by Ho, Lauren
Eric and I left the hospital together in a limo. Once in, he pushed a button and the privacy screen came up with a soft woosh that used to make my pulse race because … well. You know.
Sure enough, he scooted over and drew me close. “I think a celebratory … dinner is in order, don’t you?” he whispered in my ear.
“Uh, maybe another time,” I said. “Everything with my mother has me pretty stressed out. Not to mention the partnership interviews.”
“I can help with—”
“No,” I said a little too quickly.
He drew back. There was hurt in his eyes, and something else. “I see.”
I turned away from him and pulled out my work phone, pretending to scroll through emails. I felt numb. I had accepted his proposal—so why didn’t I feel overjoyed?
I’d just secured my future, and my family’s, no matter what happened at the partnership interview next week. So why didn’t I feel like I’d done the right thing?
Worse still, I could feel the edges of a panic attack coming. I groped in my Mansur Gavriel tote for my inhaler, which I hadn’t needed for months.
“Hey.” He held me as I took several puffs. “What’s the matter?”
I waved his concern away and wriggled out of his arms. I turned away from him and shut my eyes, trying to gain control over my breathing. Why was I having this reaction?
After my breathing had stabilized, he asked softly, “Is this about the private hospital thing?”
I could feel his eyes on me. “Maybe,” I lied. In truth, I didn’t know.
Suddenly he gripped me and swung me around to face him. “Andrea,” he choked out. “Don’t you know how much I care for you?”
I gaped at him, stunned by his passionate outburst. I realized I had never seen him lose control before. It was a little unnerving.
“I’m sorry you thought I was trying to control you. I had nothing but good intentions. You mean so much to me. Please believe me.”
His sincerity was undeniable. I felt my anger and confusion ebb a little. How could I be mad at him for wanting the best for me? I tried to explain myself. “I get that, but it still doesn’t change the fact you made me feel l-like I had no say in the matter because I don’t have as much money as you.”
His face twisted at the anger in my voice. “Andrea, I swear, I didn’t mean to throw money at you in a disrespectful way … Not when—Not when I see you as my better half. I love you.” He kissed my hands. “Please believe me. I would never, ever disrespect you like that.”
I inhaled and exhaled shakily. “Look, I’m sorry I thought badly of your kind gesture. To me money is a form of control. My mother always kowtows to my aunt because she paid for my father’s hospital bills, Linda has a bad habit of literally throwing money at me to win arguments—I just don’t want to feel like I owe you. Even if we are”—I swallowed—“engaged.”
There was a long silence in which I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. He cracked a rueful smile.
“Andrea, you are my future,” he told me. “I just want the best for you. I’m sorry if that came off the wrong way.”
“It’s OK,” I said, but when he reminded me I’d told him I’d come back with him to the Mandarin Oriental, I once again pleaded interview nerves. He was disappointed, but hey, we were going to be married, so we were going to be spending a lot of time together. What was the rush?
Monday 10 October
Linda flew home on the first flight this morning for work (and for Jason, of course).
I was alone in the living room, sitting on the couch, just staring at the wall. Kamarul and Melissa had gone to get brunch together, and, I suspect, to spend some time decompressing from our camping out at their place, the heart attack, and to mentally prepare for Melissa’s first visit with our mother at noon.
I kept the news about my saying yes to Eric’s proposal to myself; given the events of this weekend, it felt borderline inappropriate to spring this on them. Not now, anyway.
Not that that was stopping Eric, sweetness personified, from sending me pictures of ballrooms decorated in jaw-dropping lavishness and asking me what I thought of each. He was indeed thinking of inviting up to one thousand people to the wedding. He told me that I should start shopping for a wedding gown, or more, if I wished, having passed me one of his fancy-schmancy credit cards that had no limits.
“I know you’re not profligate,” he said, tenderly, to me, a person who’d always thought I was a spendthrift—but I guess we were measuring with different yardsticks now. “But darling—I want you to go all out.”
This proclamation should, under normal circumstances, send me into a mindless buying frenzy, but lately I found myself deriving less and less satisfaction from shopping. So the credit card remained tucked in my work bag, a taupe Celine medium luggage tote that I had been coveting for some time and which Eric had had delivered to Melissa and Kamarul’s yesterday night from the Mandarin Oriental as an impromptu “engagement gift.”
A limitless credit card and I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I wish I could tell you what’s going on, dear Diary.
Suresh suddenly came out of his room and joined me on the couch with his bags. He was due back at the office and was taking a flight in less than three hours. We just sat there, side by side, not speaking, and for some reason my throat began to close up and I started to tremble. I was dangerously close to crying, or screaming. Or both.
“I’m going to leave Anousha,” Suresh said quietly.
“What?” I said, shocked out of my own ennui. “How? Why?”
“I need to. I’ve changed. My feelings toward her have changed. I think I want … something else.” He held my hand. Our eyes met, mine damp, his searching. “Andrea, I …”
“Don’t,” I said, withdrawing from him. “I can’t … I can’t.”
“I think you can, if you allowed yourself to,” he said sadly.
I shook my head, got up, and went to my room. Shut the door between us.
“Andrea,” Suresh said, knocking insistently.
“No,” I said. “This can’t happen.” I could hear him breathing as he stood outside the door, but I willed myself to remain motionless. After a while he slipped something under the door. A sealed brown envelope with my name written on it. I took it gingerly but did not open the door.
“Read it when you’re ready,” he said.
I waited till I heard him shut the front door behind him before I chucked the envelope into my work bag, unopened. I didn’t trust myself around him. We were like the characters in that TLTS strip of his: a bad idea. Too alike, too unknown.
Tuesday 11 October
11:15 a.m. Home, reluctantly, at the insistence of my mother, who reminded me I had a wedding to plan and a promotion to secure. Melissa promised to keep me up to date on her recovery. Took today off. Suresh would be back in Jakarta and, I presume, is flying in again Thursday morning for the partnership interviews. I hadn’t said goodbye before he left for the airport, but it can’t be any other way. I must be strong.
10:20 p.m. Spent a couple of hours in the evening trying on wedding dresses in a bridal gown shop with Val, who was in for one of her fittings for her wedding gown (if ever there was a gown, it was hers)—I needed the distraction from the interviews, and what better way to kill two birds with one stone?
I’d heard of this store because of its reputation for stocking the most luxurious gowns, many of which cost the equivalent of a down payment for government housing in Singapore. Having never really fantasized about the details of my wedding day, I found the array of gowns daunting, but with Val’s impeccable eye, soon found something pared-down and lovely, a pearl-white sheath gown with an off-the-shoulder neckline and softly draped skirt.
“Ohh,” everyone said as soon as I stepped out onto the mini pedestal that all such stores have and faced myself in the mirror. I looked, well, stunning. What’s more, I had a Pippa butt in that dress! It would have looked great at a garden or beach wedding …
for someone else. I fingered the heavy fabric wistfully and told them I’d have to come back for my own appointment, and keep looking—for the kind of wedding Eric and I would be holding, I was going to have to go for the mother of all gowns.
Thursday 13 October
7:15 a.m. This is it.
8:20 a.m. Just saw a note on my desk from Kai:
Good luck with the final round of partnership interviews.
The note triggered fresh rounds of panic sweats, even though I sprayed layers of antiperspirant over whole body. Luckily I have two backup outfits.
8:55 a.m. Hmm, strange. Suresh isn’t in his office (I walked by it to go to the loo—I mean, toilet—because the toilets on our floor were too busy). Kai can’t get anything out of his stupidly loyal PA, Hong Lim. Goddamn principles.
10:30 a.m. Still not in.
11:45 a.m. Totally random that he’s not at his desk. He’s probably going through the interviews now. I wonder if he did break things off with Anousha. Not that it matters. Or maybe he’ll wait till the interviews are over. If I’m being cynical and uncharitable, it would help his chances until he’s secured partnership, then Inderjit can’t touch him. Well, that’s his business, on both fronts. Not mine.
11:50 a.m. Must not think of puking. Must not think of puking.
12:05 p.m. Thank goodness for second set of clothing.
2:30 p.m. Kai buzzed me and I went to Inspiration, the conference room where the senior partners making up the Partnership Committee (sans Mong, who was still in hospital) were gathered. Saw Genevieve exiting the room; she saw me and smiled her Wicked Witch of the East smile. Had no idea she was up for partnership. How is that even possible? She’s been popping babies out like a Chiclets dispenser.
2:32 p.m. Must not be uncharitable toward another woman. Must not make it even more difficult for working women who choose to have one baby after another. Even if she is the Spawn of Medusa.
2:35 p.m. Urgh, am a terrible person—she is after all a member of the sisterhood. But still. Let’s be honest: isn’t something supposed to give? How is it Genevieve is the possessor of all I want in life? Isn’t the myth of us career women being able to Have It All in life already dispelled? How is it she chose to get married and have babies while having a career, and I’m the single one, and I don’t even get a clear shot at the one thing that’s within my grasp?
Anyway. My turn now.
4:47 p.m. Done. Exhausted. Need vodka and sleep. Will find out if my whole life has been wasted or not in a few days.
It was a very disturbing interview. Evan Bilson, the managing partner with whom I have spoken twice in my life since he moved to Singapore to head the office ten months ago, was being oddly and openly hostile, asking me why I was only billing 2,210 hours this year instead of close to 2,460 hours as I did last year, a record for senior associates in the firm. He suggested that I was “coasting.” When I mentioned we still had over two months to go till the year ended, he gave me this imperious stare and said, “Well, then how come some of your peers are billing more than you are, while spending time away from their desks?”
“Do you mean Suresh, future son-in-law of Inderjit Singh?” I wanted to shout, but didn’t.
“Honestly,” I said, with great feeling, “I don’t know how anyone can put in more time than I do at the firm.”
“But you nearly cost us Sungguh,” he reminded me.
“I brought in Eric Deng. It’s a small account of his, but still. And Chapel Town is in play again, which means VizWare—”
“That’s not good enough, Andrea, to make up for Sungguh.”
After which I think the rest of the interview went down the toilet, so to speak.
1:15 a.m. I;wm beingq silly am vcleaarly best choicec for partnerfrr1@! Meritocrazcy shal triumpgh over neppooptism!!
Friday 14 October
7:20 a.m. Oh God. My eyes.
9:25 p.m. Am supposed to be working on a file but can’t because I’m in physical agony, and not just because of my lingering hangover but also because I made the bad decision of buying half-price salad from the Viet deli for early dinner. (Why am I so cavalier about death by diarrhea? Why am I not so brave when it comes to matters of the heart?)
I’ve just received a text from Kai about the interviews. Apparently, Kai, who’s friends with the chattier PAs working with some of the senior partners on the committee, had gotten wind that I had not been selected as one of the two final choices for the spot. Her sources were usually impeccable.
At first I was livid. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t even one of the final two? After everything I’d sacrificed for the firm?
What was the point of all those years of eating subpar food from the Viet deli, of chugging coffee and Red Bull (not at the same time, but sometimes yes?), of voluntarily not taking the annual leave dates I was entitled to, just to look like I was busy, even when I wasn’t? What was the point of All. That. Fucking. Face Time? What did I have to show for it, except a whole closetful of barely used bags and actual eye bags?
And what’s worse, my Work Dad didn’t even believe in me.
I opened my secret stash of chocolate (hidden inside one of my gym bags) and took out the emergency tequila from my minifridge. Like an automaton, I started downing both.
Maybe it was the alcohol or the rage, but midway I got up, a hip flask full of whiskey in one hand, and made my way in a drunken weave to Mong’s office, having a vague idea of letting him know what a jerk he’d been, to stab me in the back like that. Maybe I’d burn his precious law library. That’ll show him!
Rage was making me talk out loud, but because it was a law firm and people mutter out loud all the time, like right nutters, not one single person I passed on my way to Mong’s office gave me a second look, including a few of the more hard-core mouth breathers—I mean, juniors pretending to work.
I found myself standing outside his office, wild-eyed.
No one was in. It hit me that I had never seen it in its current state: pitch-dark, empty, its overlord away for the evening: Mong didn’t exactly believe in personal time off, much less holidays. He was always working.
The door was ajar, so I slipped in to look around, curious, having never been in his office for more than a few minutes at a time and only to receive his instructions on a file. I turned on the antique brass reading lamp on his desk and lowered myself into the chair gingerly, almost as though I was afraid he would pop out from the shadows and say, in his laconic way, “Boo.”
Mong’s office was a study in minimalism. Behind him were the shelves of expensive books from the foremost legal experts, local and international, in different areas of law, that I’d fleetingly contemplated incinerating. The two framed pieces of art were Japanese wood-cut prints, of single men at study. His desk was conspicuously bare except for a few of his favorite awards, those chintzy crystal trophies that told the world how much he was worth, and a yellow legal pad with actual important words on them, not doodles. No pictures of his family, nothing remotely personal, although this was the one place he spent the most time and was probably the one place he felt truly at home. It wasn’t because he was a private person, exactly. It was just a true reflection of who he was: married to his work, everything else second. This wasn’t just his job—it was his identity.
I had a morbid image of Mong’s funeral, and how everyone there was from the firm and, worse, dry-eyed. For some reason I’d been tasked to give a eulogy about Mong’s life, and all I could do was read out a list of case law in which he’d triumphed over his opponents, and made his clients very happy and rich.
And what about me? How was I any different?
I didn’t love the law, not this way. Yet I was spending almost as much time as he was at work. Perhaps, a voice inside me piped up hesitantly, I should take this as a sign that I had the wrong priorities?
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head angrily. I deserved to be in that seat. It was the only thing I knew, and I was good at it. One of the best. And didn’t
Eric tell me that life was about compromises, that in the beginning he hadn’t wanted to take over his family business, and now here he was molded to it and it to him, and he’d learned to accept his path, to make peace with his birthright, and now he was glad he did?
I called him and told him about what the firm had apparently decided.
“Honey,” he said, “as soon as I’m back from Vietnam this weekend, I’m going to make things right.”
“Whah you mean,” I said, helping myself to the contents (emergency whiskey) of my hip flask.
“I’m going to take my business away. And I’m going to tell all my business partners to stop using your law firm, going forward. They aren’t the only players in town.” Steel entered his voice. “And then, we’re going to launch an anti-discrimination lawsuit against them.”
“Yeaaaaargh!” I said, excited and possibly drunk. “Sue them! Sue them!” (Even though there was a remote chance that there was another female candidate on that list, although I couldn’t think of anyone else, male or female, who deserved this promotion more than me, if we were looking at merits.)
“And you can set up your own law firm with the business we’ll channel to you. I’ll make you managing partner of your own firm. How does that sound, my love?”
“Yas that shounds amazing,” I slurred. “Are you sure about this?”
“Andrea, you are my future,” he told me. “I want you to have everything, anything you’ve ever wanted. The world will be yours.”
“You’re the besht!”
“I love you,” he said.
“I do you, too,” I told him exuberantly. “I need a nap now.”
So I took one.
12:30 a.m. Woke up, head throbbing, then the events of just now came rushing back. A sour mix of injustice, anger, bitterness, and the desire for revenge fizzed in my belly. I felt betrayed by the firm, which had dangled a promotion in front of me for two years.
But now, Eric was providing me with redemption, no matter what.