Don Lee - The Collective

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.