Well, to hell with that! Her own situation was slowly improving. A group of earnest intellectual men in button-down shirts had written a letter on her behalf in a prominent magazine. The word “censorship” had been used. There were claims that she would be fired from an upcoming teaching appointment, claims which weren’t true. At first, Dee considered writing an angry response, telling the world she did not need their help, that once again they were misunderstanding her, these rich, educated-man types. But in the end she welcomed the intervention, indeed any point of view affirming that she was not a bigoted monster. So now armed with the letter, she could go back to the city to get into new and better fights with the usual combatants, to surprise her accusers and redefine the terms of her banishment. She was about ready to get into her nine-thousand-dollar vehicle and shove off, but someone else kept her glued to the wide-plank floor of the Writer’s Cottage （to whence she had been repatriated from the main house after the rightful owners had reclaimed possession）。 The reader is correct in assuming the identity of this individual.
She had never stopped going for walks with Ed, not during her three weeks of romancing with the Actor and not after. Remarkably, her affair with the thespian rarely came up as a subject of conversation between them and instead they talked about all the stupid things young （not that Ed was especially young） urban people of the moment talked about, the vagaries of social media, the flavorful mee krops and tom kha gais they had last slurped down in February, their path through the brambles of high society, along with gossip about other people being brought down, forced to recalibrate, rephrase, and recant.
After the dinner with the Actor and Vinod’s hurtful words about her being on the side of her people, Ed began to talk about the members of his own family and their manifold awfulness. If you searched for them online in Korean, you would discover their role in the destruction of labor unions and the many monopolies they wielded since the times of the Japanese occupation. You would learn about scalding cups of tea thrown at subordinates and even the flogging of an elderly chauffeur, a decorated military man, after he had fragranced a company limousine with the wrong type of air freshener. Because rich people were excused from the suffering of the world, they had to invent their own more elaborate and personalized forms of suffering and then to inflict baroque versions of that stunted interiority onto others. And that was just the public stuff. There were arranged marriages to violent schizophrenics, corrupt divorce proceedings, stolen children, suicidal mothers, shamed children shunted off to Rhode Island and London art schools. No one, but no one, was happy, just shuffling through cosmetic surgery clinics and watch boutiques in a Valium haze.
“And yet,” Ed said, “how can I claim to be entirely different from my relatives? How can I claim to be divorced from all those years of feudalism? I’m supposed to throw off the yoke of history all by myself? That’s a nonsense American idea, that one can just”—a very loud snap of his fingers—“change. My skin is too thick to be shed. I can choose not to abuse a chauffeur, but I can’t alter the manner of my gait as I tipsily saunter to the waiting car. My oppressiveness is priced in.”
“I’d rather be considered bad,” Dee said, “than to actually be false. Everything I write is a time stamp in history. Everything, no matter how horrible and self-indicting, is, I swear to God, honest. Can I be blamed that the portrait which emerges does not fit the requirements of the moment?”
This was, she had to admit, the button-down letter-writing men’s prescription for art as well—that it had to be reflective, not revolutionary. The artist, according to them and in line with their experiences at New Haven, stood in the vicinity of history processing its raw nature through her own blemished experiences and typing the resulting observations into the Notes application of her phone. That was the job description. But what if this particular job had suddenly become irrelevant? And what if irrelevancy, not cultural tone deafness, was the real specter that haunted the bungalow colony, haunted her and Senderovsky and the Actor as well? The hour for chronicling the situation had passed; it was time to seize the telegraph station and detain the provisional government. Maybe that was what drew Dee to Ed in the first place: he had placed himself outside the game. He did not publicly render an opinion on anything, and no power could hold him accountable for his action or his speech. If society collapsed, he would put on an ascot and waltz over to the nearest still-functional one. （He had Canadian citizenship.） He did not even own a social media account.