Don Lee - The Collective

“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.