Don Lee - The Collective

“Come here,” I said. “I’ll give you a foot massage.”

“No. You’re too nice to me.”

“I know I am. Should I be meaner to you? Less nice?” I asked.

She shook her head in alarm. “That’d be disastrous.”

Several nights later, we lay in bed. We had gone to see a film at the Kendall and then had eaten pizza at Emma’s. “You’re so quiet,” she said.

“It gets to me sometimes. You know how I feel about you,” I told her. “Do you think there’s a chance things could ever become romantic between us again?”

“I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling romantic with anyone right now.”

I mulled this over in silence, dispirited.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she said.

“No, I don’t.”

“I can tell by your face. You hate me.”

“No, just the opposite, Mirielle.”

The next week, Planned Parenthood contacted her. Her Pap smear had come back abnormal, and they wanted to schedule her for a biopsy. “Nothing I do makes a difference,” she said. “Another job or another apartment or another city won’t change anything — I’ll still despise myself. This grad school thing is a pipe dream. And now I might have cancer.”

I escorted her to Planned Parenthood, and then, on the morning she was to get the results, I waited for her to call me. She didn’t. I left two messages for her at her office at Mount Auburn, but she didn’t return them. Late in the afternoon, frantic she might have received terrible news from the pathologist, I finally reached her.

“Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“It’s just that I’ve been on the phone practically all day,” she said. She was typing, then I overheard her talking to someone and laughing.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“No one. The new temp.”

“We can talk later,” I said.

“No, I can talk,” she said, and continued to type.

“Well,” I said.

“What?”

“If you’re busy, we can catch up later.”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up.

The following night, when she slept over, I explained how worried I’d been about her the day before. “I always go into a tailspin when you do things like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“When you don’t call me back.”

“I don’t always have to call you back,” she said.

Throughout January and into February, we worked on her applications to MFA programs. I convinced Paviromo to write her a strong letter of recommendation, despite the B-minus she had received in his British poetry class, and I also persuaded a local poet I knew, Liam Rector, to add his own endorsement of Mirielle, even though they had never met. We revised and revised her personal statement, deliberating over whether she should delve into her former addictions. Eventually, we decided she should, since her writing sample was filled with recovery poems.

She read a new one to me about the sponsor, Alice, who had died. I tried to be encouraging.

“You don’t like it,” she said.

“No, I do.”

“I can tell you don’t.”

“I think it’s really powerful.”

She was dejected, but then said, “Well, I think I should be proud of myself for at least sitting down and completing a first draft.”

Joshua was more frank about the poem’s merits, or lack thereof. While we were watching the Celtics on TV, I showed him a copy of the poem. I still didn’t trust my ability to judge poetry. Maybe I’m wrong, I thought.

“This is unadulterated crap,” he told me. “Pure excreta. She actually said she’s proud of herself? You see, she comes from the school of the emotionally crippled wherein they pat themselves on the back for accomplishing what people do as a matter of course. We come from the school where only national recognition will satisfy ambition, and that’s the way it should be. What’s this chick’s appeal to you? I know she’s pretty, but why are you so in love with her? Because you can’t have her?”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it, then? You spend the night together, and what, nothing? No hand jobs, even? You don’t touch each other at all?”

“I give her massages sometimes.”

“You give her massages. Jesus, she’s walking all over you. You’re embarrassing yourself. What she wants is someone to support her and be a slave to her, and you happen to be available. Let’s face it, she feels nothing for you. Either she puts out, or you get the fuck out. You’re making a complete fool of yourself.”

I lit candles. We slow-danced to Johnny Hartman. I gave her a massage. She was wearing her nightgown, lying on her stomach, and I straddled her ass while I kneaded her back.

“This is all very familiar,” she said.

When I finished the massage, I lay down beside her. “Let’s make love,” I said.

“Are you crazy?”

“It’s been almost two months.”

“We’re friends.”

“Will you give me a kiss? Just one kiss?”

She pecked me on the cheek. “What’s gotten into you tonight?” she asked.

“What’s gotten into me? Look what we’re doing. How am I supposed to feel?”

She got up and pulled on her jeans underneath her nightgown. “You know what you should do?” she said. “You should go out to a bar, have a few drinks, get loose, and pick up someone who’ll fuck your brains out.”

“I don’t want to fuck anyone else. Why won’t you make love with me?”

“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to have sex with you again.”

“How come?”

“The closer I get to someone, the less I feel like having sex with him — whereas I could probably let some stranger fuck me twelve ways to Sunday.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Mirielle. Why do you feel that way?”

“Because I can only have sex when it’s degrading,” she said.

“That was a mistake,” Jessica told me. “You’re not being sensitive to her at all. You should have gotten it by now. Pushing sex, even playfully, is going to upset her after her history.”

“You’re right.”

“Honor her privacy. Don’t make demands on her. Don’t try to change her or pressure her. If you’re there for her, she’ll come around eventually.”

“Joshua thinks I’ve been humiliating myself.”

“He’s just jealous. He’d love to see you guys break up so he can have you all to himself again. Can’t you be patient?”

I apologized to Mirielle the next time we saw each other, which seemed to mollify her, but something was different. All of a sudden she was mysteriously busy on weekends, and there were fewer nights when she was able to sleep over, worn out or feeling sick or wanting to nest in her own room. More and more, her roommates would have to tell me that Mirielle wasn’t home when I called. I’d leave messages for her with them, and still I wouldn’t hear back from her. Sometimes she’d claim not to have received the notes, and I thought she was lying, just like when she would insist that she had called me back and had left a message on our answering machine, until Joshua confessed to me one night, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. I must have accidentally erased it,” whereupon I installed a code and disabled the erase function on the machine.