The Collective (24 page)

“Wow,” I said, feeling defeated by the developments.

“I know!” she said.

“Where are you thinking of applying to?”

All the schools she mentioned were outside Massachusetts. “Maybe you should apply to Walden as a backup,” I told her.

“I’ve had enough of Walden,” she said. “I want a clean slate.”

We went to Wordsworth so she could buy some GRE prep books. Her grades at Walden College had been spotty, and she would need to do well on the test.

“I could help you study,” I told her.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “Would you have a problem seeing me platonically?”

“It’d be painful,” I admitted.

“This always happens. Can’t you be my friend?”

I told her that I would try. “Are you going to date other people?” I asked. “Have you?”

“No. It’s important for me to be alone right now.”

“I won’t be a nuisance to you, then,” I said. “I’m not going to call you. When you want to see me or talk, you should call.”

She ended up calling me every day, sometimes three or four times a day. Almost immediately, her newfound confidence collapsed. After her first day of work at Mount Auburn Hospital, she was barely able to mumble hello on the phone before bursting into tears. I went over to her apartment. She was slumped in her nightgown, her face swollen from crying. “It’s so demeaning being a secretary again,” she said.

Then, during a thunderstorm, she came home to find water pouring from the windowsills, the ceiling leaking in rills, ruining her bed and sheets and her clothes on the garment rack. “Can I sleep over at your place?” she asked.

We saw each other just as much as before the BVIs. We went to movies and poetry readings. We dropped by Toscanini’s for ice cream. We drilled through GRE practice tests. I quit drinking again and accompanied her to the occasional meeting. I made her coffee and French toast and omelettes. And we kept spending nights together in my bed, though chastely.

The denial of sex now, however, instead of pushing me further away, oddly intensified my feelings for her. I waited for Mirielle to swing around. At times, it seemed she was coming back to me, but then she would abruptly retreat.

“You never call me,” she said. “I always call you.”

I reminded her about our arrangement, about not being a pest.

“That’s silly,” she said. “We talk every day, anyway. What are you doing Saturday?”

“Seeing you,” I said.

One morning, she told me she was going to the Square to hang out, maybe see a movie. “You want company?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I think we’re spending too much time together.”

“Why’d you call me, then?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You sound strange.”

Later that day, she appeared at the house, depressed by the movie, throughout which the characters had drunk copious amounts of wine. She had gone to a meeting afterward at the First Parish Unitarian Church but had left early, restless.

I had been about to head out. A jazz combo, Phil Sudo and Annie Yoshikawa’s friends, was playing at the Lizard Lounge, and I was supposed to meet them there. Yet Mirielle didn’t want to go. She had not attended any of the 3AC potlucks since December, and she felt it would be awkward seeing Phil and Annie again with me.

“It’d be like we’re double-dating,” she said. “As if we’re a couple.”

“God forbid anyone would think we’re a couple.”

“We’re not a couple.”

“We’re more of a couple than most people who have sex.”

“We have a weird relationship,” she conceded.

Another night, she was limp with exhaustion—she had been on her feet all day.

“Come here,” I said. “I’ll give you a foot massage.”

“No. You’re too nice to me.”

“I know I am. Should I be meaner to you? Less nice?” I asked.

She shook her head in alarm. “That’d be disastrous.”

Several nights later, we lay in bed. We had gone to see a film at the Kendall and then had eaten pizza at Emma’s. “You’re so quiet,” she said.

“It gets to me sometimes. You know how I feel about you,” I told her. “Do you think there’s a chance things could ever become romantic between us again?”

“I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling romantic with anyone right now.”

I mulled this over in silence, dispirited.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“I can tell by your face. You hate me.”

“No, just the opposite, Mirielle.”

The next week, Planned Parenthood contacted her. Her Pap smear had come back abnormal, and they wanted to schedule her for a biopsy. “Nothing I do makes a difference,” she said. “Another job or another apartment or another city won’t change anything—I’ll still despise myself. This grad school thing is a pipe dream. And now I might have cancer.”

I escorted her to Planned Parenthood, and then, on the morning she was to get the results, I waited for her to call me. She didn’t. I left two messages for her at her office at Mount Auburn, but she didn’t return them. Late in the afternoon, frantic she might have received terrible news from the pathologist, I finally reached her.

“Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“It’s just that I’ve been on the phone practically all day,” she said. She was typing, then I overheard her talking to someone and laughing.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“No one. The new temp.”

“We can talk later,” I said.

“No, I can talk,” she said, and continued to type.

“Well,” I said.

“What?”

“If you’re busy, we can catch up later.”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up.

The following night, when she slept over, I explained how worried I’d been about her the day before. “I always go into a tailspin when you do things like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“When you don’t call me back.”

“I don’t always have to call you back,” she said.

Throughout January and into February, we worked on her applications to MFA programs. I convinced Paviromo to write her a strong letter of recommendation, despite the B-minus she had received in his British poetry class, and I also persuaded a local poet I knew, Liam Rector, to add his own endorsement of Mirielle, even though they had never met. We revised and revised her personal statement, deliberating over whether she should delve into her former addictions. Eventually, we decided she should, since her writing sample was filled with recovery poems.

She read a new one to me about the sponsor, Alice, who had died. I tried to be encouraging.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“No, I do.”

“I can tell you don’t.”

“I think it’s really powerful.”

She was dejected, but then said, “Well, I think I should be proud of myself for at least sitting down and completing a first draft.”

Joshua was more frank about the poem’s merits, or lack thereof. While we were watching the Celtics on TV, I showed him a copy of the poem. I still didn’t trust my ability to judge poetry. Maybe I’m wrong, I thought.

“This is unadulterated crap,” he told me. “Pure excreta. She actually said she’s proud of herself? You see, she comes from the school of the emotionally crippled wherein they pat themselves on the back for accomplishing what people do as a matter of course. We come from the school where only national recognition will satisfy ambition, and that’s the way it should be. What’s this chick’s appeal to you? I know she’s pretty, but why are you so in love with her? Because you can’t have her?”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then? You spend the night together, and what, nothing? No hand jobs, even? You don’t touch each other at all?”

“I give her massages sometimes.”

“You give her massages. Jesus, she’s walking all over you. You’re embarrassing yourself. What she wants is someone to support her and be a slave to her, and you happen to be available. Let’s face it, she feels nothing for you. Either she puts out, or you get the fuck out. You’re making a complete fool of yourself.”

I lit candles. We slow-danced to Johnny Hartman. I gave her a massage. She was wearing her nightgown, lying on her stomach, and I straddled her ass while I kneaded her back.

“This is all very familiar,” she said.

When I finished the massage, I lay down beside her. “Let’s make love,” I said.

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s been almost two months.”

“We’re friends.”

“Will you give me a kiss? Just one kiss?”

She pecked me on the cheek. “What’s gotten into you tonight?” she asked.

“What’s gotten into me? Look what we’re doing. How am I supposed to feel?”

She got up and pulled on her jeans underneath her nightgown. “You know what you should do?” she said. “You should go out to a bar, have a few drinks, get loose, and pick up someone who’ll fuck your brains out.”

“I don’t want to fuck anyone else. Why won’t you make love with me?”

“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have sex with you again.”

“How come?”

“The closer I get to someone, the less I feel like having sex with him—whereas I could probably let some stranger fuck me twelve ways to Sunday.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Mirielle. Why do you feel that way?”

“Because I can only have sex when it’s degrading,” she said.

“That was a mistake,” Jessica told me. “You’re not being sensitive to her at all. You should have gotten it by now. Pushing sex, even playfully, is going to upset her after her history.”

“You’re right.”

“Honor her privacy. Don’t make demands on her. Don’t try to change her or pressure her. If you’re there for her, she’ll come around eventually.”

“Joshua thinks I’ve been humiliating myself.”

“He’s just jealous. He’d love to see you guys break up so he can have you all to himself again. Can’t you be patient?”

I apologized to Mirielle the next time we saw each other, which seemed to mollify her, but something was different. All of a sudden she was mysteriously busy on weekends, and there were fewer nights when she was able to sleep over, worn out or feeling sick or wanting to nest in her own room. More and more, her roommates would have to tell me that Mirielle wasn’t home when I called. I’d leave messages for her with them, and still I wouldn’t hear back from her. Sometimes she’d claim not to have received the notes, and I thought she was lying, just like when she would insist that she had called me back and had left a message on our answering machine, until Joshua confessed to me one night, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. I must have accidentally erased it,” whereupon I installed a code and disabled the erase function on the machine.

She would say that she was on the run, could she call me back, then wouldn’t. She would make plans to get together with me, then renege.

“You’ve been canceling on me a lot,” I’d say.

“It’s been a rough week,” she’d say.

I knew full well what was going on, but I wanted it not to be true. She had gotten back together with David, or she had met someone new altogether. Someone older, with money, in AA. Someone who could relate to her in ways that I never could. A father figure.

I thought about her every moment of the day—wondering what she was doing, imagining her going on dates with anonymous men, having impersonal, degrading sex with them. I was in torment, yet I had such pity for her, for her horrible childhood, for being so sad. I wanted to continue seeing her somehow. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that I cared about her, that no matter what, we’d find a way to remain friends. I called to tell her all of this. She wasn’t home. She didn’t return my message.

In the morning, when she picked up the phone at her office, she was laughing, in the midst of a conversation with a coworker. She never laughed like that with me anymore. “Can I call you back?” she asked me.

“Will you promise to call tonight?”

“I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be up late.”

“Okay,” she said.

She never called.

Three nights later, we met for dinner at Pho Pasteur. She was uneasy, nervous. At last, she said, “I have something to tell you. Something big.”

“I know already,” I said.

“You do?”

“You’re seeing someone else.”

She nodded. “I’ve been afraid to tell you.”

“Who is he? Where’d you meet him?”

“At the office. He was a temp there.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“A couple of weeks,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you as a friend.”

“So you tortured me instead.”

“I should have told you. It’s stupid I didn’t.”

“The worst part,” I said, “is that you deceived me. You lied to me that you were busy or tired when really you were going off to see him. You only called me when you needed me for something.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“I’m disgusted with myself,” Mirielle said. “I thought of killing myself last night.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t make this into another excuse to feel sorry for yourself.”

She took a folded check out of her purse. It was for the money I had lent her to buy her plane ticket to Tortola.

The waiter brought us the bill, and Mirielle and I split it down the middle—the first time I had ever let her pay for her share of a meal.

“Do you think we could stay friends?” she asked. “I’d like to.”

“Is he white?”

“What?”

“Your new boyfriend.”

She nodded.

“I knew it,” I said. “A yellow cab.”

“What?”

“All the crap about not wanting to jump into another relationship, how difficult it is for you to get close to people—it was all bullshit. It wasn’t that at all. It’s just that you didn’t want to be in a relationship with me.”

“Can’t you be my friend?”

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

She wouldn’t look at me, stared down at the caddy of sriracha and hoisin sauce on the table.

“I never thought you were capable of something like this,” I said. “I thought I knew you, but I guess I don’t. You’re a stranger to me,” I told her. “You’re a bad person, Mirielle.”