Table for Two (2 page)

3

“Nothing’s wrong,” I
reply. When we first got together, we promised we would always be honest with
each other. We promised we wouldn’t play games, and we promised we would always
say what we mean and mean what we say. But that was three years ago, back when
we were eager to love and be loved, back when we were willing to spend time and
energy on learning to give and take. That was three years ago, back when the
novelty of a first relationship was enough, back when companionship and
comfortable familiarity kept the pieces together. Back when the momentum was
strong enough to keep us in motion. That was three years ago.

He says, “I meant to get here
earlier,” and I say, “No, you didn’t.” I want him to argue with me, I want him
to tell me to stop acting like I know every single thing he’s thinking and
feeling and doing. But he just says, “Fine,” and makes his way to the counter
to get himself a drink.

“How long has this been going on?”
Diane asked me last year, when Tristan began showing up late for each and every
one of our dates.

“About two weeks, since he started
his internship at his dad’s office.” I said. “I don’t get it. I didn’t mind
waiting for him before, when he’d be late from time to time, but this is ridiculous.
He can’t be late
ALL
the time. It’s just not acceptable.”

“But you’re putting up with it,
aren’t you?” It sounded less like a question and more like a statement.

“What do you want me to do, break
up with him?” I paused. “I can’t.”

“You
can’t
?” she repeated. “Are you serious? Can you even hear
yourself right now?”

“I’m really upset,” I admitted.
“But that doesn’t mean I want to throw this all away. We’ll fix this. I’ll talk
to him.”

“When?”

“After his internship,” I said.
“He’s busy. I guess there’s extra pressure on him because he’s working for his
dad. I don’t want to stress him out now. But I’ll do something about it, I
swear.”

“All right,” she said. It sounded
less like “okay” and more like “you better.”

When Tristan comes back from the
counter, a drink in hand and his mind obviously somewhere else, I tell him, “We
need to talk.”

He nods. He doesn’t seem
surprised. He doesn’t even make an effort to look curious. He just nods,
waiting for me to go on, waiting for me to get it over with. Waiting for me to
seal our story with a single sentence.

So I do. “This isn’t working
anymore.”

He says, “I know,” and this hurts
me more than I want it to. I should be grateful he’s neither making a scene nor
pretending that everything’s happy and rosy. I should be grateful that he seems
to want a fresh start as much as I do, even if our fresh starts do not belong
together.

“What do you know?” I ask him. “Do
you know how I feel? Do you know that you’ve been consistently late for the
past year? Do you know how much you’ve changed since you went through that
internship?” I am telling him,
See, that was where it all went wrong.
But I’m not saying it so we can go back and undo the
damage.

“Don’t blame the internship,” he
says. “It’s not my fault I enjoyed it. I learned a lot of things I needed to
learn. I proved myself to my dad, and made him proud enough to invite me to
join the company right after graduation. I made new friends. My world became
bigger.
 
How is that wrong?”

It’s
wrong because your bigger world is spinning too fast and leaving me out
, I want to reply. But we’ve talked about this before:
I didn’t like his new friends, he didn’t like the fact that I didn’t like them.
I didn’t like the fact that he was trying so hard to please his dad, he didn’t
like the fact that I wasn’t even trying to be supportive. I didn’t like how I
had to catch up with him, he didn’t like how he had to slow down for me. We’ve
had this conversation before, about me feeling dispensable and him needing
space, and we’ve promised to sort it out. A year later, we still haven’t.

His phone
rings, and he holds it up to his ear and mutters, “Hi, Nikki, what’s up?
Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll call you later, okay?
All right. Bye.” He hangs up and I study his face, searching for any sign of
remorse. There is none.

“You should have said ‘I’m at the
end of something,’ not ‘I’m in the middle of something.’ You don’t want Nikki
to think you’re rejecting her, do you?” I don’t know why I’m angry. I don’t
want to be angry. Anger, more than any other emotion, makes you lose
control—I can’t afford to lose control right now. When I walk away from
this café today, I won’t be a blubbering emotional wreck. I will be in charge
of myself, the way I should be. I take a sip of my now-lukewarm latte. It is
bitter and bland at the same time, and it seems to have lost its original
flavor—it tasted different an hour ago. I want to spit it back out; I
want to demand a refund.

“How many times do I have to tell
you?” he asks. “There is nothing going on between me and Nikki. We went through
the internship together, and now we’re going to be co-workers because she
managed to impress my dad. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.”

But it does. Because Nikki is
gorgeous and smart and talented. When I met her for the first time, she flashed
me a friendly smile and said, “It’s great to finally meet you, Mandy. I’ve
heard so much about you.” What exactly has she heard about me, and how many
hours did she have to spend with my boyfriend to get this information? And how
come Tristan never bothered to mention her before; why does she know “so much”
about me while I have no ammunition against her whatsoever? I instantly
disliked her.

This dislike quickly developed
into something much more destructive, and eventually, I found myself weaving
images of them together every time I sat at this table alone. In my head, they
were holding hands, ducking into a dark theater, watching the sunset from the
privacy of a parked car. In my head, they were blissfully unaware of the
passing of time—seconds and minutes and hours flew by as long as they
were spent with each other. In my head, he was so enamored with her that in his
heart, his love for her displaced his love for me.
 

“It must have meant something when
you invited her to your family dinner last night,” I say.

“I didn’t invite her,” he says.
“My dad did.”

“That’s
funny, I don’t recall anyone inviting me.”

“You had your own plans for dinner
with your parents,” he tells me exasperatedly. “I couldn’t ask you to ditch
them for me. Nikki had nobody to celebrate with. You know how her family
situation is.” Yes, poor little rich girl Nikki, with her mommy traveling all
over Asia as a no-longer-super-supermodel, desperately clinging to her
dwindling glory, and her daddy living the bachelor’s life back here in Manila,
going out with one twenty-something still-super-supermodel after another.

When I don’t speak, he says,
“Don’t accuse me of cheating on you, Mandy. I have never cheated on you.” He
doesn’t follow it up with,
And I never will.

I say, “Don’t make me feel like
it’s my fault I’m doubting you.”

“I never gave you a reason to
doubt me.”

“You never gave me a reason to
believe you, either.”

I can see the wheels in his head
turning, trying to come up with a way to refute what I just said. He wants to
pinpoint a specific instance and say, “Look, this is where I fought for you.
Hard,” in the same way that I want to be able to say, “Look, this is where I
fought for
you
. Harder and better.” We stay silent for a very long time,
searching our memories for a sign that we did everything we could, that we
weren’t giving up for nothing. But all we see are scattered changes, the
gradual decline over the past year—we don’t know how we got here. This
moment crept up on us while we were studying for final exams and composing
cover letters and writing our resumés and looking forward to the future. And
now this moment is here, shoving the past and the present right in front of us,
and we must acknowledge it if we don’t want to risk putting our future on hold.

4

Last week, I
failed
my first job interview. When I walked out of the office, my toes pushing
painfully against the tips of my shoes, sweat running down the back of my legs
underneath my dark grey slacks, I knew. When I stepped into the elevator and
pressed the button for the ground floor, I knew that the sinking feeling inside
me had nothing to do with the calculated falling of that concrete and steel
box. I saw the look on the interviewer’s face when I told him I wasn’t really
sure what I wanted to do yet—I just needed work experience, something to
keep me occupied while I tried to figure it all out. I understood what his tone
meant when he said, “We’ll get in touch with you,” without mentioning when and
how; I understood what his firm grip meant as we shook hands.

I knew, so I called Tristan and
asked him to meet me for lunch. “Stay there,” he told me. “I’ll pick you up in
fifteen minutes.” I sat on the couch in the lobby and waited. And waited. And
waited. I walked over to the vending machine, fumbled for change in my purse,
and unwrapped a pack of crackers with my shaking hands. I stuffed everything
into my mouth in less than a minute—I had been too frazzled to eat
breakfast, and it was already two-thirty. At ten minutes past three, his car
pulled up in front of the building, and he opened the window and waved at me
cheerfully. He was holding up a sandwich and a plastic bottle of orange juice
for me. As I moved closer, I noticed the corners of his mouth were smeared with
yellow—mustard, maybe, or curry sauce. He was smiling.

He reminds me now, “I gave you
your yellow daisies,” and I reply, “Yes, you did, three years ago.” He feels
the weight of this statement, the disappointment in my stare, and says, “I
don’t even know why you’re so mad at me. I’m not doing anything to you.”

I look at him
and see that he has come empty-handed, with no envelopes or documents of his
own. We agreed to spend this day discussing potential jobs for me and
alternative ones for him. We agreed he would keep his options open, that he
wouldn’t automatically accept the position his father has conveniently laid out
for him. I look at him stirring his coffee, avoiding my eyes, and realize that
he’s right: he’s not doing anything to me. Because none of this—his new
girl, his new friends, his brand new life, bright and shiny with breezy
possibility—has anything at all to do with me.

Two years from now, we will sit
across from each other in this exact same spot, and he will finally say, “I’m
sorry I was always late,” to which I will just shrug in response. He will be
happy, having resigned from his dad’s company and having been offered a job in
Singapore, where he will be living independently. He will be single, having
survived a split with Nikki, and he will swear to me that we were over before
they started seeing each other. By then, it wouldn’t matter.

He will be on time, and I will
come in a few minutes late, breathless and apologetic. I will be happy, too,
with a flourishing writing career and a homey bookstore for children and
teenagers about to start running. I will invite him to the opening, and he will
thank me and promise to be there. I will be dating a sweet guy who never keeps
me waiting. Life will be wonderful.

Two years from now, we will both
be right where we want to be. And I will want to ask him this: “If we had
remained within each other’s realities—if only we were strong and patient
enough; if we tried a bit harder, stayed a bit longer, grew up a bit faster,
blocked off the pain a bit better—when we finally got our ducks in a row,
do you think it would have worked out between us?” I will want to ask him this,
but I won’t get the chance to, because he will lean in for a hug and his chin
will linger awkwardly on my shoulder for a few seconds. I will not want to ruin
the tenderness of it all with words, but I will have to pull away, explaining
that I have an appointment to catch. He will repeat, “I’m sorry I was always
late,” and I will smile and tell him, “I think the problem is that you came too
early.” And we will both know that when we walk away from each other, we will
not regret having loved one another, once upon a time.

But at this moment, this
love—
our
love—is twisting and turning
and inevitably taking the shape of hate, and we must do something to make it
stop, keep it in place, protect it until it is safe enough to bring out into
the open again. At this moment, we are young and we are fresh, and there is
still so much, too much, that needs to be done.

We raise our cups to our lips at
the same time, and as our eyes meet over the stained white rims, reflecting the
faint light from the oblivious outside world, we understand.

TIMEOUT

1

My brother tells
me I
should stop dating all these losers.

He says this with his quiet,
commanding confidence, stating it like a fact, the way he tells me to stop
buying pirated
DVD
s,
and stop going on crash diets, and stop spending too much money on books I
don’t even have time to read and high-heeled shoes I’m not even graceful enough
to walk in. He says
 
this in a way
that makes me feel ashamed of myself, like I should have known better. Charles
is eighteen and a college sophomore, seven years younger than me.

He tells me to stop dating all
these losers, and holds a hand up to silence me when I protest that I am not
dating
them, that these guys are just my friends, and that,
no, they are not
losers
, they’re just confused and having a hard time finding
themselves. He looks at me like I am crazy or in denial, whichever’s worse, and
maybe I am. He tells me to stop making excuses, and I begin to protest again
but realize that yes, making excuses is exactly what I’ve been doing all along.

Jack, my best friend since
puberty, is probably the person I make the most excuses for. We are Jack and
Jill, literally, and we go up every hill together, even when I have far better
things to do than come tumbling after him. We were seatmates in grade seven,
and I let him copy off my test papers because he was cute; his skin was smooth
when all the other boys had acne, and he had long lashes and a dimple on his
left cheek. And then we became best friends, and his cuteness stopped being a
factor, the way a very pretty girl becomes normal when you get to talk to her
up close, see her pores beneath her makeup, and maybe notice that her eyebrows
need grooming. But something else took over—he had the ability to make me
feel distinctly important. His charm lies in his helplessness, and over the
years, we have developed a mutual need for each other: I rescue him from
whatever mishap he finds himself entangled in (a project he has to cram, a
breakup, a crashed laptop or a conked out phone, an ex’s party he has no date
for), and he allows me to be the hero, showers me with gratitude, and promises
to make it up to me. Which, of course, he never does.

Next on the list is Kevin, the
king of grand gestures, who thinks surprises and home-cooked dinners and
chocolate fountains and shiny things all wrapped up in fancy paper can distract
me from the times he forgets to call, or texts me a message for another girl.
There’s Aaron, a college blockmate, whose idea of a date is letting me tag
along to an evening of canned
sisig
and Gin-Pom
with his
male buddies. There’s also Sean, who lies about
everything from his age (he told me he was twenty-three but eventually admitted
he was twenty), to his smoking (he says he hasn’t touched a stick in years but
I catch a whiff of cigarettes every time he leans in for a hug), to his curfew
(he says he’s too old for one but always has an excuse to leave before twelve).

And then there’s Robbie. I met him
on a blind date two years ago, while we were both reeling from a breakup. We
talked about our exes, compared notes, complained about the unfairness of it
all. Occasionally, he’d call and invite me to “hang out”—catch a late movie
or go for a round of drinks. We always went dutch; he never offered otherwise.
On nights when we’d stumble back to the nearly-deserted parking lot after
downing our Jagermeister shots in record time, our shoulders would brush
against each other, or he’d put an arm around my waist to steady me, and I’d
imagine something there—a spark, a connection, a sign that there could be
something more. But on the way home, neither of us would speak, and the silence
and the darkness and the fact that we were both considerably drunk and
emotionally vulnerable would mean nothing to him.

Still, I glare at Charles and say,
“Who are you, my father?” And he tells me, “Don’t flatter yourself too much.
Dad doesn’t care about your love life half as much as I do.” He is right about
this. Since he got fired from his teaching position last year (he wrote a short
story for the special faculty issue of the university’s literary portfolio and
“accidentally” forgot to cite his “inspiration”; five paragraphs were lifted,
word for word, off a Japanese professor’s online journal), our father has been
too busy being a bum to care about anyone. He has game shows to watch, and
deep-fried food to consume, and bottles of beer to drown himself in. His two
children will just have to stay out of the way.

I ask, “Then
why
do
you
care?” He answers, “Because nobody else will.” He is right about this, too. Our
mother has been too engrossed attending to our father and making sure he
doesn’t get into any more trouble. My friends are preoccupied with their
high-powered careers, with jobs that require them to wear blazers and pencil
skirts to work and allow them to travel abroad every month and/or show off a
flashy new gadget every other week. My co-teachers at Centerstage Preschool are
all happy with their responsible, mature husbands, and as Bridget Jones’s Smug
Married observation goes, may judge me for constantly collecting irresponsible,
immature anti-husbands without coming close to selecting. My students,
obviously, are at least a decade too young to understand.

“But what do I have to gain by not
dating?” I ask him. I seriously want to know—if giving up dating has some
sort of hidden benefit that could possibly change my life, then I would be
willing to be completely single in a heartbeat.

“What do you have to lose?”
Charles replies. I am annoyed. He is always doing this, answering my valid
questions with rhetorical ones, the way wise old mentors (like Dumbledore, or
Yoda) often do when they are subtly trying to prove that you are being a
birdbrain. I want to point out that he is seven years younger than me, and that
when we were little, I dressed him in frilly pink lace frocks and called him
Charlene, with his consent. But then he’d probably just stand up so he could
tower intimidatingly over me, or push up his sleeves to show off his
unmistakably masculine muscles.

“Ha, ha,” I say, though I didn’t
think it was funny at all. He reminds me that he’d be leaving for our
tita
’s house in Bohol for the summer, and that he wouldn’t
be around to watch over me. He says this like I require watching over, and I
don’t know when he stopped seeing me as a big sister and started seeing me as
this passive, pathetic person.

“
Fine,”
I say. “I’ll give it a try. No dates for one month.”

“Three,” he declares. “Might as
well aim high.”

“Are you
crazy?” I shake my head. “No way. Six weeks.”

“Seven.”

“Six and a half?”

“Two months.” He holds my gaze. “I
dare you.”

I blink. “Okay. Two months. But if
I die an old maid, alone and lonely and angry at the world, I hope it will be
clear to you that it will have been entirely your fault.”

He nods. “No problem.” He is
wrong, of course. There are, in fact, many present and pending problems, but
perhaps neither of us needs to be reminded right now.