Falling Together (40 page)

“What?” exclaimed Pen, imagining that Jason had done something ridiculous, cut off his ear while shaving, maybe. Then she remembered: Armando. “Oh. But why not wait until tomorrow? Get some rest? You guys must be as tired as I am, and it’s not like a few hours will make a difference.”

“Waiting makes sense,” said Will. “So obviously Jason won’t do it, and we can’t let him go alone.”

“Well, I guess we could,” said Pen. A vision of Jason in the hospital came to her: bursting through operating room doors in his American flag shirt, ears blazing, waving money in front of nurses and surgeons and patients on gurneys. She groaned. “Of course, we can’t. He’d get himself locked up for attempted bribery and unforgivable rudeness.” She smiled at Will with sympathy. “Sorry you have to be alone with the big galoot. Will and Jason, playing detective together.”

“Will and Jason and Jason’s friend Ulysses,” corrected Will.

Pen laughed. Then something occurred to her. “Hey, how do you know Armando will be there? What if he’s off today?”

“Oh, Jason took care of that,” said Will.

“Uh-oh. How?”

“He made an appointment. From Ohio. Under an assumed name.”

Pen stared at him. “You can do that?”

“Only if you have tunnel vision and no discernible moral compass.”

“He made up an ailment?” asked Pen.

“An ailment, a name, an entire medical history. He said he had to cancel his appointment with a doctor in Ohio because of an unexpected business trip to Cebu and didn’t want to wait until he got home to get checked out.”

“What kind of doctor is Armando, anyway?”

“A thoracic surgeon.”

“So Jason said there was something wrong with his—what? Thorax? Do humans even have thoraxes? I thought insects were the ones with thoraxes.”

“Well, that would explain why Jason has one,” said Will.

It should have been a nothing moment, slightly funny but evanescent, a moment in a long stream of moments. Instead, for Pen at least, it separated itself, became self-contained and revelatory. Pen and Will looked at each other and smiled the kind of smiles people exchange when they have known each other for a very long time, and maybe it was the exhaustion or the fact of time’s having been turned on its head, but Pen had the sensation that, right then, they were two bodies caught in perfect balance, the forces pulling them together precisely equal to the ones keeping them apart, Pen on one side of the doorway, Will on the other, and what she understood is that all the forces were love and that she was the opposite of lonely. This could be enough, she realized, this kind of being together. Friendship. In spite of all her longing (her fingers on his wrist), this could be enough.

“You’ll have to come back,” said Pen, taking a step backward into the room, “and tell me all about it.”

“You know I will,” said Will.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, W
ILL FOUND
P
EN AND
A
UGUSTA AT THE HOTEL
pool. It was six thirty, which, for Pen, under normal circumstances and time zones, would have passed for the crack of dawn, but which felt remarkably late given the fact that she and Augusta had both been up for a grim, trapped, hungry, television-filled (thank God for the Disney channel) two and a half hours.

Augusta was in the baby pool cooing to the dolphin fountain, and Pen was feasting on warm, dense, cloven rolls called Elorde bread after a Cebuano boxing star (Pen had learned from the waiter that boxing was the most popular sport in the Philippines, with basketball and billiards close behind), sticky rice redolent with coconut milk, and mangoes, palm-sized, kidney-shaped, butter-yellow on the outside, with brilliant, silken, spoonable flesh of such acute deliciousness that, upon taking her first bite, Pen could have wept with joy.

“Was he cute?” had been Pen’s first question.

“I wouldn’t say ‘cute,’” said Will.

“Because you never say ‘cute’ or because he wasn’t?” asked Pen.

“Both,” said Will.

“So what’d he look like?”

“The anti-Jason. Take Jason and substitute every single thing about him with its opposite, and you’ll get Armando.”

Pen considered this. “Jason has decent teeth. Are you saying Armando had bad teeth?”

“Every single thing about Jason except his teeth. I didn’t pry open his mouth and go in with a flashlight, but I got the impression that his teeth are fine.”

“What else about him is fine?”

“Pen.”

Pen sighed. “I knew I should have had you take a picture. What was he like? Funny? Smart? Devastatingly handsome? Did he look great in his white coat? Did he even wear a white coat? Did he really seem like the kind of guy who would run without a shirt? Was he stunned to see Jason walk into his office?”

“Yes.”

Pen narrowed her eyes at Will threateningly.

“Yes, he really did seem like the kind of guy who would run without a shirt,” said Will.

“No!” yelped Pen, recoiling. “Wait, didn’t you used to run without a shirt? I think you did. I seem to remember that.”

“I never ran without a shirt. Occasionally, when it was unusually hot, I took my shirt off afterward, when I was cooling down. Totally different thing.”

“Sure, Will. Sure, it is,” said Pen, patting his arm. “Are you saying Armando was arrogant?”

“A little. Although it was kind of an awkward situation, so maybe he’s not always like that.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“We didn’t talk long. He walked into the examining room, where we were waiting—”

“Wait a minute. You went into the examining room with Jason? Didn’t anyone find that odd?”

“He told the nurse we were brothers and that he had a tendency to panic in hospitals.”

“You look like brothers,” said Pen.

“So anyway, Armando walked in and we all shook hands, and Jason asked about Cat, and Armando said he preferred not to discuss it at work, and Jason said, ‘I don’t think you’re getting how important this is,’ and Armando said that, yes, he did, and then he invited us to his house, and then he said the thing that made Jason go apeshit, and Jason yelled, and before they could throw us out, we left.”

“Hold on. You
shook hands
. Just like that? I mean, I know you; you’d shake hands with Attila the Hun right before he chopped off your head, but
Jason
? With Armando the motherclucker? Armando, his sworn enemy?”

“I was impressed, actually,” said Will. “He was literally quaking—or at least kind of vibrating—with, I don’t know, rage or a lust for vengeance or something, before Armando got there, but the second the guy walked in, he pulled himself together. He had that ‘gotcha’ look on his face he gave us when he showed up at the reunion, but he was strangely polite, even kind of dignified.”

“But what about Armando?” Pen asked. “Wasn’t he shocked?”

“No. He didn’t miss a beat. It was crazy. Or at least, I thought it was crazy until the end, when he said the thing that made Jason go apeshit.”

“Oh, boy.”

“Right before we left, Jason said something like, ‘BTW, way to play it cool, bro. It’s like you were expecting me.’”

“He said ‘BTW’? What is
wrong
with him? Nobody says that.”

“A lot of things are wrong with him, remember?” said Will. “So then Armando gave him this arrogant smile and said, ‘I
was
expecting you,’ and Jason turned the color of Hawaiian punch the way he does and said, ‘No, you weren’t.’”

“He’s such an infant,” said Pen, sighing.

“And Armando said, ‘First of all, you called from Ohio. Second of all, you called yourself “Clark Kent.” ’”

Pen’s eyes widened. “Jason really did that? Why?”

“Apparently, he’s been a huge Superman fan his whole life.”

Pen covered her face. “Oh no.”

“Right. Then Jason said in this sneering voice, ‘Why would that mean anything to you? You don’t even
have
Superman here.’”

Her face still covered, Pen opened her fingers and peered out. “He is the ugliest American in the whole history of ugly Americans.”

“Armando didn’t refute the Superman thing, just gave Jason this sort of pitying look, and then said, ‘I knew it was you because Catalina told me about your comic book predilection. She told me how embarrassing it was that you always made restaurant reservations under the name “Clark Kent.” ’”

“Ai, yi, yi!” shrieked Pen.

“Ai, yi, yi!” echoed Augusta from the pool.

“That’s when Jason turned purple and started yelling that Armando was full of shit and how he knew what ‘predilection’ meant and how Cat hated being called Catalina and loved it when he made reservations like that and how Cat called him ‘her Superman’ when they were alone.” Will shuddered. “It was sad.”

They sat and watched the lemon light pour through the coconut palms and skim across the serene blue pool, paying tribute to the sad, angry, devoted, appalling, lunkheaded hunk of humanity that was Jason with a moment of silence.

“I’m a mermaid, Will!” called Augusta.

“I can see that,” said Will, smiling.

“So, hey,” said Pen excitedly, “I’ll meet him.”

Will made a pained face. “You sure you want to be there? It could get ugly.”

“Are you kidding? After you stopped by yesterday—or whenever it was—I got so jealous that you were meeting him and I wasn’t that it took me thirty whole seconds to fall asleep.”

It had taken her longer than that. She had lain for a long time, contemplating the familiar, easeful, uncluttered holiness of friendship and the memory of Will in the doorway with his damp hair and beautiful eyes, looking like all the Wills he had ever been. There was peace in it, in being the same old Pen who wanted, above all other things, for nothing to change, but still, her body had stayed awake, wired, her skin tingling, until sleep hit like a snowstorm, whiting out everything.

Will smiled. “Poor Pen.”

“Pen’s not poor!” corrected Augusta sternly, from the pool’s edge. “Pen’s rich!”

“True,” said Pen.

“Armando’s sending his car for us today at five,” said Will.

“Fancy,” commented Pen through a bite of mango. “I guess I’m not the only one who’s rich.” Then she sighed. “Poor Jason. Poor, poor, poor, poor Jason.”

Augusta didn’t say that Jason wasn’t poor. She had left the world of adults. In joyous self-absorption, she leaned back like the bathing beauty she was, her toes pointed, her face to the sun; then she sat up and slid into the water like a seal.

T
HE INTERIOR OF
A
RMANDO’S CAR WAS ICE-COLD AND PRISTINELY
, almost spookily clean, but it wasn’t, to Jason’s evident satisfaction, especially fancy, not a limousine certainly, which is what they’d all either dreaded or hoped for, not even a Mercedes, which seemed to be the luxury car of choice in Cebu, their slick, dignified shapes jostling incongruously through the city streets with tricycles, mopeds, and jeepneys (public conveyances of surpassing gorgeousness, flashing with chrome, dazzlingly painted, studded with hood ornaments, religious icons, proper names, and cryptic messages; Augusta declared that jeepneys were “the best things in the whole, wide world of shininess” and Pen had to agree). Instead, Armando’s vehicle turned out to be a Japanese SUV, smallish and silver.

As they’d piled into it, Pen had heard Jason mutter to Will (or possibly to himself or to Armando or Cat, neither of whom were there), “Not exactly a slammin’ ride for Dr. Hot Shit,” which had caused Pen to shoot a worried glance at the driver, whose imperturbable face reacted, if it reacted at all, by growing several degrees more imperturbable. When Will had introduced himself to the driver, the young man had identified himself as Ruben, emphasis (charmingly, Pen thought, and distinguishing him forever from her favorite sandwich) on the second syllable. Pen had winced when Jason, in what she knew he hoped was a blatant defiance of normal driver/rider protocol (although who could say for sure?), ignored the door Ruben held open and stuffed himself into the front passenger seat (it had been slid almost as far forward as it would go, presumably to accommodate passengers riding in the back where they belonged), but Ruben hadn’t so much as fluttered an eyelash.

“So, uh, Ruben,” said Jason, with a conspiratorial glance back at Will and Pen that made Pen want to strangle him, “you cart old Armando everywhere, do you? Where I come from grown men generally drive themselves, unless they’re, like, extremely elderly or paralyzed or whatnot. It’s a point of pride.”

Pen had the urge to stick her fingers in her ears and sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at full volume. Instead, she stared pointedly out the window. They passed roadside fruit stands with their big, glorious, fanned bunches of bananas overhanging careful pyramids of red, green, and gold orbs. Sometimes, the traffic slowed enough for Pen to make out individual fruits, gorgeous and strange: giant green brains, strawberry-colored sea urchins, golden hedgehogs. She wanted to ask Ruben about them, but Jason was still talking. “No offense,” he began, words to make your heart sink.

“No offense, but personally, you couldn’t pay me to ride in the back while another dude drove. I’d feel like an I-don’t-know-what. A toy poodle.”