Don Lee - The Collective

Joshua led me into the cottage and gave me a tour, which took all of two minutes, the place was so small. The living/dining room was one space, with a Pullman kitchen. It was sweltering inside from the July heat and humidity, and Joshua had two fans blowing at full speed, billowing the yellowed sheets he’d tacked to the windows. The furniture included with the rent — what little there was of it — was old. A round pedestal café table and two ladder-back chairs with rush seats, the pine painted white; a Windsor rocker; a little sofa with plaid cushions. I laughed seeing the stacks of books bungee-corded against the wall — my bygone trick at Palaver ’s office.

“I thought you kept some of the furniture from the house,” I said, remembering the beautiful bentwood tables, rugs, and Eames chair. “Don’t you have stuff in storage?”

“I sold it all.”

The bathroom was tiny, just a narrow shower stall, commode, and corner sink. In the bedroom was an oak four-poster, but the mattress was twin-sized, making it appear to be a child’s. The cottage felt even more dismal with its low ceilings, and everything needed a thorough scrubbing, the smell of mildew pungent.

“I see you’re the same old neat freak,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I can’t really be bothered with cleaning. Besides, I never invite anyone in here.”

“You haven’t met anyone lately?”

He shook his head. “I had a little flirtation at Yaddo last month, but it didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know, women don’t seem to like me anymore. It’s better this way, living like a monk. I’m writing up a storm. Haven’t you heard? Celibacy induces a form of mesmerism.”

I stared at the fluffs of dust on the floor, wavering with the fans’ currents. “You ought to hire a housecleaner, anyway. Purely for sanitary reasons.”

“You want something to eat?” Joshua asked. “I could make us some ramen.”

While he boiled water and cut up some bologna, he asked, “You’ve been reading about these credit default swaps? It’s a total racket, a Ponzi scheme sanctioned by regulators and the government that allowed these companies to get unconscionably rich. It’s not an industry I’d be proud of, you know.”

“Fidelity’s not Bear Stearns,” I told him. “It’s a different type of financial institution.”

“You’ll never write a book now for sure,” he said. “This was your fatal flaw — you always had a backup plan. You were never willing to risk everything.”

I couldn’t argue with this assessment.

“Jesus,” he said, “fucking Sourdough. And North Carolina. Prime-time redneckville.” He tore up some cabbage leaves. “You want an egg in your ramen?”

He had quit smoking a year ago and had put on a good fifteen pounds since I’d last seen him in the fall. He was wearing Nikes, madras shorts, and a T-shirt that read FOOD SHARK, MARFA that was too tight on him. Running religiously did not offset his awful diet. His hair had thinned further and was going a little gray, and he now kept it at a buzz cut with clippers. We were the same age, thirty-eight, but he looked much older.

I walked over to his desk and glanced at the piles of papers, files, Moleskines, manila envelopes, and index cards surrounding his laptop. Several articles and books on 9/11 and Asian immigrants in Manhattan rested on top of the laser printer that was on the floor.

“How’s the novel coming along?” I asked.

“Really, really well,” he said. “I think I’ll be done with a draft by the end of the year. It’s going to be a doorstopper.”

I noticed a framed photograph on the wood-paneled wall above his desk. It was of the three of us — Joshua, Jessica, and me — at Mac, when we were eighteen, during the first snowstorm our freshman year, standing beside a snowman we had built. Didi had taken the photo. I had a copy of the same snapshot hanging in our hallway.

“Hey,” Joshua said, “why don’t you turn the game on? I want to check the score.”

He carried bowls of ramen to the kitchen table. “It’s not the same anymore,” he said. He had been euphoric when the Red Sox had won the World Series in 2004, ending eighty-six years of futility, but when they won again in 2007, it had transformed them from a perennial underdog to just another big-market franchise with a bloated payroll. “The whole Bosox-Yankees agon, the way they’d find a way to lose in the most excruciating fashion, that’s what I really lived for, when I think of it. There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.”

After we ate, we took a walk down Waterborne Road. “Why are you on that side?” I asked.

“To watch out for cars. It’s safer to face the traffic.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, but joined him on the left side of the road.

He was tired. He had just returned on the red-eye from Crescent City, California, a coastal town of four thousand (not counting the three thousand residents of Pelican Bay State Prison) close to the Oregon border. The library there had chosen Upon the Shore for its one-book program, in which the entire town was supposed to read and discuss his novel. Only about two hundred people did, or at least picked up a copy, and fewer than a hundred showed up for Joshua’s reading, but the audience was attentive and appreciative, staying past the appointed hour to ask questions and have him sign their books. A young man lingered in line. “It must be so great to be a published author,” he said, “to get all this adulation.” Joshua smiled at him. What could he tell the young man? That he had published three books, but they had not made him rich or famous, or feel loved or admired? That he knew he was a journeyman destined to go out of print and be forgotten? That he had, in essence, achieved everything he had set out to do, and then had found out it was not the life he had wanted?

“I couldn’t tell him what always happens,” he said to me. “I couldn’t tell him that no matter how well an event goes, without fail I’ll wake up at two, three in the morning obsessing over a comment or a question someone asked, wondering if it was a veiled dig, or about an answer I gave, or about some old lady frowning at me in the front row, and I’ll think to myself, God, I am such an asshole. I hate myself.”

For the past few nights, I had been having trouble sleeping myself. Finnea, Didi’s three (almost four)-year-old daughter, had for weeks been fascinated with scary stories, and she had pleaded for me to make one up for her. “It has to be long, something I’ve never heard before,” she had said, “and it has to be really, really scary!” I had watched the horror channel on cable for inspiration, then, as I tucked her into bed, I told Finnea a story about a haunted house, a demon house with an underground river in which a monster was trapped. Finnea had squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears. “Too scary? Should I stop?” I had asked her. “Keep talking,” she had said. Afterward, it had been I, not Finnea, who had been frightened into waking in the middle of the night.

I thought of relating this to Joshua, describing to him, too, the simple joy of playing Frisbee with Matteo and Wyatt in the dying light of a summer’s day, but I knew he would not be interested, that indeed he would scoff at my sentimentality. It’d be further evidence to him of what my life had come to, how I had sunk into pitiable domesticity.

By the side of the road, he stopped to stretch.

“What is it? Your back?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’ve been having spasms,” he said. “I’m taking Vicodin for it. You know what my doctor suggested? Yoga. Could you ever see me doing yoga?”

Before leaving the cottage, I had used the bathroom, and I had been startled by the number of prescription bottles inside Joshua’s medicine cabinet — in addition to the Vicodin: Xanax, Effexor, Diazepam, Ambien, Valium.