FIRST ALLOW me to acknowledge the documents you sent, all of which
I received yesterday quite without a trace of gladness. I have yet
to get over the mystery of these circumstances. But perhaps it is
all perfectly understandable: what has been the downfall of historical
greatness the world over-Samson, Caesar, Troy, paradise-has also
served our ruin, and well do we deserve it for being so foolish.
Nick, my friend, when you went to Malaysia that time and left me
the request that I watch over your little wife ("in case she
tries one of her tricks again," said your hoarse voice over
the line), I simply assumed that you were going through one of your
recently frequent spells-the remains, shall we say, of what hateful
commercial psychologists have reduced to the term midlife crisis,
as if it were a phase instead of a deep, holistic uneasiness that
strikes every human being at least once in his (or her?) uneventful
life. You remember how differently we took hitting forty: you had
battles with hair loss and bouts of hypochondria, persistently having
your parts checked at Makati Med and St. Luke's, and me with my
bad lungs and my unhealthy corpulence, throwing myself harder at
the nights, wanting to live forever and not dreaming to commit.
Until you did, of course, resolving your issues in a heartbeat with
the name Stella, whose youthful owner, accordingly, produced in
you the same tumult as the heroine of the play did in its hero.
Stella, your little wife, who was tall and brown and lovely in white
beside your slight and frangible frame. Stella, who drew from your
suddenly moisturized lips a beam, an ecstatic grin that nobody in
the cathedral had ever seen you don, and from mine a sigh of such
unprecedented grief and repentance and remorse for all things past,
my past, that I finally took your advice and married our dear Rita.
That was midlife for us, my friend. And by the time you turned
forty-five you had begun to suspect that it was a sham to have believed
in the love of an attractive, intelligent woman twenty years your
junior, and when I reached that age I had already resigned myself
to the consequences of midlife folly, to spending the rest of my
life with my not-so-attractive spinster (not anymore, of course,
but connotatively, as such she will always remain) secretary churning
out briefs and pleadings from my perfunctory dictations. Thus you
and I graduated from swimming in the vodka-and-malt booze of our
decorous bachelor days, to drowning ourselves in the expensive brandies
and Irish whiskeys of our foreign fathers.
Surely you remember, my friend, the thoughts and habits of our
old days, and compared and contrasted them to the depression of
the recent ones? VP that you were of FilCo Matches (how we used
to joke about that when we were a lot younger: the sensual red nipples
of the matchsticks and the pun of the company name), you had grown
paranoid ("batty", I heard your educated wife say at a
party) and restless and stressed by work and Stella: so worried
by the possibilities that you began to ask me to watch over your
little wife whenever you were out of town.
I swear, however, on my life and my word and the old forgotten
days, that I did not take your requests to heart. It was Rita who
spent the evenings with her, dear spindly, pockmarked Rita who tucked
your tall little wife into your imported silken quilts despite your
wife's protests ("How can you take their side on this bullshit"
was the usual plaintive wail, useless on my Rita who had never been
schooled in any aspect of gender politics except by me). I, on the
other hand, kept my hands off her-except that day when I found her
out.
Here are the characters and their positions in the ill-concealed
plot. It was past 7:30 in the evening, and Rita, who unbeknownst
to me had gone home earlier than I had, was putting in the diced
vegetables for her special macaroni soup, an excellent foil for
the week's cold rains, instead of heading over to spend the night
at your and Stella's castle as I had previously assumed. You, meanwhile,
were in a glistening seventy-floor five-star hotel in Malaysia,
at a slightly different time because of zonal differences, for your
conference; and I was in an unusually large and crowded donut shop
in Cainta, freshly tired from a languorous tryst with one of Mrs.
L's newer beauties (you must remember the place, we had visited
it with some of my legal staff a few months back). I sat in a corner
where the newspapers lay, and I sat there facing the door and sipping
my coffee with the newspapers raised against my inclined elbow,
when your little wife came in, tall and beautifully disguised in
a baggy shirt so sheer I could trace the pointed cups of her breasts
from that distance, a denim jacket and loose jeans ensemble, a bandanna
around her head, and none of your coils of silver and gold about
her neck and limbs. She looked so brown and fresh and young, in
fact, that I almost sidled over to give her my warmest, most fatherly
regards, when I remembered that Stella was supposed to be with Rita
at that moment, and in my blank minute of surprise (at Rita's disobedience
and at the probability that this Stella was a mere identical twin)
she was able, undisturbed by me, to steal a table for two at the
very center of the shop from right under the nose of an overweight
matron with three tiny bouncing charges. I mulled over this turn
of events as I sipped my cooling coffee and watched your wife's
dusk-gold profile from behind my newspapers. Her gaze swept about
the bustling donut shop with the furtiveness of one who was a fugitive,
and I mulled over some more and waited with her.
Your rival did not disappoint us. He came approximately two minutes
after she had, and he stood in the doorway, his neck craned searchingly,
a taller, leaner and much, much younger boy than either of us had
ever been. Oh, I exaggerate, of course: he was just as old as your
lofty, dusky Stella, and (the terrible, irrefutable fact was) just
like her he emanated a scornful radiance of immunity, of immortality-certainly
you have felt the sear of this glorious disdain before, watching
such children's golden gyrating strangely clad bodies on TV, hearing
their extraordinary speech on the street, smelling their ultra-commercialized
odors and fragrances as you brush against their downy skin in the
crowded malls-
Allow me to go back to that moment: you should have been there
when he caught sight of her, seated in the sea of indifferent donut-eaters.
You should have seen him toss his longish, unkempt hair. I should
have captured with my camera (amazingly miniscule model, easily
assembled and plugged to my new phone) the way the knot on her brow
broke and scattered into a spectrum of delectations when he called
her name. I should have thought of recording his voice so that you
could have heard him calling: Stella-no ring nor sting nor sinuous
feeling: only the stars in her name, in his stranger's voice: Stella.
And you should have seen her bright brown face: upturned-waiting-
But he went to her and they spoke in tones that only they could
hear (for of course, there was no reason to shout at each other
while separated only by the space between the arched edges of their
seats) and so I understood nothing of what transpired between them
(except the crackle of their air).
They stayed for a mere fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes, old friend,
and yet an eternity, a maniacal quantity of years, of growing old,
of fading and despairing! You were spared the image of their hands-hers,
long and bronze and his, large and fair-clasped as only childhood
sweethearts in their hateful puppy love can clasp. No, I do not
know if he is her childhood sweetheart, nor if they went to college
together, nor if they had been introduced only that very same day,
but they held hands, and pecked each other's lips, and smiled smiles
that pained and thrilled this unfortunate voyeur, and I know that
his character can mean absolutely nothing to you.
It was all I could do not to follow them when they stood to leave,
oblivious to how my indecision has saved them from a humiliating
confrontation with me, your voluntary minion. Of course, this leaves
them prey to our inevitably malicious-and masochistic, on your part-thoughts,
for while I saw them for only fifteen minutes I called your house
every hour thereafter, checking if your dear little wife had returned,
and no, she did not, I found out that she came home three hours
after I saw her at the donut shop-and in those three long, luscious
hours, who knows where the children had gone to play?
They left and I did not follow, but soon I stepped out to my car,
but just stood there uncertainly in the drizzle, wondering, bleeding,
the image of clasped hands throbbing like a migraine in my mind.
Did you think that with Stella you would hold a hand the way you
once held the tiny mestiza palm of little Katrina, she whose obituary
I saw in the papers last week-or that downy skin of our Chinese-Filipino
classmate in high school-or the plump, pillow fingers of the very
beautiful Alexa from our days in Ateneo? Has Stella held your hand
the way you desired to be held?
And there, as I finally squeezed behind the steering wheel, my
shirt damp from the drizzle, images of fingers, hands, limbs, tumbled
into my head, displacing all other memories. How Mrs. L's new recruit
fumbled with her arms and legs as I pushed to get inside her; her
bony wrists and elbows kissing my face, hiding and exposing her
pink-freckled breasts as she yipped and yelped like a tiny stray
dog, a tiny girl who afterwards complained "ang sakit naman
po" as she massaged her pale thighs with her stalk-like fingers;
her frustrating similarity to Rita, whose frail body panted and
sniffled endlessly each time, even as I tried to pierce her old-maid
rigidity; and all, all whom I've drunk and tasted, all their possible
differences from the big, bronze, beautiful Stella.
Rita wept when I came home, she wept into her special macaroni
soup, she wept in the rain as I slammed the front door and called
and called your house until finally your tall lovely wife's voice
answered the phone. And that was when I drove to your castle.
Whatever it is that Stella told you is no doubt an exaggeration.
Indeed I had downed a couple shots or so of whiskey each time I
had called your house and received no reply, but she lies if she
says I was drunk when I went to her. I was not drunk; I distinctly
remember her recoiling at my sudden arrival; my mind treasures the
scent of her nearness, the cast-bronze of her complexion up close,
the nervous smile of her thin pink-brown lips; I recall the trill
of fear in her laughter as I began questioning her about her rendezvous
with the stranger in the donut shop.
Do not hate me, Nick, if I raised a hand to try to capture that
which has always eluded us. She fled when my questions pursued her,
and does not the hunter pursue more excitedly when the prey turns
and flees? She still wore the loose jeans, the oversized shirt that
could not hide the beads of her nipples, and each time she was impudent
enough to wave away my question I attempted to discipline her by
pulling her by the shirt repeatedly-discipline, my friend, something
you have always been unable to teach her!-until the (flimsy) material
finally tore and left us both dumbfounded by the sight of her brown
lace brassiere, which proved to be almost of the same (flimsy) material
as the gossamer shirt.
I am telling you all these with the utmost objectivity. I remembered
your rival, he with the lean, youthful build, the messy waves of
hair, the strange, starry voice. He had been with her for three
hours: what tactile acts could he have performed on those brown
breasts that should have been yours? Those large, white stranger's
paws (that bore no semblance to your stringy, arthritic hands)-what
else could they have touched?
I was angered, made furious, provoked to rage and madness by the
thought. Just as you have been angered, made furious, and provoked
to this madness.
Madness.
Would you put our careers, our years, our memories on the line
for her who has betrayed you repeatedly?
That night I returned home, the rain still raving and Rita still
weeping on our doorstep. I look back at that night, when I rushed
Rita to bed and made love to her passionately, carelessly, throwing
my weight into her, hurting her as much as she could take, and all
the while thinking of Stella's high forehead, her frozen mouth,
her pink-brown nipples, her furious tightness; I remember lying
awake beside Rita's scrawny, sleeping shoulders while the rain continued
to pound on the roof and the windows; I remember Mrs. L, Madam F,
Ms. C and all their collections of soft, multi-age flesh; I remember
the tinkling laughter of that Chinese classmate, of Katrina, Alexa,
Joan, Tessa Marie, Coleen, Tina, Josephine, Elisa, Donnabelle; I
remember Friday nights and office booze and law school and college
frats and high school rumbles over fragrant, adolescent girls; I
remember the burning, sighing warmth of Chivas, Johnny Walker, Glenfiddich,
Justerini & Brooks, Pedro Domecq, and all those great irreplaceable
masters; And I know (Oh God, Nick, I know for sure) that I can never
be as insane as you.
