Don Lee - The Collective

“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?”