The Collective (17 page)

My immediate preoccupation, though, was taking delivery of the new issue and preparing to send it off by presorted third-class bulk mail.

I would have to unload and wheel in about forty boxes—each weighing fifty pounds—from the delivery truck, and stack them in the office. I would then have to stamp a thousand Jiffy No. 1 mailing bags with two impressions: Palaver’s return address on the top left, the bulk-mailing permit indicia on the top right. Stuff each envelope with a copy of the issue and close the flap with three staples. Stick on the subscriber address labels and sort the envelopes into bundles according to zip code. Wrap two rubber bands around each bundle by length and girth, then cram them into No. 3 canvas sacks. Tag each sack for delivery to the proper district hub. Rent a cargo van from U-Haul and load, transport, and unload the fifty or so sacks at the post office in Harvard Square—a total of twelve hundred pounds.

I was in the middle of bundling and sorting envelopes when Joshua made his maiden visit to the office.

“Jesus, this place is a dump,” he said. “I had no fucking idea.”

The storefront office was sandwiched between a T-shirt shop and a pizza parlor on Waverley Avenue. One long room, the place was furnished with castoffs and street finds and stuffed with boxes of unsold issues and masses of junk, a museum of antiquated publishing paraphernalia: broken typewriters, light boxes, T-squares, strips of old Linotype, paste-ups of covers and galleys.

“Not a good time,” I told Joshua. He had gone to the RMV in Watertown to renew his license and had asked to stop by on the way back. Reluctantly I had given him directions, but had said he couldn’t stay long.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I summarized the undertaking at hand.

“Why do you have to do this?” Joshua said. “Can’t you get interns or something?”

“It’s faster if I do it myself.”

“Look at yourself, dude.”

My T-shirt was wet with sweat, my jeans filthy. My forearms were scratched from lugging boxes, my hands black from the inkpad, and my fingertips bled from wayward staple prongs.

“You are being fucking exploited, man,” Joshua said. “You’re being treated like a slave. And you know why?”

I heaved another stack of envelopes to the sorting table. “Why?”

“Because you’re Asian,” he said. “Paviromo assumes, since you’re Asian, that you’re meticulous and good with numbers and conscientious—read: docile—like all Asians are, so he’ll make you do all the shit work, the clerical and computer crap, but damn if he’ll ever let you touch anything that involves any aesthetic sensibilities or, God forbid, any real editing.”

What he was saying was accurate. The only thing Paviromo allowed me to do editorially was screen the fiction manuscripts in the slush pile. Occasionally I’d uncover a terrific story, but Paviromo never once accepted any of the submissions I passed on to him. “Can we have this conversation later?” I said to Joshua. “I’m a little busy here, if that’s not obvious enough.”

But Joshua wouldn’t leave. He poked around the office, playing with the Pantone flip book, punching keys on the old broken Olivetti typewriter (“You know Cormac McCarthy has used the same Lettera 32 since 1963?”), cutting some scraps of Lino with an X-Acto knife.

“If you’re bored,” I said, “you can take off. I’ll be okay by myself.”

But then he discovered the stacks. Palaver didn’t publish book reviews, but the journal did run a list of “Books Received” in the back of every issue, in the tiniest print, a curious feature (the lists were arbitrary in what they included, not at all comprehensive) whose sole purpose was to ensure that we were sent free books and advance reader editions by publishers.

“This is a fucking gold mine,” Joshua said. “I can’t believe you’ve been holding these out on me.”

He began pawing through the stacks, which were heaped precariously against the wall. We didn’t have enough shelves for the books and the many literary journals with which we exchanged subscriptions, so I had crisscrossed some bungee cords to keep them from falling over. He tugged out the new William Trevor, the new Gass and Sebald and Beattie. “Can I have this?” he kept asking.

He smuggled the books into the backseat of his Peugeot and then, for a late lunch, bought a meatball grinder (jumbo, with extra provolone and mayonnaise) at the pizza parlor next door, eating it in the office while I continued to label and sort and rubber-band. “Don’t you have to go home and work on your novel?” I asked.

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.

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, ŕ 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.”