Don Lee - The Collective

“I still have some work to do.”

“You sure?”

“Maybe later.”

“This young man,” he said to Joshua, “is entirely too industrious.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Paviromo rinsed out two coffee cups, poured the Macallan’s, and gave one to Joshua. “To youth,” he said.

“To fortuity.”

After a second round, Paviromo began regaling Joshua with a story about once getting drunk on Macallan’s with Robert De Niro in the White Horse Tavern in the West Village, and how, as a favor to the director John Frankenheimer, his longtime mate, he had been a silent partner and (by choice) uncredited executive producer on De Niro’s latest film, Ronin , and how some of the film’s characters were composites of Paviromo — the screenwriter, David Mamet, was an old friend, and Paviromo had disclosed details to him of his escapades as an arms dealer and his covert operations with the Special Forces — and how once, long ago, he had dropped acid with Mamet and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and in the middle of the night Ferlinghetti had gotten the brilliant idea that they should go fishing, and somewhere they had found three fishing poles and a Spanish longaniza for bait and drove out to a pond and stayed there all night, sitting on the edge of the water and casting and reeling, yet mysteriously not getting a nibble, constantly snagging and losing their hooks, and then had woken up in the morning to discover that all night they had not been fishing at the edge of a pond, but at the edge of a cabbage field.

Joshua and Paviromo nearly cried, laughing. The cabbage fishing acid story sounded familiar to me. I had heard it before — not from Paviromo, but as an oft-told yarn from Beatnik lore.

When they had recovered sufficiently, Paviromo said, “So, I have a question for you, young sir.”

“Yeah?” Joshua said, wiping the corner of his eye.

“Why, pray tell, did you send your story to Robley’s esteemed but vastly inferior publication, and not to Palaver ?”

Joshua set down his coffee cup and leaned forward. “Do you really want the truth?”

I cringed, because I knew the truth, having heard it many times from Joshua whenever I suggested shepherding one of his stories to Paviromo.

“It sounds like I might not like this,” Paviromo said, “but go on.”

“Because,” Joshua said, “although Palaver got its fair share of awards in the past, I find most of the work you publish these days dull. You rely almost exclusively on the safe choices, the old guard, the same writers over and over again, most of whom are white. Overwhelmingly white. You don’t take enough risks — with new writers, with writers of color, with anything that’s unfamiliar.”

Paviromo was taken aback. “But we’re known for our discoveries. We’re known for launching careers.”

“Early on, but not lately. Maybe it’s time to be proactive, try something different. Bold. Why not do an entire issue of discoveries?”

Paviromo nodded. “You know, that’s rather brilliant.” They hashed out ideas for a special Fiction Discoveries issue — all writers who had yet to publish a book. Writers under thirty. A good percentage of women and writers of color. “We’d get a lot of attention, I would wager,” Paviromo said.

“It’d be big news,” Joshua said, and it occurred to me then that, all along, he might have been loitering in the office with this proposition in mind.

“There could be peripheral benefits as well,” Paviromo said. “A boon with grants, perhaps even a pop in our circulation.”

“You’d be back in the game.”

“I love it,” Paviromo said. He refilled their coffee cups. “So will we see you submit a story for me to consider for this special issue?”

Joshua took a drink of the Macallan’s and savored the taste. “We’ll have to see if I have anything available,” he said.

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.