Don Lee - The Collective

“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.”