Last Tang Standing

by Ho, Lauren

  9:15 a.m. Called Kai to tell her I was not coming in. I think she fell off her chair. I have taken less than three days of sick leave in the five years I’ve worked for my law firm.

  “How sick are you?” she whispered in fear.

  “Heartsick,” I mumbled, before hanging up. She didn’t have to know that I might be dead soon, from leprosy. That’s not her burden to carry.

  9:55 a.m. I was feeling so sorry for myself that I decided to call the one person who had seen me through all the shameful events in my life: my sister, Melissa.

  As soon as she picked up the phone, I started to blubber. “Orson hasn’t texted me at all since we had sex and I think I’ve been d-dumped and I hurt when I pee and I-I think I’m going to die!” I wailed.

  “Ghosted,” she corrected me.

  “What?”

  “The correct term here is ‘ghosted.’ It’s when … ah, never mind. Go on.”

  She listened to my tale of woe without interruption and didn’t even try to make me feel stupid for being a hypochondriac. She accepted my quirks. “Look, sis, you need to give yourself a break. You made a mistake but worrying about it won’t change what happened. Go fix yourself a glass of warm milk and go to bed. You sound completely ragged.”

  “I am,” I sniffed.

  “Take another day off and take your meds,” she reminded me before we said our goodbyes.

  I did as I was told and fell into an uneasy slumber.

  Wednesday 23 March

  3:40 a.m. Woke up from a troubled sleep feeling like the back of my eyes were sandpaper. It doesn’t seem to be burning down there anymore, but my pee was the color of irradiated lemons.

  7:00 a.m. Stumbled out of bed, dazed, my face the size of a watermelon from water retention, possibly due to the meds or the tubs of salted caramel ice cream I had been eating. Tried to take my mind off things by scalding myself in the shower, which achieved nothing except making me look like a real-life Freddy Krueger. Got depressed thinking that no one Orson’s age who accidentally finds this diary and reads it would understand the reference unless they googled it. Stupid brain.

  I tried to get myself out of the funk by repeating inspirational sayings from my collection of quotable quotes scribbled around my desk, but this exercise only served to hammer home how uninspired I was that I had to read other people’s stupid quotes to solve a problem I should have seen coming. Instead I should be writing my own guide to life. My first piece of advice to pre-millennials in my position is this: don’t date anyone who does not remember VHS. Don’t even look in the vicinity of anyone who has mouthed the lyrics from anything by One Direction. Because if you do, if you are lured in by their flat bellies and full hairlines, you will live to regret it.

  Just tried to find my rose gold Cartier Ballon Bleu watch among my collection of watches and can’t find it. It was a present from my parents for graduating from university, engraved with a sweet message; it was one of the few times I’d seen them collaborate on something. Hmm. Maybe I left it somewhere. Will look for it in my gym bag at work.

  8:35 a.m. Have unearthed a rank-smelling pair of socks that caused Suresh to dash from the room, choking, but no watch. Maybe it’s with Linda. She has the keys to my place and often helps herself to my clothes and accessories, which is a little unfair because she’s a size smaller than me, which means I cannot borrow her clothes, although she does have a divine collection of Hermès, Delvaux, and Chanel bags. Speaking of bags, the watch could be in one of mine. Will have to go through all of them when I’m home.

  Texted Linda to confirm our lunch at noon, since it’s been weeks since we last met. She’s supposed to be checking on my/our Tinder progress. I made sure to ask her if she had my watch.

  9:40 a.m. Genevieve cornered me in the cafeteria with a Cheshire grin. “It seems that a little birdie saw you with a certain juicy young thing at Quinn’s the other day. Is it so thin on the ground that you have to date teenagers now?”

  “Who served you that dish of bullcrap?” I said, frowning. I was never very polite when challenged.

  “My own two eyes!” she crowed. Then she wrinkled her nose. “Well, you know what I mean. You cradle snatcher.”

  The truth was too humiliating, so I slunk away with my tail between my legs, no witty comeback for the Human Sandworm. The only thing I can rely on is my friends. That’s why I’m going to have lunch with Linda—she’s such a strong woman and doesn’t need a man in her life. I must be like her.

  1:10 p.m. Waited forty minutes for Linda in the lobby before I slunk back to my desk, trying desperately to focus on my work when she finally texted me with this flimsy excuse:

  Have something work-related that cannot be rescheduled. So sorry.

  Which is fine, of course, because friendship, like romance, is flawed, and more often than not people end up stomping all over your dreams after dangling a goddamn carrot before you like … like …

  “What is wrong with you?” Suresh said, jerking back from his screen with alarm. “Why are you crying?”

  “Leave me alone,” I blubbered. Not wanting to tell him the truth, I lied, “I-I just lost a fortune at online crabs!”

  “What?” His eye was twitching.

  “You know, the game of crabs, you roll a die and then you place a bet …” I trailed off, realizing I had no idea how to play crabs.

  “Let’s go out for some air,” Suresh said quickly, unable to meet my eye.

  We ended up having sandwiches at the new Japanese fusion sandwich bar in Raffles Place, where we did not speak for thirty-five magical minutes before heading back to the office for hard-core typing. He even patted my back and gave me an awkward no-contact-between-genitals hug when we entered the office. Someday, when Anousha finally moves to Singapore, Suresh is going to make her very happy.

  8:30 p.m. Went home early today (yes, this is early for a mid-career lawyer hoping to make partner in Singapore). Made assam laksa Maggi Mee with an egg and ate it while binge-watching episodes of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which is the brainchild of Tina Fey, who is my hero.

  11:00 p.m. Is it reflective of my own truly sad state of affairs that the thought of being imprisoned in an underground bunker with an improbably good-looking Jon Hamm alongside three other harpies is not immediately rejected by my brain as anything other than unbearable?

  1:20 a.m. Oh crap! My watch! Texted Linda again to see if she had my watch.

  1:35 a.m. Text from Linda:

  I don’t have your watch. When was the last time you wore it? The last place you saw it?

  The burning feeling is definitely back—but in my stomach. I remember exactly when I last wore it: on my date with Orson. And the very last place I saw it? On my nightstand, falling asleep as Orson and I cuddled.

  18

  Thursday 24 March

  12:50 p.m. Had early lunch with Linda, who brought me to Black Swan to make up for standing me up yesterday.

  We both ordered salads since we were in a rush, but when the food came, she picked at it listlessly while I finished mine in under ten minutes and ordered a flat white. She seemed distracted, and when I asked her what was up, she hesitated before cooking up a big Crock-Pot of BS and serving it to me. “It’s work.” She sighed dramatically. “There’s so much work and I haven’t seen my home in, like, days.”

  I gave her a careful once-over. It was true that she looked less polished and stunning than usual, her pale blue silk shirt sporting faint creases and smudges of her foundation; her hair was twisted in a messy bun and she had dark under-eye circles that showed even beneath the careful application of concealer. Linda had never let a late night out or no sleep get in the way of looking hot for work. Which meant she had not spent the night at her place. Interesting.

  “Really,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.

  “Massimo has been keeping me so busy,” she continued. “Massimo’s my new client. A real super guy but totally obsessed with work. A lot of calls. Yeah.” She was shredding her paper napkin in a to
tally not-nonchalant fashion while avoiding eye contact with me.

  Alarm bells were clanging away in my head. Massimo? Who the fuck was Massimo? Linda never called her clients by anything other than their last names, or if she really hated them, their nicknames. Something was definitely up. But it was no use asking Linda—she was never going to give me any details until she was ready to do so.

  “How’s the Tinder search for love going?” she asked suddenly.

  I flushed guiltily. I had been so focused on Orson that I had barely replied to the Tinder messages from my remaining three matches (I unmatched with Alex, obviously), even though serial killer opener guy, Sean, was still intermittently texting me. The entire thing had more or less fizzled out and Linda’s efforts were all for naught.

  “I haven’t really made myself available,” I admitted. “After I saw Jonathan Beh on Tinder it really killed my whole desire to try online dating.” I spilled about Alex and how he had hooked up with one of my colleagues, but it turns out Val had already given her all the salacious details over WhatsApp that very weekend. Thanks, Val.

  Linda sighed. “There goes weeks of texting and my trusty algorithm. Well, can’t say I didn’t try to make Tinder magic happen.” She took a bite of food. “Anyway, I heard from a birdie that you had a dinner date with Orson? Care to share?”

  Urgh. Val. I held my hands up in mock surrender: I, too, had been hiding things from my best friend. “Yup, we did, but, uh, we’re, uh, on a break now.”

  Linda lifted an eyebrow but wisely refrained from saying anything cutting. For now. “By the way, isn’t your mom coming in, like, three weeks or something? I remember you moaning about it last month.”

  She was right: I had totally forgotten that my mother was scheduled to make a pit stop in Singapore soon. Shit.

  6:50 p.m. Went home early so I could overturn the house to search for my watch.

  8:20 p.m. This is bad. The watch is the last thing my parents, well, my father, gave to me, before he passed. On top of everything that had happened that week, this is the worst.

  9:10 p.m. Googled anything and everything I could find about Orson aside from that basic LinkedIn page. Nothing. I’ve always been an awesome Google stalker, but for Orson I had curtailed my baser instincts and hadn’t gone full bloodhound. Now here I was, and yet I couldn’t find anything. Zilch. Nada. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Foursquare, OpenRice, TripAdvisor reviews, nothing. Orson was, for all intents and purposes, a millennial ghost. It was also pretty certain that Orson wasn’t even his real name, as I only found two or three pictures of him, the ones used on his “official” LinkedIn page.

  I’d been played by a fucking hipster Sponk swindler.

  Saturday 26 March

  10:30 a.m. Finally received the results of my super expensive STD test in the post: am in the clear.

  10:35 a.m. Still got conned, though. Worse still: Orson had manipulated me using evergreen techniques known to mankind since the first caveman lied to the first cavewoman and said he’d kill a herd of woolly mammoths for her if she would be his. It’s as though I fell for the Nigerian prince scam in this day and age; it’s that bad.

  5:10 p.m. Asked Linda out for dinner but had no response. No one else in the group chat was available.

  5:35 p.m. I have no friends.

  1:15 a.m. Just back from an unusual group hang, with Suresh (!) and his friends.

  We were just texting about work (yes, Saturdays belong to our dark overlords, too) when he told me he was going out with some friends and asked me to join them. I was still down about the general situation and I didn’t know he had friends outside of work. I always thought he finished work, went home, cried himself to sleep, etc., in a spin cycle of sad adulting (I may have been projecting a little, of course).

  Turns out Suresh had a whole life outside of work that involved other humans. His friends, Tu’An, Chandran, and Faisal, were buddies from law school in London, and they were all big fans of board games, in particular Settlers of Catan. So that’s what Catan actually involves: instead of some swingers’ club where they dress up as MMA fighters, they just sit there, eating sunflower seeds and talking about grain. And not the futures kind or the food kind—the kind printed on a deck of cards.

  At first I thought it was super sad that a bunch of lawyers in their thirties (except for Chandran, who was now a “professional gamer”) would be spending valuable time off work playing board games, but once I found out that Chandran, who is apparently highly ranked and had even placed in the top ten of some regional Catan championship, had made close to eight thousand American dollars winning at Catan competitions and had his own following, I changed my mind. Any hobby that (a) is moneymaking and (b) involves leader boards and national rankings was a legit pursuit in my book.

  Also Catan is quite fun, as a spectator sport. As in, I watched Suresh play and screamed obscenities at his opponents from time to time.

  We spent close to five hours playing Settlers of Catan and drinking happy hour beer in a gamers’ café. I didn’t even look at my work phone once (especially after Suresh stashed it away).

  We called it a night around 1:00 a.m., after which Suresh got in a cab with me—he didn’t have much choice since I had by then lost most of my motor skills. He half-carried me to my apartment and laid me down on my bed, brought me a glass of water and made me drink it, placed the covers over me, and was about to leave like a proper gentleman, when I spoke up. “Thank you for your help,” I said.

  He came back to the bed and perched on it. “You’re welcome. Would you like to tell me what happened to you? You look miserable.”

  I couldn’t admit to him that I’d been swindled. It was just too humiliating, and we were still just colleagues. Instead, I told him a partial lie. “We broke up by mutual agreement,” I croaked. “I’m just being the appropriate amount of annoyed, that’s all.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he still didn’t push it. I decided to change the subject. “By the way, about your superhero strip … if you don’t mind, I have some suggestions.”

  “Oh, you follow TLTS?” He seemed very pleased by this revelation.

  “Yes. You should consider giving Water a nemesis, or some kind of bigger purpose, not just stick to mini stories. That would give the strip the narrative tension it lacks and make it more compelling.”

  “Wow,” he said, stunned. For a moment I was worried I had pissed him off, but then he smiled and snapped his fingers. “How could I not have seen this? You’re right, he needs a larger purpose. I should give this more thought.” He looked at me. “You might have just unlocked the growth phase for TLTS! The strip was stagnating, Andrea, and you’ve given me much-needed inspiration.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Thank you for tonight.” On impulse, I reached out and hugged him.

  “I really enjoyed hanging out with you,” he said in a low voice.

  “Me, too,” I said in the same voice.

  We were still holding onto each other after the “friend-zone” three-second-hug rule, unwilling or unable to let go. I was aware that his hair smelled like coconut, and I nuzzled into it. Very subtly, the chemistry in the air had changed, and his arms had definitely acquired what can only be categorized as “narrative tension.”

  Oh God, what was happening? Did I … were we? And did I?

  He lowered me gently onto the bed. I looked up, licked my lips subtly, and discreetly sucked in my belly so my boobs looked—

  “Good night,” he said, pushing himself off me as though I was an anti-vaxxer and he was a pharmaceutical rep. Then, quick as a punch, he was gone. I heard a door slam on his way out.

  Now am not sure what to think. On the one hand, I like that he is a gentleman. On the other hand, am I not attractive enough that he would at least try to cop a feel? I mean, a borderline dodgy butt cup that could also be a reassuring, stabilizing move as he hoisted me onto the bed? Nothing?

  Cupped my own butt. On the scale of tof
u to steel, it rates “ten-year-old soft toy washed too many times in cheap detergent.”

  I wonder what kind of butt Anousha has.

  1:45 a.m. Puked. Felt sorry for myself. Can’t help thinking that aside from Ivan, my choices in men—i.e., Orson, Alex—have been disappointing. Maybe my taste in men reflects an underlying deficiency in my decision-making skills, off Ma’s grid.

  A terrifying, disturbing thought.

  19

  Thursday 31 March

  7:10 a.m. I have learned my lesson, dear Diary. I must never take foolish chances and go off-piste dating again, lest I end up with another Orson. If I had stuck to the plan, I’d be with someone like Ivan instead of in this sad state.

  7:13 a.m. Why had I broken it off with Ivan again?

  7:14 a.m. Oh yeah. I remember now.

  7:16 a.m. What kind of goddamn name is Orson anyway? I must have been high the night I met him.

  Anyway, must concentrate on responsible adulting, i.e., dating suitable men and getting ahead in my career.

  8:20 a.m. Texted my mom and told her grudgingly I would accept her help in arranging one blind date with rando’s son. Baby steps, baby steps.

  8:25 a.m. She texted me one word: DONE.

  9:35 a.m. Valerie texted me to ask me, and I quote verbatim, “for a private audience tomorrow at Crystal Jade @Paragon to discuss an important issue concerning La Linda.”

  This will be our first lunch together, Together Alone. The thought stresses me out: what if we have nothing to say to each other and I have to stare at that face for an entire lunch? Or worse: what if I couldn’t enjoy my food because of it?