Welcome to Envy Park

Welcome to Envy Park

Mina V. Esguerra

Smashwords Edition

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Copyright © Mina V. Esguerra, 2013.
All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License
Notes

This ebook is licensed for your
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another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person.
If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com
and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work
of this author.

Contact the author:

[email protected]

minavesguerra.com

Cover designed by Tania
Arpa

Photography by Dominique
Tiu

For Diane, Bianca, and Chris, the single girls of
Tiong Bahru.

Chapter 1

The plan was this:

Fly back home and deal with condo turnover
paperwork.

Buy furniture.

Live in the new place for six months to a year,
however long it would take to get a new Real Job.

Take temporary Not-Real Jobs to finance Real Job
search.

Find a renter for the one-bedroom.

Fly to Hong Kong, or Thailand, or
Cambodia—ideal location of Real Job.

On my third week back, paperwork accomplished and
furniture all delivered and arranged, I finally invited Roxie over.
My best friend, my partner in crime since college, was to be my
first guest at my one-bedroom apartment in somewhat-swanky NV Park,
a new residential enclave within a business district in Metro
Manila. It was an honor that she initially refused, insisting that
my first guest should be a guy, one who would gladly test out the
bed for me, or the couch, or the kitchen table, ideally all of the
above.

"Stop it. You're coming over
tonight and that's it," I told her, when she called to tell me
this.

"I'm serious. You know what
happens when you come home. A dry spell for you is a dry spell for
me, Moira."

Oh my god. Roxie was referring the oddly parallel
romantic lives we'd had in the five years that I had been living in
Singapore, while she remained in Manila. On the first year, when I
visited for Christmas, I had been dating someone at work. And soon
after, she started dating someone from her place of work.

The following year was difficult
for me, and on my second trip home, things were not doing well with
the boyfriend. We broke up a few weeks after my return to
Singapore. And Roxie's boyfriend broke up with her too. Year three
was better, sort of, because I found a great job and got introduced
to a new set of people. I dated often, but didn't really click with
anyone. Roxie went on a few dates too, but was for the most part
single. The fourth year rolled around, and by my holiday Manila
visit I didn't even bother to date then, because I'd decided that I
was going to let my work contract run out and move back home. Why
start something when my stay had an expiry date?

And on my fifth visit, just last year, Roxie
ruefully informed me that her singlehood was my fault. Like when
close friends got their periods in sync, but worse.

"We are not cursed," I reprimanded
her, speaking into my cellphone as I browsed through the NV Park
supermarket's liquor section. "And I'm not going to let you blame
me for your situation. Do you want light beer?"

"I get off work at seven. You
have...three hours to find someone and do stuff before I get there.
Please, do it for me."

"I think we're having tequila
tonight," I said. "See you later, crazy."

"It's your fault! You can do
something about this now! Change our lives for the better, Moira!"
She was yelling this and more but I had tossed the phone back into
my bag.

The reason why Roxie was still single was because
she worked too hard, didn't go out, and expected interesting men to
just show up at her door. She was stuck in a rut and I knew it. I
was an expert rut-avoidance, and told her that the only way to get
out of it was to shake things up. Change jobs, start a new hobby,
and there was also my favorite trick: move to a new city.

Five years in Singapore and I
could feel it coming on, the rut. I was comfortable, I liked my
job, and I was able to make the payments on my modest property
investment. It could have gone on for another year, or three, or
even longer, easily. All of my friends from Manila, who had come
over to "try it out for a year" that eventually became three then
five then ten, they were settling in just fine. Inertia took over,
and the new city began to feel more like home than actual
home.

But not for me. I sensed it coming, that poor-me
ennui that made me pack up and leave Manila in the first place. I
was twenty-two (a kid really), but at the time I really did feel
stuck. My days were so alike that I couldn't tell them apart. I
kept having the same conversation with different people. And after
three years at my first job I could tell that I wouldn't be able to
afford a laptop much less a home of my own.

So I shook things up.

And that was over, I was back, and now I had an
apartment, a small amount saved up, and an empty calendar.

What was next?

-/\/\/\-

Damn that Roxie. All throughout my walk home I was
thinking about finding a guy and getting the whole thing over with.
I couldn't help it.

I didn't want to tell her this on
the phone just then, but there were a few good-looking guys just in
NV Park Tower 3, where my new one-bedroom happened to be located.
I'd had several sightings in the few weeks that I'd been a
resident. There was the Smoking Guy who was always by the driveway
at eleven-thirty in the morning. Also noticed clean-looking Shorts
Guy (always in shorts, at least the two times I saw him), but he
was with Slacks Guy both times, and I thought I saw them holding
hands at some point, so it may be safe to rule them out. Suit Guy
from the mail room was attractive in a Roger Sterling kind of way,
but I also saw him with a pre-teen girl who called him
"Daddy."

Not going there.

But then there was the guy I called 9th Floor, from
the elevator. Well. Never saw him with anyone else. Much less a
girlfriend, a wife, a kid. He wasn't the type who hung back behind
everyone at the elevator and smiled too. He just stood there near
the front, in his various collared polo shirts (blue and black,
with some company name embroidered in front) and khaki pants,
looking at the tips of his shoes until the doors opened up at the
ground floor.

Which meant he didn't own a car, if he wasn't
proceeding to Basement 1 or 2, where the parking spaces were.

The second time I was in the elevator with him, this
time going up, I managed to sneak a look at the reflective surface
of the elevator doors and checked him out without turning my head.
It was only a split second look, a quick mental snapshot of him and
me side by side... and I was kind of impressed.

He looked thin to me at first, because his jaw and
Adam's apple and cheekbones were the first things I noticed, but
with that second look I took in the shoulders, the chest, the arms,
and they weren't frail at all. He looked like he spent time out in
the sun. Doing stuff. Lifting things. Or that was just me and my
dry spell imagining it.

And then when I shifted my gaze I caught my own
reflection, and happened to like what I had become, as a
twenty-seven-year-old. The acne seemed to have stopped forever,
thankfully. Wasn't as small around the waist as I used to be, but I
did stop obsessing about that when I decided that I was leaving
Singapore and stopped dating new people. The break away from any
kind of work (therefore a break from any kind of stress), took the
dark circles away from under my eyes, and I looked fresher and
younger then, than on any random day from the past few years. I had
let my hair grow long and I was leaving it alone now, letting it
fall its naturally wavy way where it wanted to. The last thing I
did to it was a coloring that gave it a hint of red, and even as it
was growing out, I was happy with how it blended into the natural
dark brown.

I looked like I was settling into my real face and
body.

And 9th Floor and I, together, we looked like poster
kids for Asia's young and upwardly mobile. Except it wouldn't be
entirely true because I was unemployed, but we looked the part.

I felt giddy about it for a second. I was just
attracted to my own potential.

Since then, I had happy warm feelings whenever I saw
my reflection on the elevator doors. Self-esteem was going to get
me through this new aimlessness, I knew it.

-/\/\/\-

By the time Roxie arrived near nine p.m., everything
was still alive at NV Park. The small shopping complex surrounded
by the three residential buildings closed at eleven, so I planned
to give her a tour of that before anything else. I wanted to show
it off because I liked how it turned out. When I was convinced to
buy a place there years ago, all I had to go on was a fancy slide
presentation and a scale model inside a glass box. The real thing
wasn't as glamorous, but it felt fresh to me. I really did feel
like I was living in a peaceful little bubble inside a busy city.
Rare, if you knew what Manila was like.

I met her at Tower 3's Japanese garden-inspired
lobby and saw my best friend alight from a cab and then just stand
there at the driveway without coming in.

"Does it take two hours to get
here from Makati?" I said as a greeting.

Roxie hadn't changed a day since
we graduated from college, and I meant that in the best possible
way. While I was awkward and self-conscious then, the "settling
into her face and body" thing seemed to have happened to her at
nineteen. She knew exactly how to dress to look great in any
situation, and being that self-aware was surely why her career in
marketing just took off as quickly as it did.

Right then she was in corpo-shark mode, actually
reminding me of a shark in a silvery gray pantsuit with a red scarf
around her neck.

"I left late," she said, still
standing outside. "I wanted to give you more time with the
guy."

"There is no guy."

"Don't touch me! Maybe you won't
curse me to further celibacy if we don't hug."

"That just makes me want to hug
you more then. We're in this together, girlfriend." And I gave her
a big hug, which probably doomed her, at least for the next few
months.

-/\/\/\-

I also had a feeling that we would be talking about
big things like life, and the future, and our hopes and dreams. It
was why I made margaritas. When I first met her, during
registration day on our first year at college, I thought we'd be at
each other's throats. We were both only children, academic
achievers from our respective high schools, vying for recognition
in the same business management program. Sometimes she got the
lucky break, and sometimes I did, but when we met to compare notes
I was always happy for her.

But I would just never do some things the way Roxie
would. We were just wired differently.

"Your parents haven't been here?"
she asked. "I thought they'd be over every weekend, knowing your
mom."

"They've been here. Just not a lot. They discovered
a social life now that they're sort of in retirement. It doesn't
involve me."

"Are you okay with that?"

It was an adjustment, but one I welcomed. "Yeah, for
now. I guess I got used to the once-a-year face-to-face thing. It's
great when I know I'm here for Christmas, because it's all good
stuff. But the rest…"

Roxie nodded. "It's a stage. Your
parents want to continue treating you like a kid, but you're not a
kid. They'll get it eventually. Or your mom will. But you have to
be around to make it happen."

"No, it doesn't work that way with them. I have to
prove myself somewhere else."

"I'm not like you," Roxie said. "I
stay put. I have roots. I work it out where I am."

"Living in another country is
going to open your mind to everything, Roxie. I think everyone
should try it."