The Collective (18 page)

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 takeout 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 starving. 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.

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 ChiMing 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.”