Don Lee - The Collective

“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.