by Paul Theroux
The soldiers stayed for a week and teamed up with a girl on the first day. I saw the buses arriving every Monday, Sathya opening the gates for them and shutting the gates after the bus pulled away. Soldiers and hookers drifted around the neighborhood and sat on benches near the canal, holding hands. They had their pictures taken at Luck Ong's camera shop in Bukit Timah Arcade, and after they had left, these pictures were hung in the window, Luck Ong's trophies, soldier and hooker, and they remained on display long after the hooker had moved on to other soldiers and the pictured soldier was gone and perhaps dead. Some of the soldiers at Serene House ignored the girls and simply drank and fought and watched cowboy movies. A few soldiers found their way across the sports field to the university buildings. One day we found a dazed soldier in our library. Ringrose wrote a poem about him. At the end of the week the bus came and took them all back to the war.
I was married so could not be drafted. I was one of those perspiring young men in shirtsleeves and sandals standing at the bus stop, among the Malays and Chinese, near Chop Keng Fatt Heng ("Provisioners") with a shopping bag of groceries in each hand. I felt burdened, I felt old, fifty or more, which seemed elderly to me then. The cars driven by Malay chauffeurs went quickly past us with their passengers dressed up for garden parties and drinks in the early evening.
Singapore was an island of party givers, everyone drumming up business or being social. You saw their hateful faces in pictures in the Straits Times, hugging each other and looking damp and overdressed and pleased. Their complete names and often their ridiculous nicknames were given in the dense captions. They were all strangers to me. They seemed not exotic but remote and foolish, inhabiting a world so different from mine that I had nothing to say to them; and they did not know me. I hated them for their parties; I also thought: Please invite me.
We were sometimes asked to parties at the American ambassador's residence. The Vietnam War caused such an invitation to be a moral dilemma, but not a serious one. We always accepted.
2
We were at an embassy party tonight.
In that Vietnam War period in Singapore when we expatriate teachers and journalists went to parties at the American embassy, we drank too much, snatched food from trays, insulted the diplomats and businessmen, and wandered outside into the ambassador's garden and pissed on his orchids.
What we resented was the order, the peacefulness of this house, which was the United States of America. When we stepped outside afterwards, we were back in Singapore. The embassy resented us, too, but had to give the parties in order to seem unthreatening. The staff had no choice but to invite us, because there were so few American civilians in Singapore. Perhaps they hoped that we would put them in touch with ordinary people. Perhaps we fantasized that they would give us privileged information. What it came down to was that they were there to serve free drinks and we were invited to drink them. But we held all American diplomats in utter contempt, and so instead of rejecting the invitations, we accepted and behaved badly.
Tonight, something in the atmosphere of the ambassador's residence made me feel unwanted and antisocial. I felt like a burglar, and when I saw that Alison was talking with some other women, I slipped into the library with the idea of stealing something—not a treasure, but an object that would be of greater use to me than to the ambassador. I rationalized that a book might be just the thing.
I was leaning against a wall of shelves, looking at the spines of books, when a man came up behind me and said, "The books in a person's house reveal an enormous amount of what's going on in his head."
This was true, if obvious, and I wanted to say so, but I was flummoxed for the moment—feeling guilty, as though I had almost been caught in the act of theft. Another minute and this man might have seen me slipping a book into my pocket.
"What do these books reveal?" he said.
We were both looking at the shelves, not at each other.
I saw history, politics, biography, diplomacy, statistics, no authors or titles I recognized.
"Not much, I guess," and as soon as I spoke, I realized I was too drunk to hold a conversation.
"Nothing," the man said. "These books come in a job lot from the State Department. They go with the house. They're inventoried under the heading Accessories."
I was nodding. I could not have put it better than that.
"There's no poetry," he said. "If there were, you'd know exactly who you were dealing with."
I liked him for saying that, but he seemed an unlikely sort to make that observation. It was the kind of thing my seedy university friends in the next room might have said, one of the extremely unpleasant intellectuals, with his mouth full of quail's eggs, his cheeks bulging. If you commented on his hogging food, he would spit egg flecks and say, "Fuck him! We're paying for it!"
But this man was pink-faced and well fed and wearing a dark suit and tie. You were dressed like that in Singapore only when your whole existence was air-conditioned. The wealthiest people dressed warmly and rode in air-conditioned cars. He wore a gold watch and chunky cufflinks and the sort of pebble-grained ostrich-skin shoes that were made to order in Hong Kong. And there was also a certain expensive odor about him, a lingering leathery smell of money.
He said, "Been in Singapore long?"
"Almost two years. I teach at the university."
"Good for you. But you seem too young to be a professor."
"I'm not a professor. It's the British system. Only one prof—the head of the department. He has the chair of English. The rest of us are lecturers."
"You still seem young to have a Ph.D."
"I don't have one."
It was hard for me to hold a conversation in which I had to explain things. In my drunken condition I could listen or agree, but I stumbled over my words.
"So what are your credentials?" he asked, and with this direct question he put himself in charge, which annoyed me.
"I don't have any credentials," I said. "And neither does he."
I had turned back to the bookshelves and seen the spine of a slim volume, Life Studies by Robert Lowell.
"You're sure of that?"
"I went fishing with Cal in the Lake District just before I came here."
The man seemed interested but somewhat disbelieving, wearing a crooked smile.
"Jonathan Raban introduced me to him. Raban's a friend of mine and of Cal's. You don't believe me."
The man stepped back a little and said, "It just seems so far away and incredulous."
That was the first hint I had that he was not at home with the English language.
"Cal," I said, "is short for Caligula."
"Did you catch anything on this fishing trip?"
"It was only a long weekend. It rained. Cal fell in. The rest of the time he stayed in his hotel room and read. Jonathan caught two trout and threw them back." My back was still turned. "And him."
I plucked off the shelf the book In the Clearing, by Robert Frost. I opened it. There was a sticker on the inside cover, an American flag and an inscription: A Gift from the United States of America.
"Frost had no credentials. He never even graduated from college. But he taught his whole life."
"I suppose you knew him, too."
I nodded. "At Amherst. One day in 1962 I followed him into Jones Library in the center of town. Up the stairs. Into the stacks. I had his new book in my hand. 'Mind signing it?'" I turned around to look into the man's big pink face. "Frost took one look at me and said, 'Do not pursue me!' Those very words."
"That's great," the man said, and now he did seem persuaded.
"But he signed the book. He said, 'I just signed a thousand of these in New York and they're selling for fifteen dollars each.'"
"You can see his objection," the man said.
I smiled at him, but he was serious. He was still beaming at me—not smiling, yet his face was brighter than before, luminous with attention. I was not used to anyone paying this much heed to anything I said. His expre
ssion was deeper than simple curiosity. It was hunger, but more than that, the expression of someone used to getting what he wants, seeing something desirable. It was a kind of confident hunger that made me self-conscious, as though he were going to take a bite out of me.
To cover my embarrassment, I said, "And what's your line of work?"
"Electronics," he said.
But his face was still radiant. Obviously he was still thinking of the two truthful stories I had just told him about Lowell and Frost.
"Timing devices. Circuitry. Switches. Small motors." These words came out mechanically. He was merely reciting, as though to a fellow passenger. But another wheel was turning in his head. "You're a writer."
"I've published two novels."
That's marvelous," he said with feeling. "What about poetry?"
"I used to write it, but I haven't written much lately."
I was too drunk to go into the reasons, which could have been listed under the headings Africa, Marriage, Children, Debt; and also my sense that the poems I wrote were miniatures. With fiction I had begun to write on a larger scale, and I was the happier for it.
"Is writing a good living?"
It was a terrible question but I had an answer.
I said, "No. It's a good life."
This impressed him, I could see. And I realized that he was not teasing me, he did not doubt me now, he was just clumsily probing.
"You must be very busy—teaching and writing."
"Yes," I said, but I did not feel busy at all. I was bored, I was neglected. There was so much more I could have written or done, if I were given the chance. I knew that my time would come, but for the moment I felt ignored. And as though this provoked a physical revulsion, I suddenly felt nauseated and could taste vomit at the back of my throat.
"Are you ever free for lunch?"
"Sometimes," I said. The true answer was: Every day. But the mention of food made me feel queasier.
"I want you to meet my wife."
"Oh, yes," I said, and started away.
"Harry Lazard," he said, and seized my hand and shook it. "Hey, you look a little pale."
"I'm sick," I said. "Excuse me."
And I hurried into the garden and puked behind the ambassador's ferns. Behind me, seemingly oblivious of my retching, Mr. Lazard was saying, "You're the only person here that I envy."
Soon after, I looked for Alison and we left, and Alison drove while I lay moaning.
Whenever we left the ambassador's residence the spell was broken: buses, hawkers, rickshaws, shouts, stinks, glaring lights, and air like a dog's breath that stuffed your head with humid heat. So many times I found myself back at my cramped house on Bukit Timah Road, hearing Serene House cowboy movies, the gunshots, the galloping horses, and feeling that I had landed with a bump back in my own world. It was disorienting to be at a great house overlooking the Botanical Gardens one minute and here the next. It helped me understand that we really were hard up and that in some obscure, related way the war in Vietnam would go on forever. The war made many Americans proud, but many of us felt like victims and were reminded of our weakness and felt like the enemy. No wonder we secretly admired the Vietcong.
I felt all that tonight too. I lay on the sofa, under the croaking fan, hating the bus fumes, thinking about his pink face, his wealth, a man not used to being the least bit impressed; incredibly, my talk of poetry—of all things—had done the trick. I had the strong sense that having met that man Lazard, something in my life was about to change.
3
Harry Lazard called me the next day and invited me for lunch. When I told him truthfully that my car was being fixed, he seemed pleased. "Don't take a taxi!" He sent his car for me, a Daimler with a Malay driver who called me Tuan, Master. I sat in the back, enjoying the cool, silent trip down Orchard Road, turning at Tang's, past the Strand and the Goodwood. Seen from inside an air-conditioned Daimler, Singapore seemed not just bearable but quaint and attractive. This was the city I had imagined before I had come here.
Ahmed, white gloves on the wheel, made a wide turn into the Tanglin Club. After two years in Singapore I was setting foot in the Tanglin Club for the first time; in less than a year, Harry Lazard had become a member. He had been waiting in the lobby and was telling me this as we made our way to the members' dining room.
Passing a photographic portrait of Winston Churchill, Lazard said loudly, "His mother was an American, you know."
At the table he explained that he enjoyed saying that about Churchill in front of the British members of the club. I noticed Lazard had hairy ears. He refused a menu; he told the waiter that he knew what was on it. He ordered the daily special: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. Feeling overwhelmed, I ordered the same.
Lazard began belittling the food as soon as it was served, which made it hard for me to swallow.
"You must come over to my house sometime for a meal," he said. "It's a funny story. My wife and I had a great meal at Chez Michel. I asked to see the chef, and when he came to our table I asked him how much he was earning. He was Chinese. It wasn't much. I said I'd double his salary if he worked for me. He learned his cooking from a Cordon Bleu cook in Saigon. He's mine now."
It impressed me, his stepping up and hiring someone, just like that.
"It was only a matter of money," Lazard said. "It usually is. Most people are underpaid in Singapore. That's the great thing about this place. They don't know how good they are. You can eat the best food in the world here."
His Singapore was air-conditioned and pleasant. Mine was hot and crowded. His had the Tanglin Club, the golfers and polo players; mine had the University Staff Club, full of complainers. His was the Singapore of great cuisine; mine was the Singapore of fried noodles and amah's soy sauce. He was happy, I was impatient. I had no telephone, I took the bus, I swam in the Singapore River, I bought ganja from trishaw drivers. I knew my Singapore was the past and that my days were numbered.
"Do you realize how clean it is here, how orderly, and how rare a thing that is?"
I said, "They flog people for petty offenses. They have press censorship. They're very hard on my students. Recently the government took all their scholarships away because studying English literature isn't part of nation-building. That was the expression. The government wants economists and scientists. Poetry's an aberration."
"Why don't you quit your job?"
"I need the money," I said, and almost choked. "If something better came along, I'd jump."
"I'm very divided on Singapore," Lazard said, and I was glad he did not question me further about quitting. "I'm a chemical engineer by training. My firm makes and sells chemicals, as well as electronics."
"I'm surprised you're not foursquare for the Singapore government, then."
"I'm also on the side of the poets," he said.
"They're burying the old Singapore. It will be gone soon. That's why I'm writing a novel about it. I want to write about the shop houses and the harbor and the hookers and Bugis Street and the trishaws while you can still hear their jingling bells. "
"And does your main character teach at the university?"
"No. He's a ship chandler's water clerk," I said. "They'll all be buried soon, too."
"What a wonderful idea," Lazard said.
"A novel is among other things a social history."
"All writing is, I guess."
"Sure. Poems, too. If you read a poem about a train in England, it will be pulled by a steam locomotive. But there are no more engines like that left. Poetry hasn't caught up."
"A poetry reader," Lazard said, and unzipped his briefcase with the kind of impatience that showed he had been planning this. He pulled out a thick, book-shaped magazine and showed me. Metro Quarterly—A Journal of the Arts. He hefted it and it opened almost by itself to the page he wanted, where a short poem was printed. I took the entire poem in at a glance: Gorgeously, the fish fits its fins to the foam and controls the spin of its bo
dy over rock. It was signed Harold Lazard.
"Tell me frankly what you think of it. Be brutal."
"It's very good. I like its simplicity."
He smiled. He seemed not to believe me, but I insisted.
"And obviously the editor agrees with me."
He smiled again. He was a big man, with big hairy fingers and heavy arms. It was hard to imagine these fingers holding a pen, writing a poem, seated at a desk.
Perhaps my staring at his meaty hands made him self-conscious. He said, "Yes, I'm a published poet."
Over coffee he said, "How much do you earn?"
"Fourteen hundred a month."
"That's pretty fair," he said.
"I can barely run a car. My wife has to work to pay off our overdraft."
"But that's an American salary."
"No. Those are Singapore dollars."
Little spasms—of pain, of incredulity, almost of mockery—set his face in motion, rippled without settling, lighting separate features, and overlapping his expressions. His eyes were frozen, a calculation going on behind them. He was thinking: Fifty bucks a week!
"Drink up," he said. "I want to show you something."
"This is where I live," he said as Ahmed turned into a gateway in a high wall off Holland Road; but all I saw alongside the driveway were palms, and a lawn, and flower beds. It was not until we had traveled for some distance that I saw the house, which was enormous, with a green tile roof and white stucco that was brilliant in the sunshine. This whole estate was hidden by the wall, and once inside the wall it was not possible to see outside—Singapore was just its steamy sky.
Big as it was, the house was a detail, and so were the lawns and flower beds. Even the swimming pool and the arbor and trellis arches around it, even the waterfall and the stream, the marble statues, the pillars, the other buildings, were mere details. Beyond the flower beds were bushes and flowering shrubs and trees, not single specimens but a forest of them, jungle foliage of blackish green, so dense and with such a thick canopy of boughs there was darkness under it.