(This is a re-worked version of an earlier story, The Girl with the Limp)
I undress, shower, dry myself, pull on a g-string, wrap myself in a white coat, go to the window, push it open and gaze down at the market place. The early morning air carries the faint odor of rotting garbage and benzene. Tuk-tuks and a multi-coloured jeepney bus wait for custom. Somewhere, a dog barks.
The airport bus pulls in and stops in front of the gleaming new concrete atrocity known as the Hotel City Garden. Passengers tumble out. Romulo is the last off, a hatless, cassocked figure of righteousness stepping down heavily, one hand on the railing, the other holding a small bag, and he glances up to where he knows I will be. His fingers are gnarled and his hair wispy strands of white.
Romulo gives no sign of recognition. He turns away, fetches his suitcase from the hold, and sets off across the market place pulling it behind him, the wheels clickety-clicking over the cobblestones.
He trudges past Robinson's department store, past the arched doorways and iron balconies of the colonial style Farmacia building, past a blood-red Porsche Carrera parked outside the gray baroque of the Immaculate Conception church. He turns the corner and vanishes.
Every time I see that car . . . So Fat Man is back in town. In my mind's eye, I see him swirling along ahead of an entourage of musclemen, his black-grey hair pulled back into a pony tail, caftan pressing against his ample belly and trailing behind him like a fluttering sheet. But not only that.
As I close the window, a wave of emotions hit me, but I push them aside. The first patient of the day is an overweight lady suffering from back pains who I take through a routine of stretching exercises.
###
Romulo arrives for his appointment wearing jeans and t-shirt. His face and neck are lined, his close-set eyes set even deeper than I recalled, but he is in good shape. We have known each twenty years but he acknowledges me stiffly, as if we are vague acquaintances.
I tell reception we are not to be interrupted. No phone calls. Inside the treatment room, I lock the door. Romulo and I embrace briefly. He touches my face and strokes my hair, and stands back, looking me over. His eyes are alight.
We exchange pleasantries.
"Did you have a good flight," I ask lamely.
The question does not match his mood, but I feel a need to say something. He mumbles assent but he's not really listening. He runs his hands up and down my arms.
"How's your health?" I ask. "Aches and pains?" I feel awkwardly distant from Romulo. Our relationship has lost much of its affection, become almost purely physical.
"Only of the soul," he replies. Even after all these years, I don't know if he is serious or not. I want to ask about his arthritis, but I stop before I start.
"Fat Man's Porsche is parked down there," I say. I'm wandering into sensitive territory.
"Oh," he says.
Fat Man owns the Happy Go Go bar in Quezon City and other pleasure pits elsewhere.
The aircon hums. Romulo takes off his t-shirt and his jeans. His scrawny chest is almost hairless and his pallid belly sags. Beneath his underpants, his cock is half erect.
He uses a wooden step to climb on to the table and lies face down. I apply a hot towel to his neck and shoulders, feel the tautness, and dig my fingers in to loosen it. I pour warm oil on to his back.
"Was Fat Man the one. . .? " he trailed off. He is uncomfortable with the topic.
"You know very well he was," I say.
We fall into silence. I work his back, bottom and legs. I part his buttocks and run one finger between them, pause for a tiny second and touch his anus. His buttocks quiver.
He turns over and his cock is fully erect. Slowly, stretching the moment, I massage his shoulders and biceps, and his fingers feel beneath my white coat. I oil his chest and slowly work over his belly in circular movements He touches my inner thigh and sends a familiar surge of heat through me. My nipples ripple with anticipation. I unbutton my coat and throw it off. His fingers find my pussy.
Romulo's breathing is heavier. His fingers are deep inside me. I brush across his cock and testicles. His eyes are shut, mouth open. I stroke his cock, playing with the red knob until the time is right and then I roll on a condom. I climb on to the step, mount the table, straddle Romulo and use two fingers to guide him into me. I move, slowly. A rush of cool air brushes my face. I move faster and faster still until I am a riding a steed, thundering across the tundra. . .
###
Czarina first came to me three years ago, this slender girl whose brown, oval face and close-set darting eyes seemed permanently washed with melancholia.
She had been riding pillion on a motorcycle being gunned along a narrow street when a cow wandered on to the road. The motorcycle swerved out of control, hit a fence and pitched the two of them down a rocky embankment. The rider suffered bruises and shock, but Czarina could not move. Surgeons pinned the pieces of her hip together but she was left with a limp. The motorcycle rider visited her once after the accident, but never again.
Czarina spent her working hours limping between cramped rows of formica tables in the Café Roces, carrying plates of barbequed chicken and steamed rice past forests of male hands brushing her thighs. Many customers were in town to satiate themselves in the blazing neon universe of the Calle Arroceros, one block away.
She was less bothered on Saturday nights at the open-air patio at the back of the Hotel City Garden, where big band musicians clad in tuxedos played old-fashioned dance music. And if that meant two shifts back-to-back, the work was less arduous than the café, the atmosphere more genteel, the tips more generous, and the customers kept their hands to themselves. But Saturdays did leave her physically and mentally spent.
Czarina had had boyfriends; they came and they went. She had become pregnant but, one starry Saturday night, as the band on the hotel patio played "Happy Day Are Here Again", she felt a stab of pain and a rumbling deep down within her. Her pregnancy ended in a fountain of blood inside a public lavatory cubicle.
Czarina came to me for physiotherapy, but also to talk and listen. I told her that her miscarriage was a blessing, that too many girls bore children, were abandoned by the fathers and trapped in life-sapping struggles for survival.
From what she told me, it was obvious that Fat Man liked the Café Roces. And Fat Man liked Czarina. Whenever he was in town, he came with his friends and sat at one of Czarina's tables. He spoke with her in quiet, reassuring tones and, if she felt flattered by his affability, she disliked his muscle-bound, tattooed cohorts and their glinting bracelets, thin necklaces and loud voices.
