The Collective (23 page)

A man at the bar—part of a French sailing crew—groaned. “They have unfair advantage,” he said, apparently referring to our team’s all-Asianness.

“What the fuck?” I said, jotting down pickled ginger.

We came in fourth, lagging on the sports questions. Yellow Polka Dot Bimini was first. Mary Poppins Was a Drug Dealer was second. The French sailor’s team, Bill Clinton Is President of the Wrong Country, was third. When the standings were announced, the Frenchman faced our table, palms upturned, smiled, then put his hands together and bowed Orientally to us.

“Did you see that?” I said.

“See what?” Joshua asked.

“That guy at the bar.”

“What about him?”

“He’s fucking mocking us.”

“I didn’t see.”

“What the fuck’s his problem?” I said, glaring at the Frenchman.

“I wish you guys could stay until New Year’s,” Joshua told me. He and Lily still had another four days to go on Great Camanoe.

“A shame,” I said drunkenly, and turned to Mirielle. “I’ve had such a grand time. Fabulous company.”

We’d started with painkillers, and now were ordering rounds of bushwackers, another potent BVI specialty.

“Enjoying those?” Mirielle said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “I don’t know why I’ve been denying myself, when I’ve been deprived of everything else.”

I knew I’d never see her again after we landed in Boston. For all intents and purposes, she had just broken up with me, and I felt murderous, thinking of everything I had done for Mirielle, all the time and money I’d spent. For what? I had been nothing but caring and solicitous and doting—indeed, worshipful. I had loved her.

I headed to the bathroom. The French sailor was roosting on a stool beside the door, leaning against the wall and calling out the nationalities of the men who entered, along with culinary associations about their endowments. “German bratwurst. Russian kupaty.” When he saw me, he shouted, “Ah, Chinese wonton!” and his chums guffawed. I kicked the stool out from underneath him, and as he was trying to get to his feet, I punched at his face, connecting with an ear. I was grabbed, a free-for-all, and Joshua flew into the throng to my aid. We started a near-riot.

“You are such an asshole,” Mirielle said to me as we climbed into the Whaler.

On the plane the next day, she wouldn’t talk to me. Every time I said something, she pretended not to hear. “What?” she’d ask, peeved.

She didn’t like our assigned seats, which faced a bulkhead. I didn’t care for the alternatives she chose, next to the lavatories. We switched to another pair of seats, but she thought they were too close to the movie screen. We moved back to the ones beside the toilets.

“You can sit somewhere else, you know,” she said.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

I was hungover. After takeoff, I asked for a Heineken, and as the flight attendant handed me the can, she stared at me curiously. My cheek was bruised, my nose scratched, my bottom lip cracked and scabbing. “Does your wife want anything?”

“I’m not his wife,” Mirielle told her.

Halfway through the flight, I asked Mirielle for the time. She unbuckled the strap of my black chronometer watch, which she had been wearing all week, and handed it back to me.

On the first Sunday of January, the 3AC resumed its potlucks (I had to explain the scrapes on my face to everyone, and Joshua said, “You should have seen him lay out the fuckwad. It was beautiful”), and two evenings later, the Tuesday Nighters convened for the first time. With Joshua declining to participate, I was the de facto leader of the writers’ group, and I set down the ground rules.

I wouldn’t endure any of the pussyfooting that Peter Anderegg had mandated at Mac. I wanted people to be forthright, speak to the authors directly, address them by name and “you,” and have the authors respond to the critiques at will—peremptorily and contentiously, if warranted. But there were only five of us in the group: Grace Kwok, the immigration attorney; Rick Wakamatsu, who sold windsurfing gear at Can-Am, near the Galleria; Ali Ong, a sous chef at the Green Street Grill; me; and, unavoidably, Esther Xing.

It was too small and unschooled of a group for candor or asperity. Grace, Rick, and Ali did not have MFAs. They had never taken a fiction workshop other than a couple of weekend classes at the Grub Street writing center in Boston. They were complete neophytes, and they were good-humored and ebullient about it. They wrote terrible, cloddish stories, and they loved everything that was presented. They wanted the writers’ group to be supportive and fun, not confrontational—an exercise in boosterism for dabblers and tenderfoots. They were too busy to read the manuscripts ahead of time, preferring to listen to them in toto the night of the meetings, and they didn’t care for the formality of penning commentary or marginalia. It was all impromptu, the pronouncements slapdash and facile. They had nary a criticism for the opening to my novella. The sessions in the living room were bush league, amateur hour. The writers’ group was a waste of my time, without utility or challenge. Until the third Tuesday night, when Esther Xing read her story to us.

“Say What You Will” was about two women, Leona Hood and Caroline Bates, who lived in the former quarry town of Severn Springs, Vermont, in 1954. Leona ran a spa-turned-inn-turned-boardinghouse with her husband. Caroline was the assistant town clerk and a spotter for the civilian Ground Observer Corps, assigned to scan the skies and alert the Air Force to any irregular or unscheduled aircraft. Leona and Caroline were lovers, had been for many years, but in 1950s small-town Vermont, they both knew that such a relationship could never be made public. The story was a subtle portrait of their everyday routines, without sentimentality or opera, culminating in a single touch, or nearly a touch, Leona furtively brushing her fingertips across the sleeve of Caroline’s blouse as they said good night after a town meeting.

“I’m totally blown away,” Ali said.

“You know, I feel honored to have read this,” Rick said.

“It’s really, really beautiful,” Grace said.

It was. It pained me to acknowledge, but it was. The story was haunting, the prose crisp: “She caught a wink of light in the sky, at once bright and flimsy. There was no contrail, nor any sound, none of the typical buzz or hum. She didn’t think it was a spy plane or a drone, yet it had form, movement, and she had a sense that it had come from a place unfathomably far away. She found something comforting in its unexpected appearance and in the fact that she could neither explain nor identify it.”

Esther Xing was a better writer than I was, perhaps rivaling Joshua in the quality of her work. There was a patient assurance in the story, an honesty of emotion, that I had never come close to producing. Sitting there, listening to Ali, Rick, and Grace fawn over her, I knew, no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good as Esther, and the knowledge galled me. There was, however, a conspicuous omission in the story, one that was instantly recognizable to me, toward which I could channel my envy.

“I guess I’ll have to be the lone dissenter here,” I said.

“Oh, no!” Esther said, clamping her hands to her fat cheeks in mock horror. She smiled kookily with her crooked teeth, then pouted. “You didn’t like it?”

“The story’s craft aside, I have a question for you—something more fundamental and profound.”

“Okay.”

“Why are all the characters white?”

“What?”

“Why are you writing about white people in Vermont in 1954?”

“My mom had a friend who grew up in Severn Springs. She told me about these women, and I thought it was so sad they were never able to come out, but it really, you know, touched me that they kept being lovers, till the day they died.”

“Why didn’t you make at least one character Asian?”

She laughed. “There were no Asians in Severn Springs in 1954.”

“You couldn’t have fudged it?”

“I did a lot of research on the town and period. I really wanted to get the historical details right.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Are you ashamed of being Chinese?”

“What?” She giggled. “What are you talking about?”

“I just find it very curious you’d choose to write a story like this instead of something about Asians.”

“Why should I restrict myself to writing about Asians?” Esther asked, becoming more sober. “Why can’t I write about anything I want?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“Because not doing so is denying who you are. Because it’s a form of whitewashing. Because it’s betraying your own race.”

I had to say, it was satisfying being in this position of power, assuming Joshua’s usual role for once.

“That’s ludicrous,” Esther said, then asked the others, “Don’t you think so?”

But Grace, Ali, and Rick, clearly uncomfortable with the emergent direction of the conversation, said nothing.

“Expression should be expression,” she said. “I’m interested in other things besides race, other themes. Aren’t you? Are you planning to write the same identity/racism story the rest of your life?”

“Until things change, I just might have to.”

“Come on,” she said. “Art’s not about being didactic. There’s nothing more boring or tedious than that. Art should simply be about what makes us human. Its only obligation, if anything, is to try to break the frozen sea within us.”

I knew the quote. “Kafka.”

“Look,” Esther said, “if we limit ourselves to the subject of race, it’s equivalent to self-segregation, to ghettoizing ourselves. Like, don’t you remember when you were back in college, and you’d go in the union and see all the Asians at one table, all the blacks at another table, all the Hispanics at yet another? I thought that was such a shame, these groups huddled in self-exile.”

“Whites don’t do that all the time, sit with other whites?”

“The whole victimization motif of minority narratives—they drive me crazy,” she said. “They just end up indulging in the same old tired clichés of romantic racialism that have been around since Gunga Din—characters speaking pidgin English or in that bizarre, singsong, Confucian/koan/proverb-laden Orientalese that’s supposed to pass for lyricism. I mean, if I see one more book by an Asian American with moon, silk, blossom, or tea in the title, I’m going to have to hang myself. At least give me some Asian American characters I can recognize, not just the virtuous or the persecuted, but some freaky, flawed motherfuckers like me. But really, why do we have to follow that path at all? We should be trying to de-label the identities of artists as Asian or African or whatever. We should insist on being regarded as artists, period.”

“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.