Almost a love story, p.3
Almost a Love Story, page 3
Karen Pereira had a modified English accent, sounding quite posh yet common at times. She would comment on the acidity of the raw fish salad, take a sip of white wine, note its peachy notes and gaze into the back of the restaurant as though her mind had been transported to some seaside town.
“She’s often elsewhere,” An had told Erin, a few months ago, when they were just hanging out. Erin understood now what he meant. His mother, though sitting in front of her, was as real and unreachable as the name of her book, Ivory Caskets: The Colour of Death in Medieval Romances, which sat on the top shelf of their Billy bookcase.
The only son of academics, An was born in a small university town in northeast England to graduate students who were busy with teaching and research. A child was not in the young students’ five-year plan, but their combined brand of ethics and biblical beliefs did not endorse abortion. Safe to say, he grew up in the company of characters and interlocutors who nourished him on his parents’ behalf. They brought him to Narnia and Middle-earth, Azkaban and the Underworld, as far out as Oceania; they demonstrated the rules and etiquette of different ages, from the Byzantine period to the High Renaissance, the Romantic age, and beyond. One could say he was a self-made man. Or a self-taught novelist, as one magazine had written.
His stood out among the titles. Well, his name surely did. Wendell Ling, the feminine-sounding surname pulled off a formidable enough presence, mostly helped by the bold letters that were industrious and glossy, etched into a cream-coloured spine. In a larger font—though light and curlicued like a linear drawing—were the words: Silver Soul.
Erin tiptoed to reach the slender title. The novella slipped between her fingers, falling face down onto the carpeted floor. Instinctively she bent slightly and found her knees lowering into a squat as she held the book in her hand. She was obliged to recognise the man in the photograph on the back cover. A half-body headshot of a dreamer, eyes gazing into an unseen vanishing point. Still the same, she thought. And like a film that cannot stop advancing until it is at the end of the roll, Erin was lost in a sentimental vision of scenes running amok.
The young man who ran into her path and knocked the books out of her hands, a caricature of a gentleman, tilting over into flesh. “It’s you,” was the first thing he said. His eyes sparkled; a switch turned on. The narrow passageway between the pillar and wall expanded into a comfortable dwelling, the stifling concrete grey washed into a soft blue light. She knew him and let on a smile. He said his name was Wendell—an odd name she had never heard of. Out of curiosity, and quite certain that he had likely gone to one of those autonomous Westernised schools and came from an English-speaking home, Erin asked if he had a Chinese name. His response was a surprise. Not only did he have one, but the name was monosyllabic.
“An,” he said. A character so gentle and evoking comfort, calling upon a Chinese heritage that seemed unassociated with his persona. In that moment, she decided to call him by his middle name, for she did not want to be like the rest of his friends or the strangers he’d introduced himself to. She couldn’t explain it, this desire to appear different to him, to regard him singularly.
“I’m Erin,” she said, and held out her hand.
He already knew her name but extended his hand anyway. A brief contact, the start of something benevolent.
He replied: “It’s a pretty name, originally Gaelic. Some say it’s the ancient name of the island that we now call Ireland or, more accurately, it’s the feminine and romantic derivative of Ireland.”
“Hmm?” Erin was used to references to the legal drama starring Julia Roberts, though she was nothing like the straight-talking paralegal, neither a girl boss nor a go-getter. This Irish whir was new.
She thought him to be self-approving, but there was a sing-song quality to his speech that softened the harshness of the unsolicited explanation. She turned her face to the passing line of people rushing to lectures, preventing him from studying her countenance; a move which he thus interpreted:
“Sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I mean is, Erin is the English name of the goddess Ériu, after whom Ireland is named. It also comes from the Irish word Éire.”
There was something in his matter-of-fact mode of speech that amused Erin. She continued the conversation with a little more interest. “Éire,” she softly muttered the word. Like air. That’s how he’d call her name.
“Cool. Thanks for the story,” she said. “You’re the first Wendell I know.”
“Cool.”
His lips were unclosed to say something. Erin waited.
A few seconds after, he remarked casually, in an offhand way: “You’re the only Erin I know.”
She chuckled and he smiled along. He helped her pick up the scattered books and she retrieved the two pens that had fallen out of his shirt pocket. A few minutes later, they left each other.
In the encounters that followed, Erin would note that there was measure and crispness in the way he enunciated words; the sentences were smooth and connected, never off-grammar. He spoke precisely and meant every single word. Months later, when he told her, “I think I quite like you,” he had thought out the modifying words with so much care that any lukewarmness was a result of an exacting balance and deep consideration. To be sure, it took him a total of ten days, he told her. Ten days to find the words that would accurately convey how he felt for her. Erin, who took only a few seconds to respond, said she liked him too. She liked him, too, period. Several months afterwards when she moved into his apartment, they were not unlike an old couple who shared a pact of contentment and fidelity.
Standing in front of the shelf of new and local books, directly underneath the air conditioning, Erin shuddered, her knees weakening. She felt an ache rising in her left chest. The physical pain sharpened, tuned to the many things he once said that levitated and circled inside her.
Just last night, she had been afraid of remembering too much of him in her life, but today, he was something else: a monochrome image of a stranger, scholar turned writer, winner of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, and, in bold font: Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. He was the author of Silver Soul, whose life was condensed into a five-liner description about his scholarly research, a two-year fellowship programme at the University of East Anglia, his first work of fiction and his mentorship with the critically acclaimed Singapore-born British novelist Byron Laurie Yong. The reviews were nondescript: “Unputdownable!”, “Brilliantly drawn!” And one had even said: “A short and sweet masterpiece about the unanalysable mysteries of love”.
A writerly life he had had in the last decade or so. Erin couldn’t help the thoughts that lined up in her mind. They were swiftly shaping her presence in his life into an obstacle that stood in his path to authorhood. How did he become a novelist, which seemed so far removed from the criticism he enjoyed writing? The man whom she knew was invested in literary analysis, this and that theory, and dismissed the rigour of historical-biographical approaches. What was the turning point—could it be that afternoon at Jenal Jetty? It was a matter of timing; it had to be. The residency came first, followed by the writing workshops, then the academic work began to fall to the wayside.
None of the information was surprising to Erin. She had looked him up before driving to the bookstore. Once he had been wrenched from her deepest reserve and came within her sight as he had done so yesterday afternoon, she could no longer leave him buried. Google did its thing, suggesting articles and similar reads, and in the morning her newsfeed was peppered with literary events and book readings, as though she were some literati invested in Singapore Literature.
She had already blundered yesterday afternoon and thought too much about him in the night. He was there, she was there, a road between them. Twelve years since they last met. Years had passed and memories thinned out to form a wall of unmendable fissures that divided their lives. It had always been so since the day at Jenal Jetty. How quickly twelve years of absence seemed to have not mattered. There was no use for a reburial now.
Letting herself relax, Erin rested in a corner where two shelves joined. She read her way round the foreword written by one David Tan, who must have been famous in the local literary scene. He noted that the book was a detailed study of fusionist love as promulgated in Plato’s The Symposium: “…A halved lover who had found the one who was willing to be halved for his sake. A union of the Reader and Writer”. In a commentary that embedded a non-spoiler summary, he wrote: “A hyper-reflexive work meant for the scholarly reader, Ling’s debut is a challenge to the theory of souls and the romance genre: Christopher, our reclusive protagonist, meets Marge, his silver-souled lover whose guardianship teaches him how not to rule over another.” A few paragraphs later, the conclusion was terse: “A story about the power of literature to restore love and to ruin lives.”
Erin pondered over the words that were clear and resonant. It had been a while since she thought about how a story could be shattering and life-saving. That was exactly what he said in the kitchenette after she had pinched the tears back with her finger. Over a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and red bean buns, she heard the story of the one-armed man who could only do one thing at a time, and the only thing he did was to carry his lover to the light of an oil lamp so she could see herself, and thereupon had unknowingly caused the shadows to dance on the floor on which he stood without an arm to fend for himself against the baton-like figures.
“The God of Small Things,” she muttered under her breath, and felt a gush of warmth through her body. Erin remembered the book and its lovers, his voice and her love for it all.
She was peeling away the egg white from the yolk. He was trying to explain the scene to her.
“Does it make any sense?” he asked, smiling, ready to say it all over again.
“Not really,” she said. “Why does he only have one arm?”
He said it more slowly this time, more descriptively: “They had met earlier in the day, but the narrative is ambiguous whether Ammu and Velutha saw each other at all. It’s quite brilliant, if you think about it, how Arundhati Roy uses the dream as a shroud to obscure the fact that they did meet in the day. Dreams are symbolic expressions of our primal and inner states, so they disturb our conscious preconceptions of who we are and what we are about.”
Erin nodded. Her eyebrows were slightly drawn.
“Sorry, let me get back to the plot. I was saying that Ammu had a dream, and in the dream, she saw the man from the morning. His face, she could not see, but she remembered his body—chocolate, dark. The body reminded Ammu of Velutha, except she seemed only to see him doing things with one arm. His arm fighting off shadows, his arm pushing things away. In her dream, their bodies were in close proximity, his only arm holding her entirely. She felt his arm gripping her—suffocating and comforting, both at once. It was confusing, as if those who were forbidden to come into contact were somehow in touch with each other.”
“Literally,” she said. The word fell out of her. Then, more words: “They’re literally in touch.”
“The whole scene is so vividly described, incredibly tactile and embodied. Yet everything happens in a dream and Velutha only has one arm,” he said.
“Right, with one arm?”
“The hard reality is juxtaposed with the dreamy encounter,” he said and repeated in fewer words the last bit of the passage, allowing each phrase to form the image of a half but tight embrace, a woman’s body clinging to an iron-wrought arm, a small space between the bodies of little contrast and only degrees of shadows. One was over-hugging; the other could not hug properly. How could he, with only one arm? An kept talking about the chapter until the images assembled themselves to form a total picture of love and darkness, until the red bean buns turned cold and were no longer soft.
“Why one arm?” she asked again.
With patience, he explained: “One-armed because the other arm is carrying Ammu. Her body and his as one, his arm fusing with hers. So she could only ever see his one arm doing things.”
Erin was confused by the mathematics of the fusion. He went on: “Velutha is from the lowest of castes, considered to be ‘subhuman’. Pardon my language. He has the darkest skin, and Ammu is of the highest caste. So the image of his amputated self is really a symbol of his status, do you see it? He, who has been dehumanised, is trying to love a woman.”
He turned to the page and murmured to himself before finally uttering the words, “It’s a perverse entanglement.”
“The God of Small Things. One of the best contemporary novels,” he said, and scooped up the egg yolk from the breakfast bowl. The rays of the sun shining upon his face.
It was something he was reading for the afternoon class. A novel about how big things like laws and history dictate the way people love, and how it’s the small things that matter to lovers. Things as small as goosebumps that rose on Ammu’s skin when Velutha caressed her. Like an infection that spread spatially, a small detail would smear over everything, and the rest of the day would unfold around one thing over and over again in hints and connotations. Erin grew weary of feeling sad, but the darkest man and the lamp were an unerasable mark.
Her thoughts were still with the tingly feeling of his fingertips running over her skin when his tone shifted. It was just like him, wasn’t it? To go on about the symbol of dreams, the injustices of systems, Marxism and some other neologism that departed from the story, from love. Most endings, for him, had to do with closures—some kind of restoration, usually. He was optimistic that way, attributing it to the book’s generosity and the reader’s discernment. The narrative value of the lovers lay not in their trying love per se, but in how each had represented something really wrong with society. Something that preceded their love, which was a symptom of greater underlying social problems.
The simple circumstance of one person asking a question and the other giving an answer did not always happen to them. Erin had many small questions and An had many big answers. To him, her questions were paving stones to a wider place. To her, his answers were not clarifying. What should have been a lover’s quarrel often became a teaching moment.
It wasn’t like An did not realise he had pressed her into a corner and that she was merely nodding blankly. His entire education hinged on openness and a generosity of interpretation. Even as he had one answer that he believed to be true, he would still prepare a couple of others that were plausible. He just had not planned for every inevitability.
Erin found it almost impossible to follow him when he expounded on the historical significance of the text, shaking his head, emphasising how events in the past made things the way they have become today. Instead, she paused at the easy task of seeing herself and him as copies of the lovers found in books. The one-armed man and his lover were semblances of her and him, only that she was better at moving things, heavy things like boxes and her cello, and he was the one who insisted on keeping the lamp always turned on. As though someone were at home, waiting for no reason, wasting energy.
As it often was in those days, they would start the day with conversations about this or that book he was reading, and she would tell him about her day to come, the morning shift at Baron’s she was dreading or the compulsory class on Contemporary Human Society. And, almost unfailingly, he would squeeze her hand. It was a gesture, a symbol of care. Then, he would go on about something he was reading.
It never occurred to Erin that literature was to blame, even though she was so sure back then, at twenty-four, and isolated from the world, that she had been ruined. Now, as she was holding the book loosely in her hand, she could see how many things came down to that. Literature had really ruined many things. For so long, she felt like she couldn’t go on reading without pausing at a parenthetical insert, a character’s dilemma, an odd omission, the inconsistency of tenses, really anything perplexing had to be underlined. The mere mention of a word like “irony” or “evanescence”, or phrases such as “was that it?” and “so it was…”, would tunnel her back into reminiscences—mostly of a flickering green Panthella lamp, half-eaten sweet buns, a late-night book club on a super single bed, him reading aloud paragraphs from ancient mythology and the classics. She indulged in his retelling of a lyre-carrying hero whose one command was to not look back, or the account of a soldier who returned home with memories of his ex-lover and not his wife. In all these memories, An was either leaning against the dining table or resting beside her in bed, always with a pen behind his ear.
Unlike An, she had not grown up with Enid Blyton or C. S. Lewis. In her family, the kids watched dramas on the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) and later, the Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS). Triple Nine and Growing Up were the stories she loved as a child. Stories about the importance of family and justice. She wasn’t a reader, per se; she just watched television and listened to Perfect 10 on the radio. Apart from the mandatory library books she had to borrow for school, a few of Russell Lee’s True Singapore Ghost Stories, which her father had enjoyed reading, the stories in her Primary English Thematic Series (PETS) textbooks and the occasional Bookworm Club mailers, Erin hadn’t felt compelled to seek out books. Stories were one thing; books were another. So when her secondary school offered a combination of science subjects that did not require literature, Erin took it up immediately. She had to study at least one humanities subject, and geography was her choice, even though she never understood the need to catalogue different kinds of sediment, the knowledge of plate tectonics and the science of land erosion. Singapore’s not prone to natural disasters, that much she was certain. The human side of geography, however, was something she quite enjoyed, thinking about what makes a country vulnerable and how individuals attach meanings and memories to specific locations. Topics of liveability and security afforded her an abstract way to process the feelings of self-doubt and aimlessness that she and her teenage peers knew all too well.
