I have known Ethel Png for twenty-five years now, ever since, at the age of fourteen, we were caned for wearing pink socks to school. It was 1966, the Western world was in turmoil, the Beatles were in the ascendant, and we were still in an environment where wearing pink socks was a major transgression. “I’m dying here,” Ethel wailed to me more than once.
Not long after, her family, then one of the richest in Singapore, sent her to the United States to study. It was never clear what exactly she was studying, but she wound up in California, in the company of millions of assorted freaks, and began to “go wild,” as her distraught mother put it to my mother. Ethel showed me photographs of herself back then, a small, even tiny figure, buried under an avalanche of hair that stopped somewhere around her kneecaps, and clad in exaggerated bell-bottoms a mile wide. She looked like Yoko Ono on a very bad day. Other photographs showed her sitting in a ring of similarly garbed people, all smoking joints. You could tell they were joints, because everybody had this fogged-out, loopy and yet perfectly ecstatic look on their faces. These pictures, which she stupidly sent back, threw her family into a tailspin and, in a fit of moralistic frenzy, they cut off her funds in an attempt to make her return. Instead, she started cultivating marijuana in her back yard in order to make a living, got busted, and languished in custody for a month, until her arresting officer, who was smitten with her, posted bail, after which they took off to Woodstock for the festival, of which she didn’t remember a single thing. She did Woodstock, she did the lot: pot, junk, LSD, transcendental meditation, yoga, Zen, yoghurt, etc...
In 1972 her father was declared a bankrupt, the family money petered out, and Ethel was back in Singapore with a Eurasian baby christened Rainforest Peace Png, whom she called Rain. She said the father (her arresting officer) was a louse and a fascist who supported Nixon and she never wanted to see him again. Ethel’s mother took one look at Rain, checked for signs of a wedding ring on her daughter’s finger, found none, and promptly had hysterics. Ethel’s father committed suicide, consumed with shame at the collapse of his business. Her mother eventually retired to a small house in Katong with the faithful family retainer, leaving Ethel with a mountain of debts and relatives who treated her like a pariah.
Meanwhile, my life continued its slow and enervating course. I read law at the local university, I had one or two boyfriends, nothing serious—earnest, steady boys who wore glasses. My parents went on being respectable, refusing to go mad or spectacularly bankrupt. Even though Ethel’s life was clearly a mess, I could never see her without feeling a pang of envy: how could one person monopolise all the excitement rationed out on this island?
Ethel took a look at her situation and decided it was serious: she had an illegitimate son and no money. So she decided to put her Californian experience to some use: she started a health food shop. At that time, everybody thought she was making a mistake. They told her meat-guzzling, oil-slurping Singaporeans would stay away in droves, and they did, at first, but Ethel refused to admit defeat. A committed vegetarian herself, she wrote articles, pamphlets, appeared on TV, gave talks; at one time, it was impossible to avoid Ethel’s face or voice, expounding on the benefits of lentils to the digestive system. Ethel’s Healthy Living stopped being a mere curiosity shop as she began to see some return on her investment.
The only problem was that for years she never abandoned her uncompromising hippie lifestyle: she never stopped smoking pot, for example, which, in the antidrugs hysteria then prevailing, led to her arrest (again), but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Magnanimously, she invited the investigating officers around for a vegetarian cook-out at her place; several of them, seduced by the great chilli stringbean recipe, no doubt, later became her lovers.
I thought she was completely mad and told her so.
“Darling, I’ve given up worrying what people think of me,” she said. “You should try it—it gives you a marvellous sense of release.”
But I knew I never would.
• • •
Rain was a large, solemn baby who never cried. He grew into a plump, stolid child with the unnerving habit of standing silently by your elbow while you talked on, unaware of his presence. He was watchful, unchildlike. Eurasian children are often said to be gorgeous, but there were no traces of it in Rain, who was ordinary, even homely. As far as I knew, he never asked after his father. When I asked him why, much later, he said, in a matter-of-fact way, “Because I thought Ethel was my father and mother.” (He called her Ethel.)
Ethel and I kept in touch regularly, though by the time we hit our thirties we had become totally different people. At university, I had had visions of myself being gloriously martyred at the stake of legal aid, dispensing good in my best lady-of-the-manor fashion. After six years of unremitting drudgery, however, I had switched to corporate law, turning my back forever on the Causes, and was ready to do battle with anybody (but especially Ethel) on the question of selling out and joining the rat race. I worked long hours in the office and then worked out furiously in the gym, I kept my figure, and I shed the gawkiness that had so painfully accompanied me through my late teens and early twenties. After an early bad incident, when I had burst into tears before a senior partner after he had ticked me off, I made a vow never to parade my feelings before the world again. I put effort into mastering a cool, detached exterior; I learned that to say little except that which was pertinent could be an intimidating weapon. Behind my back, I knew, I was described as cold; I counted it a victory. It had taken me years to reach this outwardly calm, emotionless pinnacle; I had no intention of ever climbing down again.
Ethel, true to her philosophy of doing precisely what she wanted and cocking a snook at the world’s opinion, decided at age thirty-five she was going to let it all hang out, “including wrinkles and saddlebags on the thighs,” she added cheerfully. She stopped wearing make-up and worrying about her weight, and she chopped off her tresses. Overnight she evolved from a flamboyantly dressy woman battling futilely with her figure to a crop-haired, kindly, chunky, mid-life person (“There is no such thing as middle age,” said Ethel. “Middle age is a state of mind.”) whose main concerns were saving the environment and her son, who was running around with a manic skateboarding crowd. Yet she was as attractive to men as ever, though some unkind persons were heard to say it wasn’t possible, given the way Ethel clumped around. “It’s my devastating earth mother quality,” she would say, rolling her eyes, “I’m a terrific cook, I never interrupt those tiresome monologues men are so keen on—what more could they want?” But she had momentary regrets; once, scrutinising me carefully, she sighed. “You know, I could pass for your mother,” she said wistfully. But at some deeper level she was at peace with herself now; tolerance for the world and its foibles oozed from her, thick as honey, comforting, and soon she was kidding me about my hair: “If I hit it with a hammer, what do you bet the hammer will break?”
• • •
You know it’s downhill all the way when the children of your friends start to marry and you’re still single. You start to feel unaccountably old—an imaginary pain starts up in your knee, you take out Procol Harum, A Lighter Shade of Pale, and play it to a nostalgic death on your turntable.
I was in no mood to go to the wedding of Lee Su Ting’s daughter, the second in a month to which I had been invited. Su Ting’s daughter Deanna (Deanna! for God’s sake) at the ripe old age of twenty-two was walking down the aisle with the son of a timber merchant from Sarawak, and the ninny was delighted that she would be safely married before she was washed-up at twenty-three.
The wedding was being held in Deanna’s grandfather’s house, an old colonial bungalow set in, as the real estate brochures say, spacious grounds. I thought I would show myself, present the ang-pow and melt away before the service started; that way, I would avoid being inflicted with the unctuous “Till Death Do Us Part” rigmarole.
The young couple had been educated in England and had certain ideas as to how the whole thing should be conducted. They wanted to be married in the garden, under bowers and in the light of the setting sun, an idea which, in this climate sounded like sheer folly; luckily, it had rained in the afternoon and was considerably cooler. Deanna hugged me impulsively: “It’s a shame, you’re looking wonderful, when is your turn coming?” No less than four people asked me this question (her fiance, her parents, and her grandfather, whom I remembered from my youth as a keen lecher constantly inviting young girls into corners with him), at the end of which I was ready to stagger out and drown myself in the punch bowl.
I wandered off aimlessly into the garden. Someone waylaid me, wanting to know about a legal matter; I looked about desperately for an escape route, and it was then I saw a peculiar young man, hovering by the buffet table, eyes closed, lips moving silently. He was dressed entirely in black, black T-shirt, black jeans, black loafers. More than one person was looking at him in deep suspicion. He opened his eyes, saw me glancing at him, and came straight over, purposefully. “How are you?” he cried effusively, and bore me off on his arm.
“Wait,” I said, struggling to free myself, “what are you doing?”
“Didn’t you want to be rescued?”
“Yes, but I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
He released my arm. “OK,” he said amiably. “You just looked terribly bored.”
“Do you always rescue people who are bored?”
“Always,” he said, gravely. “Life’s too short to be bored. You should do something about it.” Then he started to laugh, and couldn’t stop. When he finally sobered down, he asked, politely, “So what do you do?”
“I’m a professional wedding gate-crasher.” I amended this to, “Also a lawyer. And how old are you anyway?”
He looked at me as if I’d asked him something indecent. “Nineteen.”
“For your information, I’m thirty-nine.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“So I don’t need someone who’s practically a child rumbling in and oozing self-possession all over me.”
He said nothing, except that his eyes narrowed and a rather tight look came over his face. I began to be sorry for what I’d said. “I didn’t mean that exactly.”
“Yes, you did,” he said. “Why say things you don’t mean?”
“Because a certain amount of hypocrisy is essential to a civilised life.”
“Yeah?” he said, with a glint. “Well, screw civility.”
I could have left, but some instinct of curiosity made me ask him what he had been doing by the table.
“That? Oh. Well ... praying for the souls of all the dead animals slaughtered for the occasion.” He gave me a challenging stare.
“Oh, come on.”
His eyes, a very light grey, bored into mine suddenly, illuminated by a stern joy. “That’s just the lawyer in you speaking. Eternally sceptical. Only money, power, the things money can buy, are your verities, right? Hey, I’m not only a vegetarian—I’ve been one ever since I was born—but I know all of us living things are meshed together in this giant, interlocking organic whatchamacallit. You can’t dislodge one piece without fucking the whole thing up. That’s why I can’t stand this century, man, it’s a systematic attempt to de-harmonise the whole universe and deny the natural order of things...”
He went on in this vein for a full fifteen minutes, his eyes flashing, and his delicate, slender nose quivering, the whole complicated system of bones and muscles moving, shading fluidly in that narrow, angular face of his, his thin body held taut, whip-like, in his intensity. Periodically, he would flick the straggling, honey-coloured hair out of his eyes, then his hand would slide back into the back pocket of his jeans, his hands were always in those back pockets; even when he was standing still there was the indefinable hint of a light footed, cat-like wariness. He would never live from day to day, you could see that, he would always be hurling himself against some imaginary obstacle, carving his way furiously through the very air he breathed. He wound up with the air of having settled life, the universe and everything, with the arrogance of extreme youth, but he was smiling at his own seriousness, a lopsided smile stretching to his left ear.
“Your name’s Rain, isn’t it?” I said, when he’d finished.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, I know.”
• • •
It was with some relief that I located Ethel in the sitting room, eating her way through a large slice of cake. “I’ve met your son.”
“Oh, good,” she said, vaguely.
“He’s changed, hasn’t he? I haven’t seen him for years. He used to be such a fat child—”
“My genes,” Ethel said, nodding.
“He’s really rather—beautiful now.”
Ethel gave me a sharp look. “Hmm.” Meditatively, she crumbled her cake. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What about?”
“He’s due to be called up for National Service soon. I’m not sure whether he should do it—you know he’s still got American citizenship and he’s got to make a choice soon between that and remaining here. It’s not so much the dangers of army life I’m worried about. You know he’s always been at one or other of the international schools here all along. I’m not saying it isn’t my fault, but I just don’t know how he’s going to take to army discipline and all. You may have noticed he’s rather strange.”
Ethel, draped in a parti-coloured paisley smock and decked out in five-inch miniature Eiffel Towers for earrings, might have been described as being rather strange herself, but I forbore pointing this out.
The band in the garden struck up the wedding march. Ethel winced. “I suppose we should trot out for the nuptials. What a bore. Do you realise,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve never been married?”
“Neither have I.”
“That makes two of us.”
Ethel drifted out to the garden and I went to the back of the house to escape. But it was a large, rambling construction with odd corners and turnings, and I found myself instead in a long, high room, with a table piled high with wedding presents—or I suppose they were wedding presents, since they were unwrapped. It looked as if someone had raided the hardware and crockery departments of a store and dumped the contents, higgledy-piggledy; there was enough stuff there to equip five households at least and still have extra to spare. In spite of my determination to leave, I found myself drawn towards this unabashed display of materialism—not least because I had spotted a charming Royal Doulton figurine standing in the middle of the clutter.
I have a confession to make. I am an inveterate porcelain collector. I am also mildly kleptomaniac. These two tendencies sometimes mesh, with unfortunate results (to the owners of the porcelain, that is), though I usually confine my thieving instincts to filching stationery from the office. I was single-handedly responsible for a memo circulated earlier this year, calling for frantic economies in office stationery. In case you think I’m being unduly facetious, I know I have a little—uh—problem, but I relish too much the irony of someone who’s involved with the finer interpretations of the law being actively involved in transgressing it to give it up. I do it for the kicks, in other words.
It took barely half a second for the figurine to disappear into my bag. Turning to go, I saw Rain standing in the doorway, and froze. We were both extremely still for what seemed like a very long time; then he broke into a slow grin, and began to whistle. Slowly, I replaced the figurine and made my way past him, his black-clad body flattening itself against the door frame to let me through. I felt, rather than saw, the amused, benevolent look on his face, the same irritating tolerance which Ethel brought to bear on the menagerie of freaks and downbeats she collected around her. I ran for the road.
As I was reversing my car, I glimpsed Rain, a tiny, black speck in the side mirror. Squinting, I could just make out that he was standing by an Alfa Romeo, eyes closed again, lips moving in benediction. What was he praying for now, salvation from the oil crisis, staving off global warming? That ludicrous, sanctimonious little brat. Then, as I watched, he picked the lock, jumped in and roared off with great verve, in a flurry of squealing brakes and screeching tyres. A thin echo of the Wedding March floated through the air.
• • •
Two days later Rain called me at the office to ask whether I would go with him to watch a Hungarian movie being screened by the Film Society. I said I never watched anything that had been mutilated by censorship, and, with this thoroughly pompous reply, hung up.
A few days after this, he woke me from my sleep at midnight to invite me to dinner with him. I said no. He said, why not? I lay awake for hours, staring into the dark.
I have one other vice. I watch movies alone. I need the luminous darkness of the auditorium, the plunge into another perfectly circumscribed universe.
As I recount all this, I’m aware I sound like a progressively dotty—what is it? Oh yes—old maid. Someone who spends time and effort cultivating her eccentricities like rare plants, rather than rearing a child. Ethel, for example, is fairly bizarre, a walker on the wild side, but because she’s fathered—sorry, mothered—a son, she is somehow exonerated in the eyes of this society which sometimes sees women as nothing more than fertility symbols. Whenever I see one of those advertisements promoting happy graduate mothers and their babies, I feel so angry I have to restrain myself physically from smashing the television. To paraphrase the song, they’re my genes and I’ll squander them if I want to.
Anyway, I was talking about solitary moviegoing. In The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, the hero, who is searching for a meaning beyond his everyday existence, goes to movie after movie alone, a symptom of his disconnection from the modern world. It is a good book, but have you noticed it is always men who get to make these grand, angst-filled gestures? I don’t pretend to be grasping after the meaning of life in a celluloid fantasy; I go alone because I’m old enough to enjoy my own company.
Sometimes I manage to stumble on an unexpectedly good movie as well. Or, in the case of The Pope of Greenwich Village, a good bad one, starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts as a pair of Italian-Irish cousins who tangle with the mafia. Much of it was basically contrived, but I’ve always liked buddy-buddy themes, what with all that inarticulate emotion and sentimentality disguised as toughness. A kind of licensed homo-eroticism, if you know what I mean. Also, the cinema was almost completely empty, apart from someone snoring in the front row and a couple of people at the back—blissfully peaceful.
My only fear at these times is that I’ll meet someone I know. It hasn’t happened often but I hate finding myself in position where I have to explain why a thirty-nine-year-old woman is doing something as adolescent as sneaking into a cinema alone. Why don’t I pair up with a VCR, if I can’t find a man, I can feel them thinking—or perhaps it’s just incipient paranoia on my part?
So you can imagine why my heart sank when I saw Rain outside. He would go alone, of course. He spotted me and came up, his eyes full of that lively, ironical curiosity I remembered so well from the day of the wedding. He suggested going for a drink and I found myself agreeing, guiltily caught in the second unsocial habit of my life. It struck me, not for the first time, that he was always catching me at a disadvantage—my God, it was enough to put anyone into a really foul humour.
Except that now his head had been shaved to an unbecoming stubble, and he was several shades darker, with a constellation of spots sprayed over his nose, taking a little of the bloom off that unnerving beauty of his. He was again all in black, a lupine, theatrical figure, and yet innocently natural within that theatricality. He touched each lamppost he passed—absent-mindedly or for luck? I asked him how he liked the army; he shrugged and said, “It’s OK.”
We went to a coffee-house, where I ordered an orange juice and he ordered soup and salad. “You don’t mind if I eat, do you? I’m starving.”
“Salad’s not going to fill you up, is it?”
Again that shrug. “It’s the only vegetarian thing on the menu.”
“Don’t you want,” I said, struck by an idea, “to pray for the souls of all the dead carcasses in the kitchen?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Are you always this intense?” I was baiting the kid, but I couldn’t help it. “Do tell me what you want to be when you grow up—no, let me guess, a missionary, yes, that must be it, a visionary missionary, you have this desire to convert unbelievers—your only problem, as far as I can see, is finding a theology, unless Green politics fills the gap—”
“Hey,” he said, breaking in, “I thought you liked me a little.”
“What made you think that? You’re Ethel’s son, certainly, but I haven’t seen you for ages. You were a very unfriendly child. Just as intense.”
He wasn’t listening. “It’s this age thing, isn’t it? It doesn’t bother me, so why should it bother you? You know, this society, this world, just places too much goddamned emphasis on one’s age. It’s ridiculous. Age has nothing to do with it, unless you’re a middle-aged guy, right, and you’re sporting this little itsy-bitsy doll on your arm and everyone says, hey, you lucky dog, wish I could trade in my wife. (See, I’ve got impeccable feminist credentials—wow, three words with three syllables each at least.) You could be a hundred years old and I could be ten and I’d still like you. You’re different.”
“You know, you talk far too much, Rain. And you don’t know what you’re talking about. Believe me, I know, and I draw the line at younger men, especially very young men still living at home with their mothers.”
“OK. I’m nineteen and you’re thirty-something. So what? It’s only a negligible difference.”
“Only? Are you completely naïve? The gap is interstellar. Intergalactic. It’s unhealthy. What you need is a cold shower. That will sober you up.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You talk about me as if I’m a sex-pervert-alcoholic-dope-fiend who’s murdered his grandmother. I’m not. I’m a very nice guy. I love animals, I’m remarkably broad-minded for my age. I’m a bit pompous, but that can be cured.” He grinned, taking the sting out of his words, and added, handsomely, “Besides, you’re stunning to look at and everything. I bet lots of people must have told you that.”
“No, actually they haven’t.”
“Besides, we were born under the same star.”
“I beg your pardon.”
He grabbed my hand suddenly. “Look, this is the lifeline ... it says you were born with a fatal weakness for expensive china and though you can afford to pay for it ten times over, it’s more fun to relieve their owners of them ... anyway, they don’t care, right...? And we could go to the movies together. We’ll be together but we can pretend we went there alone.”
I dragged my hand away. I was afraid of enjoying this too much and giving in to a crazy impulse to say yes. “No,” I said. “Just eat up and let’s go.”
“OK,” he said, throwing the napkin on the table. “Let’s go.” This little gesture relieved me a little; it gave me a concrete flaw to focus on.
He steamed to the cashier’s. We paid our shares, and the cashier gave Rain a three-page receipt, each the size of his hand. Rain looked at the receipt and looked at the cashier. “What the hell is this? Why the hell is this place using three pieces of paper for one stupid receipt? Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because trees are a diminishing resource, that’s why not. The rainforest is disappearing and no one gives a damn. We’ll all go down in this sinking ship, gagged by waste-paper, smothered in dust.”
His metaphors were becoming wildly mixed; I practically had to drag him out. “What is the matter with you?”
He sneaked a look at me, calm now. “I don’t know. I’m a basket-case.”
“Then get some help! Grow up!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, I am.”
I’m not sure why I didn’t simply walk away from him then. Some nagging sense of responsibility, perhaps, or his gravely penitent air, which I didn’t trust. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”
He fell in step beside me. “Hey, I’ve thought of another argument.”
“What?”
“In no time we’ll all be dust and ashes.”
“That’s very comforting.”
“Hurl yourself into the breach. No regrets.”
We had reached my car by then. “I’ll leave you here,” he said. “I’m meeting some friends later.”
“You didn’t have to walk a geriatric to her car.”
“I like walking geriatrics to their cars.”
Oh, the corniness of it. Someone had catapulted me into a movie—that was it—a thrilling one, of mythic proportions, with my very own starring role, but which was rapidly hurtling towards a close; at any moment I expected the projector to shatter, the reel to fly out in whirling streamers. Experimentally, I placed my arms around him; it was like hugging a shadow, hard and yet somehow flickering and elusive. He tried to kiss me, but I wouldn’t let him. Not yet, anyway. And yet I didn’t push him away. I foresaw a lot of trouble. And ridicule. And an unpleasant, crepuscular old age as punishment. Why, oh why, can’t we grow younger as we grow older? I felt something cold against his neck, a thin chain, with the words Save the Rainforest in silver filigree.
“What is this, your mantra?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Rescue me.” And he looked ecstatic.
• • •
What do you do in a relationship like that? A lot of the time was spent eating, or rather, watching him eat, as he was constantly hungry. Sometimes we went to the cinema but he was always so tired from training that sitting down without the stimulus of food made him fall asleep instantly, head lolling against my shoulder. Once he dragged me into a bowling alley, a place I hadn’t stepped into for years, where he practised obsessively until midnight, while a group of girls watched admiringly and I plotted his, and their, collective murders. But his curious mixture of sure-fire arrogance and infectious enthusiasm, so different from my own pallid teenage years, made me laugh, and I’ve never been able to resist anyone who made me laugh.
Some three weeks later came the telephone call I had been dreading; Ethel sounded cool and distant and aggrieved.
“I hear you’ve been going out with my son.”
“Ethel. It was just for dinner.”
“Really, I thought better of you.”
“What has Rain been saying?”
“That he likes you.”
“As a friend.”
“Not just as a friend. In case you didn’t know, he broke up with his girlfriend a month ago and he’s rather restless and excitable.”
“You talk about him as if he were a puppy. You know he’s old enough to decide what he wants to do. Honestly, I thought you’d be wanting to protect me.”
Long silence. “Ethel?”
“I’m too furious to speak to you now,” she said coldly. “I called up hoping you’d deny everything, or that you’d act like a responsible adult. I’m going to make a tofu vegan meal—with lots of oyster sauce—and simmer down. Don’t ask me for the recipe.”
Now she was working me up as well. “Why this attack of conservatism all of a sudden? Gosh, when I think of all the times I could have told you you were making a fool of yourself ... I mean, you called him Rainforest, for goodness’ sake! What kind of name is that?”
“That was then!” Ethel said. “This is now!” She hung up.
I was upset and the next time I saw Rain, I contrived to have a really big dust-up about Saving the Whale. I said it was all a load of virtuous hypocrisy on the part of the West while he turned white around the temples and I was thinking, why am I having this silly quarrel, I don’t give a damn about whales, dead or alive.
“Ethel said she called you,” he said at last. “That’s what this fight is all about, isn’t it?” (He and Ethel had one of those tiresome parent-child relationships where they thrashed everything out ‘as adults’, and in the weeks to come I began to feel I was going out with both of them, so indistinct did the line between Ethel/Rain and Rain/Ethel become. There’s a lot to be said for the stiff upper lip, I feel.)
“All right.” I said. “Partly. She’s one of my best friends after all.”
“Hey,” he said, catching both my hands in his, “you don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, do you?”
Wrong? I had forgotten the meaning of the word. I continued to feel an intermittent guilt towards Ethel, but I also had the curious sensation of stepping outside myself at times and watching this woman, whom I thought I knew so well, acting, behaving in a totally uncharacteristic fashion—but knowing that she was perfectly happy. Yes, glad, in spite of everything.
Occasionally, he was confined for the weekend, and then I became acutely conscious of the serried ranks of shaven-headed NS boys milling about Orchard Road, each, it seemed, with a very young girl clinging onto his arm; dear God, was I really degenerating to the level of those girls, waiting for a nineteen-year-old to be released by his sadistic commander or whoever it was? At moments the situation struck me as being so insane it was all I could do not to burst out laughing at the most inappropriate times, such as office meetings.
“I’m glad you see the ridiculousness of it,” Ethel said, grimly, when I went to visit her at her shop; I hated the growing rift between us.
“Ethel, there’s nothing going on.”
“Then why are you wearing one of his shirts?” I looked down at myself. It was his shirt, a striped blue and white one: I liked its preppie, collegiate look. I had thrown it on without thinking, and I could think of nothing suitable to say now, though I was able to come up with a list of impressively innocent reasons later—by that time, of course, Ethel refused to listen.
“Excuse me,” Ethel said frigidly. “I’m extremely busy.” She was taking stock, and she moved efficiently, purposefully, down the shelves of muesli, cans of curried beans, raisin snacks, not the sort of thing I would ever want to eat, but I loved the genuine wooden decor of her shop, the folksy atmosphere, and the good, clean smell of wholemeal wholesomeness. Normally she would insist that we sit down and have some camomile tea and carrot cake, but today, I could see, was not going to be one of those days. Ethel wasn’t the type to rant: her method was to practise a kind of biting reasonableness, with the intention of making you feel absolutely criminal. She almost succeeded, but not quite.
• • •
Surreptitiously, I devoured articles and books on my predicament. The gist of it, which I could see for myself, was that all the men my age were either married, gay, or, if single, appeared to have undergone a lobotomy. My only alternatives were widowers my father’s age, younger men and very young men (a category growing every day), or a heroic celibacy—and I was prepared for neither the first nor the last. Yet I knew, rationally, that this thing with Rain was temporary; it was a fairy tale interlude, a glitch in reality—the end was already incipient in the beginning, and this, paradoxically, made me calmer, fatalistic, able to drift along without too much agonising self-examination. The people at the office remarked (maliciously?) that I was growing a softer look—at the same time as George Bush outlined his vision of a kinder, gentler nation, and the Cold War continued to thaw. Under Rain’s influence, I threw out the cans of hair spray et al—full of CFCs, after all—though I kept the rows of night cream, body lotion, etc. on my dressing table, despite Rain’s dogged eulogy of the Natural Woman. For a woman, nature has nothing comforting about it: it’s a guerilla assault on her attempts to halt the onslaught of time. Besides, he was being disingenuous—I had no illusion that our attraction was anything other than largely physical, no matter how much he talked about a meeting of minds and idiosyncrasies; and physical attraction for a woman doesn’t usually come cheap or unaided. Even feminists and environmentalists have their blind spots.
• • •
“How come you never married?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it because of X?” X was the married man I’d had an affair with for eight years. I finally saw he would never leave his wife and that her tenacity was greater than mine.
“It’s none of your business. Ethel had no right telling you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m glad to be out of it.”
He played jazz saxophone sometimes in a band on Saturday nights. He said he had saved for years, helping Ethel in her shop, to be able to afford the saxophone—ever since he had been fixated, as a kid, by a picture in a book of a black jazzman, swathed in a zoot suit and wreathed in clouds of smoke. The picture had stuck in his mind, as a symbol of freedom and how-to-be-hip; even then he had, like his mother, an instinct for the iconoclastic and the offbeat. It was an odd ambition for a child to have, here, anyway, and indeed his whole life, apart from this shaky desire to play tenor saxophone and to save the world from eco-disaster, seemed to be ambitionless, shot through with a studied aimlessness that I didn’t understand.
“What are you going to do after the army? Have you applied to go to university?”
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? You sound just like Ethel.”
“You’ve got to decide what you want to do sooner or later.”
He quoted the part in the Bible about the lilies of the field and how they toil not, neither do they spin etc., etc. I pointed out the flaw in his argument viz, that he was not a lily of the field.
“Power structures,” he groaned. “That’s all you’re ever interested in, power structures.”
“There’s no scope for a Bohemian life here, in case you haven’t noticed.” He smiled, lazily.
So far I had avoided introducing him to any of my friends, and I had no inclination to meet any of his. “Are you ashamed of me?” he asked once, eyes glittering; of course I was. I also had the superstitious feeling, not easily explained, that if we met any third parties, the gossamer-thin basis of our relationship would simply disappear.
He kept asking me to watch him play, and it seemed churlish to refuse continually. So I went down one Saturday night, unknown to him, about midnight; they were playing Thelonius Monk. It was one of those niche-in-the-wall haven concepts, where you practically sat with your knees jammed up against the back of the person in front and the cigarette smoke became a thick fog. The whole thing was so cool everybody onstage wore shades; I wondered how they saw enough to keep from tumbling off the miniscule podium. Rain recognised me, however, and raised his shades just the necessary fraction to give me a wide grin. He had a couple of solos, and got through them flawlessly; there were cheers and catcalls. Evidently, he had fans. Around one A.M. they bowed out, to lively applause, and a Filipino band took over. After some hesitation, I went round to the stage door.
The dressing room was so tiny I had the impression people were standing one on top of the other. There were about six of them, all much older than Rain, complaining about the horrible influence of jazz fusion on modern audiences: “Nobody wants to listen to the traditional stuff any more—” Rain rushed over and hugged me. “Hey, I’m so glad you came.” He introduced me, not saying who I was. There was a chorus of hi’s and they looked expectantly at Rain. He looked at me and for the first time since I’d known him, I noticed a glimmer of self-doubt.
“Uh, this is my aunt,” he said, and ducked.
“You’ve got a really talented nephew here, Miss Whang. He’s wasted in this place, wasted.”
“Absolutely,” I said.
• • •
Rain danced frenziedly around me, doing a distracting jitterbug as we walked along.
“I’ll explain everything to the guys later. I’m going to kill myself.”
“Forget it.”
“I just sort of—blanked out.”
“Rain, I would have done the same thing. I’m not angry.”
“Well, I wish you would. Get angry. I hate this reasonableness—it’s like my mother’s moods, it means you’re going to do something drastic later. Please get angry,” he begged.
“I can’t get angry to order.” And then the hysterical laughter that I’d suppressed and that had been building up inside me for weeks suddenly bubbled to the surface. I laughed so hard I had to stop and catch my breath; the few people still about gave me anxious looks and crossed to the other side of the street. I laughed and laughed a lifetime’s worth of frustrations. Rain gazed at me in astonishment, then concern, then, when I didn’t stop, he walked further down and leaned against a pavement railing, arms crossed, not looking at me.
“I’m not laughing at you,” I said, explanatorily, when I could speak again.
“Oh yeah?” he said, frowning.
Finally, when we had both calmed down, we went back to my place and made love. He said he loved me.
“I’m very fond of you, Rain,” I said, truthfully.
“What do you mean, fond? You can be fond of a dog—or a stuffed toy. Come on.”
But he was too tired to argue. I watched him fall asleep; I felt maternal, paternal, avuncular, the adult in charge of the situation once again. Then I got up noiselessly from the bed, so as not to disturb him, and padded to the kitchen, where I ate all the ice cream in the refrigerator.
• • •
Ethel called me again a month later.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” I said, cautiously, formally.
She heaved an enormous sigh down the telephone. “I can’t stay furious at you any longer,” she announced dramatically.
“Really?”
“Yes, I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to dispose of them like banana peel. Incidentally, did you know banana peel’s wholly edible? I’ve got a marvellous recipe for it. Remind me to give it to you.”
“I have to consider my options.”
“Will you relax?”
I did, I was so glad to hear from her. “I was going to call you myself.”
“Well, talk about telepathy.”
“Ethel,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Hmm,” she said. Pause. Rain hovered in the air between us, a phantasm. “You know he’s talking about going to California after the army, to look up his father, he says, heaven help him. The man probably supports Pinochet now. It’ll give him a chance to decide whether he wants to stay on.”
“Yes, I know. He says he’ll probably enrol at a university there to do film studies and practise the saxophone.”
“That layabout. Thank goodness the American government has to foot most of the bill.” A little tartly, “And what will you be doing?” “Surviving, mostly,” I said.