Miss Seetoh in the World (29 page)

Suppose the modern, educated woman, free
from all those ancient perils, decided to disregard her mother and her society,
adopt the man’s attitude and said she did not at all want the baggage, only the
excitement of the game? ‘Wonderful,’ he would say. ‘We think alike. Let’s go to
bed. No commitment! No strings attached! Perfect!’ The perfection would not
last beyond the second, or third or tenth coupling, perhaps not even beyond the
moment the man rolled off, stretched out languorously on the sheets and heaved
the huge satisfied sigh of eventual conquest.

There was the story of a married playboy
businessman in Singapore who had secretly tried for years to seduce the
beautiful Taiwanese mistress of a fellow businessman. He eventually succeeded
with a vanload of her favourite red roses, left the petal-strewn bed
triumphantly and never visited it again; later he succeeded with another
reluctant lady, in only half the time of the previous attempt, without the
need, moreover, for roses. Research studies had shown that the average life
span of an affair was a paltry eighteen months.

‘What’s the matter?’ he would demand. ‘Why
are you crying?’

And she would sniffle, ‘ I can’t bear to
think that in a short while, you’ll be up, dressed and ready to go home to your
wife and fly off on holiday with her next week.’

‘You know I can’t go on holiday with you.’

‘You could if you really tried.’

‘Now stop crying and come to me again,
there’s a good girl.’

‘I can’t bear that you carry your wife’s
photo in your wallet and her framed picture is on your office desk.’

‘You know I can’t do that with you. What’s
the matter with you? I thought we had agreed there would be no commitment.’ The
forbidden word would have to be uttered at some stage. ‘For goodness’ sake, are
you jealous that I sleep with my own wife?’

The classic quandary had been made much of
in the movies and popular literature, where even the most forbearing woman
succumbed to that dreadful green-eyed monster that eventually devoured her.
They also made much of the woman’s classic strategy to force her lover to a
commitment with the simple declarative sentence that would never lose its
fearfulness for the man: I’m going to have a baby.

Maria thought, smiling to herself: I could
never stoop to such a strategy, the lowest of the low, involving a falsehood of
such magnitude. What lies women told on men’s account! In a Chinese movie that
she saw as a young girl, Por Por had difficulty explaining to her why the
female protagonist wore a small cushion tied to her belly, and she remembered
she was aghast at the extent of the deception.

The high ground of her sexual morality, if
she were honest enough, had its slippery slopes: she was already being
tantalised by that trick, inspired by history’s royal mistresses and
concubines, whereby the wily lady led the besotted king or commander up an
enchanted garden path, strewing along the way an abundance of soft endearments and
kisses, only to stop at the line, saying sweetly, ‘No, my lord, not yet,’ and
smiling to see him driven mad with desire. When the enchantress finally did
cross the line, securing a crown, a place in history, or a position of
superiority in a household of lesser wives or concubines, she might find, alas,
that her lord’s desire thereafter rapidly declined and could, within a royally
appointed thousand days, turn into rabid hostility satisfied with no less than
a rolling of her head, after which he rubbed his hands together and got ready
to start the whole cycle of intoxicating infatuation and lust all over again.

Romantic love tried to solve the problem for
romantic women: get out of the game completely, because you will only end up
the loser. So let the men love you across an impassable gulf, let them love you
in a frozen picture on a vase that permanently captures that moment of male
yearning, let them love you in poetry and song that will never die. Stay
dressed. Wear a chastity belt of your own making. Love in the Platonic
abstraction might be the romantic woman’s only game. Such an alluring but
physiologically intact woman must be as familiar as her sexually accommodating
sister in human experience, to have gained lexical recognition: she was defined
as a demiviurge, the ultimate femme fatale.

Maria looked at herself in the mirror,
admiring the expertly subtle, undetectable use of lipstick and rouge that was
already making her colleagues and students at St Peter’s take a second,
wondering look at her. With the last bit of colour, as she capped the lipstick,
closed the powder compact and made adjustments to her hair, she was also
putting finishing touches to a new phase in her life. It stretched before her,
shimmering with thrilling possibilities. Suddenly, at thirty-nine, newly
widowed, she was entering the intriguing world of men, a world that had been so
confusing and cruel to poor Por Por and her mother, that had failed Emily and
thousands of other women, enticed young girls like Maggie and mature women like
Meeta and Winnie, and might just live up to the dreams of incurably trusting
and loyal girls like Yen Ping who would have but one true love in her entire
life.

Amidst the avowals that no men would be
allowed to enter her brave, new post-Bernard world, because they would only
complicate it and bring misery, was the realisation that, if she managed things
well enough, their entry might actually enhance it. She was not creating a new
world; she was merely staking her claim on one that that seemed decreed for
women alone, which, from girlhood, they had confided about endlessly to each
other, or into their diaries, breathless with anticipation and hope. When she
was an undergraduate in the university, even as she preferred solitariness, she
took great interest in the incessant buzz of speculation among her girlfriends,
about who was dating whom, who was serious about whom, who was poaching whose
dates, etc. She had had very little experience of that domain, preferring to
concentrate on her studies and her love of literature; the disastrous, but
fortunately brief, period of courtship and marriage to Bernard of course did
not count and could be dismissed as an anomalous experience best forgotten,
though it had provided her with new knowledge of herself, and a new awareness
and confidence that would surely stand her in good stead in the future. With
the strategic purposefulness that she had guided the student Hong Leng to
success in the examinations, she was approaching a crucial test she had set
herself in her pursuit of happiness. She did a little reenactment of that happy
dance with Randal amidst the sprays of water in the Botanic Gardens. World,
here I come! she thought with girlish tremulousness. Head and heart: each
should be allowed its promptings. That was the advantage of the latecomer to
the game of love, unlike the callow sixteen-year-old.

Head and heart: the male had a third force
which the female had to reckon with, well below either but superseding both,
allying him with the raging beast in musth, sniffing out the promising female,
ready to lose tusk or antler to win her. When she was a little girl listening in
on adult conversations despite being repeatedly shooed away, she heard her
mother and the neighbourhood women comparing men to the lustful barnyard
cockerel that chased every hen. The childhood incidents when she had been
forced to look upon throbbing male power, rearing its ophidian head in
readiness to strike, first in the group of exhibiting kampong urchins who had
enticed her and her friend into a shed, and again when an unzipped male sat
opposite her and her mother in a ferry, would have no place in her romantic
memory. Her honeymoon was no honeymoon because she had secretly cringed
throughout to the incessant demands of male desire. She had read, with
incredulity, of worshippers of Priapic power during religious festivals, who,
despite being endlessly brutalised by it, actually knelt before its symbols
cast in solid stone or clay, reverently touching and caressing them.

Her world would accommodate only male desire
when it was civilly clothed and softened by kindness and tender regard for
female needs. How could she ever forget the embrace that day outside the
sickroom when she had felt so safe, so understood and loved by a man? Memory
captured and cherished every sensuous detail – touch, sight, smell – of that
embrace. As a child, she had often heard of the dead as being safe in the arms
of Jesus; she had not wanted to wait for death to enjoy the happiness of being
enfolded by those arms in their long white sleeves, of being held close to that
loving bosom, pressed against that benign face with the soft brown eyes, the
shoulder-length brown hair and gentle beard. A god in male form was ever a
woman’s comfort; she could also look up to his representative, the priest, and
seek solace in a warm enfolding by those caring arms. The gods in mythology who
came to earth to rape mortal women, the men of God whose cassocks hid unbridled
lust – these too had been banished from her world.

During those moments of deep contentment
nestling in the divine arms, she would cuddle her favourite doll which would in
turn cuddle its baby doll, which had its own tiny infant formed by a knotted
handkerchief, in an endless nesting of love, like those lovely Russian dolls,
one inside the other, that she had once seen in somebody’s house. Meeta with
her frequent night dreams of the venerable Sai Baba would understand a woman’s
need for touch, whether from divine or mortal beings, as would Winnie who
largely favoured the mortals, cheating though they were. Touch me, said the
yearning woman, and found, too late, that she had been completely misunderstood
by the man.

There was a young girl in her school, years
ago, who was made pregnant by a neighbour, a married man with four children,
who lived two doors away in a block of flats. Why did you allow him to do that
to you? she was asked. I felt so safe and loved each time I cried and he took
me in his arms and comforted me, she replied. Did the wily, calculating Maggie
know where to draw the line so that she could go on with her school life? Was
she already teaching that young sister called Angel whom she loved so much to
do the same?

Each encounter with Dr Phang drew her closer
to the line; perhaps the thrilling challenge, on her part, of seeing how much
she would be in control, and, on his part, of seeing how soon she would
capitulate, kept both of them in that deliciously trembling prelude to an
affair that still had no name. It was as exciting as it was unreal, a man and a
woman locked together in a daring, exhilarating suspension of reality that
would come roaring back with a vengeance because the man had a wife and a
family who had the support of society. She was thirty-nine, and he fifteen
years older, and they were playing a game that men and women must have played
since the establishment of that institution called marriage with its many
relentless rules that cried out for suspension, if only for a brief while,
because they were so hopelessly contrary to the unruly passions of head, heart
and gonads.

‘Why is he calling you so often?’ said her
mother, with the same disapproval that she had when she first asked about the
frequency of his visits during her husband’s illness.

Anna Seetoh noticed the lighting up of skin
and eyes when her daughter rushed to pick up the phone, the guilty cupping of
hand over the mouthpiece. The tragic circumstances of her son-in-law’s death
would always be associated with the treachery of her own daughter and his own
best friend. Her suspicions were confirmed with the phone calls that usually
came at odd hours and lasted briefly, as expected of a man in guilty evasion of
detection by his wife, and with the secret meetings that she was sure took
place in some hotel. One of these days, she would search her daughter’s room
for incriminating evidence.

On behalf of her dead son-in-law, she felt
she had to ask her wayward daughter outright, ‘Are you having an affair with
that man? Heng says he’s absolutely sure you are.’ Maria said angrily, ‘It’s
none of his business; just leave him out of anything that concerns me.’ The
antagonism against Dr Phang of that adopted brother of hers had less to do with
affairs than with money; he would always be aggrieved that the large sum from
the sale of the apartment left by Bernard to his Third Aunt had gone forever
outside his reach into the pockets of her greedy relatives in Malaysia.
Apparently he was having money problems in the various businesses he would
never talk about, in the same secretive way he remained about his wife and
young autistic son living with his in-laws in Malaysia; the thought of never
being able to tap into a little of that vast amount must have increased his
resentment against the sister whose folly had caused all the trouble.

‘Are you having an affair?’ demanded Anna
Seetoh. ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil.’

‘Well,’ said Maria airily, ‘the devil can be
duly shamed; there’s no affair,’ adding, with the perverse need to shock a
parent who had been dominating her for too long, ‘but I don’t promise there
won’t be one.’

Anna Seetoh gave a little shriek. ‘Then you
will be committing a mortal sin!’ she said in a mixture of anger and sorrow.

‘The rules no longer apply to me,’ said
Maria with cool defiance.

‘Don’t you care what people will think?’
pleaded Anna Seetoh. She announced shortly after, ‘I’m joining Father Rozario’s
pilgrimage to Lourdes next month,’ clearly with the intention to earn enough
spiritual merit to cover the prodigal daughter.