Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  The packers came, and once again our life was crammed into boxes, brown-taped, roped, and stuffed into a van and taken away to be loaded onto a freighter that would disappear in the sapphire seas of the Pacific, churning through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean, passing only miles from the island where I was born, and turning north, far north, to New York harbor.

  The house was a desert, colorless now that we were leaving it. The movers left footprints on our cedar plank floors, and there were scraps of boxes and pieces of cardboard, brown wrapping paper and rolls of tape. We left behind the beds, a wicker sideboard, the white rattan sofa, but the place still looked barren. We locked the front screen door behind us and ran down the steps into the waiting car—it was Rolly seeing us off. Elizabeth carried Boom in his new travel cage. This time I did not glance back as the car pulled out. I did not wave.

  We sat apart, each taking up a corner of the back seat, looking out the windows at scenes so familiar, they had become nearly invisible, but this time they were frozen frames—the squatters, the half-naked kids in the mud, the bay green-gray and flat, the colors flashing by. I heard Rolly say, “You’ll be back someday. But when you come back, this country will be nothing but garbage piles and funeral homes. Boom is so lucky. Going to America!”

  At ten in the morning on December tenth, with Boom in his cage in the cargo hold of the United plane, we boarded the flight to San Francisco, and when the plane lifted off, Elizabeth pressed her face to the window and took my hand and said, “This country can break your heart.”

  PART III

  8

  NEW YORK HAD ALWAYS been a seduction. It would always be the city that stole my heart when I was fourteen, when the city seemed to rise to meet me as I peered down on it from my window seat on a Pam Am clipper. The buildings shooting into the sky seemed great monuments to me, defying gravity, beyond imagination. I was taken by the city instantly and promised myself that one day I would walk down Park Avenue and Fifth and Central Park and have exciting evenings at the theater and live in a garret in the Village, where I would write all those poems pent up inside me. But nothing like that had happened when I returned to the city when I was nineteen years old, out of college, a dreamer getting on the train in South Carolina and riding north with twenty dollars in my wallet, head in the clouds.

  I had no such illusions in January 1989. With the crunch of dirty snow under our feet and icy winds tossing about us, Elizabeth and I looked for an apartment for days and wound up renting a fifth-floor walkup in the Upper West Side, near Central Park, a brownstone with foxhound pictures framed and hung on the wallpapered foyer walls, emerald-green carpets on the stairs, and carved balusters.

  Our furniture came in batches, my sofa and rugs from Tim’s, and, months later, the Manila shipment, which came in airtight containers unloaded at the docks and pitchforked into a six-wheeler, which brought it to our stoop, the men puffing and panting as they lifted and shouldered each piece up five flights of narrow stairs, tearing the wallpaper, nicking the plaster. We crammed it all into three cramped rooms, nearly sunless, where light filtered through a soot-smeared skylight. The windows of the living room, which was in the rear, looked out on weather-streaked faded yellow brick, the back side of a towering apartment building.

  The apartment had its charms: dark hardwood floors, a red-brick fireplace that evoked nights by the hearth, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall, a Mexican tile kitchen, and a garden roof of tarpaper, potted plants, and withered vines, with deck chairs set out for alfresco twilights. I squeezed my desk against the window in the second bedroom and made room for a twin bed for guests. The windows of both bedrooms opened out on a leafy street, looking down into the French doors of a maisonette across the street and the steam pipe in the corner, which blew hard all winter.

  We were jolted awake in the middle of the night by the screech and whistles of car alarms, police sirens, ambulances, and jackhammers on Central Park West. Boom, who’d survived the trauma of traveling in a cage in a dark and cold airplane cargo hold across the Pacific, hid for days under our bed or up in the kitchen cabinets, and so we began our new life.

  Elizabeth got a job with a magazine, working out of an office with her nameplate on the door and writing pieces culled from files reported by correspondents around the world. Gone were the T-shirts and bandannas, the tennis shoes and jeans. Here she had to thread into her stories the perspectives honed at the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations, and by sitting in, in her best silk, on occasional boardroom breakfasts with Kissinger. It didn’t surprise me that she seemed comfortable there. This was inbred in her, a social polish that came naturally. But she was only passing time, waiting to go overseas.

  I was working in a pantheon. I walked by the same names I had read in the Times since my early days as a newsroom clerk in Columbia, South Carolina, bylines I had known at a distance for decades. Every afternoon I arrived in the newsroom on the third floor and crossed the long rust-carpeted corridor past desks piled high with books and unopened manuscripts. Heads bent over word processors—graying heads, bald heads—women in long black skirts, their hair wind-whipped, older men in suspenders and rumpled Brooks Brothers jackets. These were the legends.

  They used to say that people went to the Times and died there. I believed it. A sunless pallor came over your face, along with creases on your forehead and a definite slouch to your shoulders. I still have the ID picture they took on my first day. There was a smooth look on my face, a genuine smile, and my hair had life to it, shiny and dark. I was just out of Manila, still tanned, still fresh-looking, allowing myself big hopes.

  But right from the start, I was not what you would call a rousing success on the Foreign Desk. I didn’t throw myself into that work. On the graveyard shift, I came in every midafternoon and plunked down at my assigned desk, hung my jacket on the back of my chair, and cranked down the seat, which was left too high by the tall fellow who sat there in the mornings. The top of the desk was sticky from years of spilled drinks. Copyeditors worked in a cluster of ten desks jammed together, feet away from the Foreign backfield, where assigning editors handled reporters, did the heavy lifting on stories, and made the key decisions. The Copy Desk was something else, a rung below. We were grunts in boot camp, word technicians, or lifers who had lost ambition.

  Midnight, sometimes one in the morning, after the last page proofs had been checked and marked up for the last edition and the janitors were emptying the trash cans and vacuuming the carpets, I would sign off, throw out my collection of half-drunk coffee cups, and slog out of the newsroom, down the elevator to West Forty-Third Street, which was loud with the idling engines of the newspaper delivery trucks. Huddled down against the winter wind or the cloying summer heat—it did not matter which, as weather on that block always seemed the same to me, the grime unrelieved—I walked down to Eighth Avenue, by patrolmen and truckers at the deli, and hustlers in glittering wigs and beggars sprawled on garbage bags. It was a risky block then, before the regeneration of Times Square.

  There were no collegial beers after work, no dive bar. Everyone scurried their separate ways to catch the subway, the last train to Westchester, the bus to Montclair or Hoboken across the river. After a few months of this tedious routine, working the night shifts and on weekends, too, my once tanned skin took on a fluorescent gray color, a sallow cast. I had pouches under my eyes, and my hair had a droopy look, flattened around an aging face.

  Elizabeth had the power surge she usually experienced in new jobs. She immersed herself, and, a quick study, she was soon in command of her work. She had late Friday-night dinners with the office crowd, with bottles of fine wine. And when she was done with her day, which started at the normal hour of ten and usually finished around six, she did not have to walk down to Eighth Avenue for a cab at midnight or slide on spit on the Times Square subway stairs. Keeping in mind that I didn’t have the office life she did, she would bring me leftovers from her dinners and would always wait up for me. S
he could hear me on the landing, shuffling up that last long flight, turning the doorknob of the apartment door, and double-locking it behind me. She waited for me to come in and, springing up from the armchair where she had been seated, already in pajamas, her hair damp from her bath, she would stand expectantly, with a hopeful smile. But she could read my mood in seconds, the way I yanked off my coat and threw it on the sofa. I would go directly to the fridge and grab a can of beer, without a touch or a smile for her.

  I always sat in the narrow loveseat, and she across from me in an old armchair. We smoked a few cigarettes, talked about my day: the rejected headlines, the glacial pace, the prissy editor who carried a schedule sheet on a clipboard, assigning us work shifts, looking down on me with his lips pursed. I ranted on and on. She laughed at some of my stories but was more often pained, seeing the toll the job was taking. Night after night she would go to bed alone, but I would stay up late, having one last cigarette, one last beer, trying to figure out what was going wrong. After a while, after the first months, I had no funny stories to tell her after work. The early enthusiasm I had for my job in the first few weeks had gone. It was all showing on my face, in the stoop of my back when I walked to the subway, the life of Manhattan dead to me.

  Summer, then fall 1989. I stopped smoking and stashed away the few pages of the book I had completed, shoved the pages in an envelope in the bottom of my desk drawer. “Someday you’ll do it,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just not the right time now.” But I felt hopeless, defeated, and let myself slide into the old doubts. Perhaps for that reason, I was trying harder at work to prove myself. I memorized the style book and polished my headlines and caught obscure errors in copy. I stopped glaring at the finicky editor who brought his own cloth rag to clean his screen and lived on a diet of yogurt and tofu. After a while, the eccentricities of copyeditors became normal. I didn’t notice anymore the editor, already twenty years in service, who opened his large umbrella and propped it on his desk to shield him from anyone passing by. Eventually I got a turn on the backfield and I felt the lift that recognition can give, the old newspaper charge.

  We saw few of our reporters, could go years without meeting them face-to-face. But on the occasions when one or another came to town on home leave, from Rio or Warsaw or Jerusalem, from any one of the forty bureaus the Times maintained overseas, he (almost always he) would come by to meet all of us on the desk. Courteous and dressed in fine tailored suits, the correspondents looked and behaved more like diplomats than the foreign correspondents in our crowd in Manila. Even the young who’d gotten their start on minor outposts such as the Ivory Coast and the Caribbean had their hair trimmed and their poplin jackets pressed. Nobody looked rumpled.

  Every morning I took a walk up and down Columbus and Amsterdam to pick up magazines and flowers, milk or cigarettes, and I would suddenly halt, as in a fog, at the sight of a face, the thick black hair of a girl I knew immediately had to be a Filipina, round hips, pout, sweet lilt. Or sometimes, when I came out of the apartment and was struck by the evocative tropical smell of bus fumes and warm rain, I would feel it inside my body, the smell of the tropics, right there on Broadway.

  Some of our friends from Manila showed up occasionally in New York, a rotation of drop-ins and overnight guests. “That’s one thing about New York,” Elizabeth liked to say. “Everyone comes through here.”

  Kay lived nearby, and saved videotapes of news programs on the Philippines, hoarded letters from friends there, and spent days in her apartment going through pictures and faxes of newspaper clippings from Manila. Camilla flew in from London, then holed up for days at the Pierre. Sandro dropped in too, looking raffish and seductive as always, smoking up New York. He seemed younger, flushed with lust for a lithe Turkish stewardess he had met on one of his flights. Things had changed in Manila, he said. He had left Candy, had closed down his house and studio, had quit the magazine job, and was planning to move to Jerusalem. Giving us a shock, he broke the news that our homes on P. Lovina were being torn down to make way for an expansion of EDSA, the expressway that had been a symbol of the People Power Revolution. His glow made my mood darken, and I bristled when he asked if I was still writing. Worse, I was sure he could sense that Elizabeth and I had strayed since the days he knew us, when we had seemed in lockstep and confident in our relationship. That evening in New York, the three of us sat in our living room for hours, rehashing our lives, and then, with lush kisses on both cheeks to each of us, crunching embraces, and an extravagant “Ciao!,” he was gone, leaving us with the heavy sound of his steps down the stairs.

  Candy came during the Christmas holidays. She was thinner, even thinner than she had been in Manila, and was still mourning her breakup with Sandro. But she was making a valiant effort to cheer herself with a shopping spree for clothes and gifts on Madison Avenue, dinners in Greenwich Village, and plans to leave the Philippines. After the excitement on her arrival at our apartment, she cried over a glass of wine, heartbroken but hardened, and feigning optimism that she would find a way out of Manila and a new life. We caught up on gossip—we knew the same people and kept track—and her singsong voice carried Manila in it. But I noticed too that she was studying Elizabeth closely, and studying me. I saw in her eyes a flicker of concern that we seemed so different than we had been in Manila.

  We were successful, true. I had a paycheck and enjoyed the status that came automatically with a job at the Times. But it was all a surface gloss. We were both unhappy doing office work and feeling trapped and at the same time displaced or suspended, somehow out of step. We were marking time until we could leave New York. Around that time, Nick came to town. We had dinner, drinks. He was dashing as always, sun-bleached, tousle-headed in his safari shirt, downing Dos Equis at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from our apartment. He was on his way back to India. “What are you doing sitting in an office on Madison Avenue?” he asked Elizabeth, needling her. He could always get to her, knew her soft spots, and I could see her jaw clamping. She grabbed his cigarettes and took a swig of beer.

  “I’m taking a break.” She said she was tired of the road and was expanding her understanding of foreign policy. “You know, waiting for an assignment.” He twirled his mustache, looking skeptical. He had a few wrinkles around his brow, baggy eyes, some gray facial hair, but the years didn’t show on him. He swore that he kept trim and fit by drinking beer. He was the old Nick, filling us in on his latest escapade, an overland trip to Kabul, dodging bombs and bullets, and on the Manila gossip, on how the place had gone to hell since we had left. We liked to believe that Manila could not possibly be the same without us.

  That year Elizabeth bought a country house on a creek upstate, a few miles down the road from a tumbledown town with a lone fire truck and a general store where the supplies gathered dust on shelves and the screen door banged loose in the breeze. The house, a fieldstone gray-clapboard with big windows, had a fruit orchard and herb garden, and a canopy of birch and oak trees. Here was a refuge from the city. When our schedules worked out, we drove up with Boom, Elizabeth chattering the second we left Manhattan behind. She could make the drive in two hours flat, a Big Mac on her lap, the tape player blasting. Arriving at our house—after the turnoff from the main highway and the stretch on a hilly rural moonlit road—was always an event. Deer on the road, crickets singing, the rustle of corn stalks, the silhouette of an old farmhouse across the road.

  While I loved big-city life, Elizabeth chafed against living within four walls, in a walkup apartment or a row house, squeezed between one building and another, within earshot of neighbors, without a plot of land to trowel. She wasn’t a window-box gardener, one of those city people who could turn a rooftop into a greenhouse. She wanted soil under her nails, something loamy to sink her feet into. Her face would light up at a clump of fresh rosemary, and the office stress would ease the minute she spotted mallards on the creek, and geese scampering out of the woods. A shock of hair flopping on her high forehead and with her back muscles loosene
d, she could look twelve years old.

  The house brought us respite, the strain that had grown between us lessening. I could forget for a while the aggravations of work, the dreary six-to-one night shift and the wasted mornings and afternoons I spent alone in the apartment as I waited impatiently for late afternoon to come, when Elizabeth would finish work and walk across Central Park on the way home. Sometimes I would meet her midway, watching her figure from a distance; I watched the quickness or slowness in her step, the way she lugged her leather bag, the angle of her head, and could guess how her day had gone. Then we would walk together to the apartment, had long enough for a few words and a light touch, and I would leave for work.

  The country house restored some of the serenity and companionship we missed in New York. I didn’t turn away from her when she threw her arms around me, and I didn’t quarrel over every little slight. Relaxed on a deck chair, my feet on the railing, the sun on my face, I could even believe writing was possible again. We planted a pear tree to leave our mark there and weeded the orchard and Elizabeth groomed the herb garden and planted daffodil bulbs for spring. She had tree limbs trimmed back and a sturdy dock built into the creek. We bought a sofa and armchairs and furnished the rest with pieces we couldn’t fit in the New York apartment. We unpacked books that had been boxed for years and bought a red Maine canoe. She tried to teach me to paddle and to cast and reel on slow afternoons in the creek when we were the only people around. Nights drew down slowly, with long talks before the fire and wine. I would wake up early in our cedar-wood bedroom to find that she was already up, standing stock-still on the sun deck, her binoculars pressed to her face.