The Collective

9

That first month, with just the three of us in the house, was idyllic. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, the master and two smaller ones that had once been home offices for the Meers. Joshua couldn’t bear to sleep in his parents’ old room, although he said one of us was welcome to it. Jessica and I didn’t feel it’d be proper, either, and moved futons into the two smaller rooms, while Joshua encamped in the converted attic upstairs, an expansive, sunny haven with dormers and skylights and its own bathroom.

Jessica was hired as a waitress at Upstairs at the Pudding. She also got a daytime gig proofreading at the law firm Gaston & Snow downtown. She would look for a third job — her student loans were quadruple what I owed — but none of this employment would start for a few weeks, so she had much of August at her leisure, time to relax and work on her art.

Serendipity visited me, too. Palaver’s managing editor, a feminist poet who had never gotten along with Paviromo, quit without notice, and he asked me to take over her slot. The salary was shit, and still I wouldn’t have benefits, but it was a full-time job, allowing me to take a leave from teaching freshman comp at Walden College.

For once, we could all take a breather. We went to the Kendall Square Cinema and Brattle Theatre to watch indie and foreign films, to Jillian’s to play pool, to Jae’s for pad thai and the Forest Café for mole poblano, to Redbones for ribs and the Burren for Guinness, to Hollywood Express to rent DVDs, to the Harvard Book Store and Wordsworth to browse books, to Tower Records, Newbury Comics, and Looney Tunes to scope out CDs.

Joshua’s musical tastes now leaned toward Fugazi, Outkast, Massive Attack, Beck, and Marilyn Manson, but he was obsessed at the moment with Jeff Buckley’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a double-disc set of unfinished songs. He played it incessantly. Whenever the opening chords for “The Sky Is a Landfill” wafted down from the attic, Jessica would groan, “God, why does he have to keep playing that thing over and over? It’s driving me fucking insane.”

It was a strange album, at times soulful, bluesy, psychedelic, and incoherent, filled with weird, discordant riffs, Buckley’s falsetto spooky and haunting, all the more so knowing he had died after recording the demos. Joshua was convinced that Buckley had committed suicide.

“It was an accident,” I told him.

“He goes for a dip wearing jeans and Doc Martens?”

The story was that Buckley, frustrated with the production of his second album in New York, had fled to Memphis and cloistered himself in a cabin with just a mattress, a four-track, and his guitars. He had quit drinking and smoking and was working nonstop. He had just completed writing all the songs for My Sweetheart the Drunk when, enigmatically, he took an evening swim in the Wolf River Harbor, fully clothed. He was last seen floating away on his back, singing Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” at the top of his lungs. The official cause of death was listed as an accidental drowning, the theory being that he had been pulled into the Mississippi by an undertow created by a passing tugboat. Joshua didn’t buy it.

“He’d finished the album. That’s what he’d set out to accomplish, and he was done. He didn’t have any more reason to live. Writing the songs, not releasing them, was his raison d’être.”

When we were at Mac, Joshua had once taken us to the Washington Avenue Bridge, from which John Berryman had jumped. Jessica had asked why he’d done it, and Joshua had said, “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” I had thought Joshua was making a general declaration about existence, but it was a line from Berryman’s book Dream Songs. “Who knows why he did it,” he told us. “Most people inclined to kill themselves don’t out of cowardice. That’s why William Carlos Williams said the perfect man of action is the suicide.”

That summer on Walker Street, Joshua’s other obsession was with Haruki Murakami. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle had just come out in paperback. Previously he hadn’t been much of a fan of Murakami’s — too lightweight and gimmicky, too many pop culture references and cyberpunk sleights of hand — but this novel was a monumental breakthrough, he believed, right up there with Blood Meridian and The Remains of the Day. (Joshua had photos of McCarthy and Ishiguro on his bulletin board, along with Kafka, Jim Morrison, and Thích Quang Đuc, the Buddhist monk who had been famously photographed in the moment of self-immolation on the streets of Saigon, reportedly not moving a muscle or making a sound as he charred and shriveled.)

Joshua had heard Murakami was living in Cambridge, somewhere between Central and Inman Squares, while filling a titular post as a writer-in-residence at Tufts, and Joshua spent several days crisscrossing the neighborhood, trying to find the pumpkin-colored house that Murakami was reportedly renting. He read interviews in which Murakami said he rose at five a.m. and wrote for six hours and then went running, read for a bit, listened to some jazz, and was in bed by ten p.m. He kept to this routine without variation, Murakami said, because the repetition induced a deeper state of mind, a form of mesmerism.

So Joshua, formerly a sedentary, inveterate night owl, decided to change his schedule and start running himself, and he enlisted me to train him. I had continued running after Mac, doing the loop nearly every day on the Esplanade between the Museum of Science and the Mass Ave bridge when I’d lived on Marlborough Street.

We bought shoes for Joshua at Marathon Sports. He had in mind two things: first, to emulate Murakami’s work ethic, helping him wrap up a draft of his novel, and second, to possibly spot Murakami along the Charles River, his preferred route, and befriend him, perhaps become running buddies with him, do the Boston Marathon together.

I thought I’d start Joshua off with an easy jog down JFK Street to the Eliot Bridge, but Joshua — a chain-smoker since high school — was sweating and hyperventilating after a mere quarter mile.

“You’re going to have to quit smoking,” I told him.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, bent over, hands on his knees.

“And eat better.” At the moment the only meal he was making for himself was a fried egg and bologna sandwich on Wonder bread, slathered with mayonnaise and splotched with soy sauce. He considered himself a gourmand, yet could subsist on the worst junk imaginable.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

Maybe his dietary habits never improved much, but in time he did become a diligent runner. It was always he who would drag me out on cold or rainy weekends. He would never miss a day. It was one of the few things that gave him peace, he would tell me.

He never ended up meeting Murakami. We would soon learn that he had left Cambridge three years earlier, in 1995, compelled to return to Japan after the earthquake in Kobe and the sarin-gas attack in Tokyo. Yet before we knew that, Joshua would look ahead expectantly as he puffed along the Charles, and whenever he saw a middle-aged Asian man approaching us, Joshua would say, “Is that him?” It became a private joke between us. In the years to follow, anytime we saw an Asian man with a broad forehead, sunken cheeks, and short bangs, one of us would say, “Is that him?”

Jessica had stopped running quite a while before then, her joints beginning to bother her. She had become an Ashtanga Vinyasa devotee, and she was going to Baron Baptiste’s Power Yoga studio in Porter Square. I accompanied her for the first time one night in mid-August.

The class was for all levels, and it was first-come, first-served, cash only, ten dollars a head. A line of people waited on the sidewalk for the door to open. What struck me immediately upon entering the studio was the heat — sweltering and oppressive, the thermostat intentionally set at ninety degrees, hotter than it was outside. “Baron calls it healing heat,” Jessica told me as we filed in.

The place was bare-bones: no dressing rooms, showers, or lockers. Everyone — mostly young women, mixed with a few post-hippie graybeards — began stripping off their T-shirts and shorts and piling them against the walls and in the corners. I was astonished by how beautiful their bodies were, Jessica’s included.

I had seen her over the years — she’d sometimes take the train or bus up from Rhode Island or New York to visit us when Joshua was in town — but she had not ventured out of Provincetown at all during her fellowship. In the intervening year, she had cut off her hair, not much longer than mine now, and it was spiky and highlighted with burgundy streaks. She had acquired an eyebrow ring and a tongue stud, and she favored clothes in the cross-genres of Goth/punk/grunge. Zippered corset tops, cargo pants, skater shoes, a Mao cap with a red star. She had also gotten tattooed — not with 3AC, but with a large green feather, a peacock quill, that plumed up the inside of her right forearm, and also, to my regret, a tramp stamp of barbed-wire twists that defaced her lower back.

But her body — good Lord, how she had transformed her body. In her sports bra and skintight spandex shorts, she was lithe, sinewy, and buffed. So were most of the other women, and as they packed into the room and began warming up in front of me with sun salutations and downward dogs, I was afforded close-up views of curved, supple ramps of ass and distinctly delineated furrows of ungulate. I thought it impossible I’d be able to make it through the ninety-minute class without embarrassing myself with an erection.

I needn’t have been concerned. This was not yoga as I had imagined it. There were no smoldering sticks of incense or Tibetan tingsha cymbals to guide us into oneness, no Sanskrit chants or quiet moments of sitting meditation to harmonize our pranas. This was an unadulterated, ball-busting workout. This was boot camp, absolute hell on earth.

The instructor, Kenta, was Japanese American, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, loose pants, and a bandanna. He was not an imposing man — short, and even, it seemed, a little pudgy. He walked with a strut and spoke with a nasal voice that betrayed a faint metro lisp. But he led the class through a series of torturous stretches and lunges and contortions. Cobra pose, warrior pose, I couldn’t keep up with the poses, couldn’t flex or twist the way everyone else did. Soon I was out of breath, in pain, and sweating. Really sweating. I had never sweated so much in my life. With the heat turned up and the doors and windows sealed, with all the straining bodies so close together, the temperature must have been over a hundred. It was a sauna, a convection oven.

“Superglue your nips to your kneecaps,” Kenta ordered the class.

Sweat dripped onto the floor and was puddling — not just from me, from my mat neighbors, too.

“Don’t let fear interfere,” Kenta said. “You might feel like you’re struggling, but just transport yourself into the eye of the storm. Now sweep up and inhale.”

Sweat from my neighbors hit the backs of my legs, the wall mirror, the ceiling.

“You feel that decompression?” Kenta said. “It’s all about letting go. Now rotate.”

Sweat from my neighbors flew through the air and splattered my face.

“Awesome,” Kenta said. “This is warm molasses. Love your body. Don’t push. Just flow.”

I had to pause repeatedly to rest. I’d drop down into child pose, kneeling pathetically, and then rise and try to follow along, grunting and squealing. I lost my balance several times and fell over, almost instigating a dominoic catastrophe.

“I thought you were in shape from running,” Jessica said when the class ended.

“Some of those poses were inhumane.”

I stumbled through the door, into the relief of the cool night air. “Your wrists don’t hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed her modifying her poses or using any of the foam blocks or apparatuses.

“No. Yoga seems to help, actually.”

“I don’t know if I can walk home. Let’s take a cab.”

“It’s less than a mile. Come on.”

We stopped at the White Hen on Mass Ave so I could buy a jug of Gatorade. “Is Kenta gay?” I asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“He seems gay.”

“He’s married and has two kids. He used to be a professional kickboxer. Before this, he was a trainer for the Celtics. Have you become homophobic?”

“Of course not.”

“Homophobia’s always a sign of latent homosexuality.”

“I’m not homophobic, and I’m not gay. I was just asking,” I said. “Slow down. My legs are killing me.”

“I love the feeling after class,” Jessica said. “It feels like I’ve just had incredible, hot, sweaty, slippery sex.”

Sex. Sex with Jessica — hot, sweaty, slippery, or any other variety. I had been imagining it quite frequently in the two weeks we’d become housemates, in even closer proximity now than we had been on the fourth floor of Dupre. “Do you ever talk to Loki?” I asked.

“Loki? Not in years.”

From Skidmore, Loki Somerset had gone to Yale for a combined PhD in film studies and East Asian languages and literatures. RISD was only two hours up 95 from New Haven, so they had seen a lot of each other and had even begun talking about marriage. But then Loki spent a summer in Beijing and fell in love with a Chinese woman (“I guess I wasn’t authentic enough for him,” Jessica told me). Last she’d heard, he had gone back to China for a postdoc at the Beijing Film Academy.

“Have you been seeing anyone?” I asked as we crossed Linnaean Street.

“No, not really, nothing serious.”

This was her patented answer, invariably circumspect about the particulars. I didn’t really know anything about her romantic life in the last four years, whereas, if prompted, I was unfailingly forthcoming with her.

“Is it that you’re not looking for anything serious?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been going through a lot of shit, and people are always trying to analyze me, saying it’s because of Loki or what happened with my parents, or bottom-line I’m a cold heartless bitch, or that I’ll only go out with people who are so fucked up or unsuitable or unavailable, it guarantees it won’t work out, which must be secretly what I want, but you know what? Fuck all that. I just want to be alone right now. What’s so wrong with wanting to be alone?”

“Because being alone frightens people.”

“Does it frighten you?”

“A little,” I admitted.

“That could be your downfall as a writer,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“To produce art, great art, you’ve got to be willing to alienate people and suffer the consequences.”

I wanted to see what she had been working on in Provincetown, and the next day she led me into the basement of the house, where she had stacked her canvases against the foundation wall and covered them with tarps.

She had changed mediums again. At Mac, she had expanded on her elaborate ink drawings, then had started adding watercolor to them, then had gone back to representational painting, mostly hyperrealistic portraits. She entered RISD with painting as her discipline, only to become interested in doing small-scale sculpture — not a true departure, rather a redefinition of the pen-and-inks, with the same kind of intricacy and exactitude. Joshua and I drove down to Providence for her thesis exhibition, and what had fascinated us were her table sculptures. She had made them out of architectural model materials: styrene sheets, basswoods, open-cell foam, and chipboard. One sculpture, called Wushu, was shaped like the Pentagon, an ordinary replica, it appeared, except the concentric polygons were made up of miniature pairs of Nike shoes. Another, called Yawn, was a one-hundred-Taiwan-dollar bill, only, if you looked closer, you could see that the bill consisted of infinitesimal logos for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the like. All of this was rendered with the utmost specificity, down to the swoosh and laces on the shoes, and Jessica had done it all by hand, using craft knives and fine saws, files, sandpaper, and glue.

But she had started paying a price for such precision. Her hands began to hurt. Her fingers tingled and numbed, her wrists locked up on her, she couldn’t grip a knife or a brush with any vigor, and she couldn’t sleep at night, she was in such torment. She had developed carpal tunnel syndrome. She had hoped it might be temporary, but it persisted, so she began trying every conceivable remedy. She slept in wrist braces and propped her arms on pillows. She took anti-inflammatories. She stretched and massaged her forearms and wrapped them in gauze. She applied ice packs and rolled Baoding balls. She dipped her hands into baths of hot paraffin wax. She saw an acupuncturist and a chiropractor. Finally she paid out-of-pocket for cortisone injections.

“I don’t know how you can function at all, much less do yoga and art,” I said in the basement.

“They don’t hurt all the time,” she told me. “I notice it most when I’m drawing or carving, or when I’m trying to sleep. I might need to get the surgery, but I’m afraid it’ll make things worse — relieve the pain at the expense of agility. I can’t afford it, anyway, without health insurance.”

“I’ll lend you the money if you want.”

“You don’t have any money.”

“You could borrow it from Joshua.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but that’s something I’d be loath to do. I’d rather not owe anything to anyone, especially Joshua.”

“Why especially him?”

Joshua was magnanimous with his money, overly generous, really, always offering to pay for dinner or drinks when we went out. True, we’d already had some issues at the house. He pilfered our food and toilet paper and detergent without asking and didn’t replace them. He left dishes and crumbs everywhere. He relied on us to mop and sweep, take out the trash, scrub the toilets. When we complained, he would smile and say, “Listen, you know I’m not going to change.”

“He uses people,” Jessica told me. “Don’t you know that by now?” She pulled the tarps off the paintings and leaned them against the wall one by one.

This was something completely different. Gone was her fetish for minute detail. The paintings were abstract, a series of heavily textured acrylics. The paint was thickly and haphazardly applied in dozens of layers, and the colors were almost all dark — blacks, blues, browns, some purples, with a few wispy swirls of white, yellow, and green, a dab of red. They all portrayed a stick figure in what appeared to be a forest, the figure brushed in ghostly smears, as if it were disappearing, evaporating. The paintings were luminous, with a three-dimensionality that was technically cunning, yet, looking at them, I felt uncomfortable — very disturbed, actually.

“These are…,” I started to say, but couldn’t finish.

“Weird,” she said. “I know.”

“They’re stunning. They’re like nothing you’ve ever done. They’re — I don’t know how to describe it — unruly.”

“I like that. ‘Unruly.’ That’s what I was trying to do, let everything go.”

The stick figures were based on ancient pictographs for the Chinese calligraphy character —woman. In its earliest forms, the character was drawn as if a woman were bent or kneeling, her arms lowered and crossed, in a show of meekness and subservience. The titles for the paintings were words that combined nüˇ as a radical to form other characters: jiaˉn (traitor), yaˉo (witch), nú (slave), biaˇo (whore).

“What’s the series itself called?” I asked.

“The Suicide Project.”

“I’m a little worried about you. Is this a reflection of your present mood?”

She laughed. “I’m fine.”

“Are you going to keep working in this vein? I think you should. I think you’ve found your medium.”

“I’m not sure. I might try doing some installations.”

“What kind of installations?”

“Mixed media. Maybe found objects. I have to come up with a proposal soon. I’m applying to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition.”

She had been in discussions, too, about being included in group shows at the Creiger-Dane Gallery in Boston and the DNA Gallery in Provincetown. I had to confess, I was jealous of her — jealous of the palpability and immediacy of her talent.

Between paintings and sculptures, Jessica churned out watercolors, collages, crosshatched charcoals, ink washes, linear perspectives with mechanical pencils and rulers. She was always doing something, a myriad of exercises. I loved her impromptu drawings the most. She would grab a napkin or a paper towel or the back of an envelope and a felt-tip or a stub of graphite, whatever was within reach, and dash off a quick sketch — little still lifes, figures, portraits. She drew one of me once as I was chopping an onion, and somehow she captured the essence of my movements with a casual scattering of lines, a touch of shading. It took her all of four minutes to complete. These drawings and studies, they were effortless for Jessica, a pleasure (something I never felt when trying to write), but they were mere doodles to her. She might pin them up on the walls of her bedroom for a while, but eventually she would toss them. I would sometimes pick them out of the trash to preserve (I still have a portfolio of the discards in my garage). “Can you believe she’s throwing these away?” I’d ask Joshua, and we’d look at the drawings and marvel at Jessica’s dexterity, the splendor of her skills. Of the three of us, Joshua and I believed Jessica had the best chance of making it. Anyone could see right away that she had an immense gift. It wasn’t nearly as obvious or tangible for writers.

In college, Joshua and I had each made a vow to publish our first books before we hit thirty. We were twenty-eight now. It was still a distinct possibility for him, tapping away up there in the attic. For me, the chances were dubious. I wasn’t writing at the moment, just occasionally tinkering with revisions of old stories. The fact was, I hadn’t written anything new since grad school. I blamed adjunct teaching and Palaver for waylaying me, but they were poor excuses. There were no excuses, Joshua always said. If you want to write, you write. You find the time. You make the time.

I spent most of my time with Jessica. We cleaned up the backyard, which was small but quite pretty, with a Japanese maple, dogwood, and black tupelo. Jessica and I pruned the trees and shrubs, mowed and edged the grass, and weeded, tilled, and composted areas along the deck and fence, where we planted perennials and bulbs.

We shopped for groceries together, took walks, went to museums. For hours, we would sit in Café Pamplona or the Algiers or the Someday, Jessica with a sketchpad, me with a book. At each opportunity, I’d hover close to her, casually touch her arm or back, sit so our bodies adjoined. And, despite the torment, I kept accompanying her to Baptiste Power Yoga.

One night, after we returned home from another brutal session, I walked out of my room with a towel around my waist, thinking Jessica had already finished with the shower. But when I opened the door to the bathroom (the lock didn’t quite function), she was still in there, spiking her hair with pomade, and she was naked. Her skin was slick with water, and her body was everything I had always imagined it would be — lissome, toned, beautiful. There was one thing, though, that I had never imagined. She had no pubic hair — shaved or waxed off.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t think you really are,” she said, glancing down at my towel, which was tented. “We need to talk.” She took me into her bedroom and shut the door.

For one thrilling second, I thought she might seduce me. But then, as she put on her bathrobe, Jessica said, “I can’t keep having you stalking and puppying after me all the time. It’s draining. It’s exhausting, actually.” The opening chords to Jeff Buckley’s “Yard of Blonde Girls” drifted down from the attic. “Christ, not again.”

She sat down on her futon and motioned for me to follow suit. Clumsily holding my towel together, I squatted down on the foot of the futon, several feet away from her. I was embarrassed and glum, my hard-on beginning to dissipate. I knew a lecture was in the offing, one that would irrevocably puncture all the daydreams and hopes I had harbored for years.

“I thought we were over this,” she said. “I thought we’d moved past this. It can’t go on, Eric. If we’re going to be living here together, it has to stop.”

“I know,” I said.

She tore a frayed thread from the hem of her bathrobe. It was the same white silk bathrobe she had worn in Dupre, accented with flowers and branches, now faded, threadbare, and tattered. How many times had I stared at the folds and outlines and knolls of that robe, and fantasized about what was underneath? How many times had I dreamt of running my hand over her bare skin, down the runnel between her spine muscles and over the small of her back, reaching that delectable cleft and progressing over her ass?

“Sometimes,” Jessica said, “I think the only reason you want to be with me is because you can’t fuck Joshua.”

“What?”

“Your connection to him is much more real, honest, than to me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I told her, perplexed. “I don’t love Joshua.”

“You idealize me,” she said. “You don’t even know me. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me very much.”

“I’ve known you for ten years, Jessica.” I looked at the small mole on the side of her neck, and I thought of when she’d told me that, as a child, she used to rub the mole over and over, trying to expunge it.

“We’ve been friends,” she said, “but we’ve become different people. Or at least I have. Really what’s kept your glorification of me alive is the idea of conquest, but you don’t actually want to achieve it. You’re in it for the longing and the yearning. The culmination of it, having a relationship with me, wouldn’t really interest you. So let’s just get this over with, once and for all.”

“Okay,” I said, expecting she would now make me promise to cease and desist.

“Let’s just fuck,” she said.

“What?”

“Let’s just do it once and get it over with.”

“Are you insane?” I said. “Just like that?”

“Why not? Do you need more foreplay? More courting and romancing?” She slid her fingers down the lapels of her robe, unveiling the inner halves of her breasts, her stomach, the mound above her pubic bone. “From what I’ve seen, men don’t need a lot of foreplay. We’ll just have sex this one time and satisfy your curiosity, and then maybe we’ll be able to move on. It won’t mean anything.”

This was a cruel trick, I thought. She was taunting me. “This is crazy.”

“I’ll admit, there have been times I’ve been curious myself. This will be good for us. We’ll feel stupid afterwards, and it’ll be awkward for a while, but then we’ll be fine. I don’t suppose it’d do any good to say we shouldn’t tell Joshua.”

“Stop,” I said.

“Stop?”

“Can you cover yourself up? I can’t talk to you this way.”

She tied her robe together. “You’re going to deny me now,” she said, “after all those years of hangdogging? You’re going to pass up free pussy? There are no strings here, Charlie.”

“But don’t you see?” I said. “I want there to be strings. I want this to mean something. Jessica, I’ve been in love with you from the moment I saw you.”

“Okay, this was a terrible idea,” she said. “Idiotic.”

“You’ve been curious at times. Haven’t you ever felt more than that for me?”

“I’ve always seen you as a friend.”

“You just said we’re not even that, really.”

She scooted to the edge of the futon and put her feet on the floor and stared at them. She needed to cut her toenails. “I’m sorry, Eric,” she said. “I don’t feel anything for you. Not in the way you want.”

“Why can’t we try and see? Maybe it could work out between us.”

“I really don’t think it could.”

I went to my room. The next day, we felt stupid, and it was awkward, and it didn’t seem at all like things would ever be fine between us. Even Joshua noticed it. At the kitchen counter, he watched us avoiding each other, then asked me, “What’s up with you two?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you finally crack the walnut, pogo her pachinko?”

“No. We had an argument.”

“About what?”

“You.”

“What about me?”

“She said you’re a user,” I told him. “She said you’ll take advantage of anyone or anything if the opportunity presents itself. She said you don’t give a fuck about anyone except yourself.”

“Huh,” Joshua said. “That’s hurtful. Probably all true, but hurtful nonetheless. She really said all that?”

“Yes,” I told him, and then regretted it.

I was full of regrets. I should have taken Jessica up on her provocative if misguided offer, because, regardless of what she’d said, if she had been attracted to me enough in that one spontaneous moment to fuck me, her feelings were malleable, and had the potential to become larger and more substantive, given time and familiarity. This is not to say I thought my powers of lovemaking would have made her swoon, but I believed that if we had gone ahead, it would have been more than a flyby. I think eventually I would have won her over. Why had I turned her down? What kind of a limp-dick wusswank was I? I wanted to say it had all been a mistake. I wanted to tell Jessica that I had changed my mind.

Cautiously, I worked to get back in her good graces, trying to act as relaxed and nonchalant as I could around her, trying to make her trust me again. As she was coming down the stairs and I was going up a few days later, I said, “Listen, we’re all right, aren’t we?”

“Sure,” she said. “I am if you are.”

“Let’s forget about it, then, okay?”

“Okay.”

My plan was rather pedestrian. I was hoping to go out with Jessica one night, get her a little tipsy, and, once home, trundle up to the second floor with her, and into her bedroom. My chance came at the end of the week, when Jessica invited Joshua and me to tag along with her to an opening in the South End, a special group exhibition featuring Asian American artists called Transmigrations. “I think you guys should come,” she said. “It’s an important show.”

Joshua, normally so opposed to going across the river, offered to drive us in his parents’ old car, a blue Peugeot 306. The show was at Mills Gallery in the Boston Center for the Arts, and by the time we found a spot to park on the street, it was in full swing, filled with more Asian Americans than I had ever seen in one room in Boston. And these were no ordinary Asians. They were young, hip, good-looking, fashionable.

“Can you believe this?” I said to Joshua.

“Where the hell have all these people been hiding?”

The art was a mishmash. There was a pair of videos projected onto a wall, side by side, the one on the right showing white people on a city sidewalk sampling a slice of honeydew melon, the one of the left showing, in synchronicity, the same white people eating a piece of bitter melon — an Asian staple. On the right, the faces expressed pleasure. On the left, they winced, they scrunched, they gagged, they spit the melon out onto a napkin.

There were steel boxes stacked on the floor that resembled the balconies of an apartment building, with miniature pieces of laundry hanging from lines. There were two wigs on Styrofoam stands of faceless heads with elongated necks. One wig was blond, the hair gathered in a tight bun, secured by lacquered chopsticks. The other wig was Oriental black, the hair in the same tight bun, but secured this time by a sterling silver fork and knife set from Tiffany’s.

There was a series of large-format color portraits of Asian women in various nail salons, all from the vantage point of the photographer getting a pedicure from them (I saw Jessica lingering in front of the photos, no doubt thinking about the years her mother had had to work as a manicurist in Flushing). There was another set of portraits, this one of human skulls, evoking the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. The skulls were embedded in a white wall of the gallery itself. The artist had cut out pieces of the drywall with a keyhole saw, distressed the edges, then reinserted them with glue so they protruded out toward the viewer. It seemed the wall was bulging and cracking with rows and rows of hollow socketed bone, made even eerier by the holes for the eyes, noses, and mouths exposing the dark recesses behind the wall, punctuated in places by splintered studs of wood.

In the middle of the gallery was a performance piece. Two men, dressed as peasant farmers with coolie hats and their pants rolled up, stood in a shallow twenty-by-fifteen-foot pool of mud and water, planting rice seedlings. They worked methodically, staying bent over for the duration of the opening. Every so often, a woman in silk pajamas and sandals, carrying a bamboo yoke over her shoulder with two baskets, came out and replenished the men’s supply of seedlings. All three were silent, solemn. A sign said the audience was welcome to participate — a tub of clean water, a stack of neatly folded towels, and a stool awaited the intrepid — but no one dared.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the performance piece, and none of the art, excluding the skulls, had the visceral brilliance of Jessica’s paintings, but for me the show still radiated an invigorating buzz — just the idea of it, the esprit de corps.

Jessica knew some people there — a couple of classmates from RISD and a Chinese American woman named Esther Xing who had been a fellow with her at the Fine Arts Work Center. “Esther’s a fiction writer,” Jessica said as she introduced us, then left to corral someone else across the gallery.

“I think I read a story of yours in Bamboo Ridge,” Esther told Joshua.

“Yeah?”

“I thought it was groovy,” she said.

He chuckled, bemused by the turn of phrase, but was pleased. “That was an excerpt from my novel, Upon the Shore.”

“Have you finished it?”

“Almost. What are you working on?”

“A collection.”

“Eric is, too.”

“Oh, yeah? How’s it coming?”

“Good,” I said. “Pretty good.”

“Have you had stories from it published anywhere?”

“No.”

“You were in that venerable Minnesotan journal, Chanter,” Joshua said.

I couldn’t decide whether he was trying to be facetious or helpful. “I don’t send my stuff out much,” I told her. “What about you?”

“I had a thingie in Salamander and a few other small places.”

Instinctively, I did not like Esther Xing. I wasn’t certain why. She hadn’t uttered a single unpleasantry, yet she came off as snooty and disagreeable. It might have been that I had yet to see her smile or do anything other than glower. Moreover, I found her ugly. She was short, and, though not overweight, her body was shapeless and disproportioned, her arms and legs too stubby for her torso, her head seemingly enormous. She had a choppy pageboy and no makeup, her features bland and flat. She wore a quirky outfit that was not at all becoming — a black halter dress over another dress, a gray sweater jumper, and white leggings and black platform boots.

After the show, we had been planning to have dinner together, but Joshua started chatting up Tina Nguyen, the Vietnamese American artist who had done the skulls, and Jimmy Fung, the Australian/Hong Kong transplant who had assembled the wigs, and Joshua told me, “Hey, I’m thinking of going with this crew to the Franklin Café. Want to join?”

“You go on ahead,” I said. “Jessica and I want to go to the DeLux.”

The DeLux was a tiny neighborhood restaurant on the corner of Chandler and Clarendon, with maybe just ten tables and a small bar, but it had a kitschy, retro-cool vibe — dimly lit and smoky, the music running from Louis Armstrong and Sinatra to Astrud Gilberto and Petula Clark. The food was exceptional yet cheap, no entrée over ten dollars. While everything else in the South End had become chic-gentrified, the DeLux had remained a hole in the wall — my favorite hangout when I’d lived in the Back Bay. After hearing me talk it up, Jessica had been eager to try the place. And now, with Joshua gone, it would almost be as if we were on a date.

She invited Esther Xing.

“Does she have to come?” I asked.

“You don’t like her?”

“I don’t, actually.”

“You just need to get to know her,” Jessica said. “She comes off as dippy at first, but she’s actually whip-sharp — like, Joshua-sharp. You should ask to see one of her stories. She’s really good. I think you’d be surprised.”

The DeLux was jammed. We squeezed to the end of the narrow room, left our name with the lone waitress for a table, and then waited near the little Christmas tree that twinkled on top of the bar (a year-round decoration).

“This is cool!” Jessica yelled to Esther. They gazed around at the Elvis shrine and the collage of posters, postcards, and record album covers stapled to the pine-paneled walls. The crowd was boisterous, a mix of local artists, yuppies, and bike messengers. Brenda Lee was blasting from the stereo. “I love this place!” Jessica said to Esther.

I bought a round of Schlitz tallboys, as well as shots of Bushmills Black label, for the three of us. I was aggravated. I should have been the one receiving credit for introducing Jessica to the DeLux, not Esther, who heretofore had never set foot in the bar.

We were seated at a table, a two-top with an extra chair, and the waitress eventually returned to collect our orders: the salmon potato cakes and a bowl of chili for me, the grilled cheese with arugula pesto and sweet date spread for Jessica.

Esther was torn between the quesadillas with black beans and the vegetable pie made with puff pastry. “They both sound so yummy. I just can’t decide,” she said. “This is too much responsibility.” Defeated, she leaned her head on Jessica’s shoulder.

“How about the quesadillas?” Jessica said.

“Perfect,” the waitress said, turning to walk away.

“Wait!” Esther said. “I think — oh, maybe the vegetable pie might be better?”

As we drank and chitchatted, Esther divulged that, after spending the summer in Italy, she had just arrived in Cambridge for a Bunting fellowship — a very prestigious yearlong appointment at Radcliffe College that came with a hefty stipend, an office at the Bunting Institute, and a cut-rate apartment on Brattle Street.

“I thought you needed to publish a book to get a Bunting,” I said.

“You do, usually,” she said, “although you need just three stories in magazines to apply.”

“Did you know someone?” I asked, and Jessica knocked her knee against mine under the table.

The girls talked about the show, concurring that Tina Nguyen’s wall cuts of the skulls and Annie Yoshikawa’s pedicure photographs had been the best of the lot. But Esther had qualms about the fundamental premise with which the exhibition had been organized.

“What’s Transmigrations supposed to mean, anyway?” she asked, abruptly shifting into highbrow mode. “Okay, it’s a play on transoceanic and immigration, I get it. But that’s precisely what I object to. None of those artists are immigrants, yet in order to have a show with Asian Americans, there always has to be a rubric, a theme about crossing borders or bridging the diaspora or whatnot, even if it has nothing to do with the works or the artists themselves. It might as well have been called We’re All Oriental Fuckers.”

It sounded exactly like something Joshua would posit. I agreed with the overall sentiment, but didn’t want to say that I did. “I happen to have liked the show,” I told her. “It felt good, seeing so many Asian American artists in one place.”

“The camaraderie’s great, I agree, but it was such a hodgepodge of stuff, a free-for-all. Like Annie Yoshikawa, I’d love for her to be included someday in a show with Rineke Dijkstra and Sharon Lockhart — okay, maybe that’s a stretch, she’s got a long way to go before she reaches that level, but you know what I mean — included not because she’s Japanese American, but because she’s an interesting photographer, period.”

I didn’t know who Rineke Dijkstra and Sharon Lockhart were.

“What do you think of all of this?” she asked Jessica. “You’re not saying anything.”

“I don’t have an opinion, because a part of me agrees with both of you.”

I had lost the thread myself. It was one of those pointless arguments you enter without any strong formulations, but then, by dint of the opening parry, find yourself heatedly defending a position in which you don’t really believe, yet from which you can no longer withdraw. “Where’d you go to school?” I asked. “Did you get an MFA somewhere?”

“Yeah, Cornell,” Esther said. “You went to Walden College, right? How was it? I’ve heard some bad things.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve heard it called a trust-fund MFA. They’ll let anyone in if you have the money.”

This was basically true, but still, it was an appallingly rude thing to say.

“Eric just got promoted to managing editor of Palaver,” Jessica said.

“Ah, Palaver,” Esther said. “Evan Paviromo’s written me a few notes about my stories. What’s his deal? He seems kind of full of himself.”

“He’s a terrific editor. He was great as a teacher, too,” I lied.

“But Palaver is, like, so old school, you know. It’s kind of become stale and moribund, don’t you think?”

Would this woman stop at nothing? Never mind that her assessment had some validity.

“Although I will say,” Esther then told me, “if I had to be absolutely honest, that I’d kill to be in it,” and finally she smiled, exposing a mouthful of bucked teeth. “Do you have much to do with the editorial process?”

At last I could claim a measure of superiority. Esther Xing was as susceptible as any young writer to sycophancy. “Some,” I said, lying for the second time in succession. She waited. I knew she was hoping I’d ask to read one of her stories. I let her wait. I went to the men’s room to take a leak.

When I returned to the table, our food had arrived, each dinner plate different, like the flatware that did not match. Esther tasted her risotto (she had nixed the vegetable pie after the order had gone to the kitchen), and her face wilted.

“What’s wrong now?” Jessica asked.

“Miss? Miss?” Esther said to the waitress. “I don’t want to come off as a pest, I know you hate me already, but could you ask the kitchen to reheat this a little?”

“I don’t know this person,” I told the waitress.

We managed to get through the rest of the meal without incident, although the girls talked interminably about people they had known at the Fine Arts Work Center, shutting me out. As Esther left for the women’s bathroom, Jessica picked up Esther’s pack of American Spirits.

“You don’t smoke,” I said.

“I do once in a while now.”

“Since when?”

“There wasn’t much to do in Ptown. Yoga saved me from complete dissolution.”

“Your friend’s a piece of work,” I said.

“Sometimes she doesn’t think before she speaks — a lot like someone else we know. I wish you two would get along. We’ve become really close.”

I didn’t gather how close until dessert. Jessica and Esther ordered a chocolate-chip pound cake to share, and, forking bites, they burbled and purred about its scrumptiousness. At one point, Jessica had a smidge of whipped cream on the corner of her mouth, and Esther delicately scooped the cream up with her index finger and deposited it into her own mouth. Smiling moronically, they stared at each other — finger still hooked between Esther’s lips — and held the pose for a second too long, in which all was revealed. I didn’t know how I had missed it, Esther always hovering close to Jessica, touching her arm and back, sitting so their bodies adjoined. They were lovers — former, current, soon to be, or all three.

Jessica didn’t come home that night. After the DeLux, she and Esther ditched me to go dancing at Club Café, a gay bar.

In the morning, Joshua and I sat at the kitchen counter, eating cereal. “No shit?” he said.

“Did you know?” I asked him.

“I had no idea.”

Right then, Jessica opened the back door and walked through the kitchen, bedraggled, as if she had not slept a wink. “Hey,” she mumbled, and headed upstairs.

Joshua and I were caught midspoon, suspended in the wake of her chimera.

“I guess we’ll need to think of something else for you,” Joshua said, and slurped up the rest of the milk in his bowl.