The Collective (34 page)

His second novel, The Base, was set in the 1970s and portrayed the Itaewon merchants, bargirls, and civilian workers who serviced the American soldiers on Yongsan Eighth Army base. His third novel, And I Will Be Here, was about a drug-addicted Korean American female poet in a wheelchair who was stalking her Cambridge neighbor. The critical reception was less glowing, often dwelling on how unlikable or unsympathetic his characters were (the first line of And I Will Be Here was: “Just so you know, I am a hateful person”), and neither book sold well. They weren’t crossing over. With all the screeds on racism, readers felt they were being preached to. He wasn’t connecting, even, with Asian Americans. The younger generation, he was baffled to discover, wasn’t interested in the subject of race.

To me, each book was more profound and lyrical than the last. All three were beautifully bleak, quietly heartrending. They deserved better. (For years, whenever I went into a bookstore, I would locate the spines of his latest novel, rearrange the shelf, and turn the copies of his book ninety degrees so the cover would face out. I still do that now, though more and more, I cannot find any of his books in stores.)

Obsessively Joshua checked the sales rankings for his novels online. He tortured himself by reading book industry blogs and Publishers Weekly, fulminating whenever he learned about a large advance that was being given to a pretty young white writer. He railed and brooded whenever a contemporary received a rhapsodic review or prize, especially when it pertained to one writer—“our nemesis,” he called her—Esther Xing, who was offered, after her story appeared in the Discoveries issue, a two-book deal from Knopf for a story collection and a novel. The latter, which had all white main characters, became a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a first for an East Asian American writer.

The person from the 3AC who had the most success was Tina Nguyen, with her wall cuts. Annie Yoshikawa was also able to make a living from her large-format photographs, although she never reached the stature of Dijkstra or Lockhart. Leon Lee and Cindy Wong did fairly well, exhibiting their paintings regularly and teaching in an art school—a joint appointment they shared as a married couple until they divorced. Phil Sudo started an improvisational jazz band, Avant Garbage, then wrote a book called Zen Guitar and traveled around the country, giving motivational speeches about incorporating Zen philosophy into music, art, everyday life, and business. He died of stomach cancer at the age of thirty-five.

Jimmy Fung served his mandatory two-year sentence in state prison, MCI-Norfolk, then disappeared. I lost track of a lot of people. Jessica withdrew the malicious destruction complaint against Barboza, and, in kind, he dropped the obscenity complaint against her. She moved to San Francisco and then to L.A., and we kept in frequent touch for a while, but talk less now.

After our breakup, I never spoke to Mirielle Miyazato again, but occasionally I checked up on her on the Internet. She didn’t go to an MFA program in poetry. She became a research assistant at a think tank in D.C., then ended up in Miami, where she sold commercial real estate. A few years ago, she married the founder of a sustainable building company. High-res images of their wedding were online, posted by the photographer to market his services. Mirielle looked beautiful, ecstatic. More than once, I clicked through the album. In one photo, she was holding what might have been a wineglass, but I couldn’t be sure what was in it—possibly just water. Her husband was about her age, good-looking, stylish with his short dreads, Afro-Cuban American. Recently they had a baby, I read on her website. I’ve always regretted telling her that she was a bad person.

The last time I saw Joshua was in July 2008, two months before he killed himself, when I drove out to his rented cottage in Sudbury to say goodbye to him. I was leaving Cambridge for good—a relocation, a wholesale life change, that had come about swiftly.

“Unbelievable,” he said as I got out of my car. “You never got rid of your mayonnaise streak, did you?”

Two years earlier, I had gone to the Boston Athenaeum, the private library catty-corner from the State House. The Athenaeum was trying to recruit a younger membership, and they were hosting a mixer that day. These receptions, besides the draw of exceptional wine and hors d’oeuvres, had acquired a reputation as a meat market.

I was already a member. I often spent my lunch hour at the library, and that evening I had gone there after work to get a novel I wanted to reread, not knowing a mixer was being held. After checking the catalog, I wended through the crowd, past the busts of Petrarch and Dante, into the reading room with its leather chairs, vaulted ceiling, and arched windows. A woman was leaning against the very bookshelf I needed to access, listening to a fellow trying to chat her up.

She had an old-fashioned air about her, blond hair parted in the middle and tied into a thick ponytail that ran down her back, a vintage indigo dress with subtle white piping rather than the ubiquitous power suit. She wore little makeup, and had a narrow face.

I waited, not wanting to interrupt their conversation, but finally said, “Excuse me, could I reach behind you for a second?”

She looked at me blankly, then said, “You trying to find a book?”

“It’s supposed to be on that shelf. If I could—”

“I don’t think you understand the parameters here.”

“Sorry?”

“I saw a sign posted at the entrance. You didn’t see the sign?”

“Which sign?”

“The one that said no reading allowed. It was very explicit.”

She grinned slyly, and I knew then who she was. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. “I guess I was misinformed,” I said. “This isn’t a library?”

“Apparently not,” she said. “Which book?” She stepped aside, and I pulled out William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow from the shelf. “Oh, I’ve read that,” she told me.

“You have?”

“Sure, several times. My father went to elementary school with the author.”

“No kidding.”

“He said Billy was a smart kid, but kind of antisocial. The sort of kid who goes to cocktail parties and sits in a corner with a book.”

“I didn’t know elementary kids went to cocktail parties back then.”

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she said. “A different era. They started them young.”

Her prospective suitor excused himself and retreated into the crowd.

“Do you think it was something I said?” she asked me.

“How have you been, Didi?”

I moved in with her less than a year later. “Why’d we break up at Mac again?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”

In many ways, it was as if she were an entirely different person. I remembered what Joshua had told me once, long ago—that Didi had no soul—but she was nothing like she’d been in college.

After Macalester, Didi had gone to Manhattan, working as a computer programmer for an insurance corporation before landing at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. In 2000, she was transferred to Cantor’s Milan office, and the following year, all her friends and colleagues in New York died on 9/11. She quit Cantor, found a job at an Italian brokerage firm in Rome, met Alessandro Pacelli, the creative director of an ad agency, and almost immediately got pregnant by him. They had three children in quick succession, Matteo, Wyatt, and Finnea. Didi became a stay-at-home mom and was content, she thought, until she discovered that Alessandro had been sleeping with two different women, one of whom was their housekeeper. She fled to Chestnut Hill with the kids, and their divorce proceedings, involving U.S. and Italian courts, were a contentious mess, Alessandro calling Didi all manner of Italian variants for bitch, his favorite being stronza, fucking bitch, saying she had never loved him, had trapped him by deliberately getting pregnant when she knew he’d never wanted children, which was supremely ironic, since ten months after they separated he had a son with one of the women he’d been fucking (not the housekeeper).

Didi got what she wanted, sole custody of the kids, bought a house in Huron Village, and then looked for a job, a formidable challenge since she had been out of the workforce for almost five years. At last, she was hired as a software engineer at Fidelity Investments, specializing in Web applications for their online brokerage program.

She was with the technology group, not on the investment side, so she wasn’t being yoked and pummeled by the upheavals in the market like the fund managers and portfolios analysts. Nonetheless, there had been two rounds of layoffs at Fidelity in the space of a year, and she was nervous. So was I. Everyone in the financial sector—and in businesses like Gilroy Prunier that depended on it—was on tenterhooks in the spring of 2008. Then Fidelity announced that it was consolidating some of its operations, and Didi was presented with a transfer to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. We talked about it. I applied for a job in Fidelity’s marketing communications department down there, and was offered a position as a senior copywriter. I proposed to Didi. (We would join the circle of sixty percent of Mac grads who purportedly marry one another.) We were moving to Chapel Hill next week.

“I don’t get it,” Joshua said in his driveway. “Isn’t her father loaded?”

“We want to support ourselves.”

“But his money will always be there, won’t it? It’ll corrupt you eventually,” he said. “You’ll get emasculated by it.”

I chose not to remind Joshua that he’d had money himself, that he had never really had to work a day in his life.

I liked Didi’s parents, actually. Mr. O’Brien sometimes told me stories about his father, who had been the first in the family to immigrate to Boston from Ireland, and who, upon arrival, had been confronted with NINA signs: HELP WANTED—NO IRISH NEED APPLY. Mr. O’Brien thought the Irish and Koreans had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they shared a history of subjugation and divided homelands, they had violent tempers yet liked to carouse and sing, and they both drank like fish.

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.”