In Spite of Everything (13 page)

Cal came from family people. They were from the Philippines, and to the extent that it is fair or plausible to generalize, one can say
of Filipino society that it is extraordinarily devoted to family—and for this reason, getting to know Cal’s was disorienting and provoking for a rogue entity like me. At first, I thought it was a question of size. While his nuclear family comprised just Cal, his younger sister, and his parents, such restrictive definitions were not observed in their worldview; anyone related to them was family. This is a tradition in a huge number of cultures, but even so, Cal’s family was downright galactic: twenty aunts and uncles, more than ninety first cousins, an extended circle of grands, great-grands, second and third cousins, their spouses, and so on. Except for a handful who’d stayed in the Philippines, they all lived on Staten Island, and they spent all their free time together. Family dinners, for example, were like nothing I’d ever seen.

In my WASP experience, if you were invited to a family dinner, you expected to be offered a cocktail or two and submit to the parents’ tactful interview about your background, education, occupation, and interests, after which you would sit down to a pleasant conversation and the stock Protestant “guest” meal: poached salmon, asparagus, and if someone was feeling fancy, maybe risotto with a barely discernible amount of butter and salt. With Cal’s family, there might be four people present, there might be fifty. As soon as you walked in the door, you were kissed on the cheek with an audible smack, exhorted to “Eat first!” and tendered a Styrofoam plate groaning with
pancit palabok, lumpia, lechon, tapa
, and rice. After that, you were on your own. You sat wherever there was an open spot, eating, smiling, watching the children dash about and make impromptu performances for the adults, who laughed and clapped their hands and absently admonished the little girls to straighten their dresses and the little boys to “be nice!” After the card tables were set up, the mah-jongg sets and whiskey bottles came out, and as the night wore on, more relations would simply show up. At some point, an auntie would plunk herself down at the white baby grand and produce the most perfect, tinkling cocktail piano you’ve ever heard outside of an old-school hotel bar, and before long, a tipsy coterie
would encircle her singing “You Light Up My Life,” “Memories,” and “Love Will Keep Us Together,” swaying in unison, eyes glossy with sentiment.

I had no idea how to operate in such entropic circumstances. What was I supposed to do? No parental figure engaged me in one-on-one chitchat; no one wanted the abstract of my curriculum vitae; no one was interested in my opinion of lobbyists or right-wing media. Didn’t Cal’s family want to get to know me? If nothing else, my ability to sustain polite conversation was, I felt, one of my assets. If they didn’t ask me questions, how would I be able to charm them—to win them over? “That’s just not how they are,” shrugged Cal. “Don’t take it personally.” But I did take it personally.

Cal’s mother and I struggled in particular. I thought she was sexist, ostentatious, and anti-intellectual, and I’m pretty sure that she thought I was a slut, a dangerous liberal (a “women’s libber,” she spat), and a smart-ass. But after about five years or so of Cal’s and my being together, a turning point materialized at one of these giant, jolly family get-togethers. As I squished in at the edge of the crowded piano stool munching
lumpia
and warbling “Love Me Tender” in between bites, I realized that I loved pretty much everyone there. I had taken a particular shine to Cal’s youngest cousin, a troubled, sickly little boy who was so bright and ridiculously sweet that I couldn’t help eating him up. Two of Cal’s other cousins, a seriously smart and exceptionally kind pair of high school sisters, were dazzling: It never occurred to me that teenagers could be so uncloyingly cooperative and well-adjusted. To me, these girls were flat-out perfect, the kind of kids everyone hopes to have; I invented internships for them at the magazine for which I worked so that they could beef up their résumés for college admissions, and they were nothing but a pleasure. I loved all these children’s mothers. And, it struck me, I loved Cal’s mother.

First, we had discovered a passion in common: clothes and bargain shopping. That broke the ice. But once we discovered our mutual respect for hard work and self-determination, our suspicion of
each other began to melt away. I learned that as new émigrés to the United States, Cal’s mother had worked the night shift as a nurse to support the family while his father studied for the foreign medical exams. Exhausted but practical, she had trained Cal, from age six, to vacuum, sort laundry, and cook for the family. Everyone had done what needed to be done—that’s what family does,
di ba
? When she learned that I’d had to sue my wealthy father to go to college, she hooted in disbelief: Who ever heard of such a thing? His own flesh and
blood
! And I still talked to him?
Ano
, it was that
woman
, that
wife
—she was greedy, she had poisoned his mind. Your father does not appreciate what a good daughter he has! But don’t worry, dar
ling
, what comes around goes around—believe
me
. You work hard, and God will provide for you. My eyes would well up in astonishment at her heart for me. How could I
not
love her?

There was something else that I realized, too. Cal’s family never really cared much about my, or anyone’s, pedigree, level of achievement, or personal appeal, unless such things had a practical application, such as drawing a higher salary than one would have been able to command otherwise. What mattered to them was: Do you love this family? Are you willing to help its members? If you proved that your answer was “Yes,” that’s all they cared about. You could be a gas station attendant or a drug addict, and though they’d push you to better yourself if you were, there was no question that you’d have the unqualified support of this enormous, tight network at your back. If you failed to appear at a gathering, family would phone you relentlessly or come in person to fetch you. If you became ill, family would be at your bedside, feeding you, keeping you company. If you needed money, family would loan you what they had, put in calls to find you a job. No one ever used a babysitter. You would never, ever be alone. It took the wind right out of me when this dawned on me. Imagine: never alone.

But in truth, the family togetherness trait had never truly meshed with Cal’s own temperament. Even as a little boy, while the whole tribe was in peak festive mode, Cal would duck into his room or, if
they were at a relative’s home, under a table, and burrow into a book. His mother would rattle his cage in frustration and insist that he join the party, but Cal didn’t want to; he preferred his own cerebral solitude. “He was always rea
ding
, rea
ding
, rea
ding
!” his mother would tell me, as if this were a sign of some shocking character defect. “He never wanted to be with his family—my son is a lo
ner
!” There was not a single other person like this, not in the hundreds of family members. Cal also did not dance, another anathema in his family and, one could fairly assert, in Filipino culture at large. Let me tell you something: You may think that you have danced and that you’re maybe pretty good at it, but that is probably because you have never been to a real Filipino wedding.
Everybody
dances, and everybody rocks it like you would not
believe
—from eighteen months to ninety-six years, it doesn’t matter. Not Cal. So even though he was accepted, Cal was also regarded as something of a mutant. In addition, however, as the firstborn of his generation and the first to have truly grown up as an American, he was regarded as a special authority, an envoy. So even as he was browbeaten by his mother into family togetherness, and ordered in no uncertain terms to be a doctor when he grew up, he was also invariably consulted in all official family matters involving transactions with the outside world. Cal rather liked this position, especially since it gave him the appearance of being involved and, moreover, deflected attention from his retreats to be alone.

Even with his hermetic inclinations, however, Cal clearly radiated the confidence that comes only with a sense of belonging; it was central to his ease in the world. But so was his parents’ marriage. Unlike mine and most of our friends’, Cal’s parents not only were still together but were a unified, happy couple. The secret to this, I think, is that they didn’t see themselves as being in a relationship; they saw themselves as husband and wife. This still strikes me as a revolutionary notion, having been raised, like most people my age, alongside the Boomerish zeitgeist that marital cohesion is reliant on individual fulfillment. It is tempting to chalk this up to a Filipino family ethos,
but that would be cheap and false: There was always a lot of conjugal drama gusting about the family, including children born out of wedlock and rampant cheating. But not Cal’s parents. They genuinely loved each other and were always together; they genuinely loved Cal, and Cal loved them. Although he had rebelled against the family business by not becoming a doctor, and against the family culture by not becoming a confirmed Catholic, Cal had never been one of those teenagers who, like me and my type, shunned their parents at puberty’s onset, leaning on their friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends to fill the gaps. He hadn’t needed to.

Perhaps that’s why, to this day, no one has ever heard him make anything resembling a degrading remark about a woman or about women in general. Maybe this doesn’t sound like a big deal, and it never seemed like such a big deal to me in all the years that we were together. But I have since learned how surprisingly disgusting a great many men are when they think that women aren’t listening—or even sometimes in their presence. Cal was never this way. It just wasn’t in him.

There is a story that underscores that point, a story that endeared him to me in a way he never could have guessed when he related it years ago. After graduating from college, Cal had gone on one of those epic backpacking trips across Europe, the kind in which you stay in hostels, ride the EuroRail, and meet all kinds of other people in their early twenties from different countries who are doing the same thing. One of the main purposes of these trips, aside from becoming a cultured person who has visited Europe, is to hook up.

So there he was in Florence. He toured the Duomo, the Uffizi, and the Medici chapels, and he met an attractive, interesting, smart young woman whose next stop was Athens. But Cal’s plan was to go to Venice. “Come with me to Athens!” urged the young woman. “We’ll take the train together—it’ll be fun!” It sounded like fun. It probably would have been fun. But his plan was to go to Venice. “So, change your plans—come on!” she prodded. Knowing him as I do, I can visualize this scene perfectly. He is standing there, itinerary
clutched tightly, staring at her, vibrating with inner conflict. He knows exactly what this invitation means, knows that he will be an errant idiot not to take her up on it, that his friends will ridicule him into a sliver of a man, that he will come to regret it in middle age. But he has made a plan to go to Venice. And that plan is fixed as deeply in his psyche as the Duomo is in the piazza. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I planned to go to Venice.” When he told me this story, I knew that I would never meet a better man than this.

But in terms of our particular relations, this story came to illustrate two things as time went on. First, sex would never be a major point of connection. Even in the beginning, when people are supposed to be having sex in all manner of unhygienic places, we were more into cuddling, talking, and hanging out than getting it on. Was it a warning sign? At the time, I told myself it was the hallmark of a secure, mature relationship. For one thing, I had already had my share of having sex in bathrooms, stairwells, cars, and barns with Jai. People in adult relationships, I told myself, did not have that kind of sex. Their lives were not about the kind of world in which sex like that thrives. People in stable, mature relationships had careers to construct, process, and endure. They had ideas that they felt were important enough to make real. They had an interesting, vital circle of friends with whom they went out drinking and to late dinners. They had eclectic, even pedantic, music collections; favorite contemporary writers; good parties in walk-up apartments. This was the stuff of real relationships. Id-crazy, soul-gluing sex didn’t seem to be a part of this mix.

That’s what I told myself at the time. What was closer to the truth was that sex had become in my mind synonymous with giving myself away completely. It was my ultimate trading card: You can have me, if you can protect and envelop me. And by the time I met Cal, I never wanted to sacrifice myself again: I wanted to work, to make something more of myself than a patched-up rag doll. I had the feeling, from the outset, that this would be a possibility with him, that he would not make soul-sapping demands of me, that I would not have
to sacrifice myself to be a real, self-determining entity. I was right. I did not see then that this is what he had always wanted, too, nor did I understand the loneliness inherent in such a bargain.

The second, and ultimately the most important, point of the Venice story was this: It simply never occurred to Cal to allow his moral compass to be pulled in any direction other than his own. Me, I would have given anything to
have
a moral compass, my sentient planet’s missing piece of equipment. My center, to the extent that I had one, had never held. It was more like a hazmat container for high-pressure gas. Reading
Heart of Darkness
in my junior year of high school, I’d felt an instant, horrible sense of kinship with Kurtz. The wilderness had found me out early, too—and it echoed loudly within because I, too, was hollow at the core. The major difference between Kurtz and me was that I was too afraid to allow the horrifying nihilism that lived inside me to penetrate the membrane of my persona, which talked all the time and liked clothes. A line from a Billy Bragg song sums it up: “a little black cloud in a dress.” Though I was nothing but dark wind, I was desperate to feel something of solidity, to feel that there was somehow real ore embedded in my heart’s gusty caves. I wanted that moral compass. I didn’t have the first idea of how to get one. In hindsight, I simply allowed myself to be drawn to his. He did not seem to mind. Without him, I was gas; without me, he was rock. Together, we were a world.