Leaving Auckland (part two)

He was going to visit her in Wellington, he repeated aloud as they drove past houses with grilled windows and dumpsters with graffiti swirls on their lids. He took Maya’s small, slender hand as they both fixed their eyes on the empty streets of West Auckland, reassuring her, when she questioned him, that he meant every word he said.

When she left for Wellington a day after Christmas, he added her on Facebook, and tried to explain to her, when she grilled him about the girl in his profile picture, that Juliette was his former dance partner and nothing more.

“Judith says she’s your ex,” she responded via text.

He had forgotten all about Judith, and about how she and Maya had sequestered themselves in the sunroom at his parents’ Christmas party. As his mother and their guest from California took turns with the videoke microphone, Maya and Judith leaned towards each other on his mother’s wicker sofa, their eyes growing serious the more they spoke. She had gathered her information from shy, mousy Judith whose sliver of a mother hovered behind her whenever she showed up at a party. How could Maya trust the word of a girl who had never left her parents’ home, and knew nothing about the world? Judith was nothing like Maya. Judith was a girl, while Maya was a woman.

“But she was my ex by the time those photos were taken. I use them to promote my dance classes. You have to understand, we were dance partners too.” The picture had been taken in the streets of Buenos Aires at Juliette’s behest, since she wanted to have pictures to show her future grandchildren that she was a tango dancer in her youth. They had broken up by this time, but still danced together, and he was at her disposal for a favor such as this. If they could deceive onlookers into thinking that they were still together, this was because they were professionals. After every dance, he and Juliette returned to being the ex-lovers they were.

“But she’s your ex, and you still had her pictures up when you added me.”

“Baby, just because we were dancing together, doesn’t mean we had feelings for each other. I know that non-dancers don’t understand this, but you have to understand,” he texted, wishing he could say this to her in person instead of allowing his words to speak for themselves.

The photographer Juliette hired in Buenos Aires knew just when to capture a moment of unrehearsed intimacy between them. When they danced they could lose themselves in each other, and he could forget, at least temporarily, that when they were not dancing she was often a closed book, even when yielding, physically, to his wooing. In the end, he was just her dance partner who enjoyed the privilege of dancing with her and nothing more. In the photo he chose for his Facebook page, his lips hovered close to her collarbone as he closed his eyes. Her face was turned away. Whoever looked at the photo only saw the gentle slope of her nape, and her upswept, blonde hair.

Maya said she would think about it. The morning after, they agreed to meet in Wellington.

*

If Maya only knew what his relationship with Juliette had been like, she’d understand that he would never want to go back to Juliette. It only dawned on him, when he started living with Juliette, that Juliette felt for him the way a master felt for her servant, which was why there was always an unwiped stain in the kitchen when they lived together, or a conversation he wasn’t meant to hear. He thought that she would make his world bigger, when she only made him feel small.

However, Juliette did make his world big, if only initially. Growing up with his parents had allowed him to grow accustomed to certain habits of living, and it was when he started going out with Juliette that he saw how uncouth his parents were. She was the first girl he dated who pointed out his mother’s domineering ways to him, and the first girl who corrected his father when the old man tried to impress her with his mistaken assumptions about the French Revolution. She liked good wine, good food, and good music, and the more he brought her to his parents’ house, the more embarrassed he was by what he saw. He was embarrassed by how his mother couldn’t care less about using the word please to turn a command into a polite request, and by how his father made loud sucking sounds at the table even in the presence of guests. As long as he remained tethered to his parents’ lives, his future with Juliette was doomed. Juliette would play cool, registering neither disapproval nor amusement, making him wonder whether she was being polite or whether she simply chose not to be involved.

After he had booked his ticket to Wellington to visit Maya, he felt the ties that bound him to his parents slowly loosening, allowing him to plan, yet again, for a future that neither of his parents laid out for him. If Maya could lay claim to her own life, so could he.

*

While Auckland’s flatness allowed the city’s suburbs to sprawl away from its center, becoming sleepy New Zealand towns in their own right as soon as the Sky Tower disappeared from view, the hills of Wellington pushed its neighborhoods close, gathering the city in one tectonic sweep around a pool of water. Although this wasn’t Paolo’s first trip to Wellington, the city’s cramped geography had never struck him as intimate or accommodating, until this visit. Maya said she would meet him at a bus stop in front of Arty Bees Books on Cuba Street, saying that her apartment was just a ten-minute walk away, and he wondered whether he had caught a glimpse of her building from his plane as it made its abrupt, shaky descent.

“It’s the wind,” Maya texted back, as he sat in the airport bus that took him to the city center. “It’s what makes landing in Wellington so rough. But you arrived on a good day.”

She appeared before him in a lacy summer dress, all dolled up and ready for their first date, and her eyes smiled behind her sunglasses as they walked down Cuba Street, their arms encircled around each other’s waists. “Do you like Malaysian food?” she asked. He said he didn’t mind it, although he hadn’t had Asian food in a long time. In the noisy, cramped restaurant where they found a table, she high fived him, allowing him to bring her hand down to the tabletop, where he stroked her manicured fingers. If all went well, he told himself, she would be his before he flew back to Auckland. Like many Filipino girls, she was shy, and he fondly remembered how they kissed in front of her bedroom door at his parents’ house in Auckland, and how she had whispered in his ear that she wasn’t ready. But she had invited him to lie beside her in her bed that night, which was an indication, however so slight, that she was willing. A Filipino girl would never allow a man she had just met to go this far with her. Unlike the girls in New Zealand he had previously dated, none of whom were Filipino, Maya was the perfect combination of demureness and daring.

As they stepped onto her apartment building’s rooftop deck, he could feel himself breaking through the surface of dream into the reality of an endless Wellington sky. By getting on a plane to visit this girl, he had released himself into the world. She pointed at the Victorian timber homes built on hills that rose around them, while he spotted a ferry entering the harbour, leaving a trail of foam in its wake. Although he knew little about this city, he was with Maya, and with her he was safe. He lifted her doll-like face towards his and kissed her, delighted by the fact that he was a head taller than her. He could lift her easily and swing her around if he wanted to. This he did, and her screams rang above the city’s rooftops.

He brought her back to the ground and squeezed her again. Just as she pulled away, asking him if he wanted to see more of the city, he pulled her back into his arms and said, “Not so fast.” He had traveled this far to be with her, and wasn’t going to let go of her that quickly. “We aren’t in a hurry,” he said, as she pursed her lips and looked at him with mock resistance. He could tell that she liked her independence, but he had to convince her that in his arms, she was safe.

“How are your parents?” he asked, as they walked down Cuba Street, past galleries, restaurants, and vintage clothing shops, in the direction of Oriental Bay.

“They’re fine,” she said, and after a silence added, “Actually my mother’s not talking to me.”

“Is it because of me?”

“It’s because I told her about your Facebook pictures before you explained things to me, and when I told her afterwards that I accepted your explanation, she stopped talking to me.” She frowned. “Don’t worry. She does that a lot.”

She made it sound as though her mother’s silence was easy for her to take, but how could it be, when she was an only child, living alone in a foreign land? He had never intended to isolate Maya from her family, and he could tell, by the way her eyes darted away from him, that she was putting on a brave face.

“She compared me to my cousin who took her husband back after he cheated on her. I told her I’m not my cousin.” Her eyes mourned as she laughed. “I disappoint her.”

“This is all my fault.”

“No it’s not. It’s my fault for telling them about our problems before we resolved them. You have pictures with other dancers, don’t you? I told her this, she said she hoped it wasn’t just some lame excuse.”

He hadn’t lied to her, if he were to be honest with himself—when those pictures were taken, there was nothing between him and Juliette.

“How’s your mum?” she asked, her face brightening up.

“She sends her regards.”

“Wow,” Maya said, laughing. “We can’t escape her, can we.”

“Yes we can,” he said, draping his arm around her shoulder as they waited for a pedestrian light to change. “We’ve already gotten away,” he whispered into her ear.

They spent the rest of their walk talking about his mother’s new guests, Filipino construction workers involved in the Christchurch rebuild who had left their wives and children behind in the Philippines, whose collective loneliness hung over their home like a cloud until his mother bought them a cartful of beer. One of these workers had gotten so drunk that he wandered outside and was found asleep underneath a tree the next day. Paolo didn’t take it against Maya when she laughed at these stories, since he wanted to make her laugh, but she soon turned serious as the conversation turned to his mother. “She may have been nice to those blokes, but she wasn’t too nice to me. She asked if I came here because I wasn’t making it as a writer in the States,” she said, raising an eyebrow in annoyance. “And whether I had gotten scholarships to study in the States because they like Asians, the way universities supposedly do here. When I told her that I’ve published my work in the States, she just laughed.”

He was familiar with his mother’s put downs, having been subjected to these himself after choosing to pursue dancing professionally, but he was caught off guard by Maya’s story. His mother had probably sensed that Maya had a little more spirit than the other girls who came to visit them, and had attempted to put her in place. “I didn’t know this. I’m sorry.”

“It was horrible. It would’ve been the worst Christmas of my life if not for you.”

“She’s not normally like that with intellectuals, that I can assure you.” They had entertained guests in the past who, like Maya’s parents, were professors in the Philippines, but these were older men and women whose titles alone insulated them from criticism. Maya was much younger and, perhaps in his mother’s opinion, just a lowly librarian with grandiose aspirations. While his mother, a university department secretary, spoke about these professors in reverential terms, Maya, to her, was just a child.

“She probably thinks you’re like her daughter which is why she’s giving you unsolicited advice. I know it sucks, because she does that to me too.”

She laughed. “And I’m making it worse by dating you.”

He pinched her waist. “Come on, she’s not here. We don’t even have to talk about her.”

His skin began to burn underneath the harsh sun as they made their way to the bay, and they found an empty bench near a swath of sand where men and women sunbathed, while children, holding their parents’ hands, waded into the water. “You’re a lot like them,” he said, gesturing with his head towards the half-dressed Kiwis roaming the beach. “You like the sun. A Filipino would run for cover.”

“Because they don’t want to be dark,” she said, resting a bare arm behind his back.

“You’re such a white girl,” he said, laughing. Since she was wearing sunglasses, he couldn’t tell whether she was insulted or amused by what he had just said. “You speak like an American, and you like the sun.”

“And you like that?” There was an edge to her voice that he hoped to soften with flattery.

“You’re the first Filipina I’ve dated,” he said.

“How come?”

“You’re just different,” he said, brushing away her hair from her face.

“You probably haven’t met that many Filipinas.”

“I have. And they’re not like you.”

“So you’ve just dated white girls all this time?”

“Pretty much.”

“I’m the opposite. I don’t date white guys.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the ones who dated me had a fetish for Asian girls.” She rested her head on his shoulder.

“If it’s any comfort, a girl once called me her caveman.” He didn’t tell her which girlfriend this was, for he was with Maya now, and it no longer mattered.

“Oh my God.”

“And I’ve had the parents of my exes say things to me that weren’t nice.”

“I went on two dates with one white guy in the States. On our second date, he asked if I’d be working in a factory had I stayed in the Philippines. He seemed to find it sexy.”

“What the fuck.”

She draped her arms around his shoulders and said, “It was horrible. It would’ve been worse if we had sex. He pressured me, and I said no.”

“You should be proud.”

“I’m just glad I’m with you.”

 Their conversation at the beach had given them a sense of comradeship that could result in physical intimacy, if handled correctly. They returned to her apartment, and as he sat at her kitchen table, watching her prepare tea, he looked at the stairs that led to her loft, and had an idea. He would sweep her off her feet, literally.  

She hadn’t yet finished her cup of tea when he rose from his seat and lifted her from her chair. She smiled as she relaxed into his arms, and let her hands rest on his nape. For a split second, he held her above her thrift store couch before making a turn for the stairs, and a look of fear crossed her face as she asked, “Aren’t we going for the couch?”

He grinned as he carried her to her loft. It was a romantic gesture, and she was probably impressed by his strength. He hadn’t scared her—she was just surprised.

She allowed him to unzip her dress and pull down her cotton panties, and moaned loudly when he went down on her, as though she hadn’t had sex in ages. As she lay on her bed, naked, she looked away as he pulled on a condom. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

She gave a start. “Nothing.”

Had he known she was a virgin, he would’ve taken his time. It came as a surprise to him, after having heard her proclaim, as they lay in bed in his parents’ house, that virginity was a myth. After he failed to enter her, she turned away, cried, and admitted to him that he was her first. As he cradled her in his arms, she called herself a freak, and he wanted to shake her for belittling this gift she had just offered to him. “It’s not such a big deal,” he said. “In fact, I’m honored.”

“Really?”

She was a child, and rather than being revolted, he found her innocence endearing.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She was, in the true sense of the word, his. She insisted, rather vehemently, that she wasn’t saving herself for marriage, and it was clear, by the way things had transpired between them, that she was unafraid of sex. “I just wanted to do it with a guy I liked,” she said. She had seen the world, and yet she chose him.

*

Dancing had taught him that if he were to understand how to put a woman at ease, he would have to observe the way she moved. At the Tango milongas he led in Auckland, too many men thought that leading a woman meant pushing her too far, when a good leader listened to a woman’s body, connecting with her as he led her across the dance floor. Women insisted on dancing with him at the weekly milongas he hosted because he made them feel comfortable, and they all found him nice.

With women he had been unusually lucky, and he attributed this to his willingness to listen. Giving a woman what she wanted was all about earning her trust and becoming the partner she wanted him to be. He had learned, over the years, that women couldn’t resist having a man who was at their beck and call. They brought their defenses down, clinging to him long after his love for them had expired.

 When he met Juliette at the University of Auckland Tango Club, she knew exactly how he wanted to lead her, and her body moved as though it were a complete extension of his. Her eyes betrayed neither excitement nor disapproval as they danced, and afterwards, as they spoke, her smile was just enough to disturb the calm surface of her face without giving too much away. She had a foreign accent, and when he asked where she was from, he learned that she was an exchange student from France. “You’re a good dancer,” she said, in a low voice. She made it seem as though she rarely gave out these compliments, being a skilled dancer herself who had danced with many partners before. He could sense a connection between them, or at least the potential for one.

She had chosen New Zealand for her overseas year, she said, because it seemed so different from what she was accustomed to. New Zealand’s landscapes, she said, felt too breathtaking to be real. And yet his world, consisting of university, dancing, and his home life, was small compared to hers. He was unashamed to throw himself at her feet, showing up at her dorm to deliver a bouquet of roses, engaging her in conversations about French culture whenever they went out for coffee after dancing. She seemed to enjoy the attention, for she didn’t turn him down, and yet he could sense that she wasn’t easily won over. Did she truly enjoy his company, or was it the attention he lavished upon her that she found difficult to refuse? With her he could never tell, but perhaps she would reveal herself to him once he won her over.

Even when they finally made love in her dorm room, she wore the same smile on her face that betrayed nothing except amusement. She looked into his eyes as he entered her, guiding him in, and gasped when he hit a sweet spot, laughing as though she approved. He had gotten this far with her, and all he needed now was for her to open up and take him in.

*

“My father once said he was worried that I’ve lived overseas for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be Filipino,” Maya said, as they sat in a pizza parlor just outside her apartment building. This was his second visit, and the drizzle outside cast a haloed veil over the busy stretch of Cuba Street.

“Do you think you have?” Paolo asked. She had left the Philippines as an adult, and while he could understand her desire to return, it was hard for him to know for sure if he felt the same way. 

“Yes and no. When I lived with my parents for a year before coming here, I really felt like I’d changed. Things just weren’t the way they used to be.”

“When I first met you, you didn’t seem Filipino at all to me.”

“That makes me sad.”

He took her hand, which fit snugly inside his palm. “What I meant was that you’re different. If you were like the other Filipinas I’ve met, you wouldn’t be as fascinating.”

“How am I so different?” The look on her face wasn’t confrontational, but her eyes sought an explanation.

“You’re open-minded. You have your own opinions. Heck, you don’t believe the things that Filipinos usually believe in.”

“Like church?”

“Yes, like church. And saving yourself for marriage.”

She smiled. “Why should I believe that crap?”

“See? You don’t believe things simply because someone told you to believe in them.”

She pursed her lips in thought and said, “Unfortunately, that’s very Filipino, no?”

“But whenever I visit you, I feel like I’m coming home,” he said, drawing her closer to him. In this city, only Maya could remind him why he was here. Her boxy, narrow apartment, where they cooked meals, made love, and talked about the motherland, felt like home. Wellington, with its narrow streets and Edwardian facades, served to remind him that it was impossible for him to merge his personal history with Wellington’s stony, ancient geography. Auckland constantly reinvented itself, welcoming immigrants like his parents to redefine its bland, sprawling landscape, while Wellington, the nation’s capital, held fast to a sense of Englishness that failed to speak to him, no matter how long he had lived in this country.

“I mean that. I only want to be with you,” he said.

She smiled at his hand, and squeezed it back. 

After they made love in her loft for the second time that day, she rested her head on his chest and said, “Tell me how you became a dancer.”

He often surprised himself by how vividly he could remember his childhood. He told her about how, when he was five years old, he and other children of staff members at the university where Maya’s parents were professors were made to sing and dance to I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus at a staff Christmas party. He joked that the performance ruined his childhood, since he was unable to get the image of his mother kissing a white man in a Santa suit out of his head. However, he enjoyed performing in front of people, and when his family immigrated to New Zealand, he was often asked to dance at Filipino parties, where he quickly became a star. 

He was socially awkward at school and struggled with his English for years, but whenever he danced, whether it was with a girl or in front of an audience, people quickly forgave him. “It was the one thing I was good at,” he said, as they lay in bed, watching the drizzle outside turn into a full-on downpour. “Sometimes I’m not sure whether it’s a career or a hobby. I have to get a real job soon, use that qualification I earned at uni. One can’t be a dancer forever. The body surrenders eventually.”

“That’s the same way I feel about my writing,” she said. “I sometimes wonder whether it’s a career or a hobby. But it keeps me connected to home, which is probably why I keep doing it.”

“But you still chose to live abroad,” he said, fondling her breasts.

“I’m free here,” she said, smiling. “I don’t get judged for being an unmarried woman writer here. But it’s hard too. I get lonely a lot.”

“I wish I could come home to you more often.”

She kissed his shoulder. “You could move here if you want. But I’m not asking for it.” Or maybe she was.

*

He and Juliette were perfect for each other on the dance floor. They could read each other’s minds, and their bodies spoke the same language. Together they joined dance competitions, and his mother videotaped their performances, screening them for the never-ending blur of guests who showed up at their doorstep for food and company. Although his mother barely spoke to him, she shared his achievements with her friends as though they were hers as well. And they were, for her choice to move her family to New Zealand years ago had given him the freedom to pursue a life he enjoyed. Ashamed as he was to admit this, he was sure that without his mother, he would have been no different from the new immigrants who came to visit her, having studied nursing or a technical course back home, knowing that they could only gain admission into this country if they assumed a particular role that was tailored for all of them.

After watching his dance videos, the women asked: are you involved with each other? How can you touch each other so intimately without having feelings for each other? He couldn’t give them any categorical answers, since the relationship that had developed between him and Juliette outside the dance studio was difficult to define. They were dance partners, he told his mother’s guests. Nothing more.

But when Juliette finally agreed to be his date at a Filipino gathering, he knew she was his, or at least she would be in the eyes of his relatives and friends. She wore a white pantsuit that was neither too formal nor inelegant, and was cool but polite as he introduced her to the elders, to his childhood friends. She ignored the men as they stared at her, and she treated the women with civility as she took the hands they offered her and let go. They all stood at a respectful distance from her whenever she graced their gatherings, too shy to initiate conversation or ask if she liked what she had just eaten (she always ate like a bird at these parties). They had little else to talk about with her, having always kept to their tiny community that nurtured their petty grievances, their shallow, insular talk. 

At the expatriate parties she brought Paolo to, he learned that introducing himself as a tango dancer to strangers always worked as a conversation starter. He leant a sympathetic ear to these expatriates from South America and Europe when they complained about the dearth of culture in Auckland. There is so much natural beauty in this country, they all said, but it’s so lacking in culture! When they learned that he and Juliette were dance partners, they all suggested that the pair visit Buenos Aires, the birthplace of Tango. So much corruption, but so much culture, they’d say, proceeding to compare all the cities they had visited like gourmands comparing fine, exotic wines. Paolo isn’t just my dance partner, Juliette told them. When she introduced him as her caveman, he laughed along with them, just to show that he could take a joke.

“Don’t you see that she’s just playing around with you?” his childhood friend, Daniw, asked him after cornering him at a Filipino gathering that Juliette was unable to attend. Although he and Daniw had been close friends since their years at Catholic boys’ college, having banded together with other Filipino boys for protection, Daniw knew nothing about his current life, and was clutching on to the last vestiges of their shared youth by offering unsolicited advice. Daniw had never dated a French girl, had never, in fact, expanded his horizons beyond the boxing classes he took at a West Auckland gym, so how was he to know what was good for Paolo? Perhaps Daniw knew, deep inside, that Juliette would never give him the time of day, what with his acne scars and his coarse, guttural manners.

“You’re just jealous,” was all Paolo could say.

“As you wish, loverboy,” Daniw said, rubbing his pudgy nose as though to relieve a deep-seated irritation. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He expected Daniw to give him the cold shoulder when he called two years later, after having learned from Juliette that she had cheated on him with a coworker at a French café. “I thought you ought to know,” was all she could say to him, before she left the apartment they shared for her shift. Left alone to contemplate her words, he punched a wall and broke a few knuckles. Daniw drove him to the hospital, and as Paolo sat beside his childhood best friend, he was unashamed to cry.

*

“They’re all children. Thirteen years old, twelve years old, three months old, all dead on the same day,” Paolo said. It was a warm February day, and the cries of seagulls pierced the clear silence around them, reminding him of how far away they were from the city as he and Maya stood at the gate of a small cemetery on Somes Island.

“Sad, isn’t it,” Maya said, leaning forward to get a closer look. “They came all the way from England with their parents, just to die here.” According to the placard, the island had once been a quarantine station where many new immigrants died of the Spanish flu.

“Disease often claims the most vulnerable,” he said. “Imagine what their parents would’ve felt.”

“If their parents survived.”

“Yeah.”

This was a cemetery for children, he realized, looking at the ages of the dead. Like them, he was a child when he arrived in New Zealand with his family, and although his journey did not end with his death, he began to feel a strange pang of envy as he stood before their graves, as though the end of his childhood deserved some form of commemoration. When he and Maya were at the supermarket the previous day, Maya had asked him if he had ever liked gummy bears. Her father bought them for her all the time when she was a child growing up in the States, she said. Paolo winced, remembering a bag of gummy bears that a kind uncle had to given him as a parting gift to eat on the flight to Auckland. It was his first time to fly, and he finished the entire bag of gummy bears on the plane before throwing up into a sick bag.

These children had tombstones, while all he had was a lingering medicinal taste of gummy bears on his tongue.

The island trail took them through swaths of native bush. That’s a native cicada, he said, pointing at an insect with green flecks on its back. Maya had never seen a cicada before, and let out a childish “eww” before he nudged her towards the tree trunk where the insect was perched and grunted, “What eww? It’s just a cicada!” He handed her a Taupata berry, telling her it wasn’t poisonous, and he popped one into his mouth when she hesitated to prove he wasn’t joking. He plucked off a leaf from a kawakawa bush, and asked her to chew it, to savor its smoky spiciness. Studying ecology at university had brought him closer to his adopted land when he found its inhabitants difficult to befriend.

“Has your mum talked to you yet?” Paolo asked, as he and Maya rested on a bench, eating their packed lunch.

“Not yet,” Maya said, before she bit into a chicken and avocado croissant sandwich he had made for her that morning. “This is delicious, by the way.”

“I feel so bad for driving them away.”

She chewed on her food and said, “They don’t know you, that’s why. Once they meet you, they’ll know how wonderful you are.” She snuggled up beside him, and rested her head on his shoulder. “She’ll come around. I know this from experience.”

She was carrying on as though it didn’t bother her at all, and yet a few days ago she had called him, crying because she missed her mum. I’ll be there soon, he said on the phone. I love you. He was her family now, whether he liked it or not.

“They know I’m an adult. I can do whatever I like with my life.”

“If only I were as brave as you.”

“How do you mean?”

He laughed. “What I meant is that I can’t imagine myself living alone like you, in a foreign country, and carrying on without hearing from your parents when you’ve been close to them for so long.”

“Don’t worry. It’s just my mum, and besides I have you.”

“If only I could afford to come here more often, I would.”

“Long distance is so hard.”

“It doesn’t have to be long distance forever. I know you said you could move to Auckland and find a job there, but it would make more sense if I moved here.” He took a swig from his water bottle, swallowed, and said, “I have to move out of my parents’ house sometime.”

“You don’t have to do it for me.”

“No, it’s for me too. I have to leave Auckland sometime.” He still felt like a foreigner in Wellington, but he trusted Maya to ease his transition. If she could bravely live alone, perhaps he too could make that final step away from his prolonged youth.

“We aren’t like other Filipinos who are opposed to living together before marriage,” he said.

Her face brightened. “You could teach dance classes here.”

“Or use my uni qualification to get a job in government.”

After finishing their sandwiches, they trekked towards the island’s summit, where he asked Maya to tell him the names of the fog-capped suburbs of Wellington that he could see from their vantage point. In time, or after a few more visits, he would know which suburb was best for the life they were beginning to plan. But for now they could behold the city from a distance, allowing the silence of the island to insulate them from the complications of the lives they had left behind. Maya had a life to return to in Wellington, while Paolo had her. Wasn’t that enough reason for him to move to Wellington to be with her? He tried to push his misgivings aside as he took her hand and led her back to the summit’s flank, where a network of World War II bunkers had once been built in the event of a Japanese air raid. When they found a cobwebbed room for themselves underground, he pulled off her t-shirt and sucked at her small, pert breasts. As his lips traveled downwards, he told himself that the woman he loved was giving herself to him on this island, whether or not he abandoned his life in Auckland to live with her in faraway Wellington. 

*