week 11

AN EDUCATION

I FIRST MET ERIN AT A high school art camp in Maine. Since it was my first time away from my family in Los Angeles, I thought I could escape my geeky status and become the bad girl I always wanted to be. In my arsenal, I had my combat boots and my Fugazi and Pavement tapes and my pack of Marlboro Lights. But upon arrival, I knew immediately that I was out of my league, since the New York kids were nihilistically hip in that nineties Larry Clark Kids kind of way. Erin was the most striking among them: a tall Taiwanese goth girl with an asymmetrical bob who wore a full-length charcoal vintage negligee and knee- length combat boots as huge as moon boots. I was so intimidated by her I avoided her.

But we struck a hesitant friendship in drawing class because she liked my art. We kept our easels next to each other. We said nice things about each other’s work. She would borrow my drawing pens, or I, her masking tape. But once class was over, she paired off with her much cooler friend while I retreated back to my glum basement dorm room to hang out with my white Southern roommate who had hung a giant American flag on her wall as a defiant act against all the East Coast pretensions around her.

Once, on a Saturday night, Erin asked me if I wanted to go paint. The RA, she explained, said she could use the empty room and she would like the company. I immediately said yes although I had never done such a thing as painting with someone else outside of class. Making art was an entirely private affair. I did it alone on weekend nights at home to escape my life. To pin up unstretched canvas on a wall next to a friend in an empty room spotlit by clamp lights, with New Order warbling from a tape deck, felt too intimate, especially since we weren’t painting anything from life but painting from imagination. What was natural in private—sketching things out, stepping back to gaze at my painting —felt like a self-conscious act I was performing exclusively for Erin. I might as

well have worn a beret and smock. But because I was acutely aware of the fact that I was playing the role of artist, my identity as an artist became real for the first time.

As we talked, Erin’s aura of intimidation evaporated. She was not from New York City but from the suburbs of Long Island, where she attended the local public school. Her parents were computer programmers. I was surprised that her parents were strict immigrants like mine, since Erin looked like an ethereal creature who’d popped out of Ian Curtis’s forehead. Not that Erin acted ethereal either. At one point, she ripped out a fart. When she saw my shocked expression, she laughed: “Why do we have to walk around with clenched butts? It’s unhealthy to hold it in.” Mostly we worked silently. Erin was influenced by Max Ernst and painted a humanoid birdlike figure that spooked me. I copied her and began painting my own humanoid figure. Hours passed and I painted furiously rather than with my usual studious care. The muffled background chatter and laughter died down as everyone in the dorm building fell asleep. Once the tape squealed to its end, all we heard were crickets crying to the bass of bullfrogs whose songs grew louder until our room seemed to dislodge itself from the dorm and float— like a room in a dollhouse without its fourth wall—into the heart of an overgrown forest.

—

In 2013, Erin and I attended a Chelsea opening for the artist Jim Shaw, an L.A. conceptual artist who collected hundreds of amateur paintings from thrift stores and presented them salon-style in blue-chip galleries. He organized the paintings by subject: clowns, cats, UFOs, and other chintzy subjects that are often popular with amateur painters. Like our fellow viewers, we gawked our way through the portraits, which were as lurid as tabloids. This show garnered rave reviews. One critic wrote that Shaw “disrupted notions of biography or signature style by affirming the decentered subjectivity and fragmented routines of Postmodern society.”

Then we came across a work that had a familiar surrealist style, a painting with a birdlike figure in acrylic impasto. It was that unfinished painting that Erin had made in the art camp we attended years ago. Within this menagerie of kitsch, Erin’s painting appeared naïve rather than deliberate, the spookiness an accident of the untutored psyche rather than a style developed for calculated effect. Shaw must have found the painting at the Long Island thrift store where Erin’s mother

dumped her high school portfolio. Now, upon his discovery, this orphan painting became a collectible of value.

Erin was embarrassed by her painting. She said it was juvenile, an inconsequential piece of junk. I thought about all those famous artists whose crappiest juvenilia is now worth millions. Every doodle is an enshrined artifact for the archives because it unlocks the early stages of the artist’s style. I urged Erin to tell Jim Shaw that it was her painting. But she was against the idea. At that point in 2013, Erin had had exhibitions in Europe but had not yet shown in New York City. When I wouldn’t stop harping about it, Erin told me to shut up. She said, “This is not how I plan to debut in Chelsea.”

—

When I was in my twenties, I knew a guy named Joe. He was an artist who also sang in a band called Cheeseburger. He was short and stumpy like a Maurice Sendak character, yet onstage he convulsed and howled like Robert Plant, wearing his jeans loose enough to expose a palm’s length of plumber’s crack. The spotlight suited him. In 2008, I saw his solo show at Canada, a Lower East Side gallery located right where the Chinatown buses used to chuff off to Boston for fifteen dollars. When I walked into the chilly gallery space, I thought the show wasn’t installed yet. The walls were practically empty except for a few dirty unprimed canvases. One canvas had a faint scrawl of a happy face. Another canvas had a childish “S” sign for Superman. Even his bandmates were irritated by the show: “Joe totally did this last minute.”

His solo show blew up. Joe was later dubbed one of this generation’s “bad- boy avant-gardists with machismo to spare, rebelling against aesthetic conventions, social norms, or both.” His paintings were described as “primitivist” but still somehow captured “the atemporality of our digital age.” Critics marveled at how much “he got away with” by doing so little. More recently, I asked Erin’s partner, a painter and installer, what he did that day, and he said, “I moved a Joe Bradley.” “Since when did you start referring to Joe as an object?” I asked. He said, “Since I moved a Joe Bradley into Ivanka Trump’s penthouse.”

The avant-garde genealogy could be tracked through stories of bad-boy white artists who “got away with it,” beginning with Duchamp signing a urinal and calling it art. It’s about defying standards and initiating a precedent that ultimately liberates art from itself. The artist liberates the art object from the rules of mastery, then from content, then frees the art object from what Martin Heidegger

calls its very thingliness, until it becomes enfolded into life itself. Stripped of the artwork, all we are left with is the artist’s activities. The problem is that history has to recognize the artist’s transgressions as “art,” which is then dependent on the artist’s access to power. A female artist rarely “gets away with it.” A black artist rarely “gets away with it.” Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn’t mean that you’re lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.

—

Art movements have been built on the bromances of bad white boys. Their exploits are exhaustively catalogued: boys who were “fizzy with collaboration” and boys on “their decade-long benders” in bars that are now hallowed landmarks. From a young age, these boys speculated on their own legacy and critics eagerly bought their stock before they matured. But the importance of women is recognized belatedly. The female artist is given a retrospective postmortem. Archaeologists must unearth the crypt and announce they have discovered another underrecognized genius.

As I read about the friendships between Kelley, Shaw, and McCarthy, or de Kooning and Pollock, or Verlaine and Rimbaud, or Breton and Éluard, I craved to read about the friendships where women, and more urgently women of color, came of age as artists and writers. The last few decades have ushered in legions of feminist writers and artists, but it’s still fairly uncommon to read about female friendships founded on their aesthetic principles. The deeper I dug into the annals of literary and art history, the more alone I felt. But in life, I was not alone. I realized that I had already experienced that kind of bond through my own friendships with Erin and Helen.

—

By chance, Erin and I ended up at Oberlin together, but we didn’t become close until our second year because Erin, to my disappointment, arrived at orientation with her tattoo artist boyfriend from Long Island. When I first saw her on campus, Erin was even more baroquely goth, with new chin and septum piercings and a battalion of spiny arm tattoos. Her boyfriend was equally pierced and

tattooed. He was also so white he had white dreads. This boyfriend spent all hours of the day in their closet-sized dorm room.

Because of him, I thought, Erin was antisocial, microwaving vegan curry with him in the tiny dormitory kitchen instead of eating with the rest of us at the dining hall. When she wasn’t making art or studying, she slept at all hours under her black velvet blanket that looked about as snug as a dust cover. Thinking back, it’s hard to reconcile that drowsy soft-spoken Erin with the loud and opinionated Erin I know now.

I thought her passivity had something to do with her boyfriend, who I suspected was controlling and probably psychotic. Maybe I was a little possessive of her too. Erin attracted that in her friends, this envy, this sense of proprietariness, especially later from Helen, but though her boyfriend was kind of a jerk, it wasn’t because of him she was so narcoleptic and passive. Her boyfriend was actually the only one there for her while she grieved.

Helen said she first noticed me in our sophomore year, in a gut course called Chemistry and Crime, where the professor droned on endlessly about the O. J. Simpson trial. She observed, “You were that girl who snuck out of class to do coke every morning.” This was a curious take on my habit of going to the bathroom and sitting in the stall for five minutes because I was so bored in class. I said that I didn’t know she was in that class even though I did. She had long, yellowy dyed hair and wore a beige Burberry scarf, the required status accessory for all Korean international students. Her look was confused. A preppy music conservatory student trying to look arty.

I can’t recall how Helen came into my and Erin’s lives, only that as soon we met her, it was as if we’d known one another forever. Over the years, she began to resemble Erin, with her black wardrobe, chunky shoes, and glasses with aggressive black frames, until senior year when Helen came into her own glamorously butch look. Because her father had a career that required him to work overseas, she lived in six different countries before arriving at the Oberlin conservatory to train as a classical violinist. Then, burnt out from the pressure of performance, she transferred to the college to study religion and fine arts. She threw herself into every discipline with passion before abandoning it completely. She did this with friends and lovers, and with countries she’d lived in. Helen spoke five languages and had an ear for accents as well. After living in London, her family moved to Baltimore and Helen switched to an American accent within a week.

Nothing stuck to her. Only God and art stuck. That, and her body, which she tried to starve down to nothing. She stopped taking her lithium because it made her gain weight. One Easter week, on a cold, bright, and glittering day, she drove her father’s powder-blue Lincoln around campus, pelting friends she loved with pink marshmallow Peeps and those she detested with her lithium pills.

—

The greatest gift my parents granted me was making it possible for me to choose my education and career, which I can’t say for the kids I knew in Koreatown who felt bound to lift their parents out of debt and grueling seven-day workweeks. The wealthier Korean parents had no such excuse, ruthlessly managing the careers and marriages of their children, and as a result ruining their children’s lives, all because they wanted bragging rights. I was lucky because my father too wanted to be a poet, which he never revealed to me until I began taking a poetry class at Oberlin.

My father’s business did so well that by the time I was a teenager, we lived in a house with a pool in a white suburban neighborhood. From my window, I used to watch sparrows swoop down to sip a teardrop of chlorinated water before swooping back up. The move did not erase the unhappiness in our family but threw it into sharp relief because of our isolation. To unpack the source of my adolescent unhappiness would be to write about my mother, which I have struggled with in this book: How deep can I dig into myself without talking about my mother? Does an Asian American narrative always have to return to the mother? When I met the poet Hoa Nguyen, the first question she asked me was, “Tell me about your mother.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s an icebreaker.” “You have an Asian mother,” she said. “She has to be interesting.” I must defer, at least for now. I’d rather write about my friendship with Asian

women first. My mother would take over, breaching the walls of these essays, until it is only her. I have some scores to settle first—with this country, with how we have been scripted. I will only say that my mother was broken then, though I don’t know how. When illness is unnamed, the blame for it is displaced onto the child, the way I used to feel at fault just for sitting there in the passenger seat when my mother, without warning, jerked the car into the other lane, nearly crashing into another car while threatening she was going to kill us both.

Back then, my mind was a dial tone. I hid from my mother and hid from the horrible rich kids in the high school I attended. I hid in art, and if I wasn’t in the art studio at school, I willed myself invisible on the school bus that was hotboxed with the cruelty of a bully who daily reminded my friends and me that we were ugly as dogs. No matter our income, my family could not cough up the thorn embedded in our chests. That stain of violence followed us everywhere. I thought I could escape it by moving to Ohio, but it followed me there too.

—

Erin, Helen, and I used to go to J. R. Valentine’s, a freestanding diner that always advertised a fried perch special on Tuesdays. The diner had an alpine green roof and a parking lot that collected more brown humps of snow than cars. We were invariably the only college students there, because it was a few miles outside of campus. We stayed for hours as we asked for endless refills of bad coffee or ordered odd dishes off the menu. I wish I’d had a stenographer who followed me so I had transcripts of these quotidian moments that as a whole were more life- changing than losing your virginity or having your heart broken. Freud said, in his correspondence with Josef Breuer, that “creativity was most powerfully released in heated male colloquy.” The foundation of our friendship was a heated colloquy that became absorbed into our art and poetry. When I made art alone, it was a fantasy, but shared with Erin and Helen, art became a mission.

Helen made you think like the world would end without your art. But while she lavished you with praise, it wasn’t just flattery. She was also learning from you until she surpassed you. Helen was curious about poetry, so I lent her my phonebook-sized twentieth-century poetry anthology, thinking she’d boredly flip through it, and then I was annoyed when I found the book in her room with every other page dog-eared and underlined. Another time, I took her to the gym and showed her how to use the treadmill. While I jogged lightly for two miles, Helen cranked her treadmill up and sprinted as if she were running for her life. “Take it easy! You’re going to be sore,” I said when I was done, but Helen, drenched in sweat, wheezed on for another ten miles.

She never slept. What did she do all night when everyone was asleep? She couldn’t sleep in her own bed and regularly crashed with friends. One night, a friend woke up in the middle of the night and was freaked out to find Helen in her room, sitting in a chair, smoking her menthols in the dark.

When Helen was happy, she was both childlike and maternal. In the

mornings, she’d jump into bed with me and say in a childlike voice, “Let’s go to breakfast.” Sometimes she’d also sniff my blanket, yank it away, roll it up, and throw it in the washer. Still groggy, I’d always succumb to going to breakfast with her. Eventually, I noticed that she did this more with Erin. Wake her up. Enjoin her to come out and experience the day.

—

By her sophomore year, Erin was the star of the art department. Her sculptures and installations were always the most imaginative and original. Helen was still new to art and she imitated everything that Erin did at first. She used soil in her installation after Erin used soil, made artist books after Erin made artist books— but Erin never minded, finding it flattering.

Eventually, they both became indomitable forces in the art department. They were a blitzkrieg during art crit, tearing down their classmates’ ugly sculptures with daunting acumen. Famous guest artists were not immune. One guest photographer presented loving photographs of his nude pregnant wife, and Erin and Helen dressed the photographer down for objectifying the female subject as a biologically determined object. The professors adored them. My classmates feared them. But they also resented them. Without caring that it was racially insensitive, everyone passive-aggressively mixed up Erin for Helen or Helen for Erin. They had a nickname: the Twins.

I once taught a poetry workshop with three female Persian students enrolled in the class. When I called out one of their names during attendance the first day, the student responded in a voice that was both embarrassed and defiant, “Yeah, hi, I’m the other Persian.” Half the class was white but none of the other white kids felt self-conscious about the fact that there were so many of them. But I knew how she felt. I always know when there are too many people like me, because the restaurant is no longer cool, the school no longer well rounded. A space is overrun when there are too many Asians, and “too many” can be as few as three. With Erin and Helen, I could feel my selfhood being slurred into them, but Erin and Helen didn’t care. They dressed to be aggressively present. They wore big clomping shoes. They wanted to be intimidating.

Erin and Helen were an invasion in the art department, previously dominated by white boys in ironic death metal bands who silkscreened posters for off- campus parties and moved to Chicago for the music scene. Art was a pose, an underachieving lifestyle. Erin and Helen, on the other hand, were

unapologetically ambitious. Art had to have a stake. Erin was influenced by land artists like Robert Smithson and yet her style

was all her own in its brooding minimalism. She made earthworks, forming perfect miniature dirt cubes, marking each one with a dissection pin, and arranging them in patterns on the gallery floor. Another time, Erin dragged an old chair into the arboretum, sat on the chair, and spent the night digging a hole into the soil with her shoes. At the time, I made fun of her for that piece (That’s it? A hole?), but in retrospect, I can imagine its beauty during a morning walk along the marsh, seeing, in the white fog, the golden elms surrounding a lone abandoned chair and a barely perceptible depression.

—

During the year between the summer I met Erin in art camp and when I saw her again at Oberlin, she experienced a family tragedy that she is still private about to this day. I had mentioned what happened to her in this book until its final edit, when Erin intervened while we were having dinner on the Lower East Side. I was telling her about a dream I had where Helen was in my life again. I was so happy to see Helen until it dawned on me that I had to tell her that I’d been writing about her.

“By the way, you’re not writing about my family, are you?” Erin asked. “I mention what happened,” I said. “One sentence, that’s all.” “Off limits. We discussed it.” “You said I could mention it but not to go into detail!” “That’s an optimistic interpretation.” “It was a core part of your artwork in college. I don’t see how I could not talk

about it at all, since I write about your artwork.” “Let me tell you something. When I was in Shanghai this summer, there were

so many rules. Every time I asked permission to gain access to a site or equipment, the people in charge would say no. They didn’t even know what the rules were but they didn’t want to get in trouble, so it was easier to say no to everything. I had no idea how anyone got anything done until an artist told me that China is a culture of forgiveness and not permission. You break the rule and then ask for forgiveness later.”

“Are you saying that I can write about it and ask for forgiveness later?”

“No, what I’m saying is that we’re not in China. You can’t ask for forgiveness. I won’t forgive you. Our friendship is on the line here.”

“Okay. I’ll take it out.” “Thank you.” “It’s just—” “What?” “I’m taking it out—and I swear this is not a justification to keep it in—but I

think it’s a problem how Asians are so private about their own traumas, you know, which is why no one ever thinks we suffer any injustices. They think we’re just these—robots.”

“My need for privacy is not an Asian thing—it’s an artist thing.” “How is it an artist thing?” “All artists are private about their lives. They do it to protect their careers.” “That’s a huge generalization.” “And your comment about Asians isn’t? What I’m saying is true, especially if

you’re a female artist of color. If you reveal anything, they collapse your art with your life—and I don’t want my autobiography hijacking my art. Maybe back then, my loss was a deep part of me but I have worked really hard to separate my work and my identity from that loss, and I will not be knocked back down.”

“You understand that I’m not using your real name.” “Doesn’t matter,” Erin said. “I guess it’s a good thing I’m not friends with Helen anymore.” “That’s something to think about. What if you were? What would she think?

Where’s the care in the essay? Why is it necessary to take from other people’s lives?”

“Erin, you haven’t read the essay. There’s plenty of care. And it’s unrealistic for me as a writer not to take from other people’s lives. I’m not some friendless orphan. My life overlaps with the lives of others so I have no choice but to take from others, which is why writers are full of care, but also—if they’re at all truthful—a bit cruel.”

“As I said, our friendship’s on the line.” “I’m taking it out!”

—

In my freshman year, I thought I was too good for intro studio classes, so I talked my way into an intermediate drawing class with a small, owlish Greek professor, Athena Tacha, by showing her the slide sheet of my high school portfolio. I was proud of my portfolio, which was from my AP Studio Art class in high school. She held my slide sheet up to the light. When I told her I scored a 5, she put the sheet back down.

“Technically, you are advanced. But you have far to go aesthetically,” Athena said in her high-pitched Greek accent. Then she unpeeled a course registration number sticker for me to give to the registrar, but instead of handing it to me, she stuck it firmly over the slide of my pastel Gauguin-inspired self-portrait.

During crits, my classmates, who were all surly juniors and seniors, duct- taped up their drawings of badly drawn figures, the papers smeared with fingerprints since no one bothered using fixative. One senior always drew her pit bull, which she brought to class. Although I was shy and never spoke during crit, I was judgmental. I thought their drawings were lazy and unskilled. I didn’t know why my drawings were consistently dismissed. I tried but could not conquer this deskilled ugly aesthetic and continued producing obliviously feminine works. Once, Athena asked us to draw an internal organ. I drew a soft rendering of ovaries, and realizing it was too pretty, I cut out xeroxed eggs and glued them onto the picture. During crit, everyone was silent. Athena looked at my drawing and said, “Pretty colors. But why is it obscured by these eggs? It is quite silly, no?” A junior, whose hair was once blond but now the color of an old penny, snorted.

For the first time, I was confronted with the subjective vicissitudes of artmaking. One of my favorite movies later was Spellbound, a documentary made in 2002 about the national spelling bee, where many of the contestants were immigrant or working-class children who became finalists because of grit and effort. It was so poignant, so full of hope! When a South Asian boy was stumped over the word Darjeeling, I laughed with tears in my eyes. The irony of it all! If there was any documentary that promoted America as a meritocracy, it was that film. I believed talent but also old-fashioned sweat was proportional to the artwork’s success, not knowing that no matter how hard I worked, I could not make it good. Someone else had to decide it was good, and what they decided was good had little to do with the artwork itself but the conjoining forces of staging, timing, luck, and how I comported myself as an artist. Eventually, I learned to look aloof and bored. My cords grew dirtier and I stopped washing my hair. Out of apathy more than true technique, I freed my line, allowing it to travel

all over the cheap newsprint page, and Athena finally approved of my drawings.

—

In a campus that fetishized ugliness, Helen thought beauty was the highest compliment. She was firmly in the camp of Kant and Keats. Beauty did not mask nor was it a handmaiden to some higher philosophical truth. Beauty was self- evident, the highest criterion of value due to its capacity to suspend thought and freeze time, which is what she craved, a suspension of time from her existence.

Helen was inspired by the obsessiveness of Ann Hamilton, an artist who was all the rage in the nineties. Hamilton nailed thousands of copper tags to the floor or wove rivulets of horse hair donated from slaughterhouses into an eight- thousand-square-foot carpet so that the gallery floor looked like a feral ocean. “Allusive to the fairy tale’s impossible tasks,” the scholar and poet Susan Stewart said of Hamilton’s installations, which were almost obscene in their extravagance. Of course, Hamilton had an army of helpers, whereas Helen had only herself.

For her final project in her sophomore sculpture class, Helen soldered copper pipes and wove yards and yards of the finest white filament between the pipes. She wove for days and nights and didn’t sleep at all.

Her sculptures were always white, luminous, and pure, playing with the way your perceptions of beauty depended on where you stood, how close you looked. During crit, everyone loved her finished installation. The sculptures looked like rows of white gurneys, but up close, the detailing of the white threadwork was intricate, as if tiny spiders had threaded each filament. She was exhausted after it was done. Now get some sleep, we urged her. Helen said she would. She returned to her dorm room and swallowed a bottle of pills.

—

After Helen returned from the hospital, we all became closer, bound by a pact to keep her alive, but this responsibility fell especially hard on Erin. She became Helen’s confidante, collaborator, and sister. But Erin was also the most fatalistic about Helen. After that first incident, Helen threatened to kill herself so many times that Erin and I acted like she had a terminal disease. Once, when I told Erin that Helen had to return to the hospital, Erin was silent before saying, “She’s going to die anyway.”

This threat drove a wedge between Helen and me. I was afraid to upset her,

say the wrong thing. My personality shrank until I became this weak sidekick, like the watery-eyed Steve Buscemi in The Big Lebowski. Helen, on the other hand, became magnified in her volatility. She flew into rages that did not belong in college. The doctors kept changing their diagnosis: bipolar, borderline. Whatever it was, I was mad at the school for letting her back in, because now it was up to Erin and me to take care of her. I was selfish, cowardly. When Helen became paranoid, as she often did, and accused me of wanting to abandon our friendship, I wanted to yell: You’re right! You’re a fucking lunatic and I want you out of my life! But instead, I murmured how much I loved her and how her friendship was a blessing to me.

And I did love her. One of our first late-night conversations was about our mothers. Helen’s own mother had been in and out of mental institutions for most of Helen’s youth, and Helen had shuttled not only from country to country, but from relative to relative. Helen was probably bipolar but that doesn’t completely capture her affliction. Her temperament was distinctly familial to me. She could be me, if I could unzip my skin and release all my fury. If Erin brought out the intellect in me (and my petty envy), Helen brought out what was raw in me. But I also don’t trust my memories of her. Because I can’t recall the minutia of everyday life back then, I am prone to villainize or romanticize her. I am prone to turn her into an idea. She had a picture of herself, at age five, sitting on a bench between four life-sized animatronic Pink Panthers who are dancing. She is caught off-balance, as if the panthers jolted into motion only after she sat on the bench. She looks both scared and furious. This picture captures her. What am I doing here? What is this life? Get me off now.

After Helen tried to kill herself, her roommate kept her distance, which was a bad idea because if Helen sensed that you were pulling away from her, you were her sworn enemy. One evening, while Erin and I were downstairs waiting for her, we heard them arguing. As her roommate left their room, she muttered, “Fuck you, Helen.” Then from upstairs, we heard Helen thunder, “No, fuck you!” in a decibel that shook the house. Helen charged out of her room and shoved her roommate down the last three remaining steps. My heart was skipping in my throat. I knew that anger. How had I managed to find it in Ohio?

—

I saw Helen in Seoul the summer after she downed the pills. I met her outside a subway station. Helen was a good five inches taller than the Korean women

around her and looked the way she did at Oberlin, which meant that she stood out in Seoul. Her hair was shorn to a boy cut and she wore her black glasses and a tank top that exposed her bra straps. She was smoking even though there was an unwritten law at the time that women were not allowed to smoke in public. I hugged her, then tried to tuck her strap under her tank top. I was ashamed of myself for feeling ashamed of how she looked. Henpecked by my relatives, I made efforts to look feminine. “Look at you, Miss Korea.” Helen whistled.

We turned in to an alleyway of karaoke bars, locksmith stalls, and roadside carts selling fried squid to retreat into a basement café. We ordered tea and cake, although only I ate the cake, which was spongy and tasteless. Helen ate nothing. She took off her glasses and I saw the familiar dark circles under her eyes. Helen had returned to Seoul the summer after sophomore year to recover at her parents’ home. I happened to be there too, visiting family.

Her parents, she told me, had found her a psychologist in Seoul. He was her father’s age. They chose him for her, she said, because he was a Western-style analyst. She visited him three times a week. Like a cartoon Freudian analyst, he said nothing. While she talked, he did not respond nor ask questions, only scratched on his clipboard with his pen. It went on like this for weeks until Helen demanded he say something. The analyst, much to her surprise, obliged. He lectured her for a full forty minutes as if he were unbottling his thoughts from the last sessions. Helen, according to the analyst, was an unrepentant narcissist. This was mainly the fault of her parents, who neglected to give her disciplinary boundaries because she was an only child and they lived in so many different countries. As a result, Helen was spoiled and selfish, her suicide attempt a sad stunt for attention that had caused her mother great suffering.

“My God,” I said. “No wonder everyone’s suicidal here.” Helen shrugged. She looked vulnerable, reminding me of a wounded lioness.

I loved Helen best when she was vulnerable, because she was so subdued, giving me the chance to be strong for her. Afterwards, we walked over to her parents’ apartment, a two-bedroom unit that was clean and modern, with a wall of books. Her mother was home, listening to a sermon on the radio. I did not know what to expect before I met her, but I was surprised to find that she looked young, with a long, slender neck and a perm that framed her fair, elegant face. Her most intense feature was her thick black eyebrows, which were knitted into a permanent worry line. Her mother took me aside while Helen was in her room, to thank me.

“For?”

“Being Helen’s friend,” her mother said. “Oh,” I said faintly, “I’m lucky to be her friend.” “I know it’s hard,” she said. “I blame myself. She took care of me before she

even learned how to ride a bike.” Helen came back out, with a book she wanted to show me. I don’t remember

what it was. When I thought the time was appropriate, I made an excuse that I had to go, even though I had nowhere else to go.

—

During our junior year, Erin and I paid $150 a month to live in a sagging, shingle- roofed house with aluminum siding. The matted carpeted floor was caving in. The linoleum kitchen floor was caving in. My futon frame was caving in, so every morning I woke up in a futon taco. We lived with Paul, a talented, soft-spoken African American art major, who didn’t drink or smoke, and whose only vice was that he had to be constantly making things. When he sat down to chat about his day, he had to twine a driftwood magazine rack or stitch a net out of jute at the same time. The living room became his studio: lumber, cardboard, corrugated steel, with a mange of sawdust everywhere. Erin’s room was across from mine upstairs. She could strip a cozy wainscoted room down to make it look like an East Berlin squat circa 1990. It was a monastic room with a bare bulb and a black-sheeted futon on the floor and piles of books next to the radiator. We had a plague of giant ants and Erin slammed her copy of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine to kill the ants crawling out of the knothole in her room. Bam! Bam! Bam! I heard periodically throughout the day.

The previous semester, I was in London on an Oberlin study-abroad program. That semester was the college experience I craved, since it was fun and free of drama. We had an easy schedule: We watched plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company and talked about them in class. Otherwise, I was free to wander London, delighting in banal British customs like drinking bitters in pubs, or browsing the open-air book market along the Thames where I bought a buttery-paged copy of Chekhov’s short stories, or strolling through the Columbia Road flower market spilling with delphiniums and tulips and mums. Every object was thick with culture, even the canned dal I ate for lunch.

I had a boyfriend for the first time in college. He was a pedantic and humorless jazz pianist from Utica, but he was one of two straight males in the

program, and I actually felt proud for having scored him. I lived in a basement flat off the Marylebone tube stop, a block from Madame Tussauds, with three white flatmates who were wild, fun, and openly sexual. They were remarkably bold, indulging in whatever whim they had. My roommate Sonya was the most hedonistic of us but also the most disciplined. Sonya swore off sex in London— like sex was a rich chocolate she’d had too much of—which still didn’t stop her from bringing home strangers she met on the tube to do everything but fuck. Whenever we drank, my roommates stripped off their shirts and carelessly made out with each other like they were putting on a show. I was the primmest one. “Cathy has her shirt on as usual,” they said, “Come on, show us your tits.”

—

When I returned to Oberlin, I squirreled myself away in a carrel on the topmost floor of the library to write papers or poems. Occasionally I got trashed in sordid off-campus houses. In one house, my friends were too lazy to buy toilet paper, so they set out a sweater and a pair of scissors next to the toilet.

I was depressed to be back. Helen was at her worst that junior year. She started using heroin and ate

nothing but sour Skittles. She was especially jealous of Erin, who had a new boyfriend. Erin had a habit of diving into codependent relationships, which was why she and Helen were so intensely close, but Erin still had to have men in her life. Her new boyfriend, Jake, was especially pale and odiferous, incapable of doing anything except collecting records. Helen reminded him at every chance that he didn’t deserve Erin. She was right.

In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: “The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It’s like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white woman would touch.”

Erin was attractive, talented, and smart, yet she dated a guy who was so helpless he needed Erin to assemble a turkey sandwich for him. On the surface, it appeared that Erin had the upper hand in the relationship, but men who feign helplessness—which Oberlin specialized in—can be just as manipulative as alpha males because they use their incompetence to free themselves of menial tasks that

are then saddled onto women. All day long, Jake burrowed himself under the covers of Erin’s bed and Erin nurtured him as if he were tubercular. She patiently listened to him for hours while he talked about his feelings about not feeling enough. “Write about those feelings,” Erin counseled soothingly. One day, Helen barged into Erin’s room and threw a box of cookies at Jake’s head.

“Don’t you ever eat my cookies!” “Helen, I didn’t—” “Only you would eat half a cookie and put it back in the box!” Jake was tangentially connected to an all-white cool-kid group whom

everyone on campus dubbed the PoMo boys. Helen actually dated one of these guys, a dough-faced aspiring writer who was later caught in a huge plagiarism scandal when he was thirty-five. He dumped Helen for a waifish Pre-Raphaelite indie girl, which sent Helen into a shame spiral about how she wasn’t white or skinny enough. Whether it was because of him or her distrust in men that grew over the years or simply because they deserved it, Helen was a scourge against these boys. They would sit there in Campus Diner, smoking their Pall Malls, talking about Thomas Pynchon or Chris Marker, and Helen would shout out “Pretentious fucks” as she hobbled past them with a wooden cane she’d acquired after she sprained her leg. That cane gave her a sinister and regal bearing. When they saw her hobbling toward them, they scattered like pigeons.

—

One day, Helen came over to our house. We hadn’t seen her for days because she’d gone on a heroin bender with her friend Heather. Helen slumped down on our armchair. She was twitchy and had hair in her face. Erin and I were sitting on our brown floral couch in the gray early-evening gloom, drinking cheap tequila from a plastic handle. It was February and the sour winds howled outside. Seeing Helen so despondent on the armchair made me nostalgic for my time in London, when my flatmates and I smoked hash while massaging each other’s feet with shaving cream. When my flatmate Sonya discovered I’d never used a vibrator before, she shook her deluxe Rabbit at me and demanded I rush to my room and try it out: “Then give it to Carla but make sure you wash it first.” They were so warm and carefree. They were so body positive.

“Let’s take our shirts off,” I said. “Why?” Erin asked suspiciously.

“Why not?” I said with forced cheer. I drank down a slug of tequila and flung off my shirt. Erin reluctantly unbuttoned her shirt and Helen, to my surprise, wordlessly struggled out of her turtleneck. The moment I took off my shirt, I felt self-conscious. My skin puckered into goosebumps and I could feel each goosebump against the weave of the couch. We sat there in the February gloom, shrunken and silent in our bras. Helen was so catatonic, she didn’t notice her glasses were crooked from pulling her black turtleneck over her face.

“Nice abs, Cathy,” Erin said finally. “Have you been working out?” Helen stirred. She shifted her posture on the armchair and adjusted her

glasses. My heart began to beat fast as she told us that she was feeling terrified. She was hearing voices. She was in a nightmare that wouldn’t stop. The voices were telling her she was repulsive and didn’t deserve to live. Then she looked at herself as if it had dawned on her for the first time that she had no shirt on. She said, “I’m fat.”

“Helen,” we said in unison and over each other, “you’re thin.” “I’m fat,” she said repeatedly. Then she glared at me. I knew this glare well. “You tricked me.” “What do you mean?” “You made me strip so you can laugh at my fat body. You tricked me.” “Cathy’s drunk,” Erin said quietly. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.” “I’m not drunk!” I said drunkenly. “You’re beautiful! Why can’t you realize

that! I want you to know that! Your body is beautiful! Your body is sexy! All I want is for you to love yourself!”

Helen charged at me and began punching me while I cowered with my face in my arms. She shouted that I was a monster. When Erin pulled her away from me, Helen began punching and kicking Erin as hard as she could. I remember the living room being dark, and Helen and Erin as two shadows wrestling with each other. Finally, Erin tackled Helen as she fought under her. Helen had superhuman strength when she had one of her violent episodes, but Erin was stronger. Erin held her for a long time and called her name over and over. They were breathing raggedly.

—

In my sophomore year, I began taking poetry seriously and lost interest in art. My

doubts about my artistic talent began after taking Athena’s class. It didn’t help that Erin and Helen were so much better than me.

Over drinks, I told Erin recently, probably to get a reaction, that I had stopped making art because of her and Helen.

“It’s still hard for me to admit this,” I said, “but I was jealous. You were too good and I wasn’t good enough. I was constantly comparing myself to you guys. But now I’m thankful for feeling that way because I wouldn’t have discovered poetry.”

Erin looked at me skeptically. “You’re welcome?” “Although I think Myung Mi liked your poetry better too,” I mused, referring

to our former poetry professor. “That’s not true,” said Erin. “She loved both of our poetry. Your poetry had

so much feeling.” I didn’t know what to make of this compliment coming from Erin. Whenever

she sensed any soft-minded sentiment in a work, she attacked it with gusto. “Anyway, I need to make Helen more well rounded,” I said, getting out my

notebook and pen. “Do you remember any funny things she said in college? I just remember the crazy parts.”

“That’s because she was crazy,” Erin said. “Well, yes,” I said, “but you spent all your waking hours with her. Surely you

must have memories of you guys just hanging out. Or profound conversations you had about art? That would be great.”

“You know my memory sucks,” Erin said. “We were in that Heidegger independent studies group. Remember that?”

“That was awful,” I groaned. “I don’t think so. It was beautiful how serious we were about improving our

intellect.” I recall Helen, Erin, and myself sitting at Campus Diner, struggling through

Being and Time. I felt anxious and claustrophobic at the time. As Helen and Erin were pontificating about Dasein, I thought, We have no clue what any of this means.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked. “I don’t know,” said Erin. “You spent as much time with her as I did.” “No, I didn’t. I was always the third wheel.”

“I doubt that. Helen was intimidated by you.” “Please.” “We knew what we wanted to be,” Erin said. “She didn’t know who she was.” “I mean, she did move around a lot.” “She had no culture,” said Erin, “so she took from other people’s cultures.” “You know, I don’t think she ever lost her shit around her white friends.” “Yeah, well,” Erin said ruefully, “we were family.”

—

In truth, I was too neurotic for art. I was frustrated I couldn’t translate the image in my mind into an art object. With poetry, I didn’t have to realize the image as anything else but as that idea on the page. In fact, I began writing poetry as an ekphrastic description of all my irreproducible art. The lyric was the pure possibility of what my art could be if I had infinite resources to not merely build an object, but create a world.

Erin and I enrolled in Myung Mi Kim’s poetry workshop. She was a visiting professor in her late thirties, a ministerial-looking woman with closely cropped hair and a long black skirt. That first day, she gave a talk on silence that ripped the page of literary history in half for me. She talked about how the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase. Attention to silence is itself an interrogation. In the case of Paul Celan, a Jewish German poet who lost his family in the Holocaust, Kim said, “He was navigating between the impossibility of utterance and finding the means in which to utter.”

Myung Mi Kim was the first poet who said I didn’t need to sound like a white poet nor did I have to “translate” my experiences so that they sounded accessible to a white audience. No other mentor afterwards was as emphatic about this idea as her. Illegibility was a political act. In the past, I was encouraged to write about my Asian experience but I still had to write it the way a white poet would—so instead of copying a white poet, I was copying a white poet copying their idea of an Asian poet. When Kim first read my poems, she said, “Why are you imitating someone else’s speech patterns?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “What is your earliest memory of language? Write a poem from that memory.”

A friend and poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, said that “if you knock English

enough, it becomes a door to another language.” This is what Myung Mi Kim first taught me: to knock at English, using what I considered my ineloquence—my bilingualism, my childhood struggles with English—and fuse that into my own collection of lexemes that came closest to my conflicted consciousness.

—

I was the beneficiary of a mid-to-late-nineties college education, when multiculturalism was having its swan song. My most brilliant friends and professors were people of color. I took it for granted that a class should have a diverse reading list. Of course I learned about black conceptual artists like Adrian Piper alongside Bruce Nauman in studio art classes. Of course I read Theresa Hak Kyung Cha alongside William Carlos Williams in poetry class. I didn’t study the performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña because I needed a sample of the “Chicano experience” like a vitamin supplement. I studied these writers and artists because they were the most interesting thinkers.

Erin, Helen, and I parried ideas between us and then applied them to whatever medium we were working in. Whatever we did in our studio, in the library, in our notebooks, onstage, on the streets—wherever—was art. We didn’t think disciplines had to be isolated. Inspired by Myung Mi Kim’s class, Erin made her own books, repurposing the covers of old engineering texts, and filled them with her minimalist poems. Inspired by Erin’s and Helen’s work, I decided to do a poetry performance as a “site-specific” installation. I found an old unused basketball court beneath a dorm building that was flooded after a rain. That space had the glorious smell of mildew and half a foot of green rainwater that reflected the nets. I thought that I was cheating because I didn’t have to do anything; the space itself was so mysterious and so full of absence. I planned out my performance, including the plastic baggies that people would wear to wade into the rainwater, and then, the day before the performance, to my horror, there was a gigantic sump pump suctioning out all the water. When I freaked out, Helen said, “Let’s fill it back up.” Later that night, she helped me reflood the basement with a hose.

We were makers in what the art historian Rosalind Krauss called an expanded field. That included the way we talked about art and poetry. It was boring to just talk about craft. We discussed art and poetry in relation to race and gender and class. Our identities informed our aesthetic but our aesthetic wasn’t exactly about identity either. We were lucky to take classes with professors like

the artists Johnny Coleman and Nanette Yannuzzi Macias, who told us to not oversimplify ourselves and to read race with nuance; that if we were going to make art about race, the work should be difficult because race was a difficult subject.

The nineties was the era of the culture wars, when Bush stripped the NEA of visual arts funding because of controversial artworks like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. After witnessing the deaths of so many friends because of government neglect and malfeasance during the AIDS crisis, artists were radicalized. One of the most controversial Whitney Biennials was the 1993 show because of its unapologetic politics. The admission buttons, designed by the artist Daniel J. Martinez, read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” The artist Pepón Osorio re-created a crime scene installation of a South Bronx Puerto Rican home. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, dressed in tribal costumes, appeared in a gilded cage. Janine Antoni gnawed away at a six-hundred-pound cube of chocolate and lard as a feminist take on Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys.

Most critics attacked the Biennial. Peter Plagens, for instance, dismissed the show as having “the aroma of cultural reparations.” Holland Cotter, one of the few critics sympathetic to the exhibit, wrote, “When the economy tanked at the end of the 1980s and the art market fell apart, some serious gate crashing happened. Artists long shut out from the mainstream, many of them African- American, Asian-American and Latino, gained entry and changed the picture.”

As I’m writing, this charged political energy is back in the arts. I hope this time the “gate-crashing” will have lasting effects. By the time I graduated from college, white male critics, publishers, and pundits had already rung the funeral bells on multiculturalism, calling it a failure, and cut the ribbon to a post-race America. I would even say that the cultural upheaval was already over by the time Erin, Helen, and I were in college. But because we were isolated in a small campus in Ohio, we benefited from its delayed effects. Helen, Erin, and I were not only confident, we were cocky. This was our time and we thought it would always be that way.

—

I didn’t show my poetry to Helen for a while. I was intensely private because I wanted to keep the poems inside my private temple of self-regard. I knew how fast I could plunge from confidence to self-doubt, how fast my poem could fade from a vibrating disc of light to shit spray on paper.

“I’d love to read your poems,” Helen said. “They’re not any good.” “They’re awesome,” Erin said. “Don’t listen to her.” “You think I’m not smart enough to understand them,” Helen said

threateningly. “Hell no!” “Then why can’t I read your poems?” I wasn’t sure why I kept them from her. Certainly I dreaded her judgment. If

she didn’t like my poems, I would die! But Helen was such a dominating presence in my life that I wanted my poems to be free of her imprint. Poetry was my territory, my thing. Instead, I told her I was insecure. She then forced me to sit at the kitchen table and we talked about my insecurity for several hours. The next day, when I finally handed her my chapbook, which I kept wrapped in tissue paper as if it were a specimen of a rare South American butterfly, Helen laughed in delight and said she’d read it immediately.

Then I didn’t see her for a week. She’s disappeared again, I thought distantly. How could she do this to me? A week is a long time in a tiny college campus where there’s nowhere to

hide, especially since that year, our senior year, Erin, Helen, and I were all living together. But Helen would do that—disappear for days, crashing with Heather or staying with her “safe” friends, Pam and Jessica—when, for whatever reason, she was feeling paranoid that Erin and I were out to get her.

I was a knuckle of anxiety. It was all I thought about that week. “Have you seen Helen?” I asked Erin. “Mm-hmm,” Erin said. “At the studio.” “Did she say anything about my poems?” “No.” Bitch! She read the poems and she decided that she didn’t like them. She

now hates me or no, it’s worse, she has no respect for me. But why can’t she be honest about this? Doesn’t she know it’s more agonizing to not tell me? Why can’t she just be honest and tell me she hates me and doesn’t respect me because she hates my poems? Then I’ll know the truth! But doesn’t she know how sensitive I am? Didn’t we have a three-hour talk about how fragile I was about my poetry?

How guarded I was? How private I was? Didn’t we have that talk about our mothers and how we didn’t know how to trust anyone because of our mothers? Didn’t we talk about how there is a vital organ missing inside us, this vital organ called the ego? Our egos are like gigantic empty pools that will never get full, Helen! Where are you, you crazy bitch? Talk to me about my poems!

I rushed to her studio. She wasn’t there. I asked Jessica if Helen was crashing at their pad. Yes, she was camping out in their apartment that always smelled of freshly baked brownies. Had she said anything about my poems? “I don’t think so?” Jessica said. I combed the library, searched the Feve coffee shop, scoured the ’Sco, where she might be found playing pool, poked into the woodshop, went back to her studio. Finally, one day, I saw Helen, across Wilder Bowl lawn, wearing her blue leather jacket, smoking her Marlboro menthols, laughing and flirting with a redheaded girl named Ashley. I hurriedly walked up to Helen and said, “Hi.”

“Hey, you,” she said warmly. “I was looking for you.” “You know where we live,” I said petulantly. She said, “Let’s go sit somewhere.” It was an unnaturally warm day, so we sat

down on Wilder Bowl lawn, right in front of Oberlin’s concrete spaceship of a library. With tears sparkling in her eyes, she talked about my poems, using all the words that I thought I was too intellectual to use in class, but when she said them, they sounded authentic and profound. She’d never been so moved before. I’d captured something so essential in my poems. I’d captured that soul. In my poems, I was dancing. It inspired her to make art. She read my poems all in one night and then had to read them again and savor each word.

I felt happy. I felt flooded with relief. This is all that matters in writing, I thought, to move someone like this. To move Helen. I was real again. We were real. I was here sitting on the grass with Helen.

—

Then all of Helen’s artwork disappeared during winter break, two months before her senior thesis show. “Disappeared” as in got thrown away. A clerical error. The administration thought she had graduated early and gave the order to clear out her studio. Her drawings, collages, and paintings that she was preparing for her show, her documentation of her installations, all her art supplies—every trace of her artmaking was gone. As if she’d never made work in college. As if she’d never

existed. The studio was scoured, repainted white. As a response, Helen shaved off all her hair. When I heard that Helen drank a bottle of whiskey and shaved off all her

hair, I thought, This is it. She’s going to kill herself. But of course I underestimated Helen. Stronger than her will to die was her will to endure, especially when she thought she was being tested. This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time, drives that didn’t cancel each other out but stood in confluence, which made her hell to be around, lashing out at Erin and me, saying how this was God’s design telling her she shouldn’t be an artist. But she was going to prove everyone wrong, “including you,” she yelled, jabbing her finger at me when I innocently came by her studio and offered to help. In a way, Helen was right. Because not only did I underestimate her, maybe I wanted her to fail. Maybe when I heard that all of her art disappeared, I thought only of myself, and how she’d take this out on me, and what a fucking burden it was to be her friend. Helen always accused me of feeling this way, and though I denied it, she was right: I did harbor those thoughts. I felt buried by our friendship, and maybe, just maybe, if she did kill herself, it wouldn’t be so bad. I would feel unburied. I would feel free.

She proved me wrong. She did what she knows how to do best. She worked her ass off. She didn’t sleep and was theatrical about her exhaustion, staggering around, drinking a six-pack every night, spending the early hours in the woodshop, building canvas frames until she pulled off the impossible: she produced a year’s worth of paintings in a month. She used this as a test to completely reinvent her style. Helen was obsessed with the artist Eva Hesse at the time and, inspired by Hesse, she made abstract sculptural paintings, using oil, resin, and plaster to restructure the framed canvas into pliant bodily surfaces. She made paintings with skinlike protuberances the size of tennis balls; another painting was impastoed with rivulets of plaster with a metal rebar jutting out of it. Yet another painting had pearled strands of canvas draped across an exposed stretcher. Helen painted the gallery floor a bright orange, which synergized the space and brought all the paintings together. All of my misgivings vanished when I saw the show. The students and faculty were all blown away by the exhibit. At the time I thought, I will never know a genius like Helen again.

But putting together a brilliant painting show in a month wasn’t enough for Helen. In addition, she assembled an installation in her studio, which she was debuting the following weekend. Erin told me that Helen actually wrote her own

poems for the installation. I was intrigued and decided I’d see it before the show. I walked up the stairs to her studio and greeted her and her friend Jessica, who was helping her fix the lights. The walls were covered with neat layered rows of white paper. As I drew closer, I noticed that Helen had typewritten two or three lines of poetry on each page. In the corner, a small electric fan whirred, rustling the pages so they sounded like dried leaves. As I read each line, I heard influences of other poets from collections I’d lent her: Emily Dickinson, H.D., Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan. Many lines alluded to death. As I panicked and thought, Is this some kind of elaborate suicide note? I began to read lines I knew, lines that were my own. It was a whole row of poems stolen directly from my chapbook.

I wanted to push her off the balcony of the studio. I was sick. I wanted to rip all the pages down. Then I felt paralyzed, because

who knew what she was capable of if I confronted her? Instead, I waited, while Helen joked around with Jessica and swept up her studio, until I asked her, with my voice tight and strained, why my poems were in her installation. Helen stopped what she was doing. Instead of looking alarmed or guilty, she gave me that glare. She asked, “Why are you doing this?”

It was like she didn’t even realize she’d taken my poems. She’d absorbed them the way she absorbed everything else. “You promised me you wouldn’t show my poems to anyone!” I cried out plaintively. “Are you going to tell everyone you wrote them?”

Helen interrupted me and said that I was sabotaging her. “How could you do this to me?” she yelled. “How could you do this to me?” I shouted back. But it was useless. She outshouted me, accusing me of being selfish. How could I stress her out when she had a show in an hour; didn’t I realize how fragile she was, how she was barely hanging on? She always knew, she seethed, that I wanted her to fail. The whole time Jessica watched, shocked, as Helen’s fury escalated. I was afraid Helen would get violent.

I backed down. I said, “We’ll talk about this later, when we’re calmer.” I left her studio, walked down the stairs, walked away from the art building. I crossed the road. I walked away from campus. I had a boyfriend at the time. Maybe I went to his house. I didn’t go to the opening. I heard from Erin that she took those poems down. I didn’t confront her again. I even continued being friends with her. I didn’t know what else to do but be friends with her.

—

—

I had intended to write only about Erin, since we embodied a more empowering and tidier model of feminist artistic camaraderie. We moved to New York together, went to bars and parties and openings together; I visited her studio countless times and she was always one of my first readers. We argued for the sake of arguing and exchanged long emails. When we were apart, and I adrift in Iowa City and she adrift at CalArts, Erin was my raft. In the fluorescent glare of the Iowa university library, hunched over a candy-colored iMac terminal, next to some frat boy sneezing into his Hawkeye sweater’s sleeve, I wrote to her as if I were an exiled Romanian poet writing from a flat in Zurich. “What good are poets, a litterbox of snarling cats, yet we must create as if revolution’s possible!”

Helen and I parted ways after college. She moved out of the country. She disappeared from our lives and I was frankly glad she was gone. I didn’t miss her at all. In fact, I had other dreams where she returned, angry at me, and I woke up relieved that she was no longer around. But in writing this essay, it’s as if I’m summoning her back into my life, summoning her to be enraged with me, because though she betrayed me by taking my poems, I have betrayed her so much more by taking from her life.

I would have had a happier four years in college had I never met Helen. But I wouldn’t have been the writer I am today. Helen validated us, solidified us, and made us feel inevitable. We were going to define American culture. I was going to write about them for one of their solo shows at MoMA. When I wasn’t racked with insecurity, I was wildly arrogant. All three of us were. We had the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our careers, underestimated. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. That struggle kept me faithful to the creative imagination cultivated by our friendship, which was an imagination chiseled by rigor and depth to reflect the integrity of our discontented consciousness. No one else cared. No one else took us seriously. We were the only ones who demanded we be artists first.