The Noise of Infinite Longing (31 page)

I yanked open the drapes and unlocked the sliding glass door to the balcony overlooking the swimming pool and the bay. A blast of sunlight hit my face. Freighters in the harbor lay motionless in the lull of the afternoon. A few children played in the pool. I fell in love with Manila right there, just as I had fallen in love with NewYork at first sight when I was fourteen years old.

Leaving the sun of the balcony, I unpacked slowly, hung every shirt, every pair of pants, and washed my face. I walked down the corridor to the elevators. Moments later I was on her floor. I knocked on her door. Time stood still, and then I heard the door-

knob, the crack of the lock. She was standing before me.

Without touching her, I walked in and stood by a sofa, paralyzed, looking at her.

You look great, she said.

I thought, I’ve been flying for almost two days, I cannot possibly look great. She was blonder than I remembered, and thinner, her hair sun-bleached, her light skin deeply tanned. She’d been staying at the hotel for more than a month, had had no time to find an apart- ment. But her room had her life in Manila all over it. Flags and maps hung on the walls, and telephone messages, telegrams, and faxes were pinned to a bulletin board. She looked totally at home.

She walked to the bar and offered me a beer, and when she brought the bottle to me, she put a hand on my shoulder, a second only, and sat on the sofa across from me, her legs stretching down the length of the sofa, making it seem casual, this meeting. But we were both scared, as if meeting for the first time after an endless wait. No, as if meeting new parts of ourselves. She asked about my flight, work, acquaintances, and I asked about her latest story, the wreck of her Jeep near Davao in Zamboanga province, and all the while my eyes roamed around her room. I couldn’t quite fix my eyes on her. I got up and examined up close the things on her bulletin board, opening another beer, sitting down again. Funny, I thought, the way this set- ting makes her seem different, looser, as if, in this foreign country, she had found some freedom. Happens sometimes when you travel, gives you a sense of being new, unburdened by familiarity, even your own familiarity with yourself.You can be anybody, for a time.

It fits you, I said, this place, this room, all of this.

She smiled, dimples deepening around her mouth. Slants of sun- light fell on the sofa, on her hair, making it brighter. She had cut it, and it fell, thick and shaggy, just below her ears. She opened a pack of cigarettes and tapped it on the table and lit a match with a nail of

a finger, a habit of hers.

Yes, she said, taking a long drag, I would have to say, you were right. I had told her, months earlier when she got the assignment to cover Asia and she didn’t know if she could change her life so radi- cally, I had told her then, Do it or you’ll regret it all your life. I hardly

knew her then, but that much I knew.

You know, she said, people know you’re here. Reporters, pho- tographers, freelancers—people I had met at one newspaper or another.The hotel was occupied by journalists.Yes, I nodded, I know, I have messages in my room.

Do you want to go down to the lobby to see anybody? she asked, making it clear without saying it that she would not be going with me. She had an aversion to groups, and she defined more than two people as a group. But more than that, she wanted me to navigate alone. She didn’t want to stir up the gossip that she knew would go around about my presence in Manila.

No, I said, I don’t want to call anybody or see anybody until tomorrow.

That evening we went to a cafe in Ermita, the nightclub district nearby. We sat at a wobbly table on the sidewalk, under a Cinzano umbrella, drank wine, and picked at gambas al ajillo. Children played hopscotch and jumped rope on Remedios Circle across the street, and vendors meandered around the tables, selling cellophane- wrapped, long-stemmed red roses for a dollar a bunch. The table candles flickered, and the night was bright with the headlights of passing taxis and the neon signs of other restaurants and clubs around the circle.

Es un carnaval, Elizabeth said, throwing her head back, laughing, trying out her Spanish. She had learned it in Europe, the year she spent in Spain, and she spoke it like a Madrileña, with the sybillant
s
’s and
z
’s, something I never did.

Reminds me of home, I said, when I was growing up. San Juan was like this, loud music, noise, lights, people everywhere. I couldn’t take my eyes off the children playing hopscotch, just as I had played when I was young.The buildings around the circle seemed like repli- cas of 1930s buildings in San Juan, especially a two-story house with rounded corners and casement windows that resembled the apart- ment building across Pérez Galdós where my childhood friend Julia lived.

I felt instantly at home, as if I had known this place all my life.

Late into the evening, half drunk on wine and carefree as young girls, we hopped on a street taxi, the sort where the windows don’t work and the seats have springs breaking through the worn uphol- stery, and rode back to the hotel, the breeze in our faces, and lights flashing by. I went up to her room for one last drink, and she put Brahms on her tape deck, and we saw the night pass and the sun come up.

I

spent mornings by the pool, my skin getting darker, my face los- ing the winter pallor (I imagined I was getting younger); I sipped calamansi juice and read for hours under the canopy of the banyan trees, making up stories in my head, scribbling in my notebook. On weekdays, the hotel seemed empty.Tourism was down and the press was out working. But by late afternoon, just around the time when the pianist started playing in the Lobby Lounge, the tables began to fill with reporters and photographers filing back from a day out in the muck of Manila. We jammed tables together, ordered up beer and margaritas, and soon the tables piled up with bottles, bowls of peanuts, overflowing ashtrays. Every rumor was passed around and traded, rumor for rumor—gossip was the lifeblood of Manila—and before you knew it, a rumor of a coup or of a love affair was stated

as fact. Diplomats and visiting congressmen dropped by, and free- lancers came in flocks, looking for strings with the major newspa- pers and the networks, while shady types, treasure hunters, and old war veterans lazed around in the Tap Room and in the Lobby Lounge, drinking Johnnie Walker in those wood-paneled rooms fra- grant with orchids.

I’m coming back, I said to her one day.Want to live here.

She looked shocked.You can’t, she said, you can’t quit your job. She wanted me there, and she didn’t want me there. Mostly, I knew, she was afraid, afraid of the gossip, afraid of a relationship that she knew would completely change her life, devastate her family, and perhaps destroy her. Passion was something she dreaded. She knew the force it had, and the dangers that came with it, and the pain. It was the story of her life, as it had been the story of mine. But hers had been tampered, tamped down, buried, while mine came in bursts, in explosions, taking me with it.

I refused to listen to her. I’m coming back; I’ll get a leave of absence, I said finally.

I returned to Philadelphia, and on my first day back, I resigned. You have a bright future here, an editor said, why are you doing this? People are going to think you’re wacko.Well, maybe they will, I said, but I’ve got to do it. Okay, he said, so take a year and go and then come back.

Are you kidding? my friends at the paper were saying. I laughed, No, I’m not. I really am leaving.

But one night Tim, who was my closest friend, who had seen me through one breakup and the misery afterward, who owned the place that had become my refuge when I put my house in the sub- urbs up for sale, he said to me, You are crazy. Coming from Tim, I had to listen.We had sat up too many nights in his row house, those nights when his girlfriends weren’t calling him and he and I were

alone, drinking Maker’s Mark and smoking cigarettes until the blood vessels in his eyes were like spidery roads. There was nothing about me he didn’t know or couldn’t guess.

It’s Liz, isn’t it? he said.

Liz? It’s Elizabeth. She hates being called “Liz,” I said. All right, he said, sighing, Elizabeth, it’s Elizabeth.

No, I said, well, not entirely, it’s writing. I was spinning this story. I’ve got to write and I can’t do it here, can’t do it with this job. I’ve got to get away from here. I’ve never felt about any place like I feel about Manila, I went on. I knew that nothing I said made sense to him, or to anyone else. Lying, I said, I don’t really know what it is.

Tim had been to Manila, covering the fall of Marcos. He had smelled the tear gas and the garbage in Manila Bay. He had fallen in love with it, too. It was all he could talk about—the stabbing of a protester in front of his eyes, the blood that splattered his black boots, the first killing he had ever witnessed; and there was Marcos on his last day, singing with Imelda on a balcony at Malacañang; and the hundreds of thousands of people who massed in Rizal Park to celebrate people power, a spectacle televised around the world, but Tim was there himself, in the middle of it, with his backpack and his notebook. And he had to be thinking of the nights at the Manila Hotel, the dinners with a girlfriend there, and the street kids who surrounded him, pulling at his shirttails, following him, an American cowboy in black boots and white jeans.

He had wanted to stay, but once Cory Aquino was installed as president, once the story dropped off, the paper called him back.

You can’t do this, he said again. He was pacing the living room, going to and from the kitchen, shaking ice in his glass, putting an old Coltrane album on his turntable, emptying ashtrays, stirring a gumbo stew he was making. You’re ruining your career, he said, handing me a glass of wine. I thought of the evenings at my type-

writer, the cold pizza from the corner diner, and the evenings at restaurants with friends, the endless chatter about real estate, the drab routine at the office.

Elizabeth’s letters and her phone calls came day after day, her voice the only voice in my head. I waited for her letters, read and reread them, and bundled them in rubber bands. The weeks passed very slowly. I went to work in the mornings, my mind halfway around the world, and I came home every evening, picking up take- out on the way, hurrying to get to the mail, to sit in Tim’s old arm- chair by the phone. There was no other life left for me in Philadelphia.

After I sold my house and my car and gave away stacks of books, my bookshelves, the dresser, and the bed, the posters and the sofa, I left for Manila. It was August 1986. The rainy season had begun.

T

his time, on the day of my arrival, Elizabeth was waiting for me at the airport, not in a hotel room. She was scanning the crowd. But I saw her first. She caught my eye, gave me a palms-up wave, and moved toward me without any apparent rush. But she had a smile of wonder and a slight swing to her stride, a tilt of her head, neither looking directly at me nor away but focused all the same. She reached toward me and stroked my hair, light and casual, as if any- thing could be casual about this, and picking up a piece of luggage,

she led the way out of the terminal.

Watching her walk ahead of me—she always moved so much faster—I studied her back, her neck, her hair, streaks of white in it. She was wearing what she always wore, jeans, long sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and running shoes. In the taxi, I sat far from her, look- ing out the window, not so much at Manila because Manila was no

longer new to me, but to avoid her eyes, to find a proper distance, to avoid being drawn in too quickly. But then, for one second, I glanced over at her, the fine cheekbones, the wide mouth, the eyes that in sunlight turned a pearl-gray blue, the arc of her long neck, her hair brushing the top of her upturned collar. I was startled—she was so distinct, so oddly beautiful—that she was there. I had not invented this.

We had a year, or perhaps only weeks, months, maybe an eter- nity.We did not know how much time we had because nothing about us had come arranged, nothing had been easy, nothing had been like anything else in our lives.

T

he maids washed the laundry out back, on the roof over the garage of our apartment building, hunched over tin tubs, sink-

ing their arms up to their elbows in soapy water, pounding the clothes on washboards.They were girls from the provinces, brought to the city by uncles and brothers, and passed around, offered up for a few dollars a week.

The building’s manager, a rotund little man named Alex who lived in a room by the garage, procured the maids—nieces, cousins, he called them—and made the arrangements with the tenants. The building was a landmark where, according to Alex, the Japanese had fought room to room with American troops, where MacArthur had lived (MacArthur had lived everywhere), where diplomats had once occupied its stately rooms. But the building had fallen on hard times, like just about everything in Manila.

Alex came to our apartment periodically, checking up on us, I supposed. He never sat down. He stood by the doorway, rubbing his fleshy fingers on the stucco walls of the apartment, telling this story

about the Japanese and MacArthur, saying these walls—his palm planted on the wall—had been covered in blood. Now the walls were light gray, like the facade of the building, like all white build- ings in Manila, which turned dirty gray in a season.

We had an apartment on the second floor and every day noticed the spider webs that hung off lightbulbs and in the far corners of the ceiling. A statue of Jesus gathered dust in the hallway, the wood stairs creaked, the lights went on and off, geckos appeared at night, and cockroaches crawled over our bathtub. I loved it.

In the mornings, soon after Elizabeth was out the door, her heavy canvas bag strapped to her shoulder, notebook in hand, ready for her interviews, I walked around the corner for cigarettes and the papers. Garbage was piled up five feet high on the sidewalks and vendors scurried about like ants, clacking their wood boxes, boxes stacked with Marlboro reds and Marlboro Lights, Winstons, Carl- tons.They got American cigarettes on the black market, stolen from the PX at Clark Air Base, sold by the carton at the Cash-and-Carry and in the mercados. Just about everything could be found here, on the streets of Ermita and Malate, the tourist district (the word
tourist
was a euphemism for the red-light district). Vendors of all ages, wearing the uniform of the streets—cutoffs, ragged T-shirts, and flip-flops—hawked flowers, sticky sweet pastries, grilled pork slices, fish heads, chicken parts, and whores. The air stank of humanity, fumes, trash, and food. Filth stuck to the city, but the street sweepers in orange aprons and bandannas were out there in the mornings with their short brooms, sweeping the sidewalks, moving trash from one place to another, from the sidewalk to the gutter, and then the rains would come.