Heart of the City (22 page)

A first date, he told himself, then wondered if that’s what you called it when two people already lived together. Others followed: walks through Prospect Park, a matinee of the New York City Opera. And soon, places Chesa chose: the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island; the beach, where Chesa dove in the water while Milton looked on, smiling, from the sand.

Milton held off telling friends and family about the woman in his apartment. In part, he was self-conscious: what would people think? But there was something else, too: For a guy who had
always played by the rules, it was titillating to have a somewhat scandalous secret.

THE THING Chesa liked most about Milton was how easy he was, how open. He took time to consider her ideas instead of automatically fighting them, the way her large family often did back in the Philippines. She had a decent childhood—her father owned a small candy company. But she was the third youngest of nine siblings and was accustomed to a noisy house full of brothers and sisters, each with their own opinion about her best interests. She and Milton disagreed sometimes, but he was always rational. He never yelled. And as she strolled with him through the city, looking up at him, her arm around his side, she felt protected, safe.

At the dinner table, when Chesa was a girl, her father drilled in his children what he saw as the essence of a successful romance: astrological affinity. He and his wife, he liked to say, had fallen in love because their Chinese zodiac signs were highly compatible. Whenever one of her brothers or sisters started dating someone new, her father would demand to know their birth year. In short order, after consulting the astrological charts, he would pronounce the relationship either fortuitous or foolish.

Chesa, who considered herself faultlessly modern, had always laughed off her father’s superstitions. But in Milton’s apartment one weekend that fall, she found herself clicking to a website on Chinese astrology.

“I found out something,” she told Milton over breakfast.

“Oh?”

“You are a goat.”

“Thanks a lot, Chesa,” he said, putting down his cereal spoon. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Chinese sign,” she said. “Because you were born in 1967.”

“And so what are you, some kind of sweet-smelling flower?”

“I’m a pig.”

Her voice was so earnest that Milton couldn’t resist laughing. “Okay, Pig,” he said.

That evening, Chesa was back in front of the laptop. She discovered a website that measured the social compatibility of every zodiac pairing. Running her fingers over the grid to the spot where goat met pig, she grew short of breath. Such matches rated a nine out of ten.

“What
is
this?” Milton said, leaning over her shoulder.

“Goat and pig,” she said. “Very good together. Read.”

The website said that goats and pigs, along with cats, were in the same subgroup of signs. All three, it said, were “peace-loving and highly sensitive animals. They also have great ability to elicit and seek sympathy, hence they are considerate, love and sympathise with each other.” What’s more, “Pig requires Cat’s crafty cunningness and Goat’s civility and humility.”

Milton gave her a skeptical look. Soon, though, her fascination with the zodiac became an inside joke. When he was feeling flirtatious, he would call her Pig.

“You want something, Goat?” she’d reply.

In late October, after a Sunday walk through streets raw with fall, they sat down on Milton’s couch. Their hands found each other’s faces and they kissed.

The next few weeks were a dream. Milton drove her to the Berkshires for Christmas to meet his parents. Chesa, who had never before seen snow, insisted on pulling onto the shoulder of the Taconic Parkway to sink her fingers into the white cold.

“Put on your gloves,” Milton shouted from the car window.

“No,” she said, lobbing a snowball at him. “I want to feel it with my hands.”

When they returned to Brooklyn, they folded up the futon and Chesa moved into Milton’s bedroom. They started saying, “I
love you,” and letting friends in on their relationship. New York was working out for Milton in ways he’d never expected.

With the new year upon them, however, they could no longer ignore a distressing reality: her six-month visa would expire in February. If she overstayed, Milton told her, she would be an illegal alien, subject to deportation.

“I don’t care,” Chesa said petulantly. Nothing mattered, she said, if they had each other.

“Well, I do care,” Milton said. “You can’t just break the law.”

“Everybody does it,” she pleaded.

“So that makes it right?”

Chesa wrinkled her brow, trying to hold back tears.

They started talking about other options. If they married, she said one night, trying to appeal to his rectitude, it would all be legal. It made some sense, Milton thought. They’d survived four months together in a small apartment. That boded well, didn’t it? And marriage would make them—and her—legitimate.

“I guess we should really do it, right?” he said.

“Only if you are ready, Milton.”

“I am, Chesa. I love you.”

He knew the marriage would seem abrupt, particularly to friends who had just learned about Chesa. She agreed to his suggestion of a small, no-nonsense civil ceremony. They could hold it at Brooklyn Borough Hall. The sole requirement, some clerk told him, was a twenty-four-hour wait after submitting the application. He left work early one afternoon to buy an engagement ring—an aquamarine framed by two small diamonds. He handed her the black box over dinner at an Italian restaurant.

“What’s this?” Chesa said.

“What do you think? It’s an engagement ring.”

She opened the box. “Why?”

“Oops. What I should have said first was, Will you marry me?”

“You don’t already know the answer, Milton?” she said, shaking her head. “Didn’t you remember what I said?” In Manila, rings weren’t exchanged until the wedding day. She had told him that a while ago. “It’s bad luck to do it before.”

They picked at the rest of their meal in silence. What should have been one of their happiest nights together felt all of a sudden like a failure.

HIS PARENTS had been skeptical before meeting Chesa. But when they saw how happy their son looked as he tore open gifts with her under the Christmas tree, they could no longer find good reasons to object. Now, though, when he told his parents about their plans, his mother said, “That’s wonderful, Milton, but are you two really ready?”

“Of course, Mom,” he said, with some pique. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

The night he gave her the ring, he couldn’t sleep. He loved Chesa. But he had always been deliberate before making big decisions. By any reasonable standard, what he was doing was rash. How well did he know Chesa? Was he doing it for the right reasons? Should a lifelong commitment to another person really be made under deadline pressure?

Two days before their wedding, at the kitchen table, Milton told Chesa he couldn’t go through with it.

“You are cold, Milton,” she said, weeping.

“I’m sorry, Chesa.” He covered his eyelids with his fingertips and shook his head. “We probably should never have discussed it.”

On an overcast day in February 2002, Milton and Chesa again rode the A train, but this time in the reverse direction. The terminal at JFK was thronged with travelers, many waiting in a long outdoor security line. It was five months after the September 11 attacks, and the airport was on high alert. Milton walked her to the back of the
line. Saying he’d be late for work if he waited much longer, he waved goodbye. “I’ll come visit this summer, okay?” he said.

BACK IN the Philippines, Chesa moved in with her sister, who hired her to help work in a fish and produce store that her sister’s family ran in the city of La Union. She told her sister that her fiancé would be visiting from America that summer. She spent evenings tidying up the guest room she had set aside for his stay. On lonely nights, she gazed at the pale blue stone on the ring he’d given her and thought about the places she’d take him when he visited.

The days passed. To keep herself busy, she started work on a gift for Milton: a needlepoint of four pigs sprawled atop one another in a grassy field. She spent hours carefully stitching, then brought it to a store for a matte and frame. She knew Milton would smile when he saw it. She tried for a moment to remember what his laugh sounded like.

But June passed, then July and August. Milton had called every week at first. But when she brought up his promise to visit, she could sense his discomfort. “I’m not sure yet, Chesa,” he said. “If I can get the time, you know?” He called less often as the summer wore on, and then not at all.

It rained for several nights, and Chesa stayed up late in bed, crying. At first she blamed herself. Milton had taken her in off the streets, and she had repaid him with selfishness. But when weeks passed without a phone call, her heartache turned to anger. Milton was a fake. He was spineless. He had only pretended to love her. His quiet rationality—the thing she loved most about him—hid a cold heart.

In the fall of 2002, she flew back to New York on another six-month visa. She hoped never to see Milton again. She wanted only to work. Her father had passed away a while ago, and her mother was suffering from a serious kidney disease. Chesa wanted to help
with the medical bills. She knew she could make easier money in America than in the Philippines. She remembered hearing about the legions of undocumented Chinese immigrants living in cramped quarters in the boroughs and working in the city’s low-wage service economy. This time, when her plane landed at JFK, she immediately called a friend—a Chinatown cashier she’d gotten to know on her last visit—and moved into her apartment, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It took a day to find work, at another Korean deli.

She was earning $450 a week, $100 more than the year before. She was making new friends. But walking past her and Milton’s old haunts some days, she found herself awash with feelings. Her heartbreak, it seemed, had not fully healed. Before leaving Manila, she covered the needlepoint of the pigs in plain brown paper and packed it in her luggage. In a fit of ill humor one morning, she dashed out of her apartment with the package and started the ten blocks to Milton’s place in Fort Greene. She soon recognized landmarks that were part of their life together: the corner grocery, the video rental store, the stairs to the subway. She twisted the engagement ring off her finger and dropped it in a coat pocket. She didn’t want anyone to think she was still pining for him.

It was midday, when she knew he’d be out. She left the needlepoint with the building superintendent. From a pay phone outside, she called Milton’s office and got voicemail. She considered hanging up but decided to leave a short message, telling him to see the superintendent. It felt good to wipe her hands of this relic of their former relationship. If it made Milton realize how much he’d hurt her, all the better.