Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (19 page)

I always sat in the narrow loveseat, and she across from me in an old armchair. We smoked a few cigarettes, talked about my day: the rejected headlines, the glacial pace, the prissy editor who carried a schedule sheet on a clipboard, assigning us work shifts, looking down on me with his lips pursed. I ranted on and on. She laughed at some of my stories but was more often pained, seeing the toll the job was taking. Night after night she would go to bed alone, but I would stay up late, having one last cigarette, one last beer, trying to figure out what was going wrong. After a while, after the

first months, I had no funny stories to tell her after work. The early enthusiasm I had for my job in the first few weeks had gone. It was all showing on my face, in the stoop of my back when I walked to the subway, the life of Manhattan dead to me.

Summer, then fall 1989. I stopped smoking and stashed away the few pages of the book I had completed, shoved the pages in an envelope in the bottom of my desk drawer. “Someday you’ll do it,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just not the right time now.” But I felt hopeless, defeated, and let myself slide into the old doubts. Perhaps for that reason, I was trying harder at work to prove myself. I memorized the style book and polished my headlines and caught obscure errors in copy. I stopped glaring at the finicky editor who brought his own cloth rag to clean his screen and lived on a diet of yogurt and tofu. After a while, the eccentricities of copyeditors became normal. I didn’t notice anymore the editor, already twenty years in service, who opened his large umbrella and propped it on his desk to shield him from anyone passing by. Eventually I got a turn on the backfield and I felt the lift that recognition can give, the old newspaper charge.

We saw few of our reporters, could go years without meeting them face-to-face. But on the occasions when one or another came to town on home leave, from Rio or Warsaw or Jerusalem, from any one of the forty bureaus the
Times
maintained overseas, he (almost always he) would come by to meet all of us on the desk. Courteous and dressed in fine tailored suits, the correspondents looked and behaved more like diplomats than the foreign correspondents in our crowd in Manila. Even the young who’d gotten their start on minor outposts such as the Ivory Coast and the Caribbean had their hair trimmed and their poplin jackets pressed. Nobody looked rumpled.

Every morning I took a walk up and down Columbus and Amsterdam to pick up magazines and flowers, milk or cigarettes, and I would suddenly halt, as in a fog, at the sight of a face, the thick black hair of a girl I knew immediately had to be a Filipina, round hips, pout, sweet lilt. Or sometimes, when I came out of the apartment and was struck by the evocative tropical smell of bus fumes and warm rain, I would feel it inside my body, the smell of the tropics, right there on Broadway.

Some of our friends from Manila showed up occasionally in New York, a rotation of drop-ins and overnight guests. “That’s one thing about New York,” Elizabeth liked to say. “Everyone comes through here.”

Kay lived nearby, and saved videotapes of news programs on the Philippines, hoarded letters from friends there, and spent days in her apartment going through pictures and faxes of newspaper clippings from Manila. Camilla flew in from London, then holed up for days at the Pierre. Sandro dropped in too, looking raffish and seductive as always, smoking up New York. He seemed younger, flushed with lust for a lithe Turkish stewardess he had met on one of his flights. Things had changed in Manila, he said. He had left Candy, had closed down his house and studio, had quit the magazine job, and was planning to move to Jerusalem. Giving us a shock, he broke the news that our homes on P. Lovina were being torn down to make way for an expansion of EDSA, the expressway that had been a symbol of the People Power Revolution. His glow made my mood darken, and I bristled when he asked if I was still writing. Worse, I was sure he could sense that Elizabeth and I had strayed since

the days he knew us, when we had seemed in lockstep and confident in our relationship. That evening in New York, the three of us sat in our living room for hours, rehashing our lives, and then, with lush kisses on both cheeks to each of us, crunching embraces, and an extravagant
“Ciao!,”
he was gone, leaving us with the heavy sound of his steps down the stairs.

Candy came during the Christmas holidays. She was thinner, even thinner than she had been in

Manila, and was still mourning her breakup with Sandro. But she was making a valiant effort to cheer herself with a shopping spree for clothes and gifts on Madison Avenue, dinners in Greenwich Village, and plans to leave the Philippines. After the excitement on her arrival at our apartment, she cried over a glass of wine, heartbroken but hardened, and feigning optimism that she would find a way out of Manila and a new life. We caught up on gossip—we knew the same people and kept track—and her singsong voice carried Manila in it. But I noticed too that she was studying Elizabeth closely, and studying me. I saw in her eyes a flicker of concern that we seemed so different than we had been in Manila.

We were successful, true. I had a paycheck and enjoyed the status that came automatically with a job at the
Times.
But it was all a surface gloss. We were both unhappy doing office work and feeling trapped and at the same time displaced or suspended, somehow out of step. We were marking time until we could leave New York. Around that time, Nick came to town. We had dinner, drinks. He was dashing as always, sun-bleached, tousle-headed in his safari shirt, downing Dos Equis at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from our apartment. He was on his way back to India. “What are you doing sitting in an office on Madison Avenue?” he asked Elizabeth, needling her. He could always get to

her, knew her soft spots, and I could see her jaw clamping. She grabbed his cigarettes and took a swig of beer.

“I’m taking a break.” She said she was tired of the road and was expanding her understanding of foreign policy. “You know, waiting for an assignment.” He twirled his mustache, looking skeptical.

He had a few wrinkles around his brow, baggy eyes, some gray facial hair, but the years didn’t show on him. He swore that he kept trim and fit by drinking beer. He was the old Nick, filling us in on his latest escapade, an overland trip to Kabul, dodging bombs and bullets, and on the Manila gossip, on how the place had gone to hell since we had left. We liked to believe that Manila could not possibly be the same without us.

That year Elizabeth bought a country house on a creek upstate, a few miles down the road from a tumbledown town with a lone fire truck and a general store where the supplies gathered dust on shelves and the screen door banged loose in the breeze. The house, a fieldstone gray-clapboard with big windows, had a fruit orchard and herb garden, and a canopy of birch and oak trees. Here was a refuge from the city. When our schedules worked out, we drove up with Boom, Elizabeth chattering the second we left Manhattan behind. She could make the drive in two hours flat, a Big Mac on her lap, the tape player blasting. Arriving at our house—after the turnoff from the main highway and the stretch on a hilly rural moonlit road—was always an event. Deer on the road, crickets singing, the rustle of corn stalks, the silhouette of an old farmhouse across the road.

While I loved big-city life, Elizabeth chafed against living within four walls, in a walkup apartment or a row house, squeezed between one building and another, within earshot of neighbors, without a plot of land to trowel. She wasn’t a window-box gardener, one of those city people who could turn a rooftop into a greenhouse. She wanted soil under her nails, something loamy to sink her feet into. Her face would light up at a clump of fresh rosemary, and the office stress would ease the minute she spotted mallards on the creek, and geese scampering out of the woods. A shock of hair flopping on her high forehead and with her back muscles loosened, she could look twelve years old.

The house brought us respite, the strain that had grown between us lessening. I could forget for a while the aggravations of work, the dreary six-to-one night shift and the wasted mornings and afternoons I spent alone in the apartment as I waited impatiently for late afternoon to come, when Elizabeth would finish work and walk across Central Park on the way home. Sometimes I would meet

her midway, watching her figure from a distance; I watched the quickness or slowness in her step, the way she lugged her leather bag, the angle of her head, and could guess how her day had gone. Then we would walk together to the apartment, had long enough for a few words and a light touch, and I would leave for work.

The country house restored some of the serenity and companionship we missed in New York. I didn’t turn away from her when she threw her arms around me, and I didn’t quarrel over every little slight. Relaxed on a deck chair, my feet on the railing, the sun on my face, I could even believe writing was possible again. We planted a pear tree to leave our mark there and weeded the orchard and Elizabeth groomed the herb garden and planted daffodil bulbs for spring. She had tree limbs

trimmed back and a sturdy dock built into the creek. We bought a sofa and armchairs and furnished the rest with pieces we couldn’t fit in the New York apartment. We unpacked books that had been boxed for years and bought a red Maine canoe. She tried to teach me to paddle and to cast and reel on slow afternoons in the creek when we were the only people around. Nights drew down slowly, with long talks before the fire and wine. I would wake up early in our cedar-wood bedroom to find that she was already up, standing stock-still on the sun deck, her binoculars pressed to her face.

“Come here. Look,” she would call out to me. “Did you see that? A blue heron.”

The muscles in her face strained instantly when we crossed back to the city, the traffic jam boiling her temper. “I hate this city,” she said every time. I knew what she meant. We had let the world dictate our life, the world of nine-to-five and superficial distractions and old complications. But that was not all. Out of the blue, Elizabeth’s work took an unexpected turn that spring when an editor approached her and, under the guise of concern, told her things he had heard about me and her, such a strange relationship. Her heart was still pounding and her hands clammy when she told me about it later that day. She was indignant and hurt, and in the heat of anger threatened to quit her job. I was furious too, but office rumors, those little scandals, were all too familiar to me. I had lived through many years of that. For Elizabeth, it was a shock. I never saw it coming, she said. But it was something she had feared, having our private life vulgarized. Over the next days and weeks, she put on a good face at work, and the editor who had crossed the line apologized. Elizabeth didn’t quit. But she couldn’t feel totally at ease at work anymore, and we didn’t know if after all that she would still get a foreign assignment.

The waiting seemed endless, and we didn’t exactly agree on where we wanted to go. I wanted to go back to Asia—New Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong. She wanted South Africa or even Latin America, though she didn’t mind returning to Asia at all. Now and then I turned my frustration with work and myself against her, unleashing the familiar but still stinging words that I knew wounded her, and she responded in the familiar and biting way. Taut jaw, high chin, firing eyes, she bristled at the old litany I dragged out—that she had had it all, she was cold and distant, she came easily to success.

“Why don’t you leave if you feel like that,” she burst out one night, words she had thrown at me during one of our fights in Manila. She grabbed her field jacket and left the room, slamming the door behind her. She walked around and sat on the steps of a church near the corner, where I found her.

What created this desolation? Why did I push her away? It was not lack of love. It was a fear growing in me that our life was changing, that something—I didn’t know or didn’t want to know exactly what

—was pulling us apart. We were becoming ordinary. We no longer had the romance and excitement of Manila as our backdrop; now we had mundane jobs, nine-to-five lives. I made things worse, questioning myself, everything I had done and not done. I had wasted years, years when I didn’t write, years before I met Elizabeth. Writing and my hope to make a living at it seemed a delusion.

I cried so often that year in New York, cried at night, on the sofa, walking the streets, in the

subway, and woke with sickening anxiety every morning. When she wanted to hold me, I would turn away, my ardor now barely a flicker. We lay in our bed apart, each lost. “It’s only a phase,” she would often say, always tender, a light hand on me, about the many times when I would read a book, my back to her, when I would pull away from her and merely brush her cheek to say good night.

“It’s Tokyo.” She had called up to tell me her new assignment. There was such dismay in her voice. No exclamation point. I could not believe it—Tokyo? Japan was another planet, a place I had never thought of visiting, a place she knew from art and books—but it was not what we had in mind. We had wanted tropical islands and hot cities, the South China Sea, Bangkok, Jakarta. Not this, not Tokyo.

She used to say she hated first world countries. Even Hong Kong was too modern for her, and now she was going to Tokyo. An editor had handed her a slip of paper with a single word on it, and an exclamation point:
Tokyo!

I had nagged her to get out of New York, to return to Asia. And here it was; it was Asia, but not the Asia I had in mind. I felt guilty sensing her disappointment, knowing I was responsible. I tried to paint seductive pictures of life in Japan, the excitement of such an exceptional and ancient culture, the challenge it presented. “It’s a big story,” I offered, and I was right about that. “It’s a country people here take seriously.” I was also trying to convince myself while at the same time figuring out what in the world I would do there. There was little question that I would leave the
Times.
I couldn’t see life without Elizabeth, and if I stayed I would be bound to desk work for the rest of my life. Now I had a reason to get out.