Pen smiled at Armando. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Are they yours?”
“Beautiful maybe, but extremely loud,” said Armando with a chuckle. “They’re the sons of Lana, our cook.”
“You have a cook?” blurted out Jason. Pen glanced quickly at him and her heart softened at the regret she saw on his face: he hadn’t meant to sound so impressed.
“In the Philippines, a lot of middle-class households have helpers,” explained Armando. “Nannies, cooks, drivers, housekeepers. Maybe it’s because so many people are in need of employment. It’s that way in many developing countries.”
“Oh,” said Jason grudgingly. “Makes sense, I guess. Must’ve been tough back in Ohio, huh? Fending for yourself and all.”
At the mention of Ohio, everyone seemed to stiffen, social awkwardness setting in like rheumatism.
“Not so tough,” said Armando finally, a slight chill in his voice, and for a second, Pen thought he was talking about Jason.
Will was looking down into the yard. “That’s an amazing tree,” he said.
They all looked, and Pen knew what tree he meant right away: some sort of palm, but not like any she had seen before, tall and flat and wide and shaped exactly like a showgirl’s feathered fan.
“A traveler’s palm,” said Armando. “Although not a true palm tree, more closely related to a banana tree. Indigenous to Madagascar, so a non-native species.”
Pen caught a glimpse of the arrogance Will had noticed at the hospital. Armando was a man who liked to know things and liked to tell people what he knew.
“I like it,” said Pen defiantly. “Non-native or not.”
Armando laughed. “I like it, too. I think it’s cool.”
Just like that, he was warm again. Maybe it wasn’t real arrogance; maybe he resorted to didacticism in moments of social stress, the way she resorted to babbling and Jason to being a jerk (even though it could be argued—Pen had argued it herself, although she was less convinced of it than she once had been—that being a jerk was Jason’s natural state). Armando walked to the front door and opened it, with a welcoming, if slightly officious sweep of his hand. “Why don’t we go inside where we can talk?”
They all filed in, Pen and Will immediately, Jason after another leisurely look at the lawn in an act of rebellion for which Pen supposed he could not really be blamed. Still, it was embarrassingly transparent: Armando might have a cook, sculpted cheekbones, an affair with Jason’s wife under his belt, and a fancy tree, but he couldn’t make Jason go inside before Jason was good and ready. You’re not the boss of me. Pen could almost hear him say the words, sandbox voice and all.
They walked into a smaller version of Patrick and Tanya’s great room: kitchen, dining room, living room. It was nice, full of low, carved wood furniture, tall Chinese (at least, Pen assumed they were Chinese) jars, cushions in shades of gold, but it struck Pen as a little sterile, too tidy, as though most of the real living in the house took place elsewhere. Even the kitchen appeared pristine, unused. As she sat down on the sofa, she caught a glimpse of another room around the corner, kids, maybe teenagers watching television, its blue light washing over them, before one of the kids saw her looking and, with a smile, closed the door.
Armando called something in what Pen assumed was Cebuano, and a young woman—a different one from the one who had taken the children to play—appeared with a standing fan. She plugged it in and set it on rotate. When the stream of air hit Pen, she realized how hot she was. Pen smiled to herself, remembering how Cat used to say that if there were gods of fire and water and earth, there should be a god of air-conditioning because it was that elemental to human existence. She had joked about naming her firstborn child Freon.
“Can I offer you a drink? Coke? A beer?” asked Armando.
Pen would have loved a glass of water, but before she could ask for it, Jason said, “Let’s cut to the chase. I know Cat’s in Cebu, and it’s crucial that I find her. If you know anything about her current location, you should tell me. ASAP. Time is of the essence.”
Here we go, thought Pen. She wondered if Jason thought people really believed he was a detective when he talked like that.
For a moment, Armando’s face grew contemplative. Finally, he said one word, calmly, like a person making his move in a chess game: “Why?”
Jason’s face began to redden. “Why what?” he spluttered, and then said, “No, wait. Forget it. You don’t get to ask questions. Just tell me what I need to know.”
Coolly and as if he hadn’t heard Jason take back the “Why what?” Armando said, “Why is it crucial that you find her? Why should I tell you where she is? Why is time of the essence?”
Jason rocked up out of the chair to his feet, one hand on his hip, the other pointing at Armando, and said, “Because she’s my wife.”
Pen was impressed by the simplicity of the answer, but she didn’t like the wild look in Jason’s eyes, which only grew more intense when Armando got up from his chair, too. He didn’t move toward Jason, just stood there, but still managed to look quick, wary, and light-footed, like a boxer. Pen looked over at Will. He was still sitting, but Pen saw that he was full of coiled energy, his hands poised on the arms of his chair.
“I think you should sit down, Jason,” said Will in a low voice.
“Fuck that,” said Jason loudly, never taking his eyes off Armando. “What do you know about Cat?”
“Have you considered,” said Armando coldly, “that if she wanted you to find her, she would not have left in secret, without telling you where she was going?”
“Shut up!” shouted Jason. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Pen waited for it to dawn on him that he was wrong about this, that, clearly, Armando did know what he was talking about, and, sure enough, after staring into space for a few seconds, he jabbed his finger at Armando again. “You’ve talked to her. You wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t talked to her.”
Armando seemed to consider his next move, before he raised his chin an inch or two and said, “Sure, I talked to her. We had dinner together the day after she arrived in Cebu.”
At the same instant that Jason lunged across the coffee table toward Armando, Will stood up as fast as a striking snake and grabbed him, his arm thrown across Jason’s wide chest.
“No, Jason!” said Pen, but Jason was struggling to get himself free. He wasn’t in shape, but he was a lot bigger than Will, and Pen knew it could be only a matter of seconds before he broke away. Without thinking, she lifted the delicate china bowl off the perilously positioned coffee table and cradled it in her lap.
“You son of a gun!” A great, loud bark of a voice, heavily accented.
All eyes turned in the direction of the voice. Standing in the entrance to the room was an elderly woman, very elderly, frail and tiny inside her loose batik housedress, but bristling with electricity. With her short gray hair puffed around her head like a nimbus, her ferocious black eyes, and her raised fist, she looked unreal, iconic, like a miniature goddess of vengeance.
“Coming into my house, yelling!” raged the woman, walking toward Jason with remarkably steady steps. “Throwing yourself around like an elephant!”
Jason had stopped struggling as soon as he had heard the woman’s voice. Now, as the woman advanced upon him, he wilted inside Will’s grasp, and Will let go.
“Sorry about that, ma’am,” Jason said with hangdog politeness. “I-I didn’t know this was your house. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Where else would I be?” scoffed the woman.
“Lola,” said Armando softly, “it’s okay.”
He walked toward her and, with exquisite tenderness, took her hand in his. “I’m sorry we disturbed you.”
“Ehhh!” said the woman. “You should be sorry!” And she reached up and cuffed Armando across his head, but Pen saw that her eyes had grown soft. “No more yelling!”
He smiled, kissed her cheek, and turned her around.
“No more yelling, Lola. I promise.”
“You, too, elephant!” said the woman, glaring at Jason over her shoulder.
“Me, too, ma’am,” said Jason.
When the woman was gone, Armando turned back to them and said, “My grandmother.”
“You live with your grandmother?” asked Jason. He didn’t sound hostile, just dazed.
“My grandmother, my parents, my brother, Rey, who is in medical school, two of my younger sisters.”
“Oh, so, they’re the family Ruben meant,” said Pen. “He said he was the driver for your family.”
“That’s right,” said Armando.
“No wife?” asked Jason with a hint of snideness.
“Not yet,” said Armando, chin up, eyes challenging.
“Jason and I are going out for a walk,” said Will. “Get some air.”
“I’m not leaving here until he tells me what he knows about Cat,” said Jason in a blunt but thankfully unpetulant way.
“You guys go check on Augusta. I’ll stay and talk to him,” said Pen quickly, “if that’s okay with you, Armando.”
“No problem,” said Armando amiably.
When they left, Armando slumped down onto the sofa, ran his hand through his hair, and gave a low whistle. Pen liked him for this open display of relief and vulnerability. A pattern seemed to be emerging: his aloofness and pomposity would push you away; his humor and humanness would pull you back—and just in the nick of time. Pen thought that she could only take this state of affairs for so long before it exhausted her, but she could imagine Cat’s finding it exciting. She had always had a soft spot for thorny men with soft underbellies. Behind their backs, she and Pen used to call them echidnas.
“I think that went well, don’t you?” said Pen.
“He’s big, isn’t he?” said Armando, widening his eyes. “You can forget how big and then he charges you like a bull and you remember.”
“I’ve thought that before, that he’s part bull,” said Pen, smiling.
Armando sat up, gave her his out-of-the-blue, disarming white crescent of a smile, and said, “Thank you.”
“For what? Showing up here with Jason so that he could disrupt your entire household?”
“For saving my mother’s bowl.”
Pen looked down at the bowl in her lap, which she’d forgotten she was holding, and laughed. “You’re welcome.”
“I should thank Will, too,” said Armando. “Has he always had those ninja reflexes?”
Pen placed the bowl back on the table as she considered this. “I guess he has. He just used to use them for jumping on people instead of for jumping on the people who jump on people. But he reformed a while back.”
“Lucky for me. I was surprised to find you and Will traveling with Jason. I didn’t think you liked him.”
“You know who we are?” asked Pen, startled.
“Of course. Cat and I talked a lot, and after I left, we e-mailed a lot. I’ve even seen pictures of you two. You’re the friends.”
“That’s right. We’re the friends. Jason’s the husband. And you’re the—?” She waited.
“I’m the guy who lives on the other side of the world,” he said.
On impulse, Pen leaned forward with clasped hands and said, “I wish you would tell me about you and Cat.”
She expected him to get supercilious and distant, to say it was none of her business, with which she really couldn’t argue except to say that she loved Cat and missed her and that collecting what she could of Cat’s story was her only means of feeling close to her. But instead, Armando’s eyes lit up with eagerness, and for the first time since she’d met him, he looked young. Pen realized, with a start, that he was young.
“From the very first day, it was like we’d always known each other. We talked about our families, our pasts. It was easy. We both noticed that, how easy it was.”
He was so boyish and warm and open-hearted. Oh, marveled Pen, he loves her. She hadn’t expected him to love her.
“You were friends?” she asked cautiously.
“Yes, friends. Real friends.” His tone took on a note of defiance, as he said, “It’s true that we were both lonely. I was a long way from home, working all the time, and she was unhappy in her marriage, in her work, but that’s not why we were together. We could have met under any circumstances and been—”
Pen watched him search for the word. His English was fluid, even formal, eloquent. It wasn’t his command of the language that was failing him, she saw; it was that when it came to love, sometimes language just failed.
“I understand,” said Pen.
“Thanks,” said Armando.
“What job was she doing that she didn’t like?” asked Pen.
“She was training to be a pharmaceutical rep. She thought it would be glamorous, the dinners, the parties. You must understand that she was much less happy than when you knew her. She found her life very drab.” He said it as though he was apologizing for Cat’s desire for glamour, as though glamour wasn’t imprinted on Cat’s DNA as firmly as her black hair, her tapered fingers.
“And it involved travel, of course,” he continued. “She was always wanting to be someplace else, away.”
“Away from Jason, you mean,” said Pen.
“Of course!” Armando knit his straight black brows in disgust. “She didn’t love him. How could she? He’s ridiculous, unsophisticated, a—bonehead!”
Even as Pen suppressed a smile at the word bonehead coming out of Armando’s mouth, and despite having known, for nearly a decade, the way she’d known that the sky was blue, that Jason was indeed a bonehead, she felt the unexpected urge to defend him, but she couldn’t figure out how.
“He loves her,” said Pen at last. It needed to be said.
“No, he doesn’t. He wouldn’t know how to love someone like Cat.”
Pen would not be deterred. “I’m sure you’re right that he doesn’t love her the way she wants to be loved, but he loves her,” she said. “Yes, he’s a bonehead. Yes, I spend most of my time with him wanting to strangle him. But he loves Cat. She’s the reason for everything he does.”
“That’s why you’re here with him? You want him to find her because he loves her?”
Pen faltered. “I don’t—know. I mean, no. We came because—” She made a frustrated sound. “It’s a long story, but now Will and I are here for ourselves. We miss Cat. We’ve never stopped missing her all these years.”
Armando’s face softened. “And she never stopped missing you.”
“But.” Pen hesitated. Why not just leave it alone? Since when was she Jason’s champion? Since never. Still. Pen sighed. “On this trip with Jason, I’ve come to realize that it matters that he loves her. I’ve tried to deny it, but I can’t.” Gently, she added, “And Cat did marry him, after all.”
Armando shut his eyes. When he opened them, he looked young again, young, conflicted, and even regretful.
“We shouldn’t have done it,” he said quietly. “It was a mistake.”
“Why?” asked Pen.
“Because, for one thing, I was never going to stay.”
“Couldn’t you have stayed? Did you try?”
“My city needs me,” he said, with a touch of the old pomposity. “The Philippines needs me. There is a brain drain in my country; those with talent and skills leave as soon as they get the chance. The United States has plenty of good surgeons. Not so many here. I swore from the beginning that I would come back.”
“I see,” said Pen, feeling awkward. “Well, that was good of you.”
“Also,” said Armando with a grin, “I promised my mother that I would.”
“Ah! If she’s anything like Lola, I can see why you’d be afraid to break that promise.”
“You got that right.”
“What’s the other reason?” said Pen. “You said ‘for one thing.’ Why else?”
Armando’s head dropped for a second. “Because they were married, as you said. I believe in marri
age, in taking vows. We made a mistake.”
Pen felt suddenly annoyed at his ostentatious regret. “A mistake? You make it sound like an accident, like the two of you just tripped and—oops!—fell into bed. You must have discussed it. Even if you didn’t, it was deliberate. I’m not saying it was wrong or that I haven’t done things like that myself, because I have, sort of, but own up to it, for heaven’s sake.”
Armando stared at her. “What did you say?”
“Look, I didn’t mean to sound judgmental. Or maybe I did mean to. But I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”
“Why do you think we fell into bed?”
“Because you just said so, for starters.”
“We fell in love. That was our mistake. That’s what I meant.”
Pen felt flustered. “Wait. But you had an affair.”
“No, not technically. Not the physical part.”
“You mean, you didn’t have—sex?” Sometimes, a thing needed to be spelled out.
Armando looked embarrassed. “No. I wouldn’t.” He corrected himself: “I mean, we decided not to.”
We, thought Pen, ha! She knew her Cat better than that.
“You should not assume,” said Armando, scolding.
“I didn’t,” snapped Pen, and then it hit her: Cat had lied to Jason. Women all over the world trying to hide affairs from their husbands, and Cat had gone and made one up and handed it to her husband, a mean lie dressed up as an act of humility and contrition, an act of trust.
“What do you mean?” asked Armando slowly.
“I mean that—” She tried to sort out exactly whom she would be betraying by telling Armando what Cat had done. Cat? Jason?
Armando watched her struggle with what to say and asked with bewilderment, “She told him that?”
Pen gave a resigned shrug. “That’s what he said.”
Armando looked like a kid trying to figure out a Rubik’s cube, turning his thoughts this way, that way.
“If Cat isn’t here with you, where is she?” ventured Pen, hoping to take advantage of his bemused state. “Can you tell me, please?”
Falling Together Page 30
