The Collective (6 page)

What dawned on me was that no one had ever described sex properly in literature, the sheer sloppiness of it, the excretions and stickiness and sweat, the pungent smells and tastes, the slurps and smacks and pickled inelegance of daily congress. We soon used up my stockpile of condoms, and decided to go without. We wanted to feel each other, and there was something much more arousing about the perils of relying on me to pull out in time. Didi sometimes would not let me withdraw when I felt I would rupture. “Not yet, not yet,” she’d whisper.

Her poor lovely sheets. We ruined them. We slept on the wet spots, because the bed was too small not to. We couldn’t wash the sheets and duvet often enough, and they were indelibly stained with crusty yellow patches. I would use a towel to wipe the semen off myself, off Didi’s stomach and breasts and back and face, and each day the towels would become stiffer—scruffed and mangy. After a while, I didn’t bother trying to wash them anymore. I threw them away and asked my mother to mail me another set. “Why do you need so many towels?” she asked on the phone. “Is someone stealing them from the bathroom? You need to mark your name on them.”

We tried different positions, making things up as we went along. We became expert at fellatio and cunnilingus (the intricacies of which had previously been an utter mystery to me), gymnastically hanging halfway off the lofted bed.

“Your skin is so smooth,” Didi told me. “You’re practically hairless.” She plucked at my arm with her fingers, unable to gain purchase on a single strand. “I love your body.”

Both of us, quite unintentionally, through our starvation and acrobatics, had acquired washboard abs. I hadn’t appreciated how much of a workout sex could be.

“You don’t realize how beautiful you are yet, do you?” she said.

This was true. No one had ever described me as beautiful, or even good-looking, and I knew that objectively I had not changed in the course of a few months, metamorphosing from middling to handsome. But something in me had changed. I carried myself differently now. I had crossed a line of maturation, stepping from callow to experienced.

Once, as I was entering her from behind, I touched upon the wrong opening. I started to retreat, but Didi said, “Wait. Stay there.”

“Really?” I asked.

She lowered her ass and pressed back into me.

When we were done, I went to the bathroom and washed myself off in the shower. “Was it disgusting?” she asked.

“No.” I didn’t know what I had imagined. Probably the same thing Didi had: my penis excrementally and perhaps permanently browned, flecked with bits of feces. Yet, as much as I’d looked, I hadn’t noticed anything really unusual.

Didi scooted against the wall and lifted the covers as I climbed back into bed. “How did it feel? When you were inside.”

“It was … weird.”

“Didn’t it feel good?”

“It was okay, I guess.” I had been too selfconscious amid the act to derive any enjoyment from it. I had kept thinking to myself, with wonder, We–are–having–anal–sex. “How’d it feel to you?” I asked Didi.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m glad we did it.”

A taboo had been broken, and we were a little awed with ourselves, though we never tried it again. From then on, we stopped at nothing, even making love when she had her period, adding blood to the blotter of her sheets. Our intimacy was freeing and intoxicating. I had never been physically and emotionally so close to anyone. We were at ease, unabashed. We could do or say anything without fear of ridicule or retribution. It didn’t matter what we looked like, if our breath smelled or we farted or had a zit. This was acceptance, I thought. This was love.

We kept going, experimenting, exploring every inch of each other’s body, learning each other’s likes and dislikes. (She liked when I raised her knees to her chest, feeling me deepest that way; I liked when she straddled me and rubbed the folds of her vulva along the underside of my erection before reaching down and sinking onto me; she liked when, as I tongued her clitoris, I inserted a finger and hooked the tip and pressed against the roof of her vaginal canal; she disliked, though, her earlobes being sucked, and I didn’t much care for the insertion of her pinkie into my anus one time.)

Nothing had prepared me for this education—not any of my sister’s women’s magazines that I used to sneak away to read, not the two copies of Playboy and one issue of Penthouse that I had found in my father’s closet. I realized that, before Didi, I had been a complete neophyte. I had known as much about sex, real sex, as I had about thread counts. And yet I wanted to know more. I could not get enough. I wanted to become a great lover.

I didn’t see much of Joshua and Jessica during this period. I let my studies go. I didn’t attend meetings for the school literary magazine or for Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity. Reluctantly I went to my classes—sleepy, unshowered, bowlegged—but all I could think about was getting back into bed, naked again, with Didi.

The four days we spent apart for Thanksgiving, flying to opposite coasts to our respective homes, were interminable. I met her at the airport with flowers, took her back to Dupre, and stripped her down as soon as the door was shut.

“I love you,” I said.

She laughed as I backed her into the room toward a clear space on the floor, waddling with my jeans around my ankles, cock standing acutely upright.

Only three weeks were left in the semester, and there was a rush of activity as we geared toward finals. The first Saturday in December, the school held the annual Winter Ball, a semiformal dance for which you were supposed to show up in your nicest outfit, replicating—sardonically—what you had worn to your prom or homecoming. In high school, I had gone through a preppy phase, and I pulled out my blue blazer, pink button-down oxford shirt, argyle sweater vest, and penny loafers. Didi teased her hair into a poodle perm, adorned with a lacy bow, and donned a taffeta dress with spaghetti straps, white tights, and granny boots. She was, all irony aside, gorgeous. As we made our entrance at the gallery of Olin-Rice, the science building, I was proud of her, of us, of our identity as a couple.

Joshua was sporting a beat-down leather motorcycle jacket, holey jeans, and a Red Sox cap—his usual garb. “I didn’t go to my prom,” he said. “Where the hell have you been? I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age, and we live down the fucking hall.”

I nodded toward Didi, who was loading hors d’oeuvres onto two plates for us. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?”

“Jesus,” Joshua said. “You’re a goner. You’re totally pussy-whipped.”

For the rest of the term, Didi and I had to buckle down, catch up on everything we had neglected. We studied in my room—with our clothes on, for a change. I sped through Dog Soldiers and Going After Cacciato (the author, Tim O’Brien, was a Mac alum), and I wrote a paper on the role of drugs and surrealism as a counter-exposition to colonialism. Didi integrated partial fractions and differentiated logarithms and calculated polynomials. I marveled at our industry, our focus. We were actually studying, getting things done, while sitting in the same room, although all it took was a single glance from either of us to abandon everything for a quickie. But then, miraculously, as if nothing had occurred, we would slip our underwear back up and return to our books.

During exam week, we stayed up all night, cramming for tests. The school held a midnight breakfast for us, with professors and administrators—including the president—in aprons, serving us pancakes, the repast occasionally interrupted by primal screams and the time-honored appearance of students, Joshua among them, streaking nude through the hall.

And then, before I knew it, it was over. I was back home in Mission Viejo, Didi was in Massachusetts, and we would not see each other again for a month.

I moped. It was seventy-two degrees and sunny out, but I stayed in my bedroom, trying to puzzle my way through Gravity’s Rainbow—the first title on the recommended reading list that Joshua had given to me for my vacation. I slept late, watched TV, and hoggishly ate the meals my mother prepared for me (“You’re so skinny!” she had said, horrified, when she met me at John Wayne Airport).

I saw a few friends—high school buddies who had remained in Southern California, attending one of the UC or Cal State schools—but I felt little connection with them anymore and preferred staying home, renting videos of foreign films from Blockbuster and listening to Lou Reed (first on the recommended albums list that Joshua had given to me) on my headphones, occasionally interrupted by my mother as she brought in my folded laundry and asked if I wanted a snack.

I let her pamper me—something I had resisted mightily in high school, something that had, in fact, led to awful rows and appalling cruelty on my part.

My mother, Junie, had been born in 1940 in Korea and had come to the States soon after World War II, when her father, a prominent chiropractor in Seoul, was hired to teach at Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He eventually moved the family to L.A., where he set up his first clinic in Koreatown (he would build a chain of them dotting the Los Angeles Basin, yet was lousy as a businessman and was perpetually in debt). My mother grew up in Boyle Heights and attended community college, LACC, then worked as a postal clerk, a job she held until my sister was born.

From then on, her focus was solely on the maintenance of her home and her children, making our lunches and getting us to school every weekday, fastidiously cleaning the house, gardening, grocery shopping and prepping our dinners, picking us up and ferrying us to various places and activities. My mother’s typical sack lunch for me included two homemade chicken salad sandwiches, sticks of carrots and celery, cookies, potato chips, and an orange. It wasn’t a fancy lunch, not like the elaborate bentos some of my Japanese American classmates clicked open, but it was meticulously prepared, exemplified by the orange. My mother would slice the outer skin so it would open up like the petals of a flower, still connected at the base. She would peel off the inner white membrane of the orange, then put it back—now pristine and tender—into its protective skin. An ordinary piece of fruit turned into an art form.

She tried to spoil us rotten, my father, sister, and me. And how did I repay my mother for her devotion in my teenage years? I snapped at her. I belittled her. I was sarcastic and rude. Unconscionably mean. I yelled at her to stop trying to do everything for me, stop doting on me, stop being so nice to me (“You’re not my maid! Don’t you have any self-respect?!”). I raged when she cleaned my room (“Don’t ever come in here again without my permission!”). I fulminated when she ironed my clothes (“I’ll look like a nerd!”). I was apoplectic when she uniformly bleached my acid-washed jeans (“You’re an idiot!”). Her mere presence, taking a seat beside me on the couch, inquiring how I was doing, was enough to provoke my fury (“Why can’t you leave me alone?! You’re suffocating me!”).

It shames me still, the insufferable way I treated her. She had no career, no intellectual pursuits, few hobbies or interests other than horticulture, her world almost entirely confined to the domestic, to caring for us, and I thought less of my mother for it. I took her completely for granted.

She would die prematurely, when she was just fifty-nine, a month before I turned thirty. In the latter part of her life, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure, but wasn’t good about taking full doses of her medication, disliking the side effects. While she was swimming laps at the local pool, she had a stroke, a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The lifeguards were late pulling her out of the water and couldn’t revive her. Technically she drowned. My father called me with the news from California, incoherent as he wept.

For several years afterward, I could not get one question out of my head. Its arrival—usually when I was in the middle of the most humdrum things, riding the subway, washing the dishes, peeling an orange—would undo me. I was always afraid of breaking down in public. The question was this: What was going through her mind those last few seconds, after the sunburst in her brain, as she was choking facedown in the water, knowing she would likely not survive? Unlike with Joshua’s suicide later, I knew exactly what her last thoughts must have been. I knew she was thinking she would never see her children again, me and Rebecca, she would never see us marry or have children of our own, would never spend another Thanksgiving or Christmas with us, would never be able to hold us and say she loved us, and I knew this must have been unbearably, heartbreakingly sad for her.

I am forty-one years old now. Indeed I did not fully appreciate her until—relatively recently—I got married and had children. In retrospect, it dismays me how little curiosity and empathy I had toward my mother when I was young, how rarely I tried to imagine her inner life, or even acknowledged that she had one, with hopes and disappointments of her own. That image did not come complete for me until the last Christmas our family spent together, in 1999, before she died. I found a bunch of old slides in a closet, and I set up a projector in the den for my parents, Rebecca, and me to view after dinner. They were slides of my mother and father’s wedding and honeymoon. We howled and cried, we were laughing so hard, looking at the antiquated fashions and hairdos, but privately Rebecca and I were impressed by our parents’ youth, how handsome and vibrant they were. Our mother recounted their courtship, and she made fun of my father’s strenuous pursuit of her, but she was plainly delighted by the memory.

My father, Andrew, came, strictly speaking, from peasant stock, and it had apparently taken a herculean effort to convince my mother and her family that he was worthy of her. My grandfather had been among the first wave of Korean immigrants, recruited as laborers for sugar plantations in Hawaii. Later, he became the manager of a small Brussels sprouts farm in Rosarita Bay, California. My father was the last of three children to be born, but the first to go to college, at UCLA. He met my mother at a social in Koreatown, and thereafter, almost daily, drove the twenty-five miles between campus and Monterey Park on the pretext of mailing a letter or needing stamps, claiming he was, just by chance, in the neighborhood, in order to see my mother at the post office where she worked.