when the train lurches toward the 86th stop, he tells me how his mother is loving it so much here in the east coast. he does not need to tell me that.
I saw his mother just days after she flown in. she invited me to the welcome party her family in jersey city was throwing her. this was a month ago.
at the party, her mother fussed over my not eating too much. she reminded me how I used to love the pork stew that she whipped up when I used to come to their house in manila. this was when his father went out on business trips to the province. his mother was the only one in his family who knew that he and I were going out. and for a catholic mother back in parochial manila to accept this relationship, that was just huge. miraculously huge.
her mother talked about a lot of things that she knew I was not into. but then (and she knew she had to) she had to get into why he was not there at the party. she told me, the way one would say that it is monday or sunday today, that he had to go to a very important sales trip, on a sunday, with his boss.
my watch assures me I still have three minutes before I am officially tardy. but the digital clock at the middle car screams I am already late by a minute. I ask him what time his classes end later in the evening. he tells me he's going to be okay.
I then think of a white guy, tight in a hugo boss suit, driving up in a fashionable hybrid car to his college in east village later at night.
I try to halt my train of thought: me, in green surgical scrubs, slogging it out at the trauma hospital I work in, just six blocks away from his school. of him and his flaming boss going out for some fancy dinner in gaytown chelsea after his classes. of me eating alone my ba-on of day old noodles and burnt bacon during my midnight break.
at the stop, two burly white men board the car we are in. the one looking spent in an ill-constructed blue office suit stands directly in front of me. I lean to my right and ask him how he juggles his time between his studies, his mba, I speak louder, and his work. he shouts back, the way school kids holler in trains, that he's managing. quite well, this is how he puts it.
then he modulates back to his usual timid voice to tell me he and his boss are about to seal this deal with a japanese buyer for this neat-his word--backwater lot in jamaica, queens. he tells me the japanese investor is planning to develop it to an upscale retirement complex for mostly asian couples.
I watch the two elderly white ladies beside him whisper something to each other. both decide to look at me, unflinchingly, incredulously. I avoid their stares and glance, instead, at the korean-looking woman busy poring over the classifieds of a yellowing chinese tabloid.
as our train weaves, blindly it seems, through the labyrinthine subway tracks, I feel like wanting to ask him if his japanese client is aware of the racket the planes make in the area from the nearby JFK international airport. I seem suddenly bold enough to want to ask him, into his face, whether his client has any idea that he and his lover-boss are plainly hoodwinking him.
but then, my glasses just start to frost. maybe from my quickening breaths, I don't know. all I know is that after I remove them, I realize I can't ask him those questions. not now, anyway. not when the stop nearest my hospital nears fast.
and then, I realize, too, that the newspaper the korean-looking woman is reading isn't a chinese paper after all. it's just an old edition of one of the local tabloids
I think he smiles in relief as I tell him goodbye, but I am not so certain. I can not tell exactly because a white guy completely blocks my view of him.
