Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  We know how passion disintegrates. There are thin cracks, coded words. A distance that we cannot quite measure grows silently, steadily. Sometimes, too often, it happens when we are most comfortable, when life becomes routine, and the touch that once burned no longer stirs our blood. I have had loves that died when I wasn’t looking, when I had forgotten, when the love became something I had misplaced.

  That is not what came to us.

  Our life had its own wild rhythm, unchoreographed, uncharted. We moved into our new brownstone the day before New Year’s Eve, finally ending nine months of waiting to have a permanent home and have our furniture and pictures and books with us again. But nothing was quite the same. I was worn out from work, from travel, from the fear that our relationship was so frayed and tenuous that it could snap in an instant. The Christmas holidays gave us no comfort, and no time. All the recognition I had received, whatever success, had cost me—had cost both of us.

  Without even a day to get us settled in our apartment, I had to fly out on a last-minute assignment to Florida and do a story on a Cuban defector that didn’t interest me much but mattered to the magazine. I was leaving Elizabeth with all the annoying irritations of moving, alone in that large place, boxes still unpacked. I left at dawn on New Year’s Day, 1993. She saw me off from the front window, Boom in her arms. Throwing my bag in the back seat, I had the wrenching sensation of loss, and the trip was miserable.

  There were weeks in January and February when I was away most of the time, working, spending agonizing hours in hotel rooms, Elizabeth’s voice on the phone no longer my tether to the world. In between we had moments of peace when life seemed to recover a semblance of joy, when we strolled up Amsterdam Avenue and drank copious amounts of wine at Louie’s Westside Café, where they saved a back table for us and left us alone but overheard everything.

  “You are changing,” she said approvingly, grateful that I wasn’t pushing her or poking at her to analyze what had gone wrong. I seized on those encouraging words, lighting up, and we walked home arm in arm. I had been trying to change, appeasing her, minding every word I said, going to therapy to sort out my head. It was an irony that just as we were breaking apart, we were at the same time more open about our relationship. But I could not tamp down the sorrow threading through it all, fearing that it was already too late to change anything, that she was smoothing the way to leave me. I sensed it in her casual touch, in the turns in her life that she did not talk to me about, when her mind drifted off and her eyes clouded.

  Her life was moving somewhere else. That much I knew. Her words were not the old words of hers, something odd to me, words that rang hollow and seemed borrowed, as if they came from someone else. “I need space. I need boundaries.” These were clichés, so unlike her. She had come to these decisions well before I fully grasped their implications. How serious she was about this, how deadly it all was. She needed to find her way, she kept saying. “I have told you I need time alone.”

  “Is there someone else?” I blurted out, noticing her reddening face and twisted, angry mouth. “No! Damn you! It is not someone else. That is not the issue. We are.”

  Often she would just sit in the armchair by the fireplace and cry quietly, her arm clutched against her chest. She knew the hurt she was inflicting on me, and she knew she was hurting herself, too. But she wanted understanding and harmony despite it all. She wanted to save something of us.

  It couldn’t be that simple.

  We had an excess of passion. Everything about us was born out of it: our writing, our nights, our fights, our silences, and finally her desperate escape from me and the desperate loneliness that swept me when at last I came to see that I had lost her.

  We had our requiems. How many burials could we stand? Those dirges, talks dissolving into recriminations, revisions of history, tears. There were no wounds we left untouched. I would find her collapsed on the sofa, her mind roaming, her face drawn, so far from me that I no longer could reach across the room. She would try again and again to explain, to bring reason to what was intrinsically irrational: “I haven’t had a moment to myself, to find out who I really am, in ten years.” I retaliated absurdly, throwing back at her our early years, when she had needed me because all she had had before me was that—loneliness.

  We had those circular talks for so long that years later I see us fixed in place, a frozen scene, she on the corner of the sofa and I listening so intently that I noticed everything about the room as if it were new, the slanted light from the living room window casting shadows on the planes of her face, the dents in our Manila furniture, the words of a song she played over and over.

  I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to walk out, to put a blade to it, neatly. But I would not. I had more tormenting ways. I stayed, carrying my pain for her to see. I had a fantasy, that she would come to me with that innocence and frailty I had known and take me by the hand and let me smooth out the folds of her shirt where it sloped over her shoulders.

  I lied like that to myself.

  What she said was “I don’t love you the way you want me to.”

  We were having dinner at Louie’s Westside Café. I heard her words in a chamber inside my mind that was all echoes. “I don’t love you the way you want me to.” I stared at her, suddenly deaf, stunned into silence.

  I left for Washington the next day, more interviews to do, and a life to contemplate. Forlorn as one can only be in hotel bars, even in the best hotels, I would leaf through magazines and newspapers, pretending I was not a lonely guest longing for a chair to be pulled up to my side. I would sit the evening through, waiting for the night.

  The time had come when almost anything I said irritated her, even on the phone. “I can’t talk now. Have to go.” She was setting down rules. I no longer had any right to ask about any part of her life, which reduced our conversations to dead air, quick cuts. I would hang up and lie on the bed in my hotel room, smoking, choking back a scream, and by two in the morning I wanted nothing more than to hear her voice. Somehow I would get up the next day.

  Friends looked at me with that helpless and pitying expression that people assume when someone is breaking all around them. Tim, now living in Washington, was at a loss, and tried to find a middle point between me and Elizabeth, shaking the ice in his Scotch, fidgeting in the bar’s chair. I saw him half a dozen times in Washington and New York, maybe more, during that period.

  Once I asked him straight out, “Will she leave me?”

  He came at that question with a direct reply rare for him: “Yes,” he said. His bulbous eyes bored into mine. Before he could elaborate, his girlfriend joined us, and I knew he couldn’t help me out this time.

  “You’ll get over it,” people would say kindly, but it was a refrain that seemed entirely off the point, meaningless to me.

  This was not an affair, a chase of mine, fires burning and then a sweep of ashes. And it was not quite a marriage, white dresses and veils and pieces of paper. This was a life, my life. How could I get over a life or the loss of my life? I was insufferable, obsessed, the object of what I so abhorred, pity and sympathy. I think at times I was truly insane.

  Toward the end, I would spend days alone in the house, a bottle of wine within reach, cigarette ashes spilling on the rug. I would finally go to bed and stare at the page of a book I was reading, flipping pages regularly, and after an hour I would notice that I hadn’t absorbed a single word. I would listen for her footsteps on the stairs, then the click of the bedside lamp in the guest room that she now occupied. For several periods during the last months she was not there at all. She was visiting friends, finding sympathy and consolation, or out of town on stories, finding places and distractions to get away from me.

  Those were my worst days, sitting on our sofa all day long, blotting out my life, too dispirited to move, to read, to write. In the late afternoon, when the solitude became intolerable, I would go down to Louie’s and pass the time propped up on a barstool, talking with the actor bartend
er and the comedian waitress, who, being New Yorkers, connoisseurs of the human condition, could easily read the meaning of the lines on my face.

  July, and the city was thinning out, people going away for the summer, to the Cape or the Hamptons. It seemed half the town was gone, and I was looking for a place to live, dreary walks up and down Amsterdam and West End Avenue and Riverside, everything I saw square and dark and reeking of lonely nights. I would go out day after day, trying to find something to cheer about but instead finding myself crying in the middle of the street, dreading the aloneness, the finality of it.

  I knew I had to move out when she did not come home one night until two in the morning, something she had never done before. I overheard a car slow down, a door open and close, and the key turning in our front door. I waited at the top of the stairs. She looked wretched, from tears perhaps. Her linen jacket was wrinkled as if it had been balled up and thrown, and her eyes were glazed. But she was steady, composed.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded. She looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Her facial structure completely changed, her face chiseled foxlike, a gesture of disdain around her mouth. “I don’t have to tell you anything,” she snapped right back, pulling away from me. I shouted back, followed her into the guest room, groping for words, wanting to wound her. “Get out!” she shouted. Her scream sent a shock wave through me.

  I went to my bed and covered myself in a blanket and did not stop shaking until dawn.

  That morning I dressed early and left the house to begin looking for an apartment, and for a month I looked in vain for anything I could stand. Giving up, I flew down to Washington. It took me just two days to find an apartment in a stately 1917 building in the Dupont Circle neighborhood. After the awful apartments I had seen in Manhattan, this one was a relief, and Washington itself, serene, clean, and leafy, seemed a safe shelter.

  “I have an apartment in Washington,” I told her when I returned to New York. I wanted her to be pleased. She staggered. “Oh, God!” She was choked up. “That was fast . . .” Rising from the chair, she came to me and held me.

  Our last weeks together had a mournful gentleness. I could see that she was relieved, more affectionate now that our struggle was nearly over. I went through the details of moving, and she agreed easily on the things I could take with me—the New Delhi desk, an old kitchen table, our bed, the black tape deck we had in Manila, the long-armed swayback butaca, my rugs.

  On the Sunday before my departure she opened up a magnum of Dom Pérignon, raised her glass to me, and clutched me to her, her arms around my waist, her hair on my face, her breath so light. “You know you cannot chop me out of your life,” she said softly, her eyes shining. “If you do, you’ll be cursing me and yourself.”

  She had her music on, and as she held me closely, her chin resting on my head, we moved slowly around the living room, dancing as we never had before—Stay by me and make the moment last . . . Seconds, minutes, an eternity, everything blurred.

  She left for her office early that morning, before my movers came. “I don’t think I can stand to see you go,” she had said the night before. We tried to make the parting quick, couldn’t even look at each other or find any words, and when she closed the front door behind her I did not go to the window to watch her walk away. The movers came and went, and I sat on the sofa, ragged but tearless. I moved through the house, the blank spaces where my furniture had been, and it seemed enormous, so silent. Then I walked down to a florist and picked out a couple of brilliant orange Asian tiger lilies and put them in a vase on top of her Chinese chest in the living room. I found an envelope and slipped in it the one thing I wanted to leave her, a yellowing document that my mother had once given me: my first-grade report card, straight A’s from geography to arithmetic at the Van Dyke Academy in Mexico City. On the cover of the report card was stapled an oval-shaped photograph of me, a wistful face at the age of five, long, straight dark hair pulled off the forehead with a small bow clasp.

  I don’t know why I want you to have this, I scribbled on a piece of paper, and sealed the envelope and leaned it against the vase with the tiger lilies.

  I picked up my luggage, my duffel, the case with the laptop Elizabeth had given me for one of my birthdays, and my shoulder-strap bag. I found Boom, who was distracted by the birds swooping in the garden, and crushed him in my arms and kissed his head. It was a sunny day, very hot, August third, three weeks short of our seventh year together. I closed the front door and locked it and put my house keys in an envelope and left it for her under the door.

  Rush-hour taxis zipped past, and I could hardly lift my hand to hail one, but finally a cab stopped and I lugged the bags onto the back seat and got in.

  “LaGuardia,” I said, keeping my face turned away from the driver, feeling the tears come slowly, trickling down one by one. Out the window Manhattan rolled by, stranger suddenly than any place I had ever known.

  10

  I CAN’T LET GO of that time, can’t let it breathe. After all these years I can’t find the mystery, and not finding it, I can’t tear it out of me. Our last years I can only begin to trace, but even now I can’t find the exact location, the damning gesture and the words, the precise moment when the last glass of wine came with passion, and the first came dry, drained of us.

  I lie in the mornings wrapped in my old quilt, my hands in fists, a pillow at my back, and I glance out my window, always the first thing I do, and take in the sun that lingers in lilac clouds, the tree limbs slashing at the panes, and the birthday balloon some passerby lost into that tree last summer, now torn, deflated. I noticed today that spring has come, the sun spreads out early, beams across my bed, and there are crocuses and daffodils, sprigs of yellow marigolds, and the blue- and red-chested birds are making nests in brambles beneath the crooked magnolia tree and the drooping wisteria.

  I walk the streets every day and every day I stop with a jolt, suddenly seized, at the far sight of an auburn head, the tilt of a neck, the slope of shoulders. I see Elizabeth, hair blowing in her eyes, feathery around her face, combed down her neck, where it arches. She lopes across the street toward me. But she has not seen me, has not seen the stricken face that has to be mine, and I move toward her, wading in air, the moment stilled. Her voice, my name in her voice, rises from the silence I live in, and I lift my face, running to her, and then the voice is gone.

  Old songs. Grooves of music, a pounding beat. Adagios and crescendos. Drops of red wine, smoke, the smell of skin freshly soaped, a moist touch of perfume. Must she be, after these years, in everything, in my bloodstream?

  In the fall of our first months of separation, I tried to create a world for myself. Washington seemed just right for this, a mostly empty canvas. Washington wasn’t Manhattan, Manila, Tokyo, where we had made a trail. Here, the streets bore no reminders, none of our footprints. The faces I saw were unblemished by care, interchangeably bland as I passed by them when I took my morning walk to the newsstand. I was, I knew, invisible, not to them perhaps, but to myself.

  Once a day I forced myself to speak, chatting absent-mindedly with the front-desk clerks at my apartment building and with the woman who sold me newspapers and magazines. I tried to hear my voice, to recognize it. How do you like this weather, they asked, rubbing their arms for warmth. There were scraps of frozen snow on the sidewalk, northern skies. “Well, it’s winter, isn’t it?” I would reply. Later, in the spring and summer, the question changed to “How you like this heat?” I would say, “Well, it’s summer, isn’t it?” I tried to remember to smile, to give a bright lilt to my greetings while I checked my mailbox in the apartment lobby, knowing it was empty, and walked by a pair of old ladies who always seemed to be seated on the hardwood bench in the foyer, holding their grocery bags, heavy maiden ladies sitting out their mornings, giving me a searching top-to-bottom look, never quite placing me. I passed by them quickly, escaping, and climbed the three flights up the tile staircase to my apartment, only the squeak of my te
nnis shoes breaking the glum quiet of the hallway.

  In the evenings those first months, I walked up the block to a Brazilian grill, a smoky dark-glass storefront, ordered up caipirinhas, and distracted myself by listening to snatches of conversation at the bar, the gossip of waitresses, college girls with huge black-lined eyes, sheened tresses, and tight T-shirts who sidled up to the stool next to mine, wanting to know about my life. I always had a book with me, probably tipping them off that I wasn’t the standard bar drinker. It was the orange-spine copy of Graham Greene’s Collected Short Stories that I had carried on countless trips, thinking I would finish it one day. Over the years I had read only a few pages at a time, in hotels, before dropping off to sleep. I lost track of what I had read but kept my place with a dog-eared yellow Thai Air Lines boarding pass stamped Phuket International Airport and signed in black ink, Elizabeth, Bangkok 1988.

  Wanting to seem occupied, with a purpose, I clutched the book as if I were too busy for company, content to be left alone, wiping wet rings off the bar counter with my shirtsleeve. I laid the book face-up on the counter and rubbed the cover, the skin of it. I would turn the pages, flipping them like a deck of cards, writing poetic words in my head. It was my way of announcing my presence. I was trying to make a statement, saying that I was really not alone, protecting myself from the solitude that hangs over all lone drinkers.

  I did try to see people—you must see people, you must move on, everyone told me. Going to the restaurant, I was trying to set a pace, to unearth myself from entire days where I spoke to no one but shop clerks. I screamed at the world. But the scream was something only I could hear. Friends, acquaintances, came around now and then, a little dinner to perk me up, a double espresso at a coffee bar in the afternoon, but I was absent all the while, not listening, bored, longing. I carried my loss on my face, puffy eyes, lengthening lines around my mouth. Noticing the concerned eyes looking at me, the eyes of people who had suffered their own losses, who had long ago recorded them and closed the books, I felt nothing but a void, no elemental connection, and after two, three hours, I would wander home.