by Don Lee
We walked back to the house and decided to turn in early. It’d been a long day. In my bedroom, I undressed her—completely this time.
“What’s going to happen now, Eric?” Mirielle said, smiling impishly.
We made love.
“Don’t look so proud of yourself,” she said afterward. “It’s just sex.”
“No, it’s not just that,” I said. “I have a confession to make.”
“What?”
“You’re the first Asian woman I’ve ever slept with.”
“Really? That’s surprising. Why haven’t you before?”
“Maybe I was a Twinkie, I don’t know. But sometimes it seems Asian women aren’t, in general, very interested in Asian men. Sometimes it seems they prefer going out with white men. Is that true?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Is it because they’ve bought into all those clichés about Asian guys?”
“Well, I’d never say this to the 3AC, but some of those clichés have a basis in reality. A lot of Asian men are kind of nerdy and wimpy and boring. They can be very traditional.”
“You’ve dated a lot of Asians?”
“Not many,” Mirielle said, then allowed, “Okay, I’ve gone on a few dates with Asians, but I never fucked any. You’re my first. You popped my Asian-boy cherry.”
“I’m honored.”
“I am, too,” she said. “Although I’m Japanese, you’re Korean. If I had any ethnic pride, I wouldn’t be consorting with you at all. God, this futon. I swear, I’m not coming over here again until you get a new bed, an actual bed. Having a mattress on the floor is bad feng shui. And sheets. You need better sheets.”
They were cheap knockoffs from Filene’s Basement—so cheap, they hadn’t advertised a thread count on the package, just that they were one hundred percent cotton. “Any other complaints?” I asked.
“No, I’m pretty impressed with you,” she said. “You can make perfect omelettes, and you’re a hell of a kisser.”
“There’s something else I can do pretty well,” I told her, and slipped down the futon.
Later, she said, “Do you have this effect on all women? Make them crumble?”
“I think your libido’s back from Tahiti.”
“You may be right,” she said.
The next day, I went to Big John’s Mattress Factory in Lechmere and ordered a new mattress, box spring, and frame for delivery.
Joshua, never one to be outdone by me, had started his own romance the night of Leon and Cindy’s wedding. He had gone home with Lily Bai, another new 3AC member who was a ceramic artist.
“I tell you,” he said in his attic room, “this chick, she’s a little pistol. She gives unbelievable head. She could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”
“Isn’t that a line from an old movie?” I asked, but laughed nevertheless.
He had been spending the past few days at the Ritz-Carlton. Lily was from Ann Arbor, her father a geneticist who’d developed several patents that had made him a fortune.
“Room service!” Joshua said. Lily lived in a two-bedroom condo attached to the Ritz, and the hotel’s services were fully available to the condo residents. “I’ve been fucking this hot little kumquat and eating room service the entire time! You can’t ask for much more in life.” He was going back; he’d just come home for some clothes.
“You’re able to write there?” I asked.
“Sure. She’s at her studio most of the day.” Joshua had long ago abandoned his Murakami regimen, and ever since the 3AC had formed, he had become more susceptible to distractions, far less disciplined.
I told him about Mirielle, about her going to AA.
“Fuck, man,” he said, “that pious, sanctimonious twelve-step shit bores me to tears. It’s just an excuse for self-absorption. Oh, poor me, poor me. Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with this girl. I know you. You’re a complete sap when it comes to women. Will you promise me you won’t fall in love with her?”
I broke my promise to Joshua almost immediately. For the next two weeks, I helped Mirielle unpack and set up in her new apartment in Winter Hill. She was sharing it with two PhD students at Tufts who were a couple, and her room was small, without much closet space. We went to hardware and furniture stores. I installed shelves for her, and miniblinds. I hung up photos. I assembled bookshelves and storage carts. I bought her a garment rack on wheels.
Still, we spent nearly every night back in Harvard Square. She liked my new bed. I’d pick her up after one of her AA meetings or from Casablanca, and I’d walk her back to the house. “Are you living with that Chinese guy now?” a fellow waitress asked Mirielle.
I made breakfast for her every morning—omelettes, poached eggs, French toast, pancakes. I gave her massages. We went to movies and poetry readings at the Blacksmith House and the Lamont Library. We ate in the Porter Square Exchange, where she ordered food in Japanese. We stopped by Toscanini’s each night for ice cream, a weakness of hers. We ran on the Esplanade together. That path at sunset, coming down Memorial Drive toward town—the water on the Charles blustery and whitecapped, the gold dome of the State House gleaming above Beacon Hill, the skyscrapers in the Financial District orange-lit—was glorious. With Mirielle running beside me, my chest would squeeze, and I’d love the city.
The 3AC kept meeting on Sundays. The glassblower Jay Chi-Ming Lai had just returned from giving a lecture at a university in butt-fuck rural Missouri. He hadn’t wanted to go, but they had persisted, saying they had found more money for him from the minority scholars initiative. He had pictured this group of minority scholarship kids marooned in the Midwest, and thought they’d appreciate having an artist of color visit. At the lecture, there was not a single nonwhite student in attendance. It turned out he was the minority scholar. Insult to injury, for dinner the hosts drove him deeper into the country to a restaurant called Jasmine Cuisine, where the menu was not Thai or Chinese or Japanese, just generically Asian. The food was terrible.
“Why do they always assume if you’re Asian, you’ll want Asian food?” Jay said. “I’d really been looking forward to some barbecue.”
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 thousand
s 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.