Don Lee - The Collective

“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.”