Almost a love story, p.13
Almost a Love Story, page 13
Erin took another glance at the Bestsellers. Under her breath, she whispered the names of books that called out to her: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. The Midnight Library. Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookstore. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. Quickly, they formed a conspiracy, and Erin thought the bookstore was a symbol of literary culture, the brick-and-mortar advocate for reading that refused digital screens and the Cloud.
She was guilty as charged. Even though she had her leather-bound book, these days she was wont to use the Notes app on her iPhone to jot down items for her grocery list, observations of Danny’s quirks, names of shops that were new and worth visiting. The book, chartaceous and mostly smooth—its pages welcoming scribbles and folds and dog-ears—was nearly a relic, a rebellion against contemporary minimalism.
Within the next few seconds, her phone rang.
“Hello,” she said, with her hand over her mouth, nodding periodically to the comforting voice. Her eyes darted around, in search of clues to a prosecuting staff.
“Yes, I’m here. Near the Bestseller shelves. See you soon,” she whispered, and hung up.
With Hao, it was simple and quick. He didn’t need a soundboard or a listener. He didn’t seem to need her like that.
“Why,” he had asked her, “how come you’re writing that down?” She stared at him, unspeaking at first, unable to stop her thumb clicking the eraser cap to release more pencil lead. At the time, Erin had merely been doing what she had always done—absorbing information about Hao by recording the most fleeting of impressions he was leaving her. Hao had looked at her as she slowly released her grip on the pencil. Then, with a little bit of effort, she had said: “Oh, I suppose I don’t need to.”
What was it that An had said about love—that moments were fleeting and evanescent? “The brevity of love,” that was how he had phrased it. This love that she and Hao had, perhaps that was what it meant. Erin thought about this as she started and ended her chat with Hao—all under one minute.
Hao was right, she did not need to write anymore. But sometimes, like the many urges she had this afternoon, and especially in this very moment, she felt a need to write something down. She stuffed the phone into her bag and zipped it up. Walking along the sides of the Bestsellers, she found a quiet corner and, for the last time, sank into a sitting position.
More shifting on the floor.
She was taking things out of her pocket, crumpled receipts and tissue paper, trying to find scraps of paper and a pen. She would allow herself one indulgence. On a serviette from some coffee shop near Danny’s childcare, she pressed the tip of the pen. It began with a few letters that were swiftly scratched out before the words could form. The pronouns “I” and “Him” were effaced as soon as they were visible. Every attempt at free writing, as he had taught her, fell short. There was nothing freeing about writing, for her words were his words that had stayed for a long time after he had left. In his last text to her, he had said, “Thank you.” And that it was time for him to write on his own. As if all this time, she had been writing for herself.
Putting the pen into her bag, she reminded herself that there was no need to take notes. There hadn’t been a need for a long time.
Erin let her fingers meet the pages gently and tentatively, with no intention to annotate or to pace her reading. The person behind Christopher and Marge, the man that she had once loved and mastered his thoughts—he was human. Writing was his way of processing. If free writing was a kind of brainstorming meant to move one’s conscious mind out of the way, then these carefully sculpted lines that once were freely written must be reflective and distilled, with secrets abounding to the discerning reader.
It occurred to her that she was now reading the work for what it was and not for the man. After all this time, she was no different from him.
Had she completely got over him, to read his work without a trace of him? Or had she thoroughly become like him, to read without mindful consideration for him?
Erin knew that only reading on would afford her closure. She was near the denouement. One more chapter and the epilogue. It would take her ten minutes. She turned the page.
HER EYES ENLARGED, vacant and watery, as he shifted in his chair, gazing at her through the curved surface of the glass. He had read somewhere that the Marangoni effect was the explanation behind the tears of wine: tension between two different concentrations causes the more volatile component to evaporate while the one with less volatility falls, resulting in teardrops on the inner surface of wine glasses. She, the woman whom he had thought was yielding and relenting in her standards, was the stabilising force in his life; and in ensuring his equilibrium, she had given to him the kernel of her life. She had conveyed her vision and thoughts to him. As for him, he felt safer and safer, safe enough to be careless about her considerations.
Marge had always believed in what he saw and said, never knowing that he was just absorbing life as she had given him. It was a fatal gift of noticing, and since he was gifted, he could hardly look around him without thinking of how she thought about the sound of rain hitting the window, the droplets forming on the tips of their rubber plant leaves, or how she regarded the names of people that had little to do with their etymological origins but more to do with the ring of a consonant or a funny nickname that stuck around.
It was raining outside as the last train of his thoughts came to a stop. Turning away from the view of the waterlogged lawn, and then looking at her through the wine glass, he muttered to himself, “Drink up.” Drink to summon the words he had to say. Drink to drive the blade into her. Drink to accept the guilt for the hurt that would relieve them of a habit-forming dependency.
In the mingling of her tears and the wine droplets, he saw a face—smudged and queer, yet still his. Their tiny studio, nestled in the thick of northern Singapore, filled up with wordlessness.
In the quietude, looking into a face obscured by the glass, Christopher thought of Leonard Woolf and what he had written about the things one withholds from the people one loves. It was a passage taken from the man’s biography that he had randomly picked up from the library one day, perhaps because of a Virginia Woolf fatigue contracted in a class on twentieth-century women’s writing and out of a desire to find out the other side of the story—the husband’s side of things.
In love and in the South of England, Leonard and Virginia never consummated their love, and even though she was erratic and explosive, seldom affectionate, he read her gestures as a guide to better care for her. Every lapse and lashing out was an indication of an inarticulable lack, a laceration that, like a dehiscence, would not stop splitting open. So he tended to the plants for her, kept the garden in the state she would have liked, slept in the other room for the peace of mind she needed, built a shed so she could stay away from everyone, including him, arranged for a car to take her to her lover that wasn’t him. Leonard was always serving, an auxiliary, in the Platonian sense. Foolish, some might say, but his silver soul was as stable as it was tarnished, all according to the whims of Virginia.
There was a part of Christopher that knew it was going to happen, that could sense their future was meant to be an impossibility. At the outset, he might have surmised this, when at the kopitiam he had obsessively checked his email, reading and rereading her text to see if he had missed a word, any word of hers. He had read her like a text, as if she were a narrator or a character whose words had more weight than her presence. But Marge was human, whose words sometimes did not line up with actions, especially Marge’s words, which were by now entangled with his recitation of ideas and his perspective on books. And as he glanced once more into the glassy face, he saw it in her eyes, shimmering as bright as the silvery streak across the warm sea. In a moment of clarity, he realised it was he who was standing in the way.
He turned towards the window, finding comfort in the view of the soaked carpet grass. On the green canvas, he mapped out a variety of exit routes that would clear the path for her, done so incredibly subtly and subliminally to smoothen the transition so that she could depart soundlessly without guilt or longing or realisation. The image of her leaving in this comprehensively imagined escape plan should have plumbed him for tears, but he had no energy for that. There was no room for tears. He reluctantly pulled his eyes away from the maze and directed his thoughts to the possibilities he could afford her with his silence. Drink up, he reminded himself. He took the final sip of wine. The blade was in his tongue.
Washing the glass in the sink, he felt drops of water trickle down his skin. He could not turn. He was too close to finding an exit for them, and he would not risk trapping her again. In companionable silence, he convinced himself that he had exercised all due diligence, slipping her plentiful opportunities to chip away at his hold over her life. He could not demarcate a timestamp, but for a while now it had been his sole mission to give her an out, and so he would pause after a sentence ended and hold back before he began a new one to prepare spaces for respite or her retreat; he would skip a question of hers so she would not feel obliged to follow up on how his day went, and he resisted to ask after hers. One silence at a time, he smothered their conversations with close-ended questions and vague responses, often laying them out in the form of concern—“Heading to bed soon?” or “Hope you have a good day ahead!”—that encouraged solitary endeavours. In his devices, love in its excess looked like a kind of deprivation.
He could not let her touch him, for when she held his hand, it was a grasp that pulled him into the present and placed him right beside her. Like a case of morning alertness in which a koel’s piercing call jolts one awake, all imagined worlds that seemed so vivid and graspable to him—the labyrinth of corners and tight alleyways, the higgledy-piggledy cobbled streets, the great plateful of blue water, the hoary and austere lighthouse—were nothing more than a lifeless copy of real life. And he would always see her. But tonight, he would not allow her to participate in his reality.
Christopher had a choice, and he knew he could no longer hold her back with his fingers intertwined. The only act of grace was to let the book full of castles fall between them—like how the brain actively forgets a dream within the first moments of waking.
Just as a good doctor would lose his identity in his patients for a sense of connection, grasping onto a shared hope that one is saving and one could be saved, Christopher acknowledged that it was his quest for recognition that brought him to Marge. He wanted to be thoroughly understood, for in being understood, he assumed his thoughts would be the assessment of his life and work. Marge did that for him, word for word, thought for thought.
His hands were wet and soapy, the glass in the sink. He stared down at the mess, and he said, “Thank you.” He said it plainly and without need. Then, “I want to be alone.” He said it slowly because any faster and the words would all come running out, and for once they would have control over him. He was used to having a handle on them. He was going to say nothing else, not a word more.
Marge was saying some things, but he could not bring himself to hear them clearly. The rushing noise of the faucet was a serene melody. Words and feelings kept coming, washing over him like waves bouncing off a barrier.
When there was no word or action, she stood up and left, not bearing his anguish, shutting the door whose smart deadbolt automatically locked her out.
The water was running and the rain outside continued. There were quiet, suppressed sounds.
Erin recognised it. The manner varied slightly, but the matter was the same. It could be delivered cold and sedate at the breakfast table or the kitchen island, his hand on hers, or at the beach, her sitting beside him with knees pulled up to her chin, his fingers flicking sand off Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Of the times Marge Xu had walked out the door, once calmly and a couple of times more ambiguously, Erin wished she would not come back through the same door this time.
There was a speech bubbling up in her mind, but she could not quite rehearse it. The many counter-responses she had imagined had no words for them. Erin considered how Marge might return, despite having no one to come back to. She might have exited the scene, but Christopher had sent her off. Marge merely left their apartment; he had left the relationship.
An overlap between reality and the imagined, she felt as though she had lived through the situation before. Perhaps it was memory’s sabotage or wishful thinking, but Erin’s attempt to think of Marge only led to scenes of him leaving in different ways. In one configuration, he had simply sat still, staring silently at the vanishing horizon as the sun set. Even that was a kind of departure. A sadness that she could no longer reach into. In another universe, he wanted to be with his one true love, a book lover, an astute reader, and Erin could only give her blessings.
There was still a mystery for her in why he had left and why she had grovelled. It was all muddled up: What was the right thing to do and what was wrong? Only one thing was certain—any kind of hurt was wrong. Leaving her was hurtful. But staying on must have been hurting him.
How did Marge do it? His back was facing her, the uncertainty of how he felt versus the certainty of her strides. Erin contemplated her recourse. How the heck did she just leave like that? As if it was such a simple thing to do. Somehow or other she didn’t think of him. The man to whom she had bound herself was left alone in the apartment. Was that still love? Or just an ending?
Erin sat upright and stretched her back. She set the book down on the floor, for she could not continue to the epilogue.
The thing about love is that it moves. A tiny wriggle counts, though a big gesture is more common. Its ability to move is what has kept the romance genre alive through the centuries, from Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Madam White Snake and Xu Xian to Ammu and Velutha. It should be the end of the story when one lover dies or forgets about the other, but unfortunately, the story goes on. That’s the real tragedy, the one that sticks and determines the genre. It’s not that love disappears with the dead or a deserted beloved, but that love continues to exist; it simply has nowhere to go. The lover is left wandering and ruminating, never the same again.
He had told her most of this, and she had written every word down—that a little bit of love is enough. Even a bit of sad love is better than no love at all.
Like any narrative, love has characters who progress from strangers to partners, from indifference to intimacy. It doesn’t just hang around, wander about and one day stop. That wouldn’t be love. Marge and Christopher were in love—she was certain of this. There had to be more to their relationship than the echo of a door shutting, leaving behind an undivided room that shrank in the absence of its inhabitants. There was still the epilogue left.
Ideally, without words, they would turn, lifting their heads towards each other. His hand would be on the knob; hers on the red oak door. Canberra was still non-existent; there was no better world outside their apartment. But knowing him, he would remain still and silent. Marge, unlike her, did not whimper or ask anymore. She wasn’t going to knock. The scene came to a standstill.
He could not seem to get out of himself. The academic in him was still thinking, evaluating, thinking some more. She was the amanuensis but comprised the world in which his knowledge-laden lens made sense. They were an impossible match to begin with. One waxed lyrical about something, while the other took notes willingly. Now, at this juncture, each treading a thin line between what was new and what could be forever, they could still be leaning in.
For once, seeing the scene for what it was, Erin understood. When everyone was full of thoughts and things to say, yet nothing could be said, it took two people to keep the silence going. Standing on either side of the door, they were separated, yet they had no inequality between them.
It was better that way, Erin finally admitted. She let out a deep breath and closed her eyes to hear the gentle, soothing sounds of waves mingling with the sandy shore. Briefly, she viewed again the silver light that shone upon them.
The epilogue, Erin reminded herself.
The story must sort itself out. He had to. Love is life-saving and doesn’t just go away. It had saved her before; it would do it again. It had kept her reading this far.
It panned out the way Erin envisioned: Marge’s hair had grown out, long enough to braid, and she had lost some weight. His hair had grown long, too, way over his shoulders, slightly curling at the ends. They sounded older. No, to be sure, she looked older, almost catching up to him. The text confirmed this: Marge had “fine lines”, shallow lines that formed along her eyes and mouth, adding a touch of ache to her every expression.
Within a span of a page, abruptly, Marge had become so closely entangled with him again. The man who was out of her imagination, a reciter of other people’s words, a worshipper of dead men. It was a stretch, Erin thought, reading this final scene set at the English department’s party. Marge’s hand in his, she was smiling, saying hi to this person and that.
It seemed Christopher and his colleagues were not unlike An and his friends from graduate school—they were men. They were real people, but he had written them to be such caricatures that they seemed hypothetical. Men in their crumpled shirts and long hair, scruffy and barely showered, with unimpressive beards. Some characters had hints of the academics she had met: the man studying luggage, the other man looking at the run-on lines in five poems, another man who studied American presidents in the hope that the next elected president would be different. There were professors who sounded as snobby and aloof as the ones who had taught him. There was no Victoria.
Then, when the party ended, the scene shifted. It was ordinary again. Like before.
They went back to their reading, engaged.
Erin read the line again and muttered the sentence under her breath. How? she thought. How did they get there after all this time? As if nothing had changed. It seemed just a while ago that Marge had given him an ultimatum, and five pages later, they were lying in bed, ready for their bedtime read, a silver band on her finger. It was this proposal that took Erin out of it.
