One man at a time
June 28, 2006 | 12:00am
The danger of writing about men – for a writer who is not a man – is in exposing the men one has known, and if that is not trouble, I don’t know what is.
I don’t dare to profess any general opinion of men, anyway, apart maybe from saying that they have the power to make me dizzy, which is no form of judgment one way or another, because any manner of things done with or by men – too much to eat, too much wine, spirited laughter, long car trips, too much huffing and puffing, pregnancy – can give me dizzy spells. Beyond that, I make no conclusions. To say, for example, that men are dorks would be like saying that dogs are Labradors, which is wrong, because I have a poodle, his name is Fluffutus (nickname, Fluffy), and he is as dog as can be. I don’t want to say, as some people certainly do, that men are pigs. In my father’s hometown in Nueva Ecija, pigs are what my aunts feed lovingly every day, and then slit the throats of and roast at the pit when we visit at fiesta.
I had a classmate in graduate school, a married woman with children, who said emphatically that men are stupid. She said it with such conviction that I almost believed her. But no. There are some stupid men out there, certainly, but surely not all men are. Some men of great accomplishments are clueless about little things. I once texted the phrase "nyek nyok" to a man in his 60s, in response to something he said that I didn’t quite agree with. He came back with, "What strange sound was that?" The young turk from UP from whom I had picked up that expression might find my older friend’s question preposterous, but there you are.
I used to think one thing of men: they were knights in shining armor. Once,–this was very long ago–I sat with the boy of my dreams along the cliffs of Loyola Heights, watching the light fade on the Marikina Valley below, when he, whose voice I was dizzyingly in love with, sang me a song. "Born free," he crooned, "as free as a window…" He was not kidding! I was 19 years old, dizzy with laughter. Had I the sense to figure that a man who sees nothing amiss about being born free as a window might well not know where to get metal polish to shine an armor with, I would have jumped off that cliff, pronto. But what did I know?
I suppose my mother’s stories of her wartime romance with my father gave me my funny ideas about knights in shining armor. While there is no doubt in my mind that my father was that brave and intelligent and clear-thinking knight to my mother, I guess it was wrong to suppose – or expect – that all men would be like him. Some men are heroes, while others – well, they’re just not. I learned that the hard way.
A few years after that, I met another man, at work. We would go together to the company’s glass plant in Cavite, he on the wheel and I plastered to the door of the car by my own internal centrifugal force. He would chase after the chickens that were crossing the road and ask, "You want chicken for dinner?" I laughed at him and thought, men are funny, until one day, there were no chickens and he just asked, "You want dinner?" I pretended not to hear. Finally, he turned into a real knight, whose armor was a midnight blue sports car bought for him by his dad. I had gone to Cavite alone on assignment and a storm hit and I was stranded. Despite the storm, he drove alone from Makati on that dangerous night for the sole purpose of picking me up and bringing me home to Quezon City. Now, that made me dizzy with gratitude and all other strange emotions. We had dinners together for the next 12 years – years and years of dizzying surprises, pleasures, annoyances, travels, fights and making up.
When we broke up finally, I suffered vertigo, a dizziness that earned the official stamp of a doctor, who said I had something the matter with my inner ear and that I might be dizzy, now and then, for the rest of my life.
Although my personal sample size (of men, what else?) is quite limited, I have, from my official role as quack psychotherapist to my girl friends, accumulated a lot of man-stories, and I have come to believe, after having known this disturbance called men, that women should look at one man at a time–individually, for each has his own definition, each his own package of mystery and wonder and accumulated trouble. That is, if we care to put our precious analytical and emotional attention to them. (And I don’t know that we have to necessarily.)
Right now I take the men I meet as they are, one man at a time. In any event, I have my dizzy pills and a firm resolve to jump off the cliff exactly when I must.
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