Over Beers

There we were, hunched over our sisig and chicharon bulaklak, and nursing our beers like a couple of co-conspirators plotting the downfall of an absent drinking buddy. Or maybe two people in the midst of an illicit affair having a clandestine date. We certainly didn't look like parents discussing the household budget or child discipline issues. Not your a typical mom-and-pop operation, it looked like.

I was picking up the tab this time, having received some modest remuneration from one of my freelance writing gigs. When he called me earlier that afternoon, he sounded tired and throaty, and I thought I'd liven up our Friday night with a visit to one of our usual haunts. He didn't sound like he cared: head straight home and drop off to sleep, or down a couple of beers and exchange a few rare words with his Aifee.


But it was one of the unusual times I was offering to pay, and not wanting to miss this goldmine of an opportunity, my skinflint of a husband readily acquiesced.


So there we were, on our second bucket of San Mig Lites. We had wound our way through spirited discussions about the boys and work, wistful forays into the possibilities of our dream-home-to-be, and the inevitable summing up of income and expenditures.


We had finally come to the point where I was silent, chin propped on one palm, listening to him talk and talk and talk. His eyes, already silty to begin with, were at half-mast. With a lopsided smile on his face, he was yakking his face off and falling halfway towards drunk.


Funny how time has tweaked a good number of things. When I met him, he had a full head of hair, a golden tan, and an ego that rivalled some of the worst monsoon winds I have ever come across. These days he goes around saying I am partly responsible for his obscenely widening forehead. Years of slaving away at the bank have leached away most of the colour of his skin. And the ego? It's about the only thing that remains constant, it seems, except it has died down to a moderate gale.


Standing up in the middle of a watery belch, he wended his way towards the men's room, changing course midway and tromping off into the parking lot greenery where he bent over and regurgitated the contents of his stomach in between the company car and a blue Toyota SUV. My elegant and dignified banker, Atch.


As he walked back to the table with a vapid grin on his face, I was struck by how very fragile he looked in his rumpled uniform barong and his glasses slightly askew on his oily nose. Wasn't it only yesterday when he strode so confidently and energetically toward me with his arm stretched out imperiously for me to latch on? Didn't he half carry, half drag me on board a ferry at the ungodly hour of 4am for the trip back across the strait after we partied at a bacchanalian wedding feast and consumed Lord knows how many bottles of beer/whisky/wine? He steered, he directed, he commanded, and I practically kowtowed to this diminutive alpha male. A man now pale and bemused, looking old and tired. My husband.

Mrs. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I paid the bill and we drove home in silence, his gear-shift hand resting on mine. The years may have been kind, but never before now did our mortality – his mortality, loom so close before my eyes. The realization gave me pause for thought and I shivered. And in the car's frigid air, his hand tightened over mine.