The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  Joshua met us at the airport on Beef Island. He had been in the BVIs a week already, and he was tanned and relaxed. He wore a white captain’s hat with a black bill, cocked on his head at a jaunty angle. “Just call me Commander!” he said.

  He led us down a dock at the end of the runway to a seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. “You sure you know how to drive this thing?” I asked.

  “You’ll be impressed by what I’ve learned here,” he said, and bragged that he’d been taking sailing and diving lessons.

  Joshua maneuvered the workboat slowly out of the bay, and once we were in open water, he pushed down on the throttle, and we roared out to sea. Mirielle and I unwound, enjoying the sun, the wind, the panorama of boats and islands and ocean.

  “I’m so glad we’re here,” she said to me, and I put my arm around her.

  It was a ten-minute ride to Great Camanoe. “Pull those fenders out,” Joshua said as we entered a marina, and then he adroitly piloted the boat alongside a concrete pier. He secured the Whaler to cleats and posts, showing off various knots: bowline, sheet bend, clove hitch, daisy chain. For a second I pictured Joshua being tied to the railing on the Southie pier, but the mise-en-scène didn’t seem to hold any residual trauma for him.

  We walked to an old Land Rover parked at the end of the dock. It was rusty and battered, and there was no top to it, no roof or windows, just a windshield. The steering wheel was on the right side, and the interior had been stripped bare, foam poking out of the seats. “What is this?” I asked. “A relic from World War II?”

  “Could be,” Joshua said. “But it climbs like a motherfucker.”

  Great Camanoe was a volcanic doublet joined by an isthmus. The island was small, two and a half miles long and one mile at its widest, and only the southern half was inhabited, with fewer than thirty houses, the northern half a national park. There were no commercial businesses on the island, which accounted, perhaps, for the poor condition of the roads.

  We quickly reached the end of the two-track of gravel that had begun at the pier, and thereafter it was just ruts and dirt that humped in steep ascents and descents. The Land Rover had a complicated gearbox with a long black shifter, a red lever, and a yellow knob, and Joshua kept having to stop and manipulate the gears—no built-in shifting on the fly—occasionally grinding them. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” he said. Soon the dirt road narrowed even further and pitched precipitously up the hill, hanging sheerly off escarpments, twisting and hairpinning. Finally, near the top, at four hundred feet, was the house, in front of which was Lily, passed out on a chaise longue, topless.

  “Hey, you big cow,” Joshua said, kicking the chair, “wake up.”

  She opened her eyes and smiled. “Is it cocktail hour already?”

  The property was cut into the side of the hill on two terraces and was made up of four small buildings—boxy little cottages—all of them built with white stucco, red galvanized roofs, and terra-cotta tile floors. There was one cottage for the kitchen and another for the living room, connected by a breezeway that served as an open-air dining area; a cottage for the master bedroom suite; and up a stone walkway from a stone courtyard lined with boulders, a cottage for the guest suite, which had, Mirielle and I discovered, a bathroom that was agape on one end to the rock face of the hill, into which a shower had been carved.

  “How cool!” Mirielle said.

  The views from the property were magnificent—the lush green slope of trees and the white beach below, the horizon of blue ocean beyond. All around the cottages were flowers: orchids, bougainvillea, huge vines of petrea with mauve-blue flowers, hibiscus, oleander. And the trees: palms, white cedars, loblollies, whistling pines, figs, organ pipe and prickly pear cacti, frangipanis with feral branch sculptures. I could hear songbirds, the plants and trees rustling and swaying with the trade winds. I could smell wild sage and jasmine and thyme.

  “I love this place,” I told Mirielle.

  On the veranda in front of the dining area, Joshua was making drinks. “Gin rickey?” he asked me.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. You’re still not drinking? We’re on vacation, man.” He squeezed half a lime into a tall glass of ice, added gin, threw in the lime, and topped it off with club soda. “You sure?”

  Despite the wind, it was hot, and I was sweating. We had left Harvard Square at six-thirty a.m., and it had taken us nine hours to travel to this spot. For the first time in three weeks, I really wanted a drink. I looked to Mirielle, who shrugged. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Gin rickeys were Fitzgerald’s drink,” Joshua told me.

  “You know what I could really use?” I said. “A swim.”

  We changed into bathing suits and walked down the hill on the dirt road, then hiked through the trees on a trail littered with rocks and roots. After a few minutes, the path opened to the curved beach of Cam Bay, surrounded by canopies of sea grape trees and patches of bay lavender. We all ran into the water.

  Mirielle hugged her arms and legs around me, and we floated with the swells. “Heaven,” I said, and she kissed me.

  Joshua was splashing Lily. “Stop it!” she screamed.

  He had left his captain’s hat on the beach, and now that his hair was wet, I realized he was going bald at the temples.

  We returned to the house, and, perspiring from the climb, Mirielle and I took an outdoor shower together. We soaped each other up, and I became erect. “Turn around,” I said.

  “That’s so impersonal.”

  Facing her while we stood in the shower, I tried to arrange our bodies into a feasible position.

  “This is impossible,” she said. “I’d never get all that soap out of my vagina, anyway.”

  I barbecued chicken for our dinner, throughout which Joshua and Lily, drunk on gin rickeys, jousted with each other.

  Mirielle and I went to bed early. “It’s more rustic than I thought it’d be,” she said. “I was kind of expecting a villa on the water”—she kicked off the sheet—“and A/C in bedroom, at least.”

  “I’m okay with the ceiling fan and the breeze. Are you hot?”

  “They don’t have a Christmas tree or any decorations at all, not even some stockings.”

  “Well, Joshua’s Jewish.”

  “He always says that, but he never goes to temple. Lily’s Episcopalian. It doesn’t feel Christmasy without decorations.”

  “We’ll get some in town tomorrow.” I kissed and stroked her.

  “Aren’t you tired?” Mirielle said. “I’m wiped.”

  “You don’t want to?” I said. I could hear Joshua and Lily gabbling on the veranda, the tinkling of ice cubes.

  “Can you be quick?” Mirielle asked.

  I complied.

  She curled up against me. “It was a good day,” she said before falling asleep.

  She woke up with big red welts on her face—five of them. “Are these zits?” she asked. “How could they appear out of nowhere?”

  They were mosquito bites. I had a few on my arm as well.

  “Here, my father showed me this once,” Lily said. She mixed baking soda and water in a bowl and told Mirielle to apply the paste with a finger to her face.

  Mirielle used a mirror in the living room, and when she rejoined us at the dining table, we looked at her white-spotted face and burst out laughing.

  “Don’t laugh at me!” she said. “They really hurt.”

  She didn’t want to go into town with us. “I look like a total freak,” she said.

  “No one will notice.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Don’t you want to shop for souvenirs?”

  She washed off the spots of white paste and covered the welts with thick concealer, and we made the trek to Tortola, riding the Land Rover to the marina, then the Whaler to Trellis Bay, then a taxi across the bridge to Road Town, the capital city.

  It was crowded—high season, a cruise ship in port. The streets and buildings were festooned with Christma
s decorations: wreaths, tinsel, garlands, poinsettias. There was a large Christmas tree in the main plaza, and a band was playing reggae versions of “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells.” Everyone wore Santa hats, along with their Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. It was eight-five degrees, blindingly sunny.

  Joshua took photos of us in front of the tree, then we strolled through some shops. Mirielle and I bought T-shirts, and surreptitiously I purchased a pair of silver earrings for her. She found decorations for the house, especially captivated by ornaments made from seashells—a nautilus striped like a candy cane, turritellas glued together and hand-painted as Santa Clauses.

  We went to a restaurant on the water for lunch, but had to wait an hour for a table. The lines were just as long at the grocery store, where we carted up a week’s worth of food and supplies, and then, outside the store with all our sacks, we couldn’t flag a taxi.

  “Everyone’s staring at me,” Mirielle said.

  “No, they’re not.”

  “They’re thinking, So sad, she could be a pretty girl if she didn’t have such horrible acne.”

  It was getting hotter, the wind stilling. “There’s a tropical wave forming in the northeast. A trough’s blocking the trades,” Joshua said.

  The ocean was rougher as well, the Whaler rolling and yawing as we motored back to Great Camanoe, making Mirielle feel seasick.

  Onshore in the Land Rover, I asked her, “Did you put suntan lotion on? Your face is a little pink.”

  “No. I didn’t want to smear the makeup. Am I sunburned?”

  When we arrived at the house, she trudged up to the guest cottage without a word, not helping us unload the sacks.

  “Is she PMS-ing or something?” Joshua asked.

  After we put away the food, Joshua and Lily suggested another swim in Cam Bay. I went up to our cottage, where Mirielle was lying on the bed, and asked if she wanted to come along.

  “You go,” she said. “I don’t feel well.”

  On the spur of the moment, Joshua and Lily opted for a snorkel in Lee Bay, on the other side of the isthmus. Joshua knew the names of most of the fish: reef squid, a big tarpon, a beautiful blue-green queen angelfish with yellow rims. At one point, a huge stingray swam underneath me. “Did you see that?” I exclaimed to Joshua.

  Mirielle was hanging Christmas lights from the eaves of the breezeway when we returned. “You went snorkeling without me?” she asked when she saw our masks and fins.

  For dinner, I grilled steaks, and Joshua and Lily switched to Myers’s rum with pineapple juice, garnished with slices of fresh pineapple and maraschino cherries. As Mirielle and I washed the dishes, she said, “Why are we doing all the cooking and cleaning? We’re the guests. Those two haven’t lifted a finger since we got here. They’re just getting shitfaced every night.”

  “That’s the deal I made.”

  “What deal?”

  “With Joshua. For letting us stay here.”

  “It’s not even his house. They invited us. It’s not like we begged to come. They didn’t even offer to pitch in for the decorations.” She had bought stockings and tinsel in addition to the lights and seashell ornaments. “No one even thanked me for putting them up.”

  “They’re beautiful,” I said. “Thank you, Mirielle.”

  The wind dissipated further, and the heat and humidity surged, as did the insects. Our alfresco bathroom, which had seemed so charming, was now a mosquito den. Even after dousing ourselves with bug spray, we were swarmed brushing our teeth. We saw teeth marks on our bar of soap in the shower—a rodent of some sort.

  “This is like camping in a jungle,” Mirielle said. Her face was spotted with white paste again and red from the sun. “God, it’s so hot.”

  In the bedroom, she checked the screens on the windows. “There must be a hole in one of these things. Those mosquitoes got in here somehow. Wait, do you hear that?” There was a faint mechanical humming noise outside. “They have an air conditioner in their bedroom!”

  She got into bed and eventually calmed. I hovered over her, kissing her. “You’re dripping on me,” she said. I wiped the sweat from my forehead on the pillow, but then she said, “Oh, God, what is that?”

  “What?”

  “I’m burning. I’m burning inside. What’s happening to me?” Moaning, she covered her crotch with her hands and drew her knees to her chest. “It’s the fucking bug spray,” she said. “It’s on your fingers.”

  I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and got back in bed.

  “Get that erection away from me,” she said.

  We tried to sleep, but floundered in the heat. “This is an awfully long date,” Mirielle told me. “I’m not used to being around someone so much. Even when I lived with David, we never spent twenty-four hours together like this.”

  “You never went on a trip with him?”

  “He was always working,” she said, then told me, “I saw him last week.”

  “You did?”

  “We had to exchange some stuff,” she said. “He wanted to get back together.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “What could I say?” She billowed the sheet and shifted on the bed, trying to get comfortable. “I wonder what the hell I’m doing sometimes, going from one man to another, this long string of boyfriends—not even boyfriends a lot of times, just guys who want to fuck me. Sometimes I feel like I’m nothing but a sex object.”

  “You’re not that to me.”

  “No?”

  “I’m in love with you, Mirielle.”

  I waited for her to say something in response. In the dark, I watched as she lay on her back, breathing. Finally, she turned onto her side, toward the far wall. “Good night,” she said.

  She slept in the next morning, and by the time she came down the stairs—her hair matted, her face pinked, the welts recessed but still visible—the three of us had already finished breakfast. “Do you want me to fix you an omelette?” I asked.

  “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 w
hite-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?”