Almost a love story, p.2
Almost a Love Story, page 2
So, it was only when she played with the words, adding her own dose of fun by mixing up the syllables, shortening Apollinaire to Apollo or conjuring images of a bear and a camel that moos to accompany her notes on a French thinker called Albert Camus, that she began to recall foreign names better. It wasn’t that Erin was willfully disrespectful or intentional about developing some mnemonic device; she merely wanted something light-hearted to remember these sombre thinkers, to laugh and allay the drudgery of note-taking. Nicknames like Focaccia for Boccaccio and Shoe-Sharpener for Schopenhauer would crack her up, her chuckles rising in volume until she’d clap her palm over her mouth to silence herself. He noticed her half-suppressed laughs but left her alone with her childish pronunciations. He never knew about her anthroponymic shenanigans, but, in his mind, she was doing her best. As long as she kept trying and did not give up, he seemed pleased. For names, he said, were singular in themselves, without mereological parts. “They’re meaty that way.” Meaty, she heard and smiled unrestrainedly to herself.
Everyone has a name. It’s one of the few things these days that connect us. They tell one’s story, a family history, something about human existence.
She largely agreed with him, although the definition was so obvious it seemed pointless to her. Yet, in spite of the obvious knowledge, Erin began to take an interest in names after that. She’d ask her friends and new friends about their names. Why did their parents name them this? What’s the story behind that? There was always another layer, some context, a story, according to him; things beneath the surface that a discerning person must intuit. Though, more often than not, names were full of evangelical resonances—stories she’d heard too often attending Anglican schools despite being raised by a Buddhist grandmother whose children were unbelievers.
While he had taught her about semiotics and connotations, all she really wanted to know was if Cathay was short for Catherine and why Larry was the shorter name for Lawrence. Would it matter to Shawn if he were Shaun or Sean instead? Perhaps because her own name was the next closest thing to what her mother had picked out for the baby boy she had wished for, Erin was more drawn to the variations and looseness of names. She was intrigued by histories and family stories, made-up tales of names and the unconsented baggage passed from generation to generation.
She remembered this one postdoctoral colleague of his, whose name was Deodatus—the man researched existential security in the Book of Deuteronomy and had a name that literally translated to God-given. The event was a social for first-year graduate students in the humanities, which Erin had learnt did not include Sociology. At the National University of Singapore, she was used to pairing up with random people from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences for a group project or two. It hadn’t occurred to her that a sociologist like her, whose study focus was on human social relationships and institutions, was not a humanist. To her introduction, Deodatus said with a gummy smile that he was fond of sociology, but statistics was the sole reason he had avoided the discipline, for statistical fallacies and failures were rampant. In return, Erin asked him what security meant in the field of existentialism, and his reply was “low risk”. Throughout that afternoon mixer, all Erin could think about was how the name was at once ridiculous and religious, perhaps in a non-contradictory way. His name, she was sure, was more interesting than his research.
There were other startling names too. One man in a fedora, as though walking out of a 1940s film noir, said his name was Ulysses, and Erin knew better than to ask. An had told her about a seminal Irish novel called Ulysses that had changed the reading culture of its time, but how exactly it did that, she could not remember. She, who had been dating a literary wunderkind, should know the origin of the name Ulysses. Unexpectedly, Ulysses was not from Dublin but a historian who hailed from a small town called Galena, where it wouldn’t be uncommon to be named after the President. The man knew next to nothing about Irish literature.
Names were doors to souls and lives that came before the people who were shaking her hand. They could breathe life into joyless faces and hunched-over bodies. To ask a question about one’s name was a kind of hospitality, an invitation to share and to enter into a different world. One question could lead to another point of inquiry, leading to a longer conversation. From him, Erin learnt that asking did not lead to answers but generated further appeals for more.
For a moment, she thought about what An would think of Daniel. Was the name too popular, common, heavily connoted? Still, she was confident that he’d get it. He would understand.
Erin would not be able to pinpoint the exact moment she’d become like this. Unknowingly, his overwhelming curiosity and appetite for information rubbed off on her, and she saw people differently, like characters who needed close reading. But like a scar here and a birthmark there, bits and bobs do not make up a person. Presence, however, is another thing. But it was difficult for her to realise this since he had been there at the outset. Most lovers begin as strangers, then become an addition to the other’s life, gradually becoming united. Not them. They were integrated from the start, like weathered lovers who stuck it out because of memories that preceded them and hopes that had been lined up, awaiting them.
She tried to remember what it was like without him, but she could not get back to those days. The 1990s and early 2000s melted into a past century, historical and detached, like textbook content to be revisited by another generation. How alien they seemed to her. Days hidden by him, with the dark hair parted in the middle, straying curls tucked rashly behind his ears. A barely-there moustache that drew attention to the soft, full lips that naturally pursed—for he was always thinking and deciding, on the verge of saying something to her.
But not this time. Not today. Just this afternoon, he was across from her. She was sure of that. She had watched him walk away for the second time. She could not think further.
The sound of a child’s laughter rang out from afar. Erin pulled herself up. It was time for bed.
It took Erin almost two hours to put Danny to bed. The routine began with a bath, Danny picking up cups and bowls to scoop water and bubbles, splashing water all over the tiles, then Erin patting him dry and putting on his pyjamas. Once he was tucked into bed, which often required much pleading, Erin would read two stories to him—each one twice—before patting him as she sang his favourite nursery rhymes. She must have done this at least five hundred times now, but she could not get the hang of it. Usually irritated by the splatter of water directed at her face and the monotonous repetition of the same lines and same rhymes, she could not hide the sullenness on her face. Tonight, though, she would take advantage of the situation and commit herself to the drudgery. She welcomed the distraction.
For the most part, the effort it mustered to put Danny to bed exhausted Erin and kept her mind off everything but the task at hand. Once he was asleep and she could return to the serenity of the study room, it only took her a minute of being alone to remember. It was as if she were tethered to invisible threads that loosened as she walked away from the marionette controller and coiled around her limbs when she came closer to the room of her own, a room in which she was entangled in the mesh of him, with the choice to either sever connections or reunite with the ragged threads—a clean cut or a drawn-out closure? Perhaps it was the exhaustion from Danny’s bedtime routine or the exhaustion from being thrust into a past she had tried hard to suppress, but Erin could not fight the return of her younger days. Days when she thought she’d never have children, would probably never get married. It seemed so silly now, the thought that she would never be without him. Habit or destiny, it was hard to tell one from the other.
Yet she had lived without him, in the faint satisfaction that she did not need him. And she had not bothered or thought much about him until today, when he stood across the road from her. Must she start thinking about him again, with nothing to start on but the cut-out image from this afternoon?
They did not start as friends. They were strangers who knew each other’s names, then suddenly, lovers. She had noticed him in the lecture hall in the Faculty of Humanities. It wasn’t the first time they were in close proximity, but this time she became aware of him. He was the only one in the lecture hall who wasn’t taking notes, sitting with one leg crossed over the other and head tilted to one side. Even from a seat away, she could sense his cool, elitist impudence.
Erin came to herself with a sudden discomfort. She remembered watching him fixedly, then saw him move from one chair to another. Why did he move closer to her during the break? He had come over to her, his face pale and blank, his eyes staring into hers. She remembered trying to get up from her seat, for the break was only five minutes, yet she could not get away. That was when they first chatted properly, wasn’t it? Both were indifferent to what would happen.
He had called it a “partnership”. Girlfriend-boyfriend was trite, too juvenile, unrepresentative of their multifaceted connection. Laid out in practical terms, they merely happened to be in the right time and right place, stumbling into each other’s way—she was rushing to class, he was coming from a seminar. They collided into each other at a sharp corner in the southern wing of the university. He recognised her from the orientation camp: the girl who was the emcee all weekend, whose sentences were full and proper, devoid of “lahs” and “lehs”. He had noticed her then. She remembered him as the boy with the straightest posture, holding his head high even when he broke the eggs during the pass-the-egg-with-a-spoon challenge or when he was left without a group in the three-legged race. They hadn’t thought of each other since the camp but the collision had brought back impressions of a lingering gaze, a brief locking of eyes, imagined moments of near-contact—such that when she had stooped down to gather up the books that had fallen out of her arms and he had bent to help her, the entanglement of skin and books was not unfamiliar, a scene played out in a tableau of love at first sight that always leads to a cycle of passion and devastation.
He was right, for it wasn’t trite at all. A boyfriend would leave and another would come along. He left and she met Hao. She didn’t have boyfriends, in the teenage sense of the word. No infatuations or crushes. Between them was a bond whose remnants would suddenly surface in the chorus of an off-beat song that came on the radio, or expectedly every time she entered a bookstore, long after it had been severed. Erin supposed this must be the so-called phantom limb effect. A ghost of his, still around. It remained around for a long time after she had got together with Hao.
A relief, to some extent. Hao did not particularly notice the incessant stream of explanations that accompanied her casual statements about, say, the weather or work; how she’d stop herself mid-sentence, ponder for a few seconds, make an mm-mm sound while slightly shaking her head, as though she were contending with a third party of whom he was unaware. Hao just listened, whether she was full of verbiage or abruptly quiet. He didn’t make a big deal about her word choices or unordinary vocabulary. Sure, it was odd to him that she had described their weekend staycations in Johor Bahru as “jaunts” and used words like “amble” or “take a gander” when she meant to take a walk downstairs, but he loved her even more for the occasional inconsistencies. They indicated to him that she must have felt safe with him, safe enough to let loose and be herself. Once, while planning for a week-long getaway and perusing their required leave entitlements, Erin let it slip and said man-day-teri leave instead of mend-a-tori leave, and reflexively apologised to him. Hao merely looked at her, puzzled at first, then smiled sheepishly to admit that he’d say it like that too, pleased that they had more in common now. They were Singaporeans who pronounced things like most Singaporeans. There was nothing odd about that.
The creak of the door broke her thoughts. Erin shifted her arm away from the sleeping child. Danny made a clicking sound and seemed not to notice her.
Hao was entering the room, and the humming of passion calmed down. He had shaved and showered and put on his pyjamas.
“Going to bed soon?” he whispered, holding out his hand.
“In a bit,” she said. “I’ve just got to put away Danny’s toys in the living room.”
Their eyes met, his more wistful than hers. He squeezed her shoulder to let her go.
“All right. Don’t stay up too late,” he said, smiling.
Erin didn’t feel guilt, not then. The flirtation with an elusive past permitted a perverse closeness to a part of her that she had put away. Between the images running through her mind, half-forming and half-dissipating, Erin felt a pause in which she remembered who she was and where she had been.
Like a somnambulist, unthinking yet determined, Erin walked out of the bedroom and strode across the hallway to recover her handbag hanging on the hooks of the main door.
She unzipped the bag, reached into its recesses, feeling here and there to find something. She took the pens out, the scrunched-up receipts, Danny’s pacifier, a packet of Ribena gummies. Whatever she was looking for was no larger than her palm. A leather notebook, barely containing full sentences, not even a single cogent paragraph. Turning page after page of grocery lists, to-do checkboxes, scribblings of recommended childcare centres and formula brands, she wrote down on a clean page the name of the man who stood across the road. Yes, the man who loved words more than people. The man she once loved, three words that were part of the past.
Wendell An Ling. The gold-souled man whose love of wisdom had pleased and affected her. Back then, as long as he was reading, he was happy enough, and she was perfectly willing.
Erin placed her hands over her eyes to see him again. There she was, and there he was. Two people apart, with nothing to say to one another.
Well, what words could she have said to him? She couldn’t look into his eyes then, shifting her gaze to his neck and shoulders. Only in the tranquillity of the night without anyone else could she bear to see him again, shifting the strap of his satchel, ready to take a step. But what could she say? She was overthinking—it should be easy. Any one of her rehearsals from the past twelve years would do: “Hi, it’s been a while.” “You haven’t changed much.” She could pull a line from the emails she had written him that got no answers. No, the last one was too sentimental.
The green man kept flashing. She stared at the back of the man who had turned around, walking away, towards the other direction. She was relieved. Nothing needed to be said, after all.
At that, she relaxed and shut the notebook. Hidden in the words, hidden in a sacred and pained memory, Erin was starting to recover the scattered pieces, one scene at a time.
It was tucked into the fourth shelf, snugly resting between Suchen Christine Lim and Nuraliah Norasid. Erin had trudged through the philosophy, fiction, non-fiction, self-help sections and nudged her way past the busy storytelling area where children’s stories were displayed and book signings took place. Store assistants were shuffling and moving chairs. People stood by watching; others moved along, busy with their own activities. Erin moved along too, eager to finally arrive at the four shelves known as Local Literature.
The book was prominent, cream-coloured, with a shiny sheen that caught one’s eye quickly.
The middle name, the sobriquet by which he wasn’t known in his circle of intimates, was omitted. She always thought his first name was unheard of, and the last had a feminine ring, conjuring a girl resting under a peach blossom tree, the mid-autumn moon hovering above. The middle name threw a wrench in the makings of a modernist writer.
“The fault of having academic parents,” he said, recalling a childhood of kids calling him “Wendy Delly” or “Weirdo Wendo” in their high-pitched voices and limp wrists. That he had loose, long curls did not help.
James Ling and Karen Pereira were professors at the National University of Singapore. One had expertise in medieval literature in the English department; the other was a philosopher studying the evolution of Zhuangzi’s naturalism in the age of globalisation. Erin met one of them at An’s graduation: Professor James Ling was the provost and presiding official that year, whose speech encouraged the pursuit of freedom in an increasingly pragmatic society and the exploration of its use in our daily lives. She had found it difficult to follow his train of thought, having just arrived from her morning shift at a coffee shop and already preoccupied with an early evening shift at the library. The spiel about an anti-pragmatic attitude to life just didn’t seem possible.
When she was finally introduced to Professor Ling in his scarlet gown lined with wool and satin, hovering awkwardly around the graduation photobooth with a bouquet of flowers, he said to An, “Congratulations, son! It’s nice to meet your partner,” and extended his hand to her. That was perhaps the moment she fully accepted their relationship status—she was his partner, officially.
Erin got to meet An’s mother in the evening for the celebration. Her expectations were ordinary: a homemade fare or dinner at a restaurant, a classy older woman, a quiet family.
The restaurant was Primrose by Tom Hughes, a one-Michelin-star restaurant, whose full-course menu cost $180++ per person. Erin hadn’t realised the need for four different kinds of knives, mistaking the fish knife for a butter knife. She did not know that a fish fork has a deep notch to help lift fish meat off bones, and a seafood fork is the smaller one with shorter tines and a slender handle, used to extract meat from crab and other shellfish. On the rare occasion when her family ordered chilli crab, they used their hands.
