Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  ‘The cheek of him!’ Meeta had exclaimed. ‘Maria, you should have countered his story with the truth. How can you let him spoil your reputation like this?’

  Brother Philip, the only one to whom Maria cared to tell the truth, responded with a silly limerick scribbled on a scrap of paper during a staff meeting and surreptitiously passed to her:

  There’s this man who, ahem,

  Fell for a lady called M,

  But she only sniffed

  And he was so miffed

  He wished her a life of mayhem!

  Maria scribbled back a response: ‘Laughter postponed. Coffee after meeting?’

  Winnie told the story of a Mr Beh, a Chinese language teacher, who mistook her kindness in making coffee for him every morning in the staffroom, for infatuation.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole!’ she giggled. ‘No looks, no personality, bad teeth, a worse gossiper than a woman!’

  Dr Phang soared above the dull, mean-minded Mr Chin and the unprepossessing, gossip-mongering Mr Beh as Olympus above dung-hill, as white knight on horseback above the lowly, load-bearing minions on foot. He was bad news because his extraordinary charm broke the calculating machines of self-protection inside women’s heads, and caused them to throw all sensibility and caution to the winds. If asked why they had succumbed to his charms, knowing full well he was married and had had affairs throughout his more than thirty years of marriage to a good, decent, home-loving wife from a good family, they would have said, ‘I don’t know,’ meaning that they were unable to explain the huge gap between the astutely deliberative apparatus of head and the hopelessly unreliable apparatus of heart. If the situation had been reversed, and it was a woman who had cut such a huge swathe through swooning men, she would have had the charge of witchcraft laid at her door: she must have had recourse to time-tested charms and potions for making men fall desperately in love with her, for making them increase their potency in her company and losing it as soon as they climbed back into their wives’ beds.

  Dr Phang’s charm was as far removed from the dark forces of tradition as his abundance of wavy silver hair, gentle eyes, beguiling smile, witty speech and permanently relaxed air were from the artifices of the poseur at cocktail parties, or in glossy advertisements. Women ever loved the au naturel in a man; Dr Phang, in his looks, bearing and demeanour, down to the last endearing mannerism of running a hand, in moments of puzzlement, through the film-star locks, or throwing back his head in a hearty laugh, had it in abundance. Women who did much thinking about how best to give excuses, offer explanations and present arguments, loved Dr Phang’s habit of dispensing with all three. He is so spontaneous, he makes you feel completely relaxed, they said. He behaves like a gentleman even to the office boys and the cleaning women, they said, and instantly contrasted him with those arrogant high-fliers and top-achievers in the civil service whose arrogance only showed their insecurities.

  In a note after Bernard’s funeral, he had asked why Heng had told him not to attend it, but when he met her for the first time, months later, over lunch in a restaurant, he never referred to the subject and instead plunged straight into the sheer enjoyment of her company. She had been prepared for a lengthy, tedious time of endless questions and explanations, of their moving cautiously around each other’s sensitivities, of saying something and then, for answer, listening to what was not, could not be said. To her utter surprise and delight, the lunch was all pleasant, light-hearted talk and laughter.

  The note asking for an explanation could not have been a stratagem, as the man was incapable of any. All he had was his enormous self-confidence and brimming exuberance to turn a potentially discomfiting situation into a completely enjoyable one. Dr Phang, she concluded, was the true hedonist who never let the intrusive why of the past and the tiresome what if of the future intrude upon the pure enjoyment of the present, whether it was playing golf, hiking with his daughter in Europe, drinking with his buddies in a pub or trying to seduce a woman over a meal in a restaurant. It was said that as an undergraduate he would spend much time, during the examination season, playing the drums in a band, while his friends swotted, despaired and lost weight, and then, to their disgust, emerge with top grades.

  At work, his massive intellect, which had impressed his superiors right up to the Minister of Defence and the great TPK himself, came up with such brilliant ideas that the leadership, ever conservative and austere, was prepared to overlook his philandering ways and invite him to get into politics. It was said that at some time or another, every ministry had sought his views on this or that major national project.

  ‘I don’t know, let me think about it,’ he would say, settling himself comfortably in his chair with his feet on the table and closing his eyes; shortly afterwards, he would come up with the most insightful ideas.

  Head, heart, the libidinal urge: each, kept apart from the others, had its own vibrant energy because all were governed by a prodigious, unapologetic lust for life.

  The great TPK had seen enough of yes-men to appreciate his firm No to many a request or invitation. ‘I am not suited for a political life,’ he had said, and, paradoxically, became rated by the leadership as the most suitable. Only Dr Phang, it was said, could have got away with doing what he did some years ago. He had absented himself from a very important state function because his daughter, who was then studying in London, was distraught over something and had called him urgently; he had immediately taken leave to fly to be with her. The Prime Minister, who was known to chastise those who put their personal concerns above official duties, actually inquired about the distraught daughter upon his return; perhaps he was thinking of his own sickly wife needing more of his time than he could spare. The rumours about his devotion to his wife of thirty years had a somewhat softening effect on the hard, callous image that he presented to the world. Those severe eyes, that belligerent jaw, that raised forefinger of threat and warning – they all melted, it was whispered, into a soft centre of pure tenderness and concern when he attended to her, covering her feet with a warm blanket, bringing her the most expensive ginseng brew.

  He would deal with Dr Phang’s philandering in an appropriate way: once he got the man into politics, he would issue him the stern warning that he invariably issued to all his ministers and members of parliament, ‘It’s your own business, but once it becomes a public scandal, there’ll be no mercy.’

  At least one wife of an errant minister had written to the prime minister about her husband’s shenanigans; he was dropped from his ministerial job soon after and dispatched as ambassador to some obscure European country. Olivia Phang, if she even remotely suspected an affair, would likely not just send a letter but ask for a personal appearance before the prime minister to plead for no less a punishment than complete disgrace, to be commensurate with the love she had given him.

  The man’s unique hold on women must ultimately lie in his love of them, even if only ephemeral, even if only physical, but still to be called love, if women so hankered after it. Here was a man who would unabashedly say he could not do without women, thus paying them the supreme compliment. Definitely not husband material, one of the women he had loved and left had sniffed, and then had to admit sadly, but definitely lover material. No mere rude, crude Casanova, he deserved that epithet which women used for the ultimate lover: sensitive. And the ultimate tribute was that he was naturally sensitive to their every mood, need, desire, there being none of the pretence that women so hated. Effortlessly, Dr Phang made conquests; only he did not see them as such, but a celebration, on each occasion, of the sheer enjoyment of the woman’s company, a perfect meshing of male desire and female need. He put her on a pedestal; it did not matter if she had soon to vacate it for another. It was said that he had so charmed a French woman he had met in a plane to Europe that after their single rendezvous in a Paris hotel, armed with no more than a recollection of his name and appearance, she came to Singapore to look for him.

  Dr Phang had got marri
ed at the early age of twenty-two, for the sole purpose of sex, to a shy young girl of the same age, chosen for him by his strongly conservative Christian parents who would have beaten him to a pulp if he had joined his friends in their secret jaunts to test their manhood in the sleazy haunts of his home town in Malaysia. The effects of the conservative upbringing did not last long in his marriage: before long, his shy, intellectual, conservative wife must have been no match for his enormous energies and the affairs started, first with the pretty girls in his office, then, over the years, with women who came into his social circle and women outside the circle who came crashing into it, like his present wife, a model from Hong Kong whom he had met by the merest chance. It was through sheer tenacity, or her striking sexuality, that she had got him to divorce his wife and marry her. Where other men would have floundered through a mess of emotional and legal wrangling, would have wrestled with guilt, remorse and shame, Dr Phang simply sailed from his first marriage into his second amazingly calm and in control, remaining on good terms with his daughter, his ex-wife and his ex-mistresses. It’s impossible to be angry with that man, they would say. There is not a single snide, mean bone in his body. He is always generous, helpful and caring. Other men? They behave much, much worse. They can’t hold a light to his candle.

  The enviable Teflon Man, ever undamaged. If he had been the president of the most powerful nation in the world, or the leader of the most powerful religious organisation, the onerousness of office, and the responsibility of handling crises and calming a nervous world, would not in the least have detracted from his cheerful imperturbability and joie de vivre. He would have gone to play a game of golf, or made love to a woman, in the midst of an international crisis and woken up the next morning to see an abatement of the crisis. Life was a game which he played with relish by rules he bent with saucy impunity.

  Maria thought, this man bears a charmed life. The goddess who presided at his birth must have left at his cradle a mega gift of luck. The classic Byronic hero was said to be mad, bad and dangerous to know, except that in his case, the madness, badness and danger were all on the side of the poor pursuing woman. If she wrote a book about him one day, she would call it ‘The Man Who Loved Women’, a generous euphemism for that insatiable lust ranked high among the Seven Deadly Sins, depicted sometimes as a horned, goat-footed, bright-eyed man playing a merry pipe. A man’s lust, unaccompanied by a brilliant mind and an engaging manner, turned women off; dressed in both, it brought them scrambling over each other to his bed. Olivia Phang, young and beautiful and wealthy after a very profitable divorce from her first husband, with her impeccably manicured nails, must have clawed her way right to it, shredding the competitors along the way. Now she, Maria Seetoh, by no means as young, beautiful and wealthy, was being courted by this man. Vanity made the thought alone intoxicating. Was hers the next scalp he would wear on his victory belt?

  She was glad that Olivia Phang and her mother were helping her in the drawing of the line, the first through her vigilant monitoring of her husband’s activities, like a small animal with sharply quivering nostrils, and the second through simply being in the house virtually all the time, thus ruling out a major trysting venue.

  Sometimes Anna Seetoh sat by the table with the phone, in a form of self-inflicted punishment that required picking it up, hearing the hated interloper’s voice and saying to her daughter, ‘It’s for you,’ without being able to add, ‘You’re playing with fire.’

  ‘You’re playing with fire,’ said Meeta.

  ‘I’ve only seen him once,’ said Winnie, ‘and I must say he’s a charmer. No wonder you’ve fallen for him, Maria!’

  ‘He must be such a refreshing change from that awful husband of yours and that boring, childish Mr Chin,’ said Meeta.

  ‘Oo-oh, now you know what it’s like to be in love,’ said Winnie. ‘But he’s so much older! Not old enough to be your father, but definitely so much older. Think, Maria, when you’re forty-five, he’ll be an old man already!’

  ‘Winnie, you’re being your usual silly self,’ said Meeta. ‘Don’t you know that the older some men get, the better they look, the sexier they become?’

  She mentioned a gentleman at the Polo Club, seventy-three years old, and as dandy and debonair as ever.

  ‘I’ve never heard you speak with such feeling about any man before,’ said Winnie. ‘Oho, our cold, detached Maria Seetoh in love at last!’

  ‘I understand his Hong Kong wife is a shrew. I tell you, Maria, you’re playing with fire!’ cried Meeta.

  ‘Dearie,’ giggled Winnie, ‘have you slept with him yet?’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Meeta suddenly, in a display of that supreme female illogicality that could turn a warning in an instant into its total opposite of enthusiastic encouragement. ‘If you have no place to meet your beau, we could lend you ours occasionally. Winnie and I could spend an evening at my sister’s, and we’ll take the maid with us as well as Singapore who may bark too much and spoil your fun. You can have the whole place to yourself. And shut the windows; the couple opposite are real nosy parkers.’

  Twenty-Two

  A birth, a death, an affair: St Peter’s Secondary School, being society’s microcosm, duly replicated its human events with all the attendant human feelings of joy and sorrow. Mrs Kee, one of the maths teachers, had given birth to a baby boy after a succession of four daughters, and Sister Elizabeth, the chemistry teacher who had been diagnosed with womb cancer a year ago, had passed away.

  The birth and the death could be talked about at St Peter’s; the affair would have to remain secret to avoid society’s censure, even if it was only at that stage when the strict technicality of the uncrossed line put it beyond the censure. But society could still warn. It had its favourite metaphor of playing with fire, the imagery simultaneously capturing the consuming flame of foolish passion and of the other kind of flame, eternal and seasoned with brimstone, that folly deserved. Maria was sure, if she could read the mind of Brother Philip or the sharp Mrs Neo or even the principal who sometimes gave her quizzical looks, she would see the question in vivid letters rolled out in a scroll of judgement for all to see: ‘Maria Seetoh, barely a year after your husband’s death, are you having an affair?’

  Affair, liaison, relationship, infatuation, amour – it was happiness, by any name, thought Maria with defiant joy. She could not recall a time in her life, whether as a young girl or as an adult, when she had been so happy. Mentally she applied to her happy state the modifying adverbs she had taught her students to use instead of the overused, unimaginative ‘very’, selecting only those that went beyond mere modification to scale the greatest expressive heights: so she was supremely, ecstatically, phenomenally, indescribably happy. Never mind if it was happiness of the dubious kind that would not stand up to the moral scrutiny of Father Rozario or her mother or the principal. Or of the inferior kind celebrated in popular love songs and Valentine cards that relied exclusively on cheap rhyming words such as the fervid ‘true’-‘you’-‘blue’, ‘moon’-‘June’-‘soon’, ‘kiss’-‘bliss’-‘miss’ clusters of silly juvenilia. A teacher of creative writing who sternly forbade her students to use those dreadful clichés, she now recognised that the happiness she was experiencing was translatable into exactly the cheap banalities of the airy walk, the singing heart, the starry eyes.

  Meeta said, looking at her with eyes narrowed in intense probing, ‘How come you’re looking younger?’

  Her mother was less kind.

  ‘Maria, don’t think I don’t know. I heard you singing in the bathroom just now. And your mind seems far away, like it’s thinking of something else.’ She could not resist tagging on the fire warning.

  Being in love, it was said, was something purely chemical, a throwback to life’s primordial origins, back even to ancestors that were rough and scaly, crawling out of mud in response to the mating call, or that were delicately winged and beautiful, flying unimaginable distances on a pheromone-scented trail. Love, raw and p
ristine, unabashed and unstoppable, was well before the time of thinking and calculating, giving rise to the only explanation for unaccountable attraction between two people: love’s chemistry. In Nature’s grand scheme of things, its only purpose was procreation and its strategy was to offer a reward in advance for all the pains. Human beings soon dispensed with the procreative burden but cleverly kept the reward. So a woman in love was buoyed up on a tide of wondrous chemicals, with no price to pay. A clichéd happiness was still happiness, to be savoured as long as possible.

  Being in love and loving were not the same thing, the first being a temporary and intense state of suspended reality, the second, in its firm rootedness and commitment, being the exact opposite. The apportionment of reward was unfair: the loving woman, guided only by devotion and loyalty, was often weighed down by sadness and disappointment, while a woman in love, ignoring all duty and responsibility, had a face that radiated happiness and walked with a light step. Did Por Por, meeting her lover secretly in the shadows of a temple, sing and dance to that kind of love? Even her mother, while being courted by her father who was handsome and generous both with words and gifts to women, must have felt that tremor of heart and limbs.

  As a young girl she had overheard her mother telling a fellow worshipper from the Church of Eternal Mercy how disgusting it was that a couple living in sin could dare sit in the church pews and look happy. The thinking modern woman who was clandestinely in love dispensed with morality altogether and just needed to say to her head, ‘Hush, be quiet; just leave me alone for a while.’