Singapore Noir

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 asked 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.

He began to show up later for dinner and when he played with Tomiko he was slightly brusque and more impatient. He yearned for his Wednesday evenings when he was alone with Cheryl on the far side of the city, with the smell of the mango tree coming through the open window. His work, too, began to slip. Mr. Inoue sometimes called him in to see if an explanation was forthcoming. But Ryu dismissed his superior’s concerns; he said the wet season did not agree with him and that he had trouble getting to sleep at night.