The Collective

12

Everything changed the following week. Paviromo accepted an excerpt from Joshua’s novel-in-progress for the special Fiction Discoveries issue of Palaver, which he was now planning to publish in June. Then he shocked me by finally, after three years of toying intimations and broken pledges, taking my story “The Unrequited” for the issue as well. I didn’t know what to make of the offer at first. I was, in fact, initially torn about it.

“Did you have something to do with this?” I asked Joshua.

“I might have impressed upon him the obvious grandeur of your story, which he’s been a blinkered arse and bloody ninny to overlook all this time.”

“I can’t have a story in a magazine where I’m the managing editor,” I said. “Everyone will say the only reason I got in was nepotism. No one would count it as a real publication.”

“Look, you and I both know the story stands up, that it’s had to undergo quadruple the scrutiny of anything that’s ever come over the transom at Palaver. Am I right?”

“It didn’t pass the scrutiny of all those other journals I sent it to.”

“Mandarins and halfwits, those editors.”

“Maybe I should withdraw it,” I said.

“Are you fucking kidding me? So what if a few curmudgeons chirp about it? Fuck ’em! You deserve this, man. More than anyone else, you deserve this. I’ll never forgive you if you withdraw it. It’d be such a fucking loony act of career self-sabotage to pull it right when you’re on the cusp. I’m telling you, once people actually read the goddamn story, there’ll be no question that you belong.”

I deliberated for a few days, and even though I still had reservations, I signed the publication contract (which I had had to draw up myself), and let Joshua take Jessica and me out for a congratulatory dinner at Rialto in the Charles Hotel — a threefold celebration, since Jessica had received some good news herself. Her application to the Cambridge Arts Council for an exhibition had been approved.

“This is going to be our year, man,” Joshua said. “1999 will be when everything comes together for us.”

I believed everything just might. I began dreaming. Dreaming that our stories would be selected for prize anthologies, and agents and editors would come clamoring. That we’d get book contracts and fulfill our vow to each publish a book before we turned thirty. That Jessica’s exhibition would be a smash and lead to her signing with a dealer in Boston and another in New York. That Vanity Fair would ask to do a two-page photo spread of the 3AC, but only of the three of us, Joshua, Jessica, and me, because we were the founders, the core, the real fin de siècle noisemakers who were heralding the arrival of Asian American artists in the new millennium, the ones who had everything before them, a future that promised to be bright and glamorous and extraordinary.

I began writing again — not just revising old stuff but embarking on something brand-new, a novella to round out the collection, about a third-generation Korean American from Mission Viejo who moves to Boston to work for a management consulting firm and encounters the bamboo ceiling. I even yielded to Jessica and several 3AC members’ supplications to form a writers’ group after the holidays.

For the next week and a half, I wrote every minute I wasn’t at Palaver or with Mirielle. She was getting stronger — and more affectionate toward me — with each day. “I feel good around you,” she said.

By the time we boarded the plane to Tortola, my spirits were at their highest since college, and Mirielle was giddy as well, excited about the trip. “How long till we’re there?” she kept asking me during the flight. “Can I wear your watch?” I handed her my black digital chronometer. A flight attendant, serving drinks, said to Mirielle, “And what would your husband like?” and throughout the rest of the journey, Mirielle referred to me as her “husband,” and I referred to her as my “wife,” and with each reference, we chortled.

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 Christmas 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 white-bread narrow arrows who’d never touched a doobie in their lives. This got him on the topic of hip-hop sampling — he remembered the Beastie Boys had poached a part of “Duppy Conqueror” for “Funky Boss”—and the concept of détournement (“which, of course, was the primary impetus behind Jessica’s table sculptures, remember?”) and other situationist pranks intended to subvert the capitalist system, although these approaches ironically inherited the same problems of reflecting or refracting a culture (“Can there be such a thing as genuine weltanschauung or any kind of normative postulate when everything’s been so bastardized and imperialized?”), which led to a digression about Duchamp’s readymades, the anxiety of influence, T. S. Eliot, and the objective correlative.

“What about—” Lily started to say.

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

“Can I say something?” Lily asked.

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

“You’re ignoring me,” Lily said.

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

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

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

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

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

Lily threw the rest of her painkiller in his face.

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

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

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

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

“So to speak.”

“What?”

“Banana?”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

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

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

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Yes, it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t reply.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

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

She rolled her eyes and turned off the light.

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

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

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

“Roethke.”

“Sexton,” Joshua corrected me.

“Mirielle’s favorite poet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess not.”

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

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

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

“Why?”

“Put your legs around me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right, then. Don’t go.”

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

“What?”

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

“Have you met someone else?”

“No.”

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

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

“Did someone ask you out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lily scribbled eighty-eight.

“What condiment is served with sushi?”

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.