There Are Two Windows in Our Bedroom

There are two windows in our bedroom. I could throw out my husband or an old lover. Hence, the dilemma.

I was potting my market-bought roses onto the rich, loamy soil of our garden on Tagaytay Mountain. They were bright red and small roses which bristled in the wind. I was leery of the fact they may not survive the coming rains. But I was optimistic.

He came from nowhere. Dis. He is an old lover from a turbulent past I had torn myself from, fled from and married another to settle down to have children and be stable. I admit, I used my family to forget and find my peace. The man I married is Indian, rich and very conservative. He liked that I wasn’t like him at all at the start, but later on, he came to be an authoritarian of sorts, making certain his family of two children and I followed his every rule in his household. He told me to quit my job as a journalist to stay home and I did, he told me to do away with outside help to raise the children and I did, he told me to stop writing at all and I did. I began gardening instead and he scoffed but left me to tend to our garden because there was little else left to do.

I have two girls and together we would play in the garden, stringing sampaguitas onto a thread, fly kites on clear skies, read books lying down on the grass. We did most things in the garden because it was beautiful there. Living on the mountain a few hours from Manila where my Indian husband worked was a bit like living in isolation from him. Mostly it was just the children and I in a house apart from the next neighbor who lived a mile away.

I had driven the children to school and bought some roses in black plastic pots to replant in our garden when Dis appeared from my rear. Dear Dis from his disco, drug addled days looked old and tired. He cam to me with a plant called Mayana he bought at the bus station. He assumed I had a garden and had recovered from our past.

I shook the soil from my hands and received the plant. Smiling, we laughed and blushed. I asked what brought him here.

I wanted to see you, he said, one last time. I am sick you see.

I could see his arms were spotted with lesions and I wondered if he was still injecting drugs but realized he had AIDS. I looked up at him. He is Arab, a bisexual. We had been together when he worked in Manila to shoot models for an advertising firm. He had led a lifestyle that took him around the world but based in Manila and stayed in my apartment. We were lovers when I couldn’t tell the difference between right from wrong. He had numerous lovers though, men, women, bisexuals, queers.

I could tell he loved me the most, otherwise he wouldn’t be here.

I led him inside our tidy home and made him seat on the sofa. I was again, the young party girl who neither knew what was right from wrong. I couldn’t care less if he sat on our sofa or laid down on our bed. All I knew and felt was that he needed me now and I would not reject him. He was possibly dying.

The rains began when I left him to get some warm blanket for he was shivering on my sofa. When I came back, the rains began its torrential beating outside my kitchen window and that I could see he was walking naked in my flower garden. He screamed as the rain ran in slates against his body like blades that cut his skin.

I ran out to get him and brought him in. I covered him with the blanket. That was when my husband, Raj came in with a bunch of groceries. He made one look on Dis and threw the groceries on the floor. He shouted to summon me.

“Who is he? I want him out of the house!”

I ignored him and brought Dis up to our bedroom and made him sit on the bed. Raj ran up to follow us.

As I said, there are two windows in our bedroom. I remember so well the windows.

“Get him out, Linda.” He shouted again.

Dis lay down on our bed and I covered him with our bed’s comforter. He was in shock and was unable to comprehend what was going on.

“No, Raj, you get out! Get out, or I will throw you of the window.” And I meant it.

There are two windows in our bedroom. I could throw one of them out of each. I closed one and left the other open.

“C’mon Raj, jump out of the window and never come back.” I reiterated.

Raj sneered.

“I pulled you out from a life you when you were nothing. Nothing! And you want to throw me out the window? Are you crazed?”

“No. Now leave before I really will.”

Raj sneered again and walked out of our bedroom. I heard his car roar out of the garage. I called my mother to fetch my kids and take them in for the meantime, explaining I had a sick friend over whom I had to take care of.

Days passed. I would take Dis for his chemo at a hospital in Manila and drive back up to our house in Tagaytay. I knew he was dying as he vomited through our urinal and I would hold his head back from dunking into it. He would lie on the cold tiles of our bathroom and I would hold him against my chest rocking him like my own child.

He died, a few months later.

I tightened my sweater about me as I looked through the window where I would not throw Dis out and always kept it shut as I opened the other one where I should have thrown Raj out, just to clear the air in the bedroom.

There are two windows in my bedroom. My kids sleep in another room as I sleep alone in mine. The curtains billow in one of my windows letting in the cold, nippy air of Tagaytay Mountain. I finally know how it is to live alone, not needing anything to erase my past. My past caught up with me and I didn’t care. I had made amends with it. Dis would always remind me that I was never the wrong one in our marriage the way Raj insisted I was. My window to the past had opened and I was not going to close it, ever again.

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