The Collective (14 page)

“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 sculptures. 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 nü? as a radical to form other characters: jia?n (traitor), ya?o (witch), nú (slave), bia?o (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.”

“I’ve known you for ten years, Jessica.” I looked at the small mole on the side of her neck, and I thought of when she’d told me that, as a child, she used to rub the mole over and over, trying to expunge it.

“We’ve been friends,” she said, “but we’ve become different people. Or at least I have. Really what’s kept your glorification of me alive is the idea of conquest, but you don’t actually want to achieve it. You’re in it for the longing and the yearning. The culmination of it, having a relationship with me, wouldn’t really interest you. So let’s just get this over with, once and for all.”

“Okay,” I said, expecting she would now make me promise to cease and desist.

“Let’s just fuck,” she said.

“What?”

“Let’s just do it once and get it over with.”

“Are you insane?” I said. “Just like that?”

“Why not? Do you need more foreplay? More courting and romancing?” She slid her fingers down the lapels of her robe, unveiling the inner halves of her breasts, her stomach, the mound above her pubic bone. “From what I’ve seen, men don’t need a lot of foreplay. We’ll just have sex this one time and satisfy your curiosity, and then maybe we’ll be able to move on. It won’t mean anything.”

This was a cruel trick, I thought. She was taunting me. “This is crazy.”

“I’ll admit, there have been times I’ve been curious myself. This will be good for us. We’ll feel stupid afterwards, and it’ll be awkward for a while, but then we’ll be fine. I don’t suppose it’d do any good to say we shouldn’t tell Joshua.”

“Stop,” I said.

“Stop?”

“Can you cover yourself up? I can’t talk to you this way.”

She tied her robe together. “You’re going to deny me now,” she said, “after all those years of hangdogging? You’re going to pass up free pussy? There are no strings here, Charlie.”

“But don’t you see?” I said. “I want there to be strings. I want this to mean something. Jessica, I’ve been in love with you from the moment I saw you.”

“Okay, this was a terrible idea,” she said. “Idiotic.”

“You’ve been curious at times. Haven’t you ever felt more than that for me?”

“I’ve always seen you as a friend.”

“You just said we’re not even that, really.”

She scooted to the edge of the futon and put her feet on the floor and stared at them. She needed to cut her toenails. “I’m sorry, Eric,” she said. “I don’t feel anything for you. Not in the way you want.”

“Why can’t we try and see? Maybe it could work out between us.”

“I really don’t think it could.”

I went to my room. The next day, we felt stupid, and it was awkward, and it didn’t seem at all like things would ever be fine between us. Even Joshua noticed it. At the kitchen counter, he watched us avoiding each other, then asked me, “What’s up with you two?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you finally crack the walnut, pogo her pachinko?”