Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

  We sit and drink jasmine tea at the kitchen table.

  “Well?” Julius asks, after some time.

  “Well what?”

  “How was your day?”

  “Fine. I’m really tired.”

  “You look sad. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, of course. Why would you say I look sad?”

  “It’s all over your face.”

  “How was your night?”

  “Same old, lah.” He cocks his head to one side and scrutinizes me with drunken exaggeration. “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem bothered.”

  “I’m fine,” I reply. “I told you already.”

  “What’s with the attitude? Relax.” Julius frowns and I look away.

  I’ve always thought that telling people to relax only makes them more rigid. The muscles at the back of my neck tense and ache.

  “Just asking because I’m concerned,” Julius continues, drumming his too-long nails on his ridged porcelain cup. “I didn’t mean anything else by it.”

  “Look, Julius, I’m sorry,” I say. “I just had a really long day. Work is a headache.”

  “Okay,” Julius replies.

  We sound just like a tepid, long-married couple. Both of us seem to realize this at the same moment. Julius clears his throat. I don’t know how to fix the awkwardness that wafts over the table like a fart. I picture Julius naked for the very first time; get a glimpse of his long, untoned body. As if he can read my mind, he gets up in an exposed scurry. His chair scrapes against the kitchen tiles.

  “Guess I better sleep soon, got an early start,” he says, and yawns.

  I can see the grayish-pink of his gums and gullet and it reminds me of my tapeworm and the way it rappelled audaciously down my throat months ago. Just a faint memory now: unfunny how pain acquires a foggy, secondhand patina in order for us to endure its inevitable repetition. I wonder if I could call the tapeworm a form of pain. It didn’t actually hurt. Yet the invasiveness and disgust I felt from its parasitic thievery—the outrage—pained me.

  “You know, it wouldn’t hurt you to be nicer,” Julius blurts as he leaves the room. “I was only trying to help. You shouldn’t take things out on other people.”

  He’s right, and also drunk. Before I can reply he shuts the bathroom door quietly, click and lock. Julius always takes forever in the bathroom and he’s deathly silent during the endless minutes between entering and the hiss of the shower. Sometimes I wonder if he goes in there to meditate. Even the gruesome, echoey plop of a turd hitting the toilet would be demystifying. It’s reassuring to be reminded that we are all full of shit. It makes me feel united with my fellow humans.

  I make my way to bed. As I smooth overpriced night cream on my face, I marvel at the irony of it: how I left one HDB flat and a marriage to move into a more impersonal, rootless dwelling—dimmer, sparsely furnished, no strings attached, no baggage—only to have the same thing happen. Tense, arid evenings, a stalemate of two, a man telling me to be kinder, better, to try harder; giving me advice I don’t want to hear, instructions. When did I become so weak and easily upset? When did I switch from doing to being done to?

  *

  Jarrold and I met at university, during the first week of my first year in NUS. He was a third-year orientation leader, or an OL as he would call it (he was very fond of acronyms). We met at the Ice Cream Bash for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, where he was handing out cups of ice cream. He looked as happy and buoyant as a Labrador. I went up to him and asked for mint chocolate. He gave it to me, double-scooped with a smile. I ate in front of Jarrold with a cutesy shyness, licking the neon-orange spoon like a kitten. I’d noticed him earlier and already knew his name but asked for it anyway, and introduced myself as Circe. Like most people, he stumbled on how to say it.

  Jarrold Koh. Jarrold Koh Kok Yang. J.K.K.Y. I still remember the solar haze that once gathered around his name when I thought about him. Back in 2006, JK had fashionably floppy hair and the carefree demeanor of a young man who believed he had everything ahead of him. Even better, my friend Aishah told me that Jarrold used to be severely overweight, but the rigors of National Service converted him into literally half the man he used to be. I really liked that. Later on, when he showed me pictures of his teenhood, he looked like an indistinct version of his current self. It had the effect of making him seem more tentative. At the time, how I admired his discipline, loved the idea that he had condensed himself so that he would occupy less space in the world. There was something poetic about that.

  Eleven years later, after our relationship had grown big and strong and placidly devoured our twenties, things simply collapsed. The evening that my husband broke down at me, we were stranded in City Hall, the station buzzing and agitated as a hive full of worker bees. Jarrold’s face was two wet eyes, an unremarkable nose, mouth formed into a downwards cashew shape.

  Crying emasculated him. I felt bad and backwards for thinking so, and this feeling bad didn’t redeem or negate my meanness, it worsened it.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I kept muttering under my breath. “It’s gonna be okay,” I said, though I didn’t mean it.

  Over time, unwittingly, I had come to perceive him as someone I worked with but didn’t know very well and would never consort with socially. Someone who “um”ed and “aah”ed, who apologized so incessantly that it was irritating. Every evening we talked over each other in circles and absolutes, casting desperate blame spells and generalizations like a blanket over a dying animal. By that point it was You ALWAYS do this and Why do you ALWAYS do that? Everything we did together was fraught and boring. I developed a newfound appreciation for walls and doors and the socially acceptable distraction of my device screens.

  Above us the announcement ticker kept on changing just a millisecond before I could focus on what it read. An impersonal voice called out that the northbound train was arriving in two minutes. When I looked up the air around Jarrold seemed to fizz with finality.

  “Sorry?” he said. “Wah lau. Don’t you have anything else to say? Is that all you’ve got? ‘Sorry?’ Ten years and that’s it?”

  Eleven years, I thought. I shook my head at him. I looked around at the aunties rushing to trains with their herds of kids and sloe-eyed young women texting as they walked and hair-gelled uncles and NS boys with their green caps and heavy rucksacks—everyone brimming with unremarkable purpose. How I envied their detachment. I shivered.

  “To be honest, I don’t know what else I can say, Jarrold,” I finally replied.

  It was all I could think of to respond, and even as I said it I thought of how the phrase “to be honest” has always seemed to me to draw attention to a default of dishonesty. We were standing on either side of a semicircular marble bench. Jarrold gulped and began to speak in a choked, testy voice that made me fidget with the fear of being overheard.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know I’m nothing special.” He kept on staring at me imploringly, trying to catch my eye. “I know you could get on the MRT right now or you could glance around the CBD and see ten other guys just like me.”

  He was right: by that point, in my dreams, he was always a shadow or a series of shadows, not even a real face to pin my frustration on.

  “Circe, are you even listening?” Jarrold asked. “Because you’re not being fair, or very nice to me. I’m no CEO, obviously, I’m no stock trader. I don’t have a lot of money or any special skills. I know that you don’t take my job very seriously—”

  “That’s not true—” I interrupted.

  “Wait, let me finish—”

  “I don’t know where you got that from,” I said. “You can’t just accuse me of things with no basis. I like that you work for Chan Brothers. It fulfills you. We’ve gotten some amazing travel discounts. I’ve never said I don’t take it seri—”

  “That’s not the point, Circe,” he said, and his face was all red.

  “What is the point, then?”

  “Look. I love you. And isn’t that somethi
ng? I care about us. I still think we can work. But it won’t happen if you don’t try as well.”

  I squirm internally at “love” and “us” and “we.” I didn’t know how to tell this husband-shaped human that I had been trying all my life and, at just thirty-one, I was sick of it. Standing there, in a split second I ran through our entire shared history: tentative first love at university, being coupled together, BBQs and potlucks with other couples, nobody discussing their sex lives openly, hand-holding as if life depended on it. Sentosa Beach. Triple dates to the cinema. Cell groups. Long-term safety. Short-term smugness at how sorry our shy single friends seemed. Applying for our HDB flat together. Tepid in-jokes. Culinary classes after work. Couples’ aikido. Packaged diving holidays. My aunts and uncles smiling benignly at me, looking hopefully towards my tummy. Spiralizers. Five-year schemes.

  No more of that. Even thinking about it now I feel squeezed. I knew I’d rather be alone than keep on pretending. Who my true self is, I’m not even sure.

  Maybe my sanctimonious brother Leslie is correct: I’m shallow and mean.

  *

  The following Monday morning I find a brown envelope on my desk at work. Made out just to Circe, handwritten in childish black Sharpie pen capitals, with no return address.

  “Did Miki put this on my desk?” I ask Irfan. Miki is the intern who sorts out the mail.

  “Dunno,” Irfan replies. “I just got in. Why. You got love letter?” His goofy smile offers a flash of his perfect teeth, and I’m reminded of the fact that he could be cute if he wasn’t so annoying.

  The envelope is padded with Bubble Wrap, extremely crinkled and roughly the size of a greetings card. I already know what to expect. It’s the stencils again, three this time. Made of dark-red crêpe paper, somewhat unevenly snipped at the edges, forming crude shapes: a wide-eyed rabbit, huddled sideways, a grinning monkey with soup-cup ears, a coiled snake with a raggedy crêpe tongue. I smooth out the crumples on the snake stencil. Its body curls through itself like a paper pretzel, ending in two lopsided eyes and a shred for a tongue. It reminds me of my tapeworm. I keep the paper-cutout Cestoda flattened out carefully by my scroll pad and put the other two stencils away in their envelope, back on my letter tray.

  I crack my knuckles and open up my emails. There’s a progress report from Koya, the marketing wunderkind in our Novena office. At the end of the document is an attachment. A younger version of the Amisa I knew pops up from the left of the screen, in a white dress with a high neck. It resembles a cheongsam collar. She looks like a wartime ghost, haunting and haunted. She has one hand held up against her throat and she stares coyly over her right shoulder towards the camera, lips pursed into a line with a slight, forced curve. She could be Madame White Snake, or a fox spirit, a forlorn liar, a trickster.

  Beside her is a better-quality, practically luminous photo of the new Pontianak. Ponti 2020. The studio has just cast a Eurasian model/influencer/singer named Eunice Prinze after online scouting and two rounds of auditions. She’s adopting the same pose as Amisa but she is zero ghost and 100 percent tastefully sexy woman. Gaze towards the camera, hand resting on throat. Artful cleavage. Mouth slightly parted. Eunice has really built a profile over the past couple of months. I’ve seen her pulling her sleek chestnut ponytail and winking from the cover of Cleo magazine—grinning like a healthful sunbeam in a probiotic yogurt ad on TV. She is half Indochinese, a quarter Dutch, a quarter Polish, and has that wide-eyed, ethnically ambiguous (mostly European) look that we know will make her massively salable internationally. Someone like Amisa would never get anything beyond the bit part of a dim sum waitress now; she looks too Chinese and too foreboding, and that’s how it is.

  But Eunice is familiar yet exotic: white enough to fit in, desirably foreign enough to stand out. Nineteen and gorgeous and invincible. I click on the link and watch Eunice’s mini showreel. She’s even prettier in motion. Some girls (Category A) have a warm, inviting beauty; others (Category B) possess the sort that shuts other women out and makes them regret their spells of comfort snacking. Eunice is beautiful in an infuriatingly endearing way that makes you think, What a nice, chill girl, too lovely to hate. Let’s call her the rarest hybrid, Category C. Marketing gold. Queen of Buyable Hope. Conqueror of multiple demographics. Her voice is a dulcet, transatlantic drawl that dips in and out of reality-star vocal fry. She has that whole long-limbed, languid Bambi thing going.

  “What do you think?” Jeanette asks. I turn around. She is standing behind my chair, holding a coffee and wearing some kind of jumpsuit that would not look out of place in a Bond movie. Definitely Category B. I shrug at her.

  “Yeah, she looks good, I guess. Very slick promo image. I thought they wanted lo-fi? I prefer the original actress.”

  “Hmm,” Jeanette says, tilting her head slightly at the screen. “You like the old one, ah? She passed away. Nothing we can do. Unless she has a daughter who looks just like her.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” I agree, to quell the jagged alarm I feel.

  Amisa’s funeral: seventeen years ago, in August. Just before the Hungry Ghost Festival. I attended all three days of the wake. It felt everlasting, those humid strip-lit nights full of muted strangers and Szu beckoning me over, pale and clingy and desolate.

  “Anyway,” Jeanette continues, “I think they meant lo-fi in an edgy way. Says so in the brief.”

  “I know, but she looks like . . . superhero-movie slick.”

  “Well, that goes with Leow’s rewrite. You know, the redemption story arc. He wants to make it arty but all action. Like Wong Kar Wai mixed with Quentin Tarantino.”

  “Wow. Good luck to him.”

  In the original Ponti!, which I finally watched recently, the monster has no redemption. She never says sorry. Not over her dead body. She wreaks havoc until the bitter end. After the hero hammers a nail into her head, she wails and screams and refuses to transform into a docile wifeling. Instead, the earth rises up and a big banana tree engulfs her with a violent rumble, a caterwaul of rushing earth. It’s left ambiguous whether she is vanquished or has merely found a way to escape from the good witch doctor, the hero, and the brave villagers.

  “I mean, her look is completely off-brand,” I say, peering at the screen. “This new girl’s not even scary.”

  “If you watched the original trilogy carefully,” Jeanette says pointedly, “it’s not meant to be scary. It’s B-horror, sexy entertainment. Besides, it’s a reboot, not a shot-by-shot remake. So.”

  “Thanks for explaining, Jeanette. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem. Anyway, Eunice Prinze has enough social media followers for a small kingdom. She’s a real influencer. That counts for more than being scary.”

  “Hm. Okay.”

  I swivel my chair and turn back to my screen. After a minute I get up. In the office pantry I put the kettle on and lean against the counter. I take tiny sips of green tea. Everyone and everything gets old and outdated in time. One day the shitty corporate mug I’m holding will be somebody’s antique, and design plans of construction cranes will be displayed in robot museums. People will no longer need to speak. We will swipe and intuit everything. And I’ll be long dead and gone, just like Amisa Tan.

  After a minute or two I walk back to my desk. My monitor screen momentarily startles me. From a short distance away it’s like one of those freaky optical illusions—no matter where I’m standing, the eyes of the outdated woman on the left seem to follow me.

  17

  SZU

  2003

  It is the second day of the wake and I have spent the last few hours, as the sky begins to darken, greeting the steady stream of guests. Right now I’m sitting in a plastic chair on the veranda, spacing out so much that my eyes are going blurry. The yellowed ceiling fan swivels in place with slow precariousness.

  I take a break and go to the kitchen to gawp at the open fridge. A tub of tofu has split and drooled brine onto a huddle of cloud ear mushrooms on the shelf below. Disgusting: al
l these dead plants, dead meat. I don’t want any of it inside me. I get a rag to wipe up the mess. As I wring it clean under the tap my aunt calls for me.

  “Your friend is here,” she says.

  Circe pokes her head around the kitchen door frame.

  “Hi.”

  “Oh, hey,” I reply.

  “Thought I’d come by to see how you were doing,” Circe says. “Have you smelt the haze?”

  “Smoky.”

  “I’m choking to death.”

  We wander out to the driveway. Aunt Yunxi is sitting by the side of the coffin speaking in low, hushed tones to a sobbing woman with a cropped haircut. It is Lian Ying, one of my mother’s long-term clients, who was crying dramatically yesterday too. We take a seat on two plastic chairs just out of earshot.

  “That weirdo is here two nights in a row!” Circe says. “Who even is she?”

  “It’s your second night here too,” I reply, and instantly regret my bluntness. I hate the doglike apology in my smile, my aching cheeks.

  “What’s your problem? I can go if you want,” Circe says, unsmiling.

  “No, sorry,” I say. “Don’t go.”

  “Fine,” says Circe. She sounds pleased.

  “I wish I never had to go back to school,” I say, to change the topic.

  “You’ll get over it,” she replies. She is still watching Aunt Yunxi and the attention-seeking crier. “Oh,” she adds, “Leslie says you’re pleasant.”

  “Thanks,” I reply. My cheeks heat up both with the awkward placement of that comment and also how vague it is. What does “pleasant” mean? Scenery is pleasant. The scented hand towels you get in seafood restaurants are pleasant.

  I glance over at Circe’s cheek and the tips of her eyelashes as she blinks. She turns back towards me and just as she’s about to speak her focus shifts over my shoulder. I follow her stare. A willowy young woman is coming up the driveway. She wears a black maxi dress and clog sandals that buckle around the tops of her slim feet. Her wooden soles go clop-clop on the cement. She comes over to where Circe and I are sitting to pick up a piece of red thread from the pile beside us.