The Collective (28 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You sit?” she said. “You pray with me?”

I knelt down beside her. It seemed disrespectful not to.

“This my father, mother, sister,” she said. “This Gautama.”

Noklek lit the candle on the right side of the Buddhas, then the candle on the left, followed by three incense sticks. She sat stiffly upright, her palms pressed together, then bowed down, forehead on the redwood boards, and I followed suit. She chanted, “Annica? vata sankha?ra?, uppa?da vaya dhammino. Uuppajjitva? nirujjhanti tesam vu?pasamo sukho,” and bowed three more times.

She pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket. “Your mother, father alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You have brother, sister?”

“One older sister.”

“You love sister?”

“I suppose so,” I said, “even though she represents every bourgeois SoCal value that I despise. Southern California—that’s where I’m from originally.”

“My home, very far. Chiang Mai. You know Chiang Mai?”

“In Thailand, right?”

“Yes. Thailand.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Miss, no miss, no different. I no go home. This my home now. My sister dead. My father, mother dead. Everybody dead. This paper, my sister, father, mother name, my family name, ancestor name.”

I wondered how and when everyone had died. In her photograph, her sister was in a school uniform and looked no more than ten years old. The photographs of her parents seemed to have been taken a long time ago, when they were still in their late twenties. No one was smiling. They were rather grim black-and-white portraits, formal head shots, as if for passports. Yet I didn’t ask about the particulars, for without warning Noklek flicked a lighter and lit the corner of the paper with the names of her family and ancestors, holding it over a plate until it was completely enflamed. I was unsettled, assuming there was bitterness in her memories of them, not understanding until later, after I had researched Theravada Buddhist rituals, that this was a tribute to the dead, a passing of merit to their spirits.

She chanted some more, then lifted a bowl of water with flower petals floating on it. Jasmine. I breathed in the sweet scent. Where she had gotten the jasmine, I did not know. I gazed around the backyard. None of the perennials or bulbs that Jessica and I had planted late last summer had bloomed just yet.

Noklek gently sprinkled a bit of the water over the Buddhas and the photo frames, catching the runoff in another glass bowl—the same one, I recognized, in which Jessica had stuck the immersion coil for the alginate mixture. With the collected water, she doused the ashes of the paper. Then she startled me by tipping some water onto my shoulder, down my back.

“Hey!” I said. I was wearing a new button-down, and the water was cold. It was barely fifty degrees outside.

“Luck!” she said. “Songkran! New year!”

This was, I remembered then, a rite of the Songkran festival in Thailand, a three-day new year’s celebration in April. The tradition of pouring cleansing water had degenerated into a national water fight, caravans of celebrants driving down streets with water guns and cannons, drenching bystanders, who would retaliate with buckets and hoses. I had seen videos on the news.

“You water me?” Noklek asked.

I dribbled water onto her shoulder, and she momentarily shuddered from the chill.

She mixed a white powder, maybe chalk, in a small bowl with some water, then dipped her fingers in the white paste and daubed her face—a consecration, vertical lines on her forehead, swirls on her cheeks. She handed me the bowl. “You paint?”

I rubbed the chalk onto my face, mimicking her design pattern.

“Sawatdee pee mai,” she said, pressing her palms together and bowing to me. “Happy New Year.”

“Sawatdee pee mai,” I said, bowing.

“Suk-san wan songkran,” she said.

“Suk-san wan songkran,” I said, bowing again.

When I rose, she squirted my face with a tiny water pistol. “Hee hee hee hee,” she hiccupped in childlike squeaks. It was the first time I’d heard her laugh.

“Now you’re going to get it,” I said, and I jumped up and grabbed the larger of the bowls and whirled around and threw the water at the same time she tossed the contents of a bucket into my face. I had been errant in my aim and missed Noklek completely. I, on the other hand, was soaked. We ran on and off the deck, into the backyard, fighting over the garden hose, filling bowls and buckets and trash cans from the utility shed, screaming and laughing, the chalk smearing and streaking down our faces, until dusk fell and we were exhausted and deluged and shivering, yet blithe.

We never really spoke again. I think of that evening, of Noklek, our abbreviated conversation and gestures of communion, every now and then. I think of the jasmine petals she had spread in the bowls of water. I think of her youth, how alive and joyful she was in those few minutes we had shared—for once, carefree. I think of the Thai Buddhist beliefs of renewal and rebirth, of the Songkran custom of washing away misfortune and receiving the blessing of protection, the making and passing on of merit. I think of the practice of commemorating the dead by writing down their names, and then incinerating them. I think of devoting myself to more acts of kindness and goodness, as you are supposed to do during Songkran, and of dedicating those acts, in part, to Noklek Praphasirirat, wherever she may be now.

On Sunday, May 2, five days before her exhibition would be open to the public, Jessica gave the remaining members of the 3AC a preview of Dis/Orienting Proportions. We walked up the stairs to the second-floor foyer of the City Hall Annex on Inman Street, and there, in the exhibition space known as Gallery 57, past a knot of freestanding partitions that had been temporarily assembled to conceal the installation until its unveiling, stood three life-sized mannequins. They were of Bruce Lee, Charlie Chan, and Suzie Wong.

Bruce Lee was dressed in the yellow tracksuit with black stripes that he had sported in The Game of Death. He was positioned in a three-quarters fighting stance, one arm up, ready to parry, the other forward and down to block. Jessica had silkscreened a black-and-white photograph of Lee’s face onto a sheet of rubber and stretched it over the mannequin’s head, which was crowned by a high-end wig. All the mannequins had very realistic wigs, styled by Jimmy Fung. The clothes had been just as skillfully sewn by Trudy Lun, the theater costume designer/seamstress.

Charlie Chan—made portly with foam padding—was in a tweed three-piece suit and bow tie, with slicked-back hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was bowing slightly, his palms pressed together.

Suzie Wong had her hip cocked to one side, fist resting on it. She was in a form-fitting cheongsam, the silk the lightest blue with a hint of lavender, accessorized with a matching hair band and open-toed pumps—the outfit Nancy Kwan had worn in The World of Suzie Wong when she modeled for William Holden’s painting.

What made the mannequins distinctive, though, was that Bruce Lee and Charlie Chan had their zippers open, baring erect penises and scrotums. Suzie Wong’s cheongsam also had an open zipper, but the zipper and the vulva that it exposed (a clone of Jessica’s vulva) were horizontal, an allusion to the old myth that Asian women had sideways vaginas. Framed by the lashes of the zipper’s jagged teeth, the labia resembled a slitted eye. There was a one-yuan coin stuck between the folds.

The dental alginate molds Jessica had made of Joshua’s and my genitals had been the first of a four-part process. For the second, she had poured plaster of Paris into the molds, then dismantled the alginate to reveal the casts of the plaster erections, which she filed and sandpapered and filled with spackling paste to fix voids and defects. After that, she applied a coat of acrylic polymer to smooth out the surface even further, then painted on a thin layer of latex rubber molding compound on the plaster, waiting twenty-four hours for it to dry before painting another layer, repeating until she had accumulated ten coats. She then dislodged the latex molds from the plaster penises, sprayed the insides with a release agent, filled them with two-component RTV silicone, and suspended the molds inside two-liter soda bottles with the tops cut off (the water in the bottles equalized the pressure, since the weight of the silicone had a tendency to bulge). After another twenty-four hours, she peeled the rubber off to uncover the replicas.

They were, in fact, exact replicas. Contrary to Jessica’s assertion, all penises did not look alike. I identified mine right away. It was on Bruce Lee, and I could see every vein, ridge, and anatomical detail, every little bump and crease and crinkle. It was, as far as I could tell, a perfect facsimile, although I looked much thicker and longer than I had imagined—far bigger, I was pleased to see, than old Charlie Chan (Joshua).

But there was one anomaly in sacrifice of verisimilitude—the color. Jessica had made all the genitalia bright fluorescent yellow, and what’s more, they glowed in the dark. Spotlights overhead were programmed to alternate what was illuminated and what was not, a face, an arm, a leg, sometimes making an erection or labia dramatically luminescent.

Among the group, there was a lot of twittering and giggling, but I was, relatively speaking, assuaged. When Jessica had described her plans for the installation and enlisted my help, I had feared it’d be a stunt, a one-off for which she would be ridiculed and humiliated, yet there was (almost) a tenable integrity to the mannequins, and the political implications were provocative, the stretched silkscreened rubber of the faces making the Asian icons seem as if they were yowling in horror and agony, eyes monstrously slanted.

Characteristic of all of Jessica’s work, there were hidden elements, pieces within pieces. She had carved a cavity in each head, prying their mouths open, and inside each maw was a menagerie. In Bruce Lee’s mouth were miniatures of dogs—dozens of them in every variety, running, leaping, lying, snarling, shitting. In Charlie Chan’s mouth were rats. In Suzie Wong’s mouth were snakes. And the miniatures were fluorescent yellow, glow-in-the-dark as well, creating a spooky, contrapuntal incandescence whenever the spotlights changed, as if the skulls were lit from within, while the genitals appeared disembodied, floating apart. Moreover, since the mannequins were mounted on platforms, you had to get on your tiptoes and lean close to peek into the mouths, and the figures were purposely positioned so you couldn’t avoid brushing or bumping up against the genitalia, contributing to the exhibition’s gestalt of discomfiture—indeed, of disorientation.

After the preview, we migrated to the house on Walker Street for the usual potluck. The group included Jimmy, Trudy, Grace, Leon, Jay, Cindy, Phil, and Annie—the smallest turnout we’d ever had. We congregated in the kitchen, unwrapping and heating up various dishes: yakisoba, salt-and-pepper squid, cucumber sunomono, bean sprouts, chicken karaage, gyoza.

“I have to admit,” I told Jessica, “I had my doubts, but the exhibit works. You pulled it off. It’s pretty fabulous.”

“Hear, hear,” Joshua said.

“You really think so?” Jessica said, flush with relief. “I knew I was taking a risk, doing something so different, with huge potential for disaster, but I kept following my instincts.”

“The stretched faces, the mouths, the lighting—it’s all really ingenious,” I said.

“I didn’t have time to finish the installation part. I was going to have these Judd-like boxes and some table sculptures.”

“You didn’t need them,” Joshua said. “The mannequins have enough depth on their own.”

I went outside to the deck to barbecue kalbi on our grill, and Joshua soon joined me there, bringing a bottle of Tsingtao out for me. “So what’d you really think?” he asked.

This was the lesson I’d learned about being friends with artists: at first, you were honest in your critiques, just like you had been in grad school. But when you were honest, you’d find it would cause days, weeks of tension and bruised feelings, a rift that would sometimes never fully mend. You learned what artists really wanted from their friends. It wasn’t honesty, it wasn’t constructive criticism, it wasn’t the truth. They’d get the truth soon enough, from dealers, editors, directors, agents, grant-makers, foundations, critics, and the public. What artists really wanted from their friends was simply support, and encouragement, and, if it wasn’t too much of an imposition, unconditional adoration. About works in progress, they wanted you to tell them: It’s perfect. You don’t need to change a thing. It’s good to go. About works that had already been released to the world, fait accompli, they wanted you to tell them: It’s brilliant. You’re brilliant. I love it. I love you. What was the point of saying anything else? Yet, this did not prevent us from disparaging our friends’ work behind their backs.

“It’s not as silly as I thought it’d be,” I said to Joshua, “but it’s still kind of silly. What about you? What’d you think?”

“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.