Last Tang Standing

by Ho, Lauren

“Hey,” Suresh said, grabbing me by the shoulders, “what’s wrong?”

  “I’m f-fine,” I said through hacking sobs.

  “You’re literally projecting snot.”

  “So now it’s y-your turn to mock me, too?” I said angrily.

  “Shhhhhh,” he said, pulling me even closer and resting his chin on the top of my head. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m on your side. And are you going to let a bunch of MCPs get to you, Andrea? Miss ‘Top 40 Under 40’?”

  “It’s n-not fair,” I blubbered. “I-I’ve been working with these ingrates for over four years, and I’ve never made a mistake. So basically I lost Ivan because of these assholes?”

  Suresh held me and made soft shushing noises that eventually soothed my sobs down to a stream of hiccups. When I was sufficiently calm and removed myself from the warmth of his embrace, I was horrified that I had lost it like that and had soaked the right shoulder of his very expensive suit. Not that he seemed to notice. He was looking at me in a way I could only describe as “horny.”

  Or maybe he was just looking at me with concern. Maybe I was just projecting.

  “Was Ivan, ah, your ex? The fiancé you mentioned?”

  “He was my fiancé, yes,” I said, sniffling.

  “You never did tell me why you broke up. Was it really because of work?”

  “Lawyers should know better than to ask leading questions.” I couldn’t bear to tell him the whole story. “Anyway, thank you. You were a real friend in there.”

  He smiled and shrugged. “Anytime. You would have done the same for me, right?” he said rhetorically.

  I shook my head and he cuffed my shoulder. He thought I was joking. “We should stick up for each other, you know. As friends.”

  “Are we friends?” I said, also rhetorically.

  “I would hope so. You and me against the world, two foreign talents in a pod,” he said softly, his face getting closer.

  “You’re my biggest competition. I shouldn’t let my guard down with you, it’s dangerous,” I whispered, leaning in—

  “Vous avez arrivé!” the taxi driver announced suddenly, shattering the mood. I looked up in confusion. The entire ride had taken less than eight minutes, literally. Yet there we were, a stone’s throw away from the hotel. The taxi turned to a side road and stopped. Rain began pelting the car. The driver said something rapid in French to Suresh. He pointed at roadwork that was preventing him from dropping us at the hotel. “You have to walk there, sorry,” he said.

  We looked at each other, shrugged, paid the fare, and ran the last fifty meters to our hotel under a downpour. Within seconds we were drenched. We slopped into the hotel lobby, giggling. I shook off the droplets clinging to my hair to the disapproving gaze of the bellboy, then we headed to our rooms. Our very conveniently located rooms. Side-by-side. No security cameras on the wall, as far as the eye could see.

  There was an awkward moment when we just stood there in front of our doors, not knowing what to say.

  “Erm. So, like, thanks for sticking up for me in the meeting,” I babbled to dispel the tension in the air.

  “Anytime. Dinner in an hour? Six thirty?”

  “I’m way too jet lagged,” I lied. “Plus work. Gotta catch up on emails.”

  “Sure, I’ll just order room service then,” he said, suggestively. Or not. He leaned toward me and I jumped back before I realized that he had only been trying to air-kiss me, I think. But why would he do that, when he had never air-kissed me before? I mumbled a hasty goodbye, opened the door, and practically lunged in before slamming the door behind me.

  6:25 p.m. Mmm. Tub good. Shower head even better. Might take another bath.

  7:28 p.m. OK, really need to stop. Water is a precious commodity.

  7:45 p.m. OK, am really stopping now. Need to eat anyway.

  8:45 p.m. Seems like disaster is averted—the client is appeased, they will wait for the accounts to be filed, some carve-out language will need to be inserted, everyone is on board again. Hurrah!

  Wednesday 4 May

  Spent all day at the showcase, then awkward evening at the gala. Naturally, I was seated next to Suresh and Langford-Bauer. I wore my artfully crinkly (so I tell myself) pleated Issey Miyake sleeveless black dress. Suresh wore a tuxedo. He should never be allowed to wear a tuxedo—he looks too good. Spent most of the night trying to avoid talking to him because my gaze kept straying to his lips and it is very annoying because people like that don’t need to be reminded how physically attractive they are.

  Midway through the gala we ducked out and hightailed it back to the hotel, checked out, and made our way to the national airport in the nick of time to fly to Munich, after which we’d be seated next to each other for thirteen hours.

  We soon found out that our return flight was in premium economy, which is a bit of a rotten deal. Clients are like that: they want you fresh and ready to fight their battles, so they fly you in business class and put you up in a fancy five-star; but once they’ve gotten what they wanted it’s back to polyester class. If only I could slip some worm eggs in their breakfast …

  “Are you OK? You look a little constipated,” Suresh said. “Shall I buy us some in-flight data that we will not use, because I’m confiscating your phone right now, and charge it to the client?”

  “Buzz off,” I said companionably.

  “Sure,” Suresh said. He settled back down in his tiny seat and continued reading, a small smile on his lips. His soft, voluptuous, sensuous …

  I raked my nails across my arm just as Suresh turned and caught me at it. “Hives,” I said, pretending to scratch my arm. “Flares up when I’m tired.”

  He patted his right shoulder. “Why don’t you nap on me? You can even do that cavewoman drool thing you do when you nap in the office.”

  I was tired. I leaned on his shoulder and closed my eyes like an obedient child. Immediately I regretted it. It was futile to attempt to sleep when his shoulder smelled like cinnamon. And how through the soft, ticklish fibers of his linen suit I could feel the heat of his skin.

  My heart gave a strange calypso spasm and all thoughts of sleep were replaced by an untoward desire to nuzzle his neck and the terrifyingly basic urge to nibble his earlobe.

  Almost as though he had sensed my thoughts he subtly shifted in his seat so that he could angle his face to my conveniently upturned one. My breath caught in my throat and that agonizing tension began to build in my stomach. Our eyes locked; I imagined the earth trembling as every ancestor I’d ever had started turning in their graves. “Andrea,” he whispered, his lips brushing mine. “I—”

  I jerked back from his shoulder and said inanely, “I’ve got to go to the toilet!” The high altitude was obviously messing with my brain. I splashed some water on my face to jolt myself back to reality. Then I returned to my seat and sat back down, pointedly facing away from Suresh and pretending to sleep. I couldn’t wait for us to land so that I could get away from him.

  Thursday 5 May

  7:45 p.m. When we landed, I leaped out of my seat, grabbed my bags from the overhead compartment, and ran for immigration control before I ended up doing something I really regretted. I cleared immigration and customs in record time and hailed a cab for home, way before Suresh.

  Then I was in my apartment. God, I needed a cold shower, and the shower head. I turned on the light and screamed.

  “Hey,” said the figure on the couch.

  She stood up, her eyes swollen from crying. It was Linda, dressed in a ripped T-shirt and denim shorts, her makeup smeared all over her face. And my once-pristine cream leather couch.

  “L-Linda!” I gasped, staring at her. “What happened?” I was so surprised that it took me a few heartbeats to remember that she had the spare keys to my apartment.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she choked out. “Can we just go to bed?”

  “Sure,” I said. I held her as she sobbed into my shoulders while I surreptitiously checked her for bruises, all the while v
owing grimly that if Massimo Poon were to somehow appear in front of me right now, I would take him out with a blunt knife. She didn’t have to say it, but I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was the cause of my best friend’s misery.

  27

  But it turned out that it wasn’t really Massimo’s fault—well, not directly.

  “It was his wife,” Linda sniffled, through a fistful of pink toilet paper (she had exhausted my entire supply of facial tissues, pocket tissues, wet wipes, and kitchen towels).

  “Explain,” I said.

  Apparently Linda and Massimo had just come back from Capricorn Isles or some other such exotic locale two nights ago, and after he had dropped her off at her place, she had let herself into her apartment without a second thought and almost run straight into the Poonster’s current missus, Berenice Chan. And her Gregor Clegane-ish bodyguard. With preternatural calm, Berenice said she had broken into Linda’s apartment with the help of the bodyguard to “talk.”

  “Haven’t you heard of calling someone on their mobile?” Linda asked sarcastically.

  “I’ve always been a big believer in connecting face-to-face,” said Berenice.

  Linda, furious, told them to leave or she was going to call the security.

  “Call the security? On me? You have some nerve,” Berenice shouted. “I’m the one who should be calling the police on you. I’m an actress! I’m a star! That’s my fucking husband you’re screwing!”

  “So what?” Linda shouted back; she was very fond of raising her voice, Linda was. “He seduced me in the first place. I wasn’t even interested in him when I first met him, you know. I thought he was just like any other rich fuck. I thought he was fat.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes. “And now, even though I still find him fat, I look past that because we get each other, and he swears he’s going to leave you anyway!”

  By now Berenice was practically hyperventilating in anger. “Wow! That’s original. And you believed that asshole? Did you ever think about me, about my two children?” Berenice grabbed a vase and flung it at Linda, who ducked just in time as the vase shattered behind her against the wall. “You slut! You shitty slut!”

  “Stop calling me that, you alliterative bitch!” Linda shouted, taking off her heel and throwing it at Berenice, hitting her squarely in the chest. (Linda swore to me that the scene had unfolded exactly as recounted above, but this being Linda, a little narrative embellishment is to be expected.)

  That’s when Berenice ran to Linda’s kitchen counter and grabbed one of her ceramic knives. Brandishing it, she threatened to kill herself right then and there if the latter didn’t leave her husband alone.

  Linda dared Berenice to go through with her threat; she didn’t believe that Berenice would actually do it—after all, the bodyguard, who was probably with Berenice most of the time and who probably knew her better than her own husband did, simply blinked at her threat. Then Berenice drew the knife across her left wrist before she was tackled by the bodyguard and Linda bound her bleeding wrist with a scarf. They got to the hospital in good time, dropping Berenice at the emergency room, but the bodyguard advised her not to wait with them for the sake of Massimo’s reputation. And now Linda only had the absence of breaking news on Singapore TV to have any assurance that Berenice was alive. She’d been camping at my place since that night.

  The story being told, Linda slumped back on the sofa, depleted.

  “And what about Massimo? What does he think about it?”

  “I don’t know,” she bleated. “I haven’t heard from him since Capri.” She dissolved into tears again.

  I was furious. Not once—not once! After all that Linda had been through? That man was a coward and a cunt. How about that for alliteration.

  “I keep seeing her slitting her wrist,” Linda said raggedly.

  “There’s no way you could have known that it wasn’t an empty threat,” I comforted her.

  “If she dies, it will all be my fault, I-I-I …” Linda began sobbing anew. I hugged her and held my tongue.

  Friday 6 May

  8:20 a.m. Somehow we managed to catch some shut-eye before dawn broke, and somehow I managed to drag myself out of bed when my alarm rang at 7:30 a.m. I quickly showered, dressed, drew my face on, and got ready to go.

  “I’m leaving for work,” I said, standing over Linda’s prone figure on my bed.

  She looked up at me, her usually elegant curls mussed, her cheeks blotchy and cross-hatched with pillow creases. “Must you?” she bleated.

  I hesitated then snapped myself out of it. I still had a job, and she was an adult. And before the incident, she had left me in radio silence for weeks. “I have a really important meeting I can’t cancel, but I’m going to try to take the afternoon off, so I’ll see you later, all right? I’ll call you. We’ll grab an early dinner out.”

  “OK,” she said humbly.

  I left the house in a cloud of anger and self-righteousness. Even though it wasn’t Massimo’s fault that Berenice had tried to end herself in Linda’s home, I was angry that he hadn’t tried to contact her to see how she was holding up. I was so preoccupied about the situation that I almost forgot about Suresh until I saw the back of him at his desk, his large Marshall headphones bopping on his head as he typed in fitful bursts. Even though Suresh was wearing a particularly unflattering, ill-fitting oxford shirt for casual Friday, I could still see the muscles in his shoulders and his back. They were very large, angry muscles. Perfect for carrying lovers to the bed, or corpses to the trunk of waiting cars.

  I cleared my throat and gave myself a mental shake. Get a hold of yourself, I told myself sternly. Suresh was just a friend. What had happened on the trip and in that car was just a one-off. After all, he hadn’t been with his fiancée in, what, five months? Lack of intimacy can do strange things to a person. I should know.

  “Do you always stare into middle distance like that when you’re microsleeping, or has your brain malfunctioned?” said a lizardly voice. I blinked and focused on the newly Botoxed face of Genevieve, who, I think, was smirking at me.

  “Can you practice your Medusa stare on someone else?” I muttered, my face burning. Not the best comeback, but I was suffering from lack of sleep.

  Suresh must have sensed the disturbance in the Force; he turned around and removed his headphones. “What’s up, Genevieve?” he asked, politely icy. Since the ang pao matrix incident, Suresh shared my distaste for her.

  “Mong and Yasmine want to hear about your Luxembourg trip,” Genevieve said. “Apparently there was some, ah, less-than-pleasant vibes between you and Langford-Bauer. And the closing might be … delayed?” The way she said “delayed” you’d think they’d just announced they were giving up border control in Singapore.

  “A misunderstanding, that’s all,” Suresh said smoothly. “But we’re handling it and the closing will be just fine.”

  “I’ll tell the partners,” Genevieve said silkily. She gave him a lingering sexy stare before slinking out in her long-sleeved, super tight white bandage maternity dress, which somehow looked obscenely good on her toned body. Urgh.

  “She looks like a mummy—get it? Mummy?” Suresh said, mimicking one with his arms outstretched and shuffling forward. I giggled before I came to my senses with a jerk. To laugh with the enemy! On a lousy pun!

  Suresh shut the door and faced me. “So, you did a nice runner the other night.”

  “I didn’t,” I squeaked.

  He stepped closer to me and all rational thought ceased. “We need to talk.”

  I stepped away from him, sat behind the security of my desk, turned toward my screen, and pretended to scroll through emails. “What’s there to talk about?” I said, avoiding his gaze.

  No dice. He came over to block the screen with a file and discovered it was blank. Our eyes met, mine guilty, his intense. “Look, about what happened, on the, urm”—was it my imagination or was he blushing?—“plane …”

  “What? Nothing happened.” I forced myself to
look him in the eye. “Nothing.”

  I might as well have thrown a bucket of ice water on the smoldering embers in his golden-brown eyes. “Oh, is that so?” he said. It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped several degrees Celsius. “I guess there’s nothing to talk about, then.”

  We retreated to our separate sides. My thoughts were in a tumult. I wanted to hurdle over the table and jump into his lap. At the back of my head, however, was the insistent reminder that Suresh was engaged. And from what I knew about Anousha, she seemed like the kind of woman who would practice her own version of sati and throw a rival onto a burning funeral pyre.

  11:55 a.m. Was reading news (fine, tabloids) when I came across a feature of Helen and Magnus’s engagement party in Tatler. The bitch had not invited me!

  28

  Saturday 14 May

  A knock on the door. Waited for Linda to open it since she has colonized the living room, even though there is a perfectly functional second bedroom with a proper double bed. Maybe she is now allergic to the sight of double beds.

  Waited for a full two minutes before I realized that Linda was not budging. Walked out and saw that Linda was sleeping, naked as a daisy, on the couch surrounded by an empty bottle of vodka, a bottle of Chinon red, half a bottle of Patrón, a small bottle of Evian, and several bottles of Tiger beer. Maybe she wasn’t even sleeping; maybe she was dead.

  I opened the door. It was Eric Deng, standing in the hallway in a pale lemon polo shirt and khakis.

  “Are you going to gawk at me or invite me in?” he said, after a few seconds of stunned silence had passed from my end.

  I collected my dignity (I was in a god-awful Ramones T-shirt and a pair of graying cotton shorts) and said, “My friend Linda’s naked in my living room. You can’t enter.”

  “Well, get dressed. I’m taking you out to champagne brunch.”

  I pretended to hesitate; he had me at “champagne.”