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.

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

ON THE FIRST TRULY COLD day of fall, November 5, 1982, thirty-one-year-old artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left her job at the textiles department of the Metropolitan Museum. She wore a white angora sweater, a red leather coat, and a maroon beret. She also had on leather gloves and a double layer of socks. She rode the subway downtown to Artists Space, a nonprofit gallery on Hudson Street, to drop off a large manila envelope of her photos for an upcoming group show with the curator Valerie Smith. Cha’s photographs were of hands in various gestures, cropped and reproduced from a range of sources, from ancient Chinese prints to modern French paintings. Smith, when she testified at the New York State Supreme Court House, recalled that Cha looked tired and tense; she stayed for fifteen minutes, signing promotional material for the show. She said Cha left Artists Space sometime around four. From the gallery, Cha walked northeast.

    From here, I see her in my mind’s eye like I’m watching an old sixteen-millimeter film. Her shoulders are hunched from the wind as she hurries past abandoned boarded-up cast-iron buildings and old Chevrolet Caprice taxis trundling over steel road plates. The red of her leather coat is washed out in the film’s faded granular light. I imagine her passing the office of her publisher, Tanam Press, on White Street, where she spent hours editing her book Dictee. Then she turns left on Broadway where there is a white cast-iron building that once manufactured textiles for ship sails. Twenty-five years later, I will live in that building with my husband in a rent-stabilized sublet. There, I will lug two huge bags of poems, from a contest I screened, to be picked up for recycling, and overnight the bags will split open. Poems will be everywhere on my block like a ticker-tape parade, poems papered to car windshields and the storefronts of jeans stores, poems crumpled around bike racks and teepeed on trees and scattered at the feet of old Chinese women practicing their tai chi in front of the apartment across from my building. But that day, there are no poems—just trash collecting under empty loading docks.