However, in his head Robert still kept the sound of his wife weeping in the living room. He heard the abrasive sounds of tissue being ripped out of its box, two or three at a time, raging fistfuls, like gauze from a sticky yellow wound. He had asked himself how anyone could cry so much. The next morning when Robert woke up (after deciding against leaving with his packed suitcase; he didn’t want to knock at someone’s door in the middle of the night and cause trouble), he found that his wife was gone. She left behind her tissue papers, each one crumpled like a carnation from a wake. Robert sometimes wondered if that memory of his wife wailing in the dark, and that dismantled garland of grief littered on the table and carpet, was a new kind of tumour.
On Sunday nights, Robert would go to a club where most people were younger than him (or so he believed). Some of them wore eye shadow, and yet some carried what looked like handbags, but with straps to wear on their backs. Then there were those with chests so big they looked like fossilised pillows. When Robert looked at them, he was scared and thrilled at the same time. He imagined what it was like to have those pectorals, how soft or hard they were. Robert believed that they were firm, like breastplates, but he recalled that when he saw his muscular neighbour jogging bare-bodied across the front of his house, he caught them shaking like soft flesh. Robert wondered if it would be possible to pay someone during the night just to let him touch his chest, to see how it would yield to Robert’s curious, probing fingers. He would do it not like the way one would press fish in the market but with the same tenderness in which he would soothe a headache at the temples.
Robert would sit in his car first, watching the queue and waiting for it to shorten as the night wore on. He didn’t want to be part of the queue. For one thing, he was not dressed properly. He didn’t have a tight top on, his hair wasn’t gelled in lethal spikes and he didn’t have a cigarette as an accessory. To Robert, this was how he saw the boys in the queue, and sometimes, he even caught some of them throwing glances at him. He liked to imagine that they were looking at him inside the car, although it was pitch dark, rather than at his Rover. The Rover he had managed to secure, whereas his wife got the house. At the moment, Robert was living in an apartment in Holland Village but it was only a temporary arrangement. He was simply caretaker there until his friend, Wan Tung (the one who had told him to taste the fresh air, and who often nagged like a broken recorder that “closets are for mothballs”), came back from a holiday in Australia where he had gone to ‘observe’ the Sydney Mardi Gras.
At about 12 midnight, Robert, finally tired of the deejay babbling inanities on the car radio, walked out of his car. He fingered into his wallet and fished out 15 dollars at the door, glancing away from the bouncers and offering his hand to be stamped.
One of them was telling a joke to the other and they were both laughing. The bouncer who stamped Robert’s hand held his wrist clinically, as if Robert was about to donate blood. When Robert looked at the bouncer, he smiled and said, “Enjoy yourself.” He was bald, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone. His teeth were large enough to inscribe letters on them, like a billboard on a game show.
It was his fourth time at the club, and still Robert did not know how to make an entrance. He felt the music blast into his face like the rush from an oven. The thumping bassline invaded his stomach. Robert took a deep breath and walked up the steps that led into the club, and he placed his hands in his pockets to check if his car keys were still with him, although he knew that it was just an excuse to hide them. He had no idea what to do with his hands. To hold on to the handrails was something too childish for him, and he did not believe he had the rhythm to swing them by his sides without any selfconsciousness.
As Robert looked around him he was again filled with wonder. He had never seen so many beautiful men before. Where did they come from? What did they do in the day? Robert walked around, still with his hands in his pockets, and was disappointed to find that his usual spot had been occupied by a group of teenagers. There were four of them, coolly surveying their surroundings. Two of them were smoking, and when one wanted to light his cigarette he would turn towards his friend and let his friend’s lit cigarette end touch his like a godly fingernail.
Robert remembered a movie he had watched a long time ago, when a glowing finger touched a human one, and a cut was healed. It was a date movie, and Robert smiled as he recalled the elbow graze, the shoulders leaning against each other, and then two hands suddenly finding grooves in each other. He remembered the long hair and his cheek pressing into it, strumming like fingers against a broken harp, and not understanding any of it. But at the present moment he could not remember the name of the movie, nor the subsequent wedding, even trivial details like how many tiers there were on the cake. And he forced himself not to remember her name, because he would have to shut
