Heart Burn

For years, our friend Jean has been having an affair with a married man. According to her, it’s been the perfect arrangement.

            “Oh? How so?” Amanda once asked. In the world according to Amanda, life’s too short to be wasting it on second-hand anything, and that includes men.

            Jean delicately adjusted the ruffles on her Miu Miu blouse before answering. “Well, for starters, I don’t have to deal with him 24/7. I get the best bits of him. Because we see each other so infrequently, there’s no drama. I don’t have to nag him to not leave his clothes around, or brush his hair. We don’t squabble over bills and children like other married couples.”

            A small crease formed over Amanda’s forehead. “But, don’t you want to get married?”

            Jean laughed. “Are you kidding? I am such a commitment-phobe!”

            “But you’re kind of committed to him now, aren’t you? You’re not seeing anyone else…”

            “Yes, but I can also get rid of him when I get bored.”

            For her part, Saffy has never understood the whole situation, though her point has less to do with the practicality of the affair and more to do with Gerald himself. The first time she spotted them together in Parkway Parade, she speed-dialled Amanda.

            “Oh. My. God. That’s Gerald?” she breathed heavily into her phone.

            “Why, what’s wrong with him?”

            “Well, for starters, he’s twice her size and half her height! And he’s bald!” Saffy added, as if this were a crucial fact.

            “Apparently, he’s amazing in bed!” Amanda said.

            “He’d better be, because he’s also cross-eyed! Here, I just snapped a picture. I’m sending it to you now!”

            Much later, Sharyn said Saffy had missed her calling in life. “Ay, why you waste time in HR, hah? You become private eye, better! Wah, so daring, anyhow take udder people picture!”

            “I really don’t see the attraction,” Amanda said, passing Sharyn her phone with the picture of Gerald and Jean.

            Sharyn squinted at the screen. “Is OK, what? He not Richard Gere, lah, but then, hor, Richard Gere oh-so don want Jean, ah, I tell you!”

            “I’m so glad I’m not your enemy, Shazz,” Saffy told Sharyn, who turned a bright pink.

            The break-up, when it came, took place over the Sunday champagne brunch at the Ritz-Carlton. According to well-placed sources – ie, Missy Chan, Jean’s second best friend, who happened to be sitting three tables away – Jean let out a little scream, stood up, and tossed a glass of Louis Roederer Brut into Gerald’s face, and stormed off in a cloud of black Prada.

            “Very drama!” Missy confirmed in her best Katong Convent accent the next day over coffee with Saffy and Amanda. “The best part was that Gerald just continued to sit there and finish his plate of prawns! Such incredible poise! I can see what the attraction was, now.”

            For her part, Saffy has been spending long nights at Jean’s. “She alternates between raging fits and crying,” she reported after the first night.

            On Facebook, Jean has posted cryptic messages like “Never trust anyone with anything precious!” and “Stabbed in the front, and yet, I’m not surprised!!!”

            Of course, this has invited floods of responses, mostly ranging from “Hope everything is ok, babes!” to “Oh, no! What happened?!”

            “I wonder how she thought all this was going to end,” Amanda mused, her long tapered fingers scrolling through Jean’s feed. “I mean, it’s not as if he was ever going to leave his wife.”
            “Why, ah?” Sharyn asked innocently.

            “She is the daughter of - ,” and here, Amanda mentioned the name of a prominent Chinese steel tycoon.

            Sharyn’s eyes bugged. “Oh, issit? Wah, she know or not her husband got affair with Jean all dis time?”

            “She’s been having an affair with a musician!” Amanda said, all her years of prowling the gossip channels of Weibo and WeChat finally paying off.

            “Aiyoh, liddat why dey want to marry?”

            It’s a question that has haunted the girls.

            “That’s something the wedding magazines never talk about,” Saffy observed darkly. “It’s all marzipan wedding cake and Swarovski-speckled tulle, but no one ever talks about the affair and the heartache.”

            “Maybe someone should do a magazine and call it ‘Divorce’!” Amanda said.

            Saffy says it’s a genius idea. “We can get Jean to write a regular column on affairs. It’ll sell like hot cakes!”

            Ever practical, Sharyn wonders who the advertisers would be. “Confirm cannot get Lo-lex for back cover, one! Then, how?”

            

The Hours

“Have you ever wondered what it’s all about about, Alfie?”

            I looked up from ‘A Clash of Kings’ and looked at Saffy. Then I looked around the MRT train to City Hall. Everyone was either on a phone or staring vacantly into space.

            “Who are you talking to?” I asked, eventually.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated, straining the thin fabric of her bright orange tee. “You! I’m talking to you!”

            “Well, my name is not Alfie,” I told her.

            “I’m just quoting a song!”

            “Oh.” I went back to reading my book. From long and bitter experience, I’ve learnt it’s never wise to actually continue any conversation with Saffy. Like an episode of ‘The Walking Dead’, you never know where it’s going to lead.

            Saffy could tell she didn’t have my full attention, so she tried a different tack. “That’s a very thick book you’re reading. What’s it about?”

            “It’s volume two of ‘Game of Thrones’,” I mumbled.

            “Is it any good?”

            I sighed and put the book down on my lap and turned to Saffy. “OK, what’s bothering you?”

            “Well, since you asked,” Saffy said, enormously pleased that she finally had my attention. She shifted on her seat. “I’ve been thinking lately, is this it?”

            “What’s it?”

            “This!” Saffy waved her hands vaguely around the train. “In twenty years, is this going to be still us, on a train to City Hall? Will everything still be the same?”

            I shuddered involuntarily. “I sure hope not!”

            “Well, from where I’m sitting, it sure looks that way! I mean, what exactly are we doing to change things, to make sure that things will be different?”

            As philosophical questions go, this was a doozy. I stared up at the ceiling of the train and thought hard. Every day, for years, we’d gotten onto the same train and made the same journey to the same office, to sit at the same desk next to the same people, and do the same thing. Every day. For years. No change, except perhaps my outfit and shoes. Now that I thought about it, it was actually quite possible that we’d been sitting in the same seats on the same train the whole time.

            So, really, maybe Saffy was right after all. What’s it all about, Alfie? Was this to be the pattern of our lives till the day we retired, or worse, suddenly dropped dead from heart attack?

            “We’d be lucky if we died from a heart attack!” Saffy said, later that day over lunch at Maxwell Market. “What if we had a stroke and just, well, lingered?”

            “Choy!” Sharyn said, waving her hands. “Aiyoh, why you must always talk like this when I’m eating, one?”

            “It’s funny you bring this up,” Amanda said, as she delicately speared a cucumber from her rojak. “I’ve just started reading this book called ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ and it’s completely paradigm shifting!”

            “Hah? Shift what?” Sharyn asked.

            Amanda ignored the interruption. “I’ve just read the introduction, but basically, this Tim Ferris guy says you can be a highly successful person with a fabulous life by working just four hours a week!”

            Saffy’s eyebrows shot up. “Really? Four hours? How?”

            “Well, I think it’s basically being really strategic about what you want in life and taking lots of mini-vacations during the year.”

            Saffy looked at Sharyn who was staring goggle-eyed at Amanda. Her eyes darted toward me, and then back to Amanda.

            “I may be completely off base here,” she said slowly, “but isn’t that what’s known as, well, unemployment?”

            “That’s what I thought, too, but then he starts talking about automating the routine stuff in your life, or outsourcing them to virtual assistants in Chennai, and streamlining all the rest like your emails, so you don’t drown in paperwork! I know it’s counter-intuitive, but it’s a very attractive idea, don’t you think? Spend just four hours a week at work, and spend the rest of the week doing the things you love!”
            “Actually, hor,” Sharyn piped up, “I always so busy, you give me the whole week free, I tink I doan know what to do, ah! Confirm I get bored, one!”

            “Oh my God, are you mad? I’d be so happy to be bored!” Saffy said. “My life is one long episode of stress from the moment I wake up to the moment I go home! I want to read the book when you’re done!”

            Although, Saffy now wonders if she could outsource actually reading the book to someone else.

            

Doctor's Orders

According to Saffy, one of the surest ways you know you’re growing old is when your gynaecologist looks up and asks you when was the last time you had a full physical.

            Of course, it doesn’t help if you’re a few pencils short of a full box and someone smart asks you that kind of question. Apparently, Saffy shifted up onto her elbows, looked down at Dr Wong and replied, “Oh my God, you can tell just by looking? Is it all dried up?”

            From behind her white face-mask, Dr Wong blinked. “What?” came her muffled reply.

            Saffy collapsed back onto the examination couch and stared at the ceiling. “OK, lemme see. My boyfriend was posted to New York in…June? And what is it now? November? So, June, July…” Saffy’s fingers moved. “Six months! It’s been six months!”

            Dr Wong sighed and if she hadn’t been so well trained in her bedside manners, she probably would have rolled her eyes. “No, Saffy, I meant when was the last time you had a full health check!”

            As Saffy later complained, as if life isn’t complicated enough already, but why do people have to make it more so by talking in euphemisms? “She said ‘full physical’! Why couldn’t she have just said ‘health check’ to start off with? Seriously, who says that?” she demanded as she blew on a spoonful of hot chicken congee at Crystal Jade.

            “Just about every doctor I’ve ever been to!” Amanda replied. Never having been trained in Bedside Manners 101, she rolled her eyes.

            Saffy ignored the moment. “Well, anyway, after we got all that sorted out, her secretary made a call to Gleneagles, and so I now have an appointment for next week.”

            “Oh, maybe I should come along and get one done, too!” Amanda said. Apparently, it’s not just the bathroom that women go to, together. 

            Saffy dropped her spoon and clapped her hands. “Oooh, that sounds like a great idea! Yay! What about you, Shazz, you want to come along?”

            Sharyn, at that moment bent low over her bowl of double-boiled chicken and lotus root soup, turned her fogged up spectacles slightly around in Saffy’s direction. “Doh wan! I very scared! Skali they find something, then how?”

            “I think that’s the point!” Saffy told her. “That if they find something, then they can do something about it before it’s too late!”

            “Doh wan!” Sharyn repeated. “My gran mudder, hor, she live to seventy fie, neber go once to see doctor. Then one day my mudder force her go because she say my gran mudder got pain her leg. She go in, neber come out again!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Oh my God! She died in hospital?”

            “Abuden?”

            Amanda shook her head. “Tragic! So senseless”

            “Yah, lor!”

            “Speaking of senseless,” Saffy said, smoothly changing gears. “One of the things I’m meant to do before the health check is to give a stool sample. I have no idea what that is, and meant to ask you.”

            Amanda looked astonished. “You don’t know what a stool sample is?”

            “Well, at first, I though they wanted me to bring a chair from home, but that didn’t sound right.”

            “Well, we’re eating, so…” Amanda leaned over and whispered into Saffy’s ear.

            Saffy’s eyes bulged. “What? That’s what a stool sample is? How am I supposed to get that?” Amanda leaned in again. Her hands moved in a scooping motion.

            Saffy leaned away. “What?” she repeated. “That is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard of in my life! I’m not doing that!”

            “Well, that’s how they find out if you have bowel cancer!”

            “I don’t care,” Saffy said firmly. “I am not sticking my hand into the toilet bowl!”

            “But you use a spoon!”

            “I wouldn’t do it even with a shovel!”

            “Honestly, what is the big deal?” Amanda snapped.

            Saffy turned to me. “Did you know about this?”

            “Why do you think I’ve not had a health check in years? I cannot even look in the bowl after I’m done!”

            “Me, neither!” Saffy’s bosom inflated.

            “Wait, what?” Amanda said. “You don’t look?”

            “Why would you?” we sang in chorus.

            “So you can check the consistency!”

            “Seriously, I’m about to throw up!” Saffy exclaimed.

            “Ay, what are you all talking about?” Sharyn said finally. “You all don’t talk so cheem, can?”

            Saffy leaned in and whispered. Sharyn listened carefully and rolled her eyes. “Confirm you cannot have baby!” she told Saffy. “This one, no need see guy-nee!”