Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  In her mother-in-law’s house she was less than a guest and more than a servant. She lived in perpetual anxiety. She became clumsy overnight. She dropped vases which were then claimed to be irreplaceable heirlooms. She had to borrow money from Donald Duck to compensate Madam Tay for the loss. Washing the dishes one night, she broke a rice bowl and was accused of spoiling a special dinner set that had been given to Madam Tay by a close friend many Chinese New Years ago. She listened to Aretha Franklin on the radio one afternoon and woke Madam Tay up from her daily nap. She spilt some water and, before she could get a rag to mop up the liquid, Madam Tay nearly slipped in the puddle and fell. The woman sank onto her mustard-coloured velveteen sofa and patted her right hand to her fast-beating heart, moaning and scolding her daughter-in-law for her clumsiness.

  ‘Are you trying to kill an old woman?’ she demanded.

  The bathroom upstairs had no lock on the door, although that was not usually a problem as the sound of splashing water alerted those out in the hallway that the bathroom was being used. Pandora was taking a bath one day and started in shock when her mother-in-law pushed open the door and flicked a scornful glance at her daugherin-law’s wet, naked body.

  ‘Oh. You’re here,’ she said unnecessarily. ‘I thought there was no-one here. I wanted to have a bath. Ai-yah.’

  She walked away and left the door ajar.

  There was neither the time nor place for Pandora to study. Because they had to be back by six-thirty for dinner, she couldn’t stay late at the university. She wanted to do ordinary things with her husband, but the only time they had together was on the bus ride to and from the university. Madam Tay had bought a television set and she insisted that the two of them join her after dinner to watch the news and the various black and white programs about idyllic American family life. Later in the evenings, Pandora had to massage the aches and pains out of Madam Tay’s back like a dutiful daughter-in-law, then rub Tiger Balm over the woman’s flabby, liver-spotted flesh until her palms stung and burnt. She exchanged the soft-boiled egg making routine for brewing the various sweet bean soups that Madam Tay enjoyed for supper.

  ‘You’re a good girl, a good daughter,’ Madam Tay said unexpectedly at dinner one night. She took from her pocket a small red silk purse and handed it to Pandora. ‘Here. I brought this out of my bank box for you today.’

  ‘Open it,’ Jonah told his wife excitedly. Obediently, she opened it and lifted out a thick, twenty-four carat gold link chain with a round jade pendant. Its bright yellowness was almost obscene.

  ‘Cost a lot of money, you know,’ Madam Tay told her.

  ‘Wah!’ Jonah exclaimed. ‘Mother is so good to you, Pan.’ ‘Ah Bu, thank you. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve to have this, but thank you very much.’ Passively she let Jonah fasten the gold chain around her neck.

  Pandora lost her time, her space, her privacy and her boundaries. She wanted intimacy with Jonah, for she still believed that she loved him. But she also wanted support from him against the subtle slights of his mother, the barbed insults that he couldn’t or didn’t want to see. And when that wasn’t forthcoming, she wanted space to collect herself, to remember who she was. But personal boundaries were unheard of in that household where lives, personalities, tempers, needs and desires crisscrossed the bodily envelopes of individuals and blurred their solidity. Daughter-in-law kneaded, pounded and tenderised mother-in-law’s back and rubbed liniment into it. Mother-in-law patted the stomach of daughter-in-law to see if the latter was pregnant. Hands touched, skins rubbed, bodies invaded personal spaces and overlapped individual lives.

  Each night she let Jonah into her body, and each night she felt her sense of self slipping away little by little. He was a tender and passionate lover, but she most resented him when he pleasured her to the point of orgasm. In her new life where nothing outside herself was in her control, she could not forgive him for his erotic invasion of her body, for his breath-stealing, pulse-quickening lovemaking that wrested away from her what little control she had over her emotions and sensory responses. Even this belongs to me, he seemed to be saying as he ran his hands over her breasts and down to her thighs, as he slipped his fingers between her legs and caressed her. Pleasure is mine to give. Eventually she willed herself to lie still and unresponsive, watching impassively from deep inside herself as he redoubled his efforts to stimulate and arouse her desire.

  Jonah recognised the familiar low frequency of panic. Pandora was slipping away from him. He loved her so much but he began to fear that he would never understand her or share real intimacy with her. She bewildered him. He thought his loneliness and isolation had ended forever when he married this woman. How he adored her. But something had short-circuited somewhere. Where was the sense of family he should have gained from marriage? He couldn’t reach her; they didn’t connect. He got the disconcerting impression, when he was talking to her—or talking at her, more and more—that she watched him from the other side of a red wooden bridge. He stepped onto the bridge and ran towards her, but the span lengthened as he ran. His feet pounded the wooden slats and more appeared in front of him, like barrelling train tracks, even as his long strides swallowed the distance and his thin chest heaved with used-up breath.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he cried in frustration. Then he buried his face between her naked breasts and wept from self-pity because he had not escaped the loneliness that lodged in his belly like a black hole.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked obediently, automatically caressing his hair with her fingers. ‘Tell me what you want to hear.’

  She closed her eyes and imagined that the flicks of rough hair between her fingers were the coarse feathers of an owl that would spread his wings and fly off, leaving her on a deep dark forest floor with bloody claw rakings on her white breasts. In her mind she stared at the silver plate of a moon swinging between the tree branches until her pupils shrank into the white moon globes of her eyeballs. She felt the detritus of damp undergrowth and rotting vegetation under her, the soft-legged scurry of insects exploring the slim expanse of her naked body, claiming it as their own. Her fingernails grew longer and clawed into the earth. She rooted herself blindly, blood and bone freezing, then pulping until she became a giant white mushroom, vegetative, still, silent, solitary in the forest dark.

  He cupped his hand under her chin and twisted her face towards him. He searched her eyes for truth, but he could not see past the black opacity that kept her in shadow.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, because she did. But not in the way that she had once thought she would love; not in the way that she once thought she would herself be loved in return.

  Why did he invest ‘love’ with such significance, such life-changing power? Do you love me, he demanded, and because he asked—because she didn’t volunteer it—he would never know. Ask, and you shall never receive. Seek, and you will never find what you are looking for. Knock and push the door open, and you run down the empty, echoing corridors chasing the hem of a skirt that slips up the stairs, the smooth mound of a shoulder that disappears around the corner, the pale crescent of a half-turned face that melts from the window and merges into the night. Do you love me? Yes, she replies. Can he believe her ‘yes’? Has he pumped it out of her with the bellows of his need? Does she give him the answer he wants to hear out of fear or duty or even pity? Yes, she replies, but still he doubts her love. Do you love me, he asks over and over again. Each time she answers yes, each time he’s back right where he started. He runs onto the bridge and the span yawns wider before his pounding feet. Love: the miraculous medicine for all his ills, for his eternal isolation. Love that will bind a man and woman together, that will banish loneliness forever. Love is the answer, but the question is wrong. If she loves him, why can he not feel loved?

  He tries to connect with her through the only tangible thing left to him: her body. Each night he strokes, fondles and caresses her, willing, forcing her flesh to feel the a
gony of sexual pleasure, to welcome his intrusive thrusts. Did you like that? he asks desperately, panting and heaving with the night’s heptathlon effort. Yes, she answers patiently. She sighs, and it could be from sexual repletion or utter weariness. You liked it? he checks again, as if truth were to be found in repetition. Yes. And he must believe her, even though he’s ceasing to trust her. When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies. A woman’s orgasm, like love, must surely crumble the bridge and close the chasm between them. If he cannot give her even this, then what can he offer her? So he strokes, fondles and caresses her more desperately, more urgently each night.

  When he enters her, he spurts the black hole that is inside him up her body. She feels it growing within her now, that black forest where she metamorphoses into a white mushroom. Pluck me, eat me, die. That is where she hides as he manipulates her body. She tells him over and over that she loves him. The more she tells him, the less certain she is that she does. Not because he is unlovable, but because she no longer knows what love is.

  As he suckles her breast and his fingers scrabble over her body like insects, she ticks off in her mind all the things she knows: hunger, pain, malice, betrayal, hurt, anger, hate. The sharp slap of a father’s rejection. The accidental glance of a mother’s indifferent eye. But also affection, laughter and the tears of hilarity. The texture of fine Chinese silk, the suppleness of soft leather, the picture of a snow-capped mountain in New Zealand which she secretly tore out of a geography book at school, the harsh hooter of the Malay peddler selling banana fritters, the delicious shiver of cold ice running down her gullet on a hot, humid day. Also dark silence. She ticks off her emotions and joins them with a child’s wavy lines to their matching pictures. But there is no picture to match with love. Just the language of Wyatt, Shakespeare, Sidney, Marlowe, Marvell, Jonson and Donne, who were not Chinese women living in 1960s Singapore and therefore no longer count. Love has slipped its leash and floats in the ether of her unknowing; she cannot anchor it to anything. And if she loves Jonah, and love is a big black hole, then what she increasingly feels for Jonah is a big black ‘O’. He tries to colour in between the lines, but he cannot colour fast enough and the borders keep stretching further and further away from his efforts.

  Until one day he smudges her ‘O’ with a foetus. Their child, he tells Madam Tay proudly, but Pandora doesn’t feel that it belongs to her. He invades her body and she has to make space for his colony. She throws up her guts every morning as a sign that she is jettisoning her self. Madam Tay recognises this sign. It’s a bad pregnancy, she tells them both, and she insists that Pandora defer her final year at university. She is confined to her bed with this new ‘I’ in her ‘O’. She drinks ginseng tea, bird’s nest soup and chicken soup with herbs; eats pig’s liver and braised pigeon. She vegetates and roots in her bed, in the darkness of her bedroom, her belly ballooning like a septic cyst. She will never be human again until she expels this foreign ‘I’ inside her. She wants to carve her belly out, beat it and pummel it into flatness. Now she knows how her mother felt, carrying her all those years ago.

  Secretly she begs Percy-phone to buy her laxatives for her constipation. She purges herself until her body is wracked and bent double, until she is weak and trembling, her throat raw and her breath rasping. But the cyst just keeps growing in her. It swells and plumps her belly. She gives up and lies in her bed, exhausted in defeat. Her body is no longer hers to control. Pandora is lost and in her place as a wife, daughter-in-law and mother-to-be.

  ‘Is it a boy?’ Madam Tay demanded.

  ‘No, it’s a girl.’

  ‘That wife of yours! What use is she if she can’t even give you a healthy son? I curse that smelly cunt she’s brought into my house.’

  He wasn’t sure whether she was talking about his wife or his daughter, but it didn’t matter anymore. ‘No need to. It’s already dead.’

  Jonah went upstairs and entered their bedroom. He looked at his wife’s face, noted the lines of exhaustion, the grey tinge of her skin, and all at once he felt that he had never loved her as much as at that moment, when he could sponge her sweaty body, comb her matted hair and feed her nourishing ginseng tea. She was dependent on his care and he was completely happy.

  ‘Well, you’re safe and that’s the main thing,’ he said, caressing her dear, dear face. But she turned away from him and stared at the green wall. Her eyes were open but she didn’t see. ‘Don’t you want the tea? Shall I bring up some chicken soup? What do you want?’

  It was a red letter moment, the first time he had asked her this question. Pandora, showing herself to be drama queen Lida Lim’s sister, said, ‘I want to die.’ But the delivery was wrong; it was flat and soft, squeezed out from putty, mushroom lungs. Where was the force of melodrama? It was a flabby performance for this audience of one.

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ he rebuked her sharply. An English education had proved inadequate in uprooting his deeply buried superstitious fears that malevolent spirits might overhear and grant her request. ‘What do you really want?’

  ‘I want to move out of your mother’s house. I want to go far away.’

  And so he struck a deal with his father. He renounced all his rights to the rubber estates as a first-born son and, in return his father bought him a dental clinic in a small village in Malaysia. Jonah left Singapore and moved his wife away from his mother. He did it because he loved Pandora, but he would never quell his resentment at the fact that she had made him choose between his mother and herself.

  DURIAN SEASON

  Jonah Tay and his dental partner, Beng Chee, nursed a passion for durians—those yellow fleshy globs of fruit wrapped around smooth brown seeds, cradled inside thick, spiky green husks. They loved to inhale the aroma—of old unwashed socks—and looked forward to durian season with drooling anticipation. One of the benefits of living in Malaysia was undoubtedly the abundance of durians. Every year from June to September, Jonah and Beng Chee emerged into the twilight to prowl the darkened streets and roadside stalls in search of durians. It was a lifelong love affair for both of them. The pungent scent hung heavy in the humid air, easily discernible through the thick layers of pollution, petrol fumes and rotting garbage in the open sewers and unswept streets of the town. It crept into their brains and incited their lust until their mouths salivated for the creamy texture and onion aftertaste of the fruit.

  In 1969 Beng Chee’s hunger for durians arrived a month early. He heard rumours that durians were already available in Petaling Jaya. The thought tantalised him and he could not keep his mind on his work. He sat his patients down in the dental chair, prised open their jaws and saw their gaping mouths filled with creaming durian custard. He extracted teeth and imagined he saw the silky stones of durian seeds. He was impatient for the swift passage of days. Each morning he came early into the dental surgery to tear away the wafer-thin pages of the calendar one by one. He wanted to rev his motorcycle through May and screech to a halt when he arrived at June.

  ‘Hey, Jonah, let’s close up shop, man,’ Beng Chee said as he walked into the dental surgery on the morning of Friday, May 13, 1969. He shoved the appointment book under Jonah’s nose. ‘Look, no appointments today, lah.’

  ‘What about walk-in patients, ah?’ Jonah objected conscientiously.

  ‘Got rumours of durians in Selangor. Big fat durians, man! Why not we visit my brother in Petaling Jaya? If got durians, he sure know where to get some.’

  Jonah hesitated for only a moment. ‘Better tell my wife. She’s expecting any day, you know. Better make sure she’s all right first.’

  Pandora lay in a canvas hammock strung up between two banana trees in the garden. This pregnancy had been an easy one and she bore the alien weight easily, serene in the knowledge that this child would be the longed-for son; a child that would erase the guilt and atone for the death of the one she hadn’t wanted. She sipped sugarcane water, chewed salted mandarin peels and read a Hollywood fan maga
zine featuring Grace Kelly. She looked up in surprise when she heard the drone of a car engine and saw Jonah parking his Mercedes at the edge of the garden. She slipped her large Jackie O sunglasses down the bridge of her nose.

  ‘Jo, apa kaba?’ she asked, slipping into the Malay they used with their maid from the kampong.

  ‘Hey, you know what? Beng Chee thinks that durian season has started in Selangor. We’re going to drive up and get a few cases, okay? You’ll like that, won’t you? It’ll be a quick trip. We’ll just zoom up there, pick up some durians, and I’ll be back before night.’

  ‘Sure. Enjoy yourselves.’ She patted his hand absently and returned her gaze to the glossy photos in the magazine.

  Still he hovered hesitantly. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course, lah. No need to worry. Drive safely.’

  But they would not return that night. They drove off before lunch, these two Chinese knights in an orange Fiat, ardent in their self-imposed quest for the holy grail of durian. They made good time to Beng Tek’s bungalow in Petaling Jaya, a sprawling suburb which had sprung up around the University of Malaysia on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. The drive was easy as the major highways and narrow sidestreets were clear of traffic. Beng Chee rolled down the window and as the wind whooshed past, he whistled and sang at the top of his voice to Jonah’s cassette of the Best of the British Proms, Recorded Live at the Royal Albert Hall.

  ‘Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves,’ the two men carolled exuberantly, nostalgic for the sing-alongs of their schooldays. ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!’

  But whatever waves Britannia still ruled over, they were certainly not Malaysian ones. Not since merdeka—independence—in 1957, when the Malay sultan Tunku Abdul Rahman had presided over the Federation of Malaya’s separation from the British Empire. Any hope that the Federation of Malaysia might be a multicultural society made up of three main ethnicities—Malay, Chinese and Indian—began to disintegrate by the late 1960s. The fear of Chinese economic and political power had already been demonstrated on August 9, 1965, when Malaysia kicked Singapore and its prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, out of the Federation. Racial hatred against the immigrant Chinese population in Malaysia would once again be demonstrated on Friday, May 13, 1969.