Miss Seetoh in the World (42 page)

‘Well, as you wish. May I call you when I
come back?’

‘As you wish.’

She had a thought to do something which, in
her entire career of nearly twenty years as school teacher she had never done:
call in sick for a sickness not legitimated by the strict procedures governing
civil service behaviour. Medical leave was allowed for teachers who had flu,
stomach disorders, pneumonia, morning sickness; the misery of sleeplessness and
lack of appetite owing to the devastating effects of jealousy was not a
certifiable ailment and had to be borne in silence. The thought of dragging herself
out of bed and facing her students and colleagues when she would have preferred
to lie under a warm coverlet, in a quiet, darkened room, alone with her
thoughts, made her first reach out for the telephone to put a call to the
school clerk, then to put it down again. No, the alternative would have been
worse: explanations and more explanations to her mother and the maid for a
school day spent at home and later, upon her return to school, to concerned,
inquiring students and colleagues. The explanations would involve the tedium of
pretence and falsehood that would weigh her down.

Mrs Neo would have been the first to make an
inquiry, for the simple reason that only the two of them held a perfect record
of school attendance. Mrs Neo, who was not particularly friendly towards her,
had once put an arm around her to announce to no one in particular, ‘Maria
Seetoh and I have never once been absent from school; we each ought to be given
a gold medal!’ Madam Khoo who was on medical leave at least once a month, and,
rather suspiciously, on a day that coincided with the eve of a public holiday
or a weekend, thereby enabling her to enjoy a nice stretch of days, happened to
be present and immediately congratulated Mrs Neo, in a loud voice, for being
blessed with the extraordinary good health not enjoyed by many.

Jealousy gouged out holes in a woman’s sense
of self-worth that could only be filled by proportionate contrition and
amendment on the part of the man who had started it all. Surely Dr Phang,
however hectic his schedule during the one week he was in Europe, could have
called? Anna Seetoh and the maid noticed the eagerness with which Maria, upon
returning home from school, rushed to the phone to check for voice messages and
again rushed to pick it up even in the midst of a shower or meal. ‘I miss you.’
‘How I wish you were here with me right now.’ ‘Last night I dreamt about you.’
The lover’s banalities, once laughed at and dismissed, were now hankered after,
like so much soothing balm for those terrible gaping wounds of hurt pride. A
jealous woman’s raw nerves tingled to the sound of even the remotest promise of
a message – a car engine, the doorbell’s ring, a knock on the door.

In one of her many troubling dreams at
night, a call had come from him, but she could not hear what he was saying.
‘What? What?’ she screamed, as the voice became more muffled and was lost in a
chaos of background noises. In the end, in great frustration, she put down the
phone. In another dream, she was with him in a hotel room; it looked shabby,
unlike the plush one she had expected in a plush European hotel. She was
wearing a black negligee and lying on the bed. He approached her, saying, ‘My,
what a beautiful body you have!’ and made to touch her breasts. She pushed his
hands away and said angrily, ‘No, go back to that woman. I know she’s here
somewhere in this hotel, waiting for you. I saw her just now, but she hid
behind some plants when she saw me.’ He said, ‘Do be reasonable. There’s no
one. Now, my dearest –’, but she pushed him off the bed, screaming, ‘Have you
any idea how much pain you’re causing me?’ ‘Alright, as you wish,’ he said, and
left the room. When she woke up, she saw that her pillow was wet with tears.

Thankfully, her mother and the maid never
asked questions, though she was sure they were observing her closely, and also
thankfully, neither did Meeta and Winnie who were currently engrossed in their
respective affairs. Winnie must be the only winner in the hideous game of love
and romance being played by them all, for she called to tell Maria, in a voice
trembling with excitement, that she and Wilbur had got engaged and would be
married soon, after which she was likely to leave Singapore and settle down
with him in Washington.

Meeta called once to give the same news
dressed up with her usual scepticism. ‘She’s wearing a big diamond engagement
ring. Bought with her own money. That Asian-American by now must have found out
how much of family property remains in Malacca and is busy doing his sums.
They’re buying an apartment in Washington. Also with her money.’

Maria refrained from asking about Byron
because Meeta’s total silence about him could only mean one thing: her hopes
had fizzled out, like the balloons he had playfully tied to the back of her
chair on the night of the ball, with the appearance of a new girlfriend on his
horizon or the reappearance of an old one. Maria thought bitterly: every woman
eventually gets burnt in a game whose rules favour the men. Right now, the
flames consuming her had by no means run their course. She was a fool to have
got into the game in the first place.

She remembered something her mother had once
told her about a woman, a distant relative of Por Por, who was so jealous of
the new wife whom her husband had brought into the household that she poisoned
the other two wives against her, until the poor girl, who was only sixteen
years-old, one morning tied a rope round a staircase railing and hanged
herself. By no means abated, the woman’s jealousy then turned to target the two
wives, particularly the younger and prettier one who was summoned to the man’s
bed more frequently than the rest. Sexual jealousy often had recourse to
supernatural help in the form of secret potions to be put in the man’s food or
drink for immediate re-direction of his passion and lust.

The modern educated woman was not above
making secret trips to fortune-tellers and witch doctors to dispose of her
rival: Venerable Mother of the White Heaven Temple, despite her claims to harm
no one, was said to have dispensed amulets and other charms that purportedly
harmed only those truly evil women who broke up homes, destroyed marriages and
caused other women to commit suicide. In the old days, the man, by virtue of
his traditional standing as the lord and master in the household, was spared
the messiness of a woman’s jealousy. If the jealousy happened to be his, he had
no need for furtive visits to fortune-tellers and shamans, for he had all the
backing of tradition to simply, openly get rid of her. There was a woman who
her husband suspected of having an affair with the grocer and thought of
setting a trap. But that was too much bother, so he simply gave her a beating
and then told her to pack her belongings and return to her parents’ house.

His modern counterpart was less fortunate,
and indeed could bear the full brunt of his partner’s jealousy. Emily told
endless stories, with much relish, about how a highly educated woman, enraged
at discovering secret love letters hidden in secret places in her husband’s
office, stormed into it, scattering files, sweeping things off his desks,
breaking whatever could be broken. Then, to make her revenge commensurate with
the enormous pain she was suffering, she marched into his boss’s office and
revealed that her husband had been complicit in some nefarious scheme years ago
that had cost the company millions of dollars. Sometimes hard evidence was not
necessary for a woman to fly into a jealous rage: a woman who saw a pretty
waitress talking to her husband while serving him soup during dinner in a restaurant
instantly stood up, slapped the waitress and then demanded to see the manager
to have her sacked.

Maria thought, in a confusion of thinking
that invariably ended with painful self-misgivings: I have no right to be
jealous. I have not even slept with him. Jealousy claimed prospective rights:
she was going to sleep with him. It was simple reasoning to which the heart
must eventually submit: if you are so tormented with jealousy now, how much
more when you have crossed the line and staked your territory? The flames will
become an inferno, the flood a deluge. You will be utterly destroyed. Amazed at
how little control she had over an emotion so primitive yet so enduring, she
thought desperately, No, I can’t go through with it.

She thought of the sheer absurdity of being
continually tormented at the thought of him celebrating Valentine’s Day with
his wife, celebrating her birthday, their wedding anniversary, sleeping on the
same bed as her every night. Betty told her about a girlfriend, the mistress of
a highly successful corporate lawyer, who could not even bear the thought of
his wife’s picture in his wallet and made him remove it. Imagine the greater
torment of a hundred suspicious thoughts each time he went outside marital
territory to speak amiably to more attractive, younger women. There would
always be countless such women in his orbit. Jealousy, suspicion, anger,
humiliation – she could not survive their combined power. Jealousy was part of
love’s package which she was a fool to think she could approach with a fine
selectivity: select in the passion and laughter and pleasure, select out the
jealousy and the ugly, painful realities. No woman had ever managed to do that.

She had made up her mind. In the end, in the
pursuit of a happy, peaceful, good life, mind was to be more trusted than the
passions and urges of the heart. Like a willful, unruly child, the heart
wandered dangerously close to the edge, and the head had to pull it back. She
was a survivor.

Mr Ignatius Lim called her into his office.
‘Green tea? It’s the best for health,’ he said, pouring out a cup for her. Then
he put on his glasses and looked through a very impressive-looking black
leather folder. ‘Ah, here it is!’ He wanted to consult her, he said, on a very
important matter that was connected with the current national campaign for
greater productivity. The great TPK and his ministers had decided that for
Singapore to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive world, there had to be
greater productivity in the country’s industries, a greater effort put in by
the people in all domains of activity. ‘Here’s where we come in,’ said Mr
Ignatius Lim enthusiastically. ‘Education. We must prove that we too can
contribute towards national productivity. And how do we do that? By making a
more efficient use of our resources, by re-ordering our priorities.’ He loved
the jargon of official talk – ‘resources’, ‘efficient’, ‘priorities’ – which
rolled with ease upon his tongue. Miss Seetoh’s creative writing class, he
explained politely, could not be a priority compared to other more urgent
needs. He was consulting her about how best to put his idea into operation:
converting it into a Language Remedial Teaching class that would focus on the
needs of students who were always failing their exams because of their poor
grammar. In an offhand way, he hinted that the results of last year’s English
language exams were not as good as they should be. ‘Miss Seetoh,’ he said
earnestly. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that short-story writing, play
writing, poetry, all that stuff, isn’t important. I did literature in school
and enjoyed it. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! Even acted in a
school play once. But it’s a luxury. Bread and butter first, I say, before we
can go on to cake and sweets!’ He laughed heartily. ‘What do you say, Miss
Seetoh?’

He did not like her obduracy; after a while,
his smiles faded away and he said, ‘Alright, Miss Seetoh. You will please put
up a position paper to justify the continuance of your creative writing class.’

Maria said coldly, ‘There’s no need for any
position paper, sir. I can’t stop you if you want to shut down the class. But
let me tell you this: it will be a sad day for the school if by priority you
mean only the passing of exams.’ ‘That will be all, Miss Seetoh,’ he said
brusquely, and from that moment the battle lines were drawn. He liked to quote
the great TPK: ‘Those who are not for me are against me,’ and Miss Maria Seetoh
had decidedly placed herself on the other side.

‘Brother Phil, I need to talk to you,’ she
said to him later that day.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know all about this
productivity campaign.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ said Maria, ‘it doesn’t
bother me one jot.’

‘Is it about Maggie?’ asked Brother Philip
warily and Maria replied, ‘No, it’s much worse. It’s about me.’

‘Alright, we’ll have to make it tomorrow.
Same café? I’ll be wearing the shirt and trousers again to remain incognito.’
He had worn the frightfully gaudy batik shirt given by someone who had bought
it at a beach resort in Bali when they had gone looking for Maggie.

Maria smiled and said, ‘There! You’ve made
me feel better already.’

It was almost on impulse that she had
decided to confide in Brother Philip the secret she had been at pains to keep
from him. The burden of the secret had become too great not to seek discharge;
no real unburdening, only a superficial sharing could take place with the
longtime friends Meeta and Winnie. She had previously avoided talking to
Brother Philip, a religious man with limited experience and permanently sworn
to celibacy. Now for precisely these reasons, she was seeking him out. Perhaps
it was the kindness in his eyes or the simple honesty written all over his
person.

She had worried about the sheer
embarrassment of telling the Moral Education teacher of St Peter’s about her
plans for a secret rendezvous in a European hotel with a married man, but the
telling was surprisingly easy. They were sitting in a coffee-house, and while
she poured out her heart, for the first time, to any living being, he sipped
his coffee calmly, now and again pausing to look at her. She told him about the
unspeakable agonies of a jealousy that was even then troubling her dreams at
night and filling her mind with angry thoughts of revenge by day. ‘I am not
myself,’ she ended dispiritedly. ‘Please advise me.’