Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  Por Por could not take her eyes off her grand-daughter, the bright red silk dress she was wearing, nor the pearl earrings, the pearl necklace, the beaded handbag, the high-heeled shoes. She touched each item reverently with her hands, her eyes wide with wonder. Then she looked at Maria’s carefully made-up face and gently pressed two fingers on her bright pink lips.

  Rosiah laughed and said, ‘Miss Maria, Por Por wants to go to the party with you!’ Even Anna Seetoh smiled in amusement, without losing the usual frown of worry and despondency.

  Maria said, ‘Por Por, if you behave and eat up your dinner, I will take you to the party.’

  She had the idea to amuse the old one the next morning by letting her wear the pearl earrings and necklace and carry the beaded purse. Even small indulgences could add up to a happy life for the old one in her few remaining years.

  Prepared for an evening of mild diversion at the Polo Club Ball, she had no idea of the shock that awaited her. It should have been no shock that Dr Phang was there, for the ball was a grand public event and he was known to be a much desired presence at many glittering functions, having once casually remarked to her that he and Olivia had more invitations than they could accept.

  Meeta, suddenly noticing him, whispered to her, ‘Hey, look, there’s your beau over there.’

  Winnie turned to look and whispered, ‘He’s with his wife and other couples, but I’m sure he’ll come up and ask you for a dance, just to have the chance of holding you! Let us know!’

  She turned to say to Freddie who, Maria had concluded within five minutes of meeting him, was unbearably boring: ‘You mustn’t get jealous when a handsome man comes up and asks Maria for a dance!’ Then both Meeta and Winnie, lost in the pleasurable company of their respective partners, forgot about everyone else.

  A jealous woman, it was said, had multiple, all-seeing eyes, so that even if she sat still and never moved once, she could see every small action of her man in every part of the room. A woman’s jealousy was always born of a deep sense of personal outrage: the man who ought to be paying attention to her was ignoring her and attending to another woman. Jealousy turned its sharpest focus on the rival, noting her every small response, every small look and gesture, to assess the seriousness of the rivalry. A jealous woman was the most tormented woman, her body sprouting a hundred quivering antennae to catch the warning signals to respond to the humiliation of being completely ignored, even of being ridiculed by the laughing, flirting, cavorting pair.

  Suddenly aware of this most unmanageable of emotions swelling dangerously inside her, Maria struggled to maintain a calm outward presence, trying to listen politely to Freddie who was talking endlessly about his two teenaged children and their school activities. They were at present on holiday with their mother, and he would join them as soon as his work commitments allowed him.

  ‘I’m going to make a call to them,’ he said looking at his watch and rising from the table. ‘This is about the right time. They shouldn’t be in bed yet.’ Maria wished that his phone call would last the entire evening, so that she could concentrate on dealing with this new feeling that was threatening to overwhelm her. It filled her with rage and shame, with hatred directed outwards toward the whole world, and inwards toward herself. Never in her life had she been in such a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts and feelings, which was threatening to toss her around like a small helpless creature in a whirlwind, and then smash her to the ground.

  She had no right to be jealous of Olivia Phang. Indeed, how could she, how dared she? The head could only whisper its reproaches which were instantly drowned out in the roar of the heart’s anguish. It was the anguish of something even more primitive, because more sexual, felt in one’s very groins, linked to the deepest core of one’s very survival and sense of being. If all life forms were born competitive, surely Nature designed jealousy as the most effective tool against the competitor?

  She watched, without appearing to be watching as she desultorily took sips of wine and fanned herself, Dr Phang looking affectionately into his wife’s laughing face during the dancing, twirling her, pressing his cheek against hers, at one stage pressing her body to his with both arms so that, with eyes closed, they seemed to have drifted into some intimate dream-sleep together while swaying sensuously to the music.

  As she watched, she experienced sharp pangs of a feeling hitherto alien to her. She had seen it in her own husband as he lay on his deathbed and hurled wild accusations at her, and had dismissed it as pure hallucination. She had seen it in Meeta when Byron paid gallant attention to the pretty women in the Polo Club dining room, and had dismissed it as childish nonsense. Now jealousy, provoked by a man dancing with his own wife with the loving intimacy expected of happily married couples, was unaccountably gripping her like a vise and causing sharp pangs that would be relived again and again in painful solitude. No pain was greater than when a woman reproached herself for it.

  Mixed with the jealousy was a growing anger. While she was on the dance floor with Freddie, he had waved to her, and that was all the recognition of her presence for the entire evening. He did not even have the courtesy to come up to their table to greet her, much less ask her for a dance. ‘Hey, maybe he doesn’t like your new look,’ giggled Winnie. ‘Next time, change your look. Those pearl earrings make you look older.’ Meeta returned to the table with Byron, panting, fanning herself and laughing after their wild gyrations to rock music, and was immediately pulled up by him to return to the dance floor once more. She whispered into Maria’s ears as she rose from her seat, holding Byron’s hand, ‘Just watch your beau with that beauty. No wonder he’s not paying any attention to you!’

  The beauty was not Olivia but a woman friend from his table who had come with her own partner, a portly, moustached Caucasian. The jealousy she had felt towards Olivia was suddenly transferred to this woman and surged with every moment of watching her as she danced with the man who had whispered into her ear, in the parked car only a week ago, ‘I’m looking forward. You have no idea!’ Outwardly she was holding a conversation with the dull Freddie by simply timing her nods and smiles to the pauses in his interminable boasting about his accomplished children, but her gaze never left the boisterously happy dancing pair. She detected a special quality in his attentiveness to this woman that she had not seen in his behaviour towards his wife. The woman looked in her forties and was extremely attractive. Perhaps it was her imagination, now in full speculative mode, that saw a secret mutual delight lighting up their faces as they danced, laughed, clapped and hugged each other, as if flaunting a secret liaison in a public place, right under the noses of his unsuspecting wife and the Caucasian partner. Olivia was herself dancing with merry abandon with different dance partners, and for the time being, was too busy enjoying herself to be bothered with the usual vigilance.

  She was almost certain that Dr Phang and the woman he was taking repeatedly to the dance floor were having or were about to have an affair. Here was a man who, while planning to meet up with her secretly in Europe in a week’s time, was bestowing undue attention on other women, reducing her to one more casualty along his trail of selfish pleasure. In a single moment, the fires of enraged jealousy had reduced all the happiness of the past few months to dust and ashes in her mouth. They could have been instead the sweet spring waters of deep contentment increasing her eagerness for that secret meeting in Europe. If, in the midst of all that open intimacy with Olivia, all that flamboyance with the attractive woman, he had managed to slip to her table for a moment, to touch her hand furtively, to say a word or two from their shared stock of code words, such as ‘silken bed’ and ‘Sheherazade’, and then quickly gone back to his carousing with his wife and other women, she would have felt truly happy. Her sense of self would not only have been intact, but strengthened, their understanding of each other richly deepened. As it was, she rose from a scene of such devastation that she surprised herself by her calm, matter-of-fact voice as she gathered up her shawl and handbag and said to
Freddie, ‘I’m not feeling too well, and would like to go back.’ Freddie rose too with a look of concern, but she stopped him saying with a smile, ‘It’s alright, Freddie. Just a headache. Meeta and Winnie know I get it often. Don’t let me spoil your fun. I can easily get a cab back,’ and she was gone. Inside the taxi, she thought angrily, ‘He will not even notice my absence.’

  The pain of jealousy cried out for a salve which would be denied. Tossing about on her bed, she thought of what must at the same time be taking place in the fun-filled Polo Club with its music and merry-makers, its myriad gold and silver balloons decorating the ceiling, that, at the end of the ball, would be pulled down by the men to give to their ladies or playfully burst against their glittering dresses, bejewelled fingers, stiletto heels. Meeta and Winnie would already have been told by Freddie about her sudden departure; they might have looked meaningfully at each other, and then forgotten her completely in the resumption of happy dancing, drinking and laughing with their partners.

  Had he noticed her absence? The situation might have been saved even then. If he had excused himself from his table and gone to make a quick secret call – ‘Hi, Maria, why did you leave? I was going up to claim a dance from you!’ – the darkness stifling her heart would have lifted, and she would have turned off the lights and gone to sleep peacefully. As it was, she lay awake listening to the relentless ticking of the clock by her bed. She must have drifted into a deeply troubled sleep, for when she woke up suddenly and looked at the clock, it was already 3 am, two hours past the official closing time of the ball. He would have gone off home with Olivia; could he already have made plans with the attractive woman to meet for a quick tryst before his trip to Europe, and if he had, could he already be planning, with ease and flair, to make her his new, proud conquest?

  Sexual jealousy was more destructive than a simple green-eyed monster that could be searched out and destroyed; it was a flame that consumed from within.

  ‘Well?’ he called to ask, a few days before he left for Europe. ‘So are we all set for the great adventure?’

  She could hear his shock when she said, ‘I think not.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not going after all.’ There was a brief silence when the man must have wondered what was the next best thing to say without initiating the argument or confrontation he had always avoided. His quick thinking mind could have grasped the reason for her sudden change of mind, for in his time, he must have had much experience of women’s jealousies. If it did, his cheerful nonchalance would have dismissed it as just so much inconsequential behaviour expected of females. In any case, the few minutes allowed for the surreptitious call from his office when the spying clerk had left the room for something, permitted only the usual hurried exchange.

  ‘Well, as you wish. May I call you when I come back?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Twenty-Eight

  She had a thought to do something which, in her entire career of nearly twenty years as school teacher she had never done: call in sick for a sickness not legitimated by the strict procedures governing civil service behaviour. Medical leave was allowed for teachers who had flu, stomach disorders, pneumonia, morning sickness; the misery of sleeplessness and lack of appetite owing to the devastating effects of jealousy was not a certifiable ailment and had to be borne in silence. The thought of dragging herself out of bed and facing her students and colleagues when she would have preferred to lie under a warm coverlet, in a quiet, darkened room, alone with her thoughts, made her first reach out for the telephone to put a call to the school clerk, then to put it down again. No, the alternative would have been worse: explanations and more explanations to her mother and the maid for a school day spent at home and later, upon her return to school, to concerned, inquiring students and colleagues. The explanations would involve the tedium of pretence and falsehood that would weigh her down.

  Mrs Neo would have been the first to make an inquiry, for the simple reason that only the two of them held a perfect record of school attendance. Mrs Neo, who was not particularly friendly towards her, had once put an arm around her to announce to no one in particular, ‘Maria Seetoh and I have never once been absent from school; we each ought to be given a gold medal!’ Madam Khoo who was on medical leave at least once a month, and, rather suspiciously, on a day that coincided with the eve of a public holiday or a weekend, thereby enabling her to enjoy a nice stretch of days, happened to be present and immediately congratulated Mrs Neo, in a loud voice, for being blessed with the extraordinary good health not enjoyed by many.

  Jealousy gouged out holes in a woman’s sense of self-worth that could only be filled by proportionate contrition and amendment on the part of the man who had started it all. Surely Dr Phang, however hectic his schedule during the one week he was in Europe, could have called? Anna Seetoh and the maid noticed the eagerness with which Maria, upon returning home from school, rushed to the phone to check for voice messages and again rushed to pick it up even in the midst of a shower or meal. ‘I miss you.’ ‘How I wish you were here with me right now.’ ‘Last night I dreamt about you.’ The lover’s banalities, once laughed at and dismissed, were now hankered after, like so much soothing balm for those terrible gaping wounds of hurt pride. A jealous woman’s raw nerves tingled to the sound of even the remotest promise of a message – a car engine, the doorbell’s ring, a knock on the door.

  In one of her many troubling dreams at night, a call had come from him, but she could not hear what he was saying. ‘What? What?’ she screamed, as the voice became more muffled and was lost in a chaos of background noises. In the end, in great frustration, she put down the phone. In another dream, she was with him in a hotel room; it looked shabby, unlike the plush one she had expected in a plush European hotel. She was wearing a black negligee and lying on the bed. He approached her, saying, ‘My, what a beautiful body you have!’ and made to touch her breasts. She pushed his hands away and said angrily, ‘No, go back to that woman. I know she’s here somewhere in this hotel, waiting for you. I saw her just now, but she hid behind some plants when she saw me.’ He said, ‘Do be reasonable. There’s no one. Now, my dearest –’, but she pushed him off the bed, screaming, ‘Have you any idea how much pain you’re causing me?’ ‘Alright, as you wish,’ he said, and left the room. When she woke up, she saw that her pillow was wet with tears.

  Thankfully, her mother and the maid never asked questions, though she was sure they were observing her closely, and also thankfully, neither did Meeta and Winnie who were currently engrossed in their respective affairs. Winnie must be the only winner in the hideous game of love and romance being played by them all, for she called to tell Maria, in a voice trembling with excitement, that she and Wilbur had got engaged and would be married soon, after which she was likely to leave Singapore and settle down with him in Washington.

  Meeta called once to give the same news dressed up with her usual scepticism. ‘She’s wearing a big diamond engagement ring. Bought with her own money. That Asian-American by now must have found out how much of family property remains in Malacca and is busy doing his sums. They’re buying an apartment in Washington. Also with her money.’

  Maria refrained from asking about Byron because Meeta’s total silence about him could only mean one thing: her hopes had fizzled out, like the balloons he had playfully tied to the back of her chair on the night of the ball, with the appearance of a new girlfriend on his horizon or the reappearance of an old one. Maria thought bitterly: every woman eventually gets burnt in a game whose rules favour the men. Right now, the flames consuming her had by no means run their course. She was a fool to have got into the game in the first place.

  She remembered something her mother had once told her about a woman, a distant relative of Por Por, who was so jealous of the new wife whom her husband had brought into the household that she poisoned the other two wives against her, until the poor girl, who was only sixteen years-old, one morning tied a rope round a staircase railing and h
anged herself. By no means abated, the woman’s jealousy then turned to target the two wives, particularly the younger and prettier one who was summoned to the man’s bed more frequently than the rest. Sexual jealousy often had recourse to supernatural help in the form of secret potions to be put in the man’s food or drink for immediate re-direction of his passion and lust.

  The modern educated woman was not above making secret trips to fortune-tellers and witch doctors to dispose of her rival: Venerable Mother of the White Heaven Temple, despite her claims to harm no one, was said to have dispensed amulets and other charms that purportedly harmed only those truly evil women who broke up homes, destroyed marriages and caused other women to commit suicide. In the old days, the man, by virtue of his traditional standing as the lord and master in the household, was spared the messiness of a woman’s jealousy. If the jealousy happened to be his, he had no need for furtive visits to fortune-tellers and shamans, for he had all the backing of tradition to simply, openly get rid of her. There was a woman who her husband suspected of having an affair with the grocer and thought of setting a trap. But that was too much bother, so he simply gave her a beating and then told her to pack her belongings and return to her parents’ house.

  His modern counterpart was less fortunate, and indeed could bear the full brunt of his partner’s jealousy. Emily told endless stories, with much relish, about how a highly educated woman, enraged at discovering secret love letters hidden in secret places in her husband’s office, stormed into it, scattering files, sweeping things off his desks, breaking whatever could be broken. Then, to make her revenge commensurate with the enormous pain she was suffering, she marched into his boss’s office and revealed that her husband had been complicit in some nefarious scheme years ago that had cost the company millions of dollars. Sometimes hard evidence was not necessary for a woman to fly into a jealous rage: a woman who saw a pretty waitress talking to her husband while serving him soup during dinner in a restaurant instantly stood up, slapped the waitress and then demanded to see the manager to have her sacked.