From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel (11 page)

This is not the first time I have been branded a homosexual, oh no. I am quite aware of what I represent to these men. They are completely repressed. Their notion of masculinity is being challenged by my presence. I wish to tell them that in a democratic society, like in New York, all men are of equal standing no matter
their race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Even religious fundamentalists are tolerated to a point. Once I was back in my cell I flipped through my Qur’an, looking for a passage about all this—men, equality, something to come back at these animals with, something to say, “Look, you imbeciles. Look what it says so right here in your blessed book!” But I couldn’t find an appropriate passage. However, I did find a chapter that mentions homosexuals, and it was a straw man’s argument:

Do ye commit lewdness such as no people in creation committed before you?

To that I answer yes. In Western society ye may practice lusts on other men in preference to women, because ye are free to do so, proudly, heroically, and with multiple partners. Someone should drop these men in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan just to teach them a lesson. Would they be shouting, “Hey, foggot wit no slivs!” at everyone who passed? I doubt it. If they did, along would come a moment of reckoning. Perhaps a great big bear named Stephen (a stylist I once knew from Rhode Island) would come along, put down his gym bag, and rip out their awful throats.

To set the record straight once and for all, I am a lover of women! Let there be no mistake. From Marianna DeSantos on, I was in for life. I had many girlfriends too, right up until I left for America. Rachel in Cubao, Marlene in Malate, Elisa in Pasay, Filomena in Makati. I had fallen for each of them completely, but it was always so hard for a man like me to keep relationships together. In fashion, where one is surrounded by so many beautiful women, it is impossible to prevent those inevitable jealousies from occurring in the mind of the one you love. So I found that
when I arrived in America, I told myself, no longer would I wear my heart on my sleeve, no longer would I swear by love and openly abuse its name. I didn’t want a repeat of the hurt I had felt over my ex‑girlfriends, or the hurt I had inflicted upon them. Love had burned before, and it would only burn again, and America was my chance to start anew. I would devote myself to my craft without love getting in the way. Sure, I would need sexual fulfillment of a kind—I wasn’t a priest—but it would be different now. I imagined myself as someone older, someone more skilled at moving in and out of bedrooms discreetly, someone who could love as much as he wanted and not be held accountable for his haphazard nature.

But then I fell in love.

It was October, the start of a season known only to me for its brooding colors and warm accessories on the runway. Coming from the tropics, I had never before experienced anything like the fall of the Northeast, with its autumnal color palette and ravishing foliage. The farther north you went the more ravishing, and so many New Yorkers christened the season with an annual drive up the Palisades Parkway. What an exciting time in America! It’s all right out of a J. Crew catalog. Everyone returns with bushels of organic apples, miniature pumpkins for their offices, and driving moccasins by Cole Haan. I had delivered Ahmed’s two suits, and I didn’t expect to have any more contact with the man outside of the occasional hello in the hallway. I had money, but not the kind of money where things came easy. Vivienne Cho rehired me around this time to fill in for a stylist who was down on account of some gallbladder stones. Working closely out of her studio on West Twenty-seventh, we quickly became friends. She was young,
brilliant, successful, and willing to help me out whenever the time came for me to launch my clothing line. With a day or two a week devoted to her, and with the money I’d made from Ahmed, I could work on my collection most afternoons and take a Saturday off to frolic.

I made my first autumn excursion away from the city with Olya and her Turkish boyfriend, Erik, a Harvard man, on one such Saturday in mid-October. Erik drove us in his Saab across the George Washington Bridge, and then up the Hudson. We had planned to spend the day at Dia: Beacon, the former Nabisco factory turned museum, and then hit one or two organic fruit stands on the way back. Olya was in a terrible mood, because Erik, her boyfriend of only a few months, was leaving for boot camp in the Turkish army in two days’ time. Could you imagine? He was a Harvard graduate and an American citizen, in fact. He even had a semi—Long Island accent. But for him to retain his dual citizenship, he needed to complete the three weeks of boot camp.

(Let the record state that I would be happy to surrender my Philippine passport in order to become a proud U.S. citizen. Not that that means anything, since there are millions of people the world over who would do the same. And I suspect some of them are right here in No Man’s Land.)

When Olya wasn’t sitting on Erik’s lap on a bench in the museum, soaking up every last bit of him, she was brooding to me in an aside over losing him to Turkey.

“Fall in love, and they go off to die for their country,” she said. “This is what happens during wartime.”

“He’s not going to die,” I said. “He’ll be back in three weeks. It’s just boot camp.”

She shook her head. We had lost track of Erik over by Richard Serra, where he’d excused himself to the men’s room. Olya explained to me that his bladder was very weak, and this was one reason why he would most certainly perish in the Turkish army.

Then I saw her. Michelle. She was alone, walking along an installation of broken glass. Like a fashion editorial out of the 1970s, she seemed so vibrant in a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress made of green jersey. I wanted a picture of her in front of the shards of glass for my mood board.
⁴

“Quick,” I said, interrupting Olya. “Let me have your camera phone.”

“You can’t take pictures in here.”

“Who will ever know?”

“I will,” a deep voice said. We turned around to where a museum guard, a large man in uniform, was leaning against a column.

I sauntered over to explain my situation. “Excuse me, sir, I wanted to photograph a girl standing there. Not the art work, you understand. Would that be possible? With your permission, of course.”

“It would be possible. But then I’d have to confiscate your camera.”

“It’s just a cell phone.”

“It wouldn’t be the first.”

“I get it,” I said. “Doesn’t matter.”

Michelle had moved on to another installation. I hurried Olya across the factory floor and found Michelle among the gorgeous Bridget Riley paintings, those massive horizontal lines from Riley’s
Reminiscence
series.
⁵

I made sure we kept our distance so it wasn’t at all obvious that I was staring. Erik rejoined us, and Olya put her arms around him like she wasn’t ever going to lose him. She gave him an open-mouthed kiss, and I removed myself by a few steps, hands in pockets. I cleared my throat and felt Michelle turn to notice me. I pretended to be involved in Riley’s squiggles before glancing over to her. Ah, that game of notice me, notice you!

I continued to track her, a remote observer. Women were always the apple of my eye, as I have said before. All women too. Tall, short, plump, willowy. I didn’t necessarily look at them as any ordinary man, objectifying them as men do. (Although I cannot deny what I am, for in Michelle’s case there was a definite attraction.) I saw my subject foremost through the eyes of a designer. I was inspired by her sense of style, her dress, her flats, her hair, her tortoise frames that lent her a certain intelligence. She was a budding New York intellectual but from another time altogether. I watched her stroke her strong Anglo chin as she contemplated each painting in front of her. You see, every notion of style could be obtained just by watching.

I suppose it would have been easy enough to talk to her, seeing as how she was alone. But I didn’t. I held back. And then I lost her in the darkness of the basement gallery among the neon lights and video installations, in a maze of shadows and echoes.

Flipping through my Qur’an, the one that belonged to D. Hicks, I’ve come upon a chapter on women. There’s an interesting passage Hicks must have underlined, which seems appropriate now: “
Believers, do not approach your prayers when you are drunk, but wait till you can grasp the meaning of your words
.” With Michelle, I would get that chance.

The following week I went hunting for old
Vogue
magazines from the 1970s, the Grace Mirabella
⁶
years. I bought a stack on Sixth Avenue and flipped through them at my worktable, until I found a black-and-white spread of von Furstenberg herself looking as gorgeous as ever, modeling one of her own wrap dresses. I tore out two pages, one of DVF in the wrap dress and a close‑up shot of her with those dark Belgian eyes. I pinned them both to my mood board.

By November an entire wall of my apartment was covered with ideas that had bled well beyond the board. Swatches, paisley scarves, magazine clippings, photos. I was ambitious and productive, sure, but I was lonely as hell. Olya had left to do fashion week in Paris and would be gone for the rest of the year. On my way home one night from Vivienne’s studio I decided to wander, to try a different route, to get lost underground in the hopes of discovering a nook of the city I had never known. This was how I found so many of the city’s charms. Accidentally. And this was precisely how I found Michelle. Dumb luck. I caught the downtown number 4, and there she was, standing in the middle of a packed train car reading a paperback, among all of the other commuters. She was just as beautiful as she had been that day in the museum. With her book she was shielding part of her face but had the cover tilted in my direction just enough so that I could make out what she was reading. It was a play,
The Dutchman
. The one about the femme fatale who stabs her black love interest in the back with an apple core on the A train. The apple was meant to be symbolic. Death by desire. The other passengers help dump the body off at the next
stop, and the femme fatale goes off into another car to pick out her next horn-dog victim of a prevalent ethnic minority.
⁷

I once again admired her keen fashion sense. She was wearing a vintage frock, tastefully unbuttoned at the start of her breastbone. My, how she wore it all with such womanly precision. (A woman at twenty-one is so rare!) I noticed how much went into her hair for the first time. Its weighty layers seemed endless—I wanted to get lost in them! I traced her ivory legs from her hemline to her flats, where an out‑of‑place L.L. Bean backpack with the initials T.W.M. rested against her ankle. I would find out later that the initials belonged to one Todd Wayne Mercer, an ex‑boyfriend. He took her virginity; she took his backpack. Fair is fair.

She looked up from her play and I held her gaze. Her hazel eyes, nearly colorless in the light of the subway car, pierced through her big glasses. As I mentioned, from the way she held the paperback tilted in my direction, I suspected she must have already recognized me as the guy who’d followed her from Bridget Riley to Joseph Beuys. Once she smiled at me I knew I’d been given the green light.
Do not approach your prayers when you are drunk but wait till you can grasp the meaning of your words.
To my fellow passengers, I said excuse me and made my way over to where she was standing.

The next stop came. Commuters on and off.

“You’ve read it?” she said, suddenly. “You’re staring at it like you’ve read it.”

“Yes.” I hadn’t. “
The Dutchman
,” I said. “The quintessential work out of the Netherlands in the last half century.”

“That’s funny.”

“I haven’t read it,” I admitted. “But I’ve seen it.”

“You’ve seen it performed?”

“No, the movie with Louis Gossett Jr.”
⁸

This made her laugh.

“Anyway, I love the theater,” I said. “Broadway and everything.”

“I hate Broadway. Yuck. It’s nothing but overpriced garbage. Have you ever noticed who goes to the theater these days? Blue hairs and tourists. The theater’s dead. I guess that’s why I want to be a part of it. I’m drawn to swan songs. What’s your name?”

I told her and she laughed again. When I asked her what was so funny she said, “Oh c’mon, the irony. It’s like a philosophical comedy. I am girl. You are boy. Hello, Boy. I’m Michelle.”

She was on her way to see her grandmother in Brooklyn Heights. Nana owned a townhouse on Henry Street where Michelle would be spending the weekend away from college.

I missed my transfer at Union Square, but I hardly cared.

She told me about her nana, the fall she’d recently taken at her weekly tango lesson, and how Michelle planned to read Frank O’Hara at Nana’s bedside. “He was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island,” she said of O’Hara. “Can you believe that?” Nana was a poet herself. Quite accomplished in her day, as I understood it. She published under the name Willomena Proofrock.
⁹

“A dune buggy,” I repeated, imagining a man sunbathing on
a towel, and the recreational vehicle plowing over him. “That sucks.”

“It’s totally ironic.”

Michelle had a great passion for irony. To her the world was chaotically doused in the stuff. It was one big
Oedipus Rex
.

“I take it you’re an actress?” I said.

“Hardly. I’m a playwright. But I’ve acted before in plays at school. I’m in the drama conservatory at Sarah Lawrence. Are you Filipino?”

“How did you guess?”

“Our maid growing up had your nose. She spoke Filipino on the phone, long distance. My parents never minded.”

“They export them, you know,” I said. “OFW’s, they’re called.” I wrote OFW in the air between us. Whenever I was nervous I overused hand gestures. “Overseas Filipino Worker. You know, in some countries the word for maid is Filipina.”

“That’s so ironic.”

The two seats in front of us opened up and we sat down. Michelle tended to slouch a little, with her bottom too far out on the edge, her shoulders and neck folded together. At first I thought she did so to make me feel comfortable about our difference in height, but I would soon realize she always sat like this. In truth, it was the only thing about her that was unwomanly. The rest I found ravishing.