R&R

He cheated on me, the bastard, and then he denied it. He lied to me at one o’clock in the morning as I buried my head in my arms and quivered at father’s office desk, the telefax’s receiver to my left ear. The swivel chair made a soft creaking noise and I felt, for the first time in my life, truly unhappy. Not just lacking, but unhappy. (And believe me, lacking is bad enough for me.) Are you hiding something from me? was my question; I asked this while destroying a good number of paper clips; and he said no, I am only guilty of flirting. My older brother Francis must have been eavesdropping. Maybe he wasn’t; he was perhaps just still up after a night of lifting weights at the downstairs storage room of our dark, madly shadowed house in Quezon City, after the two routine glasses of protein milk shake. A hard-working man, Francis, and I am almost certain that he will be surprising many pairs of roving eyes when he takes off his shirt on the shores of Boracay.

I would love to take off my shirt in Boracay, too, even if the surfers might mistake me for an anthropomorphic toy. But that weekend all the family ended up going to was Pansol, Laguna, two hours south of Manila, in a hot springs resort spa called R&R. When we arrived, the granny-glass-wearing lady behind the check-in counter unlocked the gates and led us inside. My parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary – thirty-second? Thirty-third? My sister Lourdes is thirty-one, so my guess must be close. We stayed at a two-storey cabana. Surprisingly, there weren’t any mosquitoes. The common pool was divine, and there was a sort of huge net that was spread about ten, fifteen feet above it, like a horizontal curtain, and where I expected to find windblown leaves, dead bugs, and fallen twigs there weren’t any. I practiced the backstroke that Josemaria, my younger brother, had taught me, and both of us even raced from one end of the pool to another and I lost because the sky was very beautiful and I could not help but stop to look at it and admire it as one admires a calm sea on a summer afternoon. Mother sat poolside on a bamboo chair, watching, and then she took pictures with her Olympus digital camera. It was a birthday gift two years ago from the four of us children.

Don’t be too serious, my father muttered under his cigarette breath. He looked on as mother tried to take a picture of my unsmiling face, juxtaposed with a bookmarked David Sedaris book (Barrel Fever) I had brought with me, along with several pieces of bacon-stripped clothing which could be considered underwear and a baseball cap on which was embroidered a jolly-looking rooster. That was it, for I always travel light. Besides, we were staying there for one night only, so why carry unneeded baggage?

I had two beers at the clubhouse that evening, San Mig Light, to go with our dinner of grilled milkfish, grilled pork chops, grilled squid, grilled tomato, grilled okra, and heaps of rice. I would have had more but Francis was conscious of the calories he was taking in, and the rest of the family didn’t really relish the pleasures of drinking anyway. So instead of clinking my glass against another, I watched the game on television. As soon as we finished, Al – one of the green-shirted resort workers – cleared the table and took away the plates. As he did this, father chatted him up; he pointed to me and said, him, my second son, he’s a basketball player, he’s almost six-foot tall. Al nodded respectfully as if to show that it was the most marvelous thing he ever heard, and then he looked me up and down, up and down.

I was seething when I first found out. Fuck you, I shouted on the phone, fuck you for lying to me, I am not going to let you keep on hurting me, I am not going to let you make me sick again, you son of a five-letter animal. There was silence on the other end and I wanted to believe I was hearing guilt and shame and sincerity and an unspoken request, nay, a plea – a plea! – for forgiveness. Goddamn him if he didn’t think we were worth him on bended knees and with tears in his eyes. If Lola Nena was still alive, my grandmother who used to sleep where the bench and bars now were, she would have heard the noise and feebly risen from her bed to walk at a deliberate, forbidding pace across the television room to father’s office, warping the shadows every step of the way, and she would have slapped me on the face for saying such bad words. Maybe she wouldn’t. In any event, I would have whispered to her, Lola, it’s way too late, go back to bed, you are too old to be minding the young.

Josemaria.

Cabana.