Miss Seetoh in the World (45 page)

‘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.