Last Tang Standing
They didn’t look like they were on a first date. Who was she? There was no way to know without being a proactive stalker. I had cut all social media ties with him, blocked him on WhatsApp, severed ties with all the mutual friends we had (well, most of them were his), and deleted all his phone numbers (personal, Work 1, Work 2, and Work 3 (landline)). Not that I wanted to know who she was, of course.
Just as I was ready to walk over and casually bump into them, so that I could be introduced, he put his arm around her waist and walked her out of the bar.
“No,” I whispered in agony.
“Ma’am, can I go now?” the server said tightly.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I opened my wallet to extract the money I owed him, but he waved the bills away.
“You look like you’ll need it tonight. That, or a fresh start,” he remarked, before walking away.
I heard him through a fog. I couldn’t believe it—Ivan had moved on. First. With a rather age-inappropriate palate cleanser of a girl. What about me? Why was I still stuck in some weird, monkish state of celibacy when I had wasted over five years of my life on him already?
There are always winners and losers in a breakup. And I am not a loser, not in any sense. I should get a move on, too. Starting tonight. I’ll show him age-inappropriateness, the jeans-wearing bastard.
When I rejoined the others to grab my work bag, the boy who hit on me was still waiting by the bar with an elbow planted on the countertop and no phone in sight, which sort of endeared me to him. He saw me and waved cheerily, the way an innocent child might at a strange man in a stained house robe standing in front of what appears to be a totally normal ice-cream truck (I do realize I am the strange man in this scenario).
“Who is that yummy morsel?” Valerie stage-whispered, which was enough to send me to the bar just to get away from her and the creepy realization that Valerie was biologically old enough to be his grandmother.
“Let’s start again. My name is Orson Leong,” he said, offering me a surprisingly assured handshake. “What’s yours?”
“Andrea,” I said. I motioned the bartender over and gave him my order. “I’d like a Laphroaig, twenty-one years old, neat.” I turned to Orson, expecting him to be weirded out by the fact that my drink was older than him. But he was unfazed. He ordered a beer, and when the bartender returned, he took out his credit card and waved mine away. “I’m twenty-three, you know. I can afford to buy a pretty lady a drink.”
“And I’m thirty-three,” I told him aggressively, probably to cover up the fact that I was pleased that he was not as young as I’d originally made him out to be, which was eighteen. I probably needed glasses, perhaps due to the fact that I was (non-addictively) playing Candy Crush in my free time. “Jesus’s age, when he died,” I added, before I could stop myself.
“OK, Andrea, now that we have the basics covered, why don’t we go to that quiet little corner over there away from your staring clique, and you can tell me more about yourself?”
I nodded, and he guided me by my elbow to a secluded nook by the electronic jukebox. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dumbstruck faces of my friends turn to follow me across the room; Valerie’s looked especially comical since she had long ago lost the capacity to lift her eyebrows. I grinned and gave them a cheery wave. Let them wonder. Let them take lots of photos. That I will definitely post on Facebook publicly later.
I didn’t expect to enjoy hanging out with Orson, but I did. Orson was easygoing and had an unassuming way of asking questions with his dimpled smile that made me feel comfortable revealing things about myself that I would usually reserve for closer friends. And even though he was much younger, we conversed across a wide array of subjects with ease. I found out that Orson was working in an advertising firm as a copywriter; he read voraciously and counted Rumi and Deborah Landau among his favorite poets (pro); his favorite tipple was gin (meh); he was a dog person (hmm); and he hated EDM and reality TV (pro!).
Sometime around ten o’clock I made my excuses to leave, even though I was not at all tired but I was dangerously tipsy and considering asking him to come up to my place for a shag (I managed to restrain myself by using the clever trick of thinking of spiders every time I thought of kissing him, something I had learned about from a listicle on Aversion Therapy 101). Being the gentleman that he was he walked me to the taxi stand (a queue almost twenty people long, despite the prevalence of ride-hailing apps). I was starting to feel melancholy as the alcoholic buzz began to fade.
“Will I see you again, Andrea?” he asked, his eyes going fullpuppy on me.
“Never!” is what I should have said—he was just not right for me, and I had already taken enough selfies with him to let anyone looking know that I was a hot commodity. Instead, I meekly said, “I can’t.” Pathetic. No wonder I wasn’t partner yet.
“Why not?” he asked. He was standing very close to me and I could smell his cologne and stale tobacco and sweat.
“Not a good idea,” I said to his shoulder. I was very aware of the heat emanating from him.
“It’s the New Year,” was his reply near my earlobe. And then his lips were on mine before I could protest: they tasted amazing, young and perky, belonging to someone who didn’t need afternoon naps. It was all I could do not to chew on them, driven as I was by hormones—and hunger.
Then he broke the kiss.
“I’m sorry if I came on too strong,” he said. “It just came over me. I’m not usually like this.”
I nodded, completely dumbstruck. The queue shuffled forward. It was almost my turn.
“Listen, I’d like to see you again. Can I have your number please?”
He gave me his card, as my phone had died, and I gave him my number, my real one, even my surname. Now he can find me on the internet. Shit just became real.
When my cab arrived, he opened the door and I got in. “Good night, Andrea. I’ll text you.” No games, just a promise. Such maturity, such manliness, such round buttocks. Against my will, I began to hope that I would, indeed, see him again.
11:45 p.m. Home. Charged my phone, turned it on to find forty-plus feverish WhatsApp texts from the LGA crew group chat, with Linda’s texts being the lewdest.
“Who’s Mr. Hot Stuff?” was the general cri de coeur. I decided to let them simmer. I didn’t want to talk to them about the night when I was back to being ambivalent about seeing Orson again. I mean, where could this relationship really go? We were at totally different stages of our lives: he was probably just interested in shagging as many willing people as he could get, while I was interested in finding a suitable man for a life partner, which is difficult enough as it is. Let’s be honest: the chances of finding your true love when you’re almost in your mid-thirties are a little bleak—most of the good ones are taken, and the ones that are still on the shelf and older than you are often riddled with manufacturing or third-party defects, some so well camouflaged that you could be dating them for ten months before you accidentally find their shoebox of toenail clippings or their collection of vintage porn. I shouldn’t waste time on him when I was looking for Mr. Right—the return on investment seemed too low to be worth the outsize risk of wasting precious time—right?
On the other hand, I had spent five years with Ivan, and to what avail?
Ooh, text.
Hey gorgeous lunch or dins next Wednesday 24th K? unless u hv plans alrdy … *three emojis with heart eyes*
It was Millennial Orson. What to do, what to do.
I checked my calendar and launched Candy Crush, just a quick game thereof; no biggie, it helps me think.
Three in the morning. Oops.
5
Thursday 18 February
Emergency summit the next afternoon, over lunch, with Linda.
“You met him through Sponk?” Linda gasped theatrically. We were seated in Lau Pa Sat, a hawker center located in a large, beautiful Victorian filigree cast-iron structure in the Central Business District. The lunch crowd consisted of both tourists and office grunts, chowing down on local street food.
“Yeah, I’m On The Apps.” Yes, I said it exactly like this. “Isn’t everyone On The Apps?”
Linda sighed. “Could you please try not to sound like you’re ancient? And did you have to choose the worst app to start online dating on?”
“What’s wrong with Sponk?” I said indignantly.
“Sponk, my dear, is for furries and swingers.” She saw my mouth open to ask a question and said, “You can google that later. NSFW.”
“Thanks a lot, Cousin Gordon,” I muttered. “On the bright side, I did meet this decent, proper Sweet Young Thing, so.”
“No one decent uses Sponk; I should know,” Linda responded ominously.
“And how is Tinder any better?” I challenged. “Isn’t it a hookup app?”
“It all depends on how you screen the people, how you play the game. I’ve many, many friends who’ve met their significant others on Tinder.” She smiled beatifically. “I mean, I myself have never used it for long-term commitment, but I’m positive we can replicate Angi’s success.”
I did a double take. “Wh—So it’s just that one friend? I thought you said ‘friends.’ As in plural.”
She waved my questions away. “Potato, potahto. How old is this guy again?”
“Twenty-three,” I said meekly.
Linda whistled. “Nice. And here I thought I’d be the first cougar of our friend pack.”
“Not Valerie?” I was intrigued.
“Valerie-I’m-youngerthan-my-surgeon-makes-me-look-in-the-dark-I-swear-Gomez?” Linda said, doing her best imitation of the Rock’s signature eyebrow cock. “No way. She would never be able to accept that she’s older than the man she’s with. Unlike you, you dirty rascal.”
“I get that he’s a little younger, but he’s so mature.” I started drumming my fingers on the grease-slicked tabletop. “Would it really be such a bad idea to go on a date with him? You were just saying I need to date outside my comfort zone.”
“Depends on your objectives: a hookup or love? In my opinion, you should nip it in the bud, because you’re a serial monogamist and you’re looking for the One.”
“I don’t believe in the One,” I protested.
Linda rolled her eyes. “Please. I’ve known you since you were a toddler, remember? You inhaled Sweet Valley novels. You like all the slow songs from Backstreet Boys. You cry at every wedding, and not just because you’re not the one getting married. Face it—you’re a sucker for love, and that’s OK. What you need, my dear, is to get out there and meet guys your own age, preferably older.” She took out her phone and started scrolling intently. Her voice took on a dangerous Avon salesperson varnish, one octave higher and chirpier than usual. “Just wait till you see what I’ve got in store for you!”
She shoved the phone in my face. On the high-definition screen of Linda’s latest iPhone was my Tinder profile.
I gaped at it. “What? Wh-when and how did you access my F-Facebook …?” I managed to say. What other accounts did she have access to?
“Easy. Your password was a snooze to crack, took me literally twelve seconds, haha: ihateivan. I mean, seriously, still?” Her laughter died when she saw my face, and she cleared her throat. “But look at how good you look!” she crowed, jabbing a manicured finger at my Tinder doppelgänger. I stared at the zoomed-in view of a full-frontal shot of my face, edited and enhanced till I was barely recognizable.
“What filter is this? I look like I just popped out of the womb,” I said, squinting at my alert eyes and plumped-up lips, unmarred by years of stress-smoking and disappointment.
Linda shrugged. “Filter? Pah! This was the work of a Photoshop maestro. No filter alone could have achieved this perfection.”
Then she tapped on her screen to zoom out and I saw the body upon which my head had been almost seamlessly grafted; with a gasp I recognized the cleavage-baring black bandage dress I had worn—for our uni graduation dinner.
I looked at her and she shrugged. Innocently.
“Show me my profile description,” I said through gritted teeth. She grinned and scrolled down. “Andrea T … Hey, that’s not my age!”
“Give or take one or two years …,” Linda said cheerfully, unconcerned with being a class A, bona fide liar.
“Linda, you listed me as being twenty-nine!”
“So?” Linda’s already large eyes were wide with faux innocence.
“I’m turning thirty-four in December!”
“Geez, stop being such a stickler for details.”
“That’s rich, coming from a lawyer.”
“If I list your real age, I’ll be cutting down your market by eighty percent.”
“I don’t want to date ageists!”
“I’m being realistic,” she huffed. “Good God, it’s brutal out there. Look at me, I don’t look a day over twenty-six, am highly educated and gorgeous—”
“—and modest, don’t forget,” I added dryly.
“Yes, of course, and even then, my swipe-rights only increased when I put my age as twenty-nine. Me! What’s more, I’m sorry to say this, you!”
“Why am I still friends with you?” I muttered, palming my forehead in resignation.
“Because I’m fabulous and I’m going to get you a man worthy of your lovin’. What’s one or two li’l fibs in the grand scheme of things?”
“Lies: always a good foundation for a relationship,” I said, giving up.
The rest of the draft profile read as such:
Andrea, 29
Bubbly and adventurous salsa enthusiast (What? I squeaked, to which Linda said, Shut up and trust me, you have no choice anyway, I locked the profile and only I have the password!). I’m interested in yoga, baking, whisky (especially when it’s free), and puns. I’m very good at playing ball games, especially hand and ball-striking ones. I love a good shuttlecock.
I covered my face and rocked back and forth in my seat. “Oh God. Oh God.”
Linda beamed. “It’s perfect. It’s funny and sexy and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Win.”
“Ignoring the godawful innuendo, none of this even applies to me,” I protested. Well, except the free whisky and puns part. I began ticking off everything she got wrong on my fingers. “I don’t bake, I’ve been to all of two beginner yoga classes, and the closest I get to salsa is when I’m making a burrito. And there’s nothing here about my work, y’know, Singapore Business Review’s ‘40 Most Influential Lawyers Under 40’ and all.”
Linda rolled her eyes. “Could you please, for one sad second of your life, not shove down everyone’s throat how accomplished you are? Seriously, woman, your insecurity is quite disturbing. You have other things going on in your life besides being good at your job and being a smart cookie.”
“Like?”
“Like, ah, how you are very, ah, well-read and very, er, creative in … Anyway, just list the accolades on LinkedIn where they belong. Or, if you must brag, do it casually on purpose, the way some people take selfies standing in front of their bookshelf and the shelf behind their face is conveniently lined with books by Chomsky and Sagan and lots of dead Russians, instead of the Twilight saga in hardcover and glossy untouched cookbooks that the person bought because they went to the bookstore when they were hungry.” She gave me a pointed look, which I ignored.
“You’re right,” I said, resigned. “I just thought … there’s not a lot of truth on this profile.”
“Says who?” She leaned forward and winked. “Notice that I said ‘enthusiast’ and ‘interested in.’ That could mean anything, really, if you think about it. Maybe you just really, really enjoy watching Dancing with the Stars. And The Great British Bake Off. Meaning you love telly. And what bloke doesn’t like telly, eh?”
She sat back in her seat, looking smug as, well, a lawyer who’d just won her case.
“No further questions, your Dastardly Overlord,” I said, humbled.
“Good. Because you’re live.”
“What?” I shrieked. “Since when?”
“Since yesterday, you dork! Don’t get mad. Look how many matches you’ve already accrued. Twenty-seven!”
“What? I never chose … How many?” Despite my better judgment I was soon scrolling with Linda through the profile matches. (Apparently, in the few hours since she had hacked into my Facebook and created/linked my Tinder account, thus being able to publish my profile, all without my consent, she had already selected a few crush-worthy specimens who had also swiped right on my profile.) I did this over Linda’s shoulder, as Linda was still refusing to relinquish the phone or my new Facebook/Tinder password until I had “earned the right to use Tinder unsupervised, because Sponk.”
“You need my guidance. After all, there are a lot of creeps and liars out there,” she said, oblivious to the irony of her own words.
“So, uh, how are we supposed to handle twenty-seven Tinder chats at the same time?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, sweetie.” She gave me a pitying look, the kind she gave men when they asked her why she wouldn’t give them her number. “Fifty-five percent of these guys won’t text you beyond the first three messages because they’re just not that into you; five percent won’t make a move at all because they are too chicken shit or they want the woman to make the first move; ten percent will turn out to be liars, freaks, douchebags, socially inept, and psychos who will show themselves on my superior no-BS radar and who I will eliminate after five text lines; which leaves thirty percent worthy of navigating through, after which we will probably only find half of them deserving of our time, which leaves us with approximately three or four potential dates. I’ll have your results by Saturday morning.”
She had it down to a science.
“So let me get this straight: in order to sieve out the liars, freaks, douchebags, socially inept, and psychos, you are going to pretend to be me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Did I not make myself clear?”
“And you don’t see the similarities between you and the people you’re trying to keep away from me? None whatsoever?”
“Nope.”
“Right.” Oh well. The woman did get me twenty-seven matches. “But what if Orson—”
“No. Repeat after me: Orson is poison. Orson is poison.”
I decided to drop it. What did Linda know? She was Linda; she’d never had to compromise a day in her life. Orson seemed to like me for me. Besides, it wasn’t as though I had any other suitors—not counting the twenty-seven potential Tinder matches who were all expecting me to be some bendy yoga hottie who liked to salsa. This whole thing was doomed. By the time I returned to work I was back to giving Orson a go, if he texted again. Hey, a bird in the hand is worth twenty-seven in the bush, every good Chinese knows that.
3:00 p.m. Texted Orson to say I’d be happy to have lunch with him next Wednesday. Why wait? And I definitely didn’t need to be supervised on dating platforms/apps. I’m tech-savvy: I’m a LinkedIn Premium user, you know.
5:07 p.m. Got told off for asking Linda for the umpteenth time what was going on in the Tinder chats. She said that if I text her one more time for progress reports, she’ll start sending me dick pics. From Ben.
7:45 p.m. Orson just texted! He said he’s excited to be going on a date with a top forty lawyer. The boy can flirt! I sent him a couple of smiley emojis and chose a café that I knew Linda would never frequent and told him to meet me there at noon.
Am crushing it. Orson is probably younger than Ivan’s girl (though I wouldn’t know, there’s nothing I can see on his Facebook or his other social media platforms, not that I was looking through a fake account or anything).
6
Friday 19 February
Speaking of showing off, I awoke this morning smiling, awash with fresh purpose in life. At long last, the day I had been planning for had arrived—the day I finally take Suresh out.
For lunch.
But not just any lunch: the Establishment-of-Hierarchy Lunch. Just like the ultra-firm handshake I gave him the first time I met him, where I Showed Dominance, I have, by pretending to be super busy, managed to evade hosting the welcome lunch all Orientation Big Buddies are supposed to arrange for their assigned Little Buddy. But it was now well into his third week and I could no longer pretend that I was busy without being rude, well, ruder than I already was. And establishing dominance must be done in a classy, indirect, subtle way, like farting.
It was time Suresh understood who the alpha in the room was. The orientation lunch is all about Power Moves. For that reason I had been waiting for the right moment to invite him out on one: first of all, I had on a total Power Outfit, an exquisite, expensive tailored pantsuit in gray cashmere wool paired with a white long-sleeved cotton dress shirt (even if impractical and my boobs were melting under the layers) and a burgundy crocodile Birkin bag (that technically belonged to Linda); there’d been a significant lapse of time since his arrival before the Ask, calculated to make Suresh understand that he was very low in priority; lastly, I’d managed to book a very visible table in a quiet and expensive finedining Shanghainese restaurant that was guaranteed to make Suresh, Anglophile Indian that he was, swallow hard at the sight of all the bone china bowls and pokey chopsticks. Not to mention the fact that Suresh hadn’t had enough time to acclimate to the Singaporean weather and was still sweating profusely even in the air-conditioning, which is not in his favor at all. But this state of imbalance would not last long for men like him: I knew I had to strike soon.
I waited till he looked like he was knee-deep in a difficult file before I took a deep breath and said, “Suresh … there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
Suresh looked up from his phone, on which he was actually working, smiled, and said, “Me, too.”
In an effort to mask my true evil, I said sweetly, “You first.”
“It’s been so killer busy since I arrived, but I’ve been meaning to ask you out for lunch. How does today sound?”
“You’re asking me out for lunch?” I whispered, blood draining from my face.
“Yes,” he said. “I checked with Kai, who said your schedule was free, and since you were free I thought, why wait?”
I took a steadying breath. “Yes, sure, but where—”
Suresh’s dimpled smile deepened. “There’s this fine-dining Shanghainese restaurant that Kai said you liked. I’m a big fan of Shanghainese food myself, so I thought we’d go with the obvious choice.”
“Indeed,” I said. I made a mental note to warn Kai from divulging my schedule to Suresh in the future, even if she worked for both of us. Her loyalties should lie with me, dammit: I lent her money for her gym membership.
2:40 p.m. Just back from lunch, which got off to a bad start. Soon after we were shown to our table, I found out that Suresh had spent a year in Hangzhou studying Mandarin and knew more about regional Chinese food, and tea, than I did. He won food-ordering duties after some haggling, and proceeded to order, among other things, chicken feet in soy sauce, a Power Move in itself as this is a dish rife with possibility for disaster (of the dry-cleaning variety). Worst, when the steamed fish arrived, he looked deep into my eyes and complimented my Power Outfit as he plucked the staring eyeball out of the dead, defenseless fish, popped it into his mouth, and chewed in a deliberate manner, which meant I would have to eat the remaining eyeball.
And the lunch got personal when I least expected it. “So, have you always wanted to be a lawyer?” he asked, his lips still coated with juices from the fish’s eyeball, the psycho.