The Collective (19 page)

The entire staff at Jasmine Cuisine had been white. One of the waitresses had a tattoo of Chinese letters on her arm, which she proudly displayed to Jay. She thought it read, “Life won’t wait.” Jay didn’t have the heart to tell her it actually spelled out, “General Tso’s Chicken.”

“No shit?” Trudy Lun said. “I’ve heard of that happening, but I always thought it was an urban legend.”

“The thing is,” Phil Sudo said, “whenever I go out with a bunch of Asian friends, even in Boston, we get stares. You know, getting asked if we’re a tour group or an MIT reunion. So I’m more comfortable going to Asian restaurants, even though I’m sick to death of eating Asian all the time.”

Joshua, as much as he appreciated these soul sessions, pushed us to come up with an issue we could adopt, a protest or a cause. “We need to actually do something as an organization,” he said. “We need to get our name out there as a force to be reckoned with. We need to agitate.”

“Foment,” Jimmy Fung said.

One night, Joshua proposed picketing some of the old Brahmin men’s clubs in Boston, like the Algonquin and the Somerset. It was only in 1988 that the private clubs had begun, grudgingly, to admit women, but an Asian American financier, Woodrow Song, had carped recently that the clubs were still discriminating against people of color, his applications for admission repeatedly denied.

“I don’t know,” Annie Yoshikawa said. “This financier, I’m not sure I would have admitted the guy. I heard he—”

“Can I say something?” Lily Bai interjected.

Unlike Mirielle, who never uttered a peep at the 3AC potlucks, Lily had a habit of interjecting. She was just twenty-one years old, yet did not let her youth stop her from voicing her many opinions, which seemed, at least for the moment, to charm Joshua.

“We’ll see how long that lasts,” Jessica said to me in the kitchen.

“You know,” I said, “I was thinking, this is a first, all three of us in relationships at the same time.”

“Does that mean Esther’s grown on you?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You seem happy,” Jessica told me, looking at Mirielle in the living room.

“I am.”

A couple of evenings later, Joshua invited Mirielle and me to join him and Lily at Diamond Jim’s Lounge, the piano bar in the Lenox Hotel. We went because they were supposed to play old jazz standards there, yet, unbeknownst to any of us, it was open mike night. Amateur singers, one after another, trundled up to the piano and belted out terrible renditions of “The Look of Love,” “As Time Goes By,” and “My Funny Valentine.” The whole scene was corny and boring and tacky. What’s more, Lily kept swaying and singing along to the songs, even though she was lyrically challenged with most of them.

“Stop being a brat,” Joshua told her. “You’re acting like a little kid.”

“You’re always belittling me over my age,” Lily said. “I’m a member of Mensa! I graduated college at twenty!”

“Maturity’s not about IQs. It’s a function of experience,” Joshua said. “You might think you know all you need to know right now, but you haven’t lived through anything yet. Once you do, you might not be so annoying.”

“You might have more experience than me, Joshua, just a tiny, tiny bit,” she said, “but I’m more brilliant.”

They dragged us back to her condo at the Ritz, which had a view of the Public Garden. Joshua brought out a bottle of Macallan’s scotch.

“What’s the matter?” he said when I declined a glass. “You a teetotaler all of a sudden?”

I had stopped drinking around Mirielle. Sometimes I would still imbibe before I picked her up from Casablanca, and when I kissed her, she would say, even though I had brushed my teeth and gargled with mouthwash, “You taste like beer. Have you been drinking beer?”

Lily wanted to play strip poker. “Oh, don’t be poops!” she said after we demurred.

Joshua took photographs of us.

“Come on, that’s enough,” I said. “That flash is blinding. Why are you always taking photos?” He had become a shutterbug of late, always snapping group portraits of the 3AC.

“Take one of me and Lily,” he said, and as I did, Lily stuck out her tongue and lifted her sweater, showing us her boobs.

Mirielle eyed me, and I said, “It’s late. We’ve got to go.”

“It’s still early!” Lily said.

“Yeah, stay,” Joshua said. “We could order room service. It’s available twenty-four hours, man.”

“The T’s going to stop running soon.”

“Wait,” Joshua said. “What are you guys doing for Hanukkah? Or Christmas, I mean. Do you want to come to the BVIs with us?”

Mirielle and I walked to the Charles/MGH station. “What was that all about?” I asked. “Were they trying to get us into a foursome?”

“You tell me. They’re your friends,” she said.

“I barely know Lily.”

“You ever notice how much Joshua drinks?” she asked.

Yet, as we were waiting for the Red Line to Harvard Square, Mirielle surprised me by saying, “The BVIs would be nice, wouldn’t it? A tropical vacation. It’s not Tahiti, but it might be fun.”

Lily’s parents owned a house on Great Camanoe, a private residential island across the bay from Tortola, the most populous of the British Virgin Islands. We’d have the place to ourselves. Her parents would be in St. Moritz.

“You serious?” I asked. I usually went to California for Christmas, and in fact had bought my ticket months ago, snapping up a sale fare.

“No, it’s stupid,” Mirielle said. “I don’t have the money for a trip like that. Who am I kidding?” She had terrible credit history and virtually nothing in her checking account, and had been using her father’s gold card to buy things for her new apartment. “It’s just that I hate going home for the holidays,” she told me. “I’m dreading Thanksgiving.”

She flew down to D.C. on Wednesday night. Joshua, Jessica, and I stayed in town and baked a turkey for ourselves, and on Sunday, although most everyone was away, Joshua still hosted a 3AC gathering. I skipped it to pick Mirielle up at the airport, borrowing the Peugeot.

Her flight was delayed on the tarmac at National Airport for over an hour and a half, and by the time she got off the plane at Logan, she was flustered, on the verge of tears.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. She had first stayed at her mother’s house in Wesley Heights, and her mom had suggested Mirielle might try to get into modeling, she’d arrange for a photographer she knew in New York to take shots of her for a zed card. But her father, who lived in a co-op in Kalorama, ridiculed the idea, telling Mirielle she wasn’t pretty enough, she had bad skin, she was too short, her shoulders were too narrow, she had fat calves.

“I can’t believe he said all that,” I told Mirielle. “You’re beautiful. Your skin is perfect.”

“He said, being Japanese, there wouldn’t be much demand for me in the industry, anyway.”

Then her father, who had promised to spend the entire weekend with her, took off on a business trip on Saturday afternoon, leaving her alone in the apartment with his friend, a lobbyist whose wife had just kicked him out, and the lobbyist friend was drinking and doing lines of coke in front of Mirielle, entreating her to join him. “He was trying to seduce me!” she said. “My father probably told him to give it a whirl, what the fuck did he care. My mom, she said I was imagining things. I loathe going to D.C., shuffling between them. I can’t go back there for Christmas, I’ll have a nervous breakdown. Is there any way we can go to the BVIs?”

“Wouldn’t it bother you, being with Joshua and Lily? The way they drink?”

“I’d be all right,” she said. “Could you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please?”

I called my mother the next night and told her I wouldn’t be coming to Mission Viejo for Christmas after all. “But you always come,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just this once. I’ll come next year for sure. Maybe Mirielle will fly out with me. What do you think of that?”

“Mirielle,” she said, trying the name on for size. “How do you spell that?”

I spent the next hour on the phone with American Airlines, trying to roll over my ticket to Tortola, then walked down Brattle Street to Casablanca. Inside, Mirielle was talking to the restaurant manager and a cop. Her purse had been stolen from the employee room.

“What else can go wrong?” she said to me.

Everything had been in her bag—her wallet, driver’s license, cash, her BankBoston card and checkbook.

From my bedroom at the house, she called her father, telling him he would have to cancel his gold card, and they argued. “I wasn’t rude to your guest,” she said into the telephone, then: “No, I didn’t tell Mom he tried to rape me!”

She hung up. “He’s not going to send me another credit card. How am I going to pay for my plane ticket, then? Shit, my passport was in my bag!” She began crying. “I’m such a fuckup,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I finally graduate, and then what, I’m still a waitress? This poetry thing, who am I kidding. I miss David. I don’t know why I broke up with him anymore. So I could move into an ugly little apartment with strangers?”

I wrapped my arms around her while she wept.

“I feel so lost,” she said. “I feel so alone.”

She told me that her parents had divorced when she was five years old, and not long afterward her mother had remarried. Her stepfather repeatedly molested Mirielle as a child, but neither her father nor her mother would believe her. “She’s the most gullible person in the world,” Mirielle said. Her stepfather was a con artist. He stole tens of thousands of dollars from Mirielle’s mother, and disappeared before he could be charged for any of his crimes.

“I’ve never been happy since I quit drinking,” Mirielle said. “Look at me: I have no self-esteem, I’m lousy with interpersonal relationships, I don’t have a connection with anyone. I’m completely alone.”

“You have me,” I told her.

“I’ve been miserable sober,” she said. “I was so much happier when I was drinking. I can’t imagine not having another drink again for the rest of my life. I quit when I was so young. I was an unbelievable slut then. You’d choke if you knew the things I did, but I’m a lot more mature now. I think I could handle it. Listen, let’s get a bottle and get wasted.”

“No, this is what we’re going to do,” I told her.

We’d replace her passport—we had time, three weeks. I’d lend her the money for her plane ticket to Tortola. She’d resume therapy with her old shrink. She would talk to her AA friends and find a new sponsor (her previous one, Alice, had died of breast cancer seven months before). I would quit drinking entirely and go to meetings with her. The most important thing was for her to focus on remaining sober.

“You’d do all that for me?” she asked.

“I’d do anything for you, Mirielle.”

“Jesus, this girl is more fucked up than I am,” Joshua said later in the week. “You know what it all boils down to? Forget the addictions and the underlying abuse, forget the recovery rhetoric and the pop psychology. It all boils down to one thing for her. It’s because Daddy doesn’t love his little girl.”

“Give her more credit than that,” I told him. “She’s had more to deal with, she’s far tougher than you and I will ever be.” I didn’t want to admit that her breakdown—especially the revelation that she’d been molested—had unsettled me.

We were in the living room, and Joshua was going through his mail. “You really quit drinking for her?” he asked. “Why deny yourself one of the few pleasures in life?”

“Actually, it’s been good, not drinking,” I said. “It was harder for me to stop than I thought. I had cravings the first few days for a beer. But then that passed, and I started sleeping better. I feel this new kind of energy and clarity now.”

“Yeah? Maybe I’ll try it myself.”

“You?” I said.

“Why not?”

“Self-restraint has never been your forte.”

“I could stop anything cold turkey if I wanted. My discipline is nonpareil.”

“Is that why you’ve been screwing around with Lily instead of sitting in front of your computer?”

Joshua set down his letter opener and exhaled laboriously. “I don’t know what happened. I was in such a great flow with the novel—I thought for sure I’d finish a draft by the end of the year—and then all of a sudden everything just fizzled. I’m sort of panicked, to tell you the truth. What if it never comes back?”

“Why don’t you show it to me?” I asked.

“Not ready for external perusal yet.”

“How many pages do you have?”

“Hundreds. But it’s a mess.”

“Just keep at it,” I told him.

“Easy for you to say. If I’m not able to write, the world is intolerable to me. Utterly without purpose. Lily’s tiresome, but at least she’s serving as a form of provisional entertainment. I’ll be ditching her soon enough, no question, but I’m going to wait until after the BVIs.”

“That’s the only reason you’ve gone beyond your usual three weeks?”

“That, and the room service, and the fact that she drains old blind Bob with the efficacy of an industrial Hoover every night,” Joshua said. “I think the BVIs, the change of scenery, would do me good. And it’d be research. My characters live on an island, some of them are fishermen, but I don’t really know anything about living on an island, about boats or the sea. I think I could justify writing the whole trip off on my taxes.”

“I’d love to see how that flies with an auditor.”

“What are the AA meetings like?” Joshua asked.

I had only been to two thus far—one at Trinity Church, another at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Mirielle liked to rotate locations. “They’re less somber, funnier, than I expected. Still, some of the stories are brutal.”

“Can I tag along sometime?”

“Why would you want to?”

“I’m curious,” Joshua said. “Maybe I’ll get something out of it for my novel, hearing these people talk.”

I was skeptical. I didn’t want to bring Joshua to a meeting, afraid he might deride the proceedings, which was the last thing Mirielle needed. For several days, things had been very tenuous for her, Mirielle thrown by the smallest hiccups, such as not being able to find her birth certificate, which she needed to replace her passport. Her parents were unobliging. “How do they not know where my birth certificate is?” Mirielle had said. “They didn’t think it was worth keeping?” I made phone calls for her, found out the Vital Records Division in D.C. would mail a copy of her birth certificate to her if she sent verification of her identity with a driver’s license, which of course had been stolen. I drove Mirielle to the RMV in Watertown and waited in line with her for two hours. She stayed sober.