The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  When at last he was about to leave, we heard the screen door creak open, and unexpectedly, Paviromo, wearing his trademark blue suit and dapper bow tie, blustered in. Usually he never came to the office except to drop off the mail every few days.

  “Oh, what’s this?” he said. “An interloper in our midst, breaching the sanctum sanctorum?”

  They introduced themselves. “Yes, yes,” Paviromo said. “I read your story in the North American Review. Fabulous, I thought. I’m good friends with Robley, you know.” Over the years, whenever one of Joshua’s stories came out in a journal, I always pointed it out to Paviromo, but never imagined he would actually read one of them. “Robley kept boasting about it. It was nominated for a Pushcart and got on some other short lists, correct?”

  “Nominated, but not ultimately selected,” Joshua said.

  “Mandarins and halfwits, the committees that make these decisions.”

  Joshua, easily charmed by this sort of flattery, grinned broadly.

  They gossiped about this year’s prize annuals, opining which stories were best and which shouldn’t have been included, Paviromo confounded and outraged that Palaver had not parlayed more selections. One writer in particular intrigued them. Her story, which had been her first publication, had snared the literary triple crown, the trifecta, picked for all three prize anthologies: The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Awards. The woman had a compelling background, raised on a hippie farm in rural Pennsylvania, studying at Columbia and the Sorbonne, writing screenplays with her Argentine film director boyfriend, teaching English and coaching girls’ soccer in a village in Punjab, Pakistan. She also happened to be young, twenty-eight, the same age as Joshua and me, and drop-dead gorgeous. New York magazine ran a two-page photo spread on her, glammed up like a movie star. Agents and editors were clamoring after her. All for publishing one little short story, which was, Paviromo and Joshua admitted, dazzlingly good.

  “She’ll be a phenom,” Paviromo said. “It’s all before her.”

  “In the palm of her hand,” Joshua said.

  “Let’s salute the girl with a drink.” From a file cabinet drawer, Paviromo pulled out a bottle of Macallan’s single malt that I had not known was there. “Eric? Care for a nip?”

  “I still have some work to do.”

  “You sure?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “This young man,” he said to Joshua, “is entirely too industrious.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Paviromo rinsed out two coffee cups, poured the Macallan’s, and gave one to Joshua. “To youth,” he said.

  “To fortuity.”

  After a second round, Paviromo began regaling Joshua with a story about once getting drunk on Macallan’s with Robert De Niro in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village, and how, as a favor to the director John Frankenheimer, his longtime mate, he had been a silent partner and (by choice) uncredited executive producer on De Niro’s latest film, Ronin, and how some of the film’s characters were composites of Paviromo—the screenwriter, David Mamet, was an old friend, and Paviromo had disclosed details to him of his escapades as an arms dealer and his covert operations with the Special Forces—and how once, long ago, he had dropped acid with Mamet and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and in the middle of the night Ferlinghetti had gotten the brilliant idea that they should go fishing, and somewhere they had found three fishing poles and a Spanish longaniza for bait and drove out to a pond and stayed there all night, sitting on the edge of the water and casting and reeling, yet mysteriously not getting a nibble, constantly snagging and losing their hooks, and then had woken up in the morning to discover that all night they had not been fishing at the edge of a pond, but at the edge of a cabbage field.

  Joshua and Paviromo nearly cried, laughing. The cabbage fishing acid story sounded familiar to me. I had heard it before—not from Paviromo, but as an oft-told yarn from Beatnik lore.

  When they had recovered sufficiently, Paviromo said, “So, I have a question for you, young sir.”

  “Yeah?” Joshua said, wiping the corner of his eye.

  “Why, pray tell, did you send your story to Robley’s esteemed but vastly inferior publication, and not to Palaver?”

  Joshua set down his coffee cup and leaned forward. “Do you really want the truth?”

  I cringed, because I knew the truth, having heard it many times from Joshua whenever I suggested shepherding one of his stories to Paviromo.

  “It sounds like I might not like this,” Paviromo said, “but go on.”

  “Because,” Joshua said, “although Palaver got its fair share of awards in the past, I find most of the work you publish these days dull. You rely almost exclusively on the safe choices, the old guard, the same writers over and over again, most of whom are white. Overwhelmingly white. You don’t take enough risks—with new writers, with writers of color, with anything that’s unfamiliar.”

  Paviromo was taken aback. “But we’re known for our discoveries. We’re known for launching careers.”

  “Early on, but not lately. Maybe it’s time to be proactive, try something different. Bold. Why not do an entire issue of discoveries?”

  Paviromo nodded. “You know, that’s rather brilliant.” They hashed out ideas for a special Fiction Discoveries issue—all writers who had yet to publish a book. Writers under thirty. A good percentage of women and writers of color. “We’d get a lot of attention, I would wager,” Paviromo said.

  “It’d be big news,” Joshua said, and it occurred to me then that, all along, he might have been loitering in the office with this proposition in mind.

  “There could be peripheral benefits as well,” Paviromo said. “A boon with grants, perhaps even a pop in our circulation.”

  “You’d be back in the game.”

  “I love it,” Paviromo said. He refilled their coffee cups. “So will we see you submit a story for me to consider for this special issue?”

  Joshua took a drink of the Macallan’s and savored the taste. “We’ll have to see if I have anything available,” he said.

  11

  I can no longer recall who introduced Mirielle Miyazato to the 3AC. All sorts of people were coming and going then, and Joshua grumbled that the group was getting too large, too slipshod, that maybe we should have a nominating committee and screen and interview potential members—an idea that the rest of the 3AC rebuffed as elitist.

  Seeing Mirielle across the living room, I was struck first by how elegantly she was dressed. A fitted black blouse, gray twill pencil skirt. She was tall and thin. She wore no makeup—she didn’t have to. Her hair was straight and soft and parted in the middle, falling to her shoulders, where it rested in a layer of subdued curls.

  “You like that?” Joshua said to me.

  I didn’t really have a chance to speak to her, though, until a few weeks later, at Leon Lee and Cindy Wong’s wedding in early November. The couple had been together since college, both of them painters with similar approaches, Leon mimicking the techniques of eighteenth-century Korean genre painters to make contemporary portraits on scrolls, Cindy adopting Chinese watercolor and brush schemes to produce modern still lifes on rice paper.

  The wedding was in Fort Point Channel, and Leon and Cindy had invited everyone in the 3AC to attend. We packed into the artists’ loft space, which had been cleverly divided by hanging surplus parachutes from pipes—one area for the ceremony, another for the banquet, and a third for dancing.

  Friends, all Berklee grads, had been cobbled together to form a band, with Phil Sudo on lead guitar. Mirielle was standing near the dance floor beside the bar, wearing a black dress that had a zippered mock turtleneck with boots that snugged her calves—a simple outfit, yet vaguely haute couture.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked. “Want a refill?”

  “Oh, it’s just Diet Coke,” she said. “I need the caffeine.”

  “Out late last night?”

  “I was breaking up with my
boyfriend,” she told me.

  I perked up.

  “Don’t look so happy,” she said.

  I laughed. “It was rancorous, I take it?”

  “He had to know it was coming. We haven’t touched each other since September.”

  The band launched into a bluesy Latin song, which no one quite knew how to dance to, until Jimmy Fung led Danielle Awano out to the floor. He held her very close, his right thigh thrust forcefully between her legs. They took three steps and then paused for a beat, and on the pause they took turns lifting their knees or doing a little kick or flip with their feet, à la the tango. All along, their hips were swaying, gyrating, grinding pelvis to pelvis. The dance was unmistakably sexy, but there was also something unbearably melancholy about it. They glided and turned and twirled, and once in a while Jimmy dipped her into a back bend or raised her hands up and then slowly down, clasping her arms by the wrists behind her head, captive. He winked at the 3AC men, raised his eyebrows to Joshua.

  “It’s called the bachata,” Mirielle told me. The dance had its origins in the shantytowns of the Dominican Republic, where the music was considered the blues of the DR. The bachata was banned from being shown on Dominican TV.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “Jimmy offered to teach it to me—when he was trying to pick me up.”

  The band switched to hip-hop, and everyone spilled onto the floor, even Joshua, who held a little girl, someone’s kid, up by the arms, her feet balanced on top of his. Delighted, the two of them were. I’d never seen Joshua play with a child before; he’d never expressed the least bit of interest in kids.

  “Do you want to dance?” I asked Mirielle.

  “I only dance to old standards.”

  “Like?”

  “Jazz ballads. Johnny Hartman, Little Jimmy Scott.”

  She was from Washington, D.C., Cleveland Park. Her parents, who were divorced, both worked in international trade, specializing in the Far East, her father a lobbyist, her mother an economic policy analyst.

  Mirielle had gone to Walden College and had just graduated this past spring with a BS in political science—sidetracked in her studies somewhere along the line, apparently, since she was already twenty-six. She had taken a few creative writing and literature courses as electives, including one with Paviromo, and she wanted to be a poet.

  I thought back to my class assignments at Walden. “I could have been your teacher for Intro,” I said.

  Like Jessica, she was currently working as a waitress in Harvard Square, at Casablanca. In three days she would be moving from the Brookline apartment she had shared with her boyfriend to a place in Somerville, Winter Hill. She was crashing temporarily on a friend’s couch in Beacon Hill.

  “Let me walk you home,” I said as the wedding wound down.

  As I was getting my coat, Jessica, who’d seen me with Mirielle, told me, “She’s pretty. She’s your type.”

  “What’s my type?”

  “Skinny. Wounded.”

  We walked through downtown and across the Common to Pinckney Street, a nice night, not too cold out. In the vestibule, I asked, “Can I come up?”

  “My friend goes to bed early.”

  I kissed her. I was a bit drunk. I didn’t expect her to respond with much enthusiasm, but she did, and we made out rapaciously in the vestibule. I took off my gloves, opened our coats, pressed against her.

  “Can I come up?” I asked again.

  “No,” Mirielle said. “You’re just taking advantage of me because you know I haven’t had sex in two months.”

  The next night, I went to Casablanca. There were two sections in the restaurant, a bar/café and a more formal dining area. Mirielle worked in the latter, but she had to get her drink orders from the bar, where I sat, drinking beers, throughout her entire shift.

  “Still here?” Mirielle kept saying.

  After she cashed out, I asked, “Want to stay here for a drink?”

  “No, let’s go somewhere else.”

  Each place I suggested, she vetoed. “You know,” I said, “we could just go to the house, hang out there, talk.”

  “Can you behave this time? Last night was a mistake. We can’t do that again. You got me when I was weak.”

  The house was empty, Jessica at Esther’s, Joshua who knew where. “Do you want a glass of wine?” I asked Mirielle. “I have a good bottle of Sangiovese.”

  “Water’s fine.”

  I fetched a beer for myself and took her upstairs for a tour, and, in my room, I lit candles and put on All the Way by Jimmy Scott, a CD I had bought that afternoon. We slow-danced, began kissing.

  “You’re a pretty good kisser,” she said. “Where’d you learn to kiss like this?”

  We ended up on the floor, where I gradually disrobed her—everything except her panties.

  “There’s something very premeditated, almost professional about this seduction,” she said. “The candles, the music, the slow-dancing. Have you ever been a gigolo? Did you ask Jimmy for tips?”

  “Jimmy’s a gigolo?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “Let’s move to the bed. We’ll be more comfortable.”

  We crawled onto my futon. “Oof,” she said. “You call this more comfortable? This mattress is a lumpy abomination. No one’s going to do you in this bed, honey.”

  “I think you should spend the night, Mirielle. It’s too late to go back to Beacon Hill.”

  Reluctantly, she agreed. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said. “You haven’t even taken me out to dinner yet.”

  As much as I tried, I couldn’t convince her to have sex with me that night. “I think my libido’s taken a vacation,” she said.

  “To where?”

  “To Tahiti.” She giggled. “It’s gone to Tahiti. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go somewhere tropical right now?”

  In the morning, I made her coffee and an omelette. She was anxious. She needed to finish packing, the movers coming early tomorrow.

  “I could take the day off and help you,” I said.

  Her hair was in a tussle. She was wearing one of my flannel shirts, the tails down to her thighs, and a pair of my thick woolen socks. She looked adorable. “I can tell already,” she said, “your kindness is going to give me nightmares.”

  The apartment was near Coolidge Corner, a spacious one-bedroom. Her boyfriend had cleared out most of the furniture from the living room, but there were books and tchotchkes and lamps on the floor to pack, and neither the kitchen nor the bedroom nor the bathroom had been addressed at all. Mirielle had done nothing thus far. “You haven’t even gotten boxes?” I said.

  I made several trips to Coolidge Corner, collecting boxes from the liquor store and Brookline Booksmith, foraging recycle bins for old newspapers, buying markers and rolls of tape from CVS. We worked all day, breaking only for take-out burritos from Anna’s Taqueria. At one point, while Mirielle was in the kitchen and I was clearing out the hallway closet, I came across a shoe box of photographs of Mirielle and her boyfriend. Crane’s Beach, Mad River Glen, Ghirardelli Square, the Golden Gate Bridge. She had told me the relationship had lasted a little over a year. They had rushed into it, moved in together after a few weeks—too impulsive. He was handsome. White.

  We finished everything by evening. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” Mirielle said.

  We took a cab back to Cambridge and showered, then I treated her to dinner at Chez Henri, the Franco-Cuban bistro a few blocks away on Shepard Street. “Let’s celebrate with mojitos,” I said. “They’re famous for them here. It’s a nice tropical drink.”

  “I’m not really in the mood for a mojito,” she said.

  “How about the pinot noir?”

  She shrugged, noncommittal.

  When the waitress brought the bottle and tipped it toward Mirielle’s wineglass, she put her hand over it and asked, “Can I get a Diet Coke instead?”

  We ravished our meals, both s
tarving. As we waited for our desserts, I said, “Are you sure you don’t want any of this?” In my nervousness, I had almost finished the entire bottle of pinot noir.

  “I don’t really drink,” Mirielle said. “I quit drinking when I was twenty-one.”

  She had been out of control as a teenager, she told me. Booze, coke. She had, at one time or another, flunked or dropped out of Sidwell, National Cathedral, and Maret, then Bowdoin College, Oberlin, and Walden—the latter because she had been institutionalized for three weeks. “I tried to kill myself with a razor,” she said matter-of-factly. After the nuthouse, as she called it, she went to a halfway house in Northern Virginia, and, once released, moved back to Boston. She lived in a rooming house in the Fenway and worked as a receptionist for a year, then reenrolled in Walden College, waiting tables to support herself. She attended AA meetings at least three times a week.

  I recalled when we’d walked into her apartment earlier that morning. She had run over to the stacks of books on the floor, embarrassed, turning the covers over and the spines away. I had glimpsed a few titles. They had been mostly self-help books. Reclaim Your Life. The Narcissist Within You. Be Happy to Be You.

  “I’m flabbergasted with myself,” I said. “I’ve gotten a little soused every time I’ve seen you.”

  “I was beginning to take note of that,” Mirielle said.

  “Did you suspect I had a drinking problem?”

  “I thought maybe you might,” she said, “but—I don’t know, you don’t seem tortured enough, to be frank. Sobriety’s not much fun, either, you know. Now that I’ve been sober five years, I get depressed a lot more.”

  I glanced down at her wrists. I could see a faint scar on one of them—a tiny keloid shaped like a comma, trailed by a thin whisper of discoloration.

  I was surprised by her disclosures, but they didn’t scare me. If anything, they made me respect Mirielle even more. I had never known anyone with a history of substance abuse of such magnitude, nor anyone who had tried to commit suicide and been institutionalized. Suddenly my problems—my entire life—felt, in comparison, benign. She seemed so strong and self-possessed now. I admired the fortitude it must have taken for her to piece her life back together, and the fact that she was comfortable enough with me to make these admissions drew us, in that moment, immeasurably closer, I thought.