I once wanted to change my name from Juancho Chu to Wittgenstein Walcher H. Rockefeller van Stausen Smith (sometimes Smyth) VIII. I was twelve years old and living in Manila, in a brick house that I imagined sometimes as a castle, sometimes as an ocean liner, a large-windowed house with twelve air-conditioners to keep it as cool as a Hollywood mansion. I played with bath towels as a queen’s headdress. The seal of envelopes to my collection of Hallmark stationery tasted like a rose. In my heart was a girl to whom Hardy Boy Joe, Shaun Cassidy, serenaded “Da Doo Ron Ron.” But the idea for my American name came to me not from TV or some fantastic thoughts I might have had of another world, another life: I was an accomplice to the secret love affair our family maid was having with the neighborhood watchman.

“I’d like to know his name,” my father said one morning over breakfast. He was commending the watchman for his sense of duty. Sometime at dawn my father had gone to the bathroom. He glanced out the window and from the end of the street the watchman appeared on his motorcycle, making his rounds. The watchman stopped upon seeing a light in our house turned on, then drove off minutes later when nothing more suspicious happened.

“James Cagney,” I said.

My father laughed. He turned to my mother who grinned at the sight of his thick eyebrows twitching like caterpillars. Her lips were as pink as faded poinsettias. “James Cagney, eh,” he said.

“You eat too much,” said my mother. “You imagine things too much. Take it easy.” My mother monitored how much food I put on my plate, counting the servings of rice and pieces of pork sausages. I was a kid without a neck. My stomach blocked my view of my feet.

“James Cagney,” I said again.

It’s true. The watchman’s name was James Cagney, James Cagney Alejandro. I had met him for the first time four months back. My family and I had just returned from our yearly summer trip to San Francisco, where an aunt and an uncle lived in Atherton, a town an hour’s drive south of the city. During the trip we saw Yankee Doodle Dandy on TV, so what a coincidence that I would meet an actual James Cagney. Like the original, the watchman had a pug nose, bulldog eyes, and a boxer’s build. He was half-American, white as Yankee Cagney with nails clipped and polished and strong hands. He and our maid Malen were talking at the white gate of our house. My father had already left for work and my mother had stepped out to the beauty parlor. I was roller-skating on the driveway, oblivious to the company Malen was keeping. She and James Cagney seemed to be engaged in nothing more than friendly talk. They weren’t holding hands. Neither one of them was smiling shyly nor glancing furtively around to see if anybody aside from me was witnessing any secret flirtation — signs of love I knew about from watching my two older sisters and older brother when they brought dates home. Although the gate was open, James Cagney stood outside while Malen never went past the premises of our home. She leaned against the gate, one foot on its tip behind the other. She was a large woman, Malen. Her waist was as wide as her hips. She had a double chin and the hair of cauliflower curls on her head made her taller than James Cagney. That alone made an affair between them silly. What man wants a woman larger than he is?

I skated down to them.

“This is Juancho,” Malen said.

“Like his daddy,” said James Cagney. “So Chinese.”

His smile, it had a sincerity to it, as if he truly were glad to meet me and had been wanting to for a long time, and his voice, he sounded like a boy — my seventeen-year-old brother Bach had a deeper voice — and yet, in his blue uniform, James Cagney wasn’t anybody that a car could run over. His forearms were Popeye big. His trousers fit his thighs like tights on Captain America. Face to face with James Cagney, I must have seen what Malen saw. The sky was no longer a sky; it was a lightless space with neither clouds nor birds. The trees lining the pavements, the other massive houses behind spiked gates, Malen herself — everything fell beyond the periphery of my vision. James Cagney, James Cagney Alejandro.

James Cagney left with a “See you later” to Malen. As he drove away in his motorcycle, I asked Malen when he’d be back. “I don’t know,” she said.

He was back the next day. He and Malen stood on the same spot at the gate. Again they kept their distance as I roller-skated on the driveway. “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” I said as I approached them. They looked at each other and laughed. Malen girlishly covered her mouth. I had never seen her laugh that way before.

“What’s that Yankee Dododa?” asked James Cagney. James Cagney Alejandro had never heard of his namesake.

“You have a movie star’s name,” I said. “Everybody in the States knows your name. How did you get a name like that?”

Malen gave another girlish laugh, her head bowed as if her hand were a fan she was hiding behind. “The same way you get your name.”

I was standing closer to James Cagney now, right beside him. He smelled of meat and heavy cologne. He wore a black cord that emphasized the thickness of his neck. I touched his gun holster.

“No. That’s dangerous,” he said.

I held on tighter.

“Uh, uh,” he said. “No.”

I let go. I glanced at his belt buckle. Square with a silver sheen, it was like a miniature shield. “Where did you get this?” I held it on the tips of my fingers.

“My uniform,” he said, looking down at where my hand was and then at me. I looked up from the buckle and into his eyes.

“Juancho, you roller-skate some more,” Malen said.

James Cagney came nearly every day. My father left for work each morning at eight. My mother had no fixed schedule, yet James Cagney would knock at our gate fifteen minutes after she would leave for someplace, no matter the time of day. Some days my mother had no plans for an outing and so James Cagney never came. Whether Malen saw James Cagney or not, she was always humming a tune.

One afternoon I was alone in the back terrace, at the lunch table looking through cut out magazine pictures of “Charlie’s Angels,” which I collected in a Hallmark stationery box. The only sound was the snip snip of the gardener’s scissors while he pruned the hedges that lined the garden wall. It was a distant sound, almost an echo, for how far and small the gardener was across the sprawling green stretch of grass. All I saw of him was his straw hat, which he hid beneath to block away the sun. The ceiling fan above me chugged lazily to shoo away the flies. My glass of calamansi juice was sweating with dew. And then Malen’s humming from the kitchen at the end of the terrace drifted to where I was. Her voice was full and calming. She was humming a tune I had never heard before and which I have never heard since. It was a kind of lullaby that for a fleeting moment froze the hot garden into an image from a dream. I didn’t know I was hearing Malen. I didn’t even know she could carry a tune. For the first time I thought of how Malen spoke. She had a wispy voice, one I had never heard her raise. I had never seen her in any outburst of emotion. She was neither happy nor sad. She was just there, a maid who silently dusted the furniture and served us our meals.

Malen came out of the kitchen with a tray of bread pudding. She laid the tray on the table and picked up a photograph of the Angels. Their hair flipped back and hands clasped together in prayer, they were modeling daywear: blonde Jill in a tennis outfit; Sabrina in a secretarial skirt and blouse; Kelly, my favorite Angel, in a bikini. Kelly’s hair was nearly as black as mine and I could see a little bit of her tan on me.

“Who do you like?” I asked.

Malen shrugged her shoulders.

“Choose one.”

She gazed at the picture a few seconds more then pointed at Sabrina. Of the Angels, Sabrina was the least dolled up. She had a bob and her skirt covered her knees.

“You want to look like her?”

“Why?” Malen said. “I’m not American.”

“I mean thin like that.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“They’re all so pretty,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, though without much concern.

“Ape Woman,” I said, helping myself to the bread pudding.

Normally Malen would have pursed her lips to my taunt, but this time she grinned. She went through my cut out pictures of the Bionic Man and Woman, Hardy Boys Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson, and more Charlie’s Angels. The gardener was watering the plants now, spraying the leaves of trees taller than the house. Malen hummed her song.

“James Cagney — he’s American,” I said. “Tell me, how did he get his name?”

“His mommy was American,” Malen said. She seemed to look into herself rather than at my Hallmark box of pictures. Her eyes were foggy, not tearful but layered with emotions I was just beginning to understand. “He was named after her daddy. Her daddy’s name was James Cagney. Good name for him. Macho. Strong.” Malen flexed her forearms. “What you think? He’s macho, huh. Handsome.”

I flexed my own forearms, but it stayed small. I tucked in my stomach, but still it bulged over my belt loop. I didn’t want my bread pudding anymore. “Yes,” I said with Malen’s tone of indifference. That’s when the idea for a new name came to me. I didn’t even think long about it. One blink and it spelled itself out before me: Wittgenstein Walcher H. Rockefeller van Stausen Smith (sometimes Smyth) VIII. I don’t know where Wittgenstein came from. Walcher I derived from Walton, as in “The Walton Family,” and H from Henry VIII, the king I was fascinated with by virtue of his having ordered the beheading of two of his six wives. Rockefeller was the most famous American name I knew, Smith the most American, and van Stausen rhymed with Beerhausen, a brand of beer so heavily promoted in the Philippines as Germany’s No. 1 drink when in reality it existed nowhere else in the world but in the Philippines. “How nice to have a nice name,” I said.

“Juancho Chu,” said Malen.

“Ape Woman, be quiet.”

“What’s wrong with that? That’s your name.”

I pushed the tray of pudding away. “I don’t like this.”

“But this is your favorite,” Malen said.

“Next time I’ll have… I’ll have spinach.”

“Spinach?” She laughed. “What’s happening to you?”

From that day on I stopped drinking soft drinks, forbade my aunt and uncle in San Francisco to mail me packages of Hershey’s Kisses and Nestle’s Crunch, and left the dining table hungry. I was nauseous and weak half of my waking hours, yet never too weak for a set of toe touches and jumping jacks. Nor for another round of masturbation. Since fat is white, I reasoned that whatever it was my penis was ejaculating must be fat, and so I believed that the more I went at it, the thinner I’d be. There I lay on my bathroom floor, morning, noon, and night, rubbing the fuzzy toilet seat cover in between my legs. Those Popeye arms, those Captain America thighs, the life that lay hidden beneath that gleaming belt buckle — me, too, someday.

“He’s losing weight,” James Cagney said to Malen toward the end of summer.

Hardly any light was in the sky — everything was gray — and yet how blinding James Cagney was with his wavy hair and his eyes that ran the length of my body. His security hat was on the handle of his motorcycle. Malen was standing in between his legs. She rested one hand on his thigh as he sat on his motorcycle, while with her other hand she brushed his brown hair back. None of the neighborhood watchmen had hair as light as his. Neither did any other civil servant throughout Manila. Under the sun, James Cagney never got dark. On a cloudy day he brought a breath of cool wind to a humid drizzle. James Cagney could have passed as one of the foreign residents of the neighborhood.

“I don’t know what he’s doing to himself,” said Malen.

I leaned against the tree that they always rendezvoused beneath and tightened the waist of my shorts. I had lost ten pounds.

“You might disappear,” James Cagney said to me.

I twirled a finger in my hair to form a wave like his. “I’m growing taller,” I said. “I’m going to get the kind of shoes you have.” He wore these black elevator boots.

“Not yet,” he said. “When you’re big already.”

James Cagney took Malen’s hand. Malen looked at me from the corner of her eye. He whispered in Tagalog, “Never mind. He doesn’t say anything, does he?” She said no. And they went on whispering. Mostly they stayed frozen in their position, gazing at and holding each other.

“It might rain,” I said.

They didn’t say a word.

“The sun might come out,” I said.

Still, no word.

“Mommy’s car’s coming.”

Malen jumped back from leaning on James Cagney’s lap. A car passed by, but it wasn’t my mother’s.

“Juancho, you go inside,” Malen said.

“I don’t want,” I said. That wasn’t what James Cagney wanted either, I didn’t think. But then he didn’t contest her. He didn’t even seem to hear her. He simply kept his eyes on her, as if with one blink he would lose sight of her once and for all.

“Bye.” I waved a hand up to James Cagney’s face.

He gave me a quick, impersonal, good riddance nod.

From the den window, I watched the two lose themselves in a private world of hand clasps and soft strokes. As large as Malen was, she was suddenly demure in the worshipful way she looked into his eyes, in the bow of her head. Her head was so low that her chin pressed against her chest.

Once classes started in August, I no longer saw James Cagney in the afternoons, but I continued with my diet. In a course of two months I lost a total of thirty pounds. I knew Malen and James Cagney continued their afternoon trysts because she would always be humming, not loudly but softly, softly as one thoughtlessly hums a tune while adrift on a wave of some beautiful memory.

“Why don’t you shut up,” I said one day when I was losing my head over some math problems. Malen was serving me my afternoon meal. We were in the back terrace and again the gardener was creating his own music of snipping weeds and watering trees. All of a sudden Malen was quiet. The expression on her face didn’t change. She still looked happy; she had this smug smile that said nothing in life could go wrong. I pushed the tray of food away from me. “I don’t want this salad shit.”

“But every afternoon you eat this. You said you like vegetables only.”

“It taste like dog caca.”

Finally the corners of Malen’s lips and big eyes dropped into a sad face. “Why talk like that?”

“Because you’re ugly.”

She didn’t say anything. She just kept looking at me with that sadness.

“James Cagney doesn’t really like you. You’re too ugly. He only sees you because we pay you good money.”

Malen quietly picked up the tray and headed back to the kitchen behind us.

I threw my math book at the heels of her feet. “Ugly,” I said. “Oomph! Oomph! Monkey face. Monkey face.”

She placed the tray back on the table, picked the book up from the floor, and placed it in front of me, opened to the page that I was working on. Then she returned to the kitchen, tray in hand.

I threw the book at the kitchen door then ran to my bathroom. I lay on the floor, rubbing the fuzzy seat cover in between my legs. James Cagney was stroking my hair, smiling into my eyes, touching my lips. Or was it really me with him? My hair is lead black. My eyes are the black-brown of a castana nut. Whoever it was that I imagined as myself was as fair skinned as James Cagney, as brawny and as cool. We were surrounded by darkness, no sun, no blazing sky. Yet how hot it was. I’m from a country where under the March sun sweat drips down your forehead as mercilessly as wax down a candle, lizards squiggle across hot white walls, and papayas grow the length of a dish tray. Cold is the hum of an air-conditioner to lull you to sleep, your lips around a tangerine-flavored icicle stick in mid-afternoon. It is the snow-capped dreamscapes you’ve only seen in American Christmas specials on TV. It is dry ice in your kitchen sink creating mist under running water.

That night James Cagney made his midnight trip to our house. I knew that he came nearly every midnight because some weeks before, the creaking of the back gate woke me. Only this night, the night for which my father would commend James Cagney for being a dutiful watchman, would be his last.

“He was here to see Malen,” I told my parents the morning after over breakfast. “They’re having an affair.”

“Eh,” said my mother. She forbade liaisons between the domestic helpers and outsiders. An outsider could break into our home and steal or kill. “Malen’s an old maid. Look at her. She doesn’t do things… like that.”

The whole family would find out the truth that Monday. James Cagney’s wife came banging on our gate. A girlishly thin woman, she screamed with a sparrow dull cry for Malen to come out just as I was boarding our car for school. In a huff, Malen rushed out of the garage and down the driveway, barefoot. Her feet against the ground made hard slapping sounds. The two were yelling all sorts of stuff, but the only words I could get were from James Cagney’s wife: “You’re the one? You’re so ugly. Ugly and fat.” Malen’s fluff of curly hair stood on their ends. In the five years she had been with the family, never had I seen her so angry. Not even with my own taunts of Ape Woman did her lips quiver so and her chest heave. Malen seemed to grow in size the way cartoon depictions of children growing into adults do. She dragged James Cagney’s wife onto the driveway and pulled at her bun. “Ugly,” James Cagney’s wife kept screaming, throwing punches into the air in an attempt to loosen from Malen’s grip.

I didn’t budge from my seat on the car trunk. I tucked in my stomach. I wasn’t fat. No, I wasn’t. Not anymore. I was thin and on my way to becoming James Cagney Alejandro handsome.

Our driver hurried to the scene. He pulled at the wife’s hair so that he and Malen were caught in a tug of war, only he was as tiny and weak as the wife was. Soon the whole housekeeping staff, my parents, two older sisters and older brother surrounded the three. “Enough,” my father calmly said. His neck was stiff and his upper lip twitched furiously. Though not as husky as Malen, he stood at equal height with all 5′10″ of her. He looked into her eyes, his own eyes large and commanding. Suddenly, she shrank in stature. She was no longer a part of the staff.

I never said good-bye to Malen. I never saw her again after that. By the time I had come home from school that day, she was gone. A year later I heard from one of the other maids that Malen was back in the province, taking care of her ailing mother. What province she called home, I didn’t know. If she was married, I didn’t ask. James Cagney continued on as the neighborhood watchman, saluting cars that entered and exited the neighborhood gate. Whenever my car would pass, he’d salute at me with a faint smile of recognition. And then one day he was gone, too.

What was she trying to prove?

That was what Nigel would ask if he found out. But he wouldn’t find out. Megan wouldn’t tell him because he had no reason to know. She might have felt differently a month ago, a week ago even, felt differently before she had gotten her own place. She didn’t yet entirely understand why the grocer boy Todd’s flirtation had propelled her to find a home for herself. If she had not met Todd, she might now have been sharing the same bed with Nigel. Being with Nigel would have been the logical move to make while she was with her parents. And then Todd had given Megan his number, Todd whose eyes and smile she kept on envisioning. They would surface in her mind without any provocation, often at night, in bed, while she lay in the dark alone, daring her to break lose, to take a risk, to act as she pleased and not as anybody else expected her to. She would think of the clandestine fashion in which he had provided his phone number. She would think of Nigel and she would think damn him should he ever tell her his heart broke because she had been unfaithful. And as the late night hours would slip into early dawn, Megan would feel her desire to call Todd build from an urge to a longing and ultimately to a need.

Yet she still couldn’t bring herself to call him. Whenever Megan proceeded to press his number on her cell phone, she would stall on the third or fourth digit. What could she say after hello? How could she navigate the conversation without the ability to gauge his reaction through his facial expressions, his physical nuances?

She had to see him.

The grocery was nearly closing when Megan walked in. It was a Saturday night. Young women in short dresses and clean shaven men wearing button-down shirts tucked out chatted in front of a bar a couple of blocks away. Megan wondered at how Todd could sever himself from the fun in his midst. He ought to be enjoying his last summer before undertaking the burdening responsibility of a chemist.

Some people who appeared to be headed to the bar were in line at the register. As scantily clad as the women were, Todd was oblivious to them, ringing up their gums and cigarettes without providing anything more than a perfunctory good evening nod in response to their coquettish grins. The counter seemed to work as a cordon that sealed him off from social interaction. This pleased Megan. She might be the only woman in the city whom Todd had honored with his phone number.

Todd didn’t notice Megan when she entered, didn’t notice her as she fell in line. Five people were before her, then four and then three. He looked up from the cash register, saw her and smiled. He gave her a big smile, the kind of smile one had when overjoyed that a person one longed to see had arrived. Megan knew that smile. She had seen it on Nigel on prom night and on the afternoon in the backseat of her father’s Cadillac. She saw it on Dylan. Dylan always had that smile.

Todd’s eyes were lighter this evening. While on their first meeting they were a deep earth brown, tonight there was a milky faintness to them. They were alone in the grocery now, she and he.

“Thank you for your number,” said Megan. What else could she have said?

“You’re welcome.”

“This doesn’t always happen, a phone number on a grocery receipt. In fact, it’s never happened.”

“Me, too.” Todd sounded shy compared to the first time they spoke, embarrassed. “It’s not always I give out my phone number on a grocery receipt. Actually, I never have.”

“Why didn’t you ask for my number or give me yours upfront?”

“I didn’t want to be too… too forward. So I ended up being cheesy.”

“No, not cheesy. Surprising.”

“It’s nice of you to come. It’s nice you’re here.”

“I’ve never responded to a guy this way before,” Megan said. “Let’s start off by introducing ourselves properly. I’m Megan.” She offered her hand.

“I’m Todd.”

Todd had large hands, impressive hands. They had calluses, probably from lifting weights. Even so, his palm was soft and he seemed to be holding Megan’s hand rather than shaking it.

“You should be out at the bars enjoying your weekend like everyone else,” Megan said. She was about to add: “like everyone else your age.”

“You should be, too.”

“I’ve already been through that. It was never my scene.”

“Mine neither.” Todd stepped out from behind the counter. “I have one last thing to do. Please stay. You’re welcome to.”

He shut the door, flipped the open sign to closed. Then he returned to the cash register to count the earnings for the day.

Megan asked, “You trust me with this part of your business?”

“Do I have any reason not to?”

“Since you trust me, then I trust you.”

While Megan flipped through a magazine, Todd brought the money to a safe in an office located at the back of the store. From there, he asked her common conversational questions: where she lived, what work she did. He was wearing a lumberjack coat when he came out and he walked with a rugged stride down the aisle, slightly bow-legged in the way athletes were.

Megan placed the magazine back on the rack. As she looked up from the rack to face him, he was standing beside her.

“Do you have any plans for the rest of the evening?” he asked.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be here,” she said.

They looked at each other for a moment more, but there was nothing else to say and so he kissed her. He kissed her and she didn’t hold back.

She thought of her parents. They were a mere two blocks away. Megan had not dropped by their apartment to greet them. She had no intention of doing so. Her mother had been upset that Megan insisted on living apart from them, had said Megan didn’t care for them. Her father had defended Megan, stating that it was right she be on her own. Regardless, Megan would never be too far away. She was there this instant, thinking of them, yet allowing herself to live free of their or of anybody else’s opinion. Daughter, wife, mistress – whatever it was people identified her as, she didn’t belong to anybody.

So who was Megan tonight? As far as Todd was concerned, a stranger. He may know her first name, in what part of the city she lived, where she worked, but not her last name, neither her phone number nor her age. The only thing of herself Megan would allow Todd to take possession of was her beauty, for that was all she desired – to be nothing more than something beautiful to a man who struck her equally as such.

Todd occupied a studio a few floors above. It was typical of a young man’s abode: magazines were scattered on the floor; crumbs dirtied the kitchen counter; a closet door was haphazardly left open. But atypical of a young man’s possessions, a Smithsonian was mixed in with fitness journals, and poetry tomes on Whitman, Cummings and Bishop were stacked on a desk along with chemistry books. A quilt covered the bed. The pattern of cows grazing on the grass beneath a smiling crescent moon made Megan acutely conscious of the disparity between her and Todd’s ages. Really, Todd was just a boy. Was it his undergraduate studies he had just completed or graduate school? By the looks of him, he was perhaps no older than 24. Megan had never thought of herself as an older woman, yet there she was. There she was and how confident this boy was in his seduction of her. He was stroking the nape of her neck, fondling her hair, tenderly pressing his lips against hers. Nothing was rushed about him. How was it he knew exactly what a woman needed?

“Of all the women who walk into the grocery, why me?” Megan asked.

“Something about you,” Todd said.

“My ineptitude with stain removers?”

“Somewhat. Nobody asks me for assistance. Nobody. And you seem like you need someone to talk to, to be with. You have a softness that makes a man want to reach out to you.”

Was loneliness so palpable? In Todd’s touch and in his kisses Megan sensed something in his life was missing, too. No pictures hung on the refrigerator door, not even a postcard. The walls were bare. Moving boxes that had yet to be assembled lay beside a scruffy sofa.

Light shone in from underneath the front door, through the curtains, from the desk lamp on which Todd had draped a piece of cloth. Megan wanted light. She always liked to see the person whom she was making love to and she liked to be seen in return. Sex to her was the most honest of unions, more honest than courtship or marriage. No lies. No facades. No secrets. It was two people drawn together to fill an emptiness that both shared. She stood back so that she could take in the sight of Todd. He undressed slowly. He enjoyed being watched, Megan could tell. He reached out to her and gently he ran his hand down the length of her naked torso, around her breasts. He seemed to be astounded by the evenness of her color as much as she was by the starkness of his tan line.

“There isn’t a blemish on you,” he said. “You’re one tone all over, like a baby.”

“You, you’re so sun soaked.”

“I was a lifeguard in my previous life.”

“Have you ever saved anyone from drowning?”

“A couple of times. A little boy and a middle-aged woman.”

They lay on his bed, on the quilt with its little boy design, sinking into a pool of midnight blue and cream stars, of M’s and O’s trailing out of the heads of cows. The sheets smelled of Ivory Snow, while Todd smelled of spice and day work.

“Beautiful,” Todd whispered. “Beautiful.” He sounded as though he were experiencing beauty for the first time.

“When do you start your new job?” asked Megan. What she really wanted to know was when he was leaving.

“Less than a month.”

“Half of your place is already empty. The boxes.”

“I’ve always lived like this, ever since I left home. When I was in school, it made no sense to unpack since I’d be moving to another dorm the following year.”

“Your parents must be surprised at the vagabond their son has become.”

“My parents were killed in a plane crash when I was a kid.”

“Oh… I’m sorry.”

“No need to be,” Todd whispered, so close to her face. “I never knew them. I was very, very young. My uncle and aunt raised me.”

“Maybe your next stop will be home to you for a while, a long while.”

“Maybe.”

A draft entered through a crack to the window above the bed. It cooled Megan like soft breath blown on her body. Todd’s hand on her belly was warm. His perspiration on her cheeks was as freshening as morning dew. He nestled his head on her chest and shut his eyes. In repose like that, Todd appeared small and delicate. Megan ran her fingers through his hair and it felt as though she were stroking the silken mane of a young animal. She and Todd were strangers to each other, and yet not quite, not anymore. In the little bit she knew about him, he seemed to have bared all of himself. And for the brief moment that their lives intersected, she had plenty of him to carry with her for a lifetime.

“You’re an unusual woman,” Todd said.

“How so?”

“I never thought there could be such a thing as perfect. I was wrong. I’ll always remember this night as perfect, you as perfect.”

“That’s because you don’t know me,” Megan said.

Celeste’s singing reached out to all of Ermita’s denizens. A trio of male hairdressers in floral-printed blouses shared a table close to the stage with the grocer who had sold Jezm her tissue paper. Bouncers to neighboring bars took their breaks here. The collar to their Polo-branded tees raised, they clinked bottles with the construction workers and janitors and bus drivers. Women at an open market that sold rattan baskets and utensils carved in narra wood that tourists loved, women who were mothers and wives, liked to refresh themselves with soft drinks at Cherry, eat roasted peanuts and chicharon that curled up like worms.

Before long, Cherry was packed. Whatever her audience said on the streets about the Philippines either on the brink of a new era or on the verge of disaster by virtue of a housewife with presidential aspirations didn’t matter. So long as Celeste took to the stage, they were all one people, people of her lot, people who could very well have been Calinteños.

Such days were plenty, though they seemed to Celeste as one. The sun would flood into the open door, bounce off the wall-length mirror. The bar top and the ceiling beams and the ashtrays would glow. By the kitchen threshold opposite the entrance, an orchid was suspended in a tubular vase of paper thin glass. The orchid was an addition to Cherry that the Mama-san purchased with the money Celeste was bringing in. In the dim corner, its petals shone, wispy as the tail of a ghost.

Even on cloudy days, Celeste perceived brightness. On the stage, she could will Cherry to appear however she wanted and, with her music, claim the place as her own. She learned everyone’s name. She regarded her audience as sharing the same home as she, not under one roof but under one sky. Ermita was where loops of jeepney antennas and hearts painted on buses whizzed around them amid screeches and honks and cusses. Trash barrels and hubcaps shapeless as kneaded dough littered pavements. A movie billboard depicted Nora Aunor, Dolph Lundgren, and Eddie Murphy with lopsided noses and fleshy fingers painted in pinkish swirls.

Whenever Celeste opened her window in the morning, she thought of that billboard. It was not in her view… a graying white building with metal braces reinforcing one corner stood across from her… yet she saw the billboard as clearly as she did the new day. Ate Guy’s cheeks were more rouged than in life. The sun at high noon spilled atop the billboard, melted on Ate Guy’s forehead. But the eyes were unmistakably hers – penetrating and sorrowful. The billboard stood at an intersection that led Roxas Boulevard into Ermita. “Welcome to my world,” Ate Guy seemed to tell the incoming traffic, and in this world was Maria Celeste Solinas.

Of all the people who came to call themselves Celeste’s “fans,” whose faces gleamed with sunlight and anticipation as Celeste took to the stage, one person touched Celeste the most. She was a flower girl whom Celeste guessed to be thirteen years old, in a lime dress that was too big. The skirt flared out like a lampshade. Sooty as her face and legs were, the dress endowed the girl with a freshness reminiscent to Celeste of mountain dew and rain-sprinkled leaves. The flowers, they were sampaguitas. Their white petals dotted a string necklace as beads to a rosary. They emanated a scent so potently sweet that it cut through the smell of sweat and musky cologne, fried fish and exhaust fumes.

The girl moved without a sound from table to table, raising a sampaguita necklace for purchase. She endeavored to look at each person in the eyes. Nobody returned her look.

Only Celeste met the girl’s eyes, when the girl was standing alone by the dangling orchid, a necklace raised towards her. Celeste knew those eyes. She saw Nora Aunor in the flower girl. And she saw herself. There the girl stood, transfixed. She seemed to have forgotten that she had walked into Cherry to sell sampaguitas. Could it be that she was looking up to Celeste the way Celeste looked up to Ate Guy?

Faith can part oceans, hold a star, kiss the moon. Faith can melt cold hearts, heal wounds, bridge distance. Have faith in me ‘cuz I have faith in you. Far as I may be, my faith will be your strength as your faith is mine. Far as I may be.

Just like that, the girl was gone.

Celeste searched for the girl on the streets for days after. “Where are you from?” she wanted to ask. “Where are you going? What do you want?” With the neon lights off, Ermita was just another dusty district. Then again, not quite. Rent girls stood in doorways with their buttocks protruding from their shorts. Japanese and Australian and American men paraded the pavements, hand in hand with Filipinas. Some showed their appreciation of the Philippines by wearing short-sleeved barong tagalogs. Papa Solinas used to have a couple of those, a white one and a light blue one. He wore them on Sundays to mass. Celeste liked to run her fingers on the columnar embroidery from the shoulders to the hem. She wondered if she could do such needlework. No doubt the tourists got their barongs at an air-conditioned store, at a price Celeste would never bother with. Tesoro’s, maybe. Nobody made a barong tagalog look so good as her father had, though.

Foreigners decked in Filipino handicraft and who flaunted a Filipino girl, they were everywhere in Ermita, day and night. A lime dress on a thirteen-year-old girl should stand out, but no. Celeste discovered in her search how plentiful flower girls were, as well as newspaper boys and sweepstake ticket sellers and vendors hawking out of pushcarts salted preserved prunes and ice cream and nibble-on watermelon seeds. She also learned that the ebb and flow of laboring humanity came from all regions across the nation. They migrated to Manila in pursuit of economic advantages. By choice or by circumstance, they established their abode in Ermita. Some would stay. Some would journey onward. No matter their fate, they would find their way to Cherry. Celeste overheard folks urge one another to hear this new singer, a former maid from Forbes Park. They were saying that her voice was lovely, that her songs bespoke their feelings, their story.

As Celeste took center stage, a quietude swept through the audience. She was achieving what she had expected – unity, admiration, beauty – and something more, something she had not counted on. She had seen it in the flower girl’s eyes. She detected flashes of it in the Mama-san’s eyes, in the eyes of Guido and even of Brioness, of everyone. This spell she cast on people, there was a name for it.

This was power.

We met at the Hotel Nikko gym, where Tristan Ledan worked as a weight training instructor. With his head shaved and a dimpled smile, he had a baby face on a pugilist’s body. Tristan’s uniform was a collared red tee shirt that marked him like a flame. I could see him from the corner of my eyes no matter where he was – at the window, in front of a white wall, reflected in a mirror. Against the view of the Eiffel Tower, amid the black and white nautilus machines, Tristan was a blot of red that seemed to appear from nowhere. He would be absent upon my arrival. Then in an instant, he’d be there. Since he was genial to everybody, I never gave his smiles a second thought.

Things changed the second semester. I was doing bench presses in front a mirrored wall, while he was beside me, guiding a man through push-ups. What a sight the two of them made. Tristan, in a squat position, flaunted muscular thighs bursting through his jogging pants. His client was heavy set and breathing weightily as perspiration dripped from his hair. Through the mirror, I was admiring the client his diligence. So languorous was Tristan in counting the push-ups that his client’s fatigue didn’t seem to faze him. “Dix… Onze… Douze…” – Tristan sounded as though he was singing a lullaby. Yet the client would not stop until he was told to stop. Even when his arms were about to buckle, even when his back was giving way, the client wanted more – more push-ups, more treadmill, more of anything that Tristan would instruct of him. When I had arrived half an hour earlier, the two were already in the midst of heir session, and it didn’t seem to be ending soon. I understood the man’s zeal. He had quite an image to emulate in Tristan.

I sat on the bench press, transfixed. In my mind I was cheering the client on. He was emanating so much energy that he fogged the mirror. Now he was clapping his hands in between each push-up. I couldn’t even do that. My reflection in the mirror gave evidence that I had come a long way since high school, since my arrival in Paris seven months earlier even. My acne had cleared, and though it left its trace, I was only glad that the pock marks were not of the moon crater variety. (Richard Burton had blemished skin and look at who he got to marry twice.)

Still, I had just turned 21. The me I was meant to be was a work in progress far from complete. I figured that if this man whose stomach bounced on the floor with each push-up could strive for perfection, then so could I. I had heard Tom Cruise isn’t tall, that he is my 5’7”, yet how tall and marvelous he looked in “Top Gun.” I may never look like Tom Cruise nor may I be as buffed as Tristan, but I decided right then that I could at least work with what I have as much as this man beside me was working his darned hardest.

All these good thoughts of a future me must have washed my face aglow because at that instant, in the mirror, Tristan darted his eyes at me and he smiled.

“Après,” he mouthed.       

Huh? Afterwards? I pointed a finger at my chest and I mouthed, “Moi?”

Tristan nodded.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Pourquoi?”

Tristan smiled roguishly.

I wanted answers: What time was après? Should I dare believe this to be a come on? Was this really happening?

Instead, I moved away from Tristan in order to avoid appearing eager. I dilly dallied with this dumbbell and that Nautilus machine. On a mat, I considered trying the hand clapping push-ups, then decided against it lest I prove myself a klutz. My concentration shot, I could hardly work out. Tristan’s session with his client could not end soon enough. I kept glancing at Tristan in the mirror, from the side of my eyes, across the weight room. He’d respond with a quick look and a nod. No doubt about it, the guy was flirting.

The client’s stepping into the locker room indicated that après had arrived. I followed him to get my things. Tristan went to the front desk across from the locker room, where he stepped into an employee room behind. He didn’t make eye contact with me, so I worried that he might have lost interest, until a few minutes later I saw him outside by the elevator, gym bag slung over his shoulder, downing protein juice and waiting.

Since I didn’t want to make the same mistake with Tristan that I had with Rick, I assessed the signs: for the whole of my first semester, Tristan had said nothing more to me than “bon jour,” “comment ca va?” and “a tout a l’heure”; I had responded with the likewise salutations of good morning and see you later as well as a “bien, merci” to his question regarding my well-being; he had smiled at me from time to time and I had smiled back; we were polite. Did he really mouth “afterwards” to me oh so seductively in French just a moment earlier? What was I getting myself into? And yet, Tristan was standing in front of me, an arm’s length away. He wasn’t smiling. He was grinning. Then he blinked… coyly. If this turned out to be another misreading on my part, then so be it. No pain, no gain.

Tristan asked me something. I gave him a blank look. Even after half a year in France, my French was iffy.

“Parles lentement, s’il vous plais.” I told him to speak slowly, please.

Meanwhile, the French that incessantly played in my head as a broken record was the line from that silly disco song, “Lady Marmalade” – “Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir” – if only because the line is downright awkward. Vous is a formal term for the second person, used on an individual of age or rank or on a stranger. Of course, Tristan was a stranger, but we were going to have sex. (I hoped). Addressing him by vous would have been equivalent to calling him Mr. President. What exactly do the French say when they want to fuck?

“Nous pouvons aller chez moi,” Tristan said. “Ehh… my place.”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean oui.”

That was all it took. After fumbling over French and English and umms and ahhs, all a man had to do was to invite the person over to his place. This wasn’t as blatant and gauche as “would you… sir, Mr. President… like to go to bed with me tonight?” but it expressed everything. Tristan and I had nothing more to say to each other.

The metro ride to Tristan’s place was a series of smiles peppered with questions of “quoi?” and “what?” over a comment on the gym, my schooling, and weekend activities. We were seated on a double passenger chair. Amid people who milled around us at each stop and the rolling of the wheels on the tracks, I wanted to ask why me. I wasn’t muscular. I wasn’t flirtatious. I had given no sign of interest nor of availability. Then again, why ruin an impulsive moment with self-analysis?

Tristan placed an arm around my shoulders, brought me closer to him. His down jacket was soft. His touch was hot. I traced a pink mark on the left side of his neck.

“Marque de naissance,” he said.

I showed him my own birth mark. It was on the left side of my neck, too.

“Nous sommes jumeaux.”

I didn’t understand him, but I said oui. That was all everything we were doing from this point on required of me anyway – a yes.

Trees against a blue sky and glass towers juxtaposed with Victorian buildings passed in the window beside Tristan like shifting stage sets. Then we were underground again. As the metro stopped, Tristan said, “Nous sommes ici… Here, the two of us.”

The building Tristan lived in was a block away from the metro. It was one of those old Parisian dwellings with a cage elevator and a winding stair well, water stains on white walls and a frayed carpet. His studio was a mini-museum that displayed prints of Chagall and Van Gogh alongside Robert Doisneau and Brassai photographs. 1950s street shots of Parisian lovers locked in a kiss, the Arch of Triumph, and the Seine River mystic with street lights sparkling through mist sent me in a time warp. Reality blended with the dream of a starry night rendered in turbulent brush strokes and of amorphous figures of bulls and horses and people floating in space brilliantly colored. Tristan wasn’t just a beautiful looking man. He had a beautiful eye.

How exactly does he see me? “Tu est…” I simulated painterly brush strokes with my hands.

“Peintre? Non.”      

So what did he do if he wasn’t a painter? Photo books of male physiques, tabloid magazines, and a pair of Sylvia Plath books filled a set of standing shelves. Beside that, Charlie Brown and Linus piggy banks decorated his desk on which lay an open journal. Frenetic penmanship left no space on the page. Elongated letters slanted right as though Tristan had been chasing after his thoughts, hurrying to record them before they vanished.

“J’ecris,” Tristan said.

“T’ecris quoi?”

Rather than answering, Tristan kissed me. Or maybe the kiss was his answer. Maybe love and sex were what Tristan wrote about.

I closed my eyes. Suddenly, I forgot everything in the studio I had seen and everything I had been thinking. Tristan’s tongue alone reminded me that I was alive. Until that moment, I had understood a French kiss to involve placing the tongue in another person’s mouth and that was it. Tristan was tongue kissing my chin, my cheeks, my ears, my nose. This was more than a mere avalanche of lascivious kisses. The man was making love to my face. He was grinding his tongue so deep into me, sucking my face so hard, that I could hardly catch my breath. I was losing my footing. The two of us were standing in between the desk and the foot of the bed. He held me up and motioned me closer to the bed.

“Meow,” I heard.

“Mrrrrgrrrmm,” I grumbled. I couldn’t release my mouth from his. I struggled to talk. When finally our faces parted, I said, “Un chat?”

From underneath the bed, a pair of blue eyes in a furry head the orange of a pimp suit gazed up at me. A feline Rick Vogt.

“Shit, I’m allergic to cats,” I said.

I don’t think Tristan understood. Even if he had, I doubt it would have mattered because it didn’t matter to me. Not at this point. I was on the verge of a divine discovery. We fell on the bed. I had never known flesh so soft that I could sink into it nor muscles so solid that they promised reliability.

The radiator rattled. Legs raised in the air. A car screeched outside. Heads thrashed against pillows.

We intertwined our limbs, desperately so, as if all the love in the world were to end upon midnight. Then Tristan stopped kissing me. He raised his head, gazed at the ceiling. He could have been watching a miracle rain down. Though our mouths were agape, we uttered no words. Our hefty breathing escalated into a cry. I didn’t even realize we were making such a raucous until Tristan clamped his hand on my mouth and diminished his own sounds into a grunt. But the humping of our hips didn’t stop. We picked up momentum. And then…

Our bodies stiffened. The energy pent up inside of us was too much to fight against. Life for an hour had been heat, speed, and friction. It was ending on a soft note of a moan and ebbing twitches of the groin.

Tristan fell by my side. He sighed and he laughed a laugh more an expression of delight than of humor. Exhausted as we were, our heart beats were racing.

“Water?” Tristan acted out drinking from a glass.

“Non, merci.”

During our bed pounding, the cat had moved to the desk chair. It was staring at me with lightning eyes. That was when I started to feel it – an itch on the arm and an itch on the neck. I sneezed.

“Ca va bien?” asked Tristan.          

Oh, jolie cat, I thought. You are not making me feel well. “Oui,” I said even so.

I didn’t stay the night. I didn’t even stay till midnight. Tristan slipped on a pair of boxers and sat on the edge of the bed. That was hardly an invitation, so I put on my clothes.

The first shimmers of the evening lit the window through the Venetian blinds. Van Gogh in a self-portrait above the bed looked sad.

“Merci,” I said. “Merci beaucoup.”

“Merci aussi.”

Tristan didn’t offer his phone number. I didn’t know to ask. He hugged me, but he didn’t kiss. He hugged me for the last time ever.

At the gym from that night on, Tristan was distant. I would walk up to him at the front desk or in the weight area and say hello, then stand tongue tied. No amount of schooling teaches a boy what to say and how to act in this situation. How I must have seemed to Tristan a begging urchin, far from the lovable lovelorn innocent that Audrey Hepburn’s Sabrina is. He hardly said much himself other than his usual salutations because he was always in a rush. He was hurrying to tend to a client or he was speed eating in the employee room. He was fast talking with his colleagues or he was sprinting out the door, to the elevator, and out of my sight. He’d wink at me sometimes, nothing more – never a moment to chat, never a look between us long enough to acknowledge having connected. Tristan and I may as well had gone out to have a drink rather than have sex. Indeed, that was all I had been – a fresh bottle of testosterone for him to quench a thirst. But had my nectar not tasted sweet? Had Tristan not said that we were… What was that word?

Jumeaux, Enzo informed me, means twins. In a way, Tristan was right. By taking me to his bed, he had initiated me into a brotherhood of fly by night flings, a fraternity that in its absence of women bypasses the convention of courtship and that sacrifices emotions. As a new member of the family, I needed to adapt to its customs. Within a month, Tristan and I reduced to acknowledging each other with a mere nod and then with nothing at all. Instead of allowing myself to dwell on heartache, I decided to sample the array of male delicacies that Paris provides. Love had to be hiding somewhere amid the play, like a cherry in a cream pie.

Gay men are available for the taking in the Marais district, once the domain of the Parisian aristocracy in the 19^th century. Cushioned fold out chairs that match the color of the awnings, rainbow flags that deck doorways, and clothes along with glossy magazines in display windows framed purple, green, or blue give a splash of vibrancy to the cobblestones and palatial buildings murky in their staidness. The Marais has long ceased to be about protocol. The Marais has come to represent non-conformity. The ghosts of the nobility might disapprove, but on my first venture to a gay bar, I imagined the spirits of Honoré de Balzac’s courtesans sweeping the hems of their crinoline gowns against the floor in a waltz danced in rooms where men in Doc Martens and pierced ears today drink and fornicate. I might have hurt from Tristan’s avoidance of me, yet what I had gained from him far outweighed the pain. I was going to have the time of my life. I dressed like the guys I wanted – in baggy jeans, a logo tee, and my hair a crew cut – and what I wanted was a guy after the image of Rick or Tristan. I couldn’t forget Gavino Bellandini either, no matter that he was too darn godlike to be attainable. If a surprise such as Tristan Ledan was possible, then anything could happen.

That was the problem. I expected love to be instant and lust to be mutual. Although not everybody at Quetzal Bar fit my ideal, there were enough who did so that I was convinced that I was what they wanted, too. No. The chattering of men divided into groups reminded me of BAGLY. Only in this case, the groups never disbanded to form one large gathering of friends. Punk rockers stuck with punk rockers. Fashionistas stuck with fashionistas. Skin heads stuck with skin heads. I sat on a stool in front of a mirrored wall and kept company with a glass of soda water. That the end of my straw was producing gurgling sounds didn’t matter. Nobody heard.

Nevertheless, I didn’t lose hope. In my perseverance, subsequent outings to Quetzal didn’t amount to naught. Men would engage me in conversation, and occasionally, I’d meet a person whose handshake felt as though I had found a missing link.

There was the airport customs official who confided in me “J’aime les garcons Asiatiques.” In his flat, under dim red lights, he caressed my body as if it were a bronze sculpture. His hands were not large, but his touch was electrical. He was meaty on the stomach, but he was young and burly. As he waxed poetic on the Asian men who traveled through Charles de Gaulle Airport, his eyes lit up as if he were reciting a mantra.

I had a royalist, it’s true. His living quarter was as bare as a prison cell. Only an open drawer over which a shirt sleeve hung attested to a life within those four walls, as did his most prized possession: a scrap book containing postcard-image sketches of chateaus and castles once under the ownership of ancestors who had met their end at the guillotine. I didn’t understand his monologue on the merit of reviving the monarchy. I had never even been aware that royalists existed 200 years after the storming of the Bastille. Yet I had a sense of his frustration; Marcos supporters… or loyalists as they were called… were bent on usurping Corazon Aquino. Politics aside, the man knew how to wear a jock strap.

With the Moroccan medical student, my duplex was the play space. I didn’t dare bring him to my bed; a girly quilt would have killed the mood. We lay instead on the sofa in the living room. The Renaissance hunting scenes on cushions that depicted guns and horses on a mad chase after foxes were more conducive to our intentions. Predator or prey, he and I were each a bit of both, clawing at one another and biting. For extra income, the guy worked as a nude art model. “Regardes moi,” he’d say in the midst of making out. That was his kink – being watched as he struck sexy poses on the shag carpet.

Despite my numerous instances of two lives shared, my kisses with each man were more a hunger of the groin rather than an expression of the heart. Even so, the world became a smaller place. If men whose lives were never meant to converge could find a common bond in me, then love was possible with anybody, anywhere.

Gay establishments outside of my comfort zone of the Marais started calling to me. They were nearly as plentiful as movie theaters: Dance Club at Les Halles, where from railings on the second and third levels, I could watch potential mates on the dance floor; a porn video arcade at Pigalle, a neighborhood once home to Toulouse Lautrec; and Le Trap at St. Germain des Pres.

Le Trap. The bar was an oddity to stumble upon in a neighborhood of swanky boutiques and fine dining. While Quetzal radiated light and space, Le Trap was the nadir of darkness and sleaze. Its clientele was of the hyper-masculine type. Leather chaps and chains, tee shirts two sizes too small and jeans tight on the butt all seemed to have been lifted from the Al Pacino film “Cruising.” Just as the film depicts, the men were there for one reason alone, and it wasn’t love. The bar area was so small that body contact was inevitable. A spiral staircase led to a floor that was immersed in blackness. Blind as I was to the activities within, the sounds surging forth supplied the visuals for my imagination.

Curiosity had taken me to Le Trap. The place wasn’t to my liking. It was enticing and mysterious, no doubt, but I had not yet acquired the footing to stand alongside these giants. I stayed even then. It was May, the end of my year in Paris. To fulfill my mission for adventure, I needed to claim Le Trap as one more horizon explored.

No, Le Trap was not about love. I had searched for it in the cream pie that was Quetzal. I certainly had no expectations of finding it in this mud pit. For my one and only night there, I remained on the stairs, unavailable to the men at the bar below and the men in the backroom above. The sting of cigarette smoke in my nose, the sugary spirituous smell of liquor, and the heat from bodies joining were all I needed to be engaged in the reality of the moment. This would be enough of a memory.

Goodbye, Paris, I thought.

Footsteps clanked on the metal steps. Moans and groans thundered from the backroom. Guys kissed and groped in the bar.

I preoccupied myself with the mechanics of moving back to Tufts. Tomorrow I would buy boxes for my books. In a couple of weeks, I would disconnect my phone. I would be back in Boston before I knew it. Davilo had sent me a telegram asking to house with him and Owen. That was something to look forward to.

And right then, right beside me, the cherry in the cream pie materialized in the body of a tall, dark, and handsome Swede who spoke fluent English.

This is one career misfire my mother cannot put to pasture: I could have been the next Robert Doisneau or Milton Greene. In the summer of 1987, I roved Boston for a job as an apprentice to a photographer, a portfolio in tow of pictures I had taken in the Philippines following the People Power Revolution a year earlier that had ousted Ferdinand Marcos from his 20-year dictatorship. The pros welcomed my knock on their door (they must have been impressed by this 20-year-old’s moxie), and they provided me advice and compliments (“you have a good eye”).

The best response came from The Boston Globe. I dropped off my portfolio with the guard at the front desk, instructing him to deliver it to the photo department. Three days later, I got a call from the newspaper. “We got your portfolio and we’d like to talk to you,” the woman at the other end of the line said, to which I responded that I only wanted to work on certain days and at my chosen hours. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t help you.” The truth was that I was so lazy that I didn’t want to work at any hours on any days; thus, I dismissed the Globe’s rebuff of me as minor. I can try next year, I thought. The second time around brought no such luck with either the Globe or anywhere else. “And you thought it would be easy,” my sister said. Some life lessons are a hard learn, and this is one of them. I blew a once in a lifetime chance; not every kid gets an employment summon from a major newspaper. “You should have…” my mother says to this day.

I do wonder how my future would have been different if I had. I would have been a storyteller, albeit with images rather than with words. The narrative of a picture is what got me interested in the medium in the first place. I’ve always been a visual person. Before writing, I drew, and it had been for this art form that I was rewarded in high school. People were my subjects, specifically women from the pages of fashion magazines. I was attracted to the quixotism a model embodies. A heroine to a story played out in clothes and make-up, she is not unlike an actress, only in her case, the viewer supplies the dialogue and the plot; I could shape her in accordance to my mood and my whim. Photography was a rational next step. As the person behind the camera, a shutterbug possesses power in the role of a director. With a single shot, he or she could capture an emotion. A skirt is never more provocative, a handbag never more romantic, than when captured amid a misty sunset, smoke in the background spiraling upward from a cottage chimney, on a woman who channels Veronica Lake.

Photography was my method of creating my own Hollywood classic. I purchased my first 35mm camera for an introductory course during my freshman year at TuftsmUniversity. My sister herself had just entered the architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which was a 20-minute bus ride away from me, and on a few occasions, I would use her as a model. For direction, I’d mention studio portraits of Greta Garbo et al. Since my sister and I along with our mother used to watch old movies together, my sister didn’t need clarification when I’d say, “Frame your face with your hands like Garbo… Give me a profile like Grace Kelly on the cover of Life… Like Rita Hayworth… Like Vivien Leigh…” She was aware of each pose I was referencing. So natural was she that after a click, she’d sway her arms into another star pose, her expression a composite of daring and aloof.

Our favorite actress to emulate was Audrey Hepburn. (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1960s-1990s/breakfast-at-tiffanys-sunshine-through-rain-clouds/) Although we had both watched “My Fair Lady” (1964) as kids, it was our viewing of “Sabrina” (1954) the year my sister returned to Manila after graduation from Columbia University in New York that made us fans. The actress’s ramp model physique is relatable to every generation of fashion aficionados, and this my sister and I certainly are. The peacock dress, the pixie cut, the opera gloves… “Sabrina” is an instruction on style. “I keep telling you, it will be too much,” my sister insisted upon my insistence during one session that she darken her brows in Audrey manner. I was in no position to argue, she being the expert on eye pencils and lipstick, and I was only too thankful that she was willing to be my guinea pig. Amateurs, we both had to make do with whatever equipment was available: a black dress, a black TV stand, table lamps, and a backdrop of a gray blanket draped on closet doors. In the darkroom, classmates hovered around me, amazed at the girl whose image was materializing on the print sheet. “Jesus,” my sister said as I presented her her portraits. “Do I really look like that?”

Along with movie stars and models, I was keen on the regular folks on the streets, the truth of their stories in contrast to the escapism of a beautiful woman. I eschewed staged shots. They had to be candid, caught in the midst of an individual engaged in one’s routine of living. If a subject were smiling into my lens, then it was a pose caught by happenstance. Of this hold humanity has on me, I have dedicated a section to it in a novel I would write some 25 years later that I’ve entitled “My Wonder Years in Hollywood”:

With a camera, I learned that the world was mine for the taking. I could capture the image of any person on the street, any building, any car, and any tree, and in so doing, claim them as my own. The adage “beauty surrounds you if you look hard enough” was no longer a cliché but a truth. How could I not have seen it before? The films “Gone with the Wind” (http://www.rafsy.com/films-1920s-1950s/gone-with-the-wind-another-day-another-chance/), “Dr. Zhivago,” and “The Killing Fields” depict the ravages of war, and there is nothing uglier than war. Yet when viewed through the lens of an artist, the silhouette of a man and a woman and a galloping horse against a city in conflagration adopts an operatic grandeur. That is what the world is: a film in the making, each of its seven billion people cast in the roles of writer, director, and actor.

I couldn’t get into still life photography as a result. Just as with drawing, I preferred people. You could argue that an object has stories to tell. We see those stories from the moment we awake every morning in the objects that surround our room, in the very bed we lie on. Nonetheless, an object would be devoid of its stories if it weren’t for the human hand that had touched it. That was why of all the photographers whose works Peter introduced in class, I responded to those who focused on people: Steichen, Salgado (http://www.rafsy.com/films-2000s-present/the-salt-of-the-earth-through-the-lens-of-love/), Eisenstaedt… Gloria Swanson’s diamond luminous eyes behind a butterfly veil; Amazonians, clothes tattered and soot capping hair, numbering in the thousands as they toil in mountainous terrains like Babylonian slaves in a shot reminiscent of “The Ten Commandments”; a sailor and a nurse in Times Square embraced in a Liberation Day smooch – these images haunt me still.

I could have been the next Robert Doisneau or Milton Greene. My name might have been in bylines beneath pictures in Time and Newsweek. I could have been awarded a Pulitzer for a photo essay on Typhoon Haiyan published in The Washington Post. Not only did I have a good eye, but I also had the patience. In the pre-digitalized age of the 1980s, producing a print required hours in the claustrophobic environment of a darkroom, with as long as 45 minutes in a cubicle spent yanking a film out of its shell, adjusting it on a spool, and enclosing the spool in a canister. As easy as the procedure sounds, it was not. Getting the film onto the spool was a tactile enterprise; exposure to light, no matter how faint, destroyed the roll of celluloid. In addition, I had to ascertain that no part of the film was in contact with any other; a pair of images could be damaged when stuck together while submerged in chemicals. Even so, what a bounty when I got it right, a feeling like no other. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about: nothing is ever a win unless we slave over it.

 

 

Publicizing my first novel, “Potato Queen,” introduced me to places and people whose paths I would otherwise never have crossed. B.D. Wong was among the 100 listeners for a forum that the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York sponsored featuring me and a Canadian writer named Daniel Gawthrop, who had penned a memoir about his love of Asian men entitled “The Rice Queen Diaries.” At the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans, I was a member of a community of writers and publishers united for a weekend to give credence to the LGBT voice. And at Books on the Square in Providence, the store manager – a grandmotherly woman in gray bun and a knit shawl – told me that I was sitting in the chair that a then-unknown Dan Brown had sat in and had held court to an audience of zero. One of the most rewarding experiences, however, would have to be my talk with the students at the Providence Academy of International Studies (PAIS).

PAIS is a high school that consists largely of immigrant kids from economically challenged families. The PAIS librarian had learned about me through my publicist and invited me to speak. Given that “Potato Queen” explores the segregationist relationship between gay Caucasians and Asians in 1990s San Francisco, I was concerned about the students’ openness to the subject. My high school in Manila never had a gay awareness curriculum of any sort, and guys would taunt me for my soft appearance. As such, my perception of adolescents was that they could be myopic and mean.

Not so with the students at PAIS. It turned out that the librarian, Peter, was gay and out as was the mayor of Providence. Sexuality was not even an issue of discussion, although some of the kids did ask if I was dating anyone and if I had ever been with a girl. With my answer to the latter a no, one boy cheekily questioned how I could possibly know that I don’t like girls if I hadn’t tried them.

The talk was in the library with the audience gathered around a table. There were about a dozen students, which made for a conversational atmosphere. Yet I was nervous. When I was their age, I believed adults of authority in my school to be above the travails singular to the very young. That was why we called them teacher, guidance counselor, and principal. Insecurity was meant to be the burden of adolescents alone. Now here I was, 20 years out of high school, with a book on an adult man who experiences alienation and bouts of negative self-image, the stuff of teen angst.

So that I wouldn’t be stumped on what to say, Peter had e-mailed me guide questions: Why did I become a writer? How do I prepare for writing? How do I develop a voice? How do my characters speak through me? What should the students think about doing now while in high school and later in college?

I had prepared my answers and I had practiced them. I had won the gold medal for an oratory competition in high school and the first place cup for one at the American College in Paris during my junior year abroad. And still, I was nervous. I sat at the head of the table with hands clasped together in front of me. Peter must have introduced me. A pen must have tapped. Paper must have rustled. Yet the only sound I remember to this day was the hum of silence that permeated the library, like silence before a storm, in anticipation of my rattle-ridden speech:

“I became a writer because of my need to be heard and seen. Being gay and being Asian, I was invisible or I felt I was. We all feel a sense of isolation. Certainly, each and every one of you does, particularly at this stage in your life where you’re forming your identity, discovering where you belong, what groups of friends you fit in with. You may not always feel wanted, but it’s precisely this feeling that fuels your drive, your ambition to prove yourself. If the world were a perfect place, then what would you have to fight for, what need would you have to prove yourself?

“I started with a journal. That’s the best advice I can give all of you, whether or not you’re interested in writing. Record your thoughts for the day, an experience with a friend, a teacher. Express on page your dreams, your hopes, your hardships. Don’t think too much about what you write. Write in your journal as you would an e-mail to a friend. Write the way you speak. Writers are known to have a so-called written voice. Writers don’t consciously think of this voice. It’s something that’s inherent in them, as second nature as breathing, eating, and sleeping.

“Whatever stories you have to tell will come out in these pages. You don’t need to look far for a story. You need only to look within yourself. The stories your parents tell you about themselves when they were young, your brother’s or sister’s story about getting into a fight with someone, your own stories about the emotions you go through over someone you like… all this is material. Every day of your life is a story waiting to be told. From the moment you wake up, each decision you make each minute leads to something. You are the author of your life.

“When I write, I think of the people first that I would like to write about. I get my ideas for characters from my friends, my family, people I don’t know well but have sparked my interest for whatever reason. A little of me exists in all of the characters I create. I tend to project my frustrations and desires and dreams onto them, and from there my story is born. People make stories. Stories don’t make people. It’s the decisions that people make that lead to events. People caused the Iraq war – Bush, Hussein, Conde Rice, bin Laden. It didn’t start on its own. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr… they propelled the Civil Rights Movement.

“My advice is for all of you to look at every day as a learning experience. The films you see, the songs you listen to, the TV shows you watch, the materials you read from People magazine to the newspapers to a book – have an opinion about them. Do you like something? Why? You don’t? Why not? Take the time to understand why you react emotionally to an experience. Don’t just say, ‘I’m sad…I’m happy… I’m pissed’ and then leave it at that. This is the best way to develop your analytical skills. And you will certainly come across as a more intelligent person and a person worth listening to and believing in.

“Be good students. Study hard. Put pride into your work. There are times when it will be tough. You might not do well in a test, have a major argument with your parents, a falling out with a friend. That’s part of life. Those are obstacles you need to overcome. To experience the joy of success, you need to fail. To be a winner, you need to lose. To believe your worth something, you need to be rejected. That’s the yin and yang of human existence. “

The students clapped. They smiled and they thanked me. On the drive to the train station for my ride back to Manhattan, I made a straightforward remark that generated from Peter a straightforward reaction:

“I wonder if I made a difference in their lives.”

“You did. I know you did.”

Published on the International School Manila website for the 2003 reunion:

It’s been nearly 20 years since I last signed a Kawayan yearbook, and the further into the millennium I get, I think of a comment a fellow senior made: “The ‘80s is the best era to be young.”

We were seeking guidance with the Barron’s directory of colleges in planning the course of our future. She was Korean. I’m Filipino. She could have returned to Korea and I could have stayed in the Philippines, but we were to venture west, no matter what, because we could. For us, an earlier generation had already mobilized the Civil Rights Movement, ended two world wars, and invented the computer. We believed that with betamax, MTV, and Glasnost, technology in the ‘80s was evolving and social upheavals were rapidly occurring for us and because of us. No decade before had offered so much entertainment and so much freedom.

Man’s first walk on the moon was boring history. Michael Jackson’s moonwalk was a spectacular feat of human dexterity.

A TV with a channel dial was an antique. A touch-tone telephone was a piece of modern ingenuity.

The fall of Saigon was a chapter in a textbook. People Power was a bloodless revolution that triumphed with the strength of our voices.

So we had international baccalaureate courses and advanced placement courses. For those of us who cared anything about the possibilities they offered, the International School Manila endowed us with high ideals to shape the future as magnificently as our predecessors had built the foundations of our present. The guarded gates that enclosed our premises protected us from the appalling reality of the starvation in Ethiopia and the litter-congested sewers of Tondo.

No dream was impossible.

Sometimes the worst of the outside world infiltrated our bubble. Classes were interrupted because of mysterious bomb threats that required us all to evacuate the school. The bombing of a Korean Airline by a stray Soviet missile and a hobie catting accident left a few seats empty in our classrooms.

Our parents might pronounce the ‘50s the best era to have been young. Rock n’ roll idealized the innocence of love with songs of heartfelt men in heartbreak hotels as they serenaded their women to love them tender, of shy affections blossoming into eternal devotion at twilight time. We just wanted someone with whom to get physical. If that enraged our elders, then we simply whined for our papas not to preach.

An 18-year-old today might argue that nothing can beat coming of age in the midst of the 21^st century’s miracles of communication. E-mail and the cellphone have made dear ones far away accessible at any time, any place. And who needs to step out the door when all that’s needed to survive can be purchased on the internet?

Valid points all. But the ‘80s will always be the most dazzling of decades. Red flags flew over Tiananmen Square. Edsa Avenue radiated the yellow of the sun. Benetton celebrated the racial eclecticism of humankind. Spandau Ballet declared that we were gold and indestructible. Every dawning day, the world erupted with the vibrant colors of a Rubik’s Cube.

The first question that arises in a high school reunion is if any of us has succeeded in painting the wide canvass of the world with the brilliance of our youthful ambitions. Then follow comments and questions of how dramatically we have aged, how youthful we have remained, how many children we have, who our spouses are.

Of myself, I will say that I haven’t a strand of gray hair nor am I bald. I eat cookies, chocolate, and ice cream, but my waistline is still a 29. I dream and I anticipate tomorrow because, at 36, I feel younger than I ever have.