Don Lee - The Collective

“And ignore the Asian American experience altogether?”

“What is ‘the Asian American experience’?” Esther asked. “There’s no single way all Asians think and behave and feel. This panethnic identity as Asian Americans is an unmitigated fraud. Besides, everything’s not all about race, you know. It’s more often about class. That’s much more interesting and insidious.”

“You don’t believe in anything we’re doing, then?” I said. “We’re marginalizing ourselves, and the 3AC should disband?”

“No, I like that we have a common bond, artificial as it is,” Esther said. “I just don’t want to be told that being Asian is all that I’m about, it’s all I can explore in my fiction. That’s racist, when you get down to it.”

I looked at the others in the living room. Ali and Rick were nodding, seemingly in concord with Esther’s last statement, and I knew I would not win this argument, especially since, as in the DeLux the first time I met her, a part of me was beginning to side with Esther. “Okay, then, let’s talk about what else is missing in the story,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s.”

“There’s not much,” I told her, “except, oh, I don’t know, maybe wit, and tension, and originality. Maybe one or two other things.”

She smirked at me. “You’re kind of a sexist pig, aren’t you?”

“Now you’re talking, sister.”

“You are a sexist pig,” Jessica told me the next morning in the kitchen. “Esther’s story was good. More than good. Superb. Ad-mit it.”

“I can’t. Not unless you want me to lie.” I opened the cupboard. “Did you eat all the cereal?” I asked Joshua, who winced apologetically.

“You’re being pissy and argumentative out of spite,” Jessica said. “When did you become such a dick? You used to be a nice guy.”

“It was a perfectly reasonable discussion. She has issues being Asian.”

“I thought you were more mature than this. I thought you were above such pettiness.”

“She should be kicked out of the 3AC,” Joshua said. He had come back to Cambridge after New Year’s Day and, as promised, had promptly broken up with Lily, but the BVIs had not, as he’d wished, rekindled his creative juices. He had been moping around the house all month, rarely changing out of his manga pajamas.

“Have you read her story?” Jessica asked him.

“No. Why should I?”

“It’s brilliant,” Jessica said. “If anyone deserves to be in the Fiction Discoveries issue, she does.”

“That was her whole motivation behind the writers’ group, wasn’t it?” I said. “It was just an underhanded way to get me to read her work, hoping I’d push it onto Paviromo for the issue. She was looking for a shortcut. It was so transparent to me.”

“She suggested the group before the issue was even conceived .”

“You know what I mean,” I told her. “She’s a user.”

Jessica looked at Joshua, then at me, grasping that a confidence had been broken.

“Let’s banish her,” Joshua said.

In truth, it didn’t matter all that much to me — my quarrel with Esther. At that moment, the only thing I really cared about was Mirielle, and how I might win her back.

I didn’t hear from her for almost a week after Great Camanoe, during which, despite my anger and disappointment, I missed her terribly. Finally I gave in and called, asking to see her. She granted me lunch. We met at the Harvest Restaurant in the Square, where I learned that, in the short time since our return, she had decisively moved on with her life. She had quit her job waitressing at Casablanca, found another one as a medical secretary at Mount Auburn Hospital, and would be applying to MFA programs in poetry for the fall.

“Wow,” I said, feeling defeated by the developments.

“I know!” she said.

“Where are you thinking of applying to?”

All the schools she mentioned were outside Massachusetts. “Maybe you should apply to Walden as a backup,” I told her.

“I’ve had enough of Walden,” she said. “I want a clean slate.”

We went to Wordsworth so she could buy some GRE prep books. Her grades at Walden College had been spotty, and she would need to do well on the test.

“I could help you study,” I told her.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “Would you have a problem seeing me platonically?”

“It’d be painful,” I admitted.

“This always happens. Can’t you be my friend?”

I told her that I would try. “Are you going to date other people?” I asked. “Have you?”

“No. It’s important for me to be alone right now.”

“I won’t be a nuisance to you, then,” I said. “I’m not going to call you. When you want to see me or talk, you should call.”

She ended up calling me every day, sometimes three or four times a day. Almost immediately, her newfound confidence collapsed. After her first day of work at Mount Auburn Hospital, she was barely able to mumble hello on the phone before bursting into tears. I went over to her apartment. She was slumped in her nightgown, her face swollen from crying. “It’s so demeaning being a secretary again,” she said.

Then, during a thunderstorm, she came home to find water pouring from the windowsills, the ceiling leaking in rills, ruining her bed and sheets and her clothes on the garment rack. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked.

We saw each other just as much as before the BVIs. We went to movies and poetry readings. We dropped by Toscanini’s for ice cream. We drilled through GRE practice tests. I quit drinking again and accompanied her to the occasional meeting. I made her coffee and French toast and omelettes. And we kept spending nights together in my bed, though chastely.

The denial of sex now, however, instead of pushing me further away, oddly intensified my feelings for her. I waited for Mirielle to swing around. At times, it seemed she was coming back to me, but then she would abruptly retreat.

“You never call me,” she said. “I always call you.”

I reminded her about our arrangement, about not being a pest.

“That’s silly,” she said. “We talk every day, anyway. What are you doing Saturday?”

“Seeing you,” I said.

One morning, she told me she was going to the Square to hang out, maybe see a movie. “You want company?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I think we’re spending too much time together.”

“Why’d you call me, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You sound strange.”

Later that day, she appeared at the house, depressed by the movie, throughout which the characters had drunk copious amounts of wine. She had gone to a meeting afterward at the First Parish Unitarian Church but had left early, restless.

I had been about to head out. A jazz combo, Phil Sudo and Annie Yoshikawa’s friends, was playing at the Lizard Lounge, and I was supposed to meet them there. Yet Mirielle didn’t want to go. She had not attended any of the 3AC potlucks since December, and she felt it would be awkward seeing Phil and Annie again with me.

“It’d be like we’re double-dating,” she said. “As if we’re a couple.”

“God forbid anyone would think we’re a couple.”

“We’re not a couple.”

“We’re more of a couple than most people who have sex.”

“We have a weird relationship,” she conceded.

Another night, she was limp with exhaustion — she had been on her feet all day.