Before the Rain Read online

  We drank one glass, then another. After a while, after the half-truths strangers tell each other about their lives—she never mentioned her private life and I didn’t ask—she leaned forward and pushed up her chair, seeming more at ease. Sounding pompous even to myself, I told her that foreign reporting was a calling, strenuous, solitary, and obsessive. Embellishing as I spoke, I said that few people had a natural knack for it, and that I guessed she might have it. I was courting her with words, flattering her and exaggerating my importance at the same time. She seemed drawn in right away and came up with stories she would do in Nicaragua, recalling her trips to Mexico, the purple of the sierras, the Yucatán ruins, the mood of the people, the language.

  She had read The Conquest of the Incas, and Latin American poets and novelists, and one year after college when she was living in Europe she taught herself Spanish after visiting the Basque region—she had fallen for the barren broodiness of the place, and the food!

  It didn’t seem to make a difference to her that Nicaragua was a tinderbox, that villages were carpet-bombed day and night and the city of Managua was a blazing hole—or, more likely, that is why she sought the assignment. She liked the romance of it, the intensity of life lived so closely to death.

  Nicaragua didn’t happen. The paper went on strike for almost two months, and she stayed away from the office. But when we went back to work in the fall, she was playful, inquiring about the desk, prodding me about her prospects and passing along compliments she had heard about me—ingratiating herself with flattering comments of the kind I had heard from other reporters politicking to land a foreign bureau. But I was taken in anyway.

  After the strike that fall, she was settling back in to her beat and, on days off, painting her house and planting a garden. Around that time, Nick, our correspondent in New Delhi, announced that he was leaving the newspaper at the end of that year, in December 1985. He had a good offer somewhere else. Half a dozen reporters immediately lined up for Nick’s job, the South Asia bureau. To everyone’s surprise, the editors offered it to her—they were giving her all of Asia. She would have to leave for India within two months, in January 1986, just after Christmas. “India’s perfect for you,” I said, a bit overexcited. She had spent all day talking to the brass and was now worn out, slouching in a chair at the Foreign Desk and looking quite pained. “Don’t push me,” she warned. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  For weeks she agonized. This was not Nicaragua, a two-stop, four-hour flight from home, a quick turnaround. Asia was a universe away. There was her husband, her parents, her new house. Finally, alone, sitting in a pew at a church a few blocks from the newspaper, she decided to go.

  All this—her phone calls, her notes, her turmoil—drew me in day by day and kept my mind off the drastic changes in my own life, the end of a longtime relationship, the gloom of that house I had come to hate in the suburbs, and finally my move to the city.

  In the weeks before her departure for New Delhi, she would send elliptical messages, unsigned, undated, disrupting my day. Sometimes the whole damned deck gets reshuffled all at once, she said, making fun of herself and her habit of planning everything. Exhilarated but afraid, she was riding an emotional seesaw. It was rare for her to acknowledge such things to someone else. “It’s an irony that I somehow find you the easiest and most difficult person to talk to,” she said, annoyed.

  Some days she sat only feet from me, among the other editors on the Foreign Desk, and ignored my presence. She was going through the basics on the desk, learning the routine, deadlines, how to file stories from abroad. I noticed that some of the desk editors seemed a bit wary of her intensity and cool reserve, a manner they took for cold-blooded and cocky. While talking to them, she averted her eyes from me, but before leaving the desk she would turn and brush my shoulder with the tips of her fingers on the way out.

  One evening later that winter, after Christmas and New Year’s, on the first Monday in January 1986, Tim made a small, intimate dinner for three—grilled swordfish, good wine, candles, flowers in a bud vase—and he invited her. He invited her for me. I had been persistent, pressing him, telling him about her. “Yes, she hangs the moon,” Tim agreed. “Yes, she’s beautiful. Yes, she’s brilliant . . . but you’re crazy.” He wasn’t smiling, saying that. “You know she’s married. It’s no good.”

  I felt the burn. He had me there. I was crazy.

  But I didn’t back down.

  You’re wrong, I told him, you’ll see.

  She would pass me notes and saunter over to my desk, smelling of Chanel No. 19, and toss me a candy bar or a new tape of the Talking Heads she particularly liked. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she glanced out of the corner of her eye at me and pulled on my sweater. “You look good,” she said as she kept walking. Those mornings when I came in early to check the wires, I looked for her car in the parking lot and sensed her presence across the newsroom: the slope of her shoulders, the trailing scarf she threw around her long neck, her flowing red hair.

  She came to Tim’s that night in blue jeans and laced-up hiking boots, holding out a warm loaf of cranberry bread she had baked. Tim was in the kitchen, broiling the swordfish steaks, humming to himself, a dirty apron tied around his waist, and I was fluttering nervously, bringing her a drink, handing her a cigarette, jumping up to put on the music she wanted. There was nothing stiff about her as she shucked off her field coat and scarf and gloves, feeling free from the eyes in the office. Here at Orchard House, among the knickknacks and battered furniture, she seemed able to breathe and relax. “It’s like the third world here,” she said, looking around. “Not like my mother’s house, you know, with all the white furniture.”

  She had Scotch. I had wine. Tim was effusive, at his most charming, making her laugh, her arms resting on the table, her hands gesturing, and her head thrown back. We were high halfway through dinner, clinking glasses, toasting Tim, who was going to Manila on temporary assignment, and toasting her, too, and her new job in Asia. They would work together in the Philippines but he would get there before her. She needed more time to plan a three-year assignment and had to first go to New Delhi to the furnished flat Nick had rented, which doubled as the paper’s bureau. Eventually she would get to Manila. They cheered each other like old colleagues, but I sensed an edge to their banter, a hint of rivalry.

  Attentive to Tim, she sat close to me, held cupped hand to chin, her index finger poised over her mouth, a typical pose. With Tim filling our glasses and playing the Coltrane blues on his record player, we told each other stories—my climb from small-town newspapers in the South; her choice of a college far from her roots in the East, where she cloistered herself, studying night and day, graduating cum laude and getting a Phi Beta Kappa key; Tim’s auspicious beginning as a cub reporter chasing stories in Manhattan for a wire service, and his jazzy days as a radio DJ in college. After the coffee and the cognac, Tim cleared the dishes and stacked them on the counter for me to wash later, and went out, leaving us alone. I didn’t dare move from the table and kept talking and filling her glass and got drunk.

  Long past midnight, she had to go, and we walked out to her car and sat on a neighbor’s stoop. It was freezing that night, with slippery ice on the sidewalk, and ice on the stone stoop. We were worn out, drained, and the street was silent, the sky blue-black, starless. I touched her hand, and she turned her eyes away from me and began to cry. “I’m afraid I’ll use you, and hurt you,” she said, pulling her hand away. I was knocked back, surprised at the implied threat. You could never hurt me, I lied. But feeling slapped back, I ran down the street, hoping she would follow. She didn’t. When I got back to the house, she was gone.

  A few days later Tim left for Manila to cover the presidential campaign of Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino, which had the world riveted. So many foreign journalists had descended on Manila that the campaign took on the aspect of an epic, a crusade of good against evil. Marcos had ruled the Philippines with an iron hand and stolen millions
of dollars that he had stashed away in Swiss banks. He was a sick old man, riddled with lupus, but he still wielded power, and had the military behind him. On the other side was a political amateur, Cory Aquino, diffident, frail, soft-spoken, the widow of the nation’s leading opposition leader, Benigno S. Aquino Jr., assassinated three years earlier, in 1983, in what everyone believed was a Marcos plot. Cory had students behind her, along with the middle class and the elite, and an anxious business sector. She had something invaluable then. She had a name revered in her country, synonymous with democracy and freedom. No one that January in 1986 expected Cory to win as the months-long campaign headed to a close on Election Day, February 7. Marcos controlled the election machinery, bought votes wholesale—and violence was rampant, hundreds killed in the provinces, even in Manila in broad daylight.

  Tim and I had scanned travel guides, books on Philippine politics and history, articles on Marcos’s hidden wealth and his twenty-year regime, and stayed up nights discussing the stories he would file, putting together a plan. Brilliant and excitable, prone to lyrical hyperbole, Tim glamorized the place, dreaming of romance and meeting up with warlords. In his white jeans and shiny black boots, he hugged me goodbye out on the sidewalk, and he was grinning wildly, a boy off on an adventure.

  Suddenly I was alone in his house, its creaking stairs and dirty kitchen, and the night noises of frayed window blinds flapping in the wind and empty whiskey bottles hurled in the backyard. The mornings were dreary. With Tim gone, there were no heavy footfalls awakening me, there was no jazz playing at seven-thirty on the old radio in the bathroom, no crumpled newspapers on the breakfast table, no fresh coffee waiting.

  Every day I hurried to the office, looking for her. Halfway through the day, breaking away from the desk, I would meet her in the cafeteria. We didn’t bring up the warning she had given me that night at Tim’s, and she didn’t stay away from me. One afternoon we were sitting at a table by the window in the cafeteria, barely touching the stale coffee, talking easily and looking out at the recently fallen snow piled on the sidewalks, when suddenly she interrupted me. “Why don’t you write?” she said. “The way you talk, you should be a writer. That’s who you are . . . You just don’t know it yet.” I was stunned. I stammered, coughing the cough that came when I was nervous. “I don’t say this lightly,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone this: that they should write. Few people really can, and it’s horribly hard. But you are a writer. I know that much about you.” I used to write, I told her, when I was much younger, in college, years ago, but now I don’t even have a typewriter.

  The next time she came to Orchard, on a Saturday after work, she brought an old Smith Corona she had picked up in a junk store and had rebuilt with new bolts and a new black ribbon. With a triumphant smile, enjoying the look of surprise on my face, she hauled it in and set it on the dining table, bulky black metal with clanking keys. She had rolled a sheet of paper on it and typed a brief note: “Some really very fine writing lurks inside this old machine,” I remember it said. “I hope you find it where, too often, I did not.”

  That night we had dinner at a restaurant near the river, the sort of place she would never have chosen—too expensive, pretentious, with long-haired male waiters in slick black uniforms. The white-clothed tables were brightened with fresh-cut freesias set in miniature porcelain vases. We ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and felt celebratory, but I had a sense of danger, too, of daring too much. I brought up her husband and her mood soured immediately. I could feel her closing up, going cold. With some hesitation, she said that he already knew about me. So much was at stake, she said—her family, the life she had constructed, solid, secure. She had hardly slept for weeks. It’s not easy, she pleaded. After dinner we drove to Orchard. She stretched out on the living room rug, her back leaning against the coffee table. I put on Brahms and sat cross-legged across from her, smoking a cigarette. We didn’t talk for a long time and then she said under her breath that she hadn’t listened to Brahms in ten years. She seemed pained, her eyes welling up, a tear on her cheek. I moved toward her. She didn’t say a word.

  We had a short time. Eight days. She was leaving at the end of the month for India to get settled in the apartment Nick had recently left. From there she was going to join Tim in Manila, where she would stay for an indefinite amount of time. In those last days together, thinking ourselves so secretive, we left our tracks everywhere. Drinking beer after work at Looney’s, sprawled in a booth, with people all around us but thinking ourselves alone. Meeting on the back stairs of the paper to go shopping for a tape deck she wanted to take to New Delhi. She loved to drive by the airport at night, slowing down to watch the planes take off and land, and then speeding down the expressway, the moon roof of her midnight blue Volkswagen wide open to the winter wind, Patti LaBelle at full volume, her hand clutching mine.

  Those moments with each other when nothing else mattered and we seemed to move and think in unison didn’t last long. She was uncertain about what was happening between us, stressed about her work, anxious about living in a foreign place so far from home. I barreled through doubts, and my persistence often pushed her away. She talked time and again about the long view, the future beyond this moment. On the day she left, I had waited for her at home. She rang the bell and wouldn’t look straight at me when she crossed into the living room, her trench coat belted and a scarf knotted at her throat. She looked pale, with deep circles under her eyes, hollow sockets, her jaws clenched.

  “I’ll see you in Manila,” I promised, sitting her down by me on the couch. “I’ll see you in Manila,” I repeated as if saying it twice made it true. “It is destiny,” I said, knowing she laughed at that sort of talk. But she didn’t laugh, just looked down and bit her lower lip. She didn’t believe me. The unsettling feeling that kept her up at night would disappear once she was gone, she said. It was fleeting, an abstraction. “I’ll just be happy to know you are out there on the planet,” she said, something she would repeat over the years. She rose to go, her arms abruptly around me, and just as suddenly she left. I watched her walk slowly toward her car, never looking back.

  The letter on pale lavender stationery arrived a week later. I opened it carefully.

  She was seated in her flat in New Delhi, she said, surrounded by newspaper clips detailing a crisis going on in the Punjab and feeling guilty because she couldn’t concentrate. She was dazzled by the city and how comfortable it seemed to her, as if it had been her destiny—something I would appreciate—as if she was meant to be there.

  The trip had been difficult, she said, and I guessed, reading between the lines, that she had decided to end her marriage.

  I could envision her there, with the myna birds and the black bats that hung off tall, gnarled trees, the parrots and the rare birds she could not identify. I pictured her in her stucco apartment, seated barefooted on her dhurrie, drinking Kingfisher beer under the ceiling fan. She had bought a pair of Indian chairs made of handwoven straw and carved wood, with low round legs four inches off the ground. She had bartered for them at a roadside market a few days after she arrived in New Delhi, and she had bartered too for a carving of the head of a lion and for a battered old steamer trunk of unknown origin with heavy, rusted iron handles and weathered wood stained a coral green. These were her furnishings, along with the handmade desk with the bottle-green leather top that someday would be mine.

  She would go running early in the morning down the tree-shaded boulevards where tiny women dressed in cotton saris bent over hand brooms, sweeping the red dust that coats the city. The heat would rise slowly, the white heat that came with dawn, bleaching the exterior of buildings, the inside walls, even the curtains. By noon it blanked everything out, choking all breath. Tropical heat descends like a vast dampness blown in by trade winds, but the heat of India turns the sky white. No one goes out, nothing stirs. The cows sleep in the shade of drooping trees, the soldiers who guard the parks nap bare-chested on stretchers under canvas tents, their s
hirts hung out on lines to dry. The birds vanish into the trees, and sidewalk vendors crouch under cardboard boxes, their heads draped in rags.

  She could walk through those streets without meeting a friendly face, and in the dim stores the merchandise—thick cotton sheets and silken fabrics, sandpapery toilet tissue and scented soap—lay in plastic covers filmed with dust. In bookshops the paperbacks ran to Marx and Engels, musty with age, their corners curled. There was an earthen hue to the city: colonial grays against the stark desert red of government mausoleums gave New Delhi an austerity far removed from the steel and glass and flashing neon of the modern world. Deeper into the city, Old Delhi reeked of death. Filthy alleys, foul food markets, vegetables and spoiled meat and chickens spread out in the muck. Flies crawled over everything, and children with runny noses and muddy hands, moaning and whining, pulled at your clothes, kissing your feet. Multitudes spilling out from crumbling buildings, from stores, from buses, from brothels and mosques, taking up every centimeter of city space, all yelling, gesticulating, chattering and chanting in one monumental human chorus. There were no brilliant colors, only a pastel wash over all of it against a soil the shade of dried blood.

  Orchard House was freezing. The old furnace didn’t work. The man came to repair it, but it was still cold, the wind sifting through the window cracks. At night the streets turned dead quiet aside from neighbors parking their cars and slamming doors, and the muffled footsteps of passersby. I huddled inside, keeping myself warm with wine and music and clacking at the old typewriter she had given me. How I loved that sound! I had built a cocoon, a safe house for my secrets, telling myself stories, fantasies. At night I wrote her letters on yellow copy paper, typing until dawn. I drank white wine and ate cold pasta. I mused over her letters and stashed them away, one by one, in chronological order, and bound them in rubber bands.