Don Lee - The Collective

She would say that she was on the run, could she call me back, then wouldn’t. She would make plans to get together with me, then renege.

“You’ve been canceling on me a lot,” I’d say.

“It’s been a rough week,” she’d say.

I knew full well what was going on, but I wanted it not to be true. She had gotten back together with David, or she had met someone new altogether. Someone older, with money, in AA. Someone who could relate to her in ways that I never could. A father figure.

I thought about her every moment of the day — wondering what she was doing, imagining her going on dates with anonymous men, having impersonal, degrading sex with them. I was in torment, yet I had such pity for her, for her horrible childhood, for being so sad. I wanted to continue seeing her somehow. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, that I cared about her, that no matter what, we’d find a way to remain friends. I called to tell her all of this. She wasn’t home. She didn’t return my message.

In the morning, when she picked up the phone at her office, she was laughing, in the midst of a conversation with a coworker. She never laughed like that with me anymore. “Can I call you back?” she asked me.

“Will you promise to call tonight?”

“I don’t know when I’ll be home,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be up late.”

“Okay,” she said.

She never called.

Three nights later, we met for dinner at Pho Pasteur. She was uneasy, nervous. At last, she said, “I have something to tell you. Something big.”

“I know already,” I said.

“You do?”

“You’re seeing someone else.”

She nodded. “I’ve been afraid to tell you.”

“Who is he? Where’d you meet him?”

“At the office. He was a temp there.”

“How long has it been going on?”

“A couple of weeks,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. I didn’t want to lose you as a friend.”

“So you tortured me instead.”

“I should have told you. It’s stupid I didn’t.”

“The worst part,” I said, “is that you deceived me. You lied to me that you were busy or tired when really you were going off to see him. You only called me when you needed me for something.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“I’m disgusted with myself,” Mirielle said. “I thought of killing myself last night.”

“Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t make this into another excuse to feel sorry for yourself.”

She took a folded check out of her purse. It was for the money I had lent her to buy her plane ticket to Tortola.

The waiter brought us the bill, and Mirielle and I split it down the middle — the first time I had ever let her pay for her share of a meal.

“Do you think we could stay friends?” she asked. “I’d like to.”

“Is he white?”

“What?”

“Your new boyfriend.”

She nodded.

“I knew it,” I said. “A yellow cab.”

“What?”

“All the crap about not wanting to jump into another relationship, how difficult it is for you to get close to people — it was all bullshit. It wasn’t that at all. It’s just that you didn’t want to be in a relationship with me .”

“Can’t you be my friend?”

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

She wouldn’t look at me, stared down at the caddy of sriracha and hoisin sauce on the table.

“I never thought you were capable of something like this,” I said. “I thought I knew you, but I guess I don’t. You’re a stranger to me,” I told her. “You’re a bad person, Mirielle.”

Joshua was home, sitting in the dining room, eating sandwiches of pan-fried hot dogs, cheese, sauerkraut, and barbecue sauce on raisin bread, paired with a bottle of dolcetto.

“What the hell was I thinking the entire time?” I asked him. “What did I expect? I was a fucking fool. I was pathetic. How could I have been so blind, so fucking weak?”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“I’m sick of being such a fucking pussy. I’m pathetic .”

“It’ll be all right.”

“How come you never fall in love, huh, Joshua? What are you? Totally heartless? Do you ever feel anything? Is there nothing inside?”

He stood up from the dining table. “Let it out, Eric. You want to hit me? Go ahead, hit me.”

I sagged and began to mewl, and Joshua embraced me. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “This will pass. Everything passes eventually.”

“The fucking thing is,” I said, “all I can think about right now is Mirielle, what she must be going through. I’m worried she might jump off a bridge. She must be so depressed tonight.”

I waited months to deposit Mirielle’s check. When I did, it was returned, the account closed, and the bank charged me a fee for the voided transaction.

Suddenly Palaver was flush with money. In the fall, Paviromo had had me spend weeks on an application for a new program sponsored by the Lila Wallace— Reader’s Digest Fund (coming full circle with Mac’s major donor), and in February, we were miraculously bestowed a grant for $100,000, almost double our entire annual operating budget. I got a bump in salary. We bought new computers, and I was able to appoint a part-time office manager to assist me, Sandra Tran, a graphic designer in the 3AC who had previously worked at Granta . (Despite her qualifications, Paviromo was initially wary of hiring her, no doubt thinking that having one Asian in the office was good for the diversity checklist, but having two might be an Asian invasion.)

The two-year program was for audience development, or, in plainer terms, marketing, and involved fifteen magazines. It was an experiment of sorts. The Lila Wallace foundation wanted to see if literary journals, given the resources and the know-how, could actually find readers. They hired a group of professional magazine consultants to educate us at a series of seminars. Yet at the first panel session in San Francisco, it became clear that the consultants might need some educating themselves.

“Why do you print in this format and not in standard trim size?” one of them, Lester Dillenbeck, asked. He picked up a trade paperback journal from the stack on the table and thumbed through it. “There’s just so much text .”

The program allowed two people from each magazine to attend the seminars, and Paviromo accompanied me to the first one, but only the first, too exasperated with these “philistines” and “charlatans” and “apparatchiks” to return. “Do you recall James Carville’s famous slogan during the ’92 campaign, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’?” he said to the consultants. “Well, in our field of endeavor, quaint and stuffy and bizarre as it may seem to you, it’s what we print that is paramount, indeed sacrosanct”—and here he paused and stared directly at Dillenbeck—“stupid.”

Paviromo liked the money we were receiving and the possibility that Palaver might gain a wider audience, but he didn’t really want to change anything or do any work himself, and he couldn’t have cared less about the nuts and bolts of the program. He left all the details to me.

I threw myself into the project. I began to learn the lingua franca of marketing, which was strangely fetishized, creeping into the realm of BDSM, with terms like bind-ins and blow-ins, branding and penetration . I was assigned two consultants, Dillenbeck and another fellow named Ryan Hickel, and they came up with a plan. They decided that the Fiction Discoveries issue was an ideal marketing opportunity. They wanted me to embark on a subscription acquisition campaign — more commonly known as direct mail — and coincide the drop date with the issue’s publication in June.