“Gordon and I sold our Pulau Club memberships because I realized I was only going there to eat their ice kacang,”‡ Michael overheard Mavis telling his mother-in-law. What he wouldn’t give to be back out on the field with his friends right now. They could play soccer until the sun went down, and then head to the nearest kopi tiam§ for cold beers and some nasi goreng‖ or char bee hoon.a It would be so much better than sitting here in this tie that choked him half to death, eating unpronounceable food that was insanely overpriced. Not that anyone at this table ever noticed the prices—the Oons owned practically half of Malaysia, and as for Astrid and her brothers, Michael had never once witnessed any of them pick up a dinner check. They were all adults with children of their own, but Papa Leong always signed for everything. (In the Teo family, none of his brothers or sisters would even consider letting their parents pick up the check.)

How long would this dinner take? They were eating European style, so it would be four courses, and here that meant one course per hour. Michael stared at his menu again. Gan ni na!b There was some stupid salad course. Who ever heard of serving salad after the main course? This meant five courses, because Mavis liked her desserts, even though all she ever did was complain about her gout. And then his mother-in-law would complain about her heel spurs, and the ladies would volley chronic health complaints back and forth, trying to outdo each other. Then it would be time for the toasts—those long-winded toasts where his father-in-law would toast the Oons for their brilliance in having been born into the right family, and then Gordon Oon would turn around and toast the Leongs for their genius in having been born into the right family as well. And then Henry Leong Jr. would make a toast to Gordon’s son Gordon Jr., the wonderful chap who was caught with the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in Langkawi last year. It would be a miracle if dinner ended before eleven thirty.

Astrid glanced across the table at her husband. That ramrod-straight posture and tense half smile he was forcing himself to make as he spoke to Bishop See Bei Sien’s wife was a look she knew well—she had seen it the first time they were invited to tea at her grandmother’s, and when they had dinner with the president at Istana.c Michael clearly wished he were somewhere else right now. Or was it with someone else? Who was that someone else? Since the night she had discovered that text message, she couldn’t stop asking herself these questions.

MISS U NSIDE ME. For the first few days, Astrid tried to convince herself that there must be some rational explanation. It was an innocent mistake, a text to the wrong number, some sort of prank or private joke she didn’t understand. The text message had been erased by the next morning, and she wished it could just as simply be erased from her mind. But her mind would not let it go. Her life could not go on until she solved the mystery behind these words. She began calling Michael at work every day at odd times, inventing some silly question or excuse to make sure he was where he said he would be. She started checking his cell phone at every fleeting opportunity, feverishly scrolling through all the text messages in the precious few minutes that he was away from his phone. There were no more incriminating text messages. Was he covering his tracks, or was she just being paranoid? For weeks now, she had been deconstructing every look, every word, every move of Michael’s, searching for some sign, some evidence to confirm what she could not bring herself to put into words. But there had been nothing. Everything was seemingly normal in their beautiful life.

Until this afternoon.

Michael had just returned from the airport, and when he complained of being sore from cramming into a middle seat in the last, non-reclining row of an older China Eastern Airlines plane, Astrid suggested that he take a warm soak in the tub with Epsom salts. While he was out of commission, Astrid went snooping through his luggage, aimlessly looking for something, anything. Rifling through his wallet, she came upon a folded piece of paper hidden underneath the plastic flap that held his Singapore Identity Card. It was a receipt for dinner from the night before. A receipt from Petrus. For HK$3,812. Pretty much the price of dinner for two.

What was her husband doing having dinner at Hong Kong’s fanciest French restaurant when he was supposed to be working on some cloud-sourcing project in Chongqing in southwest China? And especially this restaurant, the sort of place he normally would have been dragged to kicking and screaming. There was no way his cash-strapped partners would approve this sort of expense, even for their top clients. (And besides, no Chinese clients would ever want to eat French nouvelle cuisine if they could possibly help it.)

Astrid looked at the receipt for a long time, staring at the bold strokes of his dark-blue signature against the crisp white paper. He had signed it with the Caran d’Ache fountain pen she had given him on his last birthday. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to jump out of her chest, and yet she felt completely paralyzed. She imagined Michael sitting in the candlelit room perched atop the Island Shangri-La hotel, staring out at the sparkling lights of Victoria Harbour, enjoying a romantic dinner with the girl who had sent the text message. They started off with a splendid Burgundy from the Côte d’Or and finished with the warm bitter-chocolate soufflé for two (with frosted lemon cream).

She wanted to burst into the bathroom and hold the receipt in his face while he was soaking in the tub. She wanted to scream and claw at his skin. But of course, she did no such thing. She breathed in deeply. She regained her composure. The composure that had been ingrained since the day she was born. She would do the sensible thing. She knew that there was no point making a scene, demanding an explanation. Any sort of explanation that could cause even the tiniest scratch on their picture-perfect life. She folded the receipt carefully and tucked it back into its hiding place, willing it to disappear from his wallet and from her mind. Just disappear.

* * *

* The second most senior federal honorific title in Malaysia (similar to a British duke), conferred by a hereditary royal ruler of one of the nine Malay states; his wife is called a puan sri. (A tan sri is usually richer than a dato’, and has likely spent far more time sucking up to the Malay royals.)

† Cantonese for “troublesome.”

‡ A Malay dessert made of shaved ice, colorful sugar syrup, and a variety of toppings such as red beans, sweet corn, agar-agar jelly, palm seed, and ice cream.

§ Hokkien for “coffee shop.”

‖ Indonesian fried rice, an immensely popular dish in Singapore.

a Fried vermicelli, another local favorite.

b A Hokkien term that could mean “fuck your mother,” or, as in this case, “fuck me.”

c “Palace” in Malay; here it refers to the official residence of the president of Singapore. Completed in 1869 on the orders of Sir Harry Saint George Ord, Singapore’s first colonial governor, it was formerly known as Government House and occupies 106 acres of land adjacent to the Orchard Road area.

13

Philip and Eleanor Young

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, AND SINGAPORE

Philip sat in his favorite metal folding chair on the dock that stretched out from his waterfront lawn, keeping one watchful eye on the fishing line that went straight into Watson’s Bay and the other eye on the latest issue of Popular Mechanics. His cell phone began to vibrate in the pocket of his cargo pants, disrupting the serenity of his morning. He knew it would be his wife on the line; she was practically the only person who ever called his cell. (Eleanor insisted that he keep the phone on his body at all times, in case she needed him in an emergency, although he doubted he could be of any help since he spent much of the year here in Sydney while she was constantly traveling between Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, and God knows where else.)