The Collective (22 page)

“I’ll just have coffee,” she said. She saw the carafe perched upside down in the dish rack. “You finished the pot?”

“I’ll make you some more.”

“I can make it,” she said irritably.

After lunch, Joshua and Lily wanted to go snorkeling in Lee Bay again, this time with the Whaler so they could explore the outer tip of the reef. I decided to give Mirielle some room. “I think I’m going to do some work on my novella,” I told her, “but you can go if you want.”

“I know I can go if I want,” she said.

I spent the afternoon alone at the house. I tried to write for a few hours, but whatever momentum I’d had before coming to Great Camanoe had disappeared. I cracked open Joshua’s copy of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, yet found myself reading the same paragraph over and over. I didn’t know what was going on with Mirielle. I’d never seen her like this, so testy and brusque toward me.

When they returned, she seemed in a better mood. The three of them talked animatedly about seeing a school of squirrelfish, a green sea turtle, elkhorn coral, a nurse shark, and a barracuda. Yet when I said to Mirielle, “I’m glad you got to go snorkeling,” she looked at me with barely concealed contempt. As dinnertime neared and she was going up to change, I stood to follow her, and she told me, “Can’t you leave me alone for a few minutes?”

We took the Whaler to a waterfront restaurant in Trellis Bay to sample the local cuisine, sharing orders of conch fritters, chicken roti, lobster, spicy goat, and johnny cakes.

Joshua and Lily were drinking painkillers, a rum cocktail that was a BVI specialty. After three or four of them, Joshua heard the bar next door playing a recording of the Wailers’ “Duppy Conqueror” and began bemoaning the commercialization of Bob Marley, how the white colonial culture had exploited his music and image and debased his message beyond recognition (“Don’t people listen to the lyrics at all?”), so Marley was now simply a symbol of island party life and sybaritism, his songs a sorry, spurious anthem to the glories of ganja for white-bread narrow arrows who’d never touched a doobie in their lives. This got him on the topic of hip-hop sampling—he remembered the Beastie Boys had poached a part of “Duppy Conqueror” for “Funky Boss”—and the concept of détournement (“which, of course, was the primary impetus behind Jessica’s table sculptures, remember?”) and other situationist pranks intended to subvert the capitalist system, although these approaches ironically inherited the same problems of reflecting or refracting a culture (“Can there be such a thing as genuine weltanschauung or any kind of normative postulate when everything’s been so bastardized and imperialized?”), which led to a digression about Duchamp’s readymades, the anxiety of influence, T. S. Eliot, and the objective correlative.

“What about—” Lily started to say.

“It’s not just with poetry,” Joshua said. “It’s the perpetual conflict with all text, language being both the material object on the page and the signifier for meanings that reside beyond it. How can you reconcile those contradictions and find a way to acknowledge them yet still allow a specificity of discourse? I don’t know if it’s possible now to create a definitive statement about any subject that’s mimetic to actual experience when every word bears a semantic, ideological charge.”

“Can I say something?” Lily asked.

“I want to agree with Valéry, who famously contended that order and disorder are equal threats in a poem. Great writing should function as a bearer of alterity, but language continually fails to contextualize the inequities of the cultural moment. You’re always reduced to privileging one thing over another.”

“You’re ignoring me,” Lily said.

“I’m sorry. You have something pertinent you wish to add?”

“I was going to say something about metaphors, but now I’ve forgotten what exactly because you were babbling so long.”

“Ah, you see, this is where you’re misapprehending the basic rules of etiquette, Lily. Conversation is not dialogue, it’s monologues. No one ever really listens in conversations. It’s civility that makes you wait and pretend you give a fuck what the other person is saying. You’ve got to learn to ignore that shit and just butt in.”

“Everything you were saying was pompous bullshit, anyway,” Lily said. “Not that it matters to you, you love the sound of your own voice so much. It’s like when the 3AC meets: my theory this, my project that. Sometimes it feels like you guys don’t think what I’m doing is as important as what you’re doing.”

“You design cute little plates and bowls,” Joshua said. “You display them at trade shows for distribution to home accessories stores. You hardly ever go to the studio, you have your helpers do all the actual work. You’ve never made a profit, but it doesn’t matter, because you can always rely on your father’s seemingly inexhaustible moola. You wonder why we might not regard what you’re doing as important. The fact is, it’s not.”

Lily threw the rest of her painkiller in his face.

“Okay,” he said, “maybe that was a little too blunt.” He rose from his chair and stumbled to the beach, taking off his shirt along the way, and dove into the water. Tittering, Lily joined him there, stripping down to her underwear.

Mirielle watched them frolicking in the bay. “Joshua’s a total prick,” she said. “Why are you friends with him?”

“Well, you’ve only seen his good side,” I told her.

“I thought after that meeting, he might actually change. That’s how stupid I am. But he’s a classic narcissist. He gets gratification by tearing apart everyone around him, because it feeds into his self-hatred. He likes to inflict pain so he won’t have to focus on his own. He’ll destroy you in the end. Don’t let him. Don’t be a second banana to him.”

“So to speak.”

“What?”

“Banana?”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“What’s going on, Mirielle?” I asked. “There’s this weird wall between us all of a sudden.”

“You’re condescending to me,” she said. “You get it from Joshua, obviously, the way he treats women. He’s a misogynist. Did you notice how he went on and on about poetry and never asked me, the only poet at the table, for my opinion? You’ve been doing it all vacation. Like this morning, telling me I could go snorkeling. You’re always telling me what I can and cannot do, making decisions for me.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

“Is it because I told you I’m in love with you?”

“You need to readjust your expectations for this trip,” Mirielle told me. “You want a romantic trip, but it’s just a vacation we happen to be on together.”

We exchanged Christmas presents in the morning. I gave Mirielle the silver earrings from the shop in Road Town, a black BCBG dress from Jasmine Sola in Harvard Square, and a necklace from the Cambridge Artists Cooperative Gallery. Mirielle gave me a novel, Blindness by José Saramago, the Portuguese author who’d won the Nobel Prize a few months ago. A book, the most unimaginative gift you could give to a writer, plucked from a rack of prizewinners. She couldn’t have put less thought into buying a present for me.

It was cloudy and sprinkling intermittently. We repaired to various corners of the house, reading and napping. It cleared up later, and Mirielle came down the stairs in her bathing suit, on her way to Lee Bay, plainly not interested in company.

That night, she said to me, “We only have two days left.”

I didn’t reply.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Just readjusting my thinking,” I said. “Evidently I’m just this guy to you.”

She rolled her eyes and turned off the light.

I couldn’t sleep, and in the middle of the night I walked down from the guest cottage to the veranda, where I found Joshua on one of the chaises longues, smoking a cigarette.

“Insomnia?” I asked, sitting down beside him.

“Stomach’s a little queasy. Nice night for stargazing, though.” We peered up at the stars pinholing the black sky. “Breathtaking, isn’t it? ‘My little campaigners, my scar daisies.’ ”

“Roethke.”

“Sexton,” Joshua corrected me.

“Mirielle’s favorite poet.”

“Figures,” he said. “Manic-depressive, suicidal, anorexic—the perfect role model.”

“I’m totally baffled by her,” I said. “Things were going so well.”

“Don’t be so nice to her,” Joshua told me. “Women, especially little girls like her, like men who are jerks. They don’t know what to do with themselves if they’re treated well. They can only function when they’re in despair. That book she gave you, Saramago—there’s a Portuguese word, saudade. It’s like nostalgia, but not quite. More like yearning, a vague acedia, a desire for something that can never be obtained or might not even exist. We all have that, don’t we? All of us who are artists, who are outsiders. It’s what your man Fitzgerald was alluding to when he said in the real dark night of the soul it’s always three o’clock in the morning. We get down, but it’s manageable, and it’s essential to our creativity, that occasional glimpse into the dark night. But for someone like Mirielle, it’s pitch-black every hour of the day. You’re not going to be able to save her, you know. If you keep trying, she’ll break your heart.”

He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to believe him just then.

The wind freshened, luffing leaves and branches. “The trades are back,” Joshua said, then asked, “What kind of tree is that?,” gesturing toward a large hardwood with peeling red bark. “Do you know?”

“Turpentine, a.k.a. gumbo limbo,” I said. I pointed out other species around the house: tamarind, flamboyant, aloe.

“One of my great failings is that I don’t know the names of trees and flowers,” Joshua said. “How’d you learn?”

“You’ve never noticed all the work Jessica and I have done in the backyard, have you?” I said. “My mom’s a gardener. She used to take me to arboretums and botanical gardens when I was a kid.”

“She did you a real favor. That was a gift,” Joshua said. “You should appreciate her more. You take your family for granted, you know.”

“Did I ever tell you what she did with the oranges for my sack lunches?”

In a year, I would go home to Mission Viejo for Christmas, as promised. It’d be the last time I would see my mother. She would die a few months afterward, and Joshua, in the throes of his own grief and guilt, would fly out to California for the funeral. In the church, he would read aloud the eulogy I had written—I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. He would follow us to the wake, then would sit with me in the house as I clicked through the old slideshow of my parents’ honeymoon, telling me, “She was a beautiful woman,” and would console me as I wept. I’d never forget that he did that for me.

We walked down to Cam Bay for a swim. “You seem unhappy,” Mirielle said as we treaded water. “You seem like you’re sulking.”

“It’s just a long date, right?” I said. I didn’t know why I was being truculent instead of seeking rapprochement. I couldn’t help it. My pride was wounded, and I didn’t want to be accommodating.

“I guess I can’t give you what you want,” she said.

“I guess not.”

She swam farther out into the bay, then floated back to me. “It’s stupid,” she said, “not having sex when you want to have sex. Just like with David. It’s not unreasonable, what you’re asking.”

For the first time in days, there was clemency in her voice. Her hair was slicked back from the water, and she looked at me with a forbearance that suggested a submerged well of regret. Or pity. But then I did exactly the wrong thing.

“Let’s go to where it’s shallower,” I said.

“Why?”

“Put your legs around me.”

“I didn’t mean I want to have sex with you right now,” she said.

We gathered our towels, and as we were leaving the beach, I glanced back and saw pink jellyfish, dozens of them, washed up on the sand. It was a miracle we hadn’t been stung.

Our bar of soap was gone from the shower, purloined by the rodent. The insects—centipedes, ants, termites, spiders—as well as the geckos, were proliferating. “I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here,” I said in our room. Stalking a mosquito, I rolled up a magazine and smacked the wall.

Mirielle was packing clothes into her suitcase. We were leaving early the next day. Holding one of her souvenir T-shirts, emblazoned with the slogan VIRGIN ISLANDER, she sat down on the bed. “I’ve always made a lousy girlfriend,” she said. “I’m always a bitch. I know I’m a drag to be around. There’s no reason you can’t have a drink. I want a gin rickey, too, you know.”

I put the magazine down. “Maybe we should get you to a meeting tonight. There have to be some on Tortola.”

“Don’t tell me to go to a meeting. I’m not a child.”

“All right, then. Don’t go.”

“I’m not what you’re looking for,” she said. “I just can’t deal with getting into another heavy-duty, exclusive relationship so soon after David. I don’t want to feel obligated or possessed, I don’t want to settle down into a routine again as a couple. I think maybe we should date other people.”

“What?”

“It might be healthy, not seeing each other so much.” She folded the T-shirt and tucked it into her suitcase.

“Have you met someone else?”

“No.”

“Did you sleep with David when you saw him?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but no.”

“Did someone ask you out?”

“Could you give the questions a rest for one fucking minute and let me pack?” she said. “God, I hate clingy men.”

I left the guest cottage. Joshua and Lily were making gin and tonics on the veranda. “Fix me one of those,” I told Joshua.

I wasn’t in the mood to cook dinner. We went back to Trellis Bay, and this time ate at De Loosey Goosey, the outdoor beach bar, which was decorated with the usual thatched roof, tiki torches, nautical flags, and picnic tables. It was quizo night there, and after some cajoling from the bar’s owner, we played the pub trivia game. Joshua named our team the Broom in the System of Cyclones.

“Which punk rocker was born in 1947 and originally named James Newell Osterberg, Jr.?” the owner asked.

“Too easy,” Joshua said, writing down Iggy Pop.

“How many keys are there on a standard piano?”

Lily scribbled eighty-eight.

“What condiment is served with sushi?”