II

Tita Rosa had finally put her foot down about the Bontotots, claiming that she could no longer play the host because of her high blood pressure. She had returned to her desk and her endless task of accounting, the ancient adding machine cranking through its gears in regular intervals, this sound the heartbeat of the house. She registered her disapproval about Chet by not asking me where I had spent the night. Maybe she was making peace with it, but by steering clear of the subject she was avoiding complicity in an inarguably immoral situation. It was the correct thing to do.

Originally, I had planned to have the car to myself all day and was going to Bibo’s apartment to help clear it out. But in the morning, one of Carmi’s restaurants had lost power, and she asked if I would bring Miggie to a birthday party in Magallanes.

Miggie sat next to me with her wrapped gift, playing a game on her iPad. Her yaya, Nini, sat on the rearmost seat, quiet, her perfect features set in an inscrutable expression. Nini was very pretty and her prettiness was remarked on, as was her ability to sit through any number of situations without uttering a word. Her stillness seemed to me a form of protest, as if her good looks should have earned her some better station in life, but there she was in her striped yaya uniform, looking out at an uncaring world, waiting to wipe Miggie’s nose or be ordered to do some other thing that other beautiful people were not subjected to. Miggie set the iPad down and fixed me with a penetrating look. “Tita Ting, why are you going to Tondo?”

“I’m doing a favor for a friend,” I said.

“In Tondo?”

“Yes.” I returned her look. “Someone died and I’m packing up their apartment.”

“Why you?”

“Because there’s no one else.”

“Why is there no one else?”

Thankfully my phone started to ring. It was Chet. “Where are you?” he said.

“Just entering Magallanes. Why?”

“I arranged for Cherry to help you.” Cherry was Chet’s maid.

“I don’t need Cherry. I’ll be fine. I have Mannie to help.”

“He’ll carry the boxes for you, but you need someone packing. I’ve already arranged it.”

Cherry was legendarily efficient. “Okay. I’ll come by the apartment.”

“No. Cherry’s at the house in Dasmariñas.”

“She’s back in Dasma?” Understandably, I was wary of anything that brought me into C. G.’s orbit.

“Just for the morning. She’s waiting. And she has boxes.”

“Chet, I’m really fine.”

“Don’t be stupid, Ting.”

He was right. I was being stupid. Dasmariñas was not far from Magallanes and at this point, what was the difference? Cherry was one of those Ilocanos who justified the “industrious” stereotype. I didn’t want to be alone in Bibo’s apartment with all her things, and we had to get it done today. The lease was up on the apartment on Monday, and Inchoy had left the task of packing up her belongings to the last minute and then proven incapable of taking part. Originally, we had planned to settle Bibo’s apartment together, but that just seemed a recipe for disaster. Inchoy would be shuttling along just fine and then—as if a fog were descending—he would freeze, seized by grief. Tears would follow. But he was still keeping up with his teaching. The work was saving him from complete disintegration.

Miggie’s mother, Leonora, was already at the party, waiting—in response to my text—as we made our way up the circular drive.

“Oh, sige, Miggie, there’s your mom. Have fun.” She leaned over presenting her cheek, her mouth pursed in the polite kissing gesture perfected by the family’s children. “Leonora,” I said, shouting in the second before Mannie slid the door shut. “Let’s get together soon.”

Chet’s house in Dasmariñas looked much like the house where I had just left Miggie. One entered through the towering gates and angled up the drive. Masses of tended greenery seemed to revel in nature and deny its riot simultaneously. Like a Mayan temple, the colossal house emerged from behind the palms, an edifice of adobe brick. It was a palace humming with Freon and money. You could feel the coldness of the polished marble floors just by looking at it, an exponential chill mirrored in the reflecting surfaces of windows. There were two cars parked in the drive, an Audi and a Mercedes, and the latter of these was being buffed to excess by a uniformed driver making careful circles on its surface with a damp chamois. I texted Chet to text Cherry that I’d arrived and was checking my phone when the car door slid open and, to my surprise, C. G. entered and sat next to me.

C. G. sat in an aggressive cloud of what I identified as Prada Candy. She inhaled, seemingly bored, and angled her gorgeous head in my direction. She was a Chinese mestiza, all cheekbones and lozenge eyes, and had the kind of bone structure that would have inspired Brâncuși.

“Hello, Ting,” she said.

I put my phone down on the seat with care. “Hello, C. G.,” I responded.

“We need to have a chat,” she said. She was speaking in her American-accented English, something she had picked up when she’d attended Middlebury.

“Okay,” I said.

She picked a piece of lint off her pants and flicked it idly away. “I don’t care if you sleep with Chet,” she said. “Frankly, I’m relieved. But if you think I’m giving him an annulment, you’re out of your mind.”

I had never considered the annulment seriously. I had thought it Chet’s decision, beyond my range of influence.

“Claro,” I said. I don’t know why I said claro, because neither C. G. nor I spoke Spanish.

She looked mildly interested at my response, but after a thought, dismissed this too. “Ting,” she said. “I’ve always liked you. You know that. And do you know why? You’re no bullshit. But you are a force for evil.”

“Evil’s a bit much.”

“Is it?” She returned her gaze to me, analyzing my face with a studied languor. “You just wander around as if nothing matters. What’s the word for that?”

“Gormless?” I offered.

She considered and shook her head. “I don’t even know what that means. You’re like a black hole. Everything is fine and then you walk past and everything is destroyed. And you can stand there and say you didn’t do anything, but you did.”

“Maybe I’m cursed.”

“Maybe. But even if you went to Aling Ligaya and had it lifted, you would still be like that.”

It occurred to me that Chet had said much the same thing about me and my lack of accountability. I had the uncomfortable sensation of seeing what was good in their marriage.

“Why don’t you just go back to the States and leave us alone?”

I did not have a good comeback for that, and C. G. did not expect one. The trunk of the car had been opened and Mannie was loading in the boxes. C. G. got out of the car and Cherry, who was standing behind her, got in. Cherry was carrying a paper bag that smelled of meat.

“It’s siopao,” said C. G. She looked up and away, presenting me with the perfect line of her jaw. “From Ma Mon Luk. We had extra. I thought you might need some lunch.”

Bibo’s apartment had been sealed shut for some time. No one wanted to be there. I felt as if I were entering the tomb to find her gone. On the table was a vase with devastated lilies, browned and broken, the water faintly reeking even from where I stood by the door. Cherry looked at me with alert eyes, already assessing the work ahead. I walked to the window unit and turned it on. It responded with a shudder as it woke up, displacing the silence.

“Ano po?” asked Cherry.

“First clean out the fridge,” I said. “Kitchen things go in boxes, then to the sari sari store.” Bibo’s belongings for the family would be picked up there. “I’ll pack the masks.” These I would bring to Inchoy. There was a picture of Bibo and Inchoy framed on the bookcase. They were at a beach restaurant smiling together behind a platter filled with prawns. The picture must have been taken by one of those people who snap pictures at tourist areas and then sell them to you. I turned the picture facedown on the shelf and shot Cherry a challenging look, but she was already eyeing the kitchen area, breaking it down into the necessary tasks. Bibo had kept the place neat and although the apartment was packed with stuff, the walls groaning with Igorot masks and shields, it was small. We would be done with this final task in a matter of hours.

When the majority of the boxes were filled and organized, I lit a cigarette, taking in how the emptied place seemed even smaller. Mannie, who had been carrying the boxes, was sitting at the table eating siopao. “When you’re finished,” I said, “the aircon comes out and that goes to the sari sari store with the other things.”

“Yung banyo po,” said Cherry from the bathroom, which I had forgotten.

I stood with her in the tiny space—a toilet, a shower stall, a sink with a small shelf above it with cheerful cosmetics, lotions, and a picture of Mariah Carey grinning madly, something clipped from a magazine and framed in gold plastic. “Just throw out what you don’t want,” I said. I picked up Bibo’s hairbrush, which, like her other things, was carefully maintained, but still had a few strands of Bibo’s stick-straight, iron-strong hair. Inchoy would want it, so I put it in my handbag.

I sent Cherry home in a GrabCar, which would be considered ridiculously extravagant, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to get back to my aunt’s house and take a bath, put on pajamas, and go to bed even though it would only be eight or nine. I could almost feel my head on the pillow. I picked up my phone and texted Inchoy that I would be dropping boxes by in about two hours and then checked my phone. There was a text from Ann.

Publisher pulled Kent J. Baxter book.

I read it twice. Was this text really meant for me? Who was Kent J. Baxter? I knew the name but couldn’t place it. I decided to brave the spotty, expensive cell service and looked up “Kent J. Baxter book pulled.”

Kent J. Baxter, I remembered as his picture slowly materialized, was the writer of erudite and surprisingly best-selling histories. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of the banana industry, Mister Tally Man, which exposed the exploitation of banana workers in the early part of the twentieth century. When this book appeared in the early nineties I had been plotting my own career. I remembered thinking that if one looked at the plight of workers at any time in history and had something appealing, like bananas, to focus the research, one would likely expose some horrific exploitation in an interesting way and that this might be a good model for a future book. Apparently a photograph from the late seventies had been unearthed of some frat party at the University of Virginia. Senator Norlund Boom of Alabama had been the first suspect for the person in blackface, but he had protested—truthfully—that he was not the man who had chosen to costume himself as Harry Belafonte (an identity suggested by the Hawaiian shirt) but was actually the man in the gorilla suit. It was Kent J. Baxter who was in blackface, and his newest book, The Sad Menagerie, already out in advance review copies, was being withdrawn from publication. It was Kent J. Baxter’s book that had been seen as the competition for mine. Baxter had made a sincere-sounding apology, saying that his admiration for Belafonte had inspired the costume, that Belafonte’s song “Banana Boat” had led him on his quest to tell the stories of the banana workers, but the damage was done. Baxter had been knocked out of the game after generating a significant amount of interest in the plight of the human zoo participants.

I inhaled and groaned and considered, then texted back:

First draft close.

My response sounded so confident that I almost believed it.