Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked him.

  ‘I am very happy, Miss Seetoh. And I thank you for your unstinting help you gave me to get my G.C.E. O Level.’

  One day Maria was surprised to get a call from Hong Leng who asked her whether she could conduct courses for his staff to improve their English. He added, rather shyly, that she would be well paid for it. She said ‘No’ instantly, for by that time, in her solitude, she wanted little to do with a world that reminded her of her days at St Peter’s Secondary School.

  Twenty-One

  Dr Phang is bad news, her head told her. Beware that man, said her heart. If head and heart were investigated by those instruments of science that told only the truth, there would be no registration of suspicion or anxiety, only the firing sparks of pure elation. Even the mention of his name, much less the recollection of the deep gaze of his eyes or the touch of his hand, would elicit that reaction, properly belonging to lovers only, which the sensitive instruments monitoring heartbeat, breathing or pupillary enlargement could instantly pick up.

  No, she would not, could not cross that line; she would be a friend only. Crossing that line: how did the act of sex, that very first time when the woman decided to abandon all the rules of the game enjoined on her by her mother with the unshakeable backing of society, give in to the man’s pleading and go to bed with him, become such a crucial, irrevocable decision, resulting in a commitment with so much emotional, if not legal, baggage? In the time of her mother and Por Por, that one act of sex could be revealed to the world by physiology: how many heartbreaking stories she had heard about the woman betrayed by the broken maidenhood and the visibly swelling belly that caused her enraged family to cast her out. Por Por was saved only because the family face had to be saved.

  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 wate
r 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.

  ‘Mother, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ said Maria, giving her a hug which she brushed away. ‘But I’m happy, at least for now. Aren’t you happy that I’m happy?’

  ‘There’s no future with a married man,’ said Anna Seetoh stiffly. ‘One of these days his wife will find out. How do you know she hasn’t already set a private detective on you? And Ah Siong has not been dead a year. For God’s sake, Maria, do you know what you are doing?’

  Maria hated it when she was dragged down from the soaring clouds of a vertiginous joy and pinned to the ugly realities on the ground. ‘Mother, please leave me alone,’ she said with firm finality. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I certainly hope so!’ snapped Anna Seetoh, and in the next breath whimpered, ‘I shall pray for you.’

  It was a happiness rich and brimming, once guilt and anxiety were banished with the simple decision not to cross the line, and it spilled over into a cheerful disposition towards everyone.

  ‘You look very happy,’ said Brother Philip with shrewd perceptiveness.

  ‘I don’t know whether I have a right to be so happy,’ said Maria with a cryptic evasiveness that only increased the good man’s curiosity. ‘Perhaps one of these days I could unburden myself to you.’

  ‘Unburden? You’re sure that’s not a Freudian slip, my dear?’ He had taken to using that little endearment when talking to her, and she was not sure whether it was simple avuncular geniality or something else.

  Dear Brot
her Philip, she thought. Of all the inhabitants in her world of St Peter’s, she enjoyed his company most. If he were not protected by that vow to be ever chaste, would he too have been drawn into her increasingly rambunctious world?

  A beneficiary of the new, light-hearted magnanimity was Mr Chin. Meeta said what he had done to her was so disgusting nobody should take it sitting down. The man had one morning during recess, when he happened to be sitting beside her in the school canteen, invited her for lunch in a newly opened restaurant in town that was famous for its dim sum. He spoke at unnecessary length on the excellence of the dim sum to cover his embarrassment at having plucked up enough courage to ask her for a date, and she apologised, with unnecessary effusiveness, for declining it. She saw the deep flush of shock and humiliation spread on his face and had an instant inspiration to save it.

  ‘Won’t you join me for a cup of coffee in the staffroom later?’ she said sweetly, assuring him that there was enough in her flask for two. Colouring even more deeply, he declined, walked away and never spoke to her again.

  Within a week, he had launched his own face-saving campaign. He spread the story that Maria Seetoh, out of sheer loneliness in her newly widowed status, had invited him for coffee; he had politely turned her down and had been avoiding her since, fearing to get involved with someone who, since her husband’s death, was no longer the same person. Besides, she had lost all her fresh beauty and looked haggard and worn out. The story accreted all manner of tantalising details along the way: Miss Seetoh had invited him for dim sum, Miss Seetoh had invited him to her home for coffee, Miss Seetoh was clearly setting her sights on him.