From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Read online

“He’s not going to die,” I said. “He’ll be back in three weeks. It’s just boot camp.”

  She shook her head. We had lost track of Erik over by Richard Serra, where he’d excused himself to the men’s room. Olya explained to me that his bladder was very weak, and this was one reason why he would most certainly perish in the Turkish army.

  Then I saw her. Michelle. She was alone, walking along an installation of broken glass. Like a fashion editorial out of the 1970s, she seemed so vibrant in a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress made of green jersey. I wanted a picture of her in front of the shards of glass for my mood board.4

  “Quick,” I said, interrupting Olya. “Let me have your camera phone.”

  “You can’t take pictures in here.”

  “Who will ever know?”

  “I will,” a deep voice said. We turned around to where a museum guard, a large man in uniform, was leaning against a column.

  I sauntered over to explain my situation. “Excuse me, sir, I wanted to photograph a girl standing there. Not the art work, you understand. Would that be possible? With your permission, of course.”

  “It would be possible. But then I’d have to confiscate your camera.”

  “It’s just a cell phone.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Michelle had moved on to another installation. I hurried Olya across the factory floor and found Michelle among the gorgeous Bridget Riley paintings, those massive horizontal lines from Riley’s Reminiscence series.5

  I made sure we kept our distance so it wasn’t at all obvious that I was staring. Erik rejoined us, and Olya put her arms around him like she wasn’t ever going to lose him. She gave him an open-mouthed kiss, and I removed myself by a few steps, hands in pockets. I cleared my throat and felt Michelle turn to notice me. I pretended to be involved in Riley’s squiggles before glancing over to her. Ah, that game of notice me, notice you!

  I continued to track her, a remote observer. Women were always the apple of my eye, as I have said before. All women too. Tall, short, plump, willowy. I didn’t necessarily look at them as any ordinary man, objectifying them as men do. (Although I cannot deny what I am, for in Michelle’s case there was a definite attraction.) I saw my subject foremost through the eyes of a designer. I was inspired by her sense of style, her dress, her flats, her hair, her tortoise frames that lent her a certain intelligence. She was a budding New York intellectual but from another time altogether. I watched her stroke her strong Anglo chin as she contemplated each painting in front of her. You see, every notion of style could be obtained just by watching.

  I suppose it would have been easy enough to talk to her, seeing as how she was alone. But I didn’t. I held back. And then I lost her in the darkness of the basement gallery among the neon lights and video installations, in a maze of shadows and echoes.

  Flipping through my Qur’an, the one that belonged to D. Hicks, I’ve come upon a chapter on women. There’s an interesting passage Hicks must have underlined, which seems appropriate now: “Believers, do not approach your prayers when you are drunk, but wait till you can grasp the meaning of your words.” With Michelle, I would get that chance.

  The following week I went hunting for old Vogue magazines from the 1970s, the Grace Mirabella6 years. I bought a stack on Sixth Avenue and flipped through them at my worktable, until I found a black-and-white spread of von Furstenberg herself looking as gorgeous as ever, modeling one of her own wrap dresses. I tore out two pages, one of DVF in the wrap dress and a close‑up shot of her with those dark Belgian eyes. I pinned them both to my mood board.

  By November an entire wall of my apartment was covered with ideas that had bled well beyond the board. Swatches, paisley scarves, magazine clippings, photos. I was ambitious and productive, sure, but I was lonely as hell. Olya had left to do fashion week in Paris and would be gone for the rest of the year. On my way home one night from Vivienne’s studio I decided to wander, to try a different route, to get lost underground in the hopes of discovering a nook of the city I had never known. This was how I found so many of the city’s charms. Accidentally. And this was precisely how I found Michelle. Dumb luck. I caught the downtown number 4, and there she was, standing in the middle of a packed train car reading a paperback, among all of the other commuters. She was just as beautiful as she had been that day in the museum. With her book she was shielding part of her face but had the cover tilted in my direction just enough so that I could make out what she was reading. It was a play, The Dutchman. The one about the femme fatale who stabs her black love interest in the back with an apple core on the A train. The apple was meant to be symbolic. Death by desire. The other passengers help dump the body off at the next stop, and the femme fatale goes off into another car to pick out her next horn-dog victim of a prevalent ethnic minority.7

  I once again admired her keen fashion sense. She was wearing a vintage frock, tastefully unbuttoned at the start of her breastbone. My, how she wore it all with such womanly precision. (A woman at twenty-one is so rare!) I noticed how much went into her hair for the first time. Its weighty layers seemed endless—I wanted to get lost in them! I traced her ivory legs from her hemline to her flats, where an out‑of‑place L.L. Bean backpack with the initials T.W.M. rested against her ankle. I would find out later that the initials belonged to one Todd Wayne Mercer, an ex‑boyfriend. He took her virginity; she took his backpack. Fair is fair.

  She looked up from her play and I held her gaze. Her hazel eyes, nearly colorless in the light of the subway car, pierced through her big glasses. As I mentioned, from the way she held the paperback tilted in my direction, I suspected she must have already recognized me as the guy who’d followed her from Bridget Riley to Joseph Beuys. Once she smiled at me I knew I’d been given the green light. Do not approach your prayers when you are drunk but wait till you can grasp the meaning of your words. To my fellow passengers, I said excuse me and made my way over to where she was standing.

  The next stop came. Commuters on and off.

  “You’ve read it?” she said, suddenly. “You’re staring at it like you’ve read it.”

  “Yes.” I hadn’t. “The Dutchman,” I said. “The quintessential work out of the Netherlands in the last half century.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “I haven’t read it,” I admitted. “But I’ve seen it.”

  “You’ve seen it performed?”

  “No, the movie with Louis Gossett Jr.”8

  This made her laugh.

  “Anyway, I love the theater,” I said. “Broadway and everything.”

  “I hate Broadway. Yuck. It’s nothing but overpriced garbage. Have you ever noticed who goes to the theater these days? Blue hairs and tourists. The theater’s dead. I guess that’s why I want to be a part of it. I’m drawn to swan songs. What’s your name?”

  I told her and she laughed again. When I asked her what was so funny she said, “Oh c’mon, the irony. It’s like a philosophical comedy. I am girl. You are boy. Hello, Boy. I’m Michelle.”

  She was on her way to see her grandmother in Brooklyn Heights. Nana owned a townhouse on Henry Street where Michelle would be spending the weekend away from college.

  I missed my transfer at Union Square, but I hardly cared.

  She told me about her nana, the fall she’d recently taken at her weekly tango lesson, and how Michelle planned to read Frank O’Hara at Nana’s bedside. “He was run over by a dune buggy on Fire Island,” she said of O’Hara. “Can you believe that?” Nana was a poet herself. Quite accomplished in her day, as I understood it. She published under the name Willomena Proofrock.9

  “A dune buggy,” I repeated, imagining a man sunbathing on a towel, and the recreational vehicle plowing over him. “That sucks.”

  “It’s totally ironic.”

  Michelle had a great passion for irony. To her the world was chaotically doused in the stuff. It was one big Oedipus Rex.

  �
�I take it you’re an actress?” I said.

  “Hardly. I’m a playwright. But I’ve acted before in plays at school. I’m in the drama conservatory at Sarah Lawrence. Are you Filipino?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Our maid growing up had your nose. She spoke Filipino on the phone, long distance. My parents never minded.”

  “They export them, you know,” I said. “OFW’s, they’re called.” I wrote OFW in the air between us. Whenever I was nervous I overused hand gestures. “Overseas Filipino Worker. You know, in some countries the word for maid is Filipina.”

  “That’s so ironic.”

  The two seats in front of us opened up and we sat down. Michelle tended to slouch a little, with her bottom too far out on the edge, her shoulders and neck folded together. At first I thought she did so to make me feel comfortable about our difference in height, but I would soon realize she always sat like this. In truth, it was the only thing about her that was unwomanly. The rest I found ravishing.

  I talked about Manila, my dying city. Cancerous, metastasizing, degenerate. Funny, I never harbored such feelings growing up there. My chief objection then was that it wasn’t a major fashion contender like New York, London, or Paris. I couldn’t give a crap about what went on in my country politically. Terrorism, the NPA,10 government corruption—none of these could make me bat a lash. Suddenly I was telling Michelle that what Manila needed was a Giuliani type. “Someone who can keep his hands out of the cookie jar for a single political term and clean up the poverty.”

  She, in turn, told me about New York when she was a kid in the eighties, a time when no one went out on the Lower East Side, and SoHo didn’t even have a Prada store yet.

  I complimented her on her vintage frock. “YSL?”

  “What are you gay?” she joked.

  “No, I’m a designer. The color seems like YSL, late seventies. But I could be wrong.”

  “That’s my favorite YSL period. But I think this is Dior.”

  “That would have been my second guess.”

  “You’re a straight fashion designer? That is so ironic.”

  Soon we were off the train, and I was carrying Todd Wayne Mercer’s backpack for her along Joralemon Street. I confessed that I had seen her before. I described what she had been wearing to a T that day at the museum, the green DVF wrap dress. Michelle was not at all taken aback. She was flattered that someone had paid attention and found her to be something she’d never considered herself to be: memorable. Only much later would she admit that she remembered me also as the small Filipino guy in tight jeans with the cute backside.

  We walked on. She showed me the Brooklyn promenade, the waterfront of a tree-lined Everytown, USA. She pointed out where Arthur Miller, her favorite American playwright, had lived. This was a neighborhood so picturesque, so literary, so quaint, so white, that on any other day, with anyone else, it would have made me uncomfortable. I felt far more at ease on the corner of McKibbin and Graham among the drug peddlers and Puerto Ricans and blacks and hipsters, right in the heart of Bushwick—all immigrants in some way, encroaching on each other’s turf. But on this first foray into Brooklyn Heights with Michelle, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. Through the open collar of her frock, I could see her pale skin, the ridges in her chest, and where the plumpness of her small breasts began. Then there was her long freckled neck—a branch. How intoxicating. Her face a ripened piece of fruit! Take a bite, it said. I resisted this compulsion to sexualize her, I swear. Oh, but how I lusted for a body! Still, I knew I needed patience and self-control if I wanted to get together with a girl of Westchester stock. I wasn’t going to kiss her yet, I decided, and so in my head I recited a bunch of American clichés: easy does it, early bird gets the worm. “I find you to be fascinating,” I told her. At my compliment she smiled and seemed to fold over like a lily whose petals were too heavy. (Why do we go floral when it comes to love?) God, how I remember her at first, so easily swayed by flattery, regardless of how crude and domineering she would become. Michelle was a sledgehammer but could melt in your arms like lead if you said the right things.

  From the waterfront we walked back to Henry Street, and then parted at the corner. I found it strange that she didn’t want me to walk with her all the way to Nana’s door. I suppose she realized that I was still a man she had only just met. After all, it was a city where anything could happen. You could be blindsided by a stranger and wind up on the Brooklyn promenade. I watched Michelle trail off along a row of oil street lanterns with Todd Wayne Mercer’s knapsack slung over one shoulder. I watched his initials fade away.

  Everything I did in my studio that fall I did with the intention of impressing Michelle. I sketched her from memory, putting her in dresses I hadn’t yet completed. She was both a muse and a curse. I was productive, but I wasn’t working for myself. Sometimes there isn’t a difference. I make clothes for women, so who cares if I was making clothes for one woman in particular.

  A week after our chance meeting on the 4 train, we had our first date at a Polish diner in the East Village, an old-world place, narrow and heavy on the linoleum. We sat at the counter and ordered from a chalkboard of specials. Michelle introduced me to borscht and challah bread. We split a grilled cheese cut from the lofty Jewish loaf that reminded me of the pandesal rolls back home. She dropped a teaspoon of sour cream in my borscht and stirred until it became a milky fuchsia, like a thick bowl of Pepto-Bismol, though still quite appetizing. She told me it was her favorite color.

  “Your favorite color is borscht?” I teased. She laughed and punched me in the side. Michelle was so strong, with big hands and slender, soft-tipped fingers covered in antique rings. Those hands could grip my whole being and hold me close. I felt safe whenever she put one on me, as she did at the counter while we slurped our borscht. I placed mine on top of hers and we interlaced our fingers. What warmth! That first breach: My hand touching hers, her hand touching mine, my thigh in her hand, her hand on my thigh. The first time two lovers touch intentionally is always more memorable than a first kiss or a first time, at least for me. It’s that rare singular jolt that can never be replicated. When the time came to split the grilled cheese, we were forced to let our hands go, and yet we craved that touch like addicts. So we faced each other to eat the sandwich, interlocking our legs under the counter. My knee was gripped by her two thighs, close enough to feel her inner warmth. It was our first date, but in the mirror behind the counter we already looked like a couple who couldn’t be separated. When I called for the check, she put her hand on my lower back, just under my shirt, and we waited.

  On Division Street in Chinatown we shared a bubble tea and ate sweet rice out of a banana leaf. I confessed that I didn’t want her to leave and asked her to spend the night with me in Bushwick. It was a Sunday, and to get to school the next day, she needed to take the train from Grand Central Station back to Bronxville. We hadn’t even kissed yet.

  “Of course,” she said without hesitation. “I hadn’t even thought of leaving.” And then she gave me a kiss, partly on the mouth, partly on the cheek, but wholly wonderful. I kissed her again. A breeze came and went. I felt the moisture she’d left on my face evaporate. I was a marked man from then on.

  Michelle came home with me and we made love, but I’ll spare you the details, except for this:

  Naked, we bare our souls to each other. There are no pretensions. It is the antifashion. Whenever I show skin in one of my dresses—an open chest in front of the heart, or a slither of exposed back—I feel I am providing a peek at the truth. Michelle’s body, naked, was like truth serum. I melted at the sight of her bare shoulders, lightly freckled from a summer spent on Nantucket Island; her breasts, two matured handfuls of pale white flesh, outlined with a bikini tan line. I’d get down on my knees and breathe her in just below the navel until her white stomach fuzz stood on end. American women are so wonderfully hairy. Oh, how I fell apart before everything down there! The scent of young womanhood, so unmistakable! Her a
ss was tremendous—I still dream about its two halves. And what her buttocks held within its dark shadow was the God’s honest truth! It was His work, revealed. Go tell it on the mountain.

  Lately I’ve been thinking about mistakes. That’s all I have the chance to do these days. There were times during the course of our two years together when I would ask myself how could I have gotten involved with a girl like this. Looking back now, isn’t it obvious? I did it for love.

  1. Ass, Arabic.

  2. Infidel, Arabic.

  3. A “nonlethal strike” in the Guantánamo lexicon.

  4. An assemblage of photographs, sketches, fabric swatches, magazine clippings, anything incorporating the ideas of a designer’s collection.

  5. Reconnaissance, paintings from the 1960s and 1970s.

  6. Editor‑in‑chief of Vogue, 1971–1988.

  7. The Dutchman, LeRoi Jones, 1964. Most—if not all—of the details recounted here are wrong.

  8. It was Al Freeman Jr. who starred in the 1966 film adaptation.

  9. Spelled Wilhelmina Prufrock (1931–2003).

  10. New People’s Army, an armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), deemed a terrorist organization by the United States in 2002.

  Bronxville Revisited

  By mid-November I was putting in serious time in the top bunks of Sarah Lawrence, with its communal kitchens, RAs, visitor slips, damp halls, pot smoke, cut grass, big oaks, track and fields. I would take the Metro-North to Bronxville to watch Michelle endure the hardships of college life in a pastoral setting with lots of ivy on brick.

  On the commute from Grand Central Station each weekend I’d see faces from my neighborhood—poorly dressed hippies, musicians, privileged brats such as myself. I learned that many Sarah Lawrence alums had flocked to Bushwick after graduation to hold on to their American collegiate squalor. They went back on the weekends to see their girlfriends and boyfriends, youth holding on to youth, as if there existed some underground pipeline between the two places. Discovering this made me determined not to be mistaken for one of them, even though one of them was upending all my happiness and fulfillment.