by Mia Alvar
“So where are you from?” he asked, as we shifted positions. “California?”
“New York,” I said. “It’s OK, no one ever guesses right.”
“You’re a dying breed,” he said, clutching the nape of my neck. “New York is all Brazilians and Danes now.”
I leaned back. We both knew how to hold a conversation without moving our lips too much. “Yeah, my booker says I would have been a perfect little waif, in 1950.”
“Well, you are perfect,” he said. I opened my eyes. No one ever said this, not at work. “Liberty Denim’s all about sweet, not edgy, girls. Anyway, those Danish chicks look like aliens to me.” For a moment I was flattered, but he wasn’t paying me a compliment. He was just describing things, coldly and casually, as he saw them. His hands and body were warm, but the hard denim and his taut muscles seemed to be resisting me.
—
At night I had to face the tricky question of food. It was important not to eat, of course, but important also not to faint or get light-headed in the middle of a job. One evening in our early twenties, Sabine and I pretended that our makeup was food. Makeup—boatloads of it, samples swiped from different jobs—was one thing we had plenty of. The colors had names like Mocha Fudge or Maraschino, and we kept them in the refrigerator so they’d last. It was easy to imagine they could do something for hunger. We rolled the lipsticks out of their tubes and sniffed them. I called Sabine by her shade of foundation, Caramel; and she called me by mine, Buttermilk; and we nibbled at each other.
Since room service was pricey and wouldn’t cure me of my delivery habit, I went out to eat. The dust was thick and almost glittered in the air. At least the sun had gone down. I passed a wall plastered with ads despite a POST NO BILLS warning. Old posters for Liberty Denim featured Jorge with another girl, looking as he had earlier that day: bare-chested and relaxed. I saw what would happen to me, eventually. While Jorge came across as his flesh-and-blood self, the girl was out of focus, a little blurry, not quite real. And some vandal had systematically spray-painted the girl’s face black, on every single poster, so I couldn’t see if she resembled me. She had my hair, though: a flossy margarine color.
I knew from Jorge that the girl changed “every season.” I was girl number four, and he had a three-year contract. He didn’t tell me if we were in the first, second, or third year of his contract, or how many seasons there were in a Manila year.
I went into the first restaurant I saw, which had four tables and a glass-roofed counter, like a canteen. The cashier and four teenage customers stared at me. It was the airport all over again: I felt conspicuously alone. I went up to the glass and examined my safest options. There was a noodle dish with brown cubes of tofu in it; I could pick those out and eat them and throw away the starch. Cucumber slices and julienned carrots floated in a colorless dressing that probably had sugar in it. Closest to the register was a sad-looking tub of pale shredded lettuce and quartered tomatoes. Those would work, I thought. Over my shoulder I heard someone suck their teeth, annoyed. I turned—it was one of the teenagers, her arms folded and her right foot tapping the floor behind me. “Sorry,” I said and stepped aside to let her pass. In less time than I’d spent deliberating she got her food and brought it on a tray back to her seat. Her friends, giggling and whispering, said Amerikano and the Tagalog word for “white.” I only knew it from Sabine, whose relatives had called her that, amazed at how one half of her had made her so distinct from them. The teenagers seemed to be staring at me, challenging my presence there. Laughing at who I happened to be.
I felt rebellious, wanting suddenly to answer those whispers. Give them something to stare at. I turned back to the counter and ordered every murky stew and stir-fry that I couldn’t recognize. Loneliness, whenever I felt it, hit me generally as a hole somewhere between my heart and gut, and now I tried to fill it. “Keep it,” I told the cashier who tried to hand me change. I remembered the early days of working, when a shoot wrapped for which Sabine or I or one of our friends had starved herself into seeing stars. Relief at finishing the job, an urge to spend the money we’d made, a craving for the grease and salt we’d been denying ourselves—all these things overpowered us, along with a curiosity about who could put away the most. At the table now I force-fed myself squid in its own ink and pork in its own fat. I nearly gagged on a dark pudding that stank of blood. Undressing an egg from its magenta-dyed shell, I felt the tears fall hot and fast out of my eyes into my food. When a sob rose in my throat I stuffed the egg down, barely chewing. It was saltier than a mouthful of seawater. The teenagers had left trails of sauce on their plates, so I soaked up the last puddles of grease on mine with white rice and shoveled everything like coal into the furnace of my mouth. My plates were clean. I felt disgust, and also victory. I had eaten myself sick. I won.
I looked up then from my tray into the window of the restaurant. And there, as if it had just fallen from the sky or risen from the ground, was a dress: white and gauzy, fluttering at the straps and hems, like something by Alberta Ferretti. And there was a body in the dress, a long-limbed woman who turned and walked away just as I caught her eye. She seemed to be alone, and tall for someone local. I abandoned my meal and went after her, not considering how I would find my way back. The alley from the restaurant went straight on like a tunnel for a while. She might have been in a private hurry somewhere, but now and then she would turn and, at the sight of me, speed up. The alley veered left and onto a set of stairs so suddenly that I almost fell. Either the stairs were steep or I descended slowly: I had time to notice that the walls on either side were made of old, crumbling bricks, pocked here and there with holes that could have been from bullets.
At the bottom of the stairs, the black strap of my sandal broke. A flash of white skirt hurried down another long alley. I had to limp to keep my sandal on. I followed the woman around a corner, but then lost her. The street was lit by fancy iron lanterns. Confetti and crepe streamers littered the cobblestones, and workers were sweeping them up with stick brooms. This had to be a tourist spot, I thought. At every other streetlamp was a taxi. The drivers, leaning on their doors and smoking, laughed together. One of them crushed his cigarette under his rubber slipper and nodded at me. “Taxi?” he said. Just below my ribs, I felt the pang that comes with too much movement after too much food. I looked down both ends of the street for any trace of white, but couldn’t see anything. I could taste, at the back of my throat, the bilious burning of a meal that wanted to come up. Dragging my loose sandal, I limped to the cab.
—
Our beach shoot the next day started at 4:00 a.m. so we wouldn’t lose the sun. We took a little jet plane, which listed drowsily in the air, to another island. When I undressed, Carmen gave me a look and tapped her stomach. “What’s this?” she asked. “I don’t remember this.”
I sucked it in. “Nothing,” I said. A little bloat had happened, from last night’s feast of grease and salt. I sucked in some more. “See? Abracadabra,” I said and laughed. Carmen relented and laughed too. It was always better not to apologize too much and come off like a new girl, a needy amateur. Better to act flighty and forgivable, like a supermodel.
On the beach it took two hours to pump me up and out in the right places: clouds of mousse to fatten my hair, chicken-cutlet-shaped silicone inserts for my bra. I wore a linen slip and a gold string bikini underneath. But Jorge wore only the product, the Liberty jeans. We lay down where the sand met the water. We were on our sides, propped up on elbows. When I leaned back against Jorge I noticed how blue the sky was and sighed. “Paradise,” I said, without thinking much of it.
Jorge laughed and said, inside a loud cough, “Typical.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just…paradise,” he said, in an extremely condescending way. “It’s so American.”
“You don’t know me,” I protested. “You know a story you heard once about some dumb blond girl who’s never left the States.” I thought of mentioning Sabine, and how we’d
traveled to the Philippines before, but then it seemed just like something that blonde would say.
Something tensed between Jorge and me; the energies had changed. But because we were professionals, our faces stayed the same. He kept on looking down at me with that mix of desire and attack. “Listen,” he said, “what’s the name of this ‘paradise’ island?”
“No one told me,” I said.
“Did you ask? You’ve been to this country before, right? Name one thing you know, one thing you’ve learned in your time here.”
“I’m only ever here to work.” On our previous trip, Sabine always woke up early in the morning and went out into Manila with a canvas hat and Lonely Planet guide. She’d invited me to go with her. But the jet lag had stretched me out like taffy and I just wanted to sleep. Unlike me, she hadn’t come for work, just tagged along to visit family and explore the city she hadn’t lived in since childhood. “Balete Drive,” I said. “I’ve been to Balete Drive, I know about the ghost woman. She got hit by a car. Or raped in World War Two. People say…I know someone who ran her over. He’s got the lace to prove it.”
This surprised Jorge; he almost broke the pose. “Is that true?” he said.
“The ghost story? Or that I’ve been?” I felt proud, as if the white lady proved my membership in some club I didn’t know existed.
“A guy I grew up with lives on Balete Drive,” said Jorge. “The version I know is she borrowed something, and now she wants to give it back. I like that one best. There’s no violence in it.”
We stayed out for as long as the sun was high. “Here we go. Perfect. Right there,” said the photographer. The sand was bright as a blank canvas. As we dressed I felt a little desperate not to be, again that night, the one lonesome person in this city of laughing brown faces. I reached for Jorge’s arm. “Saan tayo?” I said. Sabine’s Lonely Planet had taught me that one.
He smiled—forgiving me, I guess. “Anywhere we want,” he said.
—
We rode a jeepney, it was called, tricked out with streamers and painted in the colors of a carousel. The sides read Bubble Gum, Candy, Cookie, and Lollipop. “The driver’s kids, no question,” said Jorge. On my way in, I banged my head hard against the metal entrance; I didn’t know to duck. Or maybe jeepneys were made for shorter people. “Manila’s dangerous like that,” Jorge said, with a laugh. “It ain’t Kansas, if you know what I mean.” We passed my hotel, the walls of Liberty Denim ads with Jorge and his faceless girl, the little restaurant where I had eaten. In the district of cobblestones and iron lampposts Jorge said, “There was a festival last night, for the Virgin Mary’s birthday.”
“A parade?” I said.
“Yeah. They bring Mary statues out of all the churches. Girls get all dolled up in their little white dresses to watch.”
He took me to a karaoke bar, Crescendo, and dedicated a song to me. One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small. It wasn’t the first time I’d been serenaded with that—a tough song to listen to in the first place, and Jorge sang it badly. He swirled an arm above his head, genie-like. Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know….
I smiled as he returned to our table. “Don’t quit your day job.”
“Your turn,” he said.
I shook my head. “I take a good picture—that’s it.”
“I don’t believe you. What if you didn’t take a good picture? What would you do?”
My mind went blank, and hummed like feedback from a microphone. “What would you do if you couldn’t take pictures?”
“Me? Oh man, what wouldn’t I do?” Jorge stretched his arms and laced his fingers behind his head. Looking down at his stomach, he said, “Someday this’ll be a keg and not a six-pack. You know? I would love to act.”
“No cliché there,” I said. In the last few years Sabine had thought about acting, and even landed a few walk-on parts here and there. She would rehearse scenes with me even though I was no good at reading aloud. One scene involved a woman who couldn’t work because of a traffic accident and sued the driver for loss of earnings. I looked at “loss of earnings” too quickly and said “loss of earrings.” The misreading stuck. Every time we practiced I’d say “earrings” and then “sorry, earnings.” I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to sue someone for loss of earrings? And get back all the missing earrings you had left in bars or beds or clubs or cabs? “You’re kind of an idiot, Alice,” Sabine had said, but there was laughter and forgiveness in it.
A fat woman got onstage and started on that song from Titanic. Jorge was gazing very intently at the karaoke screen, with its beaches and mountain ranges and lovers walking hand in hand above the neon lyrics. A shadow of stubble had begun on his jaw. “You know, you’d get so much work in New York,” I said to him suddenly. For a second I imagined him sharing the apartment with me, taking up the room I had denied the Czech and Argentine and Senegalese girls. “Did you ever think about living there? In my agency the ethnic boys are huge.”
“Why would I?” Jorge looked amused. “All the hot American girls come here,” he said—and smiled, hotly.
—
Day three they shot us in a studio. “What happened here?” asked Carmen, frowning up at me. There was a bruised ridge, the size of a baby carrot, in the middle of my forehead, where I’d knocked into the jeepney. She called the photographer over.
I prayed I was less trouble for them to keep than to replace. It was not completely true that flexibility was my only skill, or that I could do nothing but model. During lean months in New York, I used to go out with some other young pretty people who knew how to dress and laugh. Cafés and bars had us sit near the windows, on their slowest nights, and act like we were having the time of our lives. Some of these places paid us; others let us eat and drink for free; others said they would pay us, then not only didn’t pay us but even charged us for the food and drinks. I had also worked as a shot girl, cinched into a dirndl or a corset or a sailor dress, depending on the liquor company. I circulated dance floors to peddle sticky-sweet drinks in test tubes or dosage cups. College boys became theatrical when drunk, said things like “You are so hot it hurts me,” and tipped extra for a body shot or a little pawing—though we were supposed to say no to that. One night a girl saw her boyfriend suck the salt off my neck before downing his tequila. It was true his mouth lingered on me too long. His tongue was oddly cold, and furry in texture, and I said, “Are you checking for a pulse, or what?” I had taken his money and turned away by the time his girlfriend announced herself. She lunged at me from behind, knocking a rainbow of test-tube flavors out of my arms and clawing my neck. The next morning my booker called about a go-see. Sabine helped me sponge foundation over the evidence: a hickey from the drunken kid and fingernail tracks from his jealous girlfriend. “Most action I’ve had all month,” I told Sabine. But that was a bad night. Other nights were better, and the gum of spit and sweat and alcohol washed off easily in the shower.
“She’ll be in the background anyway,” said the photographer, squinting up at me. “As long as we don’t take her profile…”
Carmen was annoyed. “If I needed a rhino,” she said, “I would’ve held a go-see at the zoo.” Her words buzzed at my forehead and at my stomach, which was flatter today, at least. The photographer directed me to the porch of a fake grass hut on stilts. The studio was lit to look like dawn. I wore a cotton eyelet bedsheet that I gathered at my chest, my hair deliberately tousled.
Jorge stood a few feet in front of the hut. “I’d do this,” he told me, picking up last night’s conversation as if no time had passed. He gazed at our backdrop.
“Make studio sets?” I said.
He looked insulted. “Live off the land.”
The “land” was a Technicolor vista of rice terraces and sky. The photographer shouted to me about Marilyn curves and a time in America when butter was golden. The directions sounded strange to me. Where I came from, everyone was over people like me; they were always looking for the Next Big Thi
ng, and It Girls came in brown and onyx-black. “Peaches and cream,” said Carmen, and I loathed them all for loving something so commonplace—even if that commonplace thing was me.
—
After work, Jorge sped me into his car, which had that cooped-up airplane smell inside. He didn’t say where we were going. I recognized the place slowly. Balete Drive reminded me a little of the French Quarter in New Orleans: tall, sturdy-looking trees, large old houses set far back from the traffic, scrollwork on the gates and shutters on the windows. Some of them were walled in. Vines hung down from the trees and brushed over Jorge’s windshield as we drove. We stopped at one of the iron gates, which was unlocked. Jorge parked the car next to a motorcycle in the driveway.
I followed him inside to yet another huddle of brown limbs and laughter and chatter. Some men sat at a low table with cigarettes and beer bottles, playing bingo. “Hoy!” they shouted when they saw Jorge, and one man—dressed in Jorge’s usual work ensemble of jeans and no shirt—jumped to his feet and half-hugged Jorge, half-shook his hand. “Alice, this is my friend Will,” said Jorge. Will welcomed me and kissed my hand, then turned and ruffled Jorge’s hair. A young woman was curled up on the sofa, bottle-feeding a baby. Jorge murmured something to her, kissing her cheek and stroking the baby’s bald head. “Alice, this is Will’s sister Rose,” he said. Rose just smiled and looked at her baby, swaying with it. I couldn’t tell the baby’s sex until Jorge took it from her, bringing it up close to me. Two ruby studs glinted in the tiny earlobes. “I’d have a kid. And raise it well,” he whispered to me. “I’d do that in a heartbeat.” To the room, he announced: “Alice has heard stories about Balete Drive.”