“You’re crying,” I sighed. “You’re crying again.”
“Yes, I know I am! Why do you keep doing this to me?”
I looked away, looked at steam rising from the spout of a small clay teapot, looked at clear water bubbling in a Pyrex pot over a stove, looked at the blue flame.
“Is this what you like to see? A 50 year old man? Looking like this?”
“No.”
“Then why?” He reached out to touch my forearm, which was resting on the table. He had well-manicured nails, and rings on his fingers. I shrank away, but not forcefully, in disgust. Mechanically, like it was a reflex.
He blinked, and knitted his brow. I looked at a rice paper scroll of Chinese calligraphy and imagined his tears smearing it, forming runny streaks. I imagined myself swallowing the tea although it tasted like seawater. I remembered those tears when I kissed his face and he told me how happy he was, in a voice so soft it was like a girlish whisper.
“I paged you at least ten times, but you never returned any of them.” His voice was low, the way people’s voices were when they want to convince themselves that they are talking with reason and not emotion.
“I was busy.”
“Busy with what? Busy with whom?”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what? What is wrong?”
“Stop asking me these questions,” I finally said. I said it softer the second time, although it wasn’t so harsh the first time round. “Just stop asking me these questions. I’m tired.”
“You’re 18! What is there to be tired about? I’ll take care of you. What are you tired of?”
“You,” I told him, looking away, to the window where drops of rain had gathered. “You’re making me tired.” There should have been a certain sense of triumph in the way I said it, as if it was something I had been meaning to say for a long time. But when it came out it sounded so truthful that there was no way I could have intended it to hurt.* * *I remembered the first time it happened. He was my father’s friend. He came over to our house one day and he caught me looking out from my room. The next week he told me to stop calling him ‘uncle’. The week after he touched my thigh while we were driving down Changi Road in his Mercedes. He had picked me up from school earlier in the evening. I had closed my eyes and let him.
“What is this music playing now?” I had asked him.
“You like it? It’s Mahler. Gustav Mahler.” He inched his hand to the inside of my thighs. I didn’t move.
“I don’t listen to classical.”
“You should,” he said, his voice a little unsteady. “You should because,” his hand was working on my zip now, “you should, because classical music is good.”
My eyes were still shut and in my mind I could see the street lamps that stretched and sloped ahead, a million birthday candles I could puff out the moment I lifted my eyelids. When I did just that we were in a car park under a rain tree, and he was crying.
“I didn’t mean to,” he sobbed. “I’ll drive you home.”
“No, it’s all right,” I told him.
“I’m an old man,” he said, looking at me only from his rear view mirror. “Most of my friends, they’re married, they have kids. One of them is seeing his son graduate next week. I eat out a lot. I don’t have holiday photographs, I don’t have cards done in crayons, I’ve got this king size bed, cost me a lot, but you know what? It’s got only one pillow.”
“Why didn’t you get married?”
He turned on the headlamps and illuminated the tree that stood in front of us. Then, he turned it on brighter and I could almost see the ants scurrying on the forlorn bark of the tree. Finally he turned it off and the tree fell back into shadows. He frowned, as if wondering what that show of light was all about.
“Some things just don’t happen. Some things don’t work out like they should. When you get to my age you’ll know.”
“I think I already know.” I ran a finger against the edge of the dashboard and wiped it from side to side, as if I were erasing a name.
“I have a lot of money,” he said, his eyes glued to the mirror. “But nobody to spend it on. I open my bank book and I see so many zeros. You know, sometimes I watch these commercials and I actually dial in. I think it’s what happens when you think you have too much money. I’ve bought myself an Abdomenizer, a kitchen helper that’s supposed to turn cucumber slices into flowers, a treadmill, a tube of white stuff that gets rid of every stain. It’s amazing, the things you can buy. And last week I bought this tray, you can put frozen food on it and it melts fast. I tried it, I put an ice cube on it and it turned to water in three minutes flat.”
“That’s nice,” I said, not really knowing what to say, “it really does that?”
“Yeah. But you know, spending on yourself isn’t the same as spending on someone else. I’d love to go buy things for people, things they’d appreciate.” He paused for a while. “I’m an old man.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
His apartment was well-kept, clean, uncluttered. If he wanted to move I guess he could have packed everything into five boxes. He was right about his bed; there was only one pillow on it. At least he wasn’t a liar, I thought, before I let him melt in my arms, his face gently nudging, his fingers moving around the trunk of my body, like someone clawing at shadows. I kept thinking of the tree in the car park, and
