fiction

Durian
by Anna Felicia C. Sanchez

IT WAS HER first time to ride an airplane, her first time to leave Luzon. She sat in the waiting area nervously sipping her coffee, while Greg browsed through business magazines in silence, in some anger, for she had overslept and made them both think that they would miss the flight. When their plane was announced he stood and gave her a peremptory nod, and she followed him to the tarmac, careful to keep him within sight as they converged in a line with tens of other passengers. Like Greg and her, many of them had chosen not to put their things through baggage, and the various traveling bags the passengers brought into the plane rattled her, making her think she would lose her seat beside Greg to someone else's climbing gear or laptop case. They boarded the plane and she fought the urge not to push, until she spotted Greg settling into his seat by the aisle, and soon she stood beside him, struggling to lift her bags into the overhead compartment. A man sitting on the row behind theirs pushed his bag against hers, vying for the slot, but Greg rose and took over, staring the stranger down so that he gave way. She reddened as she brushed past Greg and took her seat by the window, gazing out at the numbers on the runway, and wondered how long the ride would take, how far away Davao was.

She felt the seatbelt press against her stomach when the plane took off, even though she had been holding her breath, frightened by the minor tremor at the beginning, by the subtle force of acceleration and the change in air pressure. She looked out the window and marveled, People do look like ants from above, but when she turned around to share this discovery with Greg, she saw him signaling to one of the stewardesses, flirting, she thought, with the chinky-eyed mestiza, even though he probably only wanted a couple of newspapers to browse through. She shook herself and turned back to the window, catching her breath at the sight of the clouds, clouds that were no longer above, but, it seemed, right beside her.

Now that's a masterpiece, isn't it? she heard Greg say, and when she glanced at him he was nodding in approval of the bright white clouds that unfolded before them, in wisps and dimensions of light and shadow. The endless blue canvass of the sky set off near-imperceptible hues, and she thought she needed to reach out and capture one, to capture a cloud, so that she would never forget how real and infinitely pure the white puffs looked, like a meadow that undulated, paradoxically, in stillness. She was reminded of how when she was a child she had perceived the clouds as Heaven, the actual, achievable heaven of which the nuns had talked for lengths, and that if one stared hard enough one would see Mary, or Jesus, and maybe even a cherub or two. As a child she had also read a story somewhere that claimed white, fluffy cotton became cotton candy when showered with sugar, and that clouds, which were made of the same material, became a skyful of cotton candy by the exact same process. And watching the clouds now she pined for either, for the radiant white paradise and the white cotton candy, but both were outside the plane and she could do nothing but ache for them. Then she blinked and saw that the clouds resembled the silky, creamy whiteness of durian, something that Greg had brought to the office a few months ago, and she turned and exchanged smiles with him.

The stewardesses distributed newspapers, drinks and snacks, then glided up front and began asking for volunteers to join a game, a simple enough game which mechanics consisted of the volunteer singing a song and then getting a wallet or purse for his or her effort. Greg went and belted out a chorus from an old Beatles song with gusto, prompting such applause from the other passengers as to make him blush, and when he returned he gave her the prize, a black leather purse with the airline's name emblazoned in bright colors on one side. She accepted the gift with delight.

SHE HAD JUST become auditor when Greg first came to the office. He exuded all the ill-concealed smugness of one who had never needed to work for a living, and she believed, the moment she saw him in the parking lot with her willowy septuagenarian boss, that this tall dark guy with the deep-set eyes, crooked grin and gleaming silver Revo could only be trouble for a small company like theirs. She learned soon enough that he was the boss' favorite godson, and in her usual doomsday fashion she predicted that he would destroy all order, unaware that she was unable to take her eyes off him, that she was already following him throughout the office. He noticed, of course, but as early as then he already had his eyes on one of the boss' secretaries, a shy but voluptuous girl fresh out of college. She stomped off to the ladies' room when she learned this, muttering that she was only a few years older than that, that woman-child, but when she found herself staring at the lavatory mirror, at the round, rubicund face that she knew would lose its smoothness in a couple of years, at the healthy bust and the filled-out hips that would soon wither without ever having known the caresses of another's hand-that was when she realized, breathlessly, that she had not felt this way for over a decade, not since she was a university freshman, gaping at the halls that teemed with men and women who had no qualms about themselves, nor about loving one another.

She left the office early that day and sought out her sister, but the embassy was crowded with hordes of passport applicants and she had to wait till her sister could get off. They arranged to meet in a coffee shop some blocks away, and on her way out she glanced at the throng of people waiting to be given the chance to flee, to fly away to another life, and she looked up at the sky and wondered if she, too, ever would.

The things you think about, huffed her sister as they drank their cappuccino. The things I think about, she repeated in her mind as she glanced about the dimly lit, half-filled cafe. What are coffee shops really for? she thought. All these cups and pastries and pictures on the wall-what do they bring anyone who comes in here? Nobody comes here for those.

Her sister had to run, she had a family, after all, so she called her own taxi and went home by herself. In her cramped apartment with only the bonsai and potted posies for company, she lay in bed and thought about work, wondering when she'd ever get promoted, and the prospect of so many stagnant years sent a chill down her spine. Maybe she had been too laid back, she thought as she curled into the mattress, maybe she had had things too easy and she had lived half her life being too soft, too weak, too happy with what she already had. She rubbed her arm against the cold sheets and felt a welling up inside her chest. She was still young, she had always insisted, spending the days and the money as they came, but that night it felt suddenly as if all the years had gained up with her, and like an old woman she twined the sheets around her body, feeling inconsolably cold, and she wondered if there was any way at all that sleep could be warmer.

A TEMPERATE WIND blew at the Davao tarmac, surprising her, for somehow she had imagined that the climate would be cooler. Aside from the other passengers there were only security guards and porters around, and she marveled at the quiet that seemed to envelop the little airport. Greg flagged a taxi without trouble and instructed the driver to head for Aljem's Inn where he had rented a room. The taxi moved through the streets and she gawked outside at the city, at the buildings that loomed, alternating with various residences and their yards that featured strutting roosters and large durian fruit that hung from the trees. The stark ambivalence troubled her, for she felt exactly like she was riding along the streets of Manila, minus the smog and a little traffic, but the dogged presence of the durian haunted her sight and destroyed all air of familiarity. She remembered suddenly a dream she had from time to time, a dream much like a painting, a splash of solemn colors with vague, incoherent details, from which she would wake up, breathless and in cold sweat, with the distressing impression that there had been something wrong with that painting, something tiny but absolutely wrong. But Greg held her hand and the warmth of his skin soothed the clamminess of hers, and she struggled to relax, conscious of her reddening cheeks, of the tingling sensation that his hand on hers brought between her legs.

Their room was a deluxe suite, pricey but small, with a little refrigerator, a maroon-tiled bathroom with shower and tub, and a king-size bed covered with clean white sheets and a luscious batik quilt. Greg turned the TV on and flipped through the cable channels while she unpacked her bags, and then they left the hotel for lunch at the Chinese restaurant across the street. Through the restaurant's glass walls she could see a group of bare-chested teenagers loitering around the parked cars, and Greg, sipping his tea, pointed them out as a kind of protection racket gang whom the car owners had to pay to keep their cars safe from bukas-kotse and, of course, from the gang itself. She nodded fearfully, and clung to Greg when they stepped out the restaurant. Two of the boys were engaged in ta-tsing while the others lounged about, and all the couple got was a hazy, disinterested glance from a few of them. Several steps away she looked back over her shoulder just as the ta-tsing coin caught sunlight in its upward flight and the two boys' arched, muscled backs gleamed bronze under the mid-afternoon sun.

They were taking a stroll through the neighborhood, past small groceries and boutiques, and she sensed it again, the quiet that pervaded the airport. It seemed to fall upon the day like the scent of sugary bread from the nearby bakery, floating down upon the occasional passing cars, the sidewalk vendors and their carts of lanzones and marang fruit, the pedestrians chattering to one other in a language she couldn't understand. It was a good quiet, though, a story-book hush that existed only in unreal villages and kingdoms, and she felt that way-unreal-as they walked on the cobblestone sidewalks. But the sunlight was warm and Greg's laughter floated like music, and she thought to herself, This is fine, it will be all right.

The surroundings changed a little after a few more blocks, became a little dirtier, a little noisier and more populated. They entered the Aldevinco, a large building that resembled a dry market, which stalls were filled wall-to-wall with batik and tie-dyed cloths, and Greg took her to each store, haggling with the store clerk over the prices. But she couldn't decide what to buy and for whom, and in the end she had to ask Greg if she could go through the stores again. Greg sighed and said he'd just be outside, looking at some mangosteen or durian among the sidewalk vendors' wares, so they agreed to meet in half an hour at the entrance where they had come in earlier. There were several entrances, though, and she got lost in the maze of stores trying to find the right one, until she finally decided to leave the building and make her way around until she found Greg. It took her some time but he was there where he'd said he'd be, right by the entrance where they had first come in. He waved when he saw her and gestured happily to a cart of durian on the street corner. They stood beside the cart, where she stared at the durian's thick spines while Greg weighed and pressed the fruits carefully where the spines were dull. Finally he picked one out, and the vendor pried it open and scooped out the pulp with a clear plastic bag. He offered her one pulp-thick seed, plumping the rest into a plastic container, but she recoiled from the smell. Greg shook his head, smiling, and with his fingers scooped out a seed from the container. Right there, by the durian cart on the corner of the street, he closed his eyes and sucked slowly on the white creamy pulp, and for a few seconds as she stared up at his face, she thought he would drift away to heaven, up, up, and away.

HE ROSE QUICKLY to head of procurement, a mere couple of months, actually, and she couldn't say that she had no hand in it. The boss was careful in showing preference over her godson, even though Greg did spend a better part of his first month's afternoons lounging in the boss' office and strutting in front of her secretaries. He realized after a time that he needed real recommendations, people to legitimize his progress for his godmother, and soon he stopped taking the afternoons off and fell to slaving away at the orders and documents piled atop his desk. Whenever he went out to canvass for supplies-whether to other offices or out of town-he brought back snacks and fruit with him to distribute around the office. Most of the goodies reached her at the auditor's office, and while she munched on strips of dried mango or dipped strawberries into a colleague's saucer of condensed milk, she smiled in amused disdain at his effort to please. Then one day he returned from a business trip to Davao and brought with him a delicacy that made her stomach turn.

It was a large fruit, smaller than jackfruit but thornier, its hard, thick olive-green spines upturned like the face of menace to everyone who wanted a piece of it. And everyone in Procurement did, for they crowded around Greg in delight, despite the terrible garbage smell that began to permeate the office. The smell drifted to her room and offended her nose, prompting her to turn to the boss in dismay, but the old woman simply shrugged and lectured her on the sweetness and nutritional value of the durian. She wrinkled her nose, unconvinced, until finally the boss called on Greg and asked him to bring some of the fruit to the auditor, who trembled for various reasons aside from the durian's smell when the tall young man entered her office, a saucer of the silky white pulp in his hand. He stood in front of his desk, cajoling for a quarter of an hour, but she wouldn't take anything from him, and when he left she thought that was the end of it.

But it was not, for he was serious with office work, and more than that he was smart, smart enough to know that he'd get somewhere faster if he pressed the right buttons-oh, those buttons-at just the right places. She had finally caught his attention and had given him a target. She saw his master plan with uncanny exactness, for he was easy to read from a distance, this distance of a few tables away in the canteen as he ate lunch with some woman-a different one each day-or an arm's length across as they passed each other in the halls. At night she lay among the sheets thinking of his stealthy glances, his measured smiles, and she laughed despite the midnight cold and the stillness of the bonsai on her windowsill. She wielded power over the divisions, over the accounts of Procurement, and she enjoyed that he knew it. So one lunch break when he approached her with his deep-set eyes, crooked grin and a hesitant but witty joke about eating durian, she yielded a little and began playing the game, pulling strings, changing the numbers, until Greg began to enjoy the game too, and refused to ever let her go.

Don't get carried away, warned her sister when they sat in the coffee shop a few blocks from the embassy, their cups steaming with cappuccino while she brimmed over with stories about Greg. Carried away? she thought, staring at the coffee froth on her spoon. But that was what she wanted, to be carried away, to fly. To the south, like the birds of foreign lands, flying past the fluffy, pulpy clouds into the arms of company, into warmer nights. And that, perhaps, was why she agreed to come.

THEY WERE ON a mission for beauty, Greg had said an eternity ago, They were on a pilgrimage, a journey of life and love that would, must, end in the defeat of all that was false in their world, but in truth he was just tired of the office, and had taken her along in his escape. She would be lost if she lost him, so she clung to him, taking on his search, his thirst, hoping she would quench her own.

He entered her that night, in that little room where the soft batik quilt rubbed against their legs and the aircon and the little refrigerator hummed together in the dark. She wound her limbs around him, clinging despite the pain, and when he pulled back and fell beside her she felt suddenly hollow, lost, yes, as lost as she had been in the Aldevinco, walking aimlessly past the stalls that displayed the sarongs and patadiongs all ablaze with the wildness of dye, the cloths strewn across the store walls as if they were paintings: a trail of blue disappearing in the distance, a drop of red that splattered like rain-a menagerie of colors, sharp and throbbing as if they would envelop her and trap her forever, yes, that was what she saw now in the dark, beside Greg who was shifting into the batik quilt, mumbling as he fell asleep.

She shifted into the quilt, too, and nestled against his back. The dampness of his skin, the musk of his day-old cologne-these comforted her, hurt her, gave her feelings she couldn't understand, and as she stared up at the ceiling the darkness showed her nothing but livid streaks of colors that played with her vision because she had shut her eyes too tightly. She thought of the sarongs in the Aldevinco and wondered if she should go back tomorrow to buy a shawl for her sister, but the idea frightened her, thinking of that labyrinth of colorful stores, and of the people outside, as she made her way around the building to find Greg, all those street vendors and passersby who spoke in a language she had absolutely no knowledge of. She was lost, lost! and the thought had reverberated in her head as she heard the strange dialect spoken on the street that looked no different from the streets of Manila, and she had been so distraught that she had broken into a run, desperate to be reunited with Greg. The memory made her choke, made her want to wake him up, but that would be silly, she knew. She rolled onto one side and attempted to go to sleep. Then a faint smell assailed her nostrils, prodding her swiftly back to wakefulness, for it was a garbage smell, pungent, nauseating, a scent that seemed to be carefully sticking itself onto her hair, onto her pillow and onto the batik quilt.

She threw on a hotel robe and felt her way in the dark toward the little refrigerator, the pain between her legs made negligible by that subtle but unquestionable odor. The fridge light blinded her but her eyes adjusted quickly, and she hurried to check the plastic container filled with the durian pulp they had bought that afternoon. But the container was sealed, could not be sealed more tightly, and she didn't know what else to do. She held the container in her hands, the cold melting into her palms as she stared at the white pulp turned luminous by the light of the refrigerator. She glanced behind her at Greg's sleeping form, marveling at the regularity with which his body rose and fell with his breath, then she gazed at the durian pulp again, wondering what it must taste like, what he so loved about it.

She pulled off the container's lid, and the smell met her like a blast so that she had to fight not to cough or gag. She sat down in front of the refrigerator, her legs folded under her robe, and the pain acted up again, sharper this time, but she tried to shake it off, gritting her teeth, plucking a clump of soft, silky durian meat from the container. The cold pulp was sweet, sweeter and uniquely tastier than any fruit she had ever known. The fresh, creamy pulp filled her mouth and it should have been fine, but the sweetness on her tongue clashed with that rotten, irreconcilable smell, and she thought that something must be wrong, something must be absolutely, inconceivably wrong. She couldn't understand what it could be, though, and as she looked over her shoulder at Greg she found herself shivering in her robe, her legs numb and naked against the stone floor.

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