by Don Lee
“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?”
A man at the bar—part of a French sailing crew—groaned. “They have unfair advantage,” he said, apparently referring to our team’s all-Asianness.
“What the fuck?” I said, jotting down pickled ginger.
We came in fourth, lagging on the sports questions. Yellow Polka Dot Bimini was first. Mary Poppins Was a Drug Dealer was second. The French sailor’s team, Bill Clinton Is President of the Wrong Country, was third. When the standings were announced, the Frenchman faced our table, palms upturned, smiled, then put his hands together and bowed Orientally to us.
“Did you see that?” I said.
“See what?” Joshua asked.
“That guy at the bar.”
“What about him?”
“He’s fucking mocking us.”
“I didn’t see.”
“What the fuck’s his problem?” I said, glaring at the Frenchman.
“I wish you guys could stay until New Year’s,” Joshua told me. He and Lily still had another four days to go on Great Camanoe.
“A shame,” I said drunkenly, and turned to Mirielle. “I’ve had such a grand time. Fabulous company.”
We’d started with painkillers, and now were ordering rounds of bushwackers, another potent BVI specialty.
“Enjoying those?” Mirielle said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I don’t know why I’ve been denying myself, when I’ve been deprived of everything else.”
I knew I’d never see her again after we landed in Boston. For all intents and purposes, she had just broken up with me, and I felt murderous, thinking of everything I had done for Mirielle, all the time and money I’d spent. For what? I had been nothing but caring and solicitous and doting—indeed, worshipful. I had loved her.
I headed to the bathroom. The French sailor was roosting on a stool beside the door, leaning against the wall and calling out the nationalities of the men who entered, along with culinary associations about their endowments. “German bratwurst. Russian kupaty.” When he saw me, he shouted, “Ah, Chinese wonton!” and his chums guffawed. I kicked the stool out from underneath him, and as he was trying to get to his feet, I punched at his face, connecting with an ear. I was grabbed, a free-for-all, and Joshua flew into the throng to my aid. We started a near-riot.
“You are such an asshole,” Mirielle said to me as we climbed into the Whaler.
On the plane the next day, she wouldn’t talk to me. Every time I said something, she pretended not to hear. “What?” she’d ask, peeved.
She didn’t like our assigned seats, which faced a bulkhead. I didn’t care for the alternatives she chose, next to the lavatories. We switched to another pair of seats, but she thought they were too close to the movie screen. We moved back to the ones beside the toilets.
“You can sit somewhere else, you know,” she said.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
I was hungover. After takeoff, I asked for a Heineken, and as the flight attendant handed me the can, she stared at me curiously. My cheek was bruised, my nose scratched, my bottom lip cracked and scabbing. “Does your wife want anything?”
“I’m not his wife,” Mirielle told her.
Halfway through the flight, I asked Mirielle for the time. She unbuckled the strap of my black chronometer watch, which she had been wearing all week, and handed it back to me.
13
On the first Sunday of January, the 3AC resumed its potlucks (I had to explain the scrapes on my face to everyone, and Joshua said, “You should have seen him lay out the fuckwad. It was beautiful”), and two evenings later, the Tuesday Nighters convened for the first time. With Joshua declining to participate, I was the de facto leader of the writers’ group, and I set down the ground rules.
I wouldn’t endure any of the pussyfooting that Peter Anderegg had mandated at Mac. I wanted people to be forthright, speak to the authors directly, address them by name and “you,” and have the authors respond to the critiques at will—peremptorily and contentiously, if warranted. But there were only five of us in the group: Grace Kwok, the immigration attorney; Rick Wakamatsu, who sold windsurfing gear at Can-Am, near the Galleria; Ali Ong, a sous chef at the Green Street Grill; me; and, unavoidably, Esther Xing.
It was too small and unschooled of a group for candor or asperity. Grace, Rick, and Ali did not have MFAs. They had never taken a fiction workshop other than a couple of weekend classes at the Grub Street writing center in Boston. They were complete neophytes, and they were good-humored and ebullient about it. They wrote terrible, cloddish stories, and they loved everything that was presented. They wanted the writers’ group to be supportive and fun, not confrontational—an exercise in boosterism for dabblers and tenderfoots. They were too busy to read the manuscripts ahead of time, preferring to listen to them in toto the night of the meetings, and they didn’t care for the formality of penning commentary or marginalia. It was all impromptu, the pronouncements slapdash and facile. They had nary a criticism for the opening to my novella. The sessions in the living room were bush league, amateur hour. The writers’ group was a waste of my time, without utilit
y or challenge. Until the third Tuesday night, when Esther Xing read her story to us.
“Say What You Will” was about two women, Leona Hood and Caroline Bates, who lived in the former quarry town of Severn Springs, Vermont, in 1954. Leona ran a spa-turned-inn-turned-boardinghouse with her husband. Caroline was the assistant town clerk and a spotter for the civilian Ground Observer Corps, assigned to scan the skies and alert the Air Force to any irregular or unscheduled aircraft. Leona and Caroline were lovers, had been for many years, but in 1950s small-town Vermont, they both knew that such a relationship could never be made public. The story was a subtle portrait of their everyday routines, without sentimentality or opera, culminating in a single touch, or nearly a touch, Leona furtively brushing her fingertips across the sleeve of Caroline’s blouse as they said good night after a town meeting.
“I’m totally blown away,” Ali said.
“You know, I feel honored to have read this,” Rick said.
“It’s really, really beautiful,” Grace said.
It was. It pained me to acknowledge, but it was. The story was haunting, the prose crisp: “She caught a wink of light in the sky, at once bright and flimsy. There was no contrail, nor any sound, none of the typical buzz or hum. She didn’t think it was a spy plane or a drone, yet it had form, movement, and she had a sense that it had come from a place unfathomably far away. She found something comforting in its unexpected appearance and in the fact that she could neither explain nor identify it.”
Esther Xing was a better writer than I was, perhaps rivaling Joshua in the quality of her work. There was a patient assurance in the story, an honesty of emotion, that I had never come close to producing. Sitting there, listening to Ali, Rick, and Grace fawn over her, I knew, no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good as Esther, and the knowledge galled me. There was, however, a conspicuous omission in the story, one that was instantly recognizable to me, toward which I could channel my envy.
“I guess I’ll have to be the lone dissenter here,” I said.
“Oh, no!” Esther said, clamping her hands to her fat cheeks in mock horror. She smiled kookily with her crooked teeth, then pouted. “You didn’t like it?”
