by P. F. Kluge
“Darling, I have an idea,” Jun Villanueva ventured. It was his role to calm Birdy down. “Perhaps Mr. Griffin can join us Thursday evening.”
“It’s just a discussion group,” Birdy said. “A séance in memory of free speech. If you wish . . .”
“May I bring a guest?”
“Certainly.”
“Be my guest, Miss Hayes?”
“How can she say no?” Birdy said. Then she glanced across the room. “Attention, everyone! Now begins the fashion show.”
There was a surge of applause and music and a blitz of flashbulbs as the First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, made her entrance. Griffin had to admit that the effect was stunning: a white dress, floor length, with only black hair and diamonds for contrast. Queen of the Catholic Prom, appointed for life. Time had puffed and coarsened her, turning the one-time beauty queen into something of a matron. Still, the sense of past beauty, melding with current power, made her unforgettable.
She presided at the head table and, while some Ministry of Tourism official went into a lengthy and obsequious introduction—as if the audience needed to be clued in to her identity —the First Lady surveyed the room. Wherever her gaze alit, there were smiles and waves, followers marked present. It was like some tropical Camelot, Griffin thought, with knights, retainers, ladies in waiting, a close attention to dress, fashion, seating order, nuances of personal appearance, whispers, expressions. Camelot. And Camelot lasted until the First Lady arose to make her speech.
“The Philippines,” Imelda Marcos began, “is east and west, right and left, rich and poor. We are neither here nor there.”
Sometimes, at a movie, even before the credits finish, you know it’s all a mistake; it’s not going to work. Griffin had that sinking feeling now. Turning, he saw Clifford Lerner roll his eyes, place a finger at his temple, and discharge an invisible revolver. It wasn’t a speech so much as an hour-long impromptu monologue. There was the First Lady’s philosophy of tourism, her strategy for grass-roots economic development, her defense of high and mass culture, her plans for bringing the world to the Philippines, the Philippines to the world. There was an enthusiastic account of plans for the upcoming Manila International Film Festival, a world-class conference that would enrich and ennoble the humblest citizen of this struggling yet dynamic archipelago. There were those who criticized the cost of projects like the film festival—the parties and receptions, travel and hotel rooms, and most of all, the massive Parthenon-scale Film Center, which heroic construction crews were struggling round the clock to complete. What justification, they asked, for such an edifice in such an impoverished land? But there was always need—in fact, there was special need—for beauty amidst poverty. Reason not the need! Was there not poverty in Athens when the first Parthenon was built? Was India a land of plenty when Shah Jahan dreamed of the Taj Mahal? No, a thousand times! Reason not the need! Man did not live by bread alone! Or rice!
But what about some coffee? Griffin wondered. The First Lady was only warming up and Griffin badly needed coffee. He’d tried staring at waiters. He’d waved his hands in the air, as if guiding a crippled fighter onto a pitching aircraft carrier flight deck. In vain. Shit! He recognized some of his Disney World anger coming out again, recklessness and despair. Two kinds of contempt, for himself and for his world, leapfrogging toward disaster. He pushed his chair out, ready to arise and lurch across the ballroom, empty coffee cup in hand. Maybe he’d hold the cup in one hand and a pencil in another, imitating a beggar. . . . Then he felt someone’s hand on his arm. It was Susan Hayes, motioning for him to lean toward her.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
He waited for more and, while he waited, he enjoyed the appearance of intimacy, being so close to an attractive woman in a dark room.
“Don’t?” he asked.
“Don’t,” she repeated and to Griffin it meant, don’t do what you’ve done before in other places, don’t do what you would do here, now, without me.
“Okay,” he said, regretting the withdrawal of her hand and tamely sitting up to catch every word of Imelda Marcos’s speech. When historians looked back on these days, the First Lady reflected, they would not confine themselves to food production. They would not be wholly preoccupied with sacks of rice and tons of fish, with pigs or poultry, though in all these categories there were statistics to demonstrate that the New Society had scored impressive and underpublicized gains. But no! There was food for the belly. But there was also food for the eyes, the heart, and the immortal spirit!
Suddenly, abruptly, she sat down. Everyone else stood up, a standing ovation that continued while the First Lady and her entourage made an exit. Griffin stood too, stretching, yawning.
“Well, Mr. Griffin,” Torres, the resort owner, asked as soon as they were back in their seats, “Did you enjoy the First Lady’s speech?”
“Only one complaint,” he answered cheerfully. “It was too short.”
Birdy Villanueva laughed a laugh that was public and derisive. “Did you like that account of the Parthenon? Our Parthenon?”
“Unforgettable.”
“Our Parthenon collapsed a few weeks ago. Several floors of fresh cement crashed down. The government says only six workers died. Others counted dozens of bodies.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Even now there are cracks in the foundation. Structural problems. Some questions as to whether the landfill below has completely settled. What nonsense! That absurd woman!”
“Athens wasn’t built in a day,” Jun Villanueva offered brightly.
“Or for a film festival!” Birdy retorted. “In time for the visit of George Hamilton and Virna Lisi, Franco Nero, Barbara Carrera.”
“This is not fair, Birdy,” Torres protested. “You think we should live our lives under corrugated metal roofs? Should we project our movies on bed sheets? You would laugh at us then. And yet, when we aspire to match the best in the world, you laugh again. That is not fair. We are a hospitable people. We go out of our way for strangers. The whole world knows this. And when some of our people give their lives—six or sixty, I don’t know—so we can give foreigners a party, you laugh at us. That is very unfair.”
Torres’s wife patted his hand to calm him. The room darkened and a slide show depicting the natural wonders of the Philippines, not stinting certain recent improvements instigated by the leader, his wife, and offspring, began. People started leaving right away, the Villanuevas among the first to go. But while other people ducked out under cover of darkness, Birdy Villanueva walked right through the stream of light from the projector, her queenly silhouette shadowing a picture of Mrs. Marcos tiptoeing through fields of miracle rice. Perfect timing or coincidence?
“Hey, George,” Clifford Lerner came by to whisper. “Night out on the town. Meet you outside . . .”
“Can I offer you a drink?” Griffin asked Susan Hayes.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I’ll see you Thursday night, though.”
“I’m sorry if I cornered you. If you can’t come, which is my quaint way of saying if you don’t want to come, you can always phone in sick.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
“Any advice for me . . . about tonight?”
“None you’d keep. Off you go, Mr. Backyard Faraway.”
CHAPTER 3
Five travel writers, some with a history of junkets dating back to Ciudad Trujillo, set out together that December night. They were rich foreigners partying in a city that was poor, so Manila came at them, offering itself in any way it could, tempting, smiling, testing to see how, and how much, the distance between rich and poor could be eroded in a single foolish evening. When Griffin thought about it later, it reminded him of one of those war movies that begins with a half dozen character actors patrolling treacherous country, forcing strongpoints, fording rivers, fighting skirmish after skirmish, and dying along the way.
They began by reconnoitering del Pilar Street, a carnal, carnival avenue l
ined by bars, massage parlors, boardinghouses, souvenir shops, V.D. clinics. Surprise was not on their side: their approach was hailed by doormen, shoeshine boys, money changers. They started at the Firehouse, loudest and largest of the go-go emporia. The Firehouse was a theme bar. There were pictures of fire trucks and hose companies on the flame-colored walls; there were sirens, alarms, axes, helmets on display. Onstage there were firehouse poles, and fire truck lights were overhead. And everywhere, onstage, along the bar, at tables, on the dance floor, were the women who did what was needed to extinguish fires, wherever they combusted. It was hard to tell, with smoke and flashing lights and constant shifting, but George Griffin guessed there were fifty women around the Firehouse. At any time, half a dozen of them were onstage, dancing, curling themselves around firehouse poles, sliding up and down, writhing on the floor, high-kicking toward the audience. Yet it was oddly sexless, like a dressing room for teenage girls who had just opened a care package from Frederick’s of Hollywood and decided to throw a naughty, spur-of-the-moment pajama party, posing, modeling, staring at themselves in mirrors, constantly pulling at one end of a garment, tugging at another, inspecting each other and themselves, then yielding to a new group and circulating among the customers, to see if anybody took them seriously. For the most part the dancers were small and girlish; Griffin understood Clifford Lerner’s “Take two, they’re small.” They were very young; not quite so young that a customer would feel perverse, but still young. “Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher,” Lerner said.
On Mabini Street, the travel writers were ushered through a ground-floor bar, upstairs, into the “VIP Mezzanine,” a dark, moldy loft where they were urged to recline on low-lying sofas, and the girls who descended upon them, disposing of blouses as champagne arrived, made clear that fellatio was the specialty of the house. That was where they lost Hugh Elliot. He lay prostrate on a couch, pants down around his ankles, hairy belly gasping, arms flung wide in agony or ecstasy, it was hard to say, but what George Griffin remembered was the three girls who knelt around him, one on each side, one between his legs, a triple fellatio, each taking turns, the movement of their heads, rising, falling, like a trio of oil derricks pumping liquid treasure from deep out of the earth. “And then,” George Griffin said, “there were four.”
Dapper, literary Willis Ownby was the next to go, damned as soon as they stopped in a little club near the cemetery, a gay bar where some of the boys—for they were always boys and girls, never men and women, and though this should have made things morally worse, the effect was somehow otherwise, for it gave to everything the quality of play, of youthful frolic, whether it was the naughty posing of girls at the Firehouse or the innocent nudity of boys here, the boys who had taken plastic fibers, mostly blue fibers out of some cheap plastic wash line, fibers they had inserted crosswise through their foreskins, the result being a kind of permanent French tickler, and this was a piece of handicraft that Willis Ownby could not forego. Now they were three.
The next place, back on the del Pilar strip, had a large red apple emblazoned in neon over the door, a ripe and shiny MacIntosh. This was the Lost Eden, a fancier and more formal place, where a floor show featured classical skits in which statues came to life and danced before dreaming artists who committed suicide on waking, and shipwrecked maidens hallucinated about elephantine lovers, and the final skit featured audience participation. The skit was simple. An old-fashioned circular bathtub was placed onstage and then the most beautiful woman any of them had seen in Manila, clad in panties and T-shirt, stepped onstage, into the tub. The master of ceremonies invited a few members of the audience to come up onstage, to pour water on the kneeling and obeisant beauty, and then to soap and wash her. The first few customers willingly obliged, paying particular attention to the beauty’s breasts and buttocks.
That was when Griffin saw trouble coming. You couldn’t blame Lerner. Most of the women Griffin had seen were cheerfully delinquent teenagers, grabbers and gigglers, but the woman in the bathtub was different: olive-skinned, straight Castilian nose, dark winning eyes. She was taller than average, formed and tapered and, what was best of all, she made no contact with the people who watched her, the Japanese tour group, the gamy Americans, the affluent Filipinos who for once shed their macho nonchalance and assumed an attitude of protectiveness toward the woman in the tub. To all this, she seemed impervious. This was not a performance, Griffin thought, it was an epiphany, which someone was now preparing to defile. Clifford Lerner rolled up his sleeves, as though he were going into surgery, but the emcee ignored him. Lerner was more and more inflamed by the beauty in the tub. Who wouldn’t be? She was cleanliness and debauchery, sex and hygiene, and when it seemed the show was ending, lights coming up, the girl arising, Lerner lurched to his feet, upended a table of San Miguels, dove forward, tripping over the edge of the stage, smashing his forehead against the side of the tub, where he was tackled by the master of ceremonies, who helped him up, held him tightly, never failed to call him sir, and forced him out the door. Griffin settled a ridiculously inflated bill and found Lerner and a rookie named Gibbins waiting outside.
“You’re bleeding, Clifford,” Griffin said, pointing to a nasty gash on Lerner’s forehead. “You may need stitches.”
“Just a flesh wound,” Lerner countered, wiping at the wound and coming away with a blood-smeared hand. “Where to next?”
“You’d better have that looked at, really.”
“Oh, Christ, Griffin, you’re no fun at all anymore. What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s not me, Lerner. You’re the one who’s bleeding.”
“So superior,” Lerner said. “Only you’re not superior, George. Just younger. Think about it.”
Diving through a convoy of jeepneys, Lerner staggered down the other side of the street, weaving through beggars and peddlers, skipping over satay grills, finally stopping outside a place called the G-Spot, where a half dozen girls ushered the wounded writer inside. He waved good-bye: no hard feelings.
Thomas Gibbins, the other survivor, had behaved impeccably, a model of the thoughtful traveler. He asked questions about the Marcos regime, about the U.S. Military Bases Agreement, the distribution of wealth and poverty in Manila. At the start, when a girl at the Firehouse dumped herself in his lap and started trifling with his zipper, he wondered aloud about the most recent charges leveled against Marcos by Amnesty International.
“What are you going to say about Manila?” he asked now. They had stopped for Irish coffees at the Club Tennessee, a monstrous nightclub with colonnades, pillars, nymphs, fountains, and a sign that advertised an “Ivy League College Girl Fashion Show.”
“I don’t know,” Griffin said. “Manila as bargain capital?”
“You’d recommend the place? After a night like this? The whole town’s a brothel. I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe in it. I’ve never paid for it.”
“Good for you.”
“I’ll be glad to go. I’m on a swing through New Zealand. Two weeks on the South Island. I’m hiking the Milford Track. Where are you headed?”
“I don’t know. I thought I might stay around.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Gibbins asked. “This whole place is rotten. Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like it, the way they come at you here. It’s Catholic, it’s macho, it’s dictatorial, it’s small, it’s hot, it’s poor, it’s . . . evil.”
“So much for the good news.”
“Always a joke, huh, Griffin? Well, the bad news is that it’s American.”
“Used to be.”
“Come off it, George. So what if they print their own postage stamps? We run this place like the Russians run Poland. We prop up the boss man. Arm the army. Siphon off the opposition. And hold onto our beloved military bases for dear life.”
“You may be right.”
“Why hang around then?”
“For all the reasons you mentioned.”
“I don’t get you.” Curiosity mingled
with loathing in the way Gibbins looked at him, and it startled Griffin to realize that was probably the way he himself looked at Clifford Lerner: watch out, that’s what I’ll become.
“Get me out of here,” Gibbins said. He got out of his chair unsteadily. In spite—no, because of his intention to remain faithful to his bride—he’d been drinking while the others were playing. Now he was drunk. Griffin threw some money on the table, took him by the elbow, and guided him across the dance floor toward the door. He was feeling protective about young Gibbins. It was nice to meet a journalist who cared about his work. Suddenly Gibbins jerked away from him.
“What in the world is that?” he asked. He was looking through a window that ran full length down one side of the room, a one-way window that enabled Gibbins to gaze in at dozens of women available for his selection. They were a merry company, unself-conscious, trying on makeup, reading movie magazines, dancing to cassettes.
“You coming, Tom?” asked Griffin.
“Boy, oh, boy.” He leaned forward, his forehead against the glass, despondent, defeated. Sad. But when Griffin reached out to take his elbow again, he refused to budge. He was like a leashed dog, transfixed by some ecstatic scent.
“I’ve only been married a year,” he said, already confessing. “See that one by the TV? That’s the one. The hair!”
There were several girls watching an old “Let’s Make a Deal.” The girl with the hair was hard to miss, though, a cascade of straight black hair, a raven waterfall that plunged down to her buttocks. Dressed in an innocent white shift, she was like a teenager up past her bedtime, ready to dive under sheets as soon as she heard her parents’ car come up the driveway. She was striking, almost as memorable as the girl in the tub, and Griffin reckoned there was hope for everyone in the discovery —Manila discovery—that sin did not necessarily defile, or virtue beautify. Gibbins signaled to a female attendant to bring out the long-haired girl. “Got to be,” he said.
