My Other Life (16 page)

I felt all that tonight too. I lay on the sofa, under the croaking fan, hating the bus fumes, thinking about his pink face, his wealth, a man not used to being the least bit impressed; incredibly, my talk of poetry—of all things—had done the trick. I had the strong sense that having met that man Lazard, something in my life was about to change.

Harry Lazard called me the next day and invited me for lunch. When I told him truthfully that my car was being fixed, he seemed pleased. "Don't take a taxi!" He sent his car for me, a Daimler with a Malay driver who called me
Tuan,
Master. I sat in the back, enjoying the cool, silent trip down Orchard Road, turning at Tang's, past the Strand and the Goodwood. Seen from inside an air-conditioned Daimler, Singapore seemed not just bearable but quaint and attractive. This was the city I had imagined before I had come here.

Ahmed, white gloves on the wheel, made a wide turn into the Tanglin Club. After two years in Singapore I was setting foot in the Tanglin Club for the first time; in less than a year, Harry Lazard had become a member. He had been waiting in the lobby and was telling me this as we made our way to the members' dining room.

Passing a photographic portrait of Winston Churchill, Lazard said loudly, "His mother was an American, you know."

At the table he explained that he enjoyed saying that about Churchill in front of the British members of the club. I noticed Lazard had hairy ears. He refused a menu; he told the waiter that he knew what was on it. He ordered the daily special: roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. Feeling overwhelmed, I ordered the same.

Lazard began belittling the food as soon as it was served, which made it hard for me to swallow.

"You must come over to my house sometime for a meal," he said. "It's a funny story. My wife and I had a great meal at Chez Michel. I asked to see the chef, and when he came to our table I asked him how much he was earning. He was Chinese. It wasn't much. I said I'd double his salary if he worked for me. He learned his cooking from a Cordon Bleu cook in Saigon. He's mine now."

It impressed me, his stepping up and hiring someone, just like that.

"It was only a matter of money," Lazard said. "It usually is. Most people are underpaid in Singapore. That's the great thing about this place. They don't know how good they are. You can eat the best food in the world here."

His Singapore was air-conditioned and pleasant. Mine was hot and crowded. His had the Tanglin Club, the golfers and polo players; mine had the University Staff Club, full of complainers. His was the Singapore of great cuisine; mine was the Singapore of fried noodles and amah's soy sauce. He was happy, I was impatient. I had no telephone, I took the bus, I swam in the Singapore River, I bought ganja from trishaw drivers. I knew my Singapore was the past and that my days were numbered.

"Do you realize how clean it is here, how orderly, and how rare a thing that is?"

I said, "They flog people for petty offenses. They have press censorship. They're very hard on my students. Recently the government took all their scholarships away because studying English literature isn't part of nation-building. That was the expression. The government wants economists and scientists. Poetry's an aberration."

"Why don't you quit your job?"

"I need the money," I said, and almost choked. "If something better came along, I'd jump."

"I'm very divided on Singapore," Lazard said, and I was glad he did not question me further about quitting. "I'm a chemical engineer by training. My firm makes and sells chemicals, as well as electronics."

"I'm surprised you're not foursquare for the Singapore government, then."

"I'm also on the side of the poets," he said.

"They're burying the old Singapore. It will be gone soon. That's why I'm writing a novel about it. I want to write about the shop houses and the harbor and the hookers and Bugis Street and the trishaws while you can still hear their jingling bells. "

"And does your main character teach at the university?"

"No. He's a ship chandler's water clerk," I said. "They'll all be buried soon, too."

"What a wonderful idea," Lazard said.

"A novel is among other things a social history."

"All writing is, I guess."

"Sure. Poems, too. If you read a poem about a train in England, it will be pulled by a steam locomotive. But there are no more engines like that left. Poetry hasn't caught up."

"A poetry reader," Lazard said, and unzipped his briefcase with the kind of impatience that showed he had been planning this. He pulled out a thick, book-shaped magazine and showed me.
Metro Quarterly—A Journal of the Arts.
He hefted it and it opened almost by itself to the page he wanted, where a short poem was printed. I took the entire poem in at a glance:
Gorgeously, the fish fits its fins to the foam and controls the spin of its body over rock.
It was signed
Harold Lazard.

"Tell me frankly what you think of it. Be brutal."

"It's very good. I like its simplicity."

He smiled. He seemed not to believe me, but I insisted.

"And obviously the editor agrees with me."

He smiled again. He was a big man, with big hairy fingers and heavy arms. It was hard to imagine these fingers holding a pen, writing a poem, seated at a desk.

Perhaps my staring at his meaty hands made him self-conscious. He said, "Yes, I'm a published poet."

Over coffee he said, "How much do you earn?"

"Fourteen hundred a month."

"That's pretty fair," he said.

"I can barely run a car. My wife has to work to pay off our overdraft."

"But that's an American salary."

"No. Those are Singapore dollars."

Little spasms—of pain, of incredulity, almost of mockery—set his face in motion, rippled without settling, lighting separate features, and overlapping his expressions. His eyes were frozen, a calculation going on behind them. He was thinking:
Fifty bucks a week!

"Drink up," he said. "I want to show you something."

"This is where I live," he said as Ahmed turned into a gateway in a high wall off Holland Road; but all I saw alongside the driveway were palms, and a lawn, and flower beds. It was not until we had traveled for some distance that I saw the house, which was enormous, with a green tile roof and white stucco that was brilliant in the sunshine. This whole estate was hidden by the wall, and once inside the wall it was not possible to see outside—Singapore was just its steamy sky.

Big as it was, the house was a detail, and so were the lawns and flower beds. Even the swimming pool and the arbor and trellis arches around it, even the waterfall and the stream, the marble statues, the pillars, the other buildings, were mere details. Beyond the flower beds were bushes and flowering shrubs and trees, not single specimens but a forest of them, jungle foliage of blackish green, so dense and with such a thick canopy of boughs there was darkness under it.

Near the pool, pale as marble, what I took to be another statue was a woman whom Lazard roused with a shout.

"Fayette—over here!"

The woman frowned at him as though irritated, then saw me, and seemed to count to ten before she smiled and sat up.

"This is Paul Theroux," he said, "the fellow I was telling you about."

She did not move. She watched us walk nearer, waiting with a kind of queenly restraint while we circled the pool, making us do all the work. All the while she was dangling something from her finger, moving it like a pendulum.

"You have a lovely place here," I said. And added, coyly trying to compliment her, "It must be an awful lot of work."

"It's no work at all." The pendulum was green, a carved piece of luminous jade on a gold chain.

"I meant all the landscaping."

"We have four gardeners." She smiled and swung the piece of jade.

She was a bony, attractive, sharp-featured woman, quite a bit younger than Harry, probably in her forties, blond, with pinched gristly nostrils that might have been the result of a botched nose job, freshly reddened lips, perfect teeth, and very pale skin, slack at her arms. Here she was outside by the pool, yet she obviously spent no time at all in the sunshine. And her pallor, which was almost that of ill health, set off her jewels—earrings, bracelets, necklace—and gave her a languorous sensuality.

She said, "Isn't Singapore marvelous?"

Again I thought how these people, just across the island from me and behind a wall, lived in a different Singapore. I liked traveling to this country; I wanted badly to live in it. The flowers, the trees, the temperature, even the air was different here.

"Will you have something to drink?" Harry said.

"I don't want to impose," I said.

Holding the piece of jade to the side, Fayette jammed the heel of her free hand against a push button. In that same instant I heard a servant's squawk; then I saw him, a Chinese man in white jacket and pants, carrying a tray, emerging from the far end of the arbor.

"What do you have?"

"Anything you want," the woman said.

"Orange juice will be fine," I said.

"It's real fresh. Mr. Loy squeezes it himself," Harry said. After the servant had gone for the drinks, Harry Lazard said, "There is something I'd like to ask you, Paul."

But before he could continue, Fayette let out a sharp cry of pain that startled me, and when I turned she was on her knees by the side of the pool.

"It jumped off my finger," she said, peering into the pool. "I can't even see it. Oh, God!"

Harry looked suddenly stricken and helpless, and he tottered as though his indecision made him physically unsteady.

"Harry can't swim," Fayette said with surprising satisfaction.

"I'll get it. I just need a bathing suit," I said.

"In the changing room."

Most of the spare bathing suits were large, making me think that everyone they knew was fat and prosperous; we were all skinny and pathetic in my end of Singapore. Even the smallest suit was big on me, but I cinched it and jumped into the pool, did a surface dive and saw the jade pendant glittering at the bottom in about ten feet of water. I missed it on my first try, but got it on my next dive. Now I saw how bright it was, emerald green, and intricately carved.

"My hero," Fayette said distractedly, and snatched at the jade piece without looking at me.

"That thing's worth a lot of money," Harry said.

"What is it?"

"It's a child's burial mask, and that's the rarest jade obtainable."

"Did you get it in Singapore?"

"Long story."

Fayette had turned her face on him, as though dreading the story and daring him to tell it.

Harry said, "Listen, I've got a job for you."

After he explained, I said, "I'll ask my wife."

"He needs permission," Fayette said, caressing the elegant mask of jade.

He had said, "You're going to think I'm nuts," and I had had to encourage him to continue, and he went on, "I want you to give me poetry lessons," and, "You already passed the hardest test—my wife likes you." I wanted to tell him that it was the craziest thing I had ever heard. But I made a serious face and reassured him that it was a perfectly normal request.

I told Alison everything. One of the clearest indicators of being hard up is that every decision is crucial. You have no cushion, and so everything you do involves risk.

"The woman sounds awful," Alison said, "but the man seems fine—idealistic in a strange sort of way. Poetry lessons!"

"They're what I give my students," I said. "At least I'd be well paid."

"Americans are so funny. You're always trying to improve yourselves."

"Why shouldn't this guy learn to write poetry?"

"I didn't mean him. I meant you. That salary turned your head."

"You could give up teaching night school."

"That's fine with me," she said, and she laughed again, in puzzlement. "Here is this man with pots of money, and instead of sitting around and enjoying himself he wants someone to teach him how to write poems. Doesn't he know any better?"

"But you said he was idealistic."

"I think I meant naive. The idea that you can teach him that!"

"He seems to think I can, that's all that matters," I said. "It's very civilized of him!"

We looked at each other and laughed at my pompousness and hugged each other.

I kissed her and said, "I want to tell them to shove this job."

"It's nice, burning bridges," Alison said. She wrinkled her nose, she made a face, she laughed, and I loved her for her bravery.

I saw Harry Lazard again and we drew up a satisfactory agreement: I would tutor him on weekdays in return for a rent-free house and a hundred U.S. dollars a week. It would be for six months initially, but renewable. We already had our air tickets home. When I told the head of my department I was resigning, he shrugged. Half Chinese, half Indian, he was a former tax inspector named Ratnaswami, known behind his back as the Rat.

"We weren't planning to renew your contract, so it's just as well," he said. He grinned his awful stained-tooth grin. "We have someone else in the pipeline."

I hated him for that, but I hated myself, too. Why had I stayed at this badly paying job so long? The answer was that until now I could not afford to leave.

We pensioned off the two amahs, packed our belongings—everything we owned fit into our old car—and drove across the island to Holland Road and found Lazards wall. Alison's reaction was the same as mine had been—that this house and all its acres and its pool and its forest were so well hidden that Singapore seemed far away. Once you were behind the wall you were in a different place, which could have been a different country. It was quiet, it was hot, it was lush. For those differences alone it was worth making the move. And if I was to achieve anything as a writer, I needed to have the strength to quit a job, to move on and make my own life.

We were met by Mr. Loy, the Chinese servant. The Lazards were away, he said. He showed us to the guest house, where we installed ourselves, and before we had unpacked anything the children were out of the house, on the verandah and across the lawn.