Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution (9 page)

On the day I had to take the last step, to tell the editor of the paper, I crossed the length of the newsroom to his corner office and stood awkwardly at his doorway, putting on a smile, what I hoped was a smile, to win him over, to disarm him. He came around from behind his desk and invited me to take a seat on his leather couch. He sat next to me in an armchair and took sips of iced tea, his arms crossed on his chest, a finger scratching his elbow. We began with a desultory chat about Southeast Asia, his passion for it, which began when he was a war correspondent in Saigon. I was so nervous, I could feel red splotches appearing on my neck, spreading to my face, burning. He already knew why I was there, but he was letting me take my time and tried to ease my way into it. He showed me a layout of a new newspaper section he was planning, and brought over an ashtray for me, ambling across the room, his gait as slow as his southern drawl, his words making spaces between us. His mind rummaged somewhere, never exactly on point.

Finally I told him, in a burst of words I cannot remember, that I had decided to leave, that I had to go to Manila, that I had to write a book I had in my head on the Philippines. I had rehearsed this over and over, but it came out wrought and defensive. I couldn’t quite look at him and picked up a cigarette to do something with my hands. He folded his arms like the buddha he was. Asia filled him with his own memories. He appraised my Manila tan, and looked around the mess of his desk for an article he recalled reading. Yes, you should go there, he said, and find out why MacArthur failed to do for the Philippines what he did for Japan. He played with my pack of cigarettes and put it down. His voice was a throaty rumble after years of cigarettes and Jameson whiskey, giving his suggestions the sonorous tone of oracle. The silence fell between us again, and lasted what seemed an hour.

“Plunge!” he said at last.

He rose from the chair and put his arm around me. “Take a year off,” he said, “and come back

after that. Then see.”

I guessed, reading the expression in his eyes, hooded and dark, that he believed I was making the mistake of my life.

I had done it all quickly, within days of my return from Manila, shutting out, as I was prone to do, other voices, the cautionary friends, their pragmatic arguments, and my own fear that I would fail. I had nothing to show, no set of clippings, no magazine contract, and no book deal. My years in journalism had been spent almost entirely on editing desks. “You’ve not written much before, have you?” friends would say, pricking my balloon.

Editing had not been what I had set out to do, but from the start I had been assigned to desk jobs.

Always eager to succeed and always afraid that writing would crush me, that it would only lead to grief, I had put it aside, and torn up the fragments of work that I had done over so many years. But I cannot remember a time when I did not think of myself as a writer. I believed then that writing came from the night, from someplace secret and glorious, that it came with the moon and the wind, from the simple act of breathing. I did not study it, or practice it faithfully like the scales on the piano. I was too romantic, always, for that. I did not have it sketched out, or in outlines. I did not believe it was something one talked about, discourses on style and technique, but something that came or did not come, an inspiration.

Editing had not been like that. It was a skill, at times a science. It did not create. My job had been to close the gaps in other people’s stories, to find the bumps and smooth them, and I took pride in that, in the seamless paragraph, in the invisible sutures, and extracting from a reporter a clever observation, an impression that brightened the story, an interpretation that gave it depth. But editing was not writing, and I never confused the two.

I knew I would have to find the courage to write again. But I was terrified, holding on to a reef that no one else could see. I would have to start from nothing. There were many times that summer when, while I pretended to have a confidence I did not feel at all, I thought I was out of my mind.

Most of my life I had battled doubts and the limits imposed on me. From the time I was a child, a diligent child, I had clung to a stubborn loneliness, saw myself standing apart, just a few steps outside whatever was around me, observing, absorbed in some other thing, never quite making the

connections that seemed to make life comfortable for other people. I would devour encyclopedias and my mother’s books, grown-up books—Oscar Wilde, Nabokov, García Lorca—and those lives, those words, were my reality, things that formed me. The cowboy games I played, the parties of my childhood, days in the sun with girlfriends, bicycling around the plaza, holding hands with a boyfriend, all of that was real enough but existed on the outside of me.

Elizabeth, who readily saw the things in me that were so much a part of her, too, had touched that sense of aloneness in me, had been drawn to it. I was dark and fierce and had a face of shadows and moods, a face that to her seemed ageless. I was the very thing that she wanted to avoid—chaos, intensity, a fall from grace. I was writing, passion, books, long drinks in the night. It frightened her, I thought, that I could see through her, that she couldn’t lie to me, or escape me. She would say I was unlike anyone she had known, fearless, unrelenting, moving within a world that I had largely created for myself, haunted by a bottomless sorrow.

She called these things idiosyncratic. It was, she said, what she found most captivating, a way of being in the world.

The monsoon had come to Manila by the time Elizabeth moved into her apartment, after she

dismantled her room at the Manila Hotel, unpinning the things on the bulletin board, her flags, her postcards and drawings. After all that time in Manila, there was little else for her but her life there, the story. She had once assumed she would return to New Delhi, but she had made Manila hers, and she wanted to stay. With one phone call to the foreign editor, she got his approval to move the paper’s South Asia bureau to the Philippines. It was only a matter of packing boxes and changing addresses, and it seemed to make no difference to the Foreign Desk where she was based, New Delhi or Manila, didn’t matter since she would be traveling all over Asia from one crisis to another.

She found a large, unfurnished cold-water apartment in Manila, on M. H. Del Pilar Street, on the bay side of the city, not far from the Manila Hotel. It was a tropical-style 1930s building with a rusting corrugated metal roof and streaked gray exterior walls. She moved in to the flat even before her furniture, the few pieces she had bought in India, arrived in crates from New Delhi. She had bought a bed and a rattan sofa and found in the attic of an antiques shop a swayback chair of carved wood and woven cane straw with arms almost three feet long. She got ceiling fans, a small refrigerator, a simple bed. This was her new home. It was a universe away from her house in the States, from her family linen and heirloom silver.

So much stuff, she would say, things accumulated for the sake of sheer accumulation. She owned sets of fine china and dozens of glasses and wine goblets, platters and pitchers, vases and lead-glass ashtrays, and she had left all of it in boxes, in the cellar of her house and in the dining room, stacked up in corners. With all that stuff stored away, she was living in Manila in nearly bare rooms with dark wooden floors and off-white stucco walls, cooking beans in a pot she had bought at a street market.

I measured that summer by the flights she took, the places she visited, the dust roads where she ran, the mosquitoes and bars, the broken-down jeepney on a mountain road in Davao, the smell of coconut oil in the rain. By the stories she told me on the phone, and the stories she wrote. Where did I feel her farthest, and where close: airborne five thousand feet over islands of sand so white, and thin water over coral reefs; gazing hopelessly out the window of a glass hotel into the monochrome of Taipei; surrounded by men in red bandannas in an unmapped jungle; or there, at her flat in Manila, beating cockroaches in the bathtub? I recall only slivers of her summer, off-center snapshots, and her letters—from Taiwan, from Singapore, from Sri Lanka, from thirty thousand feet in the air, flitting across the Andaman Sea to the Indian Ocean, counting the gin and tonics, dashing off postcards: elephants, strange seas, monks in saffron robes.

In Colombo, wearing her faded hunter shorts, drinking a Heineken, she wrote a note while seated on a terrace high on a hill looking over a lake. She had sat for hours, reading, watching dusk

descend, the light changing on the water in the lake and the birds chasing bugs. I imagined the hill, and saw her leaning on red-clay earth, the cinders of her cigarette charring her fingertips. I could also see her in her living room in Manila, stretched out comfortably on her Indian rug, laughing at some unintended idiom of mine. I could almost feel her breath, her hand on my knee. Her face made everything around it dim.

But she was not there in my apartment, and my nights were grim. Desolate. I would warm up a can of beans and sit at my typewriter, and when I ran out of things to write, bleary from wine, I flopped down on the sofa, turned off the floor lamp, and pulled a blanket over my legs, my arms clutching a cushion. I imagined she was done with her bedtime shower, her hair damp, matted, shining. I could smell her room in Manila, the limes in the margaritas.

On some of those nights alone, when my loneliness and doubts seemed darkest, there was nothing soothing about our phone calls. Sensing my mood, she immediately would pull back, I would feel her vanishing. Frustrated, wanting to shake her, I lashed out, prickling her stoic silence, trying to

get a rise out of her. But instead, a chill fell. She had a way with silence, a mastery of it I envied, and I would flounder miserably, threatening to vanish just as she did.

One day after one of those phone calls, she wrote from Anuradhapura, in Sri Lanka, warning me that I should flee if I ever became like her. She didn’t like the way she could withhold all feeling. But she could, and she knew that we would fight always over her impulse to isolate herself, and if I did the same, if I pulled back from her, then we would both be lost.

June was gone now, and I spent July giving things away. People trooped up to my apartment, picking through my closet, taking away silk blouses, winter coats, five-hundred-dollar boots, and carrying out my framed
New Yorker
prints and bookcases, my collections of Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe. And I sold my car. No one who knew me could understand why I was getting rid of everything, why it was so easy to let go of all these things. I had always found it rather easy to walk away from things, to throw them out or give them away. Even people. But I was in a hurry now, ripping off excess, shedding that skin I had lived in half my life.

Now it was a matter of counting days, waiting to take off for Manila. I imagined the roles I would play there, inventing them, seeing myself as lover, writer, journalist, wanderer, observer. There was no defined role for me in the Philippines, nothing easily explainable, nothing in evidence. And Elizabeth, I could not talk about Elizabeth. I did not then know how to begin to tell that story.

The day my house in the suburbs was sold, the house I had left so abruptly six months earlier, I was set free to go. I walked over to Tim’s, half a mile in summer humidity, gulping down a cold beer.

Tim broke into one of those smiles that made me forgive him everything, his plans to see me that he would forget, dinners he didn’t make. We sank into his old sofa in the fading light of the afternoon, with the shutters halfway shut, his floor fan rattling. We talked about Elizabeth, and Tim was generous, wishing me good luck and love and all those things people wish for each other, those things that friends talk about at beginnings and endings. He said he envied me my obsessions, but I didn’t believe him, and we talked of little else.

Over that last month, before the departure I had scheduled for August nineteenth, a date timed to the closing on the sale of my house, which would give me the modest sum of money that would support me for a year in Manila, I would drop by to see Tim when he was in town and we would go to the backyard, where the tomato plants had grown tall and the rhododendrons were blooming. He would bring out glasses of iced coffee and bagels, cheddar, and plain crackers. He had just turned thirty, but in his Cory T-shirt and loose drawstring white pants, he seemed twenty. He saw himself flying off to crazy places and moving to Hong Kong, to live with a girlfriend there, but it was all only a fantasy. We both knew he would not go. Late in the day, Andy would bike over from his apartment and join us, bringing an onion, a can of artichokes, olives. We would sit in the backyard, with Tim’s jazz tapes playing, and drink rum straight up. Right around dusk, bloated and drowsy, Tim would light up the grill and put on a chicken, and the dark would settle over the three of us.

Tim was gone much of the time, on assignment in Washington. His house was half empty, so Andy moved in and took up the second floor, where I used to stay. I broke my lease on my apartment and friends helped me pack my remaining things into a truck and haul the load to Tim’s, where I stored boxes that over the years I would forget—a stereo player, family pictures, kitchen bowls. We jammed my rust-colored sofa against the boarded-up fireplace on the ground floor, laid my rugs in the living room, and stashed away the rest of my things in the basement. The place was transformed suddenly, a mishmash of Tim’s hand-me-downs and my terra cotta colors, a palette of burnt siennas.

The last weeks were a blur. I drank with friends, had going-away parties at restaurants, consumed bottles of white wine, countless rounds of beer. I made arrangements at my bank, closed accounts, changed addresses. I was planning to go away only for a year, and the paper had given me a leave of absence, but I was putting everything in order, performing last rites.

One day the mail brought me Elizabeth’s Manila Blues volume 3—“a last blast from a tortured brain.” She said she dreamed of my anger and my moods and awoke feeling lonely, wondering how solitary she might have been if she had never met me. She no longer brooded the way she had months earlier, during our first days together when I visited Manila, when she was uncertain about us and afraid of what our relationship would do to her life. Now there was little visible trace of the deep upheaval she had felt then, but I believed there was uncertainty still, a fear perhaps of a life new to her. When she was not traveling, she meandered around the streets of Manila, fending off beggars, buying cigarettes and Hershey’s Kisses, going to the
turo-turo
for a bite of dinner, maybe rice noodles or crispy chicken, in the rain. It was the start of the rainy season and she felt so lonely, she said, she could feel the emptiness on her skin.