Don Lee - The Collective

His side of the river, I had to admit, had its allure, namely Wu Chon in Somerville’s Union Square, where we could get our fill of Korean food — bibimbap, kalbi, and jaeyuk bokkeum — and the Porter Square Exchange, which housed the Japanese market Kotobukiya and a handful of small Japanese restaurants that were practically stalls, yet offered cheap and tasty comfort foods.

Our favorite was Cafe Mami, where we usually sat at the counter, and it was there that Joshua dispensed his latest harangue about my dating habits.

“All these years, it’s like you haven’t learned a thing,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”

“I could say the same about you. You’ve never had much luck with the ladies.”

“By choice, man. It’s by choice.”

During college, Joshua hadn’t had a single real girlfriend, and the same held true when he was in Iowa and the Bay Area, a fling here and there, never lasting longer than three weeks, at the end of which the women invariably left him. He was lazy, not interested in expending the least amount of effort required to sustain a relationship. He couldn’t be bothered with courtship, with sharing, with being complimentary or attentive or supportive or sensitive. He couldn’t care less about flowers or romantic gestures or fun excursions. He didn’t want to go out on dates or hold dinner parties. He didn’t want to talk to the women on the phone (why would he, when he had me?). He didn’t really want to spend any time with them. He needed to protect his time, for writing and mulling, for reading and pondering. He needed space and sovereignty, not be tied down with commitments and compromises. He needed women only to slake the periodic biological urge. In other words, the last thing he wanted was a girlfriend or a wife, though he could do with a mistress or a married lover, but, barring that, he would settle for a prostitute, which he still employed on occasion.

He had solicited one not too long ago from the escort pages of the Boston Phoenix . “You know, you should watch out,” I said. “They’re cracking down on johns these days.”

“It’s so stupid and hypocritical. Everyone pays for sex in one form or another, marriage being the most common and extortionate. It’s all about money. All these laws are designed to oppress women so they can’t take control of the industry and get their fair share. It’s so parochial and anti-feminist, not to mention inconvenient for people like me.”

“Somehow I’ve never thought of you as a feminist.”

“I am, at heart. I’m an equal-opportunity asshole. But you,” Joshua said, “you’d never hire a hooker, would you? Because you believe the concept of love is real and attainable and not merely a myth perpetrated by religious demagogues and prohibitionists and crypto-fascist conglomerates.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then, if you have to go down this path of felo-de-se , at least do one thing.”

“What?”

“Look around you.”

From our perch in Cafe Mami, I looked at all the young, attractive Asian women in the Porter Square Exchange, milling through the passageway to eat at the sushi bar or the ramen place, to buy bubble tea from Tapicha or pastries from Japonaise or cosmetics from the Shiseido kiosk.

“Why can’t you just go out with a nice Asian girl?” Joshua asked me.

I had tried. My parents had set me up on a few blind dates, daughters of friends or friends of friends from their Garden Grove church, Korean girls purportedly seeking a nice Korean boy from a good Korean family. By and large, they turned out to be typical KAPs — Korean American Princesses. Stuck up, superficial, very high-maintenance. They had salon hairdos, wore heavy makeup, and dressed to the nines in designer clothes, especially prizing Gucci and Louis Vuitton handbags. They expected me to take them to dinner at Biba or Blue Ginger, Mistral or Clio, Maison Robert or No. 9 Park, then go clubbing at Aria, followed by a nightcap at Sonsie, and pay for everything. They were disappointed I didn’t wear a suit — Prada, Armani, Joseph Abboud, or at least Zegna. They were bewildered I didn’t own a car — a Benz or a Beemer, or at least a Lexus. They were flummoxed most of all by my career.

“I’m working for Palaver magazine and teaching adjunct at Walden right now.”

“Is there much money in that?”

“No, but I’m trying to become a writer.”

“What kind of writer?”

“Fiction. Short stories. Novels.”

“Is there much money in that?”

“No. Not in the type of books I’m interested in writing.”

“But — I don’t get it — what would be the point, then?”

Joshua chewed on his tonkatsu curry, and I munched on my yaki donburi, thinly sliced beef with onions and bean sprouts served over rice.

“Those girls were civilians,” he said. “What can you expect from civilians? Of any color? They can’t understand. They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it’s depressing, whereas we’re fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain. You need to go out with an artist. An Asian artist.”

“You find me a nice Asian artist,” I said, “and I will.”

Later that summer, Joshua told me to come over to his house, he had a little surprise for me. He opened the front door and introduced me to his new roommate — Jessica Tsai.

I broke the lease to my basement apartment in the Back Bay and moved into the house on Walker Street.

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.