Singapore Noir

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.