January, of the Year of Other Things

The year 2008 was, for me, the Year of Other Things. I say that because it was the year in which I, as a writer (and I feel helpless that I cannot be anything else), didn’t write, or at least didn’t write what was important for me to write. In other words, it was the year which I had spent as a liar. Among other things. Mind you, it was not a year spent too unhappily.

January 2008: I think that this is where I ought to begin. I am in Quezon City. I am going out on a date. Perfumed, clean-shaven, and wearing an ostentatiously fuchsia Lacoste polo I had stolen from my older brother Francis (my own wardrobe betrays such inferior style), I jump into a taxi on the way to old Manila, nervous, excited, and rendered breathless by the brilliant fiction contained in a text message I had sent my parents. “I am off to work, Ma,” the message read. “Technical rehearsals. Tell Pa I am doing this event for Ramos, this scriptwriting gig. He will turn eighty soon, and you wouldn’t believe the logistics of it all.” The birthday party for the former Philippine President with caricatured ears will not be until March, and there probably won’t be any sort of rehearsal until the first week of that month. I haven’t even written the entrance spiel for the host. I tell Ma and Pa that I will be back later tonight. It is eleven in the morning. They were cooking when I left, but this is not the first time I am missing a homemade lunch.

I brought my laptop: for props.

Props. Like this ten-year-old pair of Ray-Bans. Like this leather Quartz watch, inherited from father. It cannot tell time, but it looks fashionable enough and it fits me perfectly, and I don’t have to flop my bony wrist when I have to pretend to check the time. I also have my tattered copy of a book that was sent to me from New York – Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – but I am almost certain that I won’t be reading it on this taxi, on this furtive ride downtown, because my hands are sweating, and my breathing is not normal, and I don’t look poised at the moment, not to anyone who knows me, and my inability to contain this severe excitement, this strange, urgent, formidable franticness, can be seen in the way I thumb an uncooperative Sony Ericsson and in the way I chomp the nails off my fingers. Thankfully, as we drive to the Rizal Park area, no one who knows me sees these ways. No one recognizes and makes fun of the props.

Not that I think anything would go wrong. I certainly hope not! It’s our third date – well, okay: third “get-together,” whatever that means these days. It won’t be the last, and we are seeing more of each other this coming February, and a trip to Chiang Mai is not impossible. You see, we hit it off right away. Or we so hit it off so right away, to be swaggeringly Yankee about it. When we are not seeing each other, we are chatting heavily on the Internet, and I have been on the phone more times than when I bothered editors and clients to pay attention to invoices. While I cannot say that I carry with me a remarkable history of amorous pursuits and conquests, I have never been like this with anyone before, and I am wondering now where I got the courage, the fearlessness, to hang about the populated Manila streets with him – this pink-skinned, hazel-eyed, hairy-naped, beautifully-aged, five-o’clock-shadowed piece of English gentlemanhood from the immediate outskirts of London.

Let us call him Evelyn. A businessman. An adopted child, and then one-time radio disc jockey. A very heavy coffee drinker. A non-smoker. A non-smoker! It’s startling enough to think that someone can drink infinite cups of cappuccino without needing cigarettes, but for me to be seeing that kind of someone in the most serious way of seeing someone – goodness, what shall I think of that?

On our second date, Evelyn asked me to go to Thailand with him. He extended the invitation during dinner at an Outback cafe in Malate, while I was dissecting a stubborn T-bone. “We stay a night in Bangkok,” he said, “and then spend the rest of the vacation in Chiang Mai.” I gave the matter some thought – about two seconds – and replied to him, but of course, why not, I would love to travel with you and see the elephants, the temples, and the pedophiles. Evelyn kind of found that funny, and after teasingly reconfiguring the ration of mixed vegetables (carrots, green peas, and corn) on his plate, he gave off a warm smile.

I will not remember much of what happened on our third date but that we paid corkage to enjoy the heady goodness of cheap Chardonnay. Of course, Evelyn and I were careful not to drink away the profundity of that evening. He wore a Lacoste polo, too. It was maroon. My parents did not send any more messages that day after “Okay – we’ll see you then.”

Everything sounds – doesn’t it? – just like a fairy tale, but being told me and not by me. God. It was impossible for me not to fall in love, and it probably became more impossible because I had uncharacteristically set myself up for it. My generation is, I should think, generally a non-committal generation, come and go, hello goodbye, I am the master of my fate, and yet when I met Evelyn I was ferocious in my attempts to dispel these very notions, and I couldn’t explain my own eagerness to have him and then have him have me. I was enchanted, and I was charmed, big-time, by a Caucasian gent with an accent, and so I thought nothing of what I would then do to reconcile my inner life – now roused like something that’s worth writing about – and the world outside. What could I do? Not much, I was convinced. It even became so that the attention I paid this inner life – this “love life,” if you will, although I am not sure why anyone else would be so terribly intrigued by it – was not proportional to the amount of interest I should have taken on the rest of the world.

So instead I held those January days as a time which, when I have grown old, or old enough, and when most other things have been forgotten, I will be happy to remember. And indeed I will be happy to remember the dinners at Indian restaurants and the sunset at Manila Bay, and the hotdog stands and bad cafes where numerous afternoons were spent, and the contemptuous stares from scapular-wearing pedestrians. I will remember our looking for Advil in 7-Eleven. I will remember karaoke on Roxas Boulevard. I will remember listening to Glenn Miller and Elton John, and then not really listening, and talking and talking and then discussing other preferred soundtracks before we stopped talking. I will remember that shortly after I saw Evelyn off for the first time at the Manila domestic airport, I instantly found it harder to be alone.

As the taxi drove me back home from the terminal, heavy with love and lies, I pined. What was happening? The thought of literature offering enough consolation suddenly seemed absurd. The twenty-three years which I lived more or less unattached did nothing to prepare me from the separation – at once terrifying and temporary – from a man I had not even known for more than a month. News crackled on the radio, but I listened only for the sounds of my phone. The only people I noticed on the streets were those who looked back at me. It was a stupefying feeling, and I am sure I will remember it, too, very well.

It was strange when I finally got back and put my bag down at the living room. The whole house felt empty. Then I saw Lisa, our housekeeper, in the kitchen peeling onions. Mother emerged from the bathroom and I took her hand, brought it to my forehead, and said nothing. She said nothing, too. But the way she looked at me, I could almost sense that she saw someone who was not writing. Then I made my way upstairs to the bedroom, where I wept and felt sorry for my mother.