Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  9

  THE CITY WAS exhilarating that spring of 1992, the way I had always dreamed. We had evenings over drinks in the babble of bars; Elizabeth was a comet, springing high, and we had weekends tracking down the streets of SoHo, imagining life in artists’ lofts, everything in black and white. I enjoyed long lunches of pinot grigio and sashimi with glamorous editors talking up my next assignment for Vanity Fair, now that my name was showcased in a famous magazine stacked in supermarket racks and displayed at newsstands across the city and the nation.

  Broadway was directly beneath us, the Les Misérables billboard sixteen floors below, across Seventh Avenue. We were staying in a hotel apartment in Midtown, a one-bedroom suite of utilitarian motel decor, hard sofas, chrome chairs, and fake ferns in cracked plastic pots. It took us weeks to get rid of the residue of the trail of people who had passed through there, the stains on the bed, the musk of cheap dressers. We had thought we would be there but a few months while we looked for a place of our own, and we did look, west and east, in Greenwich Village and SoHo, from the day we arrived in March, foggy from crossing thirteen time zones and cultures.

  We wanted to find a place, get settled with our own things. But nothing we saw seemed right: too expensive, too small, too dark and rundown. We were not weighing the merits of this place against that place, not just that. We were trying to see our life beyond. For me, New York was the one place where I could invent and reinvent myself, infinitely lonely and then not lonely at all. But Elizabeth had other ideas. She would wake up in the middle of the night, worried, anxious. So much had changed in our lives in such a short time, and she sensed that change would come again. She couldn’t see herself rooted in New York for years, on those crowded streets, sitting on a stoop to see the moon in starless skies. It wasn’t her kind of place, but I refused to see it her way.

  All the while, between March and November 1992, she traveled from one city to another doing stories, from Buffalo to Miami, from feminist protests to hurricanes, and I flew on assignments to Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro. Between flights and hotels, we lived the New York life, rushed hellos and goodbyes, burnished nights on the town, rambling conversations during which we followed a bottle of wine with Armagnac.

  But the strain was there. We were living whole lives apart. She was alone much of the time, most of that summer and fall, all that time to herself in that stifling, boxy flat on Seventh Avenue. This time our separations did not bring us closer. I was not in every sliver of her stories. I was not in every sinew. Those days when every letter and phone call bound us together—from Manila, from Sri Lanka, from Seoul—were gone. We didn’t stay on the phone for hours, and we didn’t write each other long, moody letters. Our phone calls, cheery and crisp, were filled with news but little sentiment, and she would often cut them short with a quick goodbye.

  It took me a while to notice, but Elizabeth was drawing a circle of her own. These were new people she’d meet here and there, at work, on assignments, up and down the East Coast. She talked about them with unusual enthusiasm, with rare excitement. Anyone could see she was pulling away from me, her attention turning somewhere else. But I didn’t want to see this then. I was fooling myself, swept up and blinded by the gloss of magazine life, drinks at the Pierre, all-afternoon lunches at the Royalton, dinners with pumped-up, blasé writers in love with themselves, their names and faces recognized in fancy restaurants and hot bars.

  A few times I dragged Elizabeth into these scenes. I wanted people to meet her, wanted to share that world with her. But this was exactly the sort of scene she detested, and I knew that but it didn’t stop me. I pleaded until she finally would agree to join me. She would cringe in silence while watching me, with too many glasses of wine, take over the room, sometimes arguing or ranting about one or another issue, and, worse, going out of control, cutting someone down with a sharp remark. Strung out, I knew she was watching me. I was a stranger to her at that moment. She couldn’t say anything directly to me, could only avert her eyes and pretend she wasn’t paying attention. At the end of those evenings, when they went badly, when I had drunk too much and found myself isolated from the rest of the guests, she would walk home paces ahead of me, silently, the depth of our break in every stride, in the way she jerked away from me.

  Odd, how cycles are broken. From the beginning, writing had drawn us together, our dreams of it, our passion for it. Writing was paramount, a thread coiled around us and stretched over distances. I often thought that sharing that work, even the shallows of it, those torments of self-doubt, was perhaps the ultimate connection of our lives. Yet that year in New York, when we spread apart and she was forging a new path and I was dashing from one magazine article to another, the binding began to break. We did not care less, but we had less and less time to read over each other’s shoulders and to call up with a phrase or an idea as we had during our time in Manila and the other places of our early years. We now had other editors, encouragement elsewhere.

  Slowly, maybe too slowly, Elizabeth relied on me less and less. She didn’t ask me to read her articles before she filed them, and she stopped asking me for advice. Occasionally I would read her a passage of mine, and she would listen attentively but with a reserve. “You may be the real writer in this family,” she said, lavishing praise, but I felt she was holding back.

  For so long she had allowed me to push her in one direction or another out of a notion she had that I was wiser, that I moved faster than she did. Impatiently, often with no care for her own choices, I pushed my view of things on her, my sense of what was right for her and what was not. Now a bitter resentment that had festered since Manila was coming out of her. She was no longer listening to me. There was something else I couldn’t figure out, something that weighed on her.

  Yet on the surface those were good days for her. She was covering stories she cared about, rushing off to report on protests, disasters, and tragedies, hopping on two-engine planes and landing in wrecked American cities, a foreign correspondent in her own country. She came alive on the road. I could always picture her so easily when she was away. There she was in the industrial debris of Buffalo, tracking anti-abortion protests, wearing her drab olive pea coat, a black fountain pen clenched between her teeth while her notebook got soaked in the rain. I was in New York, finishing a story on Tokyo’s closed society, one of those quick in-and-out assignments that seemed all glamour but were in fact exhausting. I was finishing the story that day, the twenty-first of August, our sixth anniversary, and the flowers I ordered had just been delivered to a hotel in Coconut Grove where she was staying when she called up to tell me they were evacuating the hotel ahead of the landing of Hurricane Andrew, which was headed toward Miami. She didn’t know where she would spend the night. I was frantic, but she was eerily calm, the way she got when something seriously bad had happened. She found a place to stay and filed stories of floods and homes destroyed over the next few days. When I asked her about the anniversary flowers I had sent her, she said quite casually that she’d had to leave them behind in the hotel when they were evacuated. It made sense, but picturing those flowers in an empty room stung me beyond reason.

  She was still in Florida when I got a new assignment. I was going to Rio de Janeiro, and I had to leave quickly. “What a life you lead!” she exclaimed on the phone, and within days she was back in New York and we celebrated at our regular place on West Fifty-First Street, where the waiters topped our wineglasses before we emptied them. We had only a few days left together, Labor Day weekend, before I was taking off for Brazil. Despite the rush of those days, we finally found a place we really liked, near the Museum of Natural History. It was a turn-of-the-century brownstone with twelve-foot ceilings, shuttered windows, sun-splashed rooms, buffed dark wooden floors, working fireplaces, and a walled-in brick garden out back. It would not be available for months, not until December. But it was breathtaking—and it was exorbitant. We sat for a long time on the staircase landing, looking out on the garden and the grand living room
with its fine wainscot paneling, contemplating what life might be like in that house, how wonderful it would be, cloistered from the car horns, sirens, and dirty smells of Midtown where we had spent nine months in that sad hotel apartment. I knew we had to take the brownstone. It was the home we both wanted. We needed it to survive.

  I arrived in Rio with a handful of out-of-date telephone numbers and no personal connections, and then there was the fact that I spoke no Portuguese. Elizabeth used to say that when she was on assignment, she lived in fear. In Rio I really understood what she meant. Thrust into an unfamiliar situation, with hundreds of reporters buzzing around and editors watching from afar, matching my story against those of the competition, I felt my throat tightening with a nauseating fear that I would come up dry. Panic attacks, coughing spells, dizziness, or all were part of the work, and they had a way of coming up at crucial moments, in the middle of an interview, at a formal dinner, during an introduction to a head of state.

  My assignment was simple and direct: to get the first interview with President Fernando Collor de Mello, who was in seclusion during impeachment proceedings on charges of corruption. With his high-society, playboy image, he was a big draw, and the story of his downfall was making the front pages around the world. But he was giving no interviews, which meant that two hundred, maybe a thousand of us in the media were left nibbling on the edges of the story. I stayed awake through the eight-hour overnight flight from JFK, determined to be the one reporter to break through, worried that another magazine would get the interview first. That would kill mine.

  A week in Rio, and I was moving into the society of characters and wealthy grandes dames of Collor de Mello’s world, absorbed in lurid tales of his sexual life and greed and the dark secrets of the prominent Collor family. I had filled three notebooks and a handful of tape cassettes in three weeks, had taught myself some Portuguese by reading half a dozen newspapers every day, and flew to Brasília to get a look at the political circus: the impeachment proceedings against Collor.

  Brasília may be the only boring place in all Brazil, but in those days, in the fall of 1992, it was a carnival. Tens of thousands of anti-Collor activists took over the wide avenues of the capital, lying about and sleeping on the green lawns of the magnificent center of government, in front of the starkly austere house of Congress, and in the lobbies of Brasília’s hotels. When the protests and the speeches inside the Congress were over, I flew in a thunderstorm back to Rio and began to write my story. I had five days to finish it and meet the magazine’s deadline. By now I had become a fixture at the Caesar Park Hotel overlooking Ipanema beach, and had my banquette at the bar and my six o’clock gin and tonic. Clerks, waiters, and housekeepers looked after me, sending up fresh-cut flowers and platters of papaya, chiding me because I was too thin and pale, working too hard, battened down in my room, writing.

  Elizabeth and I talked often, her voice always surprising me. For weeks she was patient, curious about the story, wanting to know everything about Rio and the people I was meeting and those nights on the town that fizzled out around three in the morning. But by my sixth week in Brazil, a period that turned out to be much longer than I had expected when I took on the assignment, she sounded chillingly lonely and remote.

  Some days I had to take a break from writing and get out of my room. I strolled down the Rua Baráo da Torre a few blocks away, and walked lazily by the Banana Café and the Hippopotamus Club, where I had gone to a flashy party one night, and peeked in fancy boutiques and stopped by the side of vendors, tempted by the smoky food. I was swinging along to the bossa nova of the streets, inhaling the smell of the tropics again, and I would think back to Manila, and how I had felt there. Rio was not the same. Rio did not have the equatorial heat of Manila, the pungent aromas, the tall palm trees. Rio did not have Elizabeth.

  The October air was crisp and sharp in New York the day I returned from Rio. I had been away seven weeks. It had been so long that Elizabeth came to the airport to welcome me home, a long drive from Manhattan to Kennedy. I was so surprised to see her there that I stopped walking on the spot, transfixed. She was standing inches apart from everyone else, her hair ruffled over the upturned collar of her brown suede coat, her sunglasses pushed up on her head, her right arm pressed across her midriff, her face serene. I felt all the distance vanishing, and the rift of our last six months closing. I wanted her desperately, wanted to keep her there, with me.

  Putting her hand on my elbow, her eyes softly on me, she said happily, knowing she would surprise me, “I have a car waiting!” It was her way of welcoming me back, to make a special gesture, and when we arrived home, still at the hotel apartment, I flung my bags in the hallway and threw my arms around her. She held me, but I sensed restraint, something I couldn’t read flickering in her eyes. She went on to work right away, and that evening we went out, sat at a small table by a window away from the jangle of the restaurant crowd. I was bone-tired but exuberant, splashing wine into her glass, touching her hand. It had been so long.

  The next day I walked to Fifth Avenue and pushed through the glass doors of Cartier’s, peered into the glittering display cases, tiptoeing in the funereal hush of the store. After a while I saw what I wanted. That evening when she opened the red and gold box, she took a deep breath and looked at it for a long time. My eyes were on her, anxious, waiting. She took the heavy gold ring and placed it in the palm of her hand and raised her eyes to me, her face a deep pink, and she slid the ring against the other one I had once given her in Manila, on the second finger of her left hand.

  Two weeks later, on the day after President Clinton’s election, when I was unwinding, knowing that my Brazil story was scheduled to come out in the next issue of the magazine, my editor there called. He had heard that the New York Times Magazine was coming out with a cover article on Collor de Mello that Sunday. He sounded tense and annoyed. My mind scrambled, my heart thumped. I knew my story was dead. We could not be seen as trailing the Times. This was exactly what I had feared. I called Elizabeth, told her my story was dead. It was my fault—that’s all I could think of. She tried to sympathize, but I wouldn’t listen and hung up. “This happens all the time,” an editor friend at the magazine assured me, shuffling papers on her desk while keeping an eye on me. I kept pacing, smoking, speaking loudly, making quite a spectacle of myself in her office. Fuming, striking out at everyone but especially myself, I left her office and walked into a lashing rainstorm, one of those hellish downpours in which umbrellas turn inside out and people hang on to the side of buildings, mashed like fallen leaves by the wind that rails on the city. I was drenched. By the time Elizabeth got home I had been lying on the couch for a couple of hours, staring out the living room windows into the flashes of lightning in the black sky, running my hand on Boom’s furry back, the softest surface around.

  She came in quietly carrying a dozen red roses and placed them—the only bright color in the room—in a glass on top of the television set. I looked up, without a smile, and mumbled thanks and flopped back into a dead stare, a familiar downward spiral. She sat across from me, not near enough to touch me, and tried to reassure me. “It is not your fault. You had a great story.” But I was intransigent, and juvenile, saying nothing, looking away from her. Finally, exasperated, she pleaded, “What do you want from me?”

  With that she left the apartment for a cocktail party. I stayed on the couch all night, in the jeans and shirt I had worn all day. “You don’t get it,” she blurted out the next morning. “You still don’t understand what you do to me, to yourself.” She was disconsolate; my apologies, too late, too lame, were flicked away with a cold shrug. Too quickly she was gone to work. She walked down Broadway, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, a wispy figure disappearing into the mob in Times Square, so invisible that, like anyone else in New York City, she could cry and no one would notice.

  Incredibly, I had to go back to Brazil. The interview with President Collor de Mello came through, finally. Overnight I was on my way to Rio.
I would wait days in Rio for word that the president would see me in his villa in Brasília. It was during that wait in my hotel room in Rio, late in the afternoon, talking to Elizabeth on the phone, when I heard in her voice the ice burn I knew too well. Still smoldering from those last awful nights in New York, she was curt, impersonal. For the first time in all our years, the warmth in her seemed entirely gone. She was saying the words I had dreaded.

  “We need to talk when you get back.”

  Her tone gave me no hope. I stared at the walls of my room, and her voice seemed very far. I felt myself sinking and my hands started to shake. My voice dropped, a quiver. I didn’t eat or sleep that night or the next or the next, and three days after that call, after I had finished the interviews I had to do, I took the first plane to New York. She was not at the airport, and I took a taxi into Manhattan. The city was just emerging from the early-morning haze, the sky a lavender bruise. She was waiting in the apartment, seated on the edge of the sofa, looking down on the scuffed carpet. She had been crying, I could see the red-rimmed eyes, and not daring to touch her, I took a chair, my hands trembling when I lit her cigarette. We sat looking at each other and away from each other for what seemed a long time. “If you don’t change,” she said slowly, each word stinging like a hard slap to the face, “I will leave you.” I cannot remember if I said anything or made a noise, but I remember that I had to gulp back tears but they rolled down my face, down my chin, and onto my lap.

  She was tired of our fights, my moods and depressions. “I can’t rescue you anymore.” That was not all. She felt I was choking her, stifling her. She winced, saying she no longer felt safe with me. She was groping for words, her head lowered, her voice grave. I nodded but had no response. My ears were roaring from the blood rising to my head. I could not hear her words but felt each of them. I don’t know if I spoke—surely I did—but I knew I couldn’t defend myself. I had run out of things to say.