Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  She had his complete love and loyalty until he rescued Percy-phone from the river, abandoned his dogfish, carried her home huffing and puffing, and met Pandora at the back door of the broken cement yard.

  ‘Mama, I’ve met a girl and I want to go steady with her,’ Jonah told Madam Tay a few weeks after he failed to do well in his zoology exam. She hadn’t spoken to him for days after the beating, but her favour was grudgingly and gradually restored by his remorseful assiduity as he showered attention on her, accompanied her to visit neighbours he had no wish to see and ventured into shops that held no interest for him. ‘I really like her. Her name is Pandora Lim.’

  ‘Ai-yo, very painful. Jonah, come and knock the pain out of my back.’ Madam Tay lay down on the silk-covered sofa of their North Bridge Road home and closed her eyes. Rapidly she cast her mind back over all the girls she knew from their clan, only to reject them one by one. Too short, too fat, bad physiognomy, unlucky moles, too wild, too delicate, not hard-working enough, too ugly, too pretty, too stupid, not submissive enough, no respect. She would have to see a matchmaker about finding a wife for her son. ‘Hey, you useless boy, do I have to ask you twice?’

  Obediently her son knelt by the sofa and began pummelling her back viciously with his clenched fists.

  ‘I love you, you know,’ Madam Tay said, eyes closed and voice vibrating from the drumming of her son’s white-knuckled fists. ‘I only want what’s best for you.’

  LOVE AND VERTIGO

  Pandora wanted to fall in love and she wanted it to be forever, just as Nat King Cole had pledged. She knew about love. She saw it enacted on a flickering screen every Saturday afternoon when she went to the movies with Wendy Wu and Percy-phone. They sighed together in the cinema and learned to recognise the postures of love: the kiss of fingertips, the yearning gazes of mascaraed eyes, the twining embrace of waltzing lovers, the thirty-second lip-lock. At the movies, chubby-cheeked Gordon Macrae warbled a warning that people might think he was in love, while Gene Kelly splashed in puddles and tapped his way into various heroines’ hearts. MGM made people do ridiculous things for love; they made Clark Gable don his tap shoes and sing about puttin’ on the Ritz so that, in another movie, Judy Garland could write him a letter to tell him that he made her love him though she didn’t want to do it.

  Love was two-dimensional in images and words. With her index finger Pandora traced the language of love over the pages of Renaissance poetry that she was studying for her Higher School Certificate exam. Each afternoon she pored over fragments of sonnets, nutting out their meaning painstakingly for she knew she was not a bright girl. ‘Good-for-nothing dummy,’ Por-Por used to sneer.

  Pandora had not always done well in her studies. The Anglican school that she and her sisters attended had baffled her at first. The English language, the ringing bells, the orderly rows of neat, navy-uniformed girls with their white socks and white sandshoes practising parade drills each morning—all this repelled her initially. She was slow at mental arithmetic and blurted out panicky wrong answers. The Chinese maths teacher, armed with a sharpened HB Staedtler pencil, handed back class tests scored with red crosses and drilled the pencil tip into Pandora’s scalp.

  ‘Stupid girl,’ she jeered contemptuously. ‘What are you doing at school?’

  She made Pandora stand on a stool in a corner of the classroom with her skirt pulled up over her head for all the other girls to see and mock her shame. Daphne, who was the head prefect at the time, found out about it and threatened to report the maths teacher to the principal. Pandora was allowed to lower her skirt but she had to sit facing the corner for the whole lesson. She went home that afternoon and told Winston that she’d give him her gold bracelet if he slashed the tyres of Mrs Ng’s car. He went further and flung pig shit all over the windscreen. Then he went to a goldsmith and sold the bracelet, caught a bus to Chinatown and bought himself a prostitute for the night. After that, Donald Duck helped her with maths and they struggled through it together.

  But it was English that had most terrified Pandora. She stumbled over the unfamiliar words and disturbing syntax. Her tongue tripped over the outlandish consonants, vowels and diphthongs. Each night Daphne impatiently helped her with her homework, correcting her grammar, testing her spelling and teaching her new English words. Each morning, under the petrifying gaze of Miss Liu, the principal and English teacher, English words flew out of her head like the diseased street pigeons Winston tried to catch and sell. Eventually Daphne gave up and Pandora begged Donald Duck to pay for her to have private tuition with Miss Liu.

  One afternoon a week Pandora caught a bus to Cairnhill Road and walked up the driveway to the white, low-slung colonial house with its drooping eaves and deep verandahs, where Miss Liu lived with her father. It was such a romantic house, but its grandeur awed Pandora for she had assumed that only the ang mohs lived in such mansions. Around the house, towering monstera plants reared alongside hibiscus bushes heavy with passion-red flowers, their large waxen petals framing golden, powdery stamens. Slender coconut trees waved and dipped in the afternoon breeze as, inside the library, Pandora and Miss Liu pored over mouldering leather-bound books of English poetry.

  ‘There was a man who loved me when I was young,’ Miss Liu said. ‘He picked me up from my hall of residence and carried my books to the British Library. In the rain he unfurled his black umbrella and sheltered me. On winter mornings when the air was clouded with the puff of people breathing, he placed hot bags of chestnuts in my cold gloved hands to warm them. So long ago, it was. And then I lost him in the war.’

  ‘He died?’ Pandora asked.

  ‘No. He was with the Allied occupation forces in Germany and he came back to London with a Berlin bride. I should have fallen in love with a Chinese man,’ Miss Liu sighed. ‘But they never spoke to me the words of love. Now read.’

  Pandora picked up the book, ran her finger down the middle crease and read aloud.

  Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,

  And make me travel forth without my cloak,

  To let base clouds o’ertake me in my way,

  Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

  ‘This is love,’ Miss Liu said. ‘False promises that we can’t help believing.’

  On hot afternoons interrupted by rumbling equatorial thunderstorms, she taught Pandora about lovers who were compared to summer days; whose eyes were nothing like the sun. Week after week Pandora learned about the painful wrench of love on the emotions, the swing from exhilaration to depression and back again. Lovers were not blinded by love; rather, they chose not to see, hear or believe—When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies . . . Love was the marriage of true minds, she discovered one week, the one still spot of the universe that did not change. The following week she learned of fickle love and bitter rejection from Thomas Wyatt—They flee from me, that sometime did me seek—and from Michael Drayton the impossibility of goodbyes: Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. Each lesson they untangled the knotty syntax and arcane vocabulary until the poet’s meaning blazed clear and seared the ideal of romantic love onto a soul that hungered for affection.

  What had sixteenth-century English love poetry to do with this unwanted fourth daughter (‘Rubbish girl, picked out of the dustbin,’ Por-Por used to say) of a reclusive Singaporean shopkeeper and his mahjong-addicted wife? Precious little, her family and friends would sneer. Poetry was for the ang mohs. It didn’t put food on the table or clothes on the back. It could neither help her to make an auspicious marriage nor to get a decent job as a clerk until she was lucky enough to marry. Poetry was a luxury of the West, not a necessity for the East. But week after week, those poetry lessons changed Pandora. Suddenly, a world of love, a way of loving outside the usual matchmade marriages of compatible astrologies, crude sexual attraction and similar socioeconomic status, was opened up to her. Like Miss Liu, she climbed the dizzy heights of poetry and fell in love with the language
of love. Was Miss Liu wrong to have introduced her to such impossible ideals of love that life would always disappoint? The ideals they cherished together—chivalric romance, Petrarchan fidelity, companionate love, the meeting and melding of two minds as well as two bodies—destroyed her marriage in later years. In Pandora’s neediness, love, like vertigo, pulled at her and she was at once terrified and tempted by the void below.

  Pandora was studying for her HSC exams when she met Jonah Tay. She wanted to go to university to study English, to become a teacher like Miss Liu. Education was a lifeline thrown to her; a ladder she could climb to get out of the vulgar, violent pit-life of the Lims. She watched love and studied it, longed to be in love, but didn’t know if she wanted to be in love with Jonah. Didn’t know if, in all her plans for escape through education, she could fit him in just yet. She didn’t even know if she liked him very much. This thin, earnest Chinese man in black Buddy Holly glasses scarcely matched her vision of romantic heroes fashioned by characters as disparate as Mr Darcy, Rob Roy, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant. But they were forever fixed on the screen, contained within a page.

  Jonah Tay, on the other hand, was always hanging around the house, bringing gifts of food. Never flowers though. Each afternoon she heard the bolt on the back door pulled back and her name shouted out. From her book-laden desk in front of the bedroom window, she peered down into the courtyard to see Jonah below, waving parcels of fried noodles up at her. Her parents welcomed him and treated him as one of the family; the favourite son, in fact. For his sake they stumbled over simple Singlish phrases while he began to learn their dialect. When words failed, they beamed and nodded at each other.

  At first Pandora thought that Percy-phone liked Jonah, but Percy-phone denied this vigorously. Jonah is interested in you, Percy-phone told her, and began to praise his many qualities to her imperceptive younger sister. Pandora felt that the romantic narrative was all wrong. Percy-phone was the one who had been rescued, and by all the conventions of chivalric romance, Jonah should have fallen in love with her.

  ‘Hi-yah, this is real life, not storybooks,’ Percy-phone said impatiently. ‘You want to live in one of your nineteenth-century novels or what?’

  Eventually she gave in to the strong urgings of her parents and siblings (even Winston liked him because Jonah was generous with both food and finance) and started going out with Jonah. His real attraction, in her eyes, was that he took her out of the crowded, noisy tenement where they were constantly breathing each other’s stale air and invading each other’s space. He was English-educated, like herself, and because of their different dialects they conversed in the local Singlish patois. He urged her to study and helped her with her science and maths. He seemed proud of her academic achievements. Like Miss Liu’s young English lover, he carried her books to the library and bought her plastic bags of coconut juice to sip throughout the sweaty afternoons.

  The early days of their courtship were overshadowed by the death of Por-Por and the subsequent rites of mourning that the shopkeeper, burdened with guilt and fear of the puissant dead, insisted on carrying out. Mourners had to be organised and an elaborate feast prepared for the return of Por-Por’s spirit on the seventh day after her death. Pandora oversaw the entire operation and was stunned at the end of it all to find that Por-Por had left her enough money to put her through a year of university.

  That night, after Por-Por’s will had been disclosed, her hand shook with nervousness as she ate the four eggs that she had first under- then overcooked. Finally, she made the perfect pair of soft-boiled eggs. Peppered and soy-sauced, she brought them up to her father in the pink-flowered porcelain bowl. She bent towards him and served it to him with both hands.

  ‘Papa, eat,’ she said submissively.

  He grunted, eyes not lifting from the newspaper page, accepted the eggs and waved her away. She retreated to the doorway and stood in the shadows, watching silently as he gulped the eggs and washed them down with black tea. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then wiped his hand on the white singlet top which he had tucked into his loose drawstring pyjama trousers. When she made a slight movement, he looked up, startled to find her still there.

  ‘What is it?’ He was vaguely annoyed at having his concentration interrupted, at his daughter’s unexpected demand for his attention. She came and stood before him, eyes cast down, and told him that she wished to go to university to study for an arts degree. She wanted to become a teacher like Miss Liu. She asked for his permission.

  ‘The money?’ he demanded.

  ‘Por-Por left me some and Eldest Brother has promised to help me out.’

  ‘God knows the family could use some help,’ he complained. She said nothing and he contemplated her bowed head. ‘What will you do after university? A degree is no use to a woman. Are you going to marry Jonah Tay?’

  She felt the old familiar vise clamping shut around her. To escape one trap you had to put your foot into another.

  ‘Yes, Papa.’

  ‘All right, then. Do what you like. It’s got nothing to do with me.’ He picked up the newspaper and raised it like a barrier between himself and his daughter. ‘Take my bowl to the kitchen. I’ve finished.’

  ‘Yes, Papa. Thank you.’ She took his empty bowl and left him alone with the Chinese news. Would his permission and approval always be tossed to her with such apathy? And when would she herself cease to care? Yes, Papa. Thank you, Papa. Thank you for caring for me so little, for thinking of me so little, that what I want and what I do is a matter of complete indifference to you as long as you’re not inconvenienced by any responsibility for me. She resolved to study harder than ever so that she could get out of the tenement house.

  A week before her HSC exams she sat perspiring at the tiny table upstairs in the girls’ bedroom, in front of the metal grille window overlooking the colourful wrinkled shirts, skirts and trousers flapping away on the bamboo poles. The window was open because of the unbearable humidity. Teochew opera whined from the neighbour’s portable radio. In the courtyard below, Winston practised his karate with screaming exhalations of ‘hah!’ as he massacred rickety chairs and chopped planks of wood in half. Downstairs, a gaggle of noisy women gossiped and laughed raucously, calling for more tea and steamed rice buns over the tapping of mahjong tiles. Mei Ling was having another mahjong party and two tables had been laid out in the room behind the shop. The women had come over just after lunch and would not leave until they ran out of money or their husbands came to drag them home to cook dinner.

  Frustrated, Pandora slammed the thin bedroom door bad-temperedly, but the cacophony leaked through the cracks and pounded her brain. Mei Ling came upstairs to admonish her for slamming the door and making such a lot of noise.

  ‘I’m not the one making all the noise. I’m trying to study,’ Pandora cried out in irritation. She could feel tears of self-pity gathering at the edges of her eyes, threatening to spill over. ‘Why must you have all the aunties over when I’m studying for my HSC? Don’t you know how important this is to me? Can’t you go over to Auntie Jin’s for a couple of days until my exams are over?’

  ‘Don’t be so rude to your mother. Be grateful that I don’t call you to pour tea for your aunties. What kind of daughter is this, always talking back to her own mother, ah? Good-for-nothing girl.’

  Pandora sat helplessly in the sauna of a room and felt dark bitterness seeping into her bones, filling her with violence towards her mother and the aunties who came to play mahjong; the same aunties who would leave a few hundred dollars richer that night with the winnings from the gold earrings Mei Ling had pawned that morning. Study was impossible. The aunties’ screams of cackling laughter echoed up the stairwell over the clicking and clacking of the mahjong tiles. Pandora bowed her head and wept in panicky frustration as concentration fled once more.

  There was a knock on the door. Hurriedly she dried her eyes.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’ she called out.

  The
door opened and Jonah Tay came in.

  ‘Hi. I thought you might want to come to the university library with me to study. Your exams are next week, you know,’ he said, indulging his penchant for stating the obvious—a habit that would irritate her no end in the years to come. ‘I’ve asked permission from your parents and it’s all right with them. I said I’d bring you home on the bus safely so there’s no need for them to worry. You need to study, you know.’

  Pandora squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Jonah, at this moment I could really love you.’

  He beamed happily. ‘Hey, I love you too,’ he said. Already, he heard only what he wanted to hear from her.

  Much later, when she got engaged to Jonah, it crossed her mind that she might have made a mistake. But it was too late, she had succumbed to vertigo, taken the fall and must live with the consequences. By then, her HSC was over and she was learning that one couldn’t—and shouldn’t—expect an incarnation of Renaissance courtly love in 1960s Singapore anymore than one could expect a Chinese shopkeeper father to take an interest in his fourth daughter, let alone love her.