The Collective

5

One day I walked outside, and it was twelve degrees. The weather had turned. Up to that point, I had been thinking it wasn’t too bad in Minnesota, not as dire as everyone had warned. In late August, when I’d arrived in the Twin Cities, it had been hot and humid — disagreeable but not extreme. The only unsettling thing had been the thunderstorms that would trundle through the area in the middle of the night. It had seemed so strange, to be awoken by riotous rumble at two, three a.m., the thunder clapping for hours, instead of during the dewy peak of late afternoon. Once, alarms had blared a tornado warning. (Perhaps constructing a hurricane-proof dormitory had not been a bad idea, after all.)

Yet when the humidity waned, the fall became sunny and pleasant, and although the nights dipped into the low thirties, it was entirely tolerable. I had felt confident the winter wouldn’t bother me. Contrary to people’s assumptions, it got cold in California. I wasn’t a pussy to cold, I’d told myself.

This kind of cold, though, was different. It was bone-penetrating, teeth-shuddering cold. Blood-constricting, testicle-shrinking cold. We began layering. We doubled up on T-shirts and then sweaters. We bought long underwear. The first snow — the only time I’d seen snow beyond a family ski trip to Big Bear Mountain — we joyously ran outside and, per Mac tradition, had a snowball fight across Grand Avenue, played pushball, and feasted on a lamb roast. What we didn’t know then was that it would not rise above thirty-two degrees for the duration of the winter, and that this snow would never melt, it’d remain on the ground, getting packed down and frozen and dirtied as it accumulated, until April. Everywhere there was ice, and everywhere white smoke billowed, from vents and chimneys and manholes and tailpipes. We breathed out plumes as we shivered across the quad, bundled in parkas, scarves, hats, gloves, and boots, and then peeled off the clothes — mounds heaped upon the backs of chairs and on the floors — once ensconced in the blister of heated rooms. With the first subzero day, we stopped venturing outside if it could be helped. We retreated into hibernation.

Mainly I stayed in bed — with Didi. She had a roommate and I didn’t, so we spent most of the time in my room in Dupre. To reduce the number of trips back and forth, Didi brought over some of her clothes and toiletries, then her books, boom box, and CDs, and in short order my closet and bureau were subsumed by her things. She essentially moved in with me. The RA’s attitude toward this was surprisingly lax. Students were written up for lighting candles or incense, and if you were caught with alcohol you had to pour it out, but no one seemed to care about new arrangements of cohabitation. You could sleep with anyone you wanted, it seemed, as long as you didn’t burn the place down.

Didi and I were constrained only by my tiny bed. I began to suspect that, for the original designers, putting the twin mattresses on stilts had not been so much a space-saving measure as an underhanded way of discouraging conjugal overnights. It was a wonder neither one of us ever rolled over and plummeted to the floor as we slept. Not that we slept that much, although Didi did everything possible to make the bunk bed comfortable. She replaced my bedding with hers — four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, feather-down pillows and a mattress pad, a comforter and a duvet. It was the softest, plushiest material I had ever lain on. I had never thought about thread counts before; it was possible I had never heard of the term. My mother had always bought generic sheets on sale for us at Sears.

Nonetheless, Didi and I did not take advantage of the luxurious linen, at least for slumber. We were constantly mucking it up, fucking. If we weren’t in the midst of carnality, we were in the faux-tristesse of post-carnality, moonily staring at each other, limbs and fingers entwined. Occasionally we’d catnap, then one would rouse the other and we’d begin anew. We spent more hours naked than clothed. When we were forced to get out of bed and stand, we’d nearly keel, verticality having become so unfamiliar to us. We lost weight, unable to make it to the dining hall for meals, and we were forever woozy from hunger and dehydration. We clung to each other as if our lives depended on it.

What dawned on me was that no one had ever described sex properly in literature, the sheer sloppiness of it, the excretions and stickiness and sweat, the pungent smells and tastes, the slurps and smacks and pickled inelegance of daily congress. We soon used up my stockpile of condoms, and decided to go without. We wanted to feel each other, and there was something much more arousing about the perils of relying on me to pull out in time. Didi sometimes would not let me withdraw when I felt I would rupture. “Not yet, not yet,” she’d whisper.

Her poor lovely sheets. We ruined them. We slept on the wet spots, because the bed was too small not to. We couldn’t wash the sheets and duvet often enough, and they were indelibly stained with crusty yellow patches. I would use a towel to wipe the semen off myself, off Didi’s stomach and breasts and back and face, and each day the towels would become stiffer — scruffed and mangy. After a while, I didn’t bother trying to wash them anymore. I threw them away and asked my mother to mail me another set. “Why do you need so many towels?” she asked on the phone. “Is someone stealing them from the bathroom? You need to mark your name on them.”

We tried different positions, making things up as we went along. We became expert at fellatio and cunnilingus (the intricacies of which had previously been an utter mystery to me), gymnastically hanging halfway off the lofted bed.

“Your skin is so smooth,” Didi told me. “You’re practically hairless.” She plucked at my arm with her fingers, unable to gain purchase on a single strand. “I love your body.”

Both of us, quite unintentionally, through our starvation and acrobatics, had acquired washboard abs. I hadn’t appreciated how much of a workout sex could be.

“You don’t realize how beautiful you are yet, do you?” she said.

This was true. No one had ever described me as beautiful, or even good-looking, and I knew that objectively I had not changed in the course of a few months, metamorphosing from middling to handsome. But something in me had changed. I carried myself differently now. I had crossed a line of maturation, stepping from callow to experienced.

Once, as I was entering her from behind, I touched upon the wrong opening. I started to retreat, but Didi said, “Wait. Stay there.”

“Really?” I asked.

She lowered her ass and pressed back into me.

When we were done, I went to the bathroom and washed myself off in the shower. “Was it disgusting?” she asked.

“No.” I didn’t know what I had imagined. Probably the same thing Didi had: my penis excrementally and perhaps permanently browned, flecked with bits of feces. Yet, as much as I’d looked, I hadn’t noticed anything really unusual.

Didi scooted against the wall and lifted the covers as I climbed back into bed. “How did it feel? When you were inside.”

“It was… weird.”

“Didn’t it feel good?”

“It was okay, I guess.” I had been too self-conscious amid the act to derive any enjoyment from it. I had kept thinking to myself, with wonder, We — are — having — anal — sex. “How’d it feel to you?” I asked Didi.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m glad we did it.”

A taboo had been broken, and we were a little awed with ourselves, though we never tried it again. From then on, we stopped at nothing, even making love when she had her period, adding blood to the blotter of her sheets. Our intimacy was freeing and intoxicating. I had never been physically and emotionally so close to anyone. We were at ease, unabashed. We could do or say anything without fear of ridicule or retribution. It didn’t matter what we looked like, if our breath smelled or we farted or had a zit. This was acceptance, I thought. This was love.

We kept going, experimenting, exploring every inch of each other’s body, learning each other’s likes and dislikes. (She liked when I raised her knees to her chest, feeling me deepest that way; I liked when she straddled me and rubbed the folds of her vulva along the underside of my erection before reaching down and sinking onto me; she liked when, as I tongued her clitoris, I inserted a finger and hooked the tip and pressed against the roof of her vaginal canal; she disliked, though, her earlobes being sucked, and I didn’t much care for the insertion of her pinkie into my anus one time.)

Nothing had prepared me for this education — not any of my sister’s women’s magazines that I used to sneak away to read, not the two copies of Playboy and one issue of Penthouse that I had found in my father’s closet. I realized that, before Didi, I had been a complete neophyte. I had known as much about sex, real sex, as I had about thread counts. And yet I wanted to know more. I could not get enough. I wanted to become a great lover.

I didn’t see much of Joshua and Jessica during this period. I let my studies go. I didn’t attend meetings for the school literary magazine or for Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity. Reluctantly I went to my classes — sleepy, unshowered, bowlegged — but all I could think about was getting back into bed, naked again, with Didi.

The four days we spent apart for Thanksgiving, flying to opposite coasts to our respective homes, were interminable. I met her at the airport with flowers, took her back to Dupre, and stripped her down as soon as the door was shut.

“I love you,” I said.

She laughed as I backed her into the room toward a clear space on the floor, waddling with my jeans around my ankles, cock standing acutely upright.

Only three weeks were left in the semester, and there was a rush of activity as we geared toward finals. The first Saturday in December, the school held the annual Winter Ball, a semiformal dance for which you were supposed to show up in your nicest outfit, replicating — sardonically — what you had worn to your prom or homecoming. In high school, I had gone through a preppy phase, and I pulled out my blue blazer, pink button-down oxford shirt, argyle sweater vest, and penny loafers. Didi teased her hair into a poodle perm, adorned with a lacy bow, and donned a taffeta dress with spaghetti straps, white tights, and granny boots. She was, all irony aside, gorgeous. As we made our entrance at the gallery of Olin-Rice, the science building, I was proud of her, of us, of our identity as a couple.

Joshua was sporting a beat-down leather motorcycle jacket, holey jeans, and a Red Sox cap — his usual garb. “I didn’t go to my prom,” he said. “Where the hell have you been? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age, and we live down the fucking hall.”

I nodded toward Didi, who was loading hors d’oeuvres onto two plates for us. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

“Jesus,” Joshua said. “You’re a goner. You’re totally pussy-whipped.”

For the rest of the term, Didi and I had to buckle down, catch up on everything we had neglected. We studied in my room — with our clothes on, for a change. I sped through Dog Soldiers and Going After Cacciato (the author, Tim O’Brien, was a Mac alum), and I wrote a paper on the role of drugs and surrealism as a counter-exposition to colonialism. Didi integrated partial fractions and differentiated logarithms and calculated polynomials. I marveled at our industry, our focus. We were actually studying, getting things done, while sitting in the same room, although all it took was a single glance from either of us to abandon everything for a quickie. But then, miraculously, as if nothing had occurred, we would slip our underwear back up and return to our books.

During exam week, we stayed up all night, cramming for tests. The school held a midnight breakfast for us, with professors and administrators — including the president — in aprons, serving us pancakes, the repast occasionally interrupted by primal screams and the time-honored appearance of students, Joshua among them, streaking nude through the hall.

And then, before I knew it, it was over. I was back home in Mission Viejo, Didi was in Massachusetts, and we would not see each other again for a month.

I moped. It was seventy-two degrees and sunny out, but I stayed in my bedroom, trying to puzzle my way through Gravity’s Rainbow—the first title on the recommended reading list that Joshua had given to me for my vacation. I slept late, watched TV, and hoggishly ate the meals my mother prepared for me (“You’re so skinny!” she had said, horrified, when she met me at John Wayne Airport).

I saw a few friends — high school buddies who had remained in Southern California, attending one of the UC or Cal State schools — but I felt little connection with them anymore and preferred staying home, renting videos of foreign films from Blockbuster and listening to Lou Reed (first on the recommended albums list that Joshua had given to me) on my headphones, occasionally interrupted by my mother as she brought in my folded laundry and asked if I wanted a snack.

I let her pamper me — something I had resisted mightily in high school, something that had, in fact, led to awful rows and appalling cruelty on my part.

My mother, Junie, had been born in 1940 in Korea and had come to the States soon after World War II, when her father, a prominent chiropractor in Seoul, was hired to teach at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He eventually moved the family to L.A., where he set up his first clinic in Koreatown (he would build a chain of them dotting the Los Angeles Basin, yet was lousy as a businessman and was perpetually in debt). My mother grew up in Boyle Heights and attended community college, LACC, then worked as a postal clerk, a job she held until my sister was born.

From then on, her focus was solely on the maintenance of her home and her children, making our lunches and getting us to school every weekday, fastidiously cleaning the house, gardening, grocery shopping and prepping our dinners, picking us up and ferrying us to various places and activities. My mother’s typical sack lunch for me included two homemade chicken salad sandwiches, sticks of carrots and celery, cookies, potato chips, and an orange. It wasn’t a fancy lunch, not like the elaborate bentos some of my Japanese American classmates clicked open, but it was meticulously prepared, exemplified by the orange. My mother would slice the outer skin so it would open up like the petals of a flower, still connected at the base. She would peel off the inner white membrane of the orange, then put it back — now pristine and tender — into its protective skin. An ordinary piece of fruit turned into an art form.

She tried to spoil us rotten, my father, sister, and me. And how did I repay my mother for her devotion in my teenage years? I snapped at her. I belittled her. I was sarcastic and rude. Unconscionably mean. I yelled at her to stop trying to do everything for me, stop doting on me, stop being so nice to me (“You’re not my maid! Don’t you have any self-respect?!”). I raged when she cleaned my room (“Don’t ever come in here again without my permission!”). I fulminated when she ironed my clothes (“I’ll look like a nerd!”). I was apoplectic when she uniformly bleached my acid-washed jeans (“You’re an idiot!”). Her mere presence, taking a seat beside me on the couch, inquiring how I was doing, was enough to provoke my fury (“Why can’t you leave me alone?! You’re suffocating me!”).

It shames me still, the insufferable way I treated her. She had no career, no intellectual pursuits, few hobbies or interests other than horticulture, her world almost entirely confined to the domestic, to caring for us, and I thought less of my mother for it. I took her completely for granted.

She would die prematurely, when she was just fifty-nine, a month before I turned thirty. In the latter part of her life, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure, but wasn’t good about taking full doses of her medication, disliking the side effects. While she was swimming laps at the local pool, she had a stroke, a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The lifeguards were late pulling her out of the water and couldn’t revive her. Technically she drowned. My father called me with the news from California, incoherent as he wept.

For several years afterward, I could not get one question out of my head. Its arrival — usually when I was in the middle of the most humdrum things, riding the subway, washing the dishes, peeling an orange — would undo me. I was always afraid of breaking down in public. The question was this: What was going through her mind those last few seconds, after the sunburst in her brain, as she was choking facedown in the water, knowing she would likely not survive? Unlike with Joshua’s suicide later, I knew exactly what her last thoughts must have been. I knew she was thinking she would never see her children again, me and Rebecca, she would never see us marry or have children of our own, would never spend another Thanksgiving or Christmas with us, would never be able to hold us and say she loved us, and I knew this must have been unbearably, heartbreakingly sad for her.

I am forty-one years old now. Indeed I did not fully appreciate her until — relatively recently — I got married and had children. In retrospect, it dismays me how little curiosity and empathy I had toward my mother when I was young, how rarely I tried to imagine her inner life, or even acknowledged that she had one, with hopes and disappointments of her own. That image did not come complete for me until the last Christmas our family spent together, in 1999, before she died. I found a bunch of old slides in a closet, and I set up a projector in the den for my parents, Rebecca, and me to view after dinner. They were slides of my mother and father’s wedding and honeymoon. We howled and cried, we were laughing so hard, looking at the antiquated fashions and hairdos, but privately Rebecca and I were impressed by our parents’ youth, how handsome and vibrant they were. Our mother recounted their courtship, and she made fun of my father’s strenuous pursuit of her, but she was plainly delighted by the memory.

My father, Andrew, came, strictly speaking, from peasant stock, and it had apparently taken a herculean effort to convince my mother and her family that he was worthy of her. My grandfather had been among the first wave of Korean immigrants, recruited as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii. Later, he became the manager of a small Brussels sprouts farm in Rosarita Bay, California. My father was the last of three children to be born, but the first to go to college, at UCLA. He met my mother at a social in Koreatown, and thereafter, almost daily, drove the twenty-five miles between campus and Monterey Park on the pretext of mailing a letter or needing stamps, claiming he was, just by chance, in the neighborhood, in order to see my mother at the post office where she worked.

“You sure mail a lot of letters,” she once said. She invariably weighed each envelope and checked the zip code (which, perplexingly, always needed to be corrected) before stamping the postmark, stalling their time together.

“I like writing letters.”

“Pen pals?”

“They’re friends. People I met in my travels.”

“You’ve been to Kalamazoo, Michigan? Weeki Wachee, Florida? Eros, Louisiana?”

He blushed red. He hadn’t intended the double entendre of the last address. He had never been to any of these places, had never journeyed outside of California. He picked the cities randomly from a road atlas and fabricated the names of the recipients and the street addresses. All the envelopes contained blank sheets of paper and were, in due course, returned to sender. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a beautiful country, if you have the time to explore it properly.”

“Lucky man,” she told him.

I’m thankful that, during that first Christmas home from Macalester, I began to thaw toward my mother and initiate a long-overdue détente, although my behavior could hardly have been called angelic. I could still be unforgivably judgmental, condescending, and pissy, and for that, I blamed Didi.

Joshua, in addition to his lists, had given me a calling card number and code, ostensibly to report my impressions of the recommended books and records to him. The number, he told me, was a covert account that was charged to the FBI, which I never verified yet which terrified me for years, thinking I might be arrested retroactively for interstate fraud. However, that December and January I used it with impunity to phone Didi every day, and what distressed me, each time I called, was that she was not as miserable as I was.

“Doesn’t everyone seem like a stranger to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, nothing’s really changed, but we’ve changed. Don’t you see the hypocrisy and futility of everything all of a sudden? Like, it was there all along, but now that we’ve been away, now that our eyes have been opened vis-à-vis what we’ve been studying and discussing, it’s blatantly obvious just how sad and empty everything is, the bourgeois vapidity of everything that surrounds us.” I was cribbing a few of Joshua’s expressions. “Like, the people who used to be our friends — I mean, I get so bored talking to them. They’re going to end up just like their parents—our parents. Do they ever think about anything other than money? There’s this inertial deadness that’s pulling everyone down. I mean, they should all just shoot themselves right now and get it over with. Why even bother? Doesn’t it seem like that to you?”

“Not really.”

“It’s like Pynchon says: entropy reigns supreme.”

“What?”

“It’s the heat-death of culture.”

“Eric,” Didi said, “have you been smoking dope?”

I wished I did have some dope. Didi seemed so happy. Each phone call, there was a bustle of jocularity, gaiety, in the background, people talking and cackling — a party every minute, it seemed. Didi was always distracted, continually interrupted. “What’s going on there?” I’d ask.

“Oh, it’s just my family,” she’d say. She had three sisters and a brother, a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

In contrast, my house in Mission Viejo was marked by an unearthly silence. My father would come home from work in his short-sleeved white dress shirt and clip-on tie, fix himself a bourbon and Sprite, and read the newspaper before the three of us sat down to dinner, during which no one would utter a word. I’d look at my father as he cut into my mother’s chicken cacciatore (her stab at Western food, made with Campbell’s tomato soup, yet admittedly tasty), and I’d try to recall any advice he had ever imparted to me, father-to-son, any statement of profundity or wisdom, even a bad joke, and I’d come up with zilch. After we finished eating, I’d help my mother with the dishes, and then they’d go to the den to watch TV while I went to my bedroom, from which I could hear purls of canned laugh tracks, but never my parents’ own laughter. Not a titter.

Even when my sister visited, the decibel level barely wavered. Rebecca had graduated from Whittier College — Richard Nixon’s alma mater — with a business degree and gotten a job at First Federal Savings & Loan in Hacienda Heights, processing mortgage applications. She was renting a one-bedroom apartment in West Covina and had a Chinese American boyfriend who was in dental school. It was about as dull a life as I could imagine. My father and mother approved of it wholeheartedly.

Parents believe they have such an impact on their children’s lives, yet I knew, from the moment I had set foot on Mac’s campus, that I’d become a different person, unfettered from whatever gravitational influence they had tried to extend. I’d moved beyond them. They only served now as proscriptive examples.

One afternoon, while my mother slipped freshly laundered, neatly folded briefs into my chest of drawers, I asked her, “Why don’t we have any books in the house?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you read to me as a kid?”

“That’s what school is for. Do you want something to eat?”

“How come you never sang any lullabies to me?”

“What?”

“It’s like I was in a coffin of sterility and cultural deprivation, growing up.”

She stared at me, baffled. “Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something.”

I drove to Laguna Beach and walked up the pathway bordering the ocean to Heisler Park. It was a weekday, but there were plenty of people about, playing volleyball, basketball, jogging, rollerblading. I passed by a group of twenty or so adults of various ages, sitting in a circle on the grass, and I caught a snippet of what was being said. Only in California would they hold, outside like this beside a beach, in full view and earshot of the public, an AA meeting.

What I mainly noticed, though, and what made me ache, were all the couples. They seemed to be everywhere, cuddling on benches, spooning on towels, strolling with arms encircling each other, all smiling goofily, brazenly in love. They repulsed me. I despised them, because I knew now the full range of things that couples did behind closed doors, and I was beginning to suspect that Didi might be doing those things with someone else. I wondered if she had lied to me that first night in my dorm room: perhaps she had had another date after all.

She did not love me — not like I loved her. How else to explain the fact that she did not seem to miss me one iota, that more and more she wasn’t home in Chestnut Hill when she said she would be, and then did not return my messages right away?

“Where were you tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, we went to see a movie in Cleveland Circle.”

“Where?” I wasn’t familiar with the geography of Massachusetts. As far as I knew, she could have flown to Ohio for the day.

“Nearby. On the edge of BC,” she said, not clarifying anything for me.

“How far away is Chestnut Hill from Cambridge?”

“Twenty minutes driving, forever on the T. Why?”

It was much closer than I had thought, not a distant suburb. “You could go visit Joshua. His parents’ house is near Harvard Square.”

“Why would I want to visit Joshua? He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” I said, although Joshua had never expressed anything but indifference or disdain for her.

“What would be the point?” Didi asked. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything.”

I didn’t know what the point would be, exactly. I supposed I was desperate for something to ground her, connect her, to me again. She seemed so removed from me.

“I called twice tonight,” I said. “Didn’t your mother give you the messages?”

“I was going to call you back tomorrow,” she said. “I’m beat.”

“Did you go somewhere after the movie?”

“Hey,” Didi said abruptly, “I was wondering, where were you born? I’ve never asked you. Were you born in Korea?”

“What?” The question befuddled me. “No. I was born here, in Mission Viejo. At Sisters of St. Joseph.”

“Do you speak Korean or English at home?” she asked.

“English,” I said, even more flummoxed. “I don’t know Korean. I thought I told you.” I had explained to her that I was a sansei, third generation. I had assumed she understood. All this time, had she been thinking of me as a fobby, an immigrant fresh off the boat? Was that how she saw me?

“What about your parents and sister?” Didi continued. “Do they speak to each other in Korean?”

“Why are you asking me these things all of a sudden?”

“No reason. I was just wondering.”

“Did someone in your family ask?”

“No, not really. Well, maybe the subject came up.”

“When you told them I’m your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know if I used the word boyfriend,” she said.

“Why not?”

“They’d pester me endlessly!”

“So what? They’ve got to know what’s going on — I call you every day.”

“You don’t know my family. They’re always in my business. They never leave me alone. Nothing’s ever private. I can’t ever get a moment’s peace around here. You have no idea what it’s like.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you that much. From what I can tell, you’ve been having fun, a lot of fun, being back home.”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” She yawned. “What time is it? It’s late. That movie sucked. We should have walked out halfway.”

“Who’d you go with?”

“Abby and Michael.” Her younger sister and brother.

“Just you guys?”

“We met some people there.”

“Yeah? Who?” I asked, noting the original omission.

“Nina and Sean. Friends from Milton.”

“Is Sean an old boyfriend?”

“Sean? Sean Maguire?” She laughed. “No.”

“He’s not the guy you lost your virginity to?”

She laughed again. “That’s so screwy to even suggest. So to speak. Naw, Sean’s like a cousin to me. That was Kurt, at music camp in Lake Winnipesaukee. He was from Montpelier. I don’t know where the hell he is now. Oh, my God, for a moment I forgot his last name.”

“Sean never had a thing for you?”

“Pamplin.”

“What?”

“That was his last name. Kurt Pamplin. I wonder what ever became of him. He was a really hot guitarist. I bet he’s up in Burlington, in a band or something, playing at Nectar’s. That’s where Phish got their start, you know. They went to UVM. God, I could go for an order of their gravy fries right now. If you ever go to Burlington, you have to go to Nectar’s and get their gravy fries. But you have to get them from the little window outside and eat them standing on the sidewalk. And you have to be drunk, and it has to be, like, two a.m. and wicked cold out. If you eat them inside, it’s not the same thing.”

I did not want to hear about Kurt the hot guitarist, or the band Fish, or the club Nectar’s and the culinary delights of eating their fries al fresco. “Tell me about Sean,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Where’s he go to school?”

“Princeton.”

The fucker. “Have you been hanging out with him a lot?”

“My mom’s best friends with his mom. He’s like my brother.”

First a cousin, now a brother. “I bet he’s always had a thing for you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Did you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

“I told him I’ve been seeing someone, yeah.”

“ ‘Someone.’ Not anything more definitive than that, huh? Why won’t you tell people about me?”

“I just explained.”

“Are you ashamed of me?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

“Why do you want to keep me secret, then?” For the first time, I thought there might be something to Joshua’s lemon-sucker theory.

“I’m really tired,” Didi said. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

We didn’t talk about it, though. She kept skirting the topic, and our conversations devolved into prickles of irritation the rest of the vacation.

Nevertheless, when I got back to St. Paul at the end of January, I had hopes we could somehow go back to where we’d left off at the end of the fall semester.

I met Didi at the airport, flowers in hand, reenacting our reunion after Thanksgiving. She looked wonderful. Gone were the pallor and dark circles and emaciation from finals week. She radiated health — well rested and well fed. I had a surprise planned for her: I had bought new sheets for us, exquisitely soft, with a thread count of four hundred and fifty. But Didi demurred when I tried to take her to my dorm room.

“I have a yeast infection,” she told me.

“A what?”

“The doctor said maybe it has something to do with my sugar levels. I’m not feeling that great. You mind if I sleep in my own room tonight?”

I was certain now that she had been cheating on me. Yeast infections were from sex. Too much sex. Not for nothing was it called the honeymoon syndrome.

The next morning, as I knew she would, Didi broke up with me.

“It’s Sean, isn’t it? You’ve been fucking him.”

“Sean has nothing to do with this,” she said, packing the belongings she had stored in my room.

“That’s not a denial.”

“I haven’t been fucking him, all right? I haven’t been fucking anyone. This is what I mean. I can’t breathe around you. I feel suffocated by you. You’re always all over me. All we ever do is have sex. Have you noticed we never talk about anything? I can’t remember a single conversation we’ve ever had. We don’t have anything in common.”

“You never loved me, did you?” I said.

“This is what I mean. All this talk about love! For God’s sake, we’re eighteen! Why couldn’t we have just enjoyed ourselves and, you know, been casual about it? Why’d you have to get so serious and obsessive? You want too much. You wrecked it.”

“You were just slumming.”

“What?”

In the liberal protectorate of Mac, she had felt uninhibited, free, but once she went home, she had woken up to our outward differences, and had lost her nerve. She had begun to envision my life on the opposite coast, and had been terrorized by the specter of a bunch of strange Orientals sitting on the floor in hanbok, eating live octopus and hot chili peppers, speaking in unintelligible barks and yips. “People like you,” I said, “when it gets down to it, you’ll always stick to your own kind.”

“What are you talking about? What’s that even mean?”

“It was all a lark to you. A little walk on the yellow side. You used me.”

“If anything, Eric,” she said, “we used each other.”

I brooded and cursed and cried in my room in Dupre, alone, the entire weekend, and then went down the hallway to Joshua’s room.

I walked in without knocking and sat down on his battered beanbag chair. There was detritus all over the floor: books, clothes, CDs, magazines, squashed cigarette boxes, food wrappers, an old guitar missing several strings. A red bandanna was draped over a lamp, batiks and posters of Sartre and Iggy Pop were tacked to the walls, and a black surfboard, inlaid with the prism design from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, hung down from the ceiling, held aloft by a fishnet. “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes was playing on his stereo.

For reasons unknown, Joshua was wearing a green Bavarian alpine hat with a tassel and feather and puffing on a big, curved calabash tobacco pipe. He was hunched over his desk, gluing together an arched, three-foot-long bridge, made wholly of toothpicks.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are catenary trusses,” he said. “Check this out.” He propped up the bridge so it spanned his file cabinet and desk, then, to a middle strut, he hooked a rope that was tied to a cinder block. Suspending the heavy, slowly rotating block, the bridge did not give. It did not bend. “You believe that?” Joshua asked, admiring his handiwork. “Fucking toothpicks.”

“You were right about Sourdough,” I told him. “I should have listened to you.”

He nodded. “I’ve missed you, bro.”