Don Lee - The Collective

“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.”