In life, Mother Nature loves creating
things in pairs. Night and day. Sonny and Cher. Singaporean casinos. Assorted
bodily parts like nostrils, eyes, ears, hands, legs…American Idol grand finale
sing-offs. It’s a long list, but Mother Nature loves her yin and yang. For
better or worse, the scales must be balanced. And lately, it seems to me that
the natural pairing du jour is
marriage and divorce.
News recently reached the little apartment
I share with Saffy and Amanda that our friend Jonathan had just separated from
his wife, Trisha.
“He’s so, so heartbroken!” Amanda reported
the other day as soon as she’d put down the phone from her friend Ting in
Bangkok where Jonathan and Trisha were based.
I was floored. “But they just got married!”
I bleated. “Like last April!”
“Which is a lifetime,” said Saffy, who grew
up in the Age of Britney. She shook her head with sadness and even her fabled
bosom seemed a little deflated.
“Last April,” I repeated. “We were there!
And it was such a nice wedding!”
“Apparently, it wasn’t nice enough,” said
Saffy.
Jonathan had worked in my old law firm Ong,
Wu and Yi where Trisha was the HR manager, a post she’d taken over from Saffy. According
to Sharyn who still worked in the firm and witnessed everything at close range,
it was like being part of a Bollywood movie. From the start, it was a match
made in heaven. Both were tall, attractive and intelligent. We called them the
Supermodels and secretly envied their blinding white teeth and dazzling smiles.
Both came from old family money, drove around in matching Mercedes convertibles
and took holidays in the Maldives. As Sharyn once penetratingly pointed out,
“Wah liau, where got people like this one? Hor?”
So when the engagement was announced, no
one was in the least bit surprised, though Amanda was a little miffed that
Jonathan had never asked her out on a date. “I could have given Trisha a run
for her money!” she whispered to me at the Bangkok wedding dinner.
I remember Saffy leaned over and murmured,
“Is it wrong that I find Trisha incredibly sexy in that Vera Wang shift?”
Amanda and I turned our head to stare wordlessly at Saffy.
From Amanda’s side, Barney Chen rumbled,
“Girl, let’s divide and conquer! You take Trisha and I’ll take Jonathan! I’m sure he’s in the closet!”
“You think everyone is in the closet!” I
said.
“I’m seen the way he looks at me!” Barney
insisted.
Amanda moaned that our conversation was
such bad karma, while I took another sip of my club soda and wondered how long we had to wait before the boring speeches were over and we got to the good bits, ie, the cake.
And now, barely a year later, through the
reliable Bangkok/Singapore grapevine, came news of the impending divorce.
Sharyn was astonished when we told her.
“Hah?” she yelped, her eyes rotating wildly behind her thick Coke-bottle
glasses. “But just got married how can now sar-dun-ly get die-vorced, one?”
Barney was triumphant. “I told you! He’s coming out! But no one
ever listens to me!”
Karl was upbeat about the whole thing. “The
good news is that people who look like that never stay single for long. You
watch, they’ll be hooked up with another partner before the ink dries on the
divorce papers. You know,” he added, “Trisha and I once dated before I met
Marsha.”
Barney rolled his eyes. “If you trot out
that stupid story one more time, I swear I’ll strangle you myself! And it won’t
be in a good way, either,” he added. Later, he told Saffy that he was sure Karl was in the closet. Saffy,
who’d also grown up in the Age of Trashy Magazines, said she wouldn’t be in the
least bit surprised. As she observed, “All the good ones usually are.”
Meanwhile, Trisha passed through Singapore.
“I’m looking for a job,” she told Sharyn. “Jonathan and I are just taking a
small break. We need some time to sort out some issues, but we’re not getting
divorced.”
“Really, ah?” said Sharyn. “Good, lah! If
die-vorce, hor, very sad, leh.”
Amanda wrinkled her nose when she heard the
latest through a series of SMS’s that passed between Sharyn, Saffy and Barney.
“I just wish they’d get it over and done with. It’s so pointless dragging out a
marriage that is obviously going
nowhere.”
I looked at Amanda’s innocent face. “You
want to date him, don’t you?” She suddenly became absorbed with her cuticles. Saffy’s
last word on the matter came last night. “I want a refund of my $180 wedding ang-pao
plus the return air-ticket to HK!”
“I also say,” said Amanda, still trying to
pretend that was all she cared about.
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