The Collective (7 page)

“You sure mail a lot of letters,” she once said. She invariably weighed each envelope and checked the zip code (which, perplexingly, always needed to be corrected) before stamping the postmark, stalling their time together.

“I like writing letters.”

“Pen pals?”

“They’re friends. People I met in my travels.”

“You’ve been to Kalamazoo, Michigan? Weeki Wachee, Florida? Eros, Louisiana?”

He blushed red. He hadn’t intended the double entendre of the last address. He had never been to any of these places, had never journeyed outside of California. He picked the cities randomly from a road atlas and fabricated the names of the recipients and the street addresses. All the envelopes contained blank sheets of paper and were, in due course, returned to sender. “Sure,” he said. “It’s a beautiful country, if you have the time to explore it properly.”

“Lucky man,” she told him.

I’m thankful that, during that first Christmas home from Macalester, I began to thaw toward my mother and initiate a long-overdue détente, although my behavior could hardly have been called angelic. I could still be unforgivably judgmental, condescending, and pissy, and for that, I blamed Didi.

Joshua, in addition to his lists, had given me a calling card number and code, ostensibly to report my impressions of the recommended books and records to him. The number, he told me, was a covert account that was charged to the FBI, which I never verified yet which terrified me for years, thinking I might be arrested retroactively for interstate fraud. However, that December and January I used it with impunity to phone Didi every day, and what distressed me, each time I called, was that she was not as miserable as I was.

“Doesn’t everyone seem like a stranger to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, nothing’s really changed, but we’ve changed. Don’t you see the hypocrisy and futility of everything all of a sudden? Like, it was there all along, but now that we’ve been away, now that our eyes have been opened vis-ŕ-vis what we’ve been studying and discussing, it’s blatantly obvious just how sad and empty everything is, the bourgeois vapidity of everything that surrounds us.” I was cribbing a few of Joshua’s expressions. “Like, the people who used to be our friends—I mean, I get so bored talking to them. They’re going to end up just like their parents—our parents. Do they ever think about anything other than money? There’s this inertial deadness that’s pulling everyone down. I mean, they should all just shoot themselves right now and get it over with. Why even bother? Doesn’t it seem like that to you?”

“Not really.”

“It’s like Pynchon says: entropy reigns supreme.”

“What?”

“It’s the heat-death of culture.”

“Eric,” Didi said, “have you been smoking dope?”

I wished I did have some dope. Didi seemed so happy. Each phone call, there was a bustle of jocularity, gaiety, in the background, people talking and cackling—a party every minute, it seemed. Didi was always distracted, continually interrupted. “What’s going on there?” I’d ask.

“Oh, it’s just my family,” she’d say. She had three sisters and a brother, a plethora of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

In contrast, my house in Mission Viejo was marked by an unearthly silence. My father would come home from work in his short-sleeved white dress shirt and clip-on tie, fix himself a bourbon and Sprite, and read the newspaper before the three of us sat down to dinner, during which no one would utter a word. I’d look at my father as he cut into my mother’s chicken cacciatore (her stab at Western food, made with Campbell’s tomato soup, yet admittedly tasty), and I’d try to recall any advice he had ever imparted to me, father-to-son, any statement of profundity or wisdom, even a bad joke, and I’d come up with zilch. After we finished eating, I’d help my mother with the dishes, and then they’d go to the den to watch TV while I went to my bedroom, from which I could hear purls of canned laugh tracks, but never my parents’ own laughter. Not a titter.

Even when my sister visited, the decibel level barely wavered. Rebecca had graduated from Whittier College—Richard Nixon’s alma mater—with a business degree and gotten a job at First Federal Savings & Loan in Hacienda Heights, processing mortgage applications. She was renting a one-bedroom apartment in West Covina and had a Chinese American boyfriend who was in dental school. It was about as dull a life as I could imagine. My father and mother approved of it wholeheartedly.

Parents believe they have such an impact on their children’s lives, yet I knew, from the moment I had set foot on Mac’s campus, that I’d become a different person, unfettered from whatever gravitational influence they had tried to extend. I’d moved beyond them. They only served now as proscriptive examples.

One afternoon, while my mother slipped freshly laundered, neatly folded briefs into my chest of drawers, I asked her, “Why don’t we have any books in the house?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you read to me as a kid?”

“That’s what school is for. Do you want something to eat?”

“How come you never sang any lullabies to me?”

“What?”

“It’s like I was in a coffin of sterility and cultural deprivation, growing up.”

She stared at me, baffled. “Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something.”

I drove to Laguna Beach and walked up the pathway bordering the ocean to Heisler Park. It was a weekday, but there were plenty of people about, playing volleyball, basketball, jogging, rollerblading. I passed by a group of twenty or so adults of various ages, sitting in a circle on the grass, and I caught a snippet of what was being said. Only in California would they hold, outside like this beside a beach, in full view and earshot of the public, an AA meeting.

What I mainly noticed, though, and what made me ache, were all the couples. They seemed to be everywhere, cuddling on benches, spooning on towels, strolling with arms encircling each other, all smiling goofily, brazenly in love. They repulsed me. I despised them, because I knew now the full range of things that couples did behind closed doors, and I was beginning to suspect that Didi might be doing those things with someone else. I wondered if she had lied to me that first night in my dorm room: perhaps she had had another date after all.

She did not love me—not like I loved her. How else to explain the fact that she did not seem to miss me one iota, that more and more she wasn’t home in Chestnut Hill when she said she would be, and then did not return my messages right away?

“Where were you tonight?” I asked.

“Oh, we went to see a movie in Cleveland Circle.”

“Where?” I wasn’t familiar with the geography of Massachusetts. As far as I knew, she could have flown to Ohio for the day.

“Nearby. On the edge of BC,” she said, not clarifying anything for me.

“How far away is Chestnut Hill from Cambridge?”

“Twenty minutes driving, forever on the T. Why?”

It was much closer than I had thought, not a distant suburb. “You could go visit Joshua. His parents’ house is near Harvard Square.”

“Why would I want to visit Joshua? He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” I said, although Joshua had never expressed anything but indifference or disdain for her.

“What would be the point?” Didi asked. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything.”

I didn’t know what the point would be, exactly. I supposed I was desperate for something to ground her, connect her, to me again. She seemed so removed from me.

“I called twice tonight,” I said. “Didn’t your mother give you the messages?”

“I was going to call you back tomorrow,” she said. “I’m beat.”

“Did you go somewhere after the movie?”

“Hey,” Didi said abruptly, “I was wondering, where were you born? I’ve never asked you. Were you born in Korea?”

“What?” The question befuddled me. “No. I was born here, in Mission Viejo. At Sisters of St. Joseph.”

“Do you speak Korean or English at home?” she asked.

“English,” I said, even more flummoxed. “I don’t know Korean. I thought I told you.” I had explained to her that I was a sansei, third generation. I had assumed she understood. All this time, had she been thinking of me as a fobby, an immigrant fresh off the boat? Was that how she saw me?

“What about your parents and sister?” Didi continued. “Do they speak to each other in Korean?”

“Why are you asking me these things all of a sudden?”

“No reason. I was just wondering.”

“Did someone in your family ask?”

“No, not really. Well, maybe the subject came up.”

“When you told them I’m your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know if I used the word boyfriend,” she said.

“Why not?”

“They’d pester me endlessly!”

“So what? They’ve got to know what’s going on—I call you every day.”

“You don’t know my family. They’re always in my business. They never leave me alone. Nothing’s ever private. I can’t ever get a moment’s peace around here. You have no idea what it’s like.”

“It doesn’t seem to bother you that much. From what I can tell, you’ve been having fun, a lot of fun, being back home.”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” She yawned. “What time is it? It’s late. That movie sucked. We should have walked out halfway.”

“Who’d you go with?”

“Abby and Michael.” Her younger sister and brother.

“Just you guys?”

“We met some people there.”

“Yeah? Who?” I asked, noting the original omission.

“Nina and Sean. Friends from Milton.”

“Is Sean an old boyfriend?”

“Sean? Sean Maguire?” She laughed. “No.”

“He’s not the guy you lost your virginity to?”

She laughed again. “That’s so screwy to even suggest. So to speak. Naw, Sean’s like a cousin to me. That was Kurt, at music camp in Lake Winnipesaukee. He was from Montpelier. I don’t know where the hell he is now. Oh, my God, for a moment I forgot his last name.”

“Sean never had a thing for you?”

“Pamplin.”

“What?”

“That was his last name. Kurt Pamplin. I wonder what ever became of him. He was a really hot guitarist. I bet he’s up in Burlington, in a band or something, playing at Nectar’s. That’s where Phish got their start, you know. They went to UVM. God, I could go for an order of their gravy fries right now. If you ever go to Burlington, you have to go to Nectar’s and get their gravy fries. But you have to get them from the little window outside and eat them standing on the sidewalk. And you have to be drunk, and it has to be, like, two a.m. and wicked cold out. If you eat them inside, it’s not the same thing.”

I did not want to hear about Kurt the hot guitarist, or the band Fish, or the club Nectar’s and the culinary delights of eating their fries al fresco. “Tell me about Sean,” I said.

“What about him?”

“Where’s he go to school?”

“Princeton.”

The fucker. “Have you been hanging out with him a lot?”

“My mom’s best friends with his mom. He’s like my brother.”

First a cousin, now a brother. “I bet he’s always had a thing for you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Did you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

“I told him I’ve been seeing someone, yeah.”

“ ‘Someone.’ Not anything more definitive than that, huh? Why won’t you tell people about me?”

“I just explained.”

“Are you ashamed of me?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

“Why do you want to keep me secret, then?” For the first time, I thought there might be something to Joshua’s lemon-sucker theory.

“I’m really tired,” Didi said. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?”

We didn’t talk about it, though. She kept skirting the topic, and our conversations devolved into prickles of irritation the rest of the vacation.

Nevertheless, when I got back to St. Paul at the end of January, I had hopes we could somehow go back to where we’d left off at the end of the fall semester.

I met Didi at the airport, flowers in hand, reenacting our reunion after Thanksgiving. She looked wonderful. Gone were the pallor and dark circles and emaciation from finals week. She radiated health—well rested and well fed. I had a surprise planned for her: I had bought new sheets for us, exquisitely soft, with a thread count of four hundred and fifty. But Didi demurred when I tried to take her to my dorm room.

“I have a yeast infection,” she told me.

“A what?”

“The doctor said maybe it has something to do with my sugar levels. I’m not feeling that great. You mind if I sleep in my own room tonight?”

I was certain now that she had been cheating on me. Yeast infections were from sex. Too much sex. Not for nothing was it called the honeymoon syndrome.

The next morning, as I knew she would, Didi broke up with me.

“It’s Sean, isn’t it? You’ve been fucking him.”

“Sean has nothing to do with this,” she said, packing the belongings she had stored in my room.

“That’s not a denial.”

“I haven’t been fucking him, all right? I haven’t been fucking anyone. This is what I mean. I can’t breathe around you. I feel suffocated by you. You’re always all over me. All we ever do is have sex. Have you noticed we never talk about anything? I can’t remember a single conversation we’ve ever had. We don’t have anything in common.”

“You never loved me, did you?” I said.

“This is what I mean. All this talk about love! For God’s sake, we’re eighteen! Why couldn’t we have just enjoyed ourselves and, you know, been casual about it? Why’d you have to get so serious and obsessive? You want too much. You wrecked it.”

“You were just slumming.”

“What?”

In the liberal protectorate of Mac, she had felt uninhibited, free, but once she went home, she had woken up to our outward differences, and had lost her nerve. She had begun to envision my life on the opposite coast, and had been terrorized by the specter of a bunch of strange Orientals sitting on the floor in hanbok, eating live octopus and hot chili peppers, speaking in unintelligible barks and yips. “People like you,” I said, “when it gets down to it, you’ll always stick to your own kind.”

“What are you talking about? What’s that even mean?”