It was cold up there in Shanghai, and it’s gotten warmer every day since. Some days it’s even been hot and muggy. But around the time Manila heaves into view, a warm breeze springs up over the deck and all of the Marines sigh, as if they have all ejaculated in unison.
Manila’s perfume
Fanned by the coconut palms
The thighs of Glory
Manila’s spreading tile roofs have a mestizo shape about them, half-Spanish and half-Chinese. The city has a concave seawall with a flat promenade on the top. Strollers turn and wave to the Marines; some of them blow kisses. A wedding party is gushing down the steps of a church and across the boulevard to the seawall, where they are getting their pictures taken in the flattering peach-colored light of the sunset. The men are in their fancy, gauzy Filipino shirts, or in U.S. military uniforms. The women are in spectacular gowns and dresses. The Marines holler and whistle at them and the women turn towards them, hitching up their skirts slightly so that they won’t trip, and wave enthusiastically. The Marines get woozy and practically fall overboard.
As their ship is easing into its dock, a crescent-shaped formation of flying fish erupts from the water. It moves away like a dune being blown across the desert. The fish are silver and leaf-shaped. Each one strikes the water with a metallic click, and the clicks merge into a crisp ripping noise. The crescent glides beneath a pier, flowing around its pilings, and disappears in the shadows underneath.
Manila, the Pearl of the Orient, early on a Sunday evening, the 7th of December, 1941. In Hawaii, on the other side of the Date Line, it is only just past midnight. Bobby Shaftoe and his comrades have a few hours of freedom. The city is modern, prosperous, English-speaking, and Christian, by far the wealthiest and most advanced city in Asia, practically like being back home in the States. For all its Catholicity, it has areas that seem to have been designed, from the foundation-stones upwards, to the specifications of horny sailors. You get to those parts of town by turning right once your feet are on dry land.
Bobby Shaftoe turns left, politely excuses himself past a legion of excited prostitutes, and sets his course on the looming walls of Intramuros. He stops only to buy a sheaf of roses from a vendor in the park, who is doing land-office business. The park and the walls above it are crowded with strolling lovers, the men mostly in uniforms and the women in demure but stunning dresses, twirling parasols on their shoulders.
A couple of fellows driving horse-drawn taxis want to do business with Bobby Shaftoe but he turns them down. A taxi will only get him there faster, and he is too nervous to get there fast. He walks through a gate in the wall and into the old Spanish city.
Intramuros is a maze of buff-colored stone walls rising abruptly from narrow streets. The first-floor windows along the sidewalks are guarded by black ironwork cages. The bars swell, swirl, and sprout finedly hammered leaves. The second stories hang out overhead, sporting gas lights that are just now being lit by servants with long, smoking poles. The sound of laughter and music drifts out of the windows above, and when he passes by the archways that open into the inner courtyards, he can smell flowers back in the gardens.
Damned if he can tell these places apart. He remembers the street name of Magallanes, because Glory told him once it was the same thing as “Magellan.” And he remembers the view of the cathedral from the Pascuals’ window. He wanders around a block a couple of times, certain that he is close. Then he hears an exaltation of girlish laughter coming from a second-story window, and moves toward it like a jellyfish sucked into an intake pipe. It all comes together. This is the place. The girls are all gossiping, in English, about one of their instructors. He does not hear Glory’s voice but he thinks he hears her laughter.
“Glory!” he says. Then he says it louder. If they hear him, they pay him no mind. Finally he winds up and flings the bouquet of roses like a potato-masher grenade over the wooden railing, through a narrow gap between the mother-of-pearl shutters, and into the room.
Miraculous silence from within the room, and then gales of laughter. The nacre shutters part with slow, agonizing coyness. A girl of nineteen steps out onto the balcony. She is dressed in the uniform of a nursing student. It is as white as starlight shining on the North Pole. She has let her long black hair down to brush it, and it stirs languidly in the evening breeze. The last ruddy light of the sunset makes her face glow like a coal. She hides behind the bouquet for a moment, buries her nose in it, inhales deeply, peeking out at him over the blossoms with her black eyes. Then she lowers the bouquet gradually to reveal her high cheeks, her perfect little nose, the fantastic sculpture of her lips, and teeth, white but fetchingly crooked, barely visible. She is smiling.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bobby Shaftoe says, “your cheekbones are like a fucking snowplow.”
She puts her finger to her lips. The gesture of anything touching Glory’s lips puts an invisible spear through Shaftoe’s chest. She eyes him for a while, establishing, in her own mind, that she has the boy’s attention and that he is not going anywhere. Then she turns her back on him. The light grazes her buttocks, showing nothing but suggesting cleavage. She goes back inside and the shutter glides shut behind her.
Suddenly the room full of girls becomes quiet, except for occasional ripples of suppressed laughter. Shaftoe bites his tongue. They are screwing it all up. Mr. or Mrs. Pascual will notice their silence and become suspicious.
Ironwork clangs and a big gate swings open. The porter beckons him inside. Shaftoe follows the old fellow down the black, arched tunnel of the porte-cochere. The hard soles of his shiny black shoes skid on the cobblestones. A horse back in the stable whinnies at the smell of his aftershave. Sleepy American music, slow-dance stuff from the Armed Forces station, spills tinnily from a radio in the porter’s nook.
Flowering vines grow up the stone walls of the courtyard. It is a tidy, quiet, enclosed world, almost like being indoors. The porter waves him in the direction of one of the stairways that lead up to the second floor. Glory calls it the entresuelo and says that it’s really a floor between the floors, but it looks like a full-fledged, regular floor to Bobby Shaftoe. He mounts the steps and looks up to see Mr. Pascual standing there, a tiny bald man with glasses and a trim little mustache. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt, American style, and khaki trousers, and slippers, and is holding a glass of San Miguel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Private Shaftoe! Welcome back,” he says.
So. Glory has decided to play this one by the book. The Pascuals have been alerted. A few hours of socializing now stand between Bobby Shaftoe and his girl. But a Marine is never fazed by such setbacks.
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Pascual, but I am a corporal now.”
Mr. Pascual puts his cigarette in his mouth and shakes Corporal Shaftoe’s hand. “Well, congratulations! I just saw your uncle Jack last week. I don’t think he had any idea you were on your way back.”
“It was a surprise to everyone, sir,” Bobby Shaftoe says.
Now they are on a raised walkway that runs around the courtyard. Only livestock and servants live at ground level. Mr. Pascual leads them around to a door that takes them into the entresuelo. The walls here are rough stone, the ceilings are simple painted planks. They pass through a dark, somber office where Mr. Pascual’s father and grandfather used to receive the managers of the family’s haciendas and plantations. For a moment, Bobby Shaftoe gets his hopes up. This level has a few rooms that back in the old days were apartments for high-ranking servants, bachelor uncles, and spinster aunts. Now that the hacienda business ain’t what it used to be, the Pascuals are renting them out to female students. Perhaps Mr. Pascual is leading him directly to Glory.
But this goes the way of all foolish, horny illusions as Shaftoe finds himself at the foot of a vast staircase of polished nara wood. He can see pressed-tin ceiling up there, chandeliers, and the imposing superstructure of Mrs. Pascual, contained within a mighty bodice that looks like something dreamed up by naval engineers. They ascend the stairs into
the antesala, which according to Glory is strictly for casual, drop-in visitors but is fancier than any room Bobby Shaftoe has ever seen. There are big vases and pots all over the place, supposedly old, and supposedly from Japan and China. A fresh breeze runs through; he looks out a window and sees, neatly framed in it, the green dome of the cathedral with its Celtic cross on top, just as he remembered it. Mrs. Pascual holds out her hand and Shaftoe clasps it. “Mrs. Pascual,” he says, “thank you for welcoming me into your home.”
“Please sit down,” she says, “we want to hear everything.”
Shaftoe sits in a fancy chair next to the piano, adjusts his trousers a bit so that they will not cramp his erect penis, checks his shave. It probably has a few good hours left. A wing of airplanes drones overhead. Mrs. Pascual is giving instructions to the maid in Tagalog. Shaftoe examines the crusted lacerations on his knuckles and wonders whether Mrs. Pascual has the slightest idea of what she would be in for if he really told her everything. Perhaps a little anecdote about hand-to-hand combat with Chinese river pirates on the banks of the Yangtze would break the ice. Through a door and down the hall, he can see a corner of the family chapel, all Gothic arches, a gilded altar, and in front of it an embroidered kneeler worn threadbare by the patellas of Mrs. Pascual.
Cigarettes are brought round, stacked in a large lacquer box like artillery shells in a crate. They drink tea and exchange small talk for what seems like about thirty-six hours. Mrs. Pascual wants to be reassured, over and over again, that everything is fine and that there will not be a war. Mr. Pascual obviously believes that war is just around the corner, and mostly broods. Business has been good lately. He and Jack Shaftoe, Bobby’s uncle, have been shipping a lot of stuff between here and Singapore. But business will get a lot worse soon, he thinks.
Glory appears. She has changed out of her student’s uniform and into a dress. Bobby Shaftoe nearly topples backward out of the window. Mrs. Pascual formally reintroduces them. Bobby Shaftoe kisses Glory’s hand in what he thinks is more than likely a very gallant gesture. He’s glad he did, because Glory is palming a tiny wadded-up note which ends up in his hand.
Glory takes a seat and is duly issued her own teacup. Another eternity of small talk. Mr. Pascual asks him for the eighty-seventh time whether he has touched base with Uncle Jack yet, and Shaftoe reiterates that he literally just stepped off the boat and will certainly see Uncle Jack tomorrow morning. He excuses himself to the bathroom, which is an old-fashioned two-holer mounted above deep shafts that must descend all the way to hell. He unwads and reads Glory’s note, memorizes the instructions, tears it up and sprinkles it down the hole.
Mrs. Pascual allows the two young lovers a full half hour of “private” time together, meaning that the Pascuals leave the room and only come back every five minutes or so to check up on them. There is a painfully elaborate and lengthy good-bye ceremony which ends in Shaftoe returning to the street and Glory waving to him from her balcony.
Half an hour later, they are doing tongue judo in the back of a horse-drawn taxi galloping over the cobblestones toward the nightclubs of Malate. The extraction of Glory from the Pascual residence was a simple matter for a highly motivated China Marine and a squadron of saucy nursing students.
But Glory must be kissing him with her eyes open because all of a sudden she wriggles loose and says to the taxi driver, “Stop! Please stop, sir!”
“What is it?” Shaftoe says blurrily. He looks around and sees nothing but a great big old stone church looming up above them. This brings a preliminary stab of fear. But the church is dark, there’s no Filipinas in long dresses, no Marines in dress uniforms, it can’t be his wedding.
“I want to show you something,” Glory says, and clambers down out of the taxi. Shaftoe has to pursue her into the place—the Church of San Augustin. He’s gone by this pile many times but he never reckoned he would come inside—on a date.
She stands at the bottom of a huge staircase and says, “See?”
Shaftoe looks up into darkness, thinks there might be a stained-glass window or two up there, maybe a Laceration of Christ or an Impalement of the Blessed Thorax, but—
“Look down,” Glory says, and taps one miniature foot against the first tread of the staircase. It is a single great big huge slab of granite.
“Looks like ten or twenty tons of rock there I’d estimate,” he says authoritatively.
“It came from Mexico.”
“Ah, go on!”
Glory smiles at him. “Carry me up the stairs.” And in case Shaftoe’s thinking of refusing, she sort of falls into him, and he has no choice but to catch her up in his arms. She traps his nape in the crook of her arm, the better to pull her face close to his, but what he remembers is how the silk of her sleeve feels against the freshly shaved skin of his neck. He begins the ascent. Glory doesn’t weigh much, but after four steps he has broken a fine sweat. She is watching him, from four inches away, for signs of fatigue, and he feels himself blushing. Good thing that the whole staircase is lit up by about two candles. There’s a lovely bust of a thorn-crowned Jesus with long parallel blood-drops running down his face, and on the right—
“These giant stones you are walking on were quarried in Mexico, centuries and centuries ago, before America was even a country. They were brought over in the bottoms of the Manila Galleons, as ballast.” She pronounces it bayast.
“I’ll be damned.”
“When those galleons arrived, the stones were brought out of their bellies, one by one, and taken here to the Church of San Agustin, and piled up. Each stone on top of the last year’s stone. Until finally after many, many years this staircase was finished.”
After a while it seems to Shaftoe as though it’s going to take at least that many years to reach the top of the damn thing. The summit is adorned with a life-sized Jesus carrying a cross that appears to be at least as heavy as one of those stair-treads. So who’s he to complain? Then Glory says, “Now carry me down, so you will remember the story.”
“You think I’m some horny jarhead who won’t remember a story unless it’s got a pretty girl in it?”
“Yes,” Glory says, and laughs in his face. He carries her down to the bottom again. Then, before she goes off on some other tangent, he carries her straight out the door and into the taxi.
Bobby Shaftoe is not one to lose his cool in the heat of action, but the rest of the evening is a blurry fever dream to him. Only a few impressions penetrate the haze: alighting from the taxi in front of a waterfront hotel; all of the other boys gaping at Glory; Bobby Shaftoe glaring at them, threatening to teach them some manners. Slow dancing with Glory in the ballroom, Glory’s silk-clad thigh gradually slipping between his legs, her firm body pressing harder and harder against his. Strolling along the seawall, hand in hand beneath the starlight. Noticing that the tide is out. Ex changing a look. Carrying her down from the seawall to the thin strip of rocky beach beneath it.
By the time he is actually fucking her, he has more or less lost consciousness, he is off in some fantastic, libidinal dream. He and Glory fuck without the slightest hesitation, without any doubts, without any troublesome thinking whatsoever. Their bodies have spontaneously merged, like a pair of drops running together on a windowpane. If he is thinking anything at all, it is that his entire life has culminated in this moment. His upbringing in Oconomowoc, high school prom night, deer hunting in the Upper Peninsula, Parris Island boot camp, all of the brawls and struggles in China, his duel with Sergeant Frick, they are wood behind the point of a spear.
Sirens are blowing somewhere. He startles back to awareness. Has he been here all night long, holding Glory up against the seawall, her thighs wrapped around his waist? That would not be possible. The tide hasn’t come in at all.
“What is it?” she says. Her hands are clasped around the back of his neck. She lets go and runs them down his chest.
Still holding her up, his hands making a sling under her warm and flawless ass, Shaftoe backs away from the seawall a
nd turns around on the beach, looking at the sky. He sees searchlights beginning to come on. And it ain’t no Hollywood premiere.
“It’s war, baby,” he says.
FORAYS
* * *
THE LOBBY OF THE MANILA HOTEL IS ABOUT THE size of a football field. It smells like last year’s perfume, rare tropical orchids, and bug spray. There is a metal detector set up at the front door, because the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe happens to be staying here for a couple of days. Big Africans in good suits stand around the place in clusters of two and three. Mini-throngs of Nipponese tourists, in their Bermuda shorts, sandals and white socks, have lodged themselves in the deep, thick, wide sofas and sit quietly, waiting for a prearranged signal. Upper-class Filipino children brandish cylindrical potato chip canisters like tribal chieftains carrying ceremonial maces. A dignified old bellman carrying a hand-pumped tank circulates around the defensive perimeter and silently sprays insecticide against the baseboard. Enter Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, in a turquoise polo shirt embroidered with the logo of one of the bankrupt high-tech companies that he and Avi have founded, and relaxed-fit blue jeans held up with suspenders, and bulky athletic shoes that once were white.
As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes Matter. He approaches the registration counter quickly so that the ravishing young woman in the navy-blue uniform will not see his feet. A couple of bellhops are engaged in a pathetic, Sisyphean contest with his bag, which has roughly the dimensions and mass of a two-drawer filing cabinet. “You will not be able to find technical books there,” Avi told him, “bring anything you might conceivably need.”
Randy’s suite is a bedroom and living room, both with fourteen-foot ceilings, and a corridor along one side containing several closets and various plumbing-related technologies. The entire thing is lined in some kind of tropical hardwood stained to a lovely glowing auburn, which would be dismal in the northern latitudes but, here, gives it a cozy and cool feeling. The two main rooms each have huge windows with tiny signs by the latch handles warning of tropical insects. Each room is defended from its windows by a multilayered system of interlocking barriers: incredibly massive wooden shutters that rumble back and forth on tracks, like freight trains maneuvering in a switching yard; a second layer of shutters consisting of two-inch squares of nacre held in a polished wooden grid, sliding on its own set of tracks; window sheers, and finally, heavy-gauge blackout curtains, each suspended from its own set of clanging industrial rails.
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