Singapore Noir

“I took Davey to the reserve this morning. We spotted a baby macaque in a tree. I don’t know which thought the other was funnier.” He told her this because she never asked anymore. Somewhere between Buenos Aires and Nairobi she’d stopped wondering how Ed spent his days. In Singapore she’d briefly become curious again, because of Davey, but it turned out baby news bored her. She cooed over Davey in the morning, once Ed had him dressed and in his high chair. She sang to him at night if she was home before his bedtime, though those early evenings slowly grew rare. She read parenting books, but not, as Ed did, to learn what to do, how to be a new person with the new person that was Davey. Ellen read to find out what Davey should be doing, what his accomplishments ought to be in this month, and this and this. She compared Davey with the child in the books — an average child, and shouldn’t Davey be more advanced than that? — and with the children she met, children of expats, of transplants, of locals. On weekends, before the midday heat chased her indoors, she’d walk with Ed and Davey in the Children’s Garden or to a breakfast of noodles at a hawker center. Davey’s chubby friendliness made the cooking aunties cluck and chuckle: what a buaya he was, a little flirt! Ellen basked in their adoration, but Ed understood: admiring Davey, they were admiring her. She was kiasu, Ed thought, cutthroat competitive, as she always had been. He used to admire her fire and drive, having little ambition of his own; but now that Davey had become her proxy, it began to trouble him. The aunties asked to hold Davey, which Ellen affected to think about and then graciously permitted — Ed always allowed it — and at first they tried to give him sweets but they soon learned that was only for weekdays, when Davey was alone with Ed.

Ed, enchanted with Davey’s first smile, his first tooth and first word, suggested on his first birthday that they think about another child. Ellen barked, “Are you crazy?” and went off to bed alone. Ed took a folding chair out onto the walk in front of the ground-floor flat and sat in the evening breeze. Ellen kept the air-conditioning cranked up high; Ed didn’t like it, living in a temperature Singapore never felt. Crazy? He considered. Well, maybe. Huat sio oreddy. The man’s mad.

Across another year Ed took Davey to the garden and the reserve, to the market and to other kids’ homes to crawl and then walk and then run around in a chattering tribe like monkeys. He cooked fried dough, sweet potato leaf stew, biryani, chili crab for holidays. He told Ellen about Davey’s day while Davey laughed and mashed his hands in his rice and Ellen nodded and floated farther away. At the end of the year she told him she’d found someone else and she’d like him to move out.

He wasn’t surprised. Though he wasn’t happy, he knew his unhappiness stemmed largely not from the loss of Ellen, long since lost, but from her insistence that they share custody of Davey.

“What mother would just totally give up her son?” she said, blinking.

What mother doesn’t know the names of his friends? Ed thought, but he understood. Ellen resisted Asia in Singapore, as she had Africa in Nairobi and old Europe in Prague, but still, this was about that most Asian of notions: saving face. Not with the cooking aunties, who would have mattered to Ed but meant nothing to Ellen; but among her colleagues. This ornament, this piece in the game that Davey was to her, it would make her look bad, cold-hearted, to give him up.

Ed didn’t protest, though, because he saw immediately how it would be and he was right. Ellen hired a nanny. A smiling Filipina named Maricor, who lived in the ground-floor flat three nights a week in the room that had been Ed’s office. Ellen made no adjustment in her life for Davey, still left for work early in the morning when the light was clear, and Maricor didn’t mind at all that Ed usually appeared an hour or so later, to go with them to the reserve, the garden, shopping at the market for spices and fruits. Ellen knew, and Ellen didn’t care, as long as Ed waited until she was gone so she didn’t have to see him, wasn’t required to make small talk and act as though they were still connected. They were, of course, because of Davey, who would connect them forever. But Ellen, as always, was eager to leave one life behind and begin the next.