Singapore Noir

by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

  They drove west. It was a Thursday night in the rainy season, unremarkable in every way, the streets swept with wind and rain, and Ryu didn’t ask again where the driver intended to take him. It seemed so innocuous and unexceptional that he felt embarrassed to ask something that would make him appear a rube. He sat back and enjoyed a ride into Geylang, and soon they were passing along streets of what looked like suburban villas and shop houses.

  Some of these were clearly brothels, with dark red lights and a couple of girls sitting outside on metal stools, watching the cars floating by. So that was what the driver had in mind. And yet he was neither surprised nor put off. His curiosity was lightly aroused. The area away from the white neon of the main streets seemed calm and matter-of-fact, and the red-light houses with their girls gave off no energy that could be interpreted as menacing. When they came to a quiet halt in front of one, halfway down a leafy street, he got out with a falsely cheery wave and wondered what commission the driver was given for bringing naïve expats there. The man, holding open the door for him, told him that he would wait for him and take him home afterward for a set price, to which Ryu agreed at once. There didn’t seem any point complicating things unnecessarily.

  He went up to an entrance where an older woman sat reading a paper by a garage light, and when he had gone through the bead curtain into the foyer there was a quiet commotion, a pleasurable rustle, and a mama-san appeared with a kettle in one hand and a pair of glasses wrapped around her neck with a glittering string. He had to use his awkward, slightly broken English to make it understood that he did not have much time. That it was his first time, however, was easy enough to disguise.

  The room was half-dark, with a Guan Yin shrine in a corner and a walnut coffee table piled with travel magazines. He was served tea while five girls were brought out from the room beyond, all of them dressed in below-the-knee black silk skirts, and from these he had to choose his one-hour paramour. It would have been easier, he reflected, to do so with his eyes closed, not seeing the way they subjected him to their own smiling scrutiny. But as it was, he had to look each one in the eye and cast a quick glance over her shoulder, the obscured curve of the breast and stomach, the hips in their locked poise, the angle of the mouth. Though the air-conditioning had been turned up as soon as he entered, he began to perspire and mopped his forehead with one of the napkins which had come with the tea.

  Then he turned his eye back to the girl at the dead center of the row, whose shoulders were bared by her strapless dress. She was the shortest of the line-up and her hair was dyed a curious dark blond at the tips. Her eyes looked green from a distance, as though she were wearing colored contact lenses. She did not smile, but in any case his eye had not returned to her face but to a small tattoo on her left shoulder.

  It was a dark blue Chinese character which did not correspond to a kanji which he could decipher. Suddenly prompted by something in this spidery character, with its radiating lines and disciplined geometry, he nodded to her without a moment’s further indecision and rose unsteadily, unsure as to whether his equipment would rise to the occasion of so pretty and relaxed a girl. Such an unflappable professional.

  And on top of that, he thought, you’re a swine and a low-life, and now you have a secret, the first secret you have ever had from Natsuo—

  The world of secrets. As he followed the girl—he just about caught her name as Cheryl—he wondered if every man had this moment of grim initiation into the world that lay beyond and around marriage.

  Certainly, nobody ever talked about it until they were older and it no longer mattered as much. But as soon as one had entered it, there was no going back. It was an irreversible decay, a one-way slide. Everything one had known up to that point as sexual happiness and wonder became instantly foreshortened and relativized. It was this that was arousing. One of his more lewd colleagues at work, now that he thought about it, had expressed it crudely when explaining why he had gotten divorced from his wife in Tokyo: “Like the wondrous and fastidious panda,” he’d said, “I found it impossible to mate in captivity.”

  They went into a small back room garishly adorned with a small droplet chandelier and silver-framed mirrors.

  “You like short time one hour?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Take shower together.”

  He paid her, and they disrobed under the absurd chandelier.

  Naked, she was far more beautiful. In the claustrophobic shower she soaped him from head to foot and nestled against him as she used the shower head to disperse the suds from his chest and back. As she did so, he looked down at the tattoo. It seemed to have been carved into her marvelous skin with a laser, the lines crisp and elegant. They washed each other’s hair and began to laugh. She held his erection with one hand and caressed the back of his neck with the other soaped hand, running her nails into his hair.

  He had the impression at once that this one would not keep a faithful eye on the clock by the bed. When they were half dry they rolled onto the bed in their white towels and his guilt subsided and he plunged his face into her hair, holding a shoulder in each hand, and kissed her throat.

  During the hour his ear picked up what seemed like distant sounds. Cars passed in the rain, men walked along the street looking into the brothels while a soft thunder rolled across the city. His initial hysteria also calmed and he realized that to take this sort of pleasure one needed a measured coolness, a sense of righteousness. That was the trick. The jittery fear and guiltiness of the newbie were faintly ridiculous to these girls who saw so easily beneath the male surface and who, unlike other women, did not heap facile scorn upon it. But now he also realized that this diversion away from Natsuo was in fact a boomerang motion back toward her. It didn’t matter at all, and nor did it matter that if she discovered his pecadillo she would not understand it in the least. It was one of those things that only explanations and expiation make sordid.

  The people we think we know the most are always the people we know the least. They carry their secrets within them with a greater discipline, that is all, but those secrets can be larger than oceans, deeper and more critical by virtue of being skillfully kept out of view by a surgical paranoia.

  Afterward, he lay on the bed exhausted while she brought him tea. The girls chattered in Mandarin in the next room.

  “I was wondering,” he said at last, while she carefully combed her hair in a dresser mirror, still naked but for a towel wrapped around her hips. “That tattoo on your shoulder. Is it a Chinese character?”

  Without turning, she caught his eye in the mirror. “Of course it is. But it’s an old character.”

  “I thought so. What does it mean? Do you mind me asking?”

  “I don’t mind you asking, but I won’t tell you unless you come back to see me again.”

  They smiled.

  “That seems fair,” he laughed. “You’ll tell me next time.”

  “Maybe, if you make me happy.”

  Ah, the tip. He would make it a handsome one.

  “Maybe you’ll tell me where you are from?”

  “So curious, lah! I am from Penang.”

  He guessed it was not quite true. He had heard her speak a quick, native Mandarin to her sisters in the other room. Whatever, he thought in amusement. She is allowed to lie, given what she has to do for a living. She can lie to me, or any man she likes. It’s not the same as a real lie.

  He accepted it and admired instead the almost military tension of her spine, the vertebrae visible through that delicate skin. She had a smell like bergamot tea. When she half turned toward him, her eye moved like that of a gecko, ironic and quick.

  On the way out, he kissed her more warmly than he should have and was sure that she responded in kind. It produced in him a grateful moment of crackpot pride. There was, then, the hitherto distant possibility that this hour in bed had not been merely a financial transaction, and even if this was an illusion, he clung to that moment of pride all the way back to Bayshore Park
.

  * * *

  He ate dinner with Natsuo as usual, Tomiko quietly asleep.

  “You were late,” she observed as they were halfway through the curry their maid had prepared. “Are management leaning on you?”

  “A bit.”

  “That means they want to promote you.”

  “Perhaps,” he said absently.

  He was still thinking about the shoulder scented like bergamot tea and its ancient tattooed character.

  “It’s just a thought,” she said tactfully. “It would be wonderful if they promoted you. We could get a jeep.”

  “What would we do with a jeep?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Couldn’t we drive to a jungle somewhere and swim in a waterfall?”

  What a foolish idea, he thought. Why would anyone want to buy a Jeep and swim in a waterfall?

  “Whether they promote me or not,” he said instead, “I am quite content. The salary is more than enough but I might have to work a little later on some nights. It’s normal, I guess.”

  “Then I’ll contact Koyabashi and ask her if she’d like to play cards at the Raffles. They have a group that plays there every week. Just the girls.”

  It was a ridiculous idea but maybe it could have its uses. He kept his mouth shut. Then looked into her cool, restrained eyes and wondered if she had instinctively understood the manner in which his mind and heart had wandered off for a while, without saying a word. It would be a small miracle if she had not, but he let her talk on about her atrocious cards party until she ran out of steam, and her eyes rose suddenly, enormous with a distant grief.

  They lay mutually antagonized and distant in the bedroom that night. Storm clouds amassed on the horizon, momentarily visible when lightning flickered below them. When she had fallen asleep, Ryu continued to think about his unexpected evening and the mystifying antiquity and elegance of the tattoo. He wondered about the other girls in the establishment, the leafy streets of Geylang and the calm that seemed to possess them at a certain hour. The calm, perhaps, of a thousand individual lusts rushing toward their premeditated satiations. The city had suddenly acquired a new dimension for him, and he had time to enter it again and again.

  * * *

  The following day, he worked alone in his seventh-floor office. He was filled with a hurried concentration. Come noon he took a punctual bento lunch with his immediate superior at a small Japanese place on the street and talked about the accounting software they had just installed at a well-known supermarket chain.

  “Everything all right at home?” Mr. Inoue asked halfway through the dreary meal. “How is Natsuo adapting to her new city?”

  Ryu shrugged. “She seems fine. The heat bothers her a little.”

  “The heat, eh? Well, the heat bothers everyone.”

  This wasn’t exactly helpful, and Inoue pressed on with a few more questions. Did the alienness of the new culture oppress them?

  “Oppress?” Ryu shot back irritably. “It’s as good a place as we’ve ever lived. We even have lavender milk from Hokkaido.”

  Ryu’s days began feeling longer. Between bouts of intense work he gazed through double-glazed windows at the sadly luminous monsoon skies alternately drenched with sunlight and flurries of rain. Out of their depths, huge atomic clouds materialized in slow motion, filled with a supernatural light.

  Four days later he went back to the same house in Geylang; he had taken their business card on the previous visit. Golden Lotus Happy Massage. Now it was late afternoon and he had taken off an hour early so as not to arrive home late. The street sank into a watery dusk as he walked up to the outer door and rang the musical bell.

  The same mama-san opened. Cheryl, however, was not there. He decided to wait with his tea and read the magazines on the tables. No other customers came or went. The mama-san explained that it was the unstable weather. His time was slipping away but after a half hour Cheryl appeared, dropped off by the parlor delivery car. She was dressed like a secretary, buttoned up and crisply prim, in a tartan skirt and glossy heels, a strawberry umbrella folding itself as she burst through the colored beads and showering the linoleum floor with water. She saw him at once; he rose and, with absurdly correct Japanese etiquette, bowed at the waist.

  “I didn’t think I see you again, lor,” she said as they undressed with the windows open onto a small lawn. “Shall I close them?”

  “No, leave them. I don’t mind the heat tonight.”

  A quiet purr of cicadas came from the trees, the wet shrubs.

  They felt more familiar to each other, the humor came more spontaneously. This time he forgot the hour and relaxed into their play, and when it was done he saw that three hours had passed. She said it didn’t matter, it was not a busy day of the week, and they showered together at the end with a slow-tempoed affection and deliberation. He asked her again about the tattoo.

  “What if I said I didn’t know?” she said, smiling. “I just saw it in a tattoo shop in town.”

  “What a strange thing to do.”

  “Tattoos are always a whim. Maybe I was drunk. At least it’s only on my shoulder.”

  “Your beautiful shoulder. It looks very at home there.”

  “It’s a spell, you know—I know that it’s a spell. The man who did it said it was.”

  “Why would you want a spell?”

  They walked out lazily into the reception area, where the mama-san was asleep in a corner.

  “It’s protection,” she said with a mischievous smile. “One never knows who one needs protection from, lor.”

  “Not from me, anyway.”

  He kissed her cheek and promised he would come back at the same time the following week. His courtly manner seemed to charm her. At least he told himself that it charmed her, that between them there was a quick, subtle bond which had matured with a beautiful suddenness. This unpredictable swiftness had created its own delicacy.

  It was remarkable, he thought as he drove back to his office in a taxi, how the bonds leap from one skin to another without any prompting. Like the tropism of plants. He went up to the empty office and called his driver, pretending that he had worked late. He must always arrive in Bayshore in the company car.

  Tomiko was still up when he stumbled into the apartment, oddly disheveled and incoherent, complaining as he now always did of the overwork. Natsuo was in an evening dress, pointless in the circumstances (had she gone out by herself?), and slightly tipsy from gin-and-tonics which she had been making for herself. The boy ran up to him and asked him at once to go up to the garden and water the bonsais.

  “All right,” Ryu said, quite relieved. “Let’s go make our garden grow. If Mummy will let us.”

  He went over to kiss his wife on her cheek. “Did you go out?”

  “The card game at the Raffles, remember?”

  “Ah, yes. Did the Japanese girls have a good gossip?”

  “We played bridge and missed autumn in Kyoto.”

  “You know,” he added softly, “you shouldn’t drink when you’re alone with Tomiko. It isn’t necessary. He can sense everything—”

  “There wasn’t anything else to do,” she retorted, flaring up. “You were two hours late. Are they really working you that hard?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “Or not at all—I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He went up to the roof with Tomiko. The act of watering outdoor plants during the rainy season was purely symbolic, but for that very reason the boy loved to do it. He was prospering at the American School and his English was now almost fluent. Into his flowing Japanese he would drop entire English sentences as if they were universally understood. They puttered around the bonsais they had set up and then stood on the parapet and watched the jittery lightning ever present on the horizon. He was a neat and punctual boy, somewhat like his father in that respect, and there was something neat and punctual about the way he approached the small events of his life. He took his father’s hand now and as
ked him why Mummy was drinking so many sodas by herself—could Ryu not come back a little earlier from work?

  “Maybe you’re right,” Ryu admitted. “I’ve been held up at the office rather late, I couldn’t help it. I’m sure you and Mummy can understand that.”

  “But why is she drinking so many sodas?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask her.”

  He took Tomiko in his arms playfully and kissed his overgrown mop of hair. He told him not to worry about Mummy and her sodas, or about his coming home late. Daddy always came home as soon as he could.

  * * *

  Week after week, the routine repeated itself. He saw Cheryl every Wednesday night now, assuming that this regularity would conceal his movements more effectively, and on the weekends he took Tomiko to the resorts on Sentosa and to Luna Park. It was, on balance, more or less the life he had always expected to have, if one excepted the gradual falling in love with a massage parlor girl. He had even foreseen moving to a foreign tropical city as a rising young executive living in a luxurious highrise by the sea.

  What he had not expected was the gradually encroaching sense of dissatisfaction that now began to gnaw at him at the very moment when he should have been happiest.

  Or at least most content. But something in his meetings with Cheryl had accelerated a crisis more typical of middle age. Now he saw how grimly predictable it was. The gaudy, fantasizing romance which had sprung up, but which existed only in his own head, the little lies and evasions with which he made his marriage continue to tick.

  It was a machinery which he himself had assembled unconsciously but which had now begun to work as he’d intended. The machine lurched forward—the lies were its gears. Increasingly, he could not stand having sex with Natsuo, for all the increased desire which his initial adventure had inspired. He would think, I can’t imagine her permitting herself to be tattooed. She would never do that. It would go against all her rigid principles of cleanliness and self-regard. That tattoo is everything that she is not. It would fill her with contempt and horror, just as the idea of a massage parlor whore would.