But what really put Monty over the edge, what kept him in Manila through the rainy season and on into the taglamig, was the girl bellhop—the way she winked at him in the lobby, her dimpled cheeks rising, her one bad tooth pricking gently her pink lower lip, her eyes alight with that particular radiance that simply does not exist north of the Tropic of Cancer; the way she stacked luggage on the pushcart with no logic, hat-boxes and handbags wedged under towering stacks of canvas-sided trunks and tanned-leather suitcases, unsteady spires that should have made a structural engineer like Monty seasick, swaying unbalanced but never falling; the way, too, that when she reached for high packages, her maroon uniform rose up and exposed her pearl-button navel, the garment having been cut for a man, without extra cloth in the front to provide for her bust; but perhaps more than anything—the way she made the world’s oldest profession (and porters are indeed entitled to this claim, for even before Sumerian women sold their womanhood, they were made to carry flax and wool) seem not like working but like a game, a thing to be enjoyed for the passing conversation and the happy formality and the satisfaction of lifting heavy bundles in the slowly darkening lobby as the sun set over the peaks of the Cordilleras through the glass double-doors and the smell of cigars and single-malt liquor drifted in from dining room—all of these things were what allowed him to forget Mary and Georgette, to forget his half-finished blueprint of the Madison Bridge trusses, forget the new Briggs & Stratton lawnmower and the Studebaker payments due each month to Washington Bank, to forget Martha’s voice pleading for the hundredth time for him to fix the tiny crack in their bathroom window, creeping slowly through the leaded glass like some nameless blind thing tunneling endlessly through the soil of the earth.