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GERONIMO TAGATAC'S father was from Ilocos Norte. His mother was a Russian Jew. Geronimo has been a Special Forces soldier, a legislative consultant, a dishwasher, cook, folksinger, computer system planner, a modern and jazz dancer and a roofer. His short fiction has appeared in Writers Forum, The Northwest Review, Alternatives Magazine, Orion Magazine, The Clackamas Literary Review and The Chautauqua Literary Review. He’s received fellowships from Oregon Literary Arts and Fishtrap. “Summer of the Aswang,” received the 2017 Timberline Award for short fiction. Geronimo's short story, "Hammer Lounge" is part of Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults, collected and edited by Cecilia Brainard. His first book of short fiction, The Weight of the Sun, was a 2007 Oregon Literary Arts finalist.
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A SIMPLE GRACE
Copyright by Geronimo Tagatac, all rights reserved
CATHERINE, C.K. HER FRIENDS CALLED HER, would later tell him that the way he moved when he made his way between the row of lecture hall seats and the way he sat himself down without the help of his arms is what drew her interest. The very simplicity of his gracefulness touched something in her.
C.K. saw him the following Friday evening, in the Interlude Bar. She’d gone there with Charles, a grad student who was ten years older than her. He was chummy with the younger faculty members who frequented the place. Marco was chatting with the woman bartender and, at one point he said something to her that made her laugh. C.K. was sure he knew that she was watching him by the way he sat, half turned toward her on his bar stool as though he could hear her through the clutter of conversation punctuated by the occasional raised voice or wave of laughter. She was almost sure that he would hear her if she spoke to him across the space between them.
Marco felt her swift glances, returning them with his own
in which he took in her thick straight brown hair cut square several inches
below her shoulders. He guessed she was not
much more than five-feet-two inches tall.
He noticed her light-colored eyes
behind her wire-rimmed glasses, the black turtleneck sweater, and wide-legged
pants of a fabric that softened the shape of her legs. He watched her leave with her companion but
noticed she didn’t hold his hand or lean into him in that way lovers do, and
that rubbed away some of his envy.
He didn’t see her after the semester ended. Her image faded, worn thin by the flow of
classes, term papers, exams and parties. Marco had two affairs. One lasted
three months and another didn’t. He got
a work-study job at night in the computer room, running engineering student FORTRAN
programs. It was a silent place, except
for the hum of the big disc drive and the online typewriter’s rattle as it
printed out results and error messages. Neither the light or the temperature ever varied in that white,
windowless room, and it often came as a shock to walk out into the winter
nights into the cold or rain. It made
him wonder if that was the way he’d feel if were waking from a long coma. Sometimes the image of her came to him in
those quiet moments and he thought about what he might say to her, or if there
might be something between them that was beyond words.
One night, he saw her sitting at a library reading room table taking notes on a yellow pad from a book splayed out in front of her. Marco could barely remember crossing the space between them, or what he said to draw her out of the library for a cup of coffee. Nor could he recall exactly what they talked about for the hours between nine and the coffee house’s closing hour. There was only the fact of C.K.’s presence, the soft sound of her vowels, and the way she combed her fingers through the ends of her hair when she spoke to him. And he wondered what her touch would be like. Marco didn’t ask her if there was anyone else in her life. Nor did she ask the same of him. He reached out and put his hand over hers and, when she turned her palm up to encircle his wrist with her fingers, he felt his pulse rise against the warmth of her narrow grip. Later, after they’d made love in the flat that he shared with two other students, they slept. Marco woke in the morning darkness to find her dressed and sitting on the edge of his bed. She leaned down, kissed him and left. He somehow knew that she wouldn’t be back.
Marco
graduated in June. Two mornings later,
he said goodbye to his roommates, threw on his backpack, and walked the ten
blocks to the bus station where he boarded a Greyhound bound for Denver. He planned to spend the rest of the summer in
Boulder, Colorado with a friend and to find a job. As the bus pulled out of the San Jose station
that morning, he wondered about what C.K. might be doing. In his imagination, he saw her wearing a
loose white cotton nightgown, sitting at the kitchen table of the apartment she
shared with her boyfriend, or perhaps her roommates, her unbrushed hair falling
across one side of her face. Her eyes would
be puffy from sleep and her narrow hands would cradle a steaming coffee mug. Perhaps she was remembering her night with him.
As the
bus pulled onto the freeway, Marco allowed the weight of regret dull the edge
of the anticipation he felt at the prospect of a new life in a new place. Yet he knew that the force of regret would not
overcome the inertia carrying him east. He
comforted himself with the thought that her memory would fade with time and that
there would be others to replace her. He
pulled his jacket around him, reclined his seat, and let the sound of the bus’s
engine and the road’s vibration put him to sleep.
Marco
was thirty-eight when he next saw her. He and his wife, a mathematician, had moved
back to California. They’d both landed jobs and put off having children for the
sake of their careers. They bought a
large house, in Campbell, from which they commuted daily to their jobs in two
of the many blossoming start-up companies. He’d gone to lunch with three of his fellow technical writers at a
downtown Italian restaurant when he saw her. Marco didn’t recognize her at first. Her hair, which she’d cut short, was lighter with thin gray streaks and
she was a little heavier. But the shapes
of her eyebrows and the light gray of her eyes were the same. When she said something to the red-headed
woman sitting across from her, Marco couldn’t make out the words, but the sound
of her voice might have been a fragment of a melody that had lodged itself in
his memory. She wore a wedding ring.
Marco
went back to the restaurant alone several times hoping to see her again. He entertained thoughts of talking alone with
her over a glass of wine. He was sure
she’d seen him. But she never
reappeared. For weeks he took to walking
the nearby streets on his lunch breaks hoping to see her. He imagined running into her walking into or
out of one of the downtown office buildings, of calling to her and seeing the
spark of recognition in her eyes. She
would turn and smile and they would stand on the sidewalk talking as the unacknowledged
minutes went by. They would notice the
changes that time had written on their faces, yet the years would fall away
because the night they’d spent together was ageless and stood apart from the time
that had followed and the other people who’d entered their lives.
Marco
thought he saw her once driving past him on Second Street. Another time he followed someone into Allure,
a women’s designer boutique only to find that it wasn’t her.
He
came out of his office building late one night and she was waiting for
him. She led him down Third Street to the
bar that had replaced The Interlude, where she sat across the small cocktail
table from him. She confessed that the
night they’d slept together, she was still involved with the man she later
married and that they’d been going through a bad time. Her husband had been a political science
major and they’d gone to live in Boston where he’d enrolled in a graduate
program. She told Marco that she’d
thought about their brief time together often over the years. She’d never told her husband, whom she loved
because he steadied her and made her feel safer than she’d ever felt. She couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him.
He
told her that he would never forget her and that she would occupy a secret space
in his heart for the rest of his days.
They
parted on the sidewalk outside of the lounge. She embraced him softly and kissed the side of his face. As she walked away Marco was struck by the
gracefulness of her unhurried stride. It had the same ordinariness that she’d
seen in him those many years before.
Seven-and-a-half
years later, as C.K. lay dying of cancer, one of her last visions was that of
the young Marco as he threaded his way between the rows of desks into that
lecture hall. That beautiful ease with
which he moved, like some creature that had briefly given up flight. In that moment she yearned to join him before
he lofted into the air.
Marco never saw nor heard anything of C.K. again. To his wife and two children, he became a steady, dependable presence. His wife, Brenda sometimes wondered at the silences that overtook her husband. There were times, as they laid beside each other she detected a presence behind his eyes, as though he was viewing her through the veil of another time and place. But she surmised that he was seeing her as he had first seen her when she was twenty-seven at a business conference, in Seattle and they had begun talking over their buffet breakfasts in the conference dining room.
As a widower, his children grown and living in far off cities, Marco found himself searching the Internet for the woman he’d briefly known and lost. Not knowing her full name, he came up with nothing. He passed away at the age of seventy-seven with his children by his hospital bed. When he closed his eyes for the last time, he found himself walking beside a petite woman with light colored eyes and dark brown hair. She took his hand in hers and he felt a sudden lightness that lifted him away from the earth.
READ ALSO:
2017 Timberline Prize Awarded to Geronimo Tagatac
You Are Here by Geronimo Tagatac
The Mechanism of Moving Forward by Nikki Alfar - Love Stories Series #1
The Virgin's Last Night by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard - Love Stories Series #3
Cecilia Brainard Fiction: The One-Night Stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair
How I Became a Writer Series
Tags - Philippine authors, Filipino stories, Filipino writers, Philippine literature, Filipino American writer, Filipino American literature, Filipino American short story
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