The Collective

11

I can no longer recall who introduced Mirielle Miyazato to the 3AC. All sorts of people were coming and going then, and Joshua grumbled that the group was getting too large, too slipshod, that maybe we should have a nominating committee and screen and interview potential members — an idea that the rest of the 3AC rebuffed as elitist.

Seeing Mirielle across the living room, I was struck first by how elegantly she was dressed. A fitted black blouse, gray twill pencil skirt. She was tall and thin. She wore no makeup — she didn’t have to. Her hair was straight and soft and parted in the middle, falling to her shoulders, where it rested in a layer of subdued curls.

“You like that?” Joshua said to me.

I didn’t really have a chance to speak to her, though, until a few weeks later, at Leon Lee and Cindy Wong’s wedding in early November. The couple had been together since college, both of them painters with similar approaches, Leon mimicking the techniques of eighteenth-century Korean genre painters to make contemporary portraits on scrolls, Cindy adopting Chinese watercolor and brush schemes to produce modern still lifes on rice paper.

The wedding was in Fort Point Channel, and Leon and Cindy had invited everyone in the 3AC to attend. We packed into the artists’ loft space, which had been cleverly divided by hanging surplus parachutes from pipes — one area for the ceremony, another for the banquet, and a third for dancing.

Friends, all Berklee grads, had been cobbled together to form a band, with Phil Sudo on lead guitar. Mirielle was standing near the dance floor beside the bar, wearing a black dress that had a zippered mock turtleneck with boots that snugged her calves — a simple outfit, yet vaguely haute couture.

“What are you drinking?” I asked. “Want a refill?”

“Oh, it’s just Diet Coke,” she said. “I need the caffeine.”

“Out late last night?”

“I was breaking up with my boyfriend,” she told me.

I perked up.

“Don’t look so happy,” she said.

I laughed. “It was rancorous, I take it?”

“He had to know it was coming. We haven’t touched each other since September.”

The band launched into a bluesy Latin song, which no one quite knew how to dance to, until Jimmy Fung led Danielle Awano out to the floor. He held her very close, his right thigh thrust forcefully between her legs. They took three steps and then paused for a beat, and on the pause they took turns lifting their knees or doing a little kick or flip with their feet, à la the tango. All along, their hips were swaying, gyrating, grinding pelvis to pelvis. The dance was unmistakably sexy, but there was also something unbearably melancholy about it. They glided and turned and twirled, and once in a while Jimmy dipped her into a back bend or raised her hands up and then slowly down, clasping her arms by the wrists behind her head, captive. He winked at the 3AC men, raised his eyebrows to Joshua.

“It’s called the bachata,” Mirielle told me. The dance had its origins in the shantytowns of the Dominican Republic, where the music was considered the blues of the DR. The bachata was banned from being shown on Dominican TV.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Jimmy offered to teach it to me — when he was trying to pick me up.”

The band switched to hip-hop, and everyone spilled onto the floor, even Joshua, who held a little girl, someone’s kid, up by the arms, her feet balanced on top of his. Delighted, the two of them were. I’d never seen Joshua play with a child before; he’d never expressed the least bit of interest in kids.

“Do you want to dance?” I asked Mirielle.

“I only dance to old standards.”

“Like?”

“Jazz ballads. Johnny Hartman, Little Jimmy Scott.”

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 take-out 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 Chi-Ming 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.”

The entire staff at Jasmine Cuisine had been white. One of the waitresses had a tattoo of Chinese letters on her arm, which she proudly displayed to Jay. She thought it read, “Life won’t wait.” Jay didn’t have the heart to tell her it actually spelled out, “General Tso’s Chicken.”

“No shit?” Trudy Lun said. “I’ve heard of that happening, but I always thought it was an urban legend.”

“The thing is,” Phil Sudo said, “whenever I go out with a bunch of Asian friends, even in Boston, we get stares. You know, getting asked if we’re a tour group or an MIT reunion. So I’m more comfortable going to Asian restaurants, even though I’m sick to death of eating Asian all the time.”

Joshua, as much as he appreciated these soul sessions, pushed us to come up with an issue we could adopt, a protest or a cause. “We need to actually do something as an organization,” he said. “We need to get our name out there as a force to be reckoned with. We need to agitate.”

“Foment,” Jimmy Fung said.

One night, Joshua proposed picketing some of the old Brahmin men’s clubs in Boston, like the Algonquin and the Somerset. It was only in 1988 that the private clubs had begun, grudgingly, to admit women, but an Asian American financier, Woodrow Song, had carped recently that the clubs were still discriminating against people of color, his applications for admission repeatedly denied.

“I don’t know,” Annie Yoshikawa said. “This financier, I’m not sure I would have admitted the guy. I heard he—”

“Can I say something?” Lily Bai interjected.

Unlike Mirielle, who never uttered a peep at the 3AC potlucks, Lily had a habit of interjecting. She was just twenty-one years old, yet did not let her youth stop her from voicing her many opinions, which seemed, at least for the moment, to charm Joshua.

“We’ll see how long that lasts,” Jessica said to me in the kitchen.

“You know,” I said, “I was thinking, this is a first, all three of us in relationships at the same time.”

“Does that mean Esther’s grown on you?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You seem happy,” Jessica told me, looking at Mirielle in the living room.

“I am.”

A couple of evenings later, Joshua invited Mirielle and me to join him and Lily at Diamond Jim’s Lounge, the piano bar in the Lenox Hotel. We went because they were supposed to play old jazz standards there, yet, unbeknownst to any of us, it was open mike night. Amateur singers, one after another, trundled up to the piano and belted out terrible renditions of “The Look of Love,” “As Time Goes By,” and “My Funny Valentine.” The whole scene was corny and boring and tacky. What’s more, Lily kept swaying and singing along to the songs, even though she was lyrically challenged with most of them.

“Stop being a brat,” Joshua told her. “You’re acting like a little kid.”

“You’re always belittling me over my age,” Lily said. “I’m a member of Mensa! I graduated college at twenty!”

“Maturity’s not about IQs. It’s a function of experience,” Joshua said. “You might think you know all you need to know right now, but you haven’t lived through anything yet. Once you do, you might not be so annoying.”

“You might have more experience than me, Joshua, just a tiny, tiny bit,” she said, “but I’m more brilliant.”

They dragged us back to her condo at the Ritz, which had a view of the Public Garden. Joshua brought out a bottle of Macallan’s scotch.

“What’s the matter?” he said when I declined a glass. “You a teetotaler all of a sudden?”

I had stopped drinking around Mirielle. Sometimes I would still imbibe before I picked her up from Casablanca, and when I kissed her, she would say, even though I had brushed my teeth and gargled with mouthwash, “You taste like beer. Have you been drinking beer?”

Lily wanted to play strip poker. “Oh, don’t be poops!” she said after we demurred.

Joshua took photographs of us.

“Come on, that’s enough,” I said. “That flash is blinding. Why are you always taking photos?” He had become a shutterbug of late, always snapping group portraits of the 3AC.

“Take one of me and Lily,” he said, and as I did, Lily stuck out her tongue and lifted her sweater, showing us her boobs.

Mirielle eyed me, and I said, “It’s late. We’ve got to go.”

“It’s still early!” Lily said.

“Yeah, stay,” Joshua said. “We could order room service. It’s available twenty-four hours, man.”

“The T’s going to stop running soon.”

“Wait,” Joshua said. “What are you guys doing for Hanukkah? Or Christmas, I mean. Do you want to come to the BVIs with us?”

Mirielle and I walked to the Charles/MGH station. “What was that all about?” I asked. “Were they trying to get us into a foursome?”

“You tell me. They’re your friends,” she said.

“I barely know Lily.”

“You ever notice how much Joshua drinks?” she asked.

Yet, as we were waiting for the Red Line to Harvard Square, Mirielle surprised me by saying, “The BVIs would be nice, wouldn’t it? A tropical vacation. It’s not Tahiti, but it might be fun.”

Lily’s parents owned a house on Great Camanoe, a private residential island across the bay from Tortola, the most populous of the British Virgin Islands. We’d have the place to ourselves. Her parents would be in St. Moritz.

“You serious?” I asked. I usually went to California for Christmas, and in fact had bought my ticket months ago, snapping up a sale fare.

“No, it’s stupid,” Mirielle said. “I don’t have the money for a trip like that. Who am I kidding?” She had terrible credit history and virtually nothing in her checking account, and had been using her father’s gold card to buy things for her new apartment. “It’s just that I hate going home for the holidays,” she told me. “I’m dreading Thanksgiving.”

She flew down to D.C. on Wednesday night. Joshua, Jessica, and I stayed in town and baked a turkey for ourselves, and on Sunday, although most everyone was away, Joshua still hosted a 3AC gathering. I skipped it to pick Mirielle up at the airport, borrowing the Peugeot.

Her flight was delayed on the tarmac at National Airport for over an hour and a half, and by the time she got off the plane at Logan, she was flustered, on the verge of tears.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said. She had first stayed at her mother’s house in Wesley Heights, and her mom had suggested Mirielle might try to get into modeling, she’d arrange for a photographer she knew in New York to take shots of her for a zed card. But her father, who lived in a co-op in Kalorama, ridiculed the idea, telling Mirielle she wasn’t pretty enough, she had bad skin, she was too short, her shoulders were too narrow, she had fat calves.

“I can’t believe he said all that,” I told Mirielle. “You’re beautiful. Your skin is perfect.”

“He said, being Japanese, there wouldn’t be much demand for me in the industry, anyway.”

Then her father, who had promised to spend the entire weekend with her, took off on a business trip on Saturday afternoon, leaving her alone in the apartment with his friend, a lobbyist whose wife had just kicked him out, and the lobbyist friend was drinking and doing lines of coke in front of Mirielle, entreating her to join him. “He was trying to seduce me!” she said. “My father probably told him to give it a whirl, what the fuck did he care. My mom, she said I was imagining things. I loathe going to D.C., shuffling between them. I can’t go back there for Christmas, I’ll have a nervous breakdown. Is there any way we can go to the BVIs?”

“Wouldn’t it bother you, being with Joshua and Lily? The way they drink?”

“I’d be all right,” she said. “Could you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please?”

I called my mother the next night and told her I wouldn’t be coming to Mission Viejo for Christmas after all. “But you always come,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just this once. I’ll come next year for sure. Maybe Mirielle will fly out with me. What do you think of that?”

“Mirielle,” she said, trying the name on for size. “How do you spell that?”

I spent the next hour on the phone with American Airlines, trying to roll over my ticket to Tortola, then walked down Brattle Street to Casablanca. Inside, Mirielle was talking to the restaurant manager and a cop. Her purse had been stolen from the employee room.

“What else can go wrong?” she said to me.

Everything had been in her bag — her wallet, driver’s license, cash, her BankBoston card and checkbook.

From my bedroom at the house, she called her father, telling him he would have to cancel his gold card, and they argued. “I wasn’t rude to your guest,” she said into the telephone, then: “No, I didn’t tell Mom he tried to rape me!”

She hung up. “He’s not going to send me another credit card. How am I going to pay for my plane ticket, then? Shit, my passport was in my bag!” She began crying. “I’m such a fuckup,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I finally graduate, and then what, I’m still a waitress? This poetry thing, who am I kidding. I miss David. I don’t know why I broke up with him anymore. So I could move into an ugly little apartment with strangers?”

I wrapped my arms around her while she wept.

“I feel so lost,” she said. “I feel so alone.”

She told me that her parents had divorced when she was five years old, and not long afterward her mother had remarried. Her stepfather repeatedly molested Mirielle as a child, but neither her father nor her mother would believe her. “She’s the most gullible person in the world,” Mirielle said. Her stepfather was a con artist. He stole tens of thousands of dollars from Mirielle’s mother, and disappeared before he could be charged for any of his crimes.

“I’ve never been happy since I quit drinking,” Mirielle said. “Look at me: I have no self-esteem, I’m lousy with interpersonal relationships, I don’t have a connection with anyone. I’m completely alone.”

“You have me,” I told her.

“I’ve been miserable sober,” she said. “I was so much happier when I was drinking. I can’t imagine not having another drink again for the rest of my life. I quit when I was so young. I was an unbelievable slut then. You’d choke if you knew the things I did, but I’m a lot more mature now. I think I could handle it. Listen, let’s get a bottle and get wasted.”

“No, this is what we’re going to do,” I told her.

We’d replace her passport — we had time, three weeks. I’d lend her the money for her plane ticket to Tortola. She’d resume therapy with her old shrink. She would talk to her AA friends and find a new sponsor (her previous one, Alice, had died of breast cancer seven months before). I would quit drinking entirely and go to meetings with her. The most important thing was for her to focus on remaining sober.

“You’d do all that for me?” she asked.

“I’d do anything for you, Mirielle.”

“Jesus, this girl is more fucked up than I am,” Joshua said later in the week. “You know what it all boils down to? Forget the addictions and the underlying abuse, forget the recovery rhetoric and the pop psychology. It all boils down to one thing for her. It’s because Daddy doesn’t love his little girl.”

“Give her more credit than that,” I told him. “She’s had more to deal with, she’s far tougher than you and I will ever be.” I didn’t want to admit that her breakdown — especially the revelation that she’d been molested — had unsettled me.

We were in the living room, and Joshua was going through his mail. “You really quit drinking for her?” he asked. “Why deny yourself one of the few pleasures in life?”

“Actually, it’s been good, not drinking,” I said. “It was harder for me to stop than I thought. I had cravings the first few days for a beer. But then that passed, and I started sleeping better. I feel this new kind of energy and clarity now.”

“Yeah? Maybe I’ll try it myself.”

“You?” I said.

“Why not?”

“Self-restraint has never been your forte.”

“I could stop anything cold turkey if I wanted. My discipline is nonpareil.”

“Is that why you’ve been screwing around with Lily instead of sitting in front of your computer?”

Joshua set down his letter opener and exhaled laboriously. “I don’t know what happened. I was in such a great flow with the novel — I thought for sure I’d finish a draft by the end of the year — and then all of a sudden everything just fizzled. I’m sort of panicked, to tell you the truth. What if it never comes back?”

“Why don’t you show it to me?” I asked.

“Not ready for external perusal yet.”

“How many pages do you have?”

“Hundreds. But it’s a mess.”

“Just keep at it,” I told him.

“Easy for you to say. If I’m not able to write, the world is intolerable to me. Utterly without purpose. Lily’s tiresome, but at least she’s serving as a form of provisional entertainment. I’ll be ditching her soon enough, no question, but I’m going to wait until after the BVIs.”

“That’s the only reason you’ve gone beyond your usual three weeks?”

“That, and the room service, and the fact that she drains old blind Bob with the efficacy of an industrial Hoover every night,” Joshua said. “I think the BVIs, the change of scenery, would do me good. And it’d be research. My characters live on an island, some of them are fishermen, but I don’t really know anything about living on an island, about boats or the sea. I think I could justify writing the whole trip off on my taxes.”

“I’d love to see how that flies with an auditor.”

“What are the AA meetings like?” Joshua asked.

I had only been to two thus far — one at Trinity Church, another at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Mirielle liked to rotate locations. “They’re less somber, funnier, than I expected. Still, some of the stories are brutal.”

“Can I tag along sometime?”

“Why would you want to?”

“I’m curious,” Joshua said. “Maybe I’ll get something out of it for my novel, hearing these people talk.”

I was skeptical. I didn’t want to bring Joshua to a meeting, afraid he might deride the proceedings, which was the last thing Mirielle needed. For several days, things had been very tenuous for her, Mirielle thrown by the smallest hiccups, such as not being able to find her birth certificate, which she needed to replace her passport. Her parents were unobliging. “How do they not know where my birth certificate is?” Mirielle had said. “They didn’t think it was worth keeping?” I made phone calls for her, found out the Vital Records Division in D.C. would mail a copy of her birth certificate to her if she sent verification of her identity with a driver’s license, which of course had been stolen. I drove Mirielle to the RMV in Watertown and waited in line with her for two hours. She stayed sober.

She thought it might be fruitful for Joshua to go to a meeting. “This might be his way of acknowledging he has a problem,” she said.

So on Saturday, Joshua accompanied us to the Church of the Advent on Brimmer Street. The meeting was being held in the basement of the Beacon Hill church, attended mostly by gay men, who, Mirielle assured us, would keep the mood light, in spite of any horrors they might relate. This was an open meeting: families and friends of AA members could come as guests, and we wouldn’t be expected to speak or state that we were alcoholics, Tim, the chairperson that night, told us when we entered the basement.

The room was crowded, around fifty people or so. With cups of coffee and cookies, we sat down on the beige metal folding chairs, and Tim began the meeting by asking, “Would all of you who care to please join me in opening with a moment of silence for those who are still sick and suffering?” Then he led us into the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

We said amen, and then there were introductions, and then Tim announced the topic for discussion that night — Self-Acceptance — and several members went to the podium to speak, sharing their drunkalogues, the stories familiar yet affecting. An ex — Navy SEAL used to sneak into bathhouses and public restrooms, blind drunk, and have anonymous sex with men and then beat them up, all the while in the closet in the military. A doctor started drinking and taking Benzedrine in med school, which progressed to injecting Demerol and Pentothal and losing his medical license, his wife, his kids, and his house. A man whose partner had died of AIDS found himself going to bars and picking up men and having unprotected sex with them and becoming HIV-positive himself.

The meeting was wrapping up. They handed out baskets for the Seventh Tradition, asking for contributions, and Tim was about to close with the Lord’s Prayer when Joshua, who had been silent and respectful all evening, raised his hand without warning. “Could I come up and speak?” he asked.

Tim squinted at him, disconcerted. “Well, this is a little unorthodox, but I suppose it’d be all right.”

Joshua rose out of his chair, and I grabbed his arm. “Don’t do this,” I said.

“Don’t worry, this will be great,” he said, and walked to the head of the room.

“What’s he up to?” Mirielle whispered.

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” I told her.

At the podium, he said, “My name is Joshua.”

“Hi, Joshua,” everyone said.

“I’ve been listening very carefully to the testimonials this evening — they’ve been truly inspiring and courageous. But I have to admit discomfort standing here, in the basement of a Christian church. I’m Jewish, you see. Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl’s explanation for how she got pregnant.”

The audience crowed.

“I was born on Cheju Island, off the southwestern tip of the Korean Peninsula. I was abandoned when I was four days old and sent to an orphanage on the mainland, in the port city of Pusan. I know nothing about my parents. It could be that my mother was an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl who couldn’t manufacture a clever explanation for how she got pregnant. When I was five, one of the teachers at the orphanage molested me. I told the administrators, but no one would believe me. They took me into the courtyard, where they’d assembled all the kids, and made me proclaim that I had been lying and then shaved off all the hair from my head.

“I ran away the next year. I stowed away on a cargo container ship and ended up in Hawaii, where I begged on the streets and worked the sugar plantation fields. An old Chinese hooker got me drunk one night and absolved me of my virginity when I was seven. Thereafter, sex and alcohol were forever enjoined for me. After a few years, I got into a bit of trouble with the law and had to decamp. I hitched a ride on a tanker to San Francisco and picked Brussels sprouts and artichokes in a small town called Rosarita Bay.”

“Goddamn him,” I muttered. “Goddamn him.”

“A family of Mexican migrant workers took me in, sort of as their mascot, and I followed them down the San Joaquin Valley and through Arizona to Brownsville, Texas. Oddly, in the Lone Star State, I found myself discriminated against more than the wetbacks.”

He recounted the Southie pier story, only he changed his age to ten and the setting to Port Isabel, on the edge of Laguna Madre. In the church basement, when he got to the climax about the duct tape, there were gasps and soughs of sympathy.

“I became a syrup head. I’d steal prescription cough medicine and mix it with Sprite and drink it by the gallon. Texas tea, it was called. I was also a compulsive masturbator. I’d create these ornate fantasies with which to beat off, using a variety of props: gym socks, milk bottles, and, once, a big piece of liver that was sitting in the refrigerator. I got addicted to porn. I literally wanted to fuck anything that walked.”

“Um, the profanity?” Tim cautioned from the front row.

“Sorry. I’d have sex with anything ambulatory, including — I regret to say — three times with the family dog, a rat terrier named Pepe. I started snorting coke and smack, and I became a street hustler — men, women, whatever. I’d do anything for money. I had this beautiful blond girlfriend in junior high school, Leigh Anne Wiatt.”

“Just first names, please,” Tim said.

“Leigh Anne, Leigh Anne — a tasty little majorette with a bad-girl streak. I took her across the border and got her doped up and sold her to some cholos for a donkey show. She couldn’t pee straight for a year.”

Now there were guttural protests, not laughter. Some men looked at each other, bewildered, angry. Beside me, Mirielle was furious. Joshua had gone too far. He was enjoying himself too much. People were beginning to catch on that he was playing an elaborate hoax on them, constructing a grand tour of misfortune and debauchery. He was ad-libbing, slapping his narrative together by tapping into a few raunchy movies and dysfunctional memoirs of the day, as well as Portnoy’s Complaint, sparing no one (Mirielle, me, my parents, Kathryn Newey), and, worst of all, lampooning the earnest speeches that had been shared earlier that night. He was making a mockery of the entire program. Once the rest of the crowd figured it out, there’d be mayhem. They would lynch him. And I would let them. It was unpardonable, what he was doing.

“The Mexican family eventually kicked me out. I made my way to Detroit to join the hip-hop scene there, and I got jumped by two laid-off autoworkers with baseball bats. I was in a coma for three weeks. I still get seizures, can’t hear out of my left ear. By the time I got out of the hospital, I was hooked on painkillers: roxis, percs, Captain Codys, vikes, Miss Emmas, I’d take whatever I could get my hands on, and do whatever I had to in order to get zombed. I kited checks. I robbed johns. I jacked cars. I scammed a bunch of Hmongs with a pyramid scheme.

“I got sent to juvie, where for a while I was a regular dick cushion. What saved me was a counselor, a girl from Massachusetts just out of college. Her name was Didi. She said while I was incarcerated, I might as well make use of my time and get an education. She figured out I was dyslexic and tutored me. I started keeping a journal and writing letters — long, intimate letters — to imaginary relatives. I’d actually mail them, picking out addresses at random from an atlas: Uncle Dae-hyung in Kittery, Maine, Grandma Soo-bong in Weeki Wachee, Florida.

“Didi and I fell in love. She was a sweet, modest girl who’d never done anything wrong, born and raised in Lowell, where her family owned a bakery store renowned for its sourdough bread. I moved with her to Lawrence, got my GED and a job at the New Balance factory, and went straight. For the first time in my life, I was happy. But her family, this large Irish clan, wouldn’t accept me — they said they never would, not this degenerate ex-junkie gook — and eventually Didi couldn’t take the pressure anymore and left me.

“I started drinking and pharming again. I felt so alone. I wanted to die so many times. Just shut everything down. Why—” Joshua’s voice cracked, and he closed his eyes. “Why did everyone I ever care about leave me?”

He clutched the edges of the podium, stared down at the microphone, and didn’t speak again for more than a minute. The crowd, which had become increasingly agitated and hostile, quieted. They all knew by now that his entire monologue had been a fabrication, but they could sense, as I did, a subtle change — that inadvertently Joshua had stumbled upon a cavity of undisguised emotion.

“I don’t know who I am,” he said finally. “I don’t know my real name, my real birthday. Other people, they have photos of themselves as babies, family albums. I have nothing. There’s no record of my existence. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. I’m worthless.”

He stopped again. “I don’t know what to do. What will I do? No matter what I do, I can’t get anyone to love me. I’ve had my chances, but I always fuck it up. It never fails. Why do I keep doing that? It mystifies me. My parents, though, they knew. They could tell when I was born, they could tell I was a lost cause. They saw the truth right away. The truth is, I’m unlovable. That’s why they abandoned me.”

He began to cry. He stayed up there, helpless, and a number of people in the audience, including Mirielle, cried with him.

“I’m sorry. I’m awfully sorry,” he managed to say, and walked back to his seat. The audience applauded. People patted Joshua on the back as he sidestepped to the chair next to me. Tim asked us to stand and hold hands, and we bowed our heads and recited the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” I squeezed Joshua’s hand as he continued to whimper.

When the prayer was finished, everyone shouted the standard coda to AA meetings—“Keep coming back! It works!”—and clapped.

Mirielle hugged Joshua. Others did, too, and shook his hand benevolently. “You’ll always have a home with us,” they said. “You’ll always have a family here.”

Outside, while we waited for Mirielle, Joshua lit a cigarette and shivered in the cold. “Man, that was fucking nerve-wracking, making that story up on the spot like that,” he said. “I was, like, Okay, push it, push it, keep going, let’s create a Dickensian epic here, then I’d feel I was losing them and I’d have to tell myself, Come on, think of something, you weenie, reel them back in. I couldn’t figure out a way to explain how I got to be Jewish.”

“Joshua—”

“Story time for the wretched and woebegone. Not bad, huh?”

“I want to tell you,” I said, “I was really… moved by that.”

“ ‘Moved’?” He cackled. “Come on, you didn’t buy a word of that shit, did you?”

“The last part…”

“The last part was no different than the rest. I needed an arc — an ending of contrition, of implied redemption — to round the fucker out. The whole thing was a crock.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Don’t okay me like you know something,” he told me. “Believe me, there wasn’t a shred of sincerity to anything I said up there.”