Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  “Come here. Look,” she would call out to me. “Did you see that? A blue heron.”

  The muscles in her face strained instantly when we crossed back to the city, the traffic jam boiling her temper. “I hate this city,” she said every time. I knew what she meant. We had let the world dictate our life, the world of nine-to-five and superficial distractions and old complications. But that was not all. Out of the blue, Elizabeth’s work took an unexpected turn that spring when an editor approached her and, under the guise of concern, told her things he had heard about me and her, such a strange relationship. Her heart was still pounding and her hands clammy when she told me about it later that day. She was indignant and hurt, and in the heat of anger threatened to quit her job. I was furious too, but office rumors, those little scandals, were all too familiar to me. I had lived through many years of that. For Elizabeth, it was a shock. I never saw it coming, she said. But it was something she had feared, having our private life vulgarized. Over the next days and weeks, she put on a good face at work, and the editor who had crossed the line apologized. Elizabeth didn’t quit. But she couldn’t feel totally at ease at work anymore, and we didn’t know if after all that she would still get a foreign assignment.

  The waiting seemed endless, and we didn’t exactly agree on where we wanted to go. I wanted to go back to Asia—New Delhi, Bangkok, Hong Kong. She wanted South Africa or even Latin America, though she didn’t mind returning to Asia at all. Now and then I turned my frustration with work and myself against her, unleashing the familiar but still stinging words that I knew wounded her, and she responded in the familiar and biting way. Taut jaw, high chin, firing eyes, she bristled at the old litany I dragged out—that she had had it all, she was cold and distant, she came easily to success.

  “Why don’t you leave if you feel like that,” she burst out one night, words she had thrown at me during one of our fights in Manila. She grabbed her field jacket and left the room, slamming the door behind her. She walked around and sat on the steps of a church near the corner, where I found her. What created this desolation? Why did I push her away? It was not lack of love. It was a fear growing in me that our life was changing, that something—I didn’t know or didn’t want to know exactly what—was pulling us apart. We were becoming ordinary. We no longer had the romance and excitement of Manila as our backdrop; now we had mundane jobs, nine-to-five lives. I made things worse, questioning myself, everything I had done and not done. I had wasted years, years when I didn’t write, years before I met Elizabeth. Writing and my hope to make a living at it seemed a delusion.

  I cried so often that year in New York, cried at night, on the sofa, walking the streets, in the subway, and woke with sickening anxiety every morning. When she wanted to hold me, I would turn away, my ardor now barely a flicker. We lay in our bed apart, each lost. “It’s only a phase,” she would often say, always tender, a light hand on me, about the many times when I would read a book, my back to her, when I would pull away from her and merely brush her cheek to say good night.

  “It’s Tokyo.” She had called up to tell me her new assignment. There was such dismay in her voice. No exclamation point. I could not believe it—Tokyo? Japan was another planet, a place I had never thought of visiting, a place she knew from art and books—but it was not what we had in mind. We had wanted tropical islands and hot cities, the South China Sea, Bangkok, Jakarta. Not this, not Tokyo. She used to say she hated first world countries. Even Hong Kong was too modern for her, and now she was going to Tokyo. An editor had handed her a slip of paper with a single word on it, and an exclamation point: Tokyo!

  I had nagged her to get out of New York, to return to Asia. And here it was; it was Asia, but not the Asia I had in mind. I felt guilty sensing her disappointment, knowing I was responsible. I tried to paint seductive pictures of life in Japan, the excitement of such an exceptional and ancient culture, the challenge it presented. “It’s a big story,” I offered, and I was right about that. “It’s a country people here take seriously.” I was also trying to convince myself while at the same time figuring out what in the world I would do there. There was little question that I would leave the Times. I couldn’t see life without Elizabeth, and if I stayed I would be bound to desk work for the rest of my life. Now I had a reason to get out.

  An assignment to Japan was not a simple matter of passport and plane ticket. It required elaborate visa applications, sponsors, and letters, and she had to spend months studying Japanese. Leaving the paper was not as easy as I had supposed. My editor’s face fell when I told him behind closed doors. In the next few weeks, as word got around, other editors came by, bending down, whispering, “Is there anything we can do to keep you?” On my last week at the paper—I had been there only eighteen months—the desk surprised me with chilled bottles of Taittinger and a cake, and a round of farewell speeches. On another day that week, the foreign editor and the managing editor hosted a lunch for me in a private dining room in the upper floor of the newspaper tower. There were waiters in uniform, Bloody Marys, wine, a lavish lunch, toasts, and gifts—a pen set I long ago lost somewhere and the navy blue duffel that still travels with me.

  We still had some time before leaving for Japan. I got a journalist visa, arranged to do stories out of Tokyo and Southeast Asia for the San Francisco Chronicle, and went back to the book I had started in Manila. But suddenly, it seemed, Elizabeth was gone—but not to Japan. She was in the Persian Gulf. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the United States was going to war. We were sitting in our living room when she got the call from her editors. They were sending her and other correspondents to the Gulf on a military plane. She had less than twelve hours to get ready. She flinched but knew she wanted to go; this was what she loved doing. Hovering at her side while she was still on the phone, I nodded yes, go.

  It was January 1991, more than two years since she had last climbed onto a plane and landed continents or oceans away in a country she didn’t know. Few things were more daring and exciting in the business than landing in—parachuting into—a foreign country. She could not turn down the chance to cover a war. Being chosen for that assignment was a clear statement that she was on her way up. Over the years I had grown accustomed to her absences, but something gnawed at me, something she had said days before that phone call. “I have a feeling something big is going to happen,” she had said, “something that will change everything.”

  She left the night the war began, on January sixteenth. Around midnight, after the bombing of Baghdad had begun and President Bush had gone on television to speak to the nation and we had dashed around town buying desert gear for her. I watched her go, and guessed she was a little scared and already lonely.

  She wrote me days after her arrival in Dhahran, off the Persian Gulf. She and a team of other correspondents and photographers were booked in a hotel, doing nothing, waiting for something to happen. Everyone was tense, she said, and so was she, feeling off-stride, disoriented, at loose ends.

  Between her occasional calls and letters, I was writing again. It had been a long time. Every noon I walked to the corner deli for a sandwich, and in the mornings I walked down Columbus Avenue, the mist-clouded tips of the Midtown skyscrapers on the horizon, to pick up out-of-town newspapers. I passed by a scruffy plaza on Sixty-Fifth Street where immigrant laborers gathered, stocky Salvadoran men in Yankees windbreakers, playing dominoes and tossing beer bottles. They rarely raised their eyes to me, or I to them, but I would slow down, catching the music in their boom boxes, music I used to hear at night when I was a child trying to sleep, boleros that drifted in through my bedroom window.

  I saw no friends for weeks on end, but CNN kept me entertained. I searched for Elizabeth’s face at news conferences televised in Dhahran and Riyadh; and sometimes, when I was working in my study, I would overhear her voice on television, maybe a question she was posing to the colonel debriefing the media, and I would rush to the living room to watch her, as if she were speaking directly to me. I could
almost clock her day, knew that when it was evening in the desert, she would call. Often I fell asleep on the sofa, a blanket over me, Boom at my feet, the TV still on, and then the phone would ring, her voice so near.

  This was a hotel war, she complained, a television war, a war by press conference, briefings, and canned interviews. On top of that, there was nothing to drink, no gin, no wine, no Scotch. After the tense days of lethargy in Dhahran, where the media was herded around and corralled in hotel suites, she bolted, took a jeep across the desert and arrived in Riyadh, where she thought she might have a freer hand, could interview top generals and Saudi princes and sneak out on nighttime rides into the military camps.

  She was much more chipper then, burying herself in work. But some days she felt at a loss, suspended, waiting for the war, waiting to go home. It seemed she had been gone a long time, but it had been only a month or so. Loneliness was the theme of those letters, what she called mumblings in the desert. I put up the photos and postcards she mailed me—attack helicopters, Arabs in burnooses, a Saudi flag and a war decal, and her drawings, one a picture of her in the dunes, a redheaded stick figure overshadowed by the vastness of the desert, empty but for the outline of a lone camel.

  On the day of her return from the Gulf I rose before dawn, got dressed, and took a taxi to JFK. I got there early, with time to smoke and drink a beer and flip through a couple of magazines. I could not sit still. Finally, the plane landed. She came out of the terminal pushing the luggage cart, in her khakis and Timberland boots, her face lush, her hair held up with a barrette.

  She filled our room with tulips, raspberries and cream, and Moët et Chandon, and she gave me a pair of fine gold bracelets she had bought in the Riyadh gold souk and elegant Guerlain candles she had found in Paris. It had been two months—we felt every hour of that separation, could feel it in our touch.

  She looked delicate that evening in her gray wool skirt and a charcoal cashmere jacket with black velvet lapels. Her white silk blouse was buttoned up to her neck, a graceful touch. She was dressed for a banquet her bosses were hosting to celebrate the magazine’s coverage of the war. With a dab of Chanel No. 19 on the nape of her neck, and black suede slippers on her feet, she walked to the dinner alone, her arms folded self- consciously across her chest as if to hide herself from the world, not knowing the sight she made, how she stopped my heart.

  In Manila I came to believe that places can change you, can give life or take it away. Manila had been life to us, a birth, the beginning of a time that we could not possibly have imagined.

  But Japan was deadening.

  Three months in Tokyo, and I watched her withering, a gloom that perhaps was too deep for tears. We had something of a life, I suppose. We tried to accommodate that odd city, a style of life that was not us at all, in a country of rigid faces and stifling manners. We bought Japanese objects for our apartment, a large three-bedroom ground-floor space that didn’t get much light in Shoto, an expensive neighborhood where gaijin were allowed to live (the broker only showed us apartments she deemed suited for American and European tastes—large, carpeted, modern). We learned to slurp our noodles like the Japanese do and ventured into the izkaya, where drinkers gaped at us, female foreigners, and the manager would not let us in. It took us a while to sort out the unspoken rules, the mazelike neighborhoods, the giant stores, and find our way around an incredibly difficult city to navigate where homes have no numbers and streets no names—and very few people speak English.

  I worked at my writing for days without seeing the sky, shut in the flat except for my walks to the 7-Eleven where I bought Sapporo beer and the clerks snickered when my back was turned. Some days, when I was desperate for any voices, I walked down to a department store in Shibuya, one of the city’s busiest districts, and stood in line at the bakery, bowing to the girl, who, even after months of seeing me almost every week, did not show a trace of recognition.

  Even so, it was easier for me than it was for Elizabeth. I didn’t have to leave the house, could plop down for hours in front of the TV watching CNN International. Elizabeth had to show up every weekday at the magazine’s offices in the Ginza, dressed in appropriate business attire, feigning a studious interest in her work, looking for the twist that might make a story compelling. She left the house in the mornings already dreading her day, and walked down narrow streets to the Shibuya subway station. Sometimes I walked with her and saw her off at the stairs to the train platform, her auburn head disappearing quickly into the crowd of white shirts, black ties, and dark heads.

  These were not bandanna days. Tokyo was a business story, she would say. It was not a war, not a coup, not an uprising, nothing crazy and unexpected about it. She felt out of her element. Covering Tokyo was a straitjacket for her. How did she end up among the pinstriped men and bow-tied women of the Tokyo foreign press?

  There was still a profound closeness about us, what kept us, I think, afloat. Our affection, now ingrained, showed in the small things. She still called out for me when she got home, and I always ran to the door, and we walked arm in arm to the sofa. Sometimes, often, I couldn’t wait for her arrival and would meet her at the subway stairs and we would stroll home, immersed in ourselves in the crowds of those streets, feeling as alone as we had ever felt anywhere. She would say later that I had saved her. But I wonder now about the nights that faded into days, all too much the same, when I was racked with self-doubt, and those moments that left us lonely, the loneliness that comes when you have known total communion and then feel its absence. Yet her touch was like air to me, essential to my life. No one else, nothing else, could bring me the total joy her eyes did, her laughter, her being. But I was too much consumed by uncertainty and drifted away into writing and books, and she, unable to sleep, would leave our room and sit up for hours on the sofa, Boom on her lap, her nails chewed. I found escape in Manila. The flight from Tokyo was only four hours, a hop after the two-hour bus ride from central Tokyo to Narita airport. On a trip to Manila the summer of 1991, I found out that Imelda Marcos was planning to return to the Philippines after six years in exile in Hawaii and New York. At the time, Imelda was living in Manhattan, plotting her homecoming, a carnival that had Manila all excited. I thought that the return of Imelda to Manila, against the background of the end of the presidential term of Cory Aquino, could stir up some interest in the American media. I worked on a one-page story proposal and Elizabeth loved it and thought I should fax it to magazines in New York to see if I could get an assignment.

  On a whim, I faxed it to Vanity Fair. I didn’t know anyone at the magazine and chose an editor’s name at random from the grouping on the magazine’s masthead. Within two days, I got a call. It was one in the morning in Tokyo, and on the phone was Vanity Fair. Standing because I was too nervous to sit, clutching the telephone and listening to the editor on the other end, I mouthed the news to Elizabeth. Afterward, at that hour of night, we walked to the all-night 7-Eleven and bought a bottle of wine.

  In the fall of 1991 I was flying all over the place—from Tokyo to New York to Honolulu to Manila for the story on Imelda. In the Philippines, I booked Elizabeth’s old room at the Manila Hotel, started smoking again, and before I knew it had fallen into the swing of the city and reporting. It was already November and I had spent weeks away from Elizabeth. Back in Tokyo, I noticed immediately that she was thinner yet, her face drawn. But she had friends and had begun to have a social life while I was gone. I got busy writing the magazine story and, incredibly, forgot her birthday. It struck her hard that she had to remind me, I could see that plainly. I had been so involved with my travel and stories and writing that I had forgotten her. Nothing I could do or say would make up for that, not for days and weeks.

  We wanted to have Christmas in Manila, and when our plane landed and she looked out to those shacks and brackish water, all that was so familiar, she began to cry, recovering at last something long gone from her. “Miss Whitney! Miss Whitney!” they sang out to her at the Manila Hotel, inst
antly recognizing her as if she had only been away a few months, and there she was, in no time at all, laughing and sweating on the tennis courts and drinking at the Lobby Lounge. During New Year’s week she was running down the beach at a private resort that Candy’s family had in Mamburao, swatting mosquitoes and snorkeling for coral, and every day we had margaritas and mangoes on the sands of the South China Sea.

  We entered 1992, and she was back in Tokyo but I was still in Manila, still working on the story on Imelda, covering her wacky presidential campaign. Elizabeth had said it would take me six years to make a start, and so it had. But my start meant that she was living alone in Tokyo. She had promised herself that we would leave Japan before the spring, and while I was in the Philippines, she made a quick trip to Los Angeles and New York to look for another job. Shortly after her return to Tokyo, she got a call from New York. She rang me up immediately in Manila. I was tinkering with my Imelda story, giving it one final look. I picked up the phone and heard the snap in her voice, a crackling of excitement. I leaped up from the desk and shouted from the balcony, couldn’t scream enough, I was so happy.

  We were leaving Japan less than nine months after we had arrived, and she had a new job. I finished my story and returned to Tokyo to join her. We drank plenty of champagne those last nights in Tokyo. Soon the movers came and we closed down the apartment, shutting the flint-gray door behind us. In our years together our life had been an endless caravan, a series of way stations, without a mapped course, without markers. We had lived on two continents, in three countries, four cities, six homes in less than eight years. We had no roots, no base but ourselves; that had been our home. All along I believed that the hard times, the tense days and angry moments—all the turbulence of our years together—could never destroy the passion that held us together, not ever, and not now.