Winnie’s wedding was the only bright spot in a vast desolation of broken, bleeding hearts.
Having made up her mind never to see Dr Phang again, Maria yet waited eagerly for his call for their next meeting. Women were ever Marys who were quite contrary, running away from men, running to them. The last meeting would have to have something of closure and finality about it. She was determined for it to be in the public setting of the Bon Vivant Café or a restaurant, not the dark isolated area of parked cars outside the Botanic Gardens, where, under the combined influence of a beguiling ambience and the man’s unfailing charm, she might succumb once more and agree to a love tryst in a hotel room. Their last meeting, after which they would never see each other again, should leave her pride intact, her good spirits restored, her peace of mind assured. Above all, the honesty she never wanted to lose in herself because she valued it so much in others should remain protected. She had been carried away by whatever romantic follies that sometimes overpowered common sense and decency in even the most sensible woman, but had been saved in time, ironically, by that most toxic of all human emotions: jealousy. One day, she thought, she might even say to the fearsome monster acknowledged in song and literature, thank you, you saved me. Right now, she could only cry out, enough, enough of the pain and anger.
Rehearsed speeches,in her experience with Bernard, had been a dismal failure, but she felt they would succeed with the amiable Dr Phang who would listen without the slightest frown on his handsome, open face. She had actually written down the last speech for the last meeting to make sure she got her message across clearly, firmly, truthfully. Until she did that, the waiting would be unbearable, requiring enormous effort to hide her nervous tension while standing in front of her class and teaching them the strategies of avoiding the most common grammar mistakes in the exams.
‘Yen Ping, you’re crying. What’s the matter?’ she asked as the girl struggled to hold back her tears. They were sitting at a table in a quiet corner of the canteen where they were not likely to be heard. Mark’s mother was abroad on one of her business trips, and she had got her younger sister to stay in the house for the entire duration of the trip to keep an eye on Mark. The sister who took her responsibility very seriously sometimes accompanied him to and from school in the chauffeured car. She had on one occasion done a secret search of Mark’s room, and discovered some of the poems that Yen Ping had written to him and also a small teddy bear with their initials sewn into its collar.
‘Miss Seetoh, I don’t know how long we can go on like this,’ said Yen Ping tearfully. She revealed that they had only managed to meet once that week, and only for a few brief minutes, and he had managed to speak to her twice on the phone, also for only a very brief while. They had devised a system of codes for their phone contact. She said, ‘Miss Seetoh, next week on Friday, Mark’s auntie won’t be able to accompany him to his maths tutor’s house; can we meet at your place on his way back?’
The young couple had apparently managed to work out some plan by which the chauffeur would be told that Mark would have to consult Miss Seetoh for half an hour on an important school project, during which time the man would be sent on an errand to town that would take a convenient forty minutes.
Maria said, ‘You know, Yen Ping, I don’t feel comfortable about all this deceit. I suppose your parents don’t know either?’
The girl had already told her parents she had broken up with Mark.
The enormity of their love carved out its own path of explanation and justification; if they told lies, those lies could only be the whitest of white, reflecting the purity of their purpose.
‘Yen Ping, let me ask you this,’ said Maria hesitantly. ‘Do you and Mark feel uncomfortable about all these lies, I mean, I can’t imagine either of you deceiving others like this?’
Apparently the pair, still looking like lost babes in the woods, had thought out every move to thwart parental suspicion. Without their being aware of it, they were following to perfection the wise biblical advice to be both dove and serpent. The time of dove was over, and serpent had to take charge to survive the pitilessness of parents.
Yen Ping said, her lips trembling, ‘Oh Miss Seetoh, I don’t know what we can do without you.’
‘Yen Ping,’ said Maria looking at her with frowning seriousness, ‘I hope you and Mark won’t do anything stupid – you know what I mean?’
There had been a dream in which Yen Ping’s mother dragged her by the arm to the kitchen, to watch the girl, pale and crying, bent over the sink, retching dreadfully. ‘See!’ screamed the woman. ‘My daughter’s pregnant, and it’s all your fault. You let them use your bedroom for their secret meetings. You, their teacher! Shame on you!’
Yen Ping tried to hide her shock at Miss Seetoh’s unseemly suggestion. ‘We promised ourselves that we would remain pure for each other till our marriage, Miss Seetoh.’ Neither Mark’s Christianity nor her Taoism made any such demand, she explained, but their special love did. ‘I’m going to tell you something we’ve never told anybody,’ she said, her eyes shining through her tears. ‘We made our promise in blood.’
They had made small incisions in their wrists, mixed their drops of blood and written their initials with it. ‘We each have a copy of the promise,’ she said, ‘and I keep it close to my heart. See?’ She pulled out a small silver locket from under her shirt, and opened it to reveal a roll of paper inside. Young love was transcendental, awe-inspiring.
Beside its pure sheen, Meeta’s and Byron’s affair was all dross. Since the evening of the Polo Club ball, they had been dating, mainly on Meeta’s initiative. As he grew more anxious to get out of what was an increasingly tedious affair, she grew more demanding, assuming the rights of the officially acknowledged partner who in the past would have been able to sue for breach of promise and compel the man to marry her.
‘I never slept with her,’ Byron confided in friends. ‘I tried once. Couldn’t. That woman’s off-putting.’
For a while, Meeta tried what she had in the past disdainfully called ‘the Winnie exercise in futility’. Thus had she overwhelmed Byron with gifts and favours, such as expensive soup dishes of healthful black chicken and ginseng which she had got the maid to brew for hours, ordering books he had expressed an interest in, that were not available in Singapore’s book-stores, looking all over town for a special table lamp he wanted. Byron fled before the avalanche of gifts, sometimes pretending not to be at home when the doorbell rang and he peeped out to see Meeta’s formidable person outside, all garbed in bright sari and jewellery, carrying something in her hand.
‘Do you think she could be slightly – this?’ Byron asked a confidante, twirling a finger against the side of his head to indicate the beginnings of lunacy.
The confidante told him about a woman he once knew who became so unhinged by unrequited love that she stalked the poor man in his office, his home, his favourite hawker centre, and once called him twenty times in one hour, until he had to change his phone number and also the locks in his apartment.
A man by nature too indolent to upset the weaker sex and risk a confrontation, he made all sorts of excuses when Meeta phoned him, until he ran out of them and one evening forced himself to say firmly but very kindly, ‘It’s no use, Meeta. It’s not working. You’re a very nice, attractive person, but it isn’t working.’ At that advanced stage in her infatuation, Meeta was prepared to cling to any shred of hope; the absence of outright hostility was all that it needed to sustain itself. Desperate hope could be pathetic, and the intelligent, perceptive part of Meeta must have occasionally recognised the depths to which it could sink in each desperate excuse to rationalise away his remissness: ‘Well, he tends to oversleep when there’s a storm. Also, you know how dangerous the roads are when it rains like that.’ ‘His sister-in-law was on a visit with her children. She’s very demanding and requires him to be them all the time.’ ‘He’s confused by his feelings. This is the first time that he’s taken a woman seriously. I’ll have to be patient.’
It was now Winnie’s turn to say, ‘Meeta, you’re wasting your time; he’s simply not interested.’
Safe in Wilbur’s love and devotion and happily preparing for her wedding, Winnie was unaware that her advice, confidently and cheerfully given, could only hurt by the sheer contrast in their present positions, a contrast that would be even more pronounced in the future after she left the house they had been sharing for so many years for her new home in Washington.
As soon as the wedding cards were sent out, Meeta’s habitual caustic remarks ended. She submitted sullenly to the reality that Winnie now had a man in her life, whereas she had lost all prospect of one. She wanted to have no part in the wedding preparations, saying stiffly, ‘I’ll attend the wedding dinner, that’s all. I can’t stand all that noise and fuss from her. She thinks she’s the only one in the world who’s getting married!’
Her pride recoiled from the thought that friends could be whispering to each other about how Meeta Nair was behaving towards Winnie because of jealousy.
‘Me, Meeta Nair, jealous of Winnie Poon? Don’t make me laugh!’ she said to Maria, and there and then decided to dispel all such notions: she would give her housemate the most expensive wedding present of all, a pair of sapphire earrings that Winnie had once seen in a jeweller’s shop and liked very much.
Winnie had whispered to Maria, ‘Meeta’s behaving strangely, but I understand. I told her not to be serious about Byron. He’s been avoiding her.’ It fell to Winnie to do something which she said was the most difficult thing in her life. Byron had called her with a message: ‘Please tell your friend and housemate Meeta to stop harassing me! I’m fed up with her. Tell her in exactly these words.’ Winnie recruited the help of Maria.
‘I’m too nervous,’ she said in a hushed voice. ‘You don’t have to say anything, Maria. Just be with me, to give me support.’
To their surprise and relief, Meeta received the message calmly. ‘Oh, life goes on!’ she said breezily. ‘The bastard thinks that he’s God’s gift to women! Tell that cock to stop thinking the sun rises every morning to hear him crow! Hee, hee!’
At Winnie’s wedding reception which was held in a hotel, Meeta was silent and surly-looking throughout, curling a disdainful lip or rolling sceptical eyes each time the much enamoured bridegroom professed his love for his bride in his speech.
‘Listen to him,’ she muttered, ‘All that drivel about eternal love and everlasting devotion. Why can’t he be more original? Gives me the goose pimples.’
At one point she turned to whisper to Maria who was sitting beside her, ‘Let’s see how long all this cooing of the love birds will last. Until her money runs out.’
Maria said, ‘Hey, Meeta, come off it! Today’s Winnie’s big day. Why don’t we do this – think all the nice things about Winnie and Wilbur, and all the nasty things about the men who have left us in the lurch. Then we go out and get drunk together!’
Humour could not save the situation for poor Meeta, unable to cope with the sudden good fortune of the housemate who she presumed would go through life depending on her for advice and guidance in matters regarding men. She left the party very soon after, complaining of a headache. Winnie never looked happier or prettier; the services of a professional make-up artist and dress designer had transformed her beyond recognition. Part of her happiness must have lain in the triumphant thought: ‘It’s Winnie the Blue, Winnie the Blur who’s got her man after all, not you two clever, smart-talking women!’
They were, for the third time, in a parked car in the lovers’ haunt outside the Botanic Gardens.
‘I missed you, Maria,’ he said, and would have attempted to pull her towards him except that he sensed a new mood and purpose. ‘What is it?’ he said gently.
He could accommodate any female mood, humour any female whim. The rehearsed words remained locked in her throat.
She could have begun, ‘I can’t take it. The jealousy will destroy me,’ and he would have simply swept her into his arms with his usual easy smile and laugh of dismissal; she would have aborted the rest of the prepared speech and lain contented against this warm, reassuring, handsome, smooth-talking, very dangerous man.
‘Hey, you’re crying,’ he said and wiped her eyes. He would of course not risk asking her the reason for her tears. Silence was golden, a rich lode he could continually mine to manage women.
They were silent for a while. ‘Tell me a story, my Sheherazade. You have so many stories to tell.’
With his other women, he could have said, with the same gentle, reassuring voice, ‘Tell me about your Bangkok trip.’ ‘Tell me about your plans to move to a new apartment.’ ‘Tell me about your new Persian cat.’ Tell me anything so long as we don’t start those tedious explanations and arguments.
She said, ‘Alright,’ and felt a surge of new purpose strengthening her for the last story she would ever tell him:
There was a woman called Sheherazade, actually only a pet name given to her by her lover. She lived in Singapore in a small apartment in Ang Mo Kio, which he visited whenever he could get away from his wife or business associates. He loved her because he enjoyed listening to her stories, to the melodiousness of her voice, her habit of gesturing with her small pretty hands as she told the stories. Like her namesake, she postponed the telling of the ending of each story, causing her lover to be in a frenzy of curiosity.
‘Please, please, please,’ he begged like a wide-eyed child wanting to know what happened next, and next and next. ‘Tell me what happens in the end.’
‘No, I will only tell you on your next visit,’ she said, thus cleverly making sure he would never leave her. Like Sheherazade’s enthralled story listener, the wicked sultan who kept postponing her execution to hear the ending of each story, he came again and again to see her in her Ang Mo Kio flat, without of course, his wife’s knowledge. But there was one story whose ending she wanted so much to know – their story. How would it end? Would he leave her? Would he divorce his wife, as he sometimes hinted, and marry her?
One day he told her, rather awkwardly, because he knew she would be very upset: ‘This is my last visit. I’m leaving you. I’ve found another woman.’ She was aghast.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Another woman? Does your wife know?’
‘That’s beside the point,’ he said, ‘For she’ll never find out. Besides, I love this woman very much. I’ve given her a special name – Pearl. In fact, I think I can’t live without my Pearl.’ She began to cry, and he tried to comfort her.
‘These things happen,’ he said. ‘But we can still be friends, can’t we? I may still come to my Sheherazade to hear her wonderful stories, who knows? But for the time being, this is absolutely my last visit.’
She said, her face by now all splattered with tears, ‘Please come one more time. I will prepare a special dinner for you. Our last supper, a last story, then a last goodbye.’
‘Alright,’ he said. So he came for his last meal with her. It was such a delicious meal, of his favourite abalone and mushroom soup, beef noodles, deep fried prawns and the most succulent vegetables, that he felt drowsy afterwards and fell asleep in his chair before he could ask her for her story. A tantalising little thought had occurred to him, just before he fell asleep: ‘She will withhold the ending, to make me come again, the clever little thing. But no, this will positively be my last visit!’
As he lay sleeping in his chair, emitting the gentle snores of deep, comfortable sleep, she went into the kitchen and brought out a large knife which she pressed deep into his heart, killing him instantly. As he slumped in the chair, his blood coming out in large pools and spreading rapidly on his shirt, down his trousers and on to the space around his chair, she knelt down beside him, looked at him and said sadly, ‘You had no idea, my dearest, how our story would end, had you?’
There was a short silence as Dr Phang, startled by the story as by the earnest, urgent manner of its narration, cast about in his mind for a suitable response without losing his equanimity. His first thought was, ‘She is not her usual self. I must be careful.’ It was a situation he had never found himself in, but he would not be caught unawares. He would not ask any questions as that would only provoke the impossible questions of hysterical women; he would not make light of the story as its strangeness seemed to demand a serious response. In a few seconds, he had decided on having recourse, once again, to his usual reaction to an angry, accusing woman – a two-fold strategy of deflecting the accusation and pacifying the accuser. Through the marshalling of all his resources of mild persuasion and tender caressing, he would draw her back into a state of calm, smiling mutuality. Looking at the pale taut face beside him and grasping her hands, Dr Phang said with all the gentleness he could muster,
‘Dear, don’t get upset. Come here.’
Maria broke free from his arms. She said, ‘I never want to see you again because we can’t go on like this. If I have an affair with you, we’ll just end up hating each other.’
That was as close as she could get to verbalising the brutal truth that she had earlier set out at great length in writing. Affair. They had always avoided the word with its messy connotations. He made one last attempt.
‘Dearest, we love being with each other – that’s all that matters.’ The word having been uttered, its repetition came more easily.
‘If I had an affair with you,’ she said earnestly, ‘it would always have to be shrouded in secrecy and remorse and guilt. Don’t you see?’
He had no answer, so he made certain non-committal sounds and continued to try to take her into his arms.
There had to come a point, even for this supremely self-confident man, when the truth would sink in and he would understand that the game was over. He withdrew, no longer smiling, and sat still in his seat, looking out of the window into the darkness.
‘I had no idea,’ was all he could say. It was not in his nature to resort to the crude peevishness of the rejected male’s parting shot, ‘When you grow into an old woman and lose all your attraction for men, you will look back with regret upon this day of missed opportunity.’ But he felt the urge to regain a little of the wounded pride by saying drily, ‘That was the most spiteful story I’d ever heard. Spitefulness doesn’t become you at all, my dear.’ Then he started the car engine, and drove her home without a word. When she got out, he said, with a return of the affable smile. ‘Well, goodbye, Maria.’
‘Goodbye, Benjamin.’
It might have comforted her to know that throughout the rest of his drive back, he gripped the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles stood out like hard, white stones, and that he muttered ‘Damn’ a few times under his breath. And it might have comforted him to know that as soon as she entered her bedroom and locked the door, she threw herself on the bed, covered her face with a pillow and sobbed silently.
She did not even want to read the daily papers because occasionally there was something about him, usually about his work in the Ministry and the conferences abroad. But about three months later, as she was watching TV and listening to the news presenter, she learnt that he had been sent to Germany on a posting as Singapore’s ambassador.