The silence continued all the way in the car as he drove her to school, and was broken twice, very briefly, by a grievance that was mounting by the day. The car had stopped at a traffic junction that faced a row of rundown shophouses that would soon be demolished to make way for a shopping mall. In an unguarded sharing of secrets very early in their marriage, she had pointed out one of the shophouses as the scene of a silly girlhood romance, where a young man named Kuldeep Singh used to take her for ice cream after school. Her husband had said nothing then, but retrospective jealousy, summoning back the past for present accounting, could be even more fearsome. Thereafter, each time the car stopped at the traffic junction in full view of the offensive house, she would look down, to her left through the car window, into her handbag, anywhere but in the direction of the shophouse, aware of the sideways glance that he was casting at her. Every small act of hers became a test of wifely propriety, subjected to the merciless analysis of a love turned forensic.
That morning, her thoughts being very far away, her eyes inadvertently rested on the forbidden object of the shophouse; worse, the thoughts suddenly took a turn for tender recollection as in her mind appeared an image of herself and Kuldeep Singh in their school uniforms, perched on high stools at the ice cream bar, foreheads almost touching as they sipped, through two long straws, a single glass of ice cream soda. Kuldeep had confessed to being completely broke, but a riffling of the pocket of his uniform, and then of hers, had produced a small handful of coins that was enough to pay for one soda. Out in the bright sunshine, Kuldeep suddenly had an idea, his eyes shining with mischief. He pulled out a small penknife from his pocket.
‘See, I’m leaving a mark of remembrance of our happy day.’ He carved a large X sign on a corner of the wall near the bar entrance, and had another idea. ‘Come here,’ he said to her. ‘Here, hold the penknife. Like this. Now I’m holding your hand, and we carve together.’
He was duplicating the supreme wedding moment when, in smiling union, groom and bride cut the bridal cake together. ‘You’re crazy,’ she giggled but complied. ‘Look out,’ she hissed, and they fled. The sign could still be seen, twenty-three years later.
The tiny smile at the recollection had escaped too quickly for her to stop it. Her husband said, ‘What was that smile about?’
There was a vast stock of student howlers that she could resort to, and she said, ‘I was just thinking of that awful student I told you about, Maggie, and her atrocious grammatical mistakes –’, and hated herself for the lie. The stock was cooperatively inexhaustible but was rapidly losing its usefulness.
Her husband said again, more pointedly, ‘What was that smile about?’ and she lapsed into wordless misery which, in the few minutes before they arrived at her school, became large tears filling her eyes. She made no attempt to wipe them off.
‘What are you crying about?’ he said, in the closest to a snarl that his habitual politeness would allow. ‘One would think that it’s you who’s the victim in this marriage.’
At the school gate, as she got out of the car, the tears having been hurriedly blinked back, she made a feeble attempt at normalcy. She said, ‘There’ll be a staff meeting that will probably last two hours or longer. I’ll be late home. Shall I call you at your office?’ and he said, ‘You do whatever suits you,’ and drove off.
That night the lovemaking was horrible for the intrusion of the afternoon’s jealous suspicion which worked itself into what seemed like a manic reclamation of her body. It ended in a wash of self-pity, as he whimpered, rolling off her, ‘If I don’t satisfy you, you can go back to that Sikh boyfriend of yours.’ He was not done. He took the bathos of self-pity to the histrionics of desperate self-abasement, comparing his small build to the amazing, ethnic-joke proportions and prowess of the Sikh, then of the Caucasian male, and cried out, repeatedly and tearfully, ‘Tell me the truth; after your Kuldeep, after your Brother Philip, am I a disappointment?’
If she feared a coldly judgemental husband, she was repelled by an abjectly whimpering one. Her marriage had become pure grotesquerie. She got up, rushed to the bathroom, closed the door and expelled her revulsion, which came out in a swift stream, into the toilet bowl.
The bathroom, scene of so many private miseries, had become her most dependable room. Affinity between a lost person seeking protection and an inanimate object offering it could actually grow: in the early hours of a morning, she had sat on the cover of the toilet seat for a full hour, frantically working on the setting of an examination paper due the next morning for the school typist to type and print out. On another occasion, still secure in her hiding place, she had gone through, for the second time, a marvelous story a student in the creative writing class had submitted, and written a whole page of encouraging comments. Both times, thankfully, her husband was still peacefully sleeping when she completed the job and climbed silently back into bed.
The accidental meeting with Kuldeep in a restaurant some weeks later could not have come at a worse time. They were sitting at a table, looking at the menu, and he was telling her about a special project that the admired Dr Phang was entrusting him with over the heads of at least two senior officers. He was in a good mood and summoned the waiter to ask if he could make a special order for his wife’s favourite pork rib soup that was not on that evening’s menu.
Then Kuldeep strode up to her, bellowing, ‘Hey, Maria Seetoh! Do you remember me? Imagine meeting you after all these years!’
Of course she remembered him, at once seeing the handsome beaming confidence superimposed upon the schoolboy’s scrawny limbs and untidy uniform. She greeted him joyfully, not daring to return the effusive hug, and instantly turned to her husband to introduce him. ‘This is my husband, Bernard.’
But Kuldeep’s attention was all for her. ‘Hey, Maria, you are as pretty as ever! What are you doing now – we must meet to catch up with all the news and gossip – I am now with Carlton and Wu –’ His genuine joy in seeing her, his eagerness to let her in on his good fortune of an eminently happy marriage blessed with three sons and a senior position in one of Singapore’s most prestigious law firms, completely obliterated her husband nearby, now dangerously glowering. ‘Here’s my card, give me your phone number, we really must catch up,’ said the irrepressible Kuldeep and left.
In a second he was back, exclaiming, ‘Hey, do you remember the X sign we made that day on the wall of The Rendezvous Bar? Remember, we had to run away real fast!’ He turned to Bernard, speaking to him for the first time, needing a larger audience for the happy recounting of the past: ‘We were crazy! We cut the sign, holding hands like a pair of idiots.’ Roaring with laughter, he turned to face Maria again and said, ‘You know what? It’s still there – we must go back to have a look – we really must catch up –’ He had completely ruined the evening for them. They ate the rest of their dinner in silence.
The next day she made use of the two free periods in between classes to go to the library where, under the pretext of consulting some reference book, she could take deep breaths, calm down and organise her thoughts and feelings into some coherent pattern. She had reached a point in her marriage when something had to happen, to rescue her from it. The cage, the net, the bell jar, the dark cave from which no shackled prisoner could escape into the sunlight – all were feeble images for her desperation for release.
At the centre of the tumult was a tiny, tremulous hope: suppose her husband realised that he could not go on in the marriage and decided that a divorce was best? His strong Catholicism forbade that, but suppose his need to be happy was stronger? Beyond the shock of his fellow churchgoers, the parish priest Father Rozario, her friends and, above all, her mother, would be all happiness for her. She would wear the scandal like a badge because it announced the opening of her brave new world.
There were some Catholic couples in the parish who had separated, were no longer living together, but who continued to be devout Catholics. Separation which would still mean the continuance of that hateful MRS would also mean the end of a hateful life. She did not have the strength or courage to initiate the move, but suppose he, coming to the end of the marital tether, did?
A coward’s wish. She told her students stirring stories of honesty and courage, and in the privacy of her imagination, the coward’s dream played out, one after the other. So: her husband told her they had best live separately, even if the church did not allow them to divorce; her husband managed to convince Father Rozario that they had married under unacceptable circumstances leaving the church authorities no choice but to accept the reason of non-consummation to dissolve the marriage; her husband had found another woman whom he loved deeply and truly, and quietly made arrangements for their separate lives, even paying for her to do her postgraduate degree course at the Singapore University. Each scenario ended with her saying, ‘Thank you,’ in profound gratitude.
The coward could be capable of self-blame. Too late, yet so soon, she had realised the great injustice she had done him in marrying him. She never loved him, not when she married him, not afterwards. It was possible – a modern, educated, intelligent woman marrying a man even when she did not love him, and thereafter drifting along in a one-sided marriage with all the passion on his side, and all the regret on hers. The modern woman’s mother or grandmother had had no choice; she abused hers and then found she had to live with the consequences.
She remembered a survey in which three quarters of the women surveyed stated that if divorced or widowed, they would never marry again. Some gave the most ridiculous reasons for getting married in the first place, the most common being the desirability of the married state itself. I wanted children. I wanted to get away from over-strict parents. I was tired of society labelling me a spinster. All my girlfriends had already got married. It seemed the right and necessary thing for a woman to do.
She had a girlfriend who decided to get married because she had won a beautiful bridal dress in a competition run by a woman’s magazine, another because the man had a car whereas the other two suitors had only motorcycles, yet another because as a single woman she would not have qualified to buy a government-subsidised flat that she very much desired. She knew of women who got married because they could no longer tolerate the inevitable nosiness of aunts during the Chinese New Year season when unmarried women, regardless of age, were still strictly entitled to receive the traditional gifts of money, ‘So when I see you next year, will you be giving instead of receiving ang pows?’
There were any number of substitutes for love, revealed by the survey. I was grateful to him because he had helped pay for my university education. He was the handsomest boy in our group and one day he asked me to marry him, and everyone was so jealous! We were dating for eleven years and one day he said to me, ‘We should get married before my grandmother passes away.’ He was fantastic in bed! He bought me the most beautiful engagement ring from Hong Kong. He was only one of two persons to get a first class degree from the university, and was offered a scholarship to do a PhD.
All the absurd causes of her husband’s annoyance and displeasure occurring almost on a daily basis – the porridge, his futile calls to her in school, her forgetfulness about this or that, Mr Chin, Brother Philip, her creative writing class, her meetings with the publisher, the shoes not polished right, a wrong telephone call, anything at all – they were laughably trivial, and under different circumstances could have had the opposite effect of creating lively husband-wife raillery. A pet cat fussed over, a little plant lovingly tended – her husband would have crushed them underfoot for taking away the love that should be his. In the absence of love in a marriage, anything could be a trigger for its grievance.
For three years, he had laboured under that grievance. If hate was the other side of love’s coin, then his was a huge disc, daily flashed at her, glinting with menace. She told herself she did not, would not, could not love him, astonished at the full range of the brutal auxiliaries. What had she done to him? Within a year, his placid countenance had hardened into a rictus of cynicism and frustration unsoftened even in sleep.
He was exacting a price, and she was ready to pay it. She had done injury to the sacred institution itself, and should, at the least, accord it future respect by never marrying again. If she wanted a new life, completely free of falsehood and all that it brought of confusion, pain and shame, a life as radiant with joy, pride and certainty, as it was now dark with deceit and torment, she would have to begin with nothing less than kneeling before him with a devastating confession of the truth and bow her head to the thunderbolts of his wrath. As he once knelt before her to declare the fullness of his love, she would, by the same ultimate gesture, nullify and void hers. As she was clearer in writing than in speech, she might write him a letter, a very long one, to systematically apologise for the wrongs over three years, beginning with the supreme one of agreeing to marry him. All the others had simply flowed from it. It would not matter if every word in the letter became a bitter pill forced into her mouth, to cleanse her heart of its ills, her soul of its darkness, so that she could rise to a new brightness.
She had once read a story of a woman who was so unhappy in her marriage that she wanted to run away with a man whom she met when she was thirty years old and who became her secret lover. But fear – of her husband, their relatives, his friends, her friends, society at large – held her back; she said goodbye to the lover and continued in her loveless, soulless marriage till her death, thirty years later. Upon her death, she had the following epitaph inscribed on her tombstone: ‘She died at thirty, and was buried at sixty.’
In her life she was to look many times, with fearful, honest eyes, into the embarrassing truths about herself. With missionary zeal, even from childhood, she had set out her life’s shining goal – to be a really good, a really happy person – and then floundered all the way. Be honest, be authentic, be yourself, she urged her students, and herself turned away from the mirror of the myriad painful truths of her marriage. When she summoned enough courage to do so, they became her own small humbling lights on her own personal road to Damascus.
Did you ever love me? Why did you marry me? At the very end, she was forced to tell the truth: I felt sorry for you. Pity was the least acceptable substitute for love. No man would accept it. He flung it back at her. His pride rose to reject it as a lie. He did not, would not, could not believe her. But by then it was too late.