Don Lee - The Collective

“Where? You mean… my pubes?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The same, I guess.”

“I suppose I’ll have to check it out sometime for myself.”

Things like that last statement made me ignore the strong circumstantial case that was building up against Sourdough, the sobriquet becoming more apt by the minute. I told myself I was being paranoid. So what if she was going a little Asian on me, so what if she’d contracted a bit of yellow fever? Maybe all the evidentiary pieces were merely coincidental, or just gestures of attraction, misguided as they were. She was simply trying to tell me she liked me. Anyway, I was being unduly influenced by our increasingly avid make-out sessions, by all the smooching, sucking, and licking, the groping, stroking, and grinding — they were turning me Japanese, making my testicularity bluer than origami.

Finally, one night in my dorm room, after hours of spit-swapping on the floor, Didi whispered, “Do you have a condom?”

Did I have a condom? Was she kidding? Did I have a condom? I had at least eight dozen condoms. I had condoms of every shape, color, size, material, texture, thickness, and flavor. I had condoms that were ribbed and studded, that tickled and tingled, that were lubed and edible, that heated up and glowed in the dark. For a month, I had been hoarding condoms — buying variety packs at the drugstore, palming them from the bowl in the health clinic, grabbing multiple free handouts during Safe Sex Week.

“I think I might have one,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s do it.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, then regretted asking. I’d had a feeling that tonight might be the night, and had even leaked the premonition to Joshua, yet everything felt as if it were tottering in suspension. I didn’t dare do anything that might make Didi change her mind.

“Turn off the lights,” she said.

I did.

“Take off your clothes and get into bed.”

I did.

“Put on the condom.”

I did.

I waited. I lay on my tiny bed on its stilts, sheathed by the condom, and I waited. “Didi?”

She was still standing below me. “Wait, what time is it?” she asked.

“The time?”

“It’s eleven-seventeen! I totally forgot. I have another date!” she said, and chortled weirdly. “I’m late!” Then she ran out the door.

What the hell?

I glanced down at my sensi-dotted, ultra-invigro, xtra-stimulation condom (orange, mint). Didi was not a virgin, but she was as inexperienced as I was and somewhat priggish — the residual Catholic schoolgirl. Or so I had assumed. I had never imagined she might be dating someone else simultaneously. If anything, I had worried she might be attaching too much significance to our dalliances. But now I had to recalibrate. Had I been completely mistaken about her? Was Didi, in fact, a closet hussy?

I snapped off the condom. I was miffed and angry, but eventually I fell asleep, only to be awoken at around one in the morning by a knock on the door.

In the hallway was Didi, holding a pint of Ben & Jerry’s White Russian ice cream and a bottle of vodka. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lied. I didn’t have another date. I don’t know why I said that. I freaked out a little. Okay, a lot. Do you like White Russians? Do you have a couple of glasses and a spoon and maybe another condom?”

All was forgiven.

An hour later, I dragged Didi out of my room, both of us buzzed on vodka and post-copulatory euphoria. It was relatively warm outside still. Thick clouds stretched out across the sky, peeks of a few stars in between. I’d often wondered why the sky seemed so low in the Midwest, as if the firmament were balefully compressing against the plains, and then had learned it wasn’t the sky that was lower, it was the earth that was higher — the elevation was almost a thousand feet here, flat as everything was — and for once, instead of feeling landlocked and claustrophobic, I perceived myself as being closer to the heavens. I was young. I knew nothing about the world. Already I was half in love with Didi.

“I’m so sleepy,” she said. “Do we really have to do this now? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“Tonight!” I said.

We were crossing Grand Avenue when, by happenstance, we heard the Weyerhaeuser bell tolling, and as we rounded the chapel, we saw, in the shadows, a couple walking away from the gazebo toward us. Compadres! I wanted to shout out. Brother and sister! Another pair of lovers following their biological imperative! O life, love, joy! I had to embrace this couple, I thought, have them witness our own induction into the hallowed circle of campus fornicators.

The guy was wearing a brown three-piece suit, the girl a blue halter dress with a shawl covering her shoulders, her arm hooked into his. As they came closer, I realized it was Joshua, and with him was not a girl but a woman, late twenties or early thirties, Asian, with long hair, made up rather heavily but quite beautiful, and something in the way she walked or carried herself made it obvious to me that she was, without question, a high-class hooker.

“Hello, kiddies,” Joshua said, and he and the woman kept going, strolling past us into the darkness, leaving our faces slack with astonishment.

He had called an escort service, insisting that the woman be Asian. He had met her at the Saint Paul Hotel downtown, knowing she probably wouldn’t show up if he had specified Mac as a rendezvous, and then, after offering her an extra fifty bucks, got her to take a cab with him back to Dupre. She rather enjoyed herself, he would tell me. She thought it was cute, fucking in the dorm.

I’d wonder about it later. It was too much of a coincidence. Yes, I had told Joshua this likely would be the night, but how had he timed it so he’d be at the gazebo just before we came along? Was he clairvoyant? Had he been monitoring us from down the hall? Planted some sort of listening device in my room? It would remain a mystery.

Whatever the case, Joshua had demonstrated, for the first of what would be many times during our lives and careers, that no matter how desperately I tried, he could, and would, beat me to every momentous bell.

One day I walked outside, and it was twelve degrees. The weather had turned. Up to that point, I had been thinking it wasn’t too bad in Minnesota, not as dire as everyone had warned. In late August, when I’d arrived in the Twin Cities, it had been hot and humid — disagreeable but not extreme. The only unsettling thing had been the thunderstorms that would trundle through the area in the middle of the night. It had seemed so strange, to be awoken by riotous rumble at two, three a.m., the thunder clapping for hours, instead of during the dewy peak of late afternoon. Once, alarms had blared a tornado warning. (Perhaps constructing a hurricane-proof dormitory had not been a bad idea, after all.)

Yet when the humidity waned, the fall became sunny and pleasant, and although the nights dipped into the low thirties, it was entirely tolerable. I had felt confident the winter wouldn’t bother me. Contrary to people’s assumptions, it got cold in California. I wasn’t a pussy to cold, I’d told myself.

This kind of cold, though, was different. It was bone-penetrating, teeth-shuddering cold. Blood-constricting, testicle-shrinking cold. We began layering. We doubled up on T-shirts and then sweaters. We bought long underwear. The first snow — the only time I’d seen snow beyond a family ski trip to Big Bear Mountain — we joyously ran outside and, per Mac tradition, had a snowball fight across Grand Avenue, played pushball, and feasted on a lamb roast. What we didn’t know then was that it would not rise above thirty-two degrees for the duration of the winter, and that this snow would never melt, it’d remain on the ground, getting packed down and frozen and dirtied as it accumulated, until April. Everywhere there was ice, and everywhere white smoke billowed, from vents and chimneys and manholes and tailpipes. We breathed out plumes as we shivered across the quad, bundled in parkas, scarves, hats, gloves, and boots, and then peeled off the clothes — mounds heaped upon the backs of chairs and on the floors — once ensconced in the blister of heated rooms. With the first subzero day, we stopped venturing outside if it could be helped. We retreated into hibernation.