she were an entirely different person. I remembered what Joshua had told me once, long ago — that Didi had no soul — but she was nothing like she’d been in college.

After Macalester, Didi had gone to Manhattan, working as a computer programmer for an insurance corporation before landing at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. In 2000, she was transferred to Cantor’s Milan office, and the following year, all her friends and colleagues in New York died on 9/11. She quit Cantor, found a job at an Italian brokerage firm in Rome, met Alessandro Pacelli, the creative director of an ad agency, and almost immediately got pregnant by him. They had three children in quick succession, Matteo, Wyatt, and Finnea. Didi became a stay-at-home mom and was content, she thought, until she discovered that Alessandro had been sleeping with two different women, one of whom was their housekeeper. She fled to Chestnut Hill with the kids, and their divorce proceedings, involving U.S. and Italian courts, were a contentious mess, Alessandro calling Didi all manner of Italian variants for bitch, his favorite being stronza, fucking bitch, saying she had never loved him, had trapped him by deliberately getting pregnant when she knew he’d never wanted children, which was supremely ironic, since ten months after they separated he had a son with one of the women he’d been fucking (not the housekeeper).

Didi got what she wanted, sole custody of the kids, bought a house in Huron Village, and then looked for a job, a formidable challenge since she had been out of the workforce for almost five years. At last, she was hired as a software engineer at Fidelity Investments, specializing in Web applications for their online brokerage program.

She was with the technology group, not on the investment side, so she wasn’t being yoked and pummeled by the upheavals in the market like the fund managers and portfolios analysts. Nonetheless, there had been two rounds of layoffs at Fidelity in the space of a year, and she was nervous. So was I. Everyone in the financial sector — and in businesses like Gilroy Prunier that depended on it — was on tenterhooks in the spring of 2008. Then Fidelity announced that it was consolidating some of its operations, and Didi was presented with a transfer to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. We talked about it. I applied for a job in Fidelity’s marketing communications department down there, and was offered a position as a senior copywriter. I proposed to Didi. (We would join the circle of sixty percent of Mac grads who purportedly marry one another.) We were moving to Chapel Hill next week.

“I don’t get it,” Joshua said in his driveway. “Isn’t her father loaded?”

“We want to support ourselves.”

“But his money will always be there, won’t it? It’ll corrupt you eventually,” he said. “You’ll get emasculated by it.”

I chose not to remind Joshua that he’d had money himself, that he had never really had to work a day in his life.

I liked Didi’s parents, actually. Mr. O’Brien sometimes told me stories about his father, who had been the first in the family to immigrate to Boston from Ireland, and who, upon arrival, had been confronted with NINA signs: HELP WANTED — NO IRISH NEED APPLY. Mr. O’Brien thought the Irish and Koreans had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they shared a history of subjugation and divided homelands, they had violent tempers yet liked to carouse and sing, and they both drank like fish.

Joshua led me into the cottage and gave me a tour, which took all of two minutes, the place was so small. The living/dining room was one space, with a Pullman kitchen. It was sweltering inside from the July heat and humidity, and Joshua had two fans blowing at full speed, billowing the yellowed sheets he’d tacked to the windows. The furniture included with the rent — what little there was of it — was old. A round pedestal café table and two ladder-back chairs with rush seats, the pine painted white; a Windsor rocker; a little sofa with plaid cushions. I laughed seeing the stacks of books bungee-corded against the wall — my bygone trick at Palaver’s office.

“I thought you kept some of the furniture from the house,” I said, remembering the beautiful bentwood tables, rugs, and Eames chair. “Don’t you have stuff in storage?”

“I sold it all.”

The bathroom was tiny, just a narrow shower stall, commode, and corner sink. In the bedroom was an oak four-poster, but the mattress was twin-sized, making it appear to be a child’s. The cottage felt even more dismal with its low ceilings, and everything needed a thorough scrubbing, the smell of mildew pungent.

“I see you’re the same old neat freak,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I can’t really be bothered with cleaning. Besides, I never invite anyone in here.”

“You haven’t met anyone lately?”

He shook his head. “I had a little flirtation at Yaddo last month, but it didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know, women don’t seem to like me anymore. It’s better this way, living like a monk. I’m writing up a storm. Haven’t you heard? Celibacy induces a form of mesmerism.”

I stared at the fluffs of dust on the floor, wavering with the fans’ currents. “You ought to hire a housecleaner, anyway. Purely for sanitary reasons.”

“You want something to eat?” Joshua asked. “I could make us some ramen.”

While he boiled water and cut up some bologna, he asked, “You’ve been reading about these credit default swaps? It’s a total racket, a Ponzi scheme sanctioned by regulators and the government that allowed these companies to get unconscionably rich. It’s not an industry I’d be proud of, you know.”

“Fidelity’s not Bear Stearns,” I told him. “It’s a different type of financial institution.”

“You’ll never write a book now for sure,” he said. “This was your fatal flaw — you always had a backup plan. You were never willing to risk everything.”

I couldn’t argue with this assessment.

“Jesus,” he said, “fucking Sourdough. And North Carolina. Prime-time redneckville.” He tore up some cabbage leaves. “You want an egg in your ramen?”

He had quit smoking a year ago and had put on a good fifteen pounds since I’d last seen him in the fall. He was wearing Nikes, madras shorts, and a T-shirt that read FOOD SHARK, MARFA that was too tight on him. Running religiously did not offset his awful diet. His hair had thinned further and was going a little gray, and he now kept it at a buzz cut with clippers. We were the same age, thirty-eight, but he looked much older.

I walked over to his desk and glanced at the piles of papers, files, Moleskines, manila envelopes, and index cards surrounding his laptop. Several articles and books on 9/11 and Asian immigrants in Manhattan rested on top of the laser printer that was on the floor.

“How’s the novel coming along?” I asked.

“Really, really well,” he said. “I think I’ll be done with a draft by the end of the year. It’s going to be a doorstopper.”

I noticed a framed photograph on the wood-paneled wall above his desk. It was of the three of us — Joshua, Jessica, and me — at Mac, when we were eighteen, during the first snowstorm our freshman year, standing beside a snowman we had built. Didi had taken the photo. I had a copy of the same snapshot hanging in our hallway.

“Hey,” Joshua said, “why don’t you turn the game on? I want to check the score.”

He carried bowls of ramen to the kitchen table. “It’s not the same anymore,” he said. He had been euphoric when the Red Sox had won the World Series in 2004, ending eighty-six years of futility, but when they won again in 2007, it had transformed them from a perennial underdog to just another big-market franchise with a bloated payroll. “The whole Bosox-Yankees agon, the way they’d find a way to lose in the most excruciating fashion, that’s what I really lived for, when I think of it. There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.”

After we ate, we took a walk down Waterborne Road. “Why are you on that side?” I asked.

“To watch out for cars. It’s safer to face the traffic.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, but joined him on the left side of the road.

He was tired. He had just returned on the red-eye from Crescent City, California, a coastal town of four thousand (not counting the three thousand residents of Pelican Bay State Prison) close to the Oregon border. The library there had chosen Upon the Shore for its one-book program, in which the entire town was supposed to read and discuss his novel. Only about two hundred people did, or at least picked up a copy, and fewer than a hundred showed up for Joshua’s reading, but the audience was attentive and appreciative, staying past the appointed hour to ask questions and have him sign their books. A young man lingered in line. “It must be so great to be a published author,” he said, “to get all this adulation.” Joshua smiled at him. What could he tell the young man? That he had published three books, but they had not made him rich or famous, or feel loved or admired? That he knew he was a journeyman destined to go out of print and be forgotten? That he had, in essence, achieved everything he had set out to do, and then had found out it was not the life he had wanted?

“I couldn’t tell him what always happens,” he said to me. “I couldn’t tell him that no matter how well an event goes, without fail I’ll wake up at two, three in the morning obsessing over a comment or a question someone asked, wondering if it was a veiled dig, or about an answer I gave, or about some old lady frowning at me in the front row, and I’ll think to myself, God, I am such an asshole. I hate myself.”

For the past few nights, I had been having trouble sleeping myself. Finnea, Didi’s three (almost four)-year-old daughter, had for weeks been fascinated with scary stories, and she had pleaded for me to make one up for her. “It has to be long, something I’ve never heard before,” she had said, “and it has to be really, really scary!” I had watched the horror channel on cable for inspiration, then, as I tucked her into bed, I told Finnea a story about a haunted house, a demon house with an underground river in which a monster was trapped. Finnea had squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears. “Too scary? Should I stop?” I had asked her. “Keep talking,” she had said. Afterward, it had been I, not Finnea, who had been frightened into waking in the middle of the night.

I thought of relating this to Joshua, describing to him, too, the simple joy of playing Frisbee with Matteo and Wyatt in the dying light of a summer’s day, but I knew he would not be interested, that indeed he would scoff at my sentimentality. It’d be further evidence to him of what my life had come to, how I had sunk into pitiable domesticity.

By the side of the road, he stopped to stretch.

“What is it? Your back?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ve been having spasms,” he said. “I’m taking Vicodin for it. You know what my doctor suggested? Yoga. Could you ever see me doing yoga?”

Before leaving the cottage, I had used the bathroom, and I had been startled by the number of prescription bottles inside Joshua’s medicine cabinet — in addition to the Vicodin: Xanax, Effexor, Diazepam, Ambien, Valium.

“You know,” he said, flexing his stomach forward, “when I was at Yaddo, I walked by an optometrist’s shop in Saratoga Springs. I saw this old Asian couple inside, running the store. I think they were Jessica’s parents. Do you know the name of their shop? I almost went in.”

“I’m not sure what it’s called.”

“Have you heard from her lately?”

“Not for a while.” The last time I had spoken to Jessica was when I’d flown out to California to see my father and sister. Rebecca and her husband, Howard, a Korean American high school teacher, now had two children, and my father was living with them in Pomona. During the beginning of the housing crisis, Rebecca had quit working for the mortgage industry, and was now volunteering for a nonprofit group that assisted homeowners facing foreclosure.

Jessica was in Silver Lake. Her rheumatoid arthritis had gotten worse over the years, and she had had to undergo several surgeries, getting plates and pins and polyethylene implants inserted into her wrists and ankles. When we met for coffee at a café on Hyperion, she showed me her gnarled fingers. “This is the worst part about RA,” she told me, “how ugly my hands have become.” Her feet caused her the most pain, but she was mobile, and her fingers were flexible enough to work. She operated a lucrative private business, making custom dildos and novelty porn clothes for celebrities. Her partner — both professionally and romantically — was Trudy Lun, who had been in L.A. working as a costume designer for the movie industry. Trudy was seven months’ pregnant, inseminated with sperm donated by a (white) friend, and she and Jessica had bought a house together.

“So you’re happy?” I had asked Jessica. I didn’t broach what I really wanted to know. Whether — and how — she had reconciled that she was no longer making art. She wore a simple sundress with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. The tongue stud was gone, as were the eyebrow rings. She wasn’t dyeing her hair anymore. She looked for all the world like a housewife.

“I guess so,” she told me. “But you know, as Kierkegaard once said, happiness is sometimes the greatest hiding place for despair.” One of Joshua’s favorite quotations.

As we went down Waterborne, Joshua pointed out the highbush blueberries and clethras, which he said would become very fragrant later in the summer; the royal and cinnamon ferns; the purple loosestrifes, which were vivid and pretty but terrible invasives. In late spring at night, frogs would come out onto the warm pavement, thousands of them, which would make a casual drive down the road, just to go out for an errand or takeout, a terrorizing experience — a massacre.

We heard a bell ringing in the distance — a church bell, it sounded like. “Hey, remember Weyerhaeuser?” Joshua asked, and revealed to me then that he had been a virgin — not just on-campus — when we were freshmen.

“You fucker,” I said. “I can’t believe you lied to me about that.”

“That’s between us. Have to safeguard the mythography, you know.”

I’ve thought since then, of course, of what else Joshua might have lied to me about — being called a chink at the Sonic Youth concert, perhaps, the chalkboards, the extent to which he knew what was going on at Pink Whistle, maybe even what had happened on the pier in Southie.

We walked farther, and as we rounded a corner, we saw a jogger, a middle-aged Japanese man, coming down the crest of the next hill toward us. “Is that him?” Joshua asked, squinting, and we chuckled.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” he said. “Tell me if this is crazy. I’ve been thinking about Lily Bai. Remember her? The BVIs? In retrospect, I think I should’ve tried harder to make that work. I’ve been thinking of calling her.”

“Lily Bai?”

“You’re right. It’s a dumb idea.”

We returned to the cottage, and after Joshua gave me a book he thought I should read (Stoner by John Williams), as well as a CD (End of Love by Clem Snide), we said our goodbyes beside my car.

“It was a good run, wasn’t it?” he said.

I was confused, thinking he meant the jogger, or maybe our walk on Waterborne.

“Us,” he said. “You, me, and Jessica. The real 3AC.”

“You’re talking like an old man.”

He rubbed his hand over his scalp. “I feel old. You know, next month will be twenty years since we first met. Isn’t that something? How the hell did we get here?”

I hugged him, and he squeezed me tightly. It was sad to behold, Joshua so tired and beaten down, living alone in that depressing little cottage. “Come visit us in North Carolina,” I said.

He laughed. “I can pretty much guarantee that will never happen.” He bent down gingerly and pulled some weeds out from the gravel driveway, then brushed his hands together. “You’ve been a great friend to me, Eric. My best friend,” he said. “But you stopped needing me a long time ago.”

“We’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’ll see you then?”

“I’ll see you then,” Joshua said.

“And the wedding,” I said. “Don’t forget the wedding.”

Didi and I were planning to get married next Memorial Day in Marion, at the O’Briens’ summer home on Buzzards Bay. I was going to invite nearly everyone from the 3AC, for old times’ sake, and, despite everything, I had asked Joshua to be my best man, although he had dithered about it when I phoned him in the spring, saying he couldn’t predict his whereabouts so far in advance, since he would be applying to several artists’ colonies for a residency.

“You’ll be there for sure?” I asked, holding open my car door.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Joshua told me.

We want to think that there’s an inviolable continuity among old friends, a bond that cannot be fissured despite years of lassitude and neglect. We want to believe that there’s truth and solace in our memories, that there’s meaning and purpose to the things that have happened to us. I’m not sure that’s really the case. Youth is about promise. As you approach your forties, it’s about how you’ve come up short of those dreams, and your life becomes what you do with that recognition. Inevitably, you begin to identify your old friends with what you’re trying to discard; you associate them with wreckage.

Joshua was a liar, a narcissist, a naysayer, a bully, and a misogynist; a whiner, misanthrope, and cynic. He was a user. Sometimes I wonder why we tolerated him at all, and for so long. Didi thinks he was a cancer to me, a malignancy to everyone within his crumbling, nihilistic orbit, and I was lucky, as his enabler, not to have been pulled down with him. If not for Joshua, Didi is convinced, we would not have broken up in the first place at Mac. What drove him to kill himself, she says, was realizing that he would never have what I now possess — a life beyond the pursuit of art — because being an artist, a writer, means isolating yourself in a room for hours, days on end, going into the darkest parts of yourself, and really, what sane person would want to do that?

I think she’s wrong, of course. I still respect that sort of sacrifice, for the sake of art. I disagreed with many of Joshua’s choices. Fundamentally I believed in solving how people are more alike than different; he believed in the antithesis. But he stayed constant to his principles to the very end, and he was as loyal a friend as anyone could ever ask for. I can never discount the fact that, for better or worse, he made me into the person I am today.

I can’t justify what he did, resulting, however inadvertently, in the deaths of the man and the little girl (her name was Emma Dunford, and she was almost exactly Finnea’s age). I can’t explain to Didi or anyone else why he did it. How can you explain that it’s just that he was sad, that he’d been sad all his life, and he knew he’d always be sad?

I keep returning to the last conversation I had with him in Sudbury. He was down, but no more than usual in recent years, given more to brooding and self-denigration than braggadocio. Was there something I had missed — a sign? Something meaningful in the way he had said goodbye? Did he know then that it’d be the last time we would see each other?

I ask myself what I could have done differently. If I could have prevented it. If I could have saved him. In hindsight, I think everything — his entire life — had been coalescing toward that moment on the road. He had trapped himself. He had had no other option. He had wanted too much. You see, the problem was, he had been the idealist, not me.

All this I am projecting, of course. I’ll never know for sure. We can’t fully understand what plagues each other’s hearts, much less our own at times. Ultimately even our best friends are unknowable to us.

And it could be, I will allow, that I am trying to acquit myself of responsibility. Jessica implied as much when I called to tell her about the accident. I was inveighing against Joshua, his selfishness, his reckless, last-second deviation into the car’s path instead of gassing himself in his cottage — why couldn’t he have waited? — and she said, “Oh, Eric. You’ve always been so hard on him.”

“Shouldn’t that be flipped around?”

“No,” Jessica said. “You keep using the word pathetic.”

“Never to him.”

“Don’t you think he knew?” she asked. “He was always trying, so desperately, to live up to your expectations. It was agonizing for him. Can’t you see that?”

I couldn’t, and I still can’t — not really. As the years went by, I saw less and less of Joshua, especially after Didi reentered my life. Yet, all that time, maybe even long before then, while I thought Joshua was passing judgment on the choices I was making, had he felt the opposite, forever afraid I might disavow him? Did he believe I was deserting him after years of weathering my scorn — blaming him for things in which I had been, through my actions and inactions, just as culpable?

It’s been three years now. I sit in my kitchen and watch the kids outside, climbing the old mockernut hickory tree in the backyard. Didi’s nearby, cheering them on, vigilant. There’s a pot of kalbi jjim — braised short ribs, my mother’s recipe, Matteo’s favorite — simmering on the stove.

I look at the refrigerator door, festooned with the kids’ drawings and paintings, photos of them with goofy captions. Hanging from the patio trellis, canopied by wisteria, is a bird’s nest that Wyatt made this morning, ingeniously constructed — in minutes — with paper towels, disposable Styrofoam trays, yarn, and buttons. Even now, I know he will be an engineer. Or an artist.

It’s warm today, the sliding glass door open to the wavy heat of summer and the sounds of their laughter. It’s never quiet in this house, someone always around, which I don’t mind — which I’ve come to prefer, actually. I gaze at Wyatt’s bird’s nest rotating in the breeze, starting to wheel a little tumultuously, and I picture Joshua spinning through the air, the car rolling and tumbling, and I finally arrive at what Joshua might have been contemplating on Waterborne, why he had stepped into the car’s path, what he had been hoping would happen: the driver skidding to a stop after hitting him, opening the car door, and running back to where Joshua lay on the road, kneeling down beside him and saying it would be all right, an ambulance was on its way, and maybe squeezing his hand a little, a complete stranger, yet the only person Joshua could turn to, the only person he thought available, who could provide him with, in his last few seconds, a small measure of intimacy, ensuring he wouldn’t die alone.

Not long after the accident, I received an envelope. It was addressed to me in Huron Village in Joshua’s familiar chicken-scratch scrawl. He had misspelled the street name and put down the wrong zip code, transposing the first and second numbers, so the envelope first went to Calverton, Virginia, then was rerouted to Cambridge, then had to be forwarded to me in North Carolina. The original postmark was the Saturday of his death. I let the envelope sit on my desk all afternoon, overcome by what I might find inside. At last, I opened it. All it contained was a utility bill and a check.

I could imagine an accounts receivable clerk at NStar opening the envelope that Joshua must have mailed on the same morning, the clerk unfolding the letter that was within, looking curiously at it for a second, not exactly surprised, since this sort of thing happened practically every day, before tossing it into the recycle bin — whatever it was that Joshua had meant to tell me.