My Other Life (15 page)

Except for official bashes at the embassies, especially the American embassy, no one I knew gave parties; no one was sociable. Quite the opposite. People prided themselves on being loners and bad-tempered drunks. They thrived on chaos, and when they were drinking they told stories of the last time they had been drunk and what a mess they had made. If a stranger walked into the Staff Club, the regulars were generally rude to him—or her. Being awful to someone to his face without flinching, while he was kept one humiliating beat behind, was regarded as an art, and it was better if the victim was a woman. "He's a rat bag," people said admiringly of the torturer. Hearing that in the Staff Club, I was reminded of how much I hated the place and pitied these people, and how badly I wanted to resign and go away.

But I needed my job, and so I stayed and I listened to my colleagues in the Staff Club whisper about each other and tell the same terrible jokes and complain of the heat, or the rain, depending on the time of year. People didn't give parties unless they were leaving Singapore for good. And when they left there was a sourness in the air, mingled jealousy and resentment for the ones who were getting out. Afterwards we toasted "absent friends," talked about them constantly, and it was hard to tell whether they were being ridiculed or envied. The other expatriates were older and English and had no idea how I wanted to be self-sufficient as a writer. I knew I could not afford to quit, and so I had my hands full with my teaching at the university English department, my writing, and my family.

A year went by, then another. Now it was 1970 and I was still on the lowest salary scale, still a lecturer in English, still teaching the course called Shakespeare's Contemporaries, still working on my novel. Africa had cured me of poetry. Fiction writing seemed to offer a hope of financial self-sufficiency. That was what I told myself, but I knew my soul was possessed; I needed to turn what I saw into fiction, to give it light and shape. I had published two novels. Ripples still widened from where they sank; they had received respectful reviews.

And I had more to write—my head was full of plots and pronouncements, characters' names. I wrote each morning between seven and ten, lectured at eleven, had lunch, held tutorials in the afternoon, drank from five to seven, and then went home to my family. It was a strange and selfish existence, but it was what the other men did, the English, the Indians, the Chinese. Although we were just scraping by, we had two servants. Such was life in Singapore.

We lived, the four of us and our two amahs, Ah Chang and Ah Ho, in a hot semidetached house of mildewed plaster so near to Bukit Timah Road that the place always smelled of exhaust fumes and all day and night we could hear the gasping and plowing of the buses. Just across Bukit Timah, in a walled compound, was Serene House, a private hotel that catered exclusively to soldiers on R and R from Vietnam—enlisted men. The officers stayed several blocks away at the Shelford. Serene House was a glorified brothel which was one of Singapore's secrets—open only to the military and to prostitutes. Even the police stayed away. It was run with the connivance of the United States and the Singapore governments, a supervised whorehouse. The Shelford had a better class of prostitute and a forbidding fence. I knew the Serene House gatekeeper, a Tamil Indian named Sathyamurthy, and so I often dropped in for a drink on my way home from my lecturing at the university.

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.

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 expression 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.