Don Lee - The Collective

“Ditto.”

“I wish she’d kept going with her latest paintings. Have you seen the series in the basement?”

“No.”

“They’re my favorite of anything she’s ever produced,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t matter. No one’s ever going to see this show, anyway.” Gallery 57 was small-fry, almost a nonentity, in Boston’s art world.

“It’s pretty wild, though,” Joshua said, “seeing your breakfast burrito up there, isn’t it?”

I rearranged the kalbi on the grill. “When Jessica was making the mold of you, what was she wearing?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he said. “I don’t know. Jeans, a T-shirt. Why?”

“Did she do anything to you?”

“Like what?”

“You didn’t have trouble staying stiff?”

“My piccolo never needs prodding. Yours did?”

“She never, like, handled you? Even when she was checking out your shaving job?”

“She used chopsticks to turn over my dick, which I have to say was a little antiseptic, not to mention ironic and insulting and not very erotic,” he said. “She didn’t use the chopsticks on you? What the fuck happened between you guys?”

“Nothing happened,” I said, and flipped the kalbi. For the moment, no one knew that the penises on the mannequins were casts of Joshua and me, everyone believing they were scrupulously carved sculptures based on dildos.

In the dusk, I looked at the crocuses and daffodils that had bloomed. Glancing up at the pink flowers of the dogwood, I saw the lights on the second floor, in the master bedroom, turning on. Joshua noticed them, too.

“You know, you could invite her down,” I told him. “She doesn’t have to stay in her room all the time. We have a lot of food — more than enough.”

“She doesn’t want to,” he said. “I’ve asked her before, but she’s shy.”

“When there aren’t so many people around, then. She must get bored up there all by herself.”

The other week, after coming home from work, I had slipped into Noklek’s room. On the second-floor landing, I had thought I smelled something burning. I knocked on her door, waited, then entered the master bedroom. She had a hot plate on the bureau. I put my hand over the coil element, and it was still warm. She must have just cooked something. Beside the bureau was a small refrigerator, and in the bathtub there was a dish rack, a freshly washed pot and bowl drying in it. A braided nylon rope stretched across the bathroom, laundry clipped to it. She had few possessions overall — the Buddhas, the framed photographs. On the neatly made bed was the pig piñata that used to hang in Joshua’s attic, which he had named Claudette, in homage to Claude, the pig piñata that Pynchon had owned when he lived in Manhattan Beach, where he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow . Otherwise, there was not much personal in the bedroom, just a stack of celebrity gossip magazines.

“I’ve been thinking—” Joshua said. He picked up a slab of kalbi from the grill with my tongs and bit into it. “Ow, that’s hot — of marrying Noklek.”

“What?”

“So she can get a green card. Jimmy told me she’s worried about getting booted out of the country. Her visa’s expired. I’ve been talking to Grace about it,” he said — Grace, the immigration attorney.

“Joshua,” I said, “that is utterly fucking nuts. Did she offer you money? Or something else.”

“I offered.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Nothing,” Joshua said. “My intentions are entirely honorable. I haven’t laid a finger on her. I just feel sorry for the kid. I mean, yeah, there are things to be concerned about, like being financially responsible for her for ten years, like her maybe trying to take me for a ride down the road with a divorce and busting my balls over a settlement. But I’d have her sign a prenup.”

“You realize what the penalty is if you get caught?”

“Up to five years in prison and two hundred fifty thou.”

I had not actually known the penalty. It was more severe than I had assumed. “The INS is always trying to crack down on these sorts of scams,” I said. “You can’t fuck around with shit like this.”

“That’s why we wouldn’t do it right away. We’d wait at least six months. We’d be careful. Even though she’s illegal now, if everything went through, she’d be entitled to residency.”

“She says she wants to do this?”

“We’ve talked about it. She hasn’t said yes for sure yet, and neither have I. I’m gathering facts. Grace told us we need to build evidence of a relationship history — you know, ticket stubs to events and vacation photos and birthday cards, shit like that. I’m thinking we could go to the Virgin Islands together — to St. John this time.”

“What are you looking to get out of this? You’d be risking a hell of a lot just to get laid regularly.”

“I like having her around,” Joshua said. He pinched the kalbi by the ribs and, with his teeth, tore meat off and gnawed on it. “You know a couple of weeks ago she cleaned the entire house top to bottom? She even mowed the lawn.”

“That was for Songkran,” I told him.

“Songkran?”

“New Year’s in Thailand. It’s a ritual, to clean your house. You don’t know anything about her, do you? She’s not as tough as you think. You know her entire family is dead?”

“Jimmy told me.”

“Tell me the circumstances,” I said, as if I were testing him.

“Ferry accident,” he said. “Her parents and little sister were on holiday, and Noklek got left behind with a neighbor because she was sick. The ferryboat captain tried to cut across the path of a chemical tanker, and the ferry got cleaved in half. Eighty-seven people died.”

I thought of the black-and-white head shots, the paper burning and curling in layers of ash.

“She’s an orphan, just like me,” Joshua said. “She’s all alone in the world. You’ll laugh at this, but maybe, I mean, who knows, maybe we’ll even fall in love and it’ll become a real marriage.”

“Don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t fuck with her. She’s a teenager. She’s practically a child. You know you don’t want a real marriage. You want a maid, a concubine. That’s the only reason you’re considering this.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Joshua said. “You know I consider us a family — you, me, Jessica. I would love it if we could live here together forever. Love it. But I know someday you guys will meet someone, maybe even get together with each other finally, and you’ll want to move out and have a place of your own. You’ll be tired of having old Joshua around all the time. Then where will I be? I mean, I know I’m no prize. I know I’m a pain in the ass. I’m demanding and strident, I’m lazy and messy and difficult. Who would have me? No woman in her right mind, that’s for sure. I don’t want to get married, not for real. I don’t want to have kids. All I want to do is write.”

“You might change your mind someday,” I said. “You might fall in love and want a family. There’s always the possibility of that happening.”

“No.”

“I saw you dancing with that little girl at Leon and Cindy’s wedding. You were enrapt.”

“I never told you. I had a vasectomy.”

“You did?”

“Years ago,” Joshua said.

“There’s always adoption,” I said, and saw him flinch in distaste. “Or you might meet a woman with kids.”

“I’m not going to change,” Joshua said. “People don’t change. If there’s one thing I’ve learned by now, it’s that. I’ll never fall in love, because I could never trust that I wouldn’t be abandoned. The only problem, the only noisome little contradictory wrinkle, is I don’t want to be alone. The truth is, the idea of dying alone terrifies me. Remember those journal excerpts by your hero, Cheever, about ending up cold, alone, dishonored, and forgotten? An old man approaching death without a companion? As much as I try to thwart it, I know that’s my fate. That’s why I’d never arrange for a memorial service. I’d be afraid no one would show up.”