5
Astrid and Michael
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SINGAPORE
Whenever her grandmother’s parties ran late, Astrid would normally opt to spend the night at Tyersall Park. She preferred not to wake Cassian if he was sleeping soundly, and she would head for the bedroom (just opposite from Nick’s) that had been set aside for her frequent visits since she was a little girl. Her adoring grandmother had created an enchanted emporium for her, commissioning whimsical hand-carved furniture from Italy and walls painted with scenes from her favorite fairy tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” Astrid still loved the occasional night spent in this childhood bedroom, cosseted by the most fantastical dolls, stuffed animals, and tea sets that money could buy.
Tonight, however, Astrid was determined to get home. Even though it was well past midnight, she swept Cassian into her arms, buckled him into his child seat, and headed for her apartment. She was desperate to know if Michael was back “from work” yet. She was kidding herself in thinking she could just look the other way while Michael carried on. She was not like those wives. She was not going to be a victim, like Eddie’s wife, Fiona. All these weeks of speculation and uncertainty had become a crushing weight on her, and she had to resolve this issue once and for all. She needed to see her husband with her own eyes. She needed to smell him. She needed to know whether there truly was another woman. Although, if she was being brutally honest with herself, she had known the truth ever since those four simple words flashed across his iPhone screen. This was the price she had to pay for falling for Michael. He was a man whom all women found irresistible.
SINGAPORE, 2004
The first time Astrid laid eyes on Michael, he was in a camouflage-print speedo. The sight of anyone over the age of ten in one of these banana hammocks was usually repellant to Astrid’s aesthetic sensibilities, but when Michael strutted down the runway in his Custo Barcelona speedo, his arm around an Amazonian girl clad in a sheer black Rosa Cha bathing suit and emerald necklace, Astrid was trans-fixed.
She had been dragged to Churchill Club for a charity fashion show organized by one of her Leong cousins and had sat bored stiff throughout the proceedings. For someone used to a front-row seat at Jean Paul Gaultier’s elaborate flights of stagecraft, this hastily constructed catwalk lit with yellow gels, fake palm fronds, and flashing strobe lights seemed like underfunded community theater.
But then Michael appeared, and suddenly everything went into slow motion. He was taller and bigger than most Asian men, with a gorgeous nut-brown tan that wasn’t the sort you could spray on at a salon. His severe military buzz cut served to accentuate a hawklike nose that seemed so incongruous to the rest of his face, it took on an overtly sexual quality. Then there were those piercing, deep-set eyes and the washboard abs rippling along his lean torso. He was only on the runway for less than thirty seconds, but she immediately recognized him a few weeks later at Andy Ong’s birthday party even though he was fully clothed in a V-neck T-shirt and faded gray jeans.
This time it was Michael who noticed her first. He was leaning against a ledge at the bottom of the garden at the Ong bungalow with Andy and some friends when Astrid appeared on the terrace in a long white linen dress with delicate lace cutouts. Here’s a girl who does not belong at this party, he thought to himself. The girl soon spotted the birthday boy, and made a beeline toward them, giving Andy a big hug. The guys around him stared openmouthed.
“Many happy returns!” she exclaimed, handing over a small present exquisitely wrapped in purple silk fabric.
“Aiyah, Astrid, um sai lah!” Andy said.
“It’s just a little something I thought you’d like from Paris, that’s all.”
“So did you get that city totally out of your system? Back for good now?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Astrid said carefully.
The guys were all jockeying for position, so as reluctant as he was, Andy felt that it would be rude not to introduce them. “Astrid, allow me to introduce Lee Shen Wei, Michael Teo, and Terence Tan. All army buddies.”
Astrid smiled sweetly at everyone before fixing her gaze on Michael. “If I’m not mistaken, I’ve seen you in a speedo,” she said.
The guys were equal parts stunned and baffled by her statement. Michael just shook his head and laughed.
“Er . . . what is she talking about?” Shen Wei asked.
Astrid peered at Michael’s sculpted torso, which was clearly evident despite his loose T-shirt. “Yes, it was you, wasn’t it? At Churchill Club’s fashion show to benefit juvenile shopaholics?”
“Michael, you modeled in a fashion show?” Shen Wei said in disbelief.
“In a speedo?” Terence added.
“It was for charity. I got dragged into it!” Michael sputtered, his face turning beet red.
“So you don’t model professionally?” Astrid asked.
The guys all started laughing. “He does! He does! He’s Michael Zoolander,” Andy cracked.
“No, I’m serious,” Astrid insisted. “If you ever want to model professionally, I know a few agencies in Paris that would probably love to represent you.”
Michael just looked at her, not knowing how to respond. There was a palpable tension in the air, and none of the guys knew what to say.
“Listen, I’m famished, and I think I have to have some of that delicious-looking mee rebus back at the house,” Astrid said, giving Andy a quick peck on the cheek before striding back toward the house.
“Okay, laeng tsai, what are you waiting for? She was obviously into you,” Shen Wei said to Michael.
“Don’t want to get your hopes up, Teo, but she’s untouchable,” Andy warned.
“What do you mean untouchable?” Shen Wei asked.
“Astrid doesn’t date in our stratosphere. You know who she almost married? Charlie Wu, the tech billionaire Wu Hao Lian’s son. They were engaged, but then she broke it off at the last minute because her family felt that even he wasn’t good enough,” Andy said.
“Well, Teo here is going to prove you wrong. Mike, that was an open invitation if I’ve ever seen one. Don’t be so kiasu, man!” Shen Wei exclaimed.
Michael did not know what to make of the girl sitting across the table from him. First of all, this date should not even be happening. Astrid wasn’t his type. This was the kind of girl he would see shopping at one of those pricey boutiques on Orchard Road or sitting in the lobby café of some fancy hotel having a double decaf macchiato with her banker boyfriend. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked her out. It wasn’t his style to go after girls in such an obvious way. All his life, he had never needed to chase after women. They had always given themselves freely to him, starting with his older brother’s girlfriend when he was fourteen. Technically, Astrid had made the first move, so he didn’t mind going after her. Andy’s talk about her being “out of his league” really irked him, and he thought it would be fun to bed her, just to shove it in Andy’s face.
Michael never expected she would say yes to the date, but here they were, barely a week later, sitting at a restaurant in Dempsey Hill with cobalt-blue glass votives on every table (the trendy sort of place filled with ang mors that he hated) with nothing much to say to each other. They had nothing in common, except for the fact that they both knew Andy. She didn’t have a job, and since all his work was classified, they couldn’t really talk about that. She had been living in Paris for the past few years, so she was out of touch with Singapore. Hell, she didn’t even seem like a true Singaporean—with her Englishy accent and her mannerisms.
Yet he couldn’t help but feel incredibly drawn to her. She was the complete opposite of the type of girls he normally dated. Even though he knew she came from a rich family, she wasn’t wearing brand-name clothes or any jewelry. She didn’t even appear to be wearing makeup, and still she looked smoking hot. This girl wasn’t as seow chieh as he had been led to believe, and she even challenged him to a game of pool after dinner.
She turned out to be pretty lethal at billiards, and it made her even sexier. But this was obviously not the kind of girl he could have a casual fling with. He felt almost embarrassed about it, but all he wanted to do was keep staring at her face. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was sure he lost the game partly because he was just too distracted by her. At the end of the date, he walked her out to her car (surprisingly, just an Acura) and held the door open as she got in, convinced he would never see her again.
Astrid lay in bed later that night, trying to read Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest tome but having no luck focusing. She couldn’t stop thinking about her disastrous date with Michael. The poor guy really didn’t have much in the way of conversation, and he was hopelessly unsophisticated. Figures. Guys who looked like that obviously did not have to work hard to impress a woman. There was something to him, though, something that imbued him with a beauty that seemed almost feral. He was simply the most perfect specimen of masculinity she had ever seen, and it unleashed a physiological response in her that she did not realize she possessed.
She turned off her bedside lamp and lay in the dark under the mosquito netting of her heirloom Peranakan bed, wishing Michael could read her mind at this very moment. She wanted him to dress up in night camouflage and scale the walls of her father’s house, evading the guards in the sentry house and the German shepherds on patrol. She wanted him to climb the guava tree by her window and enter her bedroom without a sound. She wanted him to stand at the foot of her bed for a while, nothing but a leering black shadow. Then she wanted him to rip off her clothes, cover her mouth with his earthy hand, and ravish her nonstop till dawn.
She was twenty-seven years old, and for the first time in her life, Astrid realized what it really felt like to crave a man sexually. She reached for her cell phone and, before she could stop herself, dialed Michael’s number. He picked up after two rings, and Astrid could hear that he was in some sort of noisy bar. She hung up immediately. Fifteen seconds later, her phone rang. She let it ring about five times before answering.
“Why did you call me and hang up?” Michael said in a calm, low voice.
“I didn’t call you. My phone must have rung your number accidentally while it was in my purse,” Astrid said nonchalantly.
“Uh-huh.”
There was a long pause, before Michael casually added, “I’m at Harry’s Bar now, but I’m going to drive over to the Ladyhill Hotel and check into a room. The Ladyhill is quite near you, isn’t it?”
Astrid was taken aback by his audacity. Who the hell did he think he was? She felt her face go hot, and she wanted to hang up on him again. Instead, she found herself turning on her bedside lamp. “Text me the room number,” she said simply.
SINGAPORE, 2010
Astrid drove along the meandering curves of Cluny Road, her head swimming in thoughts. At the start of the evening at Tyersall Park, she had entertained the fantasy that her husband was at some one-star hotel engaged in a torrid affair with the Hong Kong sexting tramp. Even while she was on conversational autopilot with her family, she envisioned herself bursting in on Michael and the tramp in their sordid little room and flinging every available object at them. The lamp. The water pitcher. The cheap plastic coffeemaker.
After Oliver’s comment, however, a darker fantasy began to consume her. She was now convinced that Oliver had not made a mistake, and that it was indeed her husband he had spotted in Hong Kong. Michael was too distinctive to be mistaken for anyone else, and Oliver, who was equal parts schemer and diplomat, was obviously sending her a coded message. But who was the little boy? Could Michael have fathered another child? As Astrid turned right onto Dalvey Road, she almost didn’t notice the truck parked just a few yards ahead, where a nighttime construction crew stood repairing a tall streetlamp. One of the workers suddenly flung open the truck door, and before Astrid could even gasp, she swerved hard to the right. The windshield shattered, and the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the complex root system of an ancient banyan tree.