Conclusion

Waiting for a cab, putting an arm around her shoulders so naturally, checking her in at her hotel, asking her to dinner afterward.

Why did they seem to be the most natural things in the world to happen? So effortlessly for them both, it seemed, although for him it was a kind of revelation, a novel experience, a path not previously taken.

She changed while he waited for her at the lobby. She was now wearing a light-colored flimsy blouse with a skirt to match, one of those RTWs one sees in most of the department stores, which women inside Makati’s plush offices loved to don, making them look like bunches of twins. But on her, he thought it looked like an original by one of those Italian-sounding couturiers.

“You must be fond of strangers,” she said, sipping her second Martini at Marakkesh, alternating with deep pulls on her Marlboro Longs. “Are you in the habit of picking up strangers on the plane? Eyeing them at the pre-departure lounge and deciding on one when the flight call finally comes?”

“What are you saying?”
“Oh, come on.”
“You’re very cynical, you know, for your age.”
“Am I? How old do you think I am?”
“All right, how old are you?”
“I’m thirty-five.”
“Of course not. Why do you want to pass yourself as older?”
“All right, how old am I?”
“You could be between eighteen and sixty-five.”
“All right, I’m twenty-six.”
“That’s more like it.”
What was it that he really wanted to say? That he longed for her the moment his eyes sat on her at the airport back in Manila?
He heard her say: “How old are you?”
He said he was forty.
“You look thirty to me,” she said, and smiled and puckered her nose.

He didn’t know how it came about: if he had meant to, or if she did, or if they both did. But he never took his eyes off her, nor let go of her hand. And the singer under the bright red light sang one love song after another, whose lyrics he barely heard, whose melodies wafted through his consciousness.

He wanted to feel that young, lithe body under his. He kissed her mouth with trembling lips and whispered, “Let’s go.”

She slept at his hotel, in his pajamas. It was a night of unbelievable passion and tenderness, novel and mystifying. Was it because it was illicit? He didn’t realize till then that he was capable of such emotions, and wondered if something hadn’t been wrong all throughout his life.

She was a novice. He had wanted to believe she was a virgin. Which he really shouldn’t have expected, he realized, the circumstances considering. She said it was actually the second time. “And the first time?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered. “It was a horrible experience.”
“Like how?”

“Oh, I was magnificently bored. It seemed to me a better alternative than slashing my wrist or jumping off the tallest building on Ayala.”

She was smoking again. He took the cigarette from her fingers, and in the darkness of the room he felt for her face, feeling an infinite tenderness for the girl, an emotion, he realized, he hadn’t felt for a long time. What marriage does to a relationship, he sadly thought; and swiftly brushed away all thought of Celine, of Alex and Marianne, of his job in Manila. Nothing mattered now, nothing existed, but this girl. No, this woman with a girl’s body, who smoked non-stop, who made love with such vulnerability and nervousness it could make him cry, who was now clinging to him and whispering his name.

When he woke up in the morning, she had already dressed, her face freshly made-up, and had rung for breakfast. She ate little. She clasped his hand throughout and looked as though she was going to cry.

Finally, she said: “You’re going to be here for a week?”

“Yes,” he answered.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure”
“You mustn’t see me any more.”
“Why?” he asked, uncomprehendingly.
“I just want it that way.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I think that will be best for us.”
“Marjorie . . .”
“Yes, a stranger you picked up on the plane.”
“Marjorie!”
“It was a nice time.”
“Please. It’s hurting me.”
“Does it? It happens all the time, doesn’t it? And I’m a selfish person. I hate the thought that if it hadn’t been me it would have been anybody else.”
“Christ!” he blurted out. “Can I make a confession?”
“Why not?”
“Would you believe that this is the first time this happened to me?”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Why don’t you? Why can’t you believe it?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t believe it.”
“You mean you refuse to believe it.”
She stood up. “Have to go,” she said. “Business first, you know, as the saying goes, before pleasure. But as it was . . .”
“I’ll drop you off at your hotel.”
“Yes, please,” she agreed.

FOUR DAYS. Four days transpired just as he predicted, having known Marjorie notwithstanding. How ironic that knowing her had made it worse. Because the last four days had been spent with a nightmarish quality: puzzled by her, by the complexity of her decisions, feeling intolerably dejected and forlorn, dismissed arbitrarily, without explanation whatsoever. And the torture of remembering her in his arms, making love to her, of her body gasping for love.

He went to her hotel every day and each time she was out. In the evening, she would still be out. And he realized he didn’t get to know or ask about the people she was going to see in Davao. Come to think of it, there was nothing they had really talked about at all. Not about themselves, not about their families – she hadn’t even asked if he was married, if he had children. No, she hadn’t asked about anything at all, except the reason why he was there. And he realized, too, with a jolt, how right she was in a sense: that she was a stranger. From the beginning to the end, she was a stranger. In that case, who wasn’t? Wasn’t he, too? And didn’t she easily take on to a stranger?

Yet his whole being violently refused to believe all this: that it was the casual experience of two intrinsically lonely strangers bumping into each other, and ending up in a hotel bed. And one party saying goodbye to the other as heartlessly, as mercilessly as that.

On his last day in the lonely hotel room, reviewing everything that had transpired between him and Marjorie - every single word she had uttered, every movement she had made, the contour of her face, of her body during that single night they were together - he realized that there was only one thing he could hope for: that she would call, that she would turn up. And a miracle it was going to be.

That last morning, he had a late breakfast and was busy packing up for the afternoon flight when he heard a knock at his door. For some reasons, he sensed a nervousness in himself, an unusual, strange feeling of an inevitable encounter with something, some finality in life, some decision to be made.

When he opened the door, there she was: his T-shirt-and-denim girl. With those soulful eyes and that teasing mouth.

“Hello, Noel,” she said brightly.

He was speechless for a while. Then he embraced her tightly, kissed her face, her hair, and didn’t loosen his hold on her, as though to do so would mean going back to the horrible state of nothingness again.

“Marjorie, Marjorie,” he whispered. “You’ve come back. I thought I had lost you forever.”

She looked sprightly now, which he didn’t want her to be. He wanted her to gaze at him sadly, to say how she had missed him, too; that it was stupid of her to have done what she did.

“I decided I might as well go back in the same plane with you,” she said with a playful look in her eyes. “After all, we came in together, didn’t we?”

“Your companion,” he asked. “She didn’t come?”

“No, which is just all right,” she countered mischievously. “There were guys who helped me out in the interview.”

There was something in her tone, in the way she said it, which he found hurting.

“That’s why you never found the need to see me at all, or call me.”
“Oh, come on, Noel. Don’t be sentimental.”
“I’m not being sentimental. And I mean it.”
“Well, I decided not to see you again, didn’t I? You should have known better than to feel jealous.”
“Yes,” he said. “It was just one of those encounters anyway, wasn’t it?”
“You sound bitter, Noel.”
“That’s how you wanted it to appear, isn’t it? Strangers on the plane having fun on business trips, having pleasure first before the business portion”
“Who knows? Maybe it was. Anyway, shall we have lunch together?”
“Stop it, Marjorie. It wasn’t like that for me. Oh God, maybe it’s stupid of me to tell you this. But I swear it wasn’t like that for me at all.”

Suddenly, she lost the mischievous look on her face. Her eyes started to look downcast. She was herself now, he thought, her real self. And he loved her again. Why did she have to wear a mask, to pretend?

She came into her arms, sat down in bed and they held each other and said nothing for a long time.

“Yes, we mustn’t quarrel,” she said finally. “Life’s sad as it is already, isn’t it? Forgive me. Will you forgive me, Noel?”

At that point, he didn’t know exactly what she was asking forgiveness for. For everything that she had done to him? For not being able to feel more deeply for that swift, hazy relationship which he was hanging on to? For her trying to play a game and knowing that it hurt? Or for not being truthful enough, for wearing a mask?

There were a lot of questions he should have asked but being held by her now, and holding her tightly before and after they made love, nothing mattered but the fact that they were close again, one again.

They had lunch at the hotel restaurant, and it struck him that indeed they looked like an ordinary couple. They could probably even pass off as newlyweds. She laughed a lot and told stories of her interview experiences. Not once did either of them mention how it was going to be from then on, the moment they reached Manila.

In the taxi which drove them to the airport, she was silent, conspicuously and eerily silent, and she held his hand all the time. Also, she would look at him with those eyes: lost, imploring and desperate.

“Noel, Noel,” she kept uttering when they were seated in the plane, clinging to him.
“Marjorie,” he started to say, “I love you.”
“No, please. I don’t want you to say that again.”
Then he saw that she was crying. Just for a while. He didn’t even prod her to stop. She let go of his hand when the flight stewardess paused with the papers.
“The Journal, please.”

She read the rest of the way, hardly touched the snack tray, and when the plane made the whirring sound announcing arrival at the domestic airport, she looked eager to get out. She took off her seat belt adeptly and said, “Well, Manila at last.”

As they walked down the plane, waited for their baggage at the counter, walked down the lobby and finally stood out on the curb where the taxicabs waited, he felt numbness slowly growing inside him. Neither of them had said a word.

Under an overcast Manila sky, they stood beside each other, she very lithe and looking like an undergraduate, her hair flying, her huge dark colored glasses framing her face.

A taxicab pulled up before them.

“Ladies first?” she asked, turning to him.
“Ladies first,” he answered.

He watched the back of the speeding cab for a long time, till it receded out of his sight, and hailed the next one.u