Not in the Way You Mean
26. KL, December 2014
The emails had started in October.
Not often. The particular cadence of two people who had agreed not to maintain something and had found, without discussing it, that they had things to say occasionally. He wrote the way she made him write — without preamble, without the soft tissue around the actual point.
She mentioned a window in December. Christmas period. She’d be in KL.
He told her he’d be there anyway — a friend’s birthday, a few days with people he hadn’t seen properly in years. Melbourne people who’d ended up in KL the way people ended up places, through work, moving home, and marriage and the slow gravitational drift of lives.
I’ll be at a hotel, he wrote. Let me know when your window is.
She wrote back two days later with a date.
He arrived on the twenty-second.
KL at Christmas was its own particular thing — the city had decided to do Christmas with commitment, the malls lit and gleaming, carols in the air-conditioning, a festivity that sat lightly on a city that wore it like borrowed clothes rather than inheritance. It didn’t feel wrong. Just specific. The particular way a place adapts something into its own register and makes it genuinely its own.
He checked into the hotel. His own room, his own floor, his bag on the luggage rack. He’d learned to travel lightly enough that unpacking took three minutes.
The birthday dinner was at someone’s house in Bangsar — a terrace that had been renovated carefully, the original bones kept, a garden in the back that had been allowed to go slightly wild in a way that felt intentional. He’d known these people since 2000. Some of them since before that. The particular ease of old friends who had watched each other become different people without requiring explanation for the changes.
He was different and they registered this without naming it. Just — received him as he was now, the way people do when enough time has passed and enough has happened that taking stock feels more interesting than accounting for the distance.
The evening ran late. He walked back to the hotel through streets that were quieter than Singapore at the same hour, the air slightly cooler, the particular quality of a city that went to sleep earlier and dreamed differently.
She arrived on the twenty-third.
He heard the knock and opened the door and she looked the same as she had in HCMC — composed, unhurried, a bag over one shoulder. She came in and set the bag down and looked at the room the way she looked at fabric swatches.
“Good room,” she said.
“I asked for high floor.”
She turned and looked at him the same way she had at the lunch table. He’d thought about it in the months since HCMC.
“You look well,” she said.
“Better than?”
“Better than the fair,” she said. “You were holding something then.”
“I’m always holding something.”
“Less now.”
He thought about this. Thought she was probably right.
Later, in the particular quiet that followed — her arm across his chest, the ceiling above them, the city outside still doing Christmas — she said: “I told everyone I was in Penang.”
He looked at the ceiling.
“Not a lie exactly,” she said. “I was in Penang last week.”
He waited.
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “My ex-husband’s family does Christmas. Properly. The whole production.” She said it without bitterness — just the even tone of someone describing the weather in a place they no longer lived. “I was part of that for eight years. The lunch, the relatives, the particular dance of everyone being grateful.”
“When did it end,” he said.
“The marriage? Two years ago.”
He didn’t say he was sorry. She hadn’t said it as something that needed that.
“Christmas asks you to show up as a version of your life,” she said. “The continuous version. The one that makes sense from the outside.” She paused. “I don’t have that version anymore. And I find I can’t make the absence something it isn’t.”
He thought about Karen’s best friend’s party. The warmth he’d produced on request. You seem better. The monitor under his shirt.
“So you disappeared,” he said.
“I went to Penang,” she said. “And then I came here.”
He turned his head and looked at her.
“Good decision,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Something in her face shifted.
She didn’t reach for more than that.
Neither did he.
The twenty-fourth.
He had something in the afternoon — lunch with the birthday friends, probably running into the evening. He mentioned this in passing.
“Go,” she said.
“I’ll be back by nine.”
He was back at eight-fifty.
She had ordered room service at two. Something with noodles. The bathtub in this room was deep, good pressure, and she used it for an hour. Read something on her phone. He came back to find her in a bath-robe. Watching the city from the window with the curtains half-open.
She wasn’t waiting. She was on holiday.
He came in, set his jacket down, found something at the minibar.
He mentioned Lina — not as an introduction, just the way a name appears when you’re telling a story that needs it. His godmother. Sixty four. Still reading charts, still making bags. He’d been bringing pineapple tarts across borders since he was sixteen.
Elaine looked at him. “She sounds difficult to disappoint.”
“She’s impossible to disappoint. That’s what makes her useful.”
He talked a little about the travel. Manila, Jakarta, Guangzhou. The fairs. Rooms in other cities. She listened the way she ate — with attention, tasting before commenting.
“Do you want anything continuous,” she said.
He thought about it. “I’ve tried. My body doesn’t want a centre.”
She looked at him once. Then she went back to her glass.
The twenty-fifth.
No plans. Outside the city was finishing Christmas — the particular quiet of a public holiday that had peaked and was now just time. They ordered breakfast to the room. She read. He worked for a while at the desk, something small, the Manila inbox. She didn’t ask what.
In the afternoon the light came through the curtains at a low angle and did what light did. Later they slept again, the particular sleep of people who have nowhere they need to be.
It was the best kind of day. Nothing happened in it.
She left on the twenty-sixth.
At the door — same as HCMC, same quality of departure. She had somewhere to be. She was good at leaving without it meaning anything other than what it was.
“I’ll be in Singapore in March,” she said.
“Send me an email.”
She looked at him.
“WhatsApp,” she said. “Email is slow.”
He nodded.
“Alright.”
She left.
He stood at the window and watched the street below. The Christmas decorations still up, the city moving through the gap between the twenty-fifth and the new year with the particular ease of a place that had done its Christmas and was now just — itself again.
He picked up his phone.
Added her.
The friends lunch was on the twenty-eighth. Someone’s house again, the garden, the easy accumulation of people who had known each other long enough to stop explaining themselves.
His phone buzzed.
A photo. An art piece — a woman suspended in a structure of rope and frame, the composition deliberate, something between restraint and architecture. Elaine’s caption underneath:
Turn on or turn off?
He was looking at it when someone asked if he was seeing anyone.
He looked up.
“Not in the way you mean,” he said.
His friend looked at him. “Is there a way I don’t mean?”
“Yes,” he said.
His friend considered this.
“Fair enough,” she said.
And they moved on.