The Collective (35 page)

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.

“You know,” he said, flexing his stomach forward, “when I was at Yaddo, I walked by an optometrist’s shop in Saratoga Springs. I saw this old Asian couple inside, running the store. I think they were Jessica’s parents. Do you know the name of their shop? I almost went in.”

“I’m not sure what it’s called.”

“Have you heard from her lately?”

“Not for a while.” The last time I had spoken to Jessica was when I’d flown out to California to see my father and sister. Rebecca and her husband, Howard, a Korean American high school teacher, now had two children, and my father was living with them in Pomona. During the beginning of the housing crisis, Rebecca had quit working for the mortgage industry, and was now volunteering for a nonprofit group that assisted homeowners facing foreclosure.

Jessica was in Silver Lake. Her rheumatoid arthritis had gotten worse over the years, and she had had to undergo several surgeries, getting plates and pins and polyethylene implants inserted into her wrists and ankles. When we met for coffee at a café on Hyperion, she showed me her gnarled fingers. “This is the worst part about RA,” she told me, “how ugly my hands have become.” Her feet caused her the most pain, but she was mobile, and her fingers were flexible enough to work. She operated a lucrative private business, making custom dildos and novelty porn clothes for celebrities. Her partner—both professionally and romantically—was Trudy Lun, who had been in L.A. working as a costume designer for the movie industry. Trudy was seven months’ pregnant, inseminated with sperm donated by a (white) friend, and she and Jessica had bought a house together.

“So you’re happy?” I had asked Jessica. I didn’t broach what I really wanted to know. Whether—and how—she had reconciled that she was no longer making art. She wore a simple sundress with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. The tongue stud was gone, as were the eyebrow rings. She wasn’t dyeing her hair anymore. She looked for all the world like a housewife.

“I guess so,” she told me. “But you know, as Kierkegaard once said, happiness is sometimes the greatest hiding place for despair.” One of Joshua’s favorite quotations.

As we went down Waterborne, Joshua pointed out the highbush blueberries and clethras, which he said would become very fragrant later in the summer; the royal and cinnamon ferns; the purple loosestrifes, which were vivid and pretty but terrible invasives. In late spring at night, frogs would come out onto the warm pavement, thousands of them, which would make a casual drive down the road, just to go out for an errand or takeout, a terrorizing experience—a massacre.

We heard a bell ringing in the distance—a church bell, it sounded like. “Hey, remember Weyerhaeuser?” Joshua asked, and revealed to me then that he had been a virgin—not just on-campus—when we were freshmen.

“You fucker,” I said. “I can’t believe you lied to me about that.”

“That’s between us. Have to safeguard the mythography, you know.”

I’ve thought since then, of course, of what else Joshua might have lied to me about—being called a chink at the Sonic Youth concert, perhaps, the chalkboards, the extent to which he knew what was going on at Pink Whistle, maybe even what had happened on the pier in Southie.

We walked farther, and as we rounded a corner, we saw a jogger, a middle-aged Japanese man, coming down the crest of the next hill toward us. “Is that him?” Joshua asked, squinting, and we chuckled.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” he said. “Tell me if this is crazy. I’ve been thinking about Lily Bai. Remember her? The BVIs? In retrospect, I think I should’ve tried harder to make that work. I’ve been thinking of calling her.”

“Lily Bai?”

“You’re right. It’s a dumb idea.”

We returned to the cottage, and after Joshua gave me a book he thought I should read (Stoner by John Williams), as well as a CD (End of Love by Clem Snide), we said our goodbyes beside my car.

“It was a good run, wasn’t it?” he said.

I was confused, thinking he meant the jogger, or maybe our walk on Waterborne.

“Us,” he said. “You, me, and Jessica. The real 3AC.”

“You’re talking like an old man.”

He rubbed his hand over his scalp. “I feel old. You know, next month will be twenty years since we first met. Isn’t that something? How the hell did we get here?”

I hugged him, and he squeezed me tightly. It was sad to behold, Joshua so tired and beaten down, living alone in that depressing little cottage. “Come visit us in North Carolina,” I said.

He laughed. “I can pretty much guarantee that will never happen.” He bent down gingerly and pulled some weeds out from the gravel driveway, then brushed his hands together. “You’ve been a great friend to me, Eric. My best friend,” he said. “But you stopped needing me a long time ago.”

“We’ll be back for Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’ll see you then?”

“I’ll see you then,” Joshua said.

“And the wedding,” I said. “Don’t forget the wedding.”

Didi and I were planning to get married next Memorial Day in Marion, at the O’Briens’ summer home on Buzzards Bay. I was going to invite nearly everyone from the 3AC, for old times’ sake, and, despite everything, I had asked Joshua to be my best man, although he had dithered about it when I phoned him in the spring, saying he couldn’t predict his whereabouts so far in advance, since he would be applying to several artists’ colonies for a residency.

“You’ll be there for sure?” I asked, holding open my car door.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Joshua told me.

We want to think that there’s an inviolable continuity among old friends, a bond that cannot be fissured despite years of lassitude and neglect. We want to believe that there’s truth and solace in our memories, that there’s meaning and purpose to the things that have happened to us. I’m not sure that’s really the case. Youth is about promise. As you approach your forties, it’s about how you’ve come up short of those dreams, and your life becomes what you do with that recognition. Inevitably, you begin to identify your old friends with what you’re trying to discard; you associate them with wreckage.

Joshua was a liar, a narcissist, a naysayer, a bully, and a misogynist; a whiner, misanthrope, and cynic. He was a user. Sometimes I wonder why we tolerated him at all, and for so long. Didi thinks he was a cancer to me, a malignancy to everyone within his crumbling, nihilistic orbit, and I was lucky, as his enabler, not to have been pulled down with him. If not for Joshua, Didi is convinced, we would not have broken up in the first place at Mac. What drove him to kill himself, she says, was realizing that he would never have what I now possess—a life beyond the pursuit of art—because being an artist, a writer, means isolating yourself in a room for hours, days on end, going into the darkest parts of yourself, and really, what sane person would want to do that?

I think she’s wrong, of course. I still respect that sort of sacrifice, for the sake of art. I disagreed with many of Joshua’s choices. Fundamentally I believed in solving how people are more alike than different; he believed in the antithesis. But he stayed constant to his principles to the very end, and he was as loyal a friend as anyone could ever ask for. I can never discount the fact that, for better or worse, he made me into the person I am today.

I can’t justify what he did, resulting, however inadvertently, in the deaths of the man and the little girl (her name was Emma Dunford, and she was almost exactly Finnea’s age). I can’t explain to Didi or anyone else why he did it. How can you explain that it’s just that he was sad, that he’d been sad all his life, and he knew he’d always be sad?

I keep returning to the last conversation I had with him in Sudbury. He was down, but no more than usual in recent years, given more to brooding and self-denigration than braggadocio. Was there something I had missed—a sign? Something meaningful in the way he had said goodbye? Did he know then that it’d be the last time we would see each other?

I ask myself what I could have done differently. If I could have prevented it. If I could have saved him. In hindsight, I think everything—his entire life—had been coalescing toward that moment on the road. He had trapped himself. He had had no other option. He had wanted too much. You see, the problem was, he had been the idealist, not me.

All this I am projecting, of course. I’ll never know for sure. We can’t fully understand what plagues each other’s hearts, much less our own at times. Ultimately even our best friends are unknowable to us.

And it could be, I will allow, that I am trying to acquit myself of responsibility. Jessica implied as much when I called to tell her about the accident. I was inveighing against Joshua, his selfishness, his reckless, last-second deviation into the car’s path instead of gassing himself in his cottage—why couldn’t he have waited?—and she said, “Oh, Eric. You’ve always been so hard on him.”

“Shouldn’t that be flipped around?”

“No,” Jessica said. “You keep using the word pathetic.”

“Never to him.”

“Don’t you think he knew?” she asked. “He was always trying, so desperately, to live up to your expectations. It was agonizing for him. Can’t you see that?”

I couldn’t, and I still can’t—not really. As the years went by, I saw less and less of Joshua, especially after Didi reentered my life. Yet, all that time, maybe even long before then, while I thought Joshua was passing judgment on the choices I was making, had he felt the opposite, forever afraid I might disavow him? Did he believe I was deserting him after years of weathering my scorn—blaming him for things in which I had been, through my actions and inactions, just as culpable?

It’s been three years now. I sit in my kitchen and watch the kids outside, climbing the old mockernut hickory tree in the backyard. Didi’s nearby, cheering them on, vigilant. There’s a pot of kalbi jjim—braised short ribs, my mother’s recipe, Matteo’s favorite—simmering on the stove.

I look at the refrigerator door, festooned with the kids’ drawings and paintings, photos of them with goofy captions. Hanging from the patio trellis, canopied by wisteria, is a bird’s nest that Wyatt made this morning, ingeniously constructed—in minutes—with paper towels, disposable Styrofoam trays, yarn, and buttons. Even now, I know he will be an engineer. Or an artist.

It’s warm today, the sliding glass door open to the wavy heat of summer and the sounds of their laughter. It’s never quiet in this house, someone always around, which I don’t mind—which I’ve come to prefer, actually. I gaze at Wyatt’s bird’s nest rotating in the breeze, starting to wheel a little tumultuously, and I picture Joshua spinning through the air, the car rolling and tumbling, and I finally arrive at what Joshua might have been contemplating on Waterborne, why he had stepped into the car’s path, what he had been hoping would happen: the driver skidding to a stop after hitting him, opening the car door, and running back to where Joshua lay on the road, kneeling down beside him and saying it would be all right, an ambulance was on its way, and maybe squeezing his hand a little, a complete stranger, yet the only person Joshua could turn to, the only person he thought available, who could provide him with, in his last few seconds, a small measure of intimacy, ensuring he wouldn’t die alone.