Before the Rain

by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

  Tim was still living in Washington and would meet me after he got done at work for a drink at the Bombay Club, or at the Ritz-Carlton, and shaking the ice cubes in his gin and tonic, flipping open his pack of Dunhills and tossing it at me, he would exhort, expound, making sense of the world for me. But he seemed impatient. He had moved past me, had left behind the brittle affairs. His heart had grown up, and he no longer needed nights of sour mash whiskey and confessions, his eyes moistening over his adored goddesses. He had passed that stage. He was graying at the temples, thickening around the waist. His life had changed. He had obligations, family duties, his engagement, big wedding plans, two hundred invitations to address, and his work, dealing with national security, breaking stories.

  There was something else, too—the discomfort of people in the presence of disaster. He had loved Elizabeth, had brightened up in her presence, the arms she threw around his neck. I had always known that, since that first time at Orchard when he earnestly pleaded with me to leave her alone. Now that she and I had broken up, he was torn, he said. The hurt he saw in each of us was more than he could bear. So for a time he stayed away, worn out by me and the endless grief. He was not the only one to give me a pass. Some old friends disappeared altogether, people whom Elizabeth and I had shared. My messages and letters went unanswered, and for a long time I waited for the phone to ring, for the mail, even when I pretended to myself that I no longer cared.

  Slowly I made a routine, a frame I constructed to hold myself in. The apartment I lived in had good light, windows on three sides. I set up my desk and my other things, and it became a refuge, another refuge. I wrote every day and rarely left the building but for excursions down the street just to take into account that there was a world out there. I found myself staring absently into the glass windows of coffee shops, scanning the faces inside, vapid, smug, animated sometimes, engaged in lives of their own. But most of the time I strode by, catching the reflection of sunglasses on a grave face, myself, and I shifted my eyes and moved rapidly past. I could feel no relation to any of it, no fit anywhere.

  For months I would not listen to music. I would not open that door. In fits of anger I threw out my Manila notebooks and folders filled with half-done articles and drafts, and I put away a framed picture of her and the rings she had given me. But all that, coming in bursts of crying and remorse, did nothing to take her away. After a time I brought out the picture I had tossed, splitting the wooden frame, on the top of a closet shelf and placed it back just where it had always been. I put back my rings and began to listen to music and sorted through hundreds of loose snapshots of our years together, collecting them in groupings by dates and places, and bound them in rubber bands.

  I brought out our letters from the leather bag where I kept them and scattered them on the living room rug. I sat on the rug and opened one, two, then another, and each line, each line of her writing, was a stab. It was then, with her old clipboard and a faded yellow notepad, that I picked up a pen and wrote down a phrase that came from nowhere, and the next day I looked at it and made it into a sentence, and that was the way this story came to me.

  She moved to Washington in the late fall, and presently a letter from her came in the mail, a typewritten sheet folded in one of her old crinkly par avion envelopes. She had typed it on her Royal, wrote it fast I could see by the crossovers and keys that seemed to run into each other. She had been settling into her new house in Washington, she said lightly, a great house for reading. I pictured it instantly: the sofa, the lamps, and the things that used to be “our” things. She was finding her way in a new place quietly, she said. The letter was light, careful. I looked for words she didn’t write, conjured the rhythms of her life. But the truth is that I knew nothing.

  “I don’t want our lives to crisscross,” she had told me a few months earlier, in New York, when she announced that she was moving to Washington. She had run into me by chance at a restaurant, one of our spots during our years in Manhattan. I was in from Washington for Halloween weekend, trying to keep in touch with New York friends and doing some business, when suddenly there she was in the restaurant, in a rush as usual. She didn’t notice me and went on to sit nearby with a friend, her back to me. Bracing myself, I got up and walked over and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered and her face turned pink, a flush broke down her neck, then she recovered, smiled brightly, and stuck out her hand, cold, clammy, to shake mine. I knew blood was rushing to my face, my head was pounding, and I felt sick, but we played on, a casual patter, the lies of false indifference, and then I went back to my business, watching as she left the restaurant.

  We met by agreement the next day. It was a miserable rainy afternoon on Times Square. We found a noodle shop, went through the preambles. Then she said I was to make no effort to see her once she moved to Washington. She didn’t want any of what she called “our back-and-forth.” She looked formidable, unmovable. I left her in the rain on a sidewalk on Broadway, tugged at the mustard-colored slicker that made her look like a 1940s flier. As I leaned forward to embrace her, she stepped away and barely brushed my neck with her fingers.

  Her words rang in my head all the way back to Washington. I didn’t try to find out where in Washington she was moving to, or when, but I wondered constantly, and one day when I was walking up Connecticut Avenue, near my neighborhood, I stopped at a real estate office where photos of houses for sale were posted on the display window. There was an ink sketch of a house with a SOLD banner across it. Somehow I knew it had to be her house; it looked just like her.

  I saw her finally. I was going up Connecticut, hunched down in my coat to ward off a brittle winter wind. It was a Saturday, and I had just gone to the store for bread and magazines. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, a flash across the road. I had to look twice. She was running, hair flying, a swatch of lavender sweatshirt and white sweatpants, but by the time I recognized her she had run half a block ahead across the road. I called out to her, shouting, and I ran after her. But I couldn’t catch her. I saw her disappear down the road, and I stopped at my street corner, feeling foolish, my body chilled.

  The next afternoon I walked across a bridge that spans Rock Creek Park, the bridge she was about to cross when I had lost sight of her. The December wind was blowing hard, unblocked by buildings or trees. The sun was out and people were wearing their sweats, running and biking, swooshing past me. I kept a lookout for her and trudged on against the wind until I came to the end of the bridge. I stopped at the curb, waiting for the light to change, half wishing I hadn’t gone out at all.

  On that other side of the bridge everyone seemed smug and blond, and toddlers wobbled in hundred-dollar baby running shoes. The suburbs begin just around that point, and on bright shiny weekends the lines form at the ice cream parlor and the restaurants are overrun at brunch. The last thing I wished was to seem forlorn, single. I wanted a destination, a rendezvous. I stopped to read the display menus at the Thai, Indian, and Lebanese restaurants along the strip. I went into a market and bought a pack of cigarettes. I browsed through a gallery of tacky silver crafts and motel art. An hour had gone by and I was leaving a gift shop when I turned my eyes down the street and saw her.

  She was walking toward me but had not noticed me. Her neck was wrapped in a long woolen scarf, the collar of her jacket was half turned up; she often forgot to smooth it down. She was swinging a small pink bag from a record store. I stopped dead, watching her, and pushed toward her. I wanted to run but measured each step, and she saw me. She smiled, ah, there you are, and before either of us could say a word, I had thrown my arms around her, feeling the coat, the ridges of her back, her chest, her neck, the ruff of her hair. I had not seen her for three months. Her arms hung limp at her sides but she didn’t pull away.

  She didn’t seem surprised to see me. “I thought I heard your voice shouting my name yesterday when I was running,” she said, light in her voice, in her face. “I thought, Well, it’s time.” She believed in these things, the jun
ctures of history, confluence of moments. “You look great,” she said. “But you always looked great in a tan.” I had just returned from a spur-of-the-moment four-day trip to Hawaii, a sort of cure I had taken, had read a book lying by a pool in Kauai, spent too much money on bad food, and had too many jet-lagged nights thinking of her and listening to the rustling of palm trees.

  We went for coffee and she read a letter I had written her and had carried with me, thinking I would mail it. Her hand was trembling just so, the paper fluttering. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “as usual.” I could not stop staring at her, wanted to take in everything about her. She had on her old blue jeans and a crewneck sweater and a green bandanna rolled around her head. No lines on her face, no circles under her eyes. Puttering around her yard, getting her house in order, she had slowly burrowed into Washington. We talked for a long time, a few hours, about the changes she saw in me, wounds closing, she said, and she took my hand and held it a second, and then it was dusk and we picked up our coats and walked toward the street where she lived, and at the corner where she had to turn, we stopped. I lit a cigarette, scrubbed the ashes on the sidewalk, unable to pull away. Then she said, “Would you like to come over for a glass of wine, maybe on Christmas?”

  I wore a silk blouse and jeans and black flats and my dark jacket and fluffed my hair and practiced a carefree smile. On Christmas morning I took a cab to her house, which was the house that I had picked out as hers from the sketch at the real estate office. She watched me get out of the car and walk up the brick steps to her doorway. “It’s strange,” she said, “to see you arriving by taxi.” I knew what she meant—arriving as a guest, a stranger.

  She had built a fire. Boom was curled down on the back cushion of an armchair, and the Christmas tree was trimmed with the things we had collected since Manila. The furniture that had been ours was placed against Navajo-white walls; the old wooden sculpture of a lion’s head from India was hung above the mantelpiece; the rugs I knew so well were scattered in all the rooms of her house, in the living room, in the bedrooms upstairs. She showed me around, a little nervous, and I climbed the staircase behind her and went into every room and did not touch anything, the house so definitely hers.

  She went into the kitchen, sun-white, red-tiled, and brought out a silver platter on which she had arranged slices of smoked salmon and a cream cheese and caviar dip she made for big occasions, and we sat on the rug in the living room. She had put effort into all of this, wanted it to go smoothly, a perfect reunion. All the afternoon through we talked as we always could all those years, about writing and books, and my magazine assignments with Vanity Fair, but we did not talk about us, and she touched my hand and threw more logs on the fire and shifted the ashes and brought out more wine and I lit her cigarettes.

  Her knees brushed mine, we were seated that close, and the flames off the fire made her face glow as if she were newly in love. I had a sense of time not having moved at all, of things in their proper place, and the loneliness eased off. But I knew anything could change this, that we were testing each other, calibrating words, checking the drift of the conversation. There was nothing neutral; there was nothing that was not fraught. I knew I could not cross that wall of privacy she put up around her to keep me out. But with her I couldn’t maintain distance for any length of time. Three glasses of wine, and I was reckless. I began to probe and poke into our relationship, what had gone wrong, and what her new life was like without me—the things she did not want to talk about. She immediately shut down, folding herself. Rising off the floor, she moved to the farthest armchair, put her knees up defensively against her chest, and tucked her hands in her armpits. I persisted, pushing her, and spilled wine on the rug. I mumbled apologies, mortified. I had ruined the day.

  She drove me home in anger and silence. Halfway to my place I blurted out, “How do you feel about me?”

  I glanced over at her. She was looking straight ahead, and after taking a long moment to phrase her reply, she said, “If you mean, do I love you like I used to? No.” I said nothing; I was numbed. We arrived at my building and I thanked her, got out of her car, and closed the door carefully. I didn’t want to slam it. I didn’t want to run into the building. I wanted to walk away very slowly.

  “Worst winter we’ve had around here,” the old ladies in my building said day after day, in January and February and March, the winter of 1994. The doorman worried about me: “Girl, how you going out there without gloves and scarf?” Seasons caught me by surprise. I always had too many layers or not enough, maybe because I had grown up in the tropics where seasons don’t change, maybe because it seemed silly to me to carry rubber boots and umbrellas in the rain, and earmuffs in the snow.

  But, God, I froze that winter, shivered through days and nights in my apartment, the wind sifting through the cracks around the air conditioners. That winter gave me an understanding of the rhythms one creates to keep life within. I learned to live alone. Cork walls around me, silence. Vast, empty nights. I would lie on the sofa, listening to Brahms, or maybe Schubert, Annie Lennox, or the Manila Blues tapes, watching the amber lights of the building across the street, the men in undershirts moving behind half-drawn blinds, and in the mornings the garbage trucks came and the buses coughed and cranked, and the world came to my door, and I knew that another day stretched before me, without voices, without someone for dinner, without the phone call I always waited for.

  Months passed. One night quite late the phone broke the silence, Elizabeth on the line, and when I heard her voice, everything about her came back to me, the way she said my name, the solitude that was in her and had been mine. She was muttering, crying, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I wanted to keep her on the phone, but she hung up and I was left in the dark of my apartment.

  Much later, one Sunday morning, she appeared at my door. I was still in my robe, hair springing in unruly curls. She looked exactly the way she looked that first day we spent together in Manila, in March 1986: panting, sweating, red-faced from a two-mile run from her house, in madras shorts, her chest damp in an old familiar T-shirt. “I’ve been wanting to see the place you live in,” she said. “Saw you the other day when I drove by—you were looking out the window.” She took in the apartment in a couple of strides, liked it, said it reminded her of Manila. She took up a corner of the sofa, taking my coffee, while I fumbled with cigarettes, smiling helplessly. She fit in perfectly in the apartment, and I realized for the first time that I had made the place for her, that every bookshelf, every rug, every piece of furniture, had something of hers.

  “You live like a writer,” she said approvingly. She would say this frequently, as a compliment, that it was the life she wanted. She made a romance of this life, and so much of it was true, and we talked about that, and over the next months she invited me to dinner at her house, and we would call each other up like we used to, for no reason at all, just to check in, and we drank wine and at times it seemed to me that there was no space between us.

  On the day of Tim’s wedding in May, we stood side by side among people we had known since our first year. Seated next to me, while poetry was read and songs played, she clasped her hands, my rings still there. I could hardly breathe and played with the rings she had given me, daydreaming. We filed out of the church together, and with every step I felt her arm brushing against me. Later, we toasted each other with sparkling wine and drifted in and out of the wedding party and circled back to each other, like an old married couple, she said, teasing. When she was set to leave, I walked her out and she draped an arm around me, pulling me to her. “We have such cinematic moments,” she said, laughing, and then she picked up her bag and walked off. I thought she was crying.

  I left the apartment building that summer, just around the time a couple moved next door with a snake. The old ladies, who learned about the snake too late to stop it, were beside themselves. “That snake has to go,” they shouted at the concierge, who rolled her eyes, commiserating and patting their b
acks. The snake was the most exciting thing that happened in the building in the year I lived there.

  It seemed that I moved every August—to Manila, to New York, from New York to Washington. Now I was moving again. This time it was a short move, from Dupont Circle to Georgetown. I rented a two-story brick house with a patio out back and a magnolia tree, bamboo stands, and azaleas in bloom. Elizabeth came over to look it over, snooped around it, ran up the stairs, opened closet doors, and helped me pick out the right shade of white for the walls. No buildings hovered over this place. A tree out front on the sidewalk was all you could see from the living room, and the eastern light flooded the place through white shutters. “You could make love in here and no one would see you,” she said, and I wondered.

  But for periods of time, without explanation, she would remove herself from my life. Sometimes we talked for six hours straight, and sometimes not for months. Twisting on a string, I was always reading between her words, setting them in ink, recording them, analyzing, interpreting, snaring myself. She used to say that I knew no limits, that given a drop of water I wanted the entire Pacific, that she had to keep me far from her, and we fought about this. She drew the lines I constantly crossed. She would then try to set the terms of our separation and build a fence around herself, excluding me. “I am so sick that I cannot express it, going back and forth, continuing this fight,” she said over and over, wanting me to stay away, but I didn’t quite believe it.