Heart of the City (21 page)

At the Broadway-Nassau Street station, Chesa doubled back through the underground passageways a few times before finding the stairs that led outside. She was hungry. But it was past 2 a.m. now, and stores nearby looked closed. Chesa did want to
surprise Malaya, but a postmidnight knock on the door might be taking things too far. So she began searching for signs for hostels.

From the photos she’d seen on the Internet, she had imagined New York as a giant parking lot of yellow cabs. But the streets here, wherever she was, were a wasteland. She heard a tinkle of glass shattering behind her and shuddered as a trash truck rumbled past. It was fifteen minutes before a cab appeared.

“Please, hotel,” she said, shoving her bags across the back seat.

“Any one in particular?” the man said.

“Hostel. For students.”

He drove for what seemed like twenty-five minutes. She began to see familiar buildings, as if they’d been driving in circles. When he dropped her off, at a rundown rooming house on a street called Bowery, he asked for forty dollars.

Her sister had given her two thousand dollars in cash for the trip. It was supposed to stretch weeks, even a few months.

“Meter?” she asked.

She could see his eyes shift in the rearview mirror.

“It’s broken.”

She dug into her pocketbook for two twenty-dollar bills. At the hotel, she pushed another forty through the bars beneath a Plexiglas window. A Chinese man led her upstairs to a small room with paper-thin walls. She spent a sleepless night listening to the thuck-thuck of the ceiling fan and to the squabbling of a couple in the next room.

AT SEVEN the next morning, jittery and frayed, Chesa left the hotel with all of her cash and found the nearest bank. She wired all but a few hundred dollars back to her sister. New York was not what she expected. She wasn’t sure she could trust people here.

At a pay phone in Chinatown, she tried her friend’s phone number. There was no answer. She walked to the Baxter Street address Malaya had given her months earlier, but no one came to the door. Was there more than one Baxter Street? Had she copied down the right numbers? She spent half a day knocking on neighbors’ doors. Many of the people who answered spoke only Mandarin, and no one seemed to know the first thing about anyone named Malaya. What Chesa wouldn’t find out until months later was that Malaya had left Manhattan weeks before for a job in a new city.

After a joyless lunch in a dimly lit restaurant, Chesa wove through the narrow streets, hoping to spot her friend among the sea of Asian faces. The neighborhood felt like a third-world bazaar, with stooped men in street stalls selling knockoff bags, costume jewelry, and stacks of exotic-looking fruit and vegetables. From the insides of small groceries came sharp odors of pork and fish.

She struggled to get her bearings. But with so many vendors selling the same products, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t doubling back on herself. Then the sun scudded behind the buildings and shadows unfurled along the streets. At her wits’ end, she reached into her pocket for the map with the phone number—mortified to be on the cusp of asking another favor.

THE PHONE at Milton’s apartment rang minutes after he entered. It had been a busy day at work, and he worried his boss was calling with yet another demand.

But the voice on the line was decidedly not his boss’s.

“Hi, Milton.”

“Yes?”

“It’s Chesa. Girl from subway.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry to call.”

“It’s okay. What’s up?”

“I look and look, but my friend, she is nowhere.”

Milton brushed some newspapers off a chair in the kitchen and sat down, leaning his forehead against his hand. “I’m sorry to hear that, Chesa. Gosh, you sure you have no other information about this person?”

“Please, Milton, you’re only person I know in America.”

Milton felt a tightening in his stomach. “I’d like to help, Chesa, it’s just, you know, I’m not sure I’d have any more luck.”

“Luck, maybe for me,” she said, her voice quavering. “You are only person I know.”

This feels like a scam, Milton told himself. Befriend the trusting stranger on the subway, play the damsel in distress, then rob him blind. The perfect con.

“Milton?”

There was a long pause. Milton could hear her jagged breathing. “Where are you?” he said.

OVER DINNER at a Bowery Street restaurant, he grilled her. What was her friend’s name? Where exactly did she live? Why hadn’t Chesa let her friend know she was coming? Where had she spent the night? What was she planning to do here besides visit her friend?

He kept his guard up, looking for holes in her story. But there was dread in her eyes, he saw, and a voice that sounded on the edge of breaking. She was worried, it seemed, not just for herself but for her friend. How is it, she asked, that someone disappears?

When the waiter set down their food, Milton could see tears pooling. He all of a sudden felt bad about his interrogation. This woman trusted him. Why, he wasn’t sure. But she did. This intensity of feeling from another person was something he hadn’t
been around in a long time. The words came almost before his awareness of them. “I, you know, have a couch in my apartment,” he said. “It’s very uncomfortable. But you could sleep there for a night or two, if you needed to.”

Outside, a cold rain was falling. He bought an umbrella from a sidewalk vendor, and she moved under it to keep dry as they carried her bags through the rain. They rode the Q train to his apartment. As it crossed the East River, an arc of lights smudged against rain-streaked windows. “See the Brooklyn Bridge?” Milton said. But when he turned toward the woman at his elbow, she was looking straight ahead. She was a total stranger. He raked his fingers across his beetled forehead and thought, I might just be the biggest sucker in the world.

AS THE door to Milton’s apartment clicked shut, Chesa felt unexpectedly vulnerable. She was no longer on a subway or in a restaurant—public places where people kept an eye on one another. She was in a man’s apartment, behind a locked door. She had called him because she feared for her safety. But now she was in close quarters with a six-foot-tall man about whom she realized she knew nothing, no matter how trustworthy he seemed. Was she really better off here?

She studied his hands as he jimmied the futon away from the wall, unhooked its latches and laid it flat. He pulled neatly folded sheets from a closet and spread them across the mattress, then returned from another room with a pillow.

He shrugged, as if perturbed or embarrassed. “It’s not the Hilton.”

“It’s okay.”

“Chesa, you’re welcome to sleep here for a few nights. But I just, well, I mean, I can’t give you a key.” When he left for work in the mornings, he told her, she’d have to clear out, too.

“Okay.”

When she went into the tiny bathroom to change into her pajamas, she could hear rain pelting the window. She felt her pulse quicken. She turned the lock, then tested the door to make sure no one could get in.

In the morning, Milton drew Chesa maps to Manhattan landmarks—Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Met. “You should get to know the city,” he said. “And if you take another taxi, Chesa, make sure the meter’s on. That cabdriver who charged you forty dollars—that should have been a six-dollar ride.”

“Okay.” She left her bags in Milton’s apartment but took all her money, stuffing bills into the pockets of her coat and jeans. Most of those first few days, she ventured back to Chinatown, hoping to run into her friend. She stopped in laundries and groceries. She asked shopkeepers if they’d seen or heard of Malaya. New York was full of transients, a man selling international calling cards told her. It was hardly unusual for a new immigrant to be here one day, gone the next. A few shopkeepers thought Chesa was no more than another newcomer looking for work. A woman at a jewelry shop handed her a flyer for an agency that claimed to make immediate job placements, for a fee.

After a few days of fruitless searching, her money dwindling, Chesa went to the agency, a bunkerlike office beneath a butcher’s shop. She handed over a few bills. The man behind the desk dispatched her the next day to a six-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day job as a cashier in a Korean deli.

When she crowed to Milton about her earnings—$350 a week—she was surprised to see him grimace. “For all those hours?” he said. “That’s below minimum wage.”

She told him that $350 was more than twice her monthly earnings in Manila. Then she handed him a wad of bills.

“For you,” she said.

“For what?”

“My part of rent.”

It was her first step, however small, toward restoring
bao
between them, she told herself. She wore the proud if somewhat nervous look of a girl bringing home an A on her math test.

After making tea for the two of them, Milton set something metallic in her hand.

“What’s this?”

“The key. A copy for Chesa.”

She folded her fingers over his, and the cold metal in her palm warmed. Milton didn’t withdraw his hand, and they stood, touching, for a long moment. When Chesa looked up and their eyes met, they broke into nervous laughter. Their hands fell to their sides like scattering sparrows.

As the days passed, Milton came to admire her pluck. He doubted he’d have her courage—her ability to fend for herself—if he were deposited alone in a new country. She charged into the world with a self-assuredness that often eluded him. In his apartment in the evenings, he grew anxious for the sound of the front door unlatching. Even after twelve-hour shifts that Milton imagined as grueling, she came home with a cheerful look, as though the best part of her day were just beginning. In the dark, uncertain days after the September 11 attacks, she was one of the few things in his life that felt normal.

“Chesa?” he asked one morning in late September, after she’d cleared their cereal bowls. “Would you like to go to a movie? There’s a matinee.”