Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (23 page)

I went to my bed and covered myself in a blanket and did not stop shaking until dawn.

That morning I dressed early and left the house to begin looking for an apartment, and for a month I looked in vain for anything I could stand. Giving up, I flew down to Washington. It took me just two days to find an apartment in a stately 1917 building in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. After the awful apartments I had seen in Manhattan, this one was a relief, and Washington itself, serene, clean, and leafy, seemed a safe shelter.

“I have an apartment in Washington,” I told her when I returned to New York. I wanted her to be pleased. She staggered. “Oh, God!” She was choked up. “That was fast . . .” Rising from the chair, she came to me and held me.

Our last weeks together had a mournful gentleness. I could see that she was relieved, more affectionate now that our struggle was nearly over. I went through the details of moving, and she agreed easily on the things I could take with me—the New Delhi desk, an old kitchen table, our bed, the black tape deck we had in Manila, the long-armed swayback butaca, my rugs.

On the Sunday before my departure she opened up a magnum of Dom Pérignon, raised her glass to me, and clutched me to her, her arms around my waist, her hair on my face, her breath so light. “You know you cannot chop me out of your life,” she said softly, her eyes shining. “If you do, you’ll be cursing me and yourself.”

She had her music on, and as she held me closely, her chin resting on my head, we moved slowly around the living room, dancing as we never had before—
Stay by me and make the moment last .
.
.
Seconds, minutes, an eternity, everything blurred.

She left for her office early that morning, before my movers came. “I don’t think I can stand to see you go,” she had said the night before. We tried to make the parting quick, couldn’t even look at each other or find any words, and when she closed the front door behind her I did not go to the window to watch her walk away. The movers came and went, and I sat on the sofa, ragged but tearless. I moved through the house, the blank spaces where my furniture had been, and it seemed

enormous, so silent. Then I walked down to a florist and picked out a couple of brilliant orange Asian

tiger lilies and put them in a vase on top of her Chinese chest in the living room. I found an envelope and slipped in it the one thing I wanted to leave her, a yellowing document that my mother had once given me: my first-grade report card, straight A’s from geography to arithmetic at the Van Dyke Academy in Mexico City. On the cover of the report card was stapled an oval-shaped photograph of me, a wistful face at the age of five, long, straight dark hair pulled off the forehead with a small bow clasp.

I don’t know why I want you to have this,
I scribbled on a piece of paper, and sealed the envelope and leaned it against the vase with the tiger lilies.

I picked up my luggage, my duffel, the case with the laptop Elizabeth had given me for one of my birthdays, and my shoulder-strap bag. I found Boom, who was distracted by the birds swooping in the garden, and crushed him in my arms and kissed his head. It was a sunny day, very hot, August third, three weeks short of our seventh year together. I closed the front door and locked it and put my house keys in an envelope and left it for her under the door.

Rush-hour taxis zipped past, and I could hardly lift my hand to hail one, but finally a cab stopped and I lugged the bags onto the back seat and got in.

“LaGuardia,” I said, keeping my face turned away from the driver, feeling the tears come slowly, trickling down one by one. Out the window Manhattan rolled by, stranger suddenly than any place I had ever known.

I
CAN’T LET GO
of that time, can’t let it breathe. After all these years I can’t find the mystery, and not finding it, I can’t tear it out of me. Our last years I can only begin to trace, but even now I can’t find the exact location, the damning gesture and the words, the precise moment when the last glass of wine came with passion, and the first came dry, drained of us.

I lie in the mornings wrapped in my old quilt, my hands in fists, a pillow at my back, and I glance out my window, always the first thing I do, and take in the sun that lingers in lilac clouds, the tree limbs slashing at the panes, and the birthday balloon some passerby lost into that tree last summer, now torn, deflated. I noticed today that spring has come, the sun spreads out early, beams across my bed, and there are crocuses and daffodils, sprigs of yellow marigolds, and the blue- and red-chested birds are making nests in brambles beneath the crooked magnolia tree and the drooping wisteria.

I walk the streets every day and every day I stop with a jolt, suddenly seized, at the far sight of an auburn head, the tilt of a neck, the slope of shoulders. I see Elizabeth, hair blowing in her eyes, feathery around her face, combed down her neck, where it arches. She lopes across the street toward me. But she has not seen me, has not seen the stricken face that has to be mine, and I move toward her, wading in air, the moment stilled. Her voice, my name in her voice, rises from the silence I live in, and I lift my face, running to her, and then the voice is gone.

Old songs. Grooves of music, a pounding beat. Adagios and crescendos. Drops of red wine, smoke, the smell of skin freshly soaped, a moist touch of perfume. Must she be, after these years, in everything, in my bloodstream?

In the fall of our first months of separation, I tried to create a world for myself. Washington seemed just right for this, a mostly empty canvas. Washington wasn’t Manhattan, Manila, Tokyo, where we had made a trail. Here, the streets bore no reminders, none of our footprints. The faces I saw were unblemished by care, interchangeably bland as I passed by them when I took my morning walk to the newsstand. I was, I knew, invisible, not to them perhaps, but to myself.

Once a day I forced myself to speak, chatting absent-mindedly with the front-desk clerks at my apartment building and with the woman who sold me newspapers and magazines. I tried to hear my voice, to recognize it. How do you like this weather, they asked, rubbing their arms for warmth. There were scraps of frozen snow on the sidewalk, northern skies. “Well, it’s winter, isn’t it?” I would reply. Later, in the spring and summer, the question changed to “How you like this heat?” I would say, “Well, it’s summer, isn’t it?” I tried to remember to smile, to give a bright lilt to my greetings while I checked my mailbox in the apartment lobby, knowing it was empty, and walked by a pair of old ladies who always seemed to be seated on the hardwood bench in the foyer, holding their grocery bags, heavy maiden ladies sitting out their mornings, giving me a searching top-to-bottom look, never quite placing me. I passed by them quickly, escaping, and climbed the three flights up the tile staircase to my apartment, only the squeak of my tennis shoes breaking the glum quiet of the hallway.

In the evenings those first months, I walked up the block to a Brazilian grill, a smoky dark-glass storefront, ordered up caipirinhas, and distracted myself by listening to snatches of conversation at the bar, the gossip of waitresses, college girls with huge black-lined eyes, sheened tresses, and tight T-shirts who sidled up to the stool next to mine, wanting to know about my life. I always had a book

with me, probably tipping them off that I wasn’t the standard bar drinker. It was the orange-spine copy of Graham Greene’s
Collected Short Stories
that I had carried on countless trips, thinking I would

finish it one day. Over the years I had read only a few pages at a time, in hotels, before dropping off to sleep. I lost track of what I had read but kept my place with a dog-eared yellow Thai Air Lines boarding pass stamped Phuket International Airport and signed in black ink,
Elizabeth, Bangkok 1988.

Wanting to seem occupied, with a purpose, I clutched the book as if I were too busy for company, content to be left alone, wiping wet rings off the bar counter with my shirtsleeve. I laid the book face-up on the counter and rubbed the cover, the skin of it. I would turn the pages, flipping them like a deck of cards, writing poetic words in my head. It was my way of announcing my presence. I was trying to make a statement, saying that I was really not alone, protecting myself from the solitude that hangs over all lone drinkers.

I did try to see people—you must see people, you must move on, everyone told me. Going to the restaurant, I was trying to set a pace, to unearth myself from entire days where I spoke to no one but shop clerks. I screamed at the world. But the scream was something only I could hear. Friends, acquaintances, came around now and then, a little dinner to perk me up, a double espresso at a coffee bar in the afternoon, but I was absent all the while, not listening, bored, longing. I carried my loss on my face, puffy eyes, lengthening lines around my mouth. Noticing the concerned eyes looking at me,

the eyes of people who had suffered their own losses, who had long ago recorded them and closed the books, I felt nothing but a void, no elemental connection, and after two, three hours, I would wander home.

Tim was still living in Washington and would meet me after he got done at work for a drink at the Bombay Club, or at the Ritz-Carlton, and shaking the ice cubes in his gin and tonic, flipping open his pack of Dunhills and tossing it at me, he would exhort, expound, making sense of the world for me. But he seemed impatient. He had moved past me, had left behind the brittle affairs. His heart had grown up, and he no longer needed nights of sour mash whiskey and confessions, his eyes moistening over his adored goddesses. He had passed that stage. He was graying at the temples, thickening around the waist. His life had changed. He had obligations, family duties, his engagement, big wedding plans, two hundred invitations to address, and his work, dealing with national security, breaking stories.

There was something else, too—the discomfort of people in the presence of disaster. He had loved Elizabeth, had brightened up in her presence, the arms she threw around his neck. I had always known that, since that first time at Orchard when he earnestly pleaded with me to leave her alone.

Now that she and I had broken up, he was torn, he said. The hurt he saw in each of us was more than he could bear. So for a time he stayed away, worn out by me and the endless grief. He was not the only one to give me a pass. Some old friends disappeared altogether, people whom Elizabeth and I had shared. My messages and letters went unanswered, and for a long time I waited for the phone to ring, for the mail, even when I pretended to myself that I no longer cared.

Slowly I made a routine, a frame I constructed to hold myself in. The apartment I lived in had good light, windows on three sides. I set up my desk and my other things, and it became a refuge, another refuge. I wrote every day and rarely left the building but for excursions down the street just to take into account that there was a world out there. I found myself staring absently into the glass windows of coffee shops, scanning the faces inside, vapid, smug, animated sometimes, engaged in lives of their own. But most of the time I strode by, catching the reflection of sunglasses on a grave face, myself, and I shifted my eyes and moved rapidly past. I could feel no relation to any of it, no fit anywhere.

For months I would not listen to music. I would not open that door. In fits of anger I threw out my

Manila notebooks and folders filled with half-done articles and drafts, and I put away a framed picture of her and the rings she had given me. But all that, coming in bursts of crying and remorse, did nothing to take her away. After a time I brought out the picture I had tossed, splitting the wooden frame, on the top of a closet shelf and placed it back just where it had always been. I put back my rings and began to listen to music and sorted through hundreds of loose snapshots of our years together, collecting them in groupings by dates and places, and bound them in rubber bands.

I brought out our letters from the leather bag where I kept them and scattered them on the living room rug. I sat on the rug and opened one, two, then another, and each line, each line of her writing, was a stab. It was then, with her old clipboard and a faded yellow notepad, that I picked up a pen and wrote down a phrase that came from nowhere, and the next day I looked at it and made it into a sentence, and that was the way this story came to me.

She moved to Washington in the late fall, and presently a letter from her came in the mail, a typewritten sheet folded in one of her old crinkly
par avion
envelopes. She had typed it on her Royal, wrote it fast I could see by the crossovers and keys that seemed to run into each other. She had been settling into her new house in Washington, she said lightly, a great house for reading. I pictured it instantly: the sofa, the lamps, and the things that used to be “our” things. She was finding her way in a new place quietly, she said. The letter was light, careful. I looked for words she didn’t write, conjured the rhythms of her life. But the truth is that I knew nothing.

“I don’t want our lives to crisscross,” she had told me a few months earlier, in New York, when she announced that she was moving to Washington. She had run into me by chance at a restaurant, one of our spots during our years in Manhattan. I was in from Washington for Halloween weekend, trying to keep in touch with New York friends and doing some business, when suddenly there she was in the restaurant, in a rush as usual. She didn’t notice me and went on to sit nearby with a friend, her back to me. Bracing myself, I got up and walked over and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered and

her face turned pink, a flush broke down her neck, then she recovered, smiled brightly, and stuck out her hand, cold, clammy, to shake mine. I knew blood was rushing to my face, my head was pounding, and I felt sick, but we played on, a casual patter, the lies of false indifference, and then I went back to my business, watching as she left the restaurant.

We met by agreement the next day. It was a miserable rainy afternoon on Times Square. We found a noodle shop, went through the preambles. Then she said I was to make no effort to see her once she moved to Washington. She didn’t want any of what she called “our back-and-forth.” She looked formidable, unmovable. I left her in the rain on a sidewalk on Broadway, tugged at the mustard-colored slicker that made her look like a 1940s flier. As I leaned forward to embrace her, she stepped away and barely brushed my neck with her fingers.