by Nicki Chen
She turned around, and there was Jay, smiling, a sampaguita lei looped over his fingers. It was one of the fancy leis with a medallion of the tiny flowers.
“Hold still.”
She ducked her head, and as he placed the lei around her neck, she breathed in the jasmine-like fragrance. “Thank you, honey. Where’d you get this?”
“A vendor was selling them outside the D-TAP gate.”
Diana’s mind was racing. The elevator arrived and a couple of Filipino men and one woman got out. The lei was nice, but sampaguita leis were sold everywhere—on the highway and in parking lots all over the city. Why did he decide to buy one for her today? she wondered as the elevator started moving up.
Jay lifted a lock of her wet hair and let it drop. “Looks like you got caught in the rain.”
She fluffed her hair back from her temples. “I went swimming.” Did he take her silence the past two days as a sign that she’d already given up hope of moving to Vanuatu? Was he just trying to soften her up with flowers?
The doors opened on the sixth floor and the man who’d been standing in front of them got out. The moment the doors closed again, Jay pulled Diana to him and gave her a quick kiss. “Alone at last.”
“You’re in high spirits.”
He smiled. “You’ll see.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. What would she see? Had something happened at work to put him in such a good mood?
“Clarita,” he called the moment they walked in the door. “Can you find my bottle of good scotch?”
Clarita wiped her hands on her apron and hustled off to fetch it.
“Neat?” he asked, taking out two glasses.
She wasn’t sure how she took scotch, but she nodded anyway. What was going on? Did he get a raise? A promotion? Suddenly she remembered hearing him and Eddie Wu talk about the possibility of Tiongson being promoted to a director’s job, leaving the manager’s job wide open. If Jay had been promoted to manager, she thought as Clarita appeared with a bottle of scotch, Diana could kiss any Vanuatu plans good-bye.
“This one, sir?” Clarita asked, holding up the distinctive three-sided bottle of Haig Pinch.
“Yes, that’s it. Thank you, Clarita.”
Jay held the bottle up for Diana to see. “Twelve years old,” he said proudly. He poured a generous two-finger shot into each glass and handed one to her. “Let’s go into the other room and let Clarita cook in peace.”
They walked through the dining room and living room and then stood for a moment watching the muted sunset through the rain-streaked sliding glass doors.
“So,” Jay said, turning to her with a half smile. “I have some good news and some bad news.” He tapped the side of his glass with one finger and licked his lips. “The bad news is, I didn’t get the manager’s job. They gave it to Hoffmann.”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It seems that Hoffmann had a family connection with a well-placed director.”
“That’s so unfair.”
“Yeah. He wasn’t a good choice. I’m afraid the department’s work will suffer with him in charge.”
Diana had met Hoffmann at parties, and her impression of the man was that he was insufferably arrogant and not very bright.
“That was the bad news,” Jay said, a smile breaking through. “The good news is that I may not have to work for him.”
“What?”
“I contacted Marshall today.”
Behind the dark row of palm trees along the boulevard and the jumble of squatters’ shanties, the flat expanse of newly reclaimed land and the gray-white waters of Manila Bay, the sun was slowly sinking. Even at the end of a rainy day, it had the power to throw a tangerine blush on the straight gray clouds and turn the low edge of the sky a glowing purplish pink. Diana squinted at the red half-disk of the sinking sun, trying to make sense of what he’d just said.
“I sent him an internet message, told him I’m interested in Johnny Gamboa’s job.”
“You did?”
“You look shocked.”
“I am.”
He winced. “I guess I deserve that.” He put his arm around her shoulder as the sun flared and sank out of sight.
“Is this because of Hoffmann, because you didn’t get the manager’s job?”
“No. Although, yes, it would have been hard to turn down the manager’s job. Maybe it’s better I didn’t get it. Yes.” He nodded in agreement with himself. “I’m glad I didn’t.” He looked at her and paused. “I don’t know if you noticed, but what you said after the movie . . . it really hit me hard.”
“It did?”
“Yes.” He sounded hurt. “I thought about it a lot—seriously thought about it. What a selfish SOB I’ve been!” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “You deserve to be happy, my love. And if you think moving to Vanuatu will make you happy, then by all means, let’s do it. It’s your turn to choose.”
She threw her arms around him, bumping her glass against his back.
“To us,” he said, stepping back and raising his glass.
She clinked her glass against his. “To us,” she said, taking her first drink of the scotch. It burned all the way down her throat, but it settled warm and comfy in her chest.
“I should hear back from Marshall in a day or two,” he said. “Nothing is certain. But I think our chances are good.”
24
The apartment was a mess—boxes stacked against walls, drawers and cupboards left open, packing tape piled on end tables. A glorious mess. And Diana loved it—the hustle, the sense of purpose. It felt as though their once neat and somnolent apartment had come alive.
Humming, stepping around boxes in the dining room, she carried her grandmother’s teapot from the china cabinet to the table. Without its ever-present embroidered cloth, the table looked naked. Stacks of old newspapers, a jumble of dishes, and a cardboard box, its flaps reaching out like four clumsy wings, replaced the bowl of fruit and the precisely arranged place settings.
“You know,” Jay said. He was standing in the alcove behind the bar where he kept his tool box tucked between bottles of wine, whiskey, and assorted liqueurs. “You know,” he said again, nodding, “you’re braver than I am.” He wrote something down, another item added to the list of tools he wanted to buy while they were still in Manila.
“Ha.” She pushed a newspaper aside and set the teapot down. “What have I ever done that’s brave? You’re the one who jumped out of a plane.”
“I was in the army. I had to jump.”
“Still . . . sounds brave to me.”
“You would have done it.”
She chuckled. “I don’t know about that.”
“The thing is . . .” He stared at his pen. “. . . I was afraid . . .”
“Who wouldn’t be?” She wadded up some newspaper and stuffed it inside the teapot.
“No, no. I mean . . . that too, but . . .”
She tried not to roll her eyes. Jay was so articulate most of the time. He could explain the ins and outs of providing safer drinking water in Bangladesh or setting up family planning clinics in Indonesia. But when it came to talking about his feelings, he tended to stumble around on a host of unlikely back roads and detours before he ever got around to what he wanted to say.
“I mean this whole thing.” He cleared his throat, put his pen down, and picked up a wrench. “Trying to have a baby and . . . we get our hopes up . . .” He looked at the ceiling. “That’s what scares me.”
“I didn’t know you felt that way.” She had the crazy urge to run to him, as though she could calm his fears with a hug and a pat on the back. “We have to have faith, honey.”
“You see. You’re braver than I am. You don’t give up.”
“Of course not.” She frowned. “Wait. You haven’t given up, have you?”
Jay lowered his eyes. He turned the wrench over in his hand a couple of times. Then he returned it to the toolbox. “No. Not now. Maybe for a while I did.
I don’t know. I do know that I didn’t want to think about it. I mean, every month we failed. And it hurt, you know.” His voice cracked. He took a deep, ragged breath and continued. “I saw how much it hurt you, too. You tried not to show it, but I could tell.”
She was caught unaware by gathering tears, pain clutching at her throat.
“After a while I think I was afraid to hope anymore,” he said.
This was why they seldom talked about her failure to get pregnant. It was too painful. Looking down at her hands, Diana saw that they were still clutching a sheet of the Manila Chronicle. “Then why?” Her voice betrayed her with a squeak. “Why did you do this thing? Why did you go along with me about Vanuatu?”
“You crazy woman, because I love you.” He smiled at her for a moment. Then he looked down and started fingering their stash of batteries as though he might have said too much. After a long silence, he spoke again. “What you said after the movie that day threw me for a loop. I’ve been so selfish. You came here to the Philippines for my sake. So now . . . well . . . I think you’re right. It’s your turn to set our course for a while.” He picked up a hammer, swung it a few times in the air, and put it down. “No one knows whether this noble enterprise of ours is going to succeed.” He smiled. “But maybe you’re right and all we need is to get out of Manila and live in a quieter, more peaceful place.”
“I sure hope so.”
They looked at each other across the dining room table. The extended moment felt like a covenant, a hope they both shared and a promise of fulfillment.
“I wonder if they have a hardware store in Port Vila,” he said.
She frowned. “They would, wouldn’t they?”
“We’ll see.”
She wrapped a full sheet of the Chronicle around the teapot, carefully tucking it into the cavity and around the spout. Suddenly, as she placed the teapot in a box beside a stack of wrapped saucers, she felt a stab of uncertainty. What if Port Vila didn’t have a hardware store? What if the path she’d chosen turned out to be wrong for them? She walked across to the china cabinet and took out a stack of dessert plates. Then she took a deep breath. This is what she wanted. She just had to believe that it would all work out.
It was happening so fast, though. They had to be in Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, on August fifteenth. Jay had contacted Marshall on July twenty-first and heard back from him the following day. Marshall said a doctor in Manila had already declared Johnny Gamboa eligible for disability retirement, and Gamboa had elected to take it. He hadn’t been kidding when he said he wanted to hire Jay if the position opened up.
As soon as Jay heard the news, he’d called Diana from work to tell her. “Good news, honey,” he said. “We’re going to Vanuatu.”
“Really?”
He’d laughed. “Yes, really. Marshall wants me there by August fifteenth. That’s only three weeks away.” She heard him suck in his breath. “You’re going to have to take care of most of the packing. I’ve got so much to handle here before I go. Well,” he’d said, rallying, “and so our adventure begins.”
Preparations for moving involved a whole series of tasks and decisions. They needed to make airline and hotel reservations, sell their car, and borrow or rent one in Port Vila until they could get a new one. There were arrangements to be made with a moving company and extra boxes and wrapping paper to locate. And there were all those decisions about what to bring and what to give away and to whom. Then they had to pack up the small things and supervise the movers who would take care of the furniture. There was no room in Diana’s head to think about what they were leaving behind.
Not until the night of the farewell party.
It was at Madeline and Quan’s house, a dinner party for some of Diana and Jay’s best friends. When she and Jay pulled up to the house, Diana was still preoccupied with packing details and decisions. Once they got out of the car, though, the whole world widened around her. She looked at the sky where a smattering of stars was trying in vain to compete with the bright lights in Madeline’s windows, and a silent, serene moon kept watch above the treetops. Something—maybe it was the sound of laughter from inside or the scent of damas de noche—reminded her of their first dinner parties in the Philippines. How romantic they’d seemed then!
Quan met them at the front door. “Welcome,” he said, kissing Diana on both cheeks and giving Jay a warm one-armed hug. Then he led them into the living room, a large space, filled to bursting with many of the friends they’d made over the past four years. Such an attractive group, Diana thought—the men looking smart and distinguished in their batik shirts and informal barongs, the women looking beautiful, each in her own way. Dark or fair, outgoing or quiet, they all had strength of personality. And they all looked lovely tonight, Sheila Chatterjee in a sari, Emily Brown and Gerda Klein in colorful dresses made from batik and Thai silk, fabric brought back from missions no doubt in their husband’s suitcases. Diana, too, was wearing a dress made from fabric Jay brought back from a business trip, a sleeveless dress with a long straight skirt made from Malaysian batik.
“Hey.” Madeline’s slim arms wrapped around Diana from behind. “I’m going to miss you,” she whispered in her ear.
“Me, too.” Diana smiled, blinking away a tear.
Madeline squeezed her arm and stepped back. “Sorry. I need to get back to the kitchen. Luz is waiting for me to taste the soup. Quan will take care of you.”
“Right. You two need some drinks. Mirasol. Please see what Mr. and Mrs. McIntosh would like to drink. Then . . .” Quan jingled his ice cubes. “. . . we men can retire to the lanai and leave the living room to the ladies.”
The women smiled at their husbands and each other. No one really minded the separation. Their lives and their conversations were so different from their husbands’. Besides, they’d all get back together at the dinner table where the hostess would seat them man, woman, man, woman, with no spouses sitting together, of course. It was all very old-fashioned and at the same time elegant, Diana thought as she squeezed in on the sofa between Clare Campbell and Sheila Chatterjee.
For a while the talk among the women centered around food—Madeline’s well-earned reputation for cooking amazing Vietnamese dishes, Sheila’s curries, the high price of fish and shrimp these days. There was some talk of children—Clare’s new baby, birthday parties and summer school, and Emily Brown’s son who would soon be leaving for college.
“Rhode Island is so far away,” she moaned. “He could at least have chosen the West Coast. Not that I’d be able to help him out if he got in trouble there either.” She covered her mouth as though stifling a sob. “I can’t believe my baby is going to be so far away from me.”
“Lucky him,” Giulia Moretti mumbled under her breath.
Emily’s mouth dropped open.
“I just wish I were going to Rhode Island along with him,” Giulia added. “I’m fed up with Manila.”
Diana felt rather than heard it, the slight collective gasp, the breath-hold that froze the air for a moment. They all had their ups and downs, their complaints and struggles. But when they were together in a group, they tried not to talk about them. It was like an unspoken creed, the “expat-wife rule”: smile, share the small good things, joke about the problems, even if your jokes are sarcastic and mean. And if you must complain, let it be to your husband or best friend. Everyone knew that unhappiness could spread like an infestation of lice.
Giulia certainly had changed. When Diana first met her, she seemed to be genuinely happy and engaged with her life in the Philippines. She and Paolo were the most enthusiastic dancers at the D-TAP parties. When she and Diana volunteered at the free medical clinic on McKinley Road, Giulia never missed a day. She was the one who organized the Women’s Club trip to Corregidor. But this past year, for some reason, Giulia’s sparkle had disappeared. And expat-wife rule or no rule, she wasn’t one to hide how she felt.
If she noticed the uncomfortable looks on her friends’ faces, Giulia didn’t
let it stop her. “And now we can’t even go to Baguio,” she said, a lament spoken with both hands beating the air like an orchestral conductor building up to a crescendo. “We had our trip all planned. And . . . wouldn’t you know it, a natural disaster.” She dropped her hands and looked around the room as though suddenly realizing how unseemly it was to compare the disruption of her vacation plans with the disaster of last week’s earthquake.
In the interlude of silence that followed, Clare reached for some peanuts, Sheila Chatterjee recrossed her legs, and Emily took a sip of rum and coke. They may have wanted to go back to talking about food or children, but once the earthquake was mentioned, they couldn’t look away. Even in Manila, they’d all felt the tremors. But up in the mountain city of Baguio, five thousand feet above sea level, the quake had been much worse. It had hit 7.7 on the Richter scale. Buildings collapsed; landslides closed all the roads leading to Baguio and damaged the runway; and, from all they’d been able to find out, more than a thousand people had been killed, maybe more. Diana and her friends had all vacationed in Baguio at one time or another. They knew its roads and shops and hotels.
“I keep thinking about the Hyatt Terraces,” Emily said. She sucked in her breath. “We stayed there last year.”
“It’s terrible,” Clare said. “All those people trapped under the rubble, survivors sleeping in the park.”
Giulia shook her head. “This country! If it’s not an earthquake, it’s a typhoon, and if it isn’t a typhoon, it’s a coup or a bus drivers’ strike.”
They all fell silent again, feeling perhaps they’d gone too far down a dark road. The bus and jeepney drivers’ strike was still going on. They’d undoubtedly heard about the burned buses and the strikers and bystanders who’d been shot, but no one said anything. Enough bad news for one day. And it was a party.
“It was a lovely party,” Diana said as she and Jay walked to the car, pleasantly full after the magnificent dinner Madeline had served. The delicate flavors of fresh basil, cilantro, and mint were still with them. And yes, it had been a lovely party, Giulia’s complaints in the living room easily swept away amidst all the good cheer over dinner. “Mmm.” Diana raised her arms and breathed in the flower-scented air. “I love damas de noche.”
