Miss Seetoh in the World (54 page)

The sheer novelty of teasing her mother on a
subject as alien as it was shocking, and watching the sudden flush on her
cheeks and her little cries of protest, provided a special piquancy to a
mischievous nature carried over from childhood. She remembered that as a little
girl, she had one day put a grasshopper in her mother’s hair for the thrill of
seeing this most prim and well-mannered parent break out into a frenzy of
screaming and hair-searching. Every memory of her mother playing and laughing
with her, telling her stories of ancient gods and goddesses, was precious, and
its pleasure worth recapturing even in the sober years of their adult lives.

Joseph Boey was one of those elderly, very
pious retirees, mainly widows and widowers, who formed a reliable pool of
volunteers found in any church, who could always be seen cleaning the altar,
dusting or polishing statues and candlesticks, getting ready the prayer books
for the next service, arranging the flowers, lighting the candles. As they went
about their work in quiet devoted service, often working together, anything
more than pious fellowship would be both a scandal and a sacrilege. Joseph Boey
provided the perfect opportunity to steer her mother from her dreary,
religion-drenched talk to something that might just expose another, unexpected,
indeed, refreshing, side of her.

‘Ah, Mother, I see you’re blushing!’ said
Maria pursuing the subject with relentless relish. ‘It’s alright, Mother. It’s
alright to take a lover, if he makes you happy.’

Anna Seetoh uttered a little cry of protest
against the obscene word. ‘Maria, how can you say anything like that? You ought
to be ashamed of yourself!’ She began a flurry of hand gestures of frantic
dismissal accompanied by cries of ‘Choy! Choy! ’, exactly as she had done,
years ago, when she wanted to dismiss the evil image of the man who had sat
opposite them in a ferry and exposed himself.

Lust, concupiscence, carnal desire. Even
married couples could be guilty of these sins. After her conversion to
Catholicism, with the presence of a daughter to attest to her fulfillment of
holy matrimony’s purpose, Anna Seetoh had rejected all her husband’s attempts
at sex.

Maria watched her mother closely. There was
the unmistakable blush, as of a young girl caught unawares. ‘You must introduce
me to this Joseph Boey one of these days, Mother.’ Anna Seetoh, secure in her
faith, terrified about what fellow parishioners would think of her, would never
have a romance, or even remotely approach one. There would be none of the
torturous quandaries that her daughter had experienced, there would be no line
to cross, no perilous edge overlooking a chasm to peep into and withdraw from.
When Anna Seetoh went down on her knees to pray, it was for others, never for
herself, for in her simple, ardent soul there were no inner demons to vanquish.
But the blush, the frantically denying hand gestures, the stern prohibition
against the subject ever occurring again, her own guardedness in future
conversations – all proved that even the thick encrustations of nun-like piety
that Anna Seetoh had, over so many years, laid over her consciousness, could be
penetrated by every woman’s need to be loved, touched, or at the least, singled
out for attention by a man.

She had done her mother a disservice. Now
poor Anna Seetoh, confused by the new light in which her perverse daughter had
made her see her friendship with Joseph Boey, would very likely avoid him like
poison. If he as much as tried to hold her hand, she would recoil in horror and
flee the occasion for temptation. If she had a dream of them together, she
would run to the cleansing power of the confessional the next morning and sob
out her guilt: ‘Father forgive me, for I have sinned. I had impure thoughts…’

Maria said again, ‘Mother, it’s okay! You
are a widow, Joseph a widower; there can be no sin.’ She reminded her mother of
the example of two similarly circumstanced parishioners of the Church of
Eternal Mercy, both in their sixties, who fell in love and got married.

Anna Seetoh pressed her hands to her ears
and said, ‘Stop. Stop this instant. You are saying disgusting things. Never
talk like that in my presence again.’

She was unusually quiet during a shopping
trip after lunch, when Maria, feeling closer to her mother than she had been
for a long time, bought gifts, including books and toys for the autistic
nephew, to take back to her new home in Malaysia.

Back home by herself, she thought with an
amused smile, ‘If I write about the love lives of the women in my family, poor
Mother’s innocence, would lie in the middle, a pure bright pool in stark
contrast to the dark, churning waves at each end.’ Was any family as strange as
hers, where the woman in each generation could truly say, ‘My mother and I were
so different – like night and day,’ and the outside observer could ask, with
much astonishment: ‘How could someone like you have produced a daughter like
her?’

She thought of herself in old age; in her
chosen life of solitude would she, even then, find love? Would she be like that
lonely elderly widow who sought and found love, whose story was well-known in
Singapore? The widow of a fairly successful businessman, she had found a lover
eighteen years younger and was happy for the remaining years of her life,
baffling all predictions about a faithless fortune-hunting husband.

When she died, he said proudly to his
relatives and friends, ‘It was not what people thought. It was love of her, not
her money. I gave her seven years of happiness,’ and made clear it was not just
the happiness of gentle companionship during her extensive travels round the
world, but the special happiness enjoyed only on the silken bed.

She met the jogger one more time in the
Botanic Gardens, and once again, there was the proposition, a bold direct one
without the usual preliminaries for testing the water. He had persuaded her,
since it was getting dark, to take a lift home in his car; when he reached the
car park of her block, he turned to her and said with a smile, ‘Won’t you ask
me in for a cup of tea?’

They were sitting very close together in the
growing darkness. She was suddenly gripped by one image that could sum up the
amatory quandaries in her life: a parked car, herself and a man in the parked
car, the enveloping darkness of evening to assure privacy and intimacy. Each
time, it had ended either with a proposal or a proposition. The stark
difference between the two would determine a woman’s response; she was likely
to rejoice at the first and react with anger or embarrassment to the second.
She had recoiled at Bernard’s proposal and demurred at Benjamin Phang’s
proposition, finally rejecting it. There was no hesitation at all in the case
of the third supplicant. She simply said to the jogger, ‘No. Goodnight and
thank you for the lift,’ and was gone in a second.

In later years she could not even recall his
name or appearance, only the startling boast, the first time he had sat down
and talked to her in the gardens, that he had bedded an American lady jogger
the very first time he met her.

Alone by herself in those first weeks of
retirement from her job at St Peter’s Secondary School, she surrendered to the
luxury of lying in bed for hours and letting her thoughts wander on their own.
Like a flock of butterflies, they settled on the sweet allurements of love,
lust, romance, sex, each a bright, enticing, fragrant bloom, gloriously
indistinguishable from the other.

Maybe they were all one and the same, just
different aspects of Nature’s single, supreme strategy to propagate life on the
face of the earth, so that the mountain goat in musth chasing the coy female
across steep rocks was no different from her parents on their wedding night,
her father eagerly lifting up her mother’s chaste white cotton nightdress, no
different from Por Por’s and her lover’s tentative explorations of each other’s
nakedness as they lay on some improvised bed of old sacks on the floor of a dark
corner in a temple, no different from herself in the parked car where she lay
against the warmth of Benjamin Phang’s body.

This need of woman for man, of man for
woman, must have received Nature’s fiat to transcend even the restraining
forces of culture, even the sternest strictures of religion and morality. Thou
shalt not commit adultery. If you lust after a woman in your mind, you have
already committed adultery. In every church there must be men and women,
quietly sitting in the pews and listening to sermons about the sanctity of the
marriage vows who had already broken them, in thought, word or deed. The
conscience in the end would be the most accommodating organ of the human self,
reduced to a tiny voice that said, ‘So what. Everyone does it.’

Nature probably never intended for this most
primordial of needs to transcend death as well. The mountain goat, the prairie
mole, the moth – they went their separate ways to die eventually of old age or
as food for others; indeed, after the act of sex, they lost all interest in the
partner. But the human being could pay no less homage to love than ascribe to
it an eternal existence. In the Christian heaven there was no marriage and no
sex, only pure love, but in the myths and legends that had endured from time
immemorial across cultures, gods fell in love with goddesses and competed for
their sexual favours; gods fell in love with earthly maidens, came down to
earth or took them up into heavenly abodes; mortal lovers achieved immortality
when they met at long last on an eternal shore; mortal lovers who were cruelly
separated on earth could still be united in death by a marriage of their effigies.

Nature probably never intended for this need
for love and sex to turn defiant and separate itself from the primary goal of
propagation. As soon as they were able, men and women must have learnt to enjoy
the pleasure without having to pay its price, delighting in the marvellous
workings of Nature’s love chemicals, and profiting from Nature’s thoughtful
provision of ambient moonlight, starlight, flowers in bloom. Nature’s gift had
become a free for all, satisfying the entire range of needs of the complex
human being who liked to think of complexity only in terms of head and heart,
forgetting a multitude of other entities, mostly nameless and unnameable, often
vaguely referred to as the subconscious, the unconscious, the subliminal, each
with its own pressing needs and demands. Thus, in catering to human complexity,
love had become an obfuscation, defying definition, eluding scholarly efforts
to pin it down to something comprehensible. It had the largest possible
clientele – the young, the not-so-young, the brazen old, the poorest and the
richest, the most powerful and the humblest, the most beautiful and the
ugliest, the most saintly and the most sinful.

Moreover, it allowed a generous bursting of
all boundaries, so that all could come together in a gloriously crazy mix:
marriages and love affairs galore between young, winsome May and old, hoary
December, waitress and multimillionaire banker, king and commoner, president
and stripper, Esmeralda and Quasimodo, Lancelot and Guinevere, Lolita and her
ageing professor, Abelard and Heloise. Love too claimed its martyrs, for, as
frequently reported in newspapers all over the world, a girl from a high caste
or a conservative, punitive religion, would run away to get married to her
secret lover, and risk being murdered by her own family in a brutality called
an honour killing.

Love had become marvellously, exasperatingly
multiform, multifaceted, multidimensional, a vast fluid term to accommodate any
variant of human need and emotion, so that even Anna Seetoh, experiencing the
small girlish stirrings of pleasure in the presence of Joseph Boey, and Maria
Seetoh, experiencing an inchoate, vague but still very real pleasure in the
recollection of her days in St Peter’s Secondary School with Brother Philip,
could inhabit its vast hospitable mansions.

To each his own. Live and let live. Life
goes on. In the end, life was lived according to the earthy wisdom of
banalities and clichés, in accordance with Nature’s primary law that said,
Survive, be happy. In the end, Nature’s brute laws of competition and forced
cooperation in the game of survival, prevailed, not the high-sounding
pronouncements of religion and morality.

In one of his letters, Brother Philip had
described some educational project he had undertaken for the poor children of
his parish and mentioned a co-worker named Sister Bridget who taught in the
Convent of Mary and the Angels. In subsequent letters, he again referred to
Sister Bridget in the warmest tones. Jealousy, which the head denounced as most
unreasonable and downright despicable, could still be sustained by the heart’s
persistent questions: who was she? Was Brother Phil in love with her? Why was
he singling her out for special mention in his letters? Was he trying to make
his former colleague and close friend in St Peter’s jealous? Did that mean that
he was in love with her? What did it mean when a man who was committed to
chaste service to God fell in love with a woman? Could it mean only love of the
pure, non-sensual kind? Had he, in the first place, asked for the posting back
to Ireland because he had become afraid of his feelings for her?

Maria decided that the inaction of solitude
was bad for her, throwing her into agonies of thinking, that were traceable in
the end to pure, useless vanity. In any case, thinking was now a luxury. She
had to start planning for a new life, alone in an old, rundown apartment that
needed repairs, having little money beyond some modest savings, keeping alive
her passion to write when writing guaranteed no income. She stared gloomily at
the old ceiling, the cracked cement floor of one of the bathrooms, the scuffed
dining room set. Then she stared, even more gloomily, at a clutch of bills in
her hands. She would have to think seriously about giving private tuition – coaching
students to improve their grammar, pass their G.C.E. O Level English Language
paper. The thought alone was dispiriting.