Don Lee - The Collective

“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.