Almost a love story, p.6
Almost a Love Story, page 6
She had written many names and snappy phrases down, from time to time, until foreign expressions became familiar, even the ones that were idiosyncratic grew on her. The twists in plots held her in suspense at first but ceased to surprise upon the third or fourth retelling. No story is ever so original, she concluded. A detail about star-crossed lovers in medieval times would be found in a contemporary love story; the letter would become an email, but the spirit was largely the same.
Romance, as she knew it, characterised by scenes of lovers running towards each other, the embrace after a long separation, a highly anticipated kiss, when repeated and mediated too many times, felt clichéd.
Regardless, he had said it and so she wrote it. That was the way things were between them. Old, classical things became new things to her. Unpronounceable names were anglicised for her sake. In many ways, which Erin could not see, An was reading texts to her on her terms. He seemed to be her translator, but she could never surmise that.
She assumed he chose her because she had good listening skills, was able to make out conversations recorded in coffee shops and by the road, pushing through heavy accents and crosstalk. She knew not to get caught up in all the “ums,” “lahs” and “you knows”. Her reflexes were directed to listening, not interpreting. As a student of Sociology, she learnt to do that well. All that training seemed to have led her into dictation work for him, her frantic jotting down of the vowels and consonants that would match the words rolling from his tongue, his lips forming a myriad of shapes and then relaxing.
Loss was inevitable in the process of dictation too—her transcripts were at times full of sics and parentheses and ellipses. Although with An, she knew that the accuracy of her transcription had less to do with comprehension and information retrieval. She wasn’t exactly a transcriber. Not really.
She had tried to find a word for it—stenographer? Secretary? A literary assistant? No, she wasn’t literary in any way. She took notes, that was all. It was true, she collected his ideas—the long tomes on the English novel, the savants of the twentieth century and their contributions, the important years when this and that happened, even his trailing and unfinished thoughts. She had written pages and pages about these things. She could recall the smoothness of his manner when he described the sea in Wordsworth’s poetry, the way his voice sank when he spoke about the war, as if he were witness to its turmoil, his fingers reaching to touch hers when he didn’t want her to write about his contempt for the inexorable march of contemporary writing.
Yet, the things that filled up her notebook, the squiggly lines running up and down the pages, words crossed out, even redacted, phrases gnawing at the thin line of perforations, were not just ideas. More than a document of his words, his thoughts, his vision of the world, it was a token of her obedience and his openness, a ground of trust that bound them together. How was she to listen to him? It was a question she had asked herself numerous times, the answer to which had much to do with a kind of fidelity.
It’s hard to say when exactly, but for a long time now, mostly without her knowing this, everything she saw was filtered through his vision. Her world had grown larger as his place in it expanded.
FOR HIS ACTIONS, he received seven complaints—though nothing from the female student in question—and a stern warning in an email from Atkinson, to which he responded with a two-page Word document about the calibre of the new intake and their many shortcomings, closing with a paragraph about how he was sorry for the department and its lousy, shrinking student body.
The reply that came swiftly was not argumentative as he had expected; instead, Atkinson had forwarded an email from the Student Services Centre:
Marge Xu is a contracted note-taker from The Singapore Association for the Deaf, deployed to deaf and hard-of-hearing students enrolled in HL102: Survey of Twentieth-Century Literature.
The facts were simple and ripping.
Christopher scrolled through the email:
A contracted note-taker spends a few minutes after each class to scan and upload their notes to a secure site for the student with a disability. The student with a disability may be physically unable to take notes or may need to focus only on what the instructor is saying. Often, a student’s disability is invisible.
He had learnt about these functional limitations and their necessary accommodations during a refresher training programme for senior faculty. The twenty-first century had ushered in new diagnoses and syllabi had to be designed in more inclusive ways. “Inclusive” was a word thrown around in their departmental meetings; Atkinson frequently urged faculty members to create more “inclusive” classrooms to support students of varying abilities and socio-economic status—from using larger fonts in presentation slides to providing a minimum of two undocumented absences to students. The laundry list of concessions was getting absurd; a marginal difference between enabling and excusing.
At first, Christopher struggled, easily suspicious of students who claimed to have learning disabilities, who were merely faking it or were simply uninterested in his courses; but, upon evaluation and drafting a pros and cons list, he concluded that for one or two black sheep that might be playing the system, there were many more real cases of students who could use the accommodations. So a fair compromise, he thought, was to include a statement in his course policy inviting students who recognised their need for help to talk with him and the Student Services Centre about disability-related issues, as well as to be unapologetically transparent, some would say aggressive, about his expectations, which ranged from grilling students in their first class about something metaphysical in the text to assigning a seventy-page critical theory reading for each class. His attempt at building a more accommodating classroom often resulted in a self-selecting group of readers.
Thinking this, Christopher was intrigued by the woman whose job was to sit in lectures and be paid for the transmission of knowledge. The thought excited him: So, Marge Xu was a modern-day scrivener!
He continued reading the final lines:
All note-taking services are managed by the Deaf Access Service, which has been in partnership with the Student Services Centre since 2015. The Student Services Centre ensures that all contracted note-takers from external partners are not current (active) students at the university and do not have unexpired access to any course.
We have verified that Marge Xu is not a current (active) student. Her last activity at the university was a part-time course with the Institute for Adult Learning in 2023.
It was certain now. He had done a mean thing, which slowly caused him to slump in his chair, to look back on how possibly neurotic and severely unhinged he might have come across to everyone, raging against the inevitable, fuming at behind-the-scenes capitalistic forces, lashing out at teenagers who were in university for an education that could wake them up from the neoliberal slumber; and, yet, that was what he had chosen to make of the platform he was given. They could not have understood what he was feeling or needed to know. He had associated himself with stupidity and vulgarity.
Once he had evaluated the narrative with literary acumen, the next steps were unambiguous. Within half an hour, Christopher wrote an apology and a request to Atkinson and the Student Services Centre with a sincerity and quickness that even surprised himself, for pride had receded without contest to make way for the urgent want to reach out to Marge Xu, the want to be understood, the want to be proven wrong.
The bookstore assistant walked towards her as if to speak but didn’t. Erin brought the book up to cover her face. She held her breath. She did not want to be interrupted again.
Had the novel turned out any other way, Erin might have put the book down and headed out to fetch Danny from childcare.
The punchline of the latter half of the chapter was this: Marge Xu had responded kindly, in an uncomplicated way. It was written out in one paragraph, but his reaction to it had filled up the next few pages. Christopher was smiling at the email, described as being “suddenly boyish”. It was sent from her personal email account, whose address indicated her birth year. She was twenty-six and did not look like it. Her words gave him nothing much, and although his instincts were to trust the simplicity of the text, he could not imagine the lack of undertone or connotations. He thought too much—an occupational hazard.
It was when he looked at the evidence and remembered how she had said “Okay” in a tone more sincere than spiteful as he ordered her to leave the lecture hall that he became more convinced that there was nothing more. Marge Xu was possibly as she had presented herself. Yet, there was something about the text written in lowercase, the couple of typing errors, the “heyo” and that last smiley face that assuaged his anxiety and guilt. Just one text had dared him to imagine the woman who had penned her unedited thoughts as she was walking to, perhaps, another note-taking session. It read like a stream of consciousness to which he was privy.
So far, the plot was predictable, but Erin could not help the growing feelings she had for the two protagonists. Marge Xu was twenty-six and Christopher was a senior faculty member, the difference diverted her thoughts for a moment. It was to her like the many unclear obstacles that stood between lovers. Age, position, power differences—you know, the usual conflicts. Having glanced at the line in which Marge’s age stood out to her—her calculations were usually loose and poor on a daily basis when it came to grocery shopping or managing her savings, but were oddly precise where love was concerned—Erin closed the book and replayed in her mind whatever little she remembered about narratology. She recalled, with unsettling accuracy, how much time An had spent at the graduate writing circle with Victoria, how he had limited their time together to no more than two days a week, afraid they would fuse into a singular entity, yet had spent five out of seven luncheons with Victoria and the rest.
A sentiment of familiarity greeted her when she could identify the narrative drive and delaying force. She recognised moments in the prose when she was compelled to reread the lines, how she was suspended by the end of each chapter, wanting more. An had explained the mechanics of fiction writing to her. Most stories comprise the rise and fall, the hook, the climax, the resolution; and, the great ones have, most importantly, beautiful lines. Old stories from the past had way too many lines, but this was understandable because, as he had explained to her, Victorian writers were paid per page back then. She did not write this down but made a mental note about their meagre earnings. It was an interesting fact that lessened her resentment for Great Expectations.
The very first time she penned his thoughts, however, had nothing to do with the Victorians—French, more like it. He had said those words that made it seem like he was from an era inaccessible to her.
Terrines, pâtés, saucisson, lardo, crudités.
She could see him standing against the window, backlit by morning light coming in through the half-open blinds. His arms hanging down naturally, shoulders even, a slight smile showing, as he asked her what she thought of the dinner menu. A figure cut out from a sheet of cardboard, too gallant for the kitschy spinach-green tiles his parents had chosen for the backsplash of the kitchenette.
She understood things like wafer-thin carrots and pickled cucumbers, but the rest of them had to be phonetically spelled out. She took the Post-it pad on the countertop and started to decipher the consonants that rolled off his tongue and reached her with a soft purring sound.
“Charcuterie,” he said in a manner that effortlessly placed them in separate worlds. Words that accentuated his natural poise and her benightedness. Words that needed clarification and internet searches. And when she asked him about them, he merely said it was a way of serving cured meats and raw sticks of vegetables. Much like shaved ham, she gathered when he described the salt and slickness.
He had explained so smoothly and without impatience that the fact they would have to prepare and serve a smörgåsbord of meats went over Erin’s head. He didn’t know it at the time, but she had partaken in her first piece of meat at Jack’s Place with him. Before she met him, Erin was a lifelong vegetarian, born to parents who had turned away from the Buddhist faith to which her grandparents were devoted. Her abstinence had little to do with religion and was largely out of habit. In that moment of An explaining the ancient culinary tradition of cooked flesh, as the French etymology indicated, her mind busied itself with his cadence and reason. The meatiness of the evening’s menu wasted away in his passionate account of the prudent use of every last bit of flesh animated by blood and fat.
She kept her eyes on him and watched him mouth secrets about foreign flesh and tongue to her. Her hands, holding firm to the paper and pen, began to scribble words in curlicued handwriting, holding on to them as a net to capture his world. The more fragments of him she could retain and piece together, the less she needed to focus on her churning stomach. For to eat meat was one thing; to touch and fold it was something else. So Erin busied herself with jotting down his utterances: Gouda pronounced how-duh, not goo-dah. Camembert pronounced cam-mem-bear, with a silent “t”. Specifics of green European pastures she could never be a part of, hard and soft sounds like little fairies pirouetting, dropping magic crumbs and echoes as they went, tempting Erin to repeat them like a foreigner trying to steal a strange tongue. The core parts of her—her sociological training and vegetarianism—were slowly becoming undone.
Caught up in the echoes of the strange tongue, she forgot about the reality of meat. The real distressing moment only came when he pulled up an article on how to make a charcuterie board from Bon Appétit. The photograph of a ring sausage resting on a wooden board spoke the thousand words she should have heard.
Erin couldn’t bear it. She was overwhelmed. It wasn’t just words anymore. Each had the capability of flashing an image in her mind. A pink furry thing, a little pig, Piglet.
She tried to think of the principles behind her vegetarianism—the concept of ahimsa and the avoidance of doing harm unto all living things, or why she had followed her grandmother’s instructions so faithfully even after she had passed away—to stop the melodious utterance, but her brain failed her.
The next few words out of his mouth were, “It leaves nothing to waste.” That threw her off. His words brought her running thoughts to a halt. That it was a tradition where the conservation of meat was as important as its creation made it seem like the charcuterie was absolved of blame.
Just like that, it began to matter less. She realised there was no good reason to snap out of it. A realisation that she would like to be a part of that world that played along to the soundtrack of unknown words and beautiful lines. The same moment in which she registered his way with words and why she was so daft about him.
There’s the romantic side of love, and there’s the realistic side of love, but most of the time, the two are felt in tandem. In their humble abode on Sembawang Crescent, they opened cheap bottles of red wine and laid out a board of stinky, smoky and tangy cheese for under thirty dollars to accompany the platter of ham and salami from FairPrice. Here and there, on the table, were small candles that warmed up the dinette. The guests were sated and happy. Conversations went on until the wee hours. It was a good dinner party. They were good hosts.
Something happened to them on that Labour Day evening. It was during their first dinner party, two fresh graduates playing at being adults, when he didn’t let go of her hand. She had been anxious but did not tell him, keeping busy with the décor and food. When his friends finally arrived, she thought the stone would roll away, but it only weighed differently. The anxiety of being unready was supplanted by the fear of misspeaking. The grip of his hand was grounding. So were the smiles on the guests’ faces. They were nice to her, divulging their postgraduate aspirations and fears. Like them, An reiterated his plans of going back to school in August and the want for an even further education in Oxford. They nodded in agreement and turned to her. She shrugged and leaned towards him. He held her hand throughout the talk about his future as if she were an intrinsic part of the plan. Something less trite than a girlfriend. He would get them to England one day and pay back all the rent money they owed to his parents. They were going to make it.
Over time, as quick as a month or so, it was apparent to her that their thoughts for one another were aspiring and unheeding of the practical side of things, even though she hadn’t yet given up on his sanguine ideals: to find a job in an Ivy League institution, to publish an academic monograph with a university press, to join the ranks of Franco Moretti or Harold Bloom whose names were destined to be famous. Erin always thought the ang mohs had an edge, a better chance of becoming famous because of their naturally winning names. A name like Peter Tan or Jane Lee simply had little chance of success when matched up against Tom, Dick and Harry. But Wendell was a name that stayed. He could make it; she believed in him back then.
From all of that to this slim title in her hand, Erin thought, riffling through the pages, to raise the corner of the book slightly. For a moment, she felt pity and a strong need to continue reading.
SUCH CONDUCT OF her, he thought, even in the twenty-first century, was uncommon. He was used to being treated with as much reserve as it was possible to combine with courtesy by students and colleagues, wait staff and the aunties and uncles of shop fronts. He was unfamiliar with her unpracticed tongue. All allowance he had tried to make for the forthcoming nature of Marge Xu’s response and the informality in language had failed, let alone the plain sentence of shall we meet then—which was not punctuated by a question mark, as though fate had lorded over their inevitable interchange.
After his fifth reading of the starred message. Christopher found himself wondering whether she had a mind. He had wavered here and there in the last couple of days, on one read, thinking she was friendly, and on the other, inclined to dismiss her as silly. For if she had a mind, she would know to capitalise the first word of her sentences, to use semi-colons instead of the dreadful ellipsis, to begin all letters, including electronic ones, with Dear, and to sign off on a sincere note. Worse, the reminder that she had replied on her mobile phone, and did that within an hour, was unforgivable. He was tempted to think of her in the same manner he’d characterised his colleagues: slaves to capitalism, subject to its crippling expectations of round-the-clock digital availability, playing out the illusion of efficiency; all of these at the expense of mindfulness, propriety, personal space. So it was expected, after all, that Marge Xu would respond so haphazardly. “Sent from my Android,” he scoffed at the tasteless signature.
