The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  Jessica had stopped running quite a while before then, her joints beginning to bother her. She had become an Ashtanga Vinyasa devotee, and she was going to Baron Baptiste’s Power Yoga studio in Porter Square. I accompanied her for the first time one night in mid-August.

  The class was for all levels, and it was first-come, first-served, cash only, ten dollars a head. A line of people waited on the sidewalk for the door to open. What struck me immediately upon entering the studio was the heat—sweltering and oppressive, the thermostat intentionally set at ninety degrees, hotter than it was outside. “Baron calls it healing heat,” Jessica told me as we filed in.

  The place was bare-bones: no dressing rooms, showers, or lockers. Everyone—mostly young women, mixed with a few post-hippie graybeards—began stripping off their T-shirts and shorts and piling them against the walls and in the corners. I was astonished by how beautiful their bodies were, Jessica’s included.

  I had seen her over the years—she’d sometimes take the train or bus up from Rhode Island or New York to visit us when Joshua was in town—but she had not ventured out of Provincetown at all during her fellowship. In the intervening year, she had cut off her hair, not much longer than mine now, and it was spiky and highlighted with burgundy streaks. She had acquired an eyebrow ring and a tongue stud, and she favored clothes in the cross-genres of Goth/punk/grunge. Zippered corset tops, cargo pants, skater shoes, a Mao cap with a red star. She had also gotten tattooed—not with 3AC, but with a large green feather, a peacock quill, that plumed up the inside of her right forearm, and also, to my regret, a tramp stamp of barbed-wire twists that defaced her lower back.

  But her body—good Lord, how she had transformed her body. In her sports bra and skintight spandex shorts, she was lithe, sinewy, and buffed. So were most of the other women, and as they packed into the room and began warming up in front of me with sun salutations and downward dogs, I was afforded close-up views of curved, supple ramps of ass and distinctly delineated furrows of ungulate. I thought it impossible I’d be able to make it through the ninety-minute class without embarrassing myself with an erection.

  I needn’t have been concerned. This was not yoga as I had imagined it. There were no smoldering sticks of incense or Tibetan tingsha cymbals to guide us into oneness, no Sanskrit chants or quiet moments of sitting meditation to harmonize our pranas. This was an unadulterated, ball-busting workout. This was boot camp, absolute hell on earth.

  The instructor, Kenta, was Japanese American, dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt, loose pants, and a bandanna. He was not an imposing man—short, and even, it seemed, a little pudgy. He walked with a strut and spoke with a nasal voice that betrayed a faint metro lisp. But he led the class through a series of torturous stretches and lunges and contortions. Cobra pose, warrior pose, I couldn’t keep up with the poses, couldn’t flex or twist the way everyone else did. Soon I was out of breath, in pain, and sweating. Really sweating. I had never sweated so much in my life. With the heat turned up and the doors and windows sealed, with all the straining bodies so close together, the temperature must have been over a hundred. It was a sauna, a convection oven.

  “Superglue your nips to your kneecaps,” Kenta ordered the class.

  Sweat dripped onto the floor and was puddling—not just from me, from my mat neighbors, too.

  “Don’t let fear interfere,” Kenta said. “You might feel like you’re struggling, but just transport yourself into the eye of the storm. Now sweep up and inhale.”

  Sweat from my neighbors hit the backs of my legs, the wall mirror, the ceiling.

  “You feel that decompression?” Kenta said. “It’s all about letting go. Now rotate.”

  Sweat from my neighbors flew through the air and splattered my face.

  “Awesome,” Kenta said. “This is warm molasses. Love your body. Don’t push. Just flow.”

  I had to pause repeatedly to rest. I’d drop down into child pose, kneeling pathetically, and then rise and try to follow along, grunting and squealing. I lost my balance several times and fell over, almost instigating a dominoic catastrophe.

  “I thought you were in shape from running,” Jessica said when the class ended.

  “Some of those poses were inhumane.”

  I stumbled through the door, into the relief of the cool night air. “Your wrists don’t hurt?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed her modifying her poses or using any of the foam blocks or apparatuses.

  “No. Yoga seems to help, actually.”

  “I don’t know if I can walk home. Let’s take a cab.”

  “It’s less than a mile. Come on.”

  We stopped at the White Hen on Mass Ave so I could buy a jug of Gatorade. “Is Kenta gay?” I asked.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “He seems gay.”

  “He’s married and has two kids. He used to be a professional kickboxer. Before this, he was a trainer for the Celtics. Have you become homophobic?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Homophobia’s always a sign of latent homosexuality.”

  “I’m not homophobic, and I’m not gay. I was just asking,” I said. “Slow down. My legs are killing me.”

  “I love the feeling after class,” Jessica said. “It feels like I’ve just had incredible, hot, sweaty, slippery sex.”

  Sex. Sex with Jessica—hot, sweaty, slippery, or any other variety. I had been imagining it quite frequently in the two weeks we’d become housemates, in even closer proximity now than we had been on the fourth floor of Dupre. “Do you ever talk to Loki?” I asked.

  “Loki? Not in years.”

  From Skidmore, Loki Somerset had gone to Yale for a combined PhD in film studies and East Asian languages and literatures. RISD was only two hours up 95 from New Haven, so they had seen a lot of each other and had even begun talking about marriage. But then Loki spent a summer in Beijing and fell in love with a Chinese woman (“I guess I wasn’t authentic enough for him,” Jessica told me). Last she’d heard, he had gone back to China for a postdoc at the Beijing Film Academy.

  “Have you been seeing anyone?” I asked as we crossed Linnaean Street.

  “No, not really, nothing serious.”

  This was her patented answer, invariably circumspect about the particulars. I didn’t really know anything about her romantic life in the last four years, whereas, if prompted, I was unfailingly forthcoming with her.

  “Is it that you’re not looking for anything serious?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been going through a lot of shit, and people are always trying to analyze me, saying it’s because of Loki or what happened with my parents, or bottom-line I’m a cold heartless bitch, or that I’ll only go out with people who are so fucked up or unsuitable or unavailable, it guarantees it won’t work out, which must be secretly what I want, but you know what? Fuck all that. I just want to be alone right now. What’s so wrong with wanting to be alone?”

  “Because being alone frightens people.”

  “Does it frighten you?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “That could be your downfall as a writer,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “To produce art, great art, you’ve got to be willing to alienate people and suffer the consequences.”

  I wanted to see what she had been working on in Provincetown, and the next day she led me into the basement of the house, where she had stacked her canvases against the foundation wall and covered them with tarps.

  She had changed mediums again. At Mac, she had expanded on her elaborate ink drawings, then had started adding watercolor to them, then had gone back to representational painting, mostly hyperrealistic portraits. She entered RISD with painting as her discipline, only to become interested in doing small-scale sculpture—not a true departure, rather a redefinition of the pen-and-inks, with the same kind of intricacy and exactitude. Joshua and I drove down to Providence for her thesis exhibition, and what had fascinated us were her table sculp
tures. She had made them out of architectural model materials: styrene sheets, basswoods, open-cell foam, and chipboard. One sculpture, called Wushu, was shaped like the Pentagon, an ordinary replica, it appeared, except the concentric polygons were made up of miniature pairs of Nike shoes. Another, called Yawn, was a one-hundred-Taiwan-dollar bill, only, if you looked closer, you could see that the bill consisted of infinitesimal logos for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the like. All of this was rendered with the utmost specificity, down to the swoosh and laces on the shoes, and Jessica had done it all by hand, using craft knives and fine saws, files, sandpaper, and glue.

  But she had started paying a price for such precision. Her hands began to hurt. Her fingers tingled and numbed, her wrists locked up on her, she couldn’t grip a knife or a brush with any vigor, and she couldn’t sleep at night, she was in such torment. She had developed carpal tunnel syndrome. She had hoped it might be temporary, but it persisted, so she began trying every conceivable remedy. She slept in wrist braces and propped her arms on pillows. She took anti-inflammatories. She stretched and massaged her forearms and wrapped them in gauze. She applied ice packs and rolled Baoding balls. She dipped her hands into baths of hot paraffin wax. She saw an acupuncturist and a chiropractor. Finally she paid out-of-pocket for cortisone injections.

  “I don’t know how you can function at all, much less do yoga and art,” I said in the basement.

  “They don’t hurt all the time,” she told me. “I notice it most when I’m drawing or carving, or when I’m trying to sleep. I might need to get the surgery, but I’m afraid it’ll make things worse—relieve the pain at the expense of agility. I can’t afford it, anyway, without health insurance.”

  “I’ll lend you the money if you want.”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “You could borrow it from Joshua.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but that’s something I’d be loath to do. I’d rather not owe anything to anyone, especially Joshua.”

  “Why especially him?”

  Joshua was magnanimous with his money, overly generous, really, always offering to pay for dinner or drinks when we went out. True, we’d already had some issues at the house. He pilfered our food and toilet paper and detergent without asking and didn’t replace them. He left dishes and crumbs everywhere. He relied on us to mop and sweep, take out the trash, scrub the toilets. When we complained, he would smile and say, “Listen, you know I’m not going to change.”

  “He uses people,” Jessica told me. “Don’t you know that by now?” She pulled the tarps off the paintings and leaned them against the wall one by one.

  This was something completely different. Gone was her fetish for minute detail. The paintings were abstract, a series of heavily textured acrylics. The paint was thickly and haphazardly applied in dozens of layers, and the colors were almost all dark—blacks, blues, browns, some purples, with a few wispy swirls of white, yellow, and green, a dab of red. They all portrayed a stick figure in what appeared to be a forest, the figure brushed in ghostly smears, as if it were disappearing, evaporating. The paintings were luminous, with a three-dimensionality that was technically cunning, yet, looking at them, I felt uncomfortable—very disturbed, actually.

  “These are . . . ,” I started to say, but couldn’t finish.

  “Weird,” she said. “I know.”

  “They’re stunning. They’re like nothing you’ve ever done. They’re—I don’t know how to describe it—unruly.”

  “I like that. ‘Unruly.’ That’s what I was trying to do, let everything go.”

  The stick figures were based on ancient pictographs for the Chinese calligraphy character —woman. In its earliest forms, the character was drawn as if a woman were bent or kneeling, her arms lowered and crossed, in a show of meekness and subservience. The titles for the paintings were words that combined nüˇ as a radical to form other characters: jiaˉn (traitor), yaˉo (witch), nú (slave), biaˇo (whore).

  “What’s the series itself called?” I asked.

  “The Suicide Project.”

  “I’m a little worried about you. Is this a reflection of your present mood?”

  She laughed. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you going to keep working in this vein? I think you should. I think you’ve found your medium.”

  “I’m not sure. I might try doing some installations.”

  “What kind of installations?”

  “Mixed media. Maybe found objects. I have to come up with a proposal soon. I’m applying to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition.”

  She had been in discussions, too, about being included in group shows at the Creiger-Dane Gallery in Boston and the DNA Gallery in Provincetown. I had to confess, I was jealous of her—jealous of the palpability and immediacy of her talent.

  Between paintings and sculptures, Jessica churned out watercolors, collages, crosshatched charcoals, ink washes, linear perspectives with mechanical pencils and rulers. She was always doing something, a myriad of exercises. I loved her impromptu drawings the most. She would grab a napkin or a paper towel or the back of an envelope and a felt-tip or a stub of graphite, whatever was within reach, and dash off a quick sketch—little still lifes, figures, portraits. She drew one of me once as I was chopping an onion, and somehow she captured the essence of my movements with a casual scattering of lines, a touch of shading. It took her all of four minutes to complete. These drawings and studies, they were effortless for Jessica, a pleasure (something I never felt when trying to write), but they were mere doodles to her. She might pin them up on the walls of her bedroom for a while, but eventually she would toss them. I would sometimes pick them out of the trash to preserve (I still have a portfolio of the discards in my garage). “Can you believe she’s throwing these away?” I’d ask Joshua, and we’d look at the drawings and marvel at Jessica’s dexterity, the splendor of her skills. Of the three of us, Joshua and I believed Jessica had the best chance of making it. Anyone could see right away that she had an immense gift. It wasn’t nearly as obvious or tangible for writers.

  In college, Joshua and I had each made a vow to publish our first books before we hit thirty. We were twenty-eight now. It was still a distinct possibility for him, tapping away up there in the attic. For me, the chances were dubious. I wasn’t writing at the moment, just occasionally tinkering with revisions of old stories. The fact was, I hadn’t written anything new since grad school. I blamed adjunct teaching and Palaver for waylaying me, but they were poor excuses. There were no excuses, Joshua always said. If you want to write, you write. You find the time. You make the time.

  I spent most of my time with Jessica. We cleaned up the backyard, which was small but quite pretty, with a Japanese maple, dogwood, and black tupelo. Jessica and I pruned the trees and shrubs, mowed and edged the grass, and weeded, tilled, and composted areas along the deck and fence, where we planted perennials and bulbs.

  We shopped for groceries together, took walks, went to museums. For hours, we would sit in Café Pamplona or the Algiers or the Someday, Jessica with a sketchpad, me with a book. At each opportunity, I’d hover close to her, casually touch her arm or back, sit so our bodies adjoined. And, despite the torment, I kept accompanying her to Baptiste Power Yoga.

  One night, after we returned home from another brutal session, I walked out of my room with a towel around my waist, thinking Jessica had already finished with the shower. But when I opened the door to the bathroom (the lock didn’t quite function), she was still in there, spiking her hair with pomade, and she was naked. Her skin was slick with water, and her body was everything I had always imagined it would be—lissome, toned, beautiful. There was one thing, though, that I had never imagined. She had no pubic hair—shaved or waxed off.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t think you really are,” she said, glancing down at my towel, which was tented. “We need to talk.” She took me into her bedroom and shut the door.

 
For one thrilling second, I thought she might seduce me. But then, as she put on her bathrobe, Jessica said, “I can’t keep having you stalking and puppying after me all the time. It’s draining. It’s exhausting, actually.” The opening chords to Jeff Buckley’s “Yard of Blonde Girls” drifted down from the attic. “Christ, not again.”

  She sat down on her futon and motioned for me to follow suit. Clumsily holding my towel together, I squatted down on the foot of the futon, several feet away from her. I was embarrassed and glum, my hard-on beginning to dissipate. I knew a lecture was in the offing, one that would irrevocably puncture all the daydreams and hopes I had harbored for years.

  “I thought we were over this,” she said. “I thought we’d moved past this. It can’t go on, Eric. If we’re going to be living here together, it has to stop.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She tore a frayed thread from the hem of her bathrobe. It was the same white silk bathrobe she had worn in Dupre, accented with flowers and branches, now faded, threadbare, and tattered. How many times had I stared at the folds and outlines and knolls of that robe, and fantasized about what was underneath? How many times had I dreamt of running my hand over her bare skin, down the runnel between her spine muscles and over the small of her back, reaching that delectable cleft and progressing over her ass?

  “Sometimes,” Jessica said, “I think the only reason you want to be with me is because you can’t fuck Joshua.”

  “What?”

  “Your connection to him is much more real, honest, than to me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I told her, perplexed. “I don’t love Joshua.”

  “You idealize me,” she said. “You don’t even know me. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me very much.”