Don Lee - The Collective

Jimmy Fung served his mandatory two-year sentence in state prison, MCI-Norfolk, then disappeared. I lost track of a lot of people. Jessica withdrew the malicious destruction complaint against Barboza, and, in kind, he dropped the obscenity complaint against her. She moved to San Francisco and then to L.A., and we kept in frequent touch for a while, but talk less now.

After our breakup, I never spoke to Mirielle Miyazato again, but occasionally I checked up on her on the Internet. She didn’t go to an MFA program in poetry. She became a research assistant at a think tank in D.C., then ended up in Miami, where she sold commercial real estate. A few years ago, she married the founder of a sustainable building company. High-res images of their wedding were online, posted by the photographer to market his services. Mirielle looked beautiful, ecstatic. More than once, I clicked through the album. In one photo, she was holding what might have been a wineglass, but I couldn’t be sure what was in it — possibly just water. Her husband was about her age, good-looking, stylish with his short dreads, Afro-Cuban American. Recently they had a baby, I read on her website. I’ve always regretted telling her that she was a bad person.

The last time I saw Joshua was in July 2008, two months before he killed himself, when I drove out to his rented cottage in Sudbury to say goodbye to him. I was leaving Cambridge for good — a relocation, a wholesale life change, that had come about swiftly.

“Unbelievable,” he said as I got out of my car. “You never got rid of your mayonnaise streak, did you?”

Two years earlier, I had gone to the Boston Athenaeum, the private library catty-corner from the State House. The Athenaeum was trying to recruit a younger membership, and they were hosting a mixer that day. These receptions, besides the draw of exceptional wine and hors d’oeuvres, had acquired a reputation as a meat market.

I was already a member. I often spent my lunch hour at the library, and that evening I had gone there after work to get a novel I wanted to reread, not knowing a mixer was being held. After checking the catalog, I wended through the crowd, past the busts of Petrarch and Dante, into the reading room with its leather chairs, vaulted ceiling, and arched windows. A woman was leaning against the very bookshelf I needed to access, listening to a fellow trying to chat her up.

She had an old-fashioned air about her, blond hair parted in the middle and tied into a thick ponytail that ran down her back, a vintage indigo dress with subtle white piping rather than the ubiquitous power suit. She wore little makeup, and had a narrow face.

I waited, not wanting to interrupt their conversation, but finally said, “Excuse me, could I reach behind you for a second?”

She looked at me blankly, then said, “You trying to find a book?”

“It’s supposed to be on that shelf. If I could—”

“I don’t think you understand the parameters here.”

“Sorry?”

“I saw a sign posted at the entrance. You didn’t see the sign?”

“Which sign?”

“The one that said no reading allowed. It was very explicit.”

She grinned slyly, and I knew then who she was. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. “I guess I was misinformed,” I said. “This isn’t a library?”

“Apparently not,” she said. “Which book?” She stepped aside, and I pulled out William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow from the shelf. “Oh, I’ve read that,” she told me.

“You have?”

“Sure, several times. My father went to elementary school with the author.”

“No kidding.”

“He said Billy was a smart kid, but kind of antisocial. The sort of kid who goes to cocktail parties and sits in a corner with a book.”

“I didn’t know elementary kids went to cocktail parties back then.”

“Astonishing, isn’t it?” she said. “A different era. They started them young.”

Her prospective suitor excused himself and retreated into the crowd.

“Do you think it was something I said?” she asked me.

“How have you been, Didi?”

I moved in with her less than a year later. “Why’d we break up at Mac again?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”

In many ways, it was as if she were an entirely different person. I remembered what Joshua had told me once, long ago — that Didi had no soul — but she was nothing like she’d been in college.

After Macalester, Didi had gone to Manhattan, working as a computer programmer for an insurance corporation before landing at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. In 2000, she was transferred to Cantor’s Milan office, and the following year, all her friends and colleagues in New York died on 9/11. She quit Cantor, found a job at an Italian brokerage firm in Rome, met Alessandro Pacelli, the creative director of an ad agency, and almost immediately got pregnant by him. They had three children in quick succession, Matteo, Wyatt, and Finnea. Didi became a stay-at-home mom and was content, she thought, until she discovered that Alessandro had been sleeping with two different women, one of whom was their housekeeper. She fled to Chestnut Hill with the kids, and their divorce proceedings, involving U.S. and Italian courts, were a contentious mess, Alessandro calling Didi all manner of Italian variants for bitch, his favorite being stronza , fucking bitch, saying she had never loved him, had trapped him by deliberately getting pregnant when she knew he’d never wanted children, which was supremely ironic, since ten months after they separated he had a son with one of the women he’d been fucking (not the housekeeper).

Didi got what she wanted, sole custody of the kids, bought a house in Huron Village, and then looked for a job, a formidable challenge since she had been out of the workforce for almost five years. At last, she was hired as a software engineer at Fidelity Investments, specializing in Web applications for their online brokerage program.

She was with the technology group, not on the investment side, so she wasn’t being yoked and pummeled by the upheavals in the market like the fund managers and portfolios analysts. Nonetheless, there had been two rounds of layoffs at Fidelity in the space of a year, and she was nervous. So was I. Everyone in the financial sector — and in businesses like Gilroy Prunier that depended on it — was on tenterhooks in the spring of 2008. Then Fidelity announced that it was consolidating some of its operations, and Didi was presented with a transfer to the Research Triangle in North Carolina. We talked about it. I applied for a job in Fidelity’s marketing communications department down there, and was offered a position as a senior copywriter. I proposed to Didi. (We would join the circle of sixty percent of Mac grads who purportedly marry one another.) We were moving to Chapel Hill next week.

“I don’t get it,” Joshua said in his driveway. “Isn’t her father loaded?”

“We want to support ourselves.”

“But his money will always be there, won’t it? It’ll corrupt you eventually,” he said. “You’ll get emasculated by it.”

I chose not to remind Joshua that he’d had money himself, that he had never really had to work a day in his life.

I liked Didi’s parents, actually. Mr. O’Brien sometimes told me stories about his father, who had been the first in the family to immigrate to Boston from Ireland, and who, upon arrival, had been confronted with NINA signs: HELP WANTED — NO IRISH NEED APPLY. Mr. O’Brien thought the Irish and Koreans had more in common than any other ethnic groups: they shared a history of subjugation and divided homelands, they had violent tempers yet liked to carouse and sing, and they both drank like fish.