Chua, R. (1981). A Requiem for Love. In The Newspaper Editor and Other Stories (pp.

34-40). Singapore: Heinemann Asia.

A Requiem for Love

It was inevitable this time.

But, then, it had always been inevitable.
Sitting alone in the still, unlighted room, she wondered, for the umpteenth time, if her entire
life was to be a perpetual cycle of finding and losing.
She had been so sure — so sure — this time. And yet even the sheer defiance of her
arrogance had not halted the inevitable.
Surely she could resign herself to the knowledge that it must end, and accept it with good
grace.
But, no, she had never known how to take, or give, goodbye.
Too anxious to keep, too eager to let go, she had never learned how to simply sustain.
Perhaps what rankled most was that she was never prepared — not hurt pride or bruised ego.
No, she was never prepared. Always, waiting like a fool, holding her breath, never suspecting
till it was too late.
Now, with a rapidly growing cynicism, she wondered why she even bothered. She could live
without love. It was not breath or food or water, nor wealth or prestige. It was only the
illusion of the moment. It was not real, or tangible, as she was, or her car, her house, the dog,
or even the spot on the wall where he had flung the beer mug in anger.
Only once, just once, she thought she had possessed it with a fierce, false pride of ownership.
And that had been the greatest mistake of all. How could she have thought to have possessed
it — when it didn’t exist?
It had been the insidious conditioning by her poor, heartbroken, disillusioned mother; her
wide-eyed, castle-building friends; the bubbly, expectant mothers she met one day in a
maternity ward; the dramatic intensity of the handsome heart-throb in a glittering
advertisement.
For six months in every year, she revelled in a delirium of love — that mad, insatiable, blind
craving that drove her more relentlessly than ambition. Maybe in some strange, perverse
fashion, she pursued the destruction that each love affair, annihilated, brought.
Well, that was the trick, wasn’t it?
How did that old song go?

Laugh and the whole world laughs with you...

Cry and you cry alone

She must qualify as a regular comedienne, in that case: she could laugh at anything now, she
was that blasé. And the way things were, what with inflation, unemployment, the nuclear
crisis, pollution, regression and rebellion, only a nut or an idiot could find something to laugh
about.
“I don’t care what anyone thinks,” she slurred drunkenly, trying not to tilt her swaying body
to the angle of her replenished glass. “I don’t care what I think, so everybody can just go to
hell!”
The hangover never lasted as long as she would have liked. The next morning, though she
couldn’t for the life of her remember who had been her escort the night before, or where they
had been, she would still be conscious of being able to think clearly in spite of a gritty
headache. And she was never stupid enough to embark on another alcoholic binge so soon on
the heels of the last, so she invariably spent the rest of the day feeling really low.
She sat clutching the sofa in the middle of the morning, wondering if she were not a sick,
sentimental fool. Bryant... such a dandified name, she thought, and smiled despite herself. He
was everything the story books had ever promised — tall and dark and dashing. Beautiful
manners, beautiful taste. All the polished charm, the faultless elegance, the endearing little at
tentions. And that hint of playful callousness. Or carelessness.
She had known, she reminded herself needlessly, she had known that all the girls in the block
were his play-things. Love them and leave them. She had known, and thought it did not
matter. She had thought herself too smart to fall into the gilded trap. But she had.
He had loved and left her... well, not entirely destitute. She had that big, blown-up print
which had amused her and infuriated him, that portrait of them both dressed in ridiculous
hick-town costumes reminiscent of the gold rush. She had discovered two flashy ties in the
bottom of the wardrobe they had once shared, and a bent tie-pin. And he had left one-third of
a postcard from Morocco, the portion with her name and address and the butterfly stamp she
fancied. Had that been residual remorse or wanton pity? He had left nothing else.
No matter, she whispered into the cushion cover. No matter, she said, and sighed. She would
have had that last telegram if she had not been silly enough to tear it up. She should have kept
that last telegram and framed it for everyone to see. It would have kept all her visitors in
stitches, when she explained what that framed fare-well meant, or no longer meant, to her.
She looked up for a moment. Yes, she thought to herself, she would consign all these — the
large print, the flashy ties, the bent tie-pin and the scrap of postcard — to a memento box.
And in her dotage, she would peer at them all, count each leftover tie, dribble over the
butterfly stamp, and wonder vaguely, with an old woman’s inconsequentiality, what they
were souvenirs of.
She could just see herself now: an old woman with a Mother Goose cap, rimless glasses and
wispy silver hair. Maybe she would even have gone a little bald. Who knows? Maybe she
would become crotchety because some prankster had stolen her false teeth. That was funny.
Much too funny. She hiccuped in the middle of her laughter, partly because that laughter had
begun to sound tinny in that long, empty room, but mostly because, suddenly, she
remembered — the only time he had ever lost his impeccable cool.
“I can take so much of your crap, my love, just so much, and nothing more. Do you realize
there is nothing in this world but your stupid, meaningless, infantile fantasies? And you can
have them for all I care. Just don’t try and saddle me with all that baloney, that’s all.”
“I never asked you—” she choked.
“Well, you’re damned right, you didn’t!” he retorted. “I’m telling you. I’m telling you life
isn’t made up of fantasies.”
“Well, if it isn’t, it ought to be!”
He looked at her, with a curious mixture of baffled disgust and exasperation.
“Bryant!” she pleaded. “You ruin everything with your hard-headed practicality, we’re none
of us happy any more. You’re trying so hard to get ahead, there’s no room for illusions.”
When he had gone, and there was no longer any need to maintain that tough pose of defiance,
she wondered whom she had really been trying to convince. What had she been defending,
her outmoded idealism or, cleverly disguised, her inflated, self-opinionated bigotry?
She touched the spot on the wall where he had flung the beer mug, rubbed with an ineffectual
finger the flaking paintwork, and tried to tell herself that everything was as it should be.
It would never have worked anyway. Better now to go their separate ways, before they had
learned the code of obligations which stifled even the attempt for an honourable peace.
She had lost nothing, she told herself with passable disdain. How could she lose, when there
was nothing to lose in the first place? It had not existed. It had merely been a trick of her
imagination, that was all.
And yet, perhaps now, she might be able to distinguish between his insistence on an
intractable reality and her own flights of fancies. Now, in the tortured privacy of her own
thoughts, she might admit that she had (always? surely, not always?) been wrong.
But had there not been a moment when she had believed fervently, and belief had given
breath and life to it all? Had it been for nothing, all her hopeful, unrealistic imaginings?
Would she betray her hopes and dreams now that he had demolished her pride and her belief?
She was not sure, even now, if the battle had been won or lost. Had it been worth the
shattering of heart and soul, belief and being? Was it worth the tears and false memories? She
could not believe that, in the final analysis, he was right, and that survival was everything.
No, she was convinced that hopes and dreams were integral to the scheme of things.
But, if she had won, why the sense of loss?
What’s done cannot be undone.
She knew that, forced herself to face it and the cold comfort of yet another cliche: Tomorrow
is another day.
Oh, if she were wrong, she would be wrong magnificently.... If only that were even remotely
possible.
But she didn’t even have the courage of her follies any more.
What was it Yeats had said?
The best lack conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.
She was not the best, no, nor yet the worst. She had lost the capacity for passionate intensity
of mood or thought or longing. Oh, it rankled, how it rankled to be numbered among the
mediocre damned.
She would have sat and cried if tears could bring relief. But tears would have made a travesty
of rage and pain and grief. She would have laughed for all the world to see. She would have
waved a banner saying “I don’t need you. I have me.” But it would have been mere bravado.
Because she felt the loss, and felt it keenly. Minded it dreadfully, only she tried not to show it.
And when the tell-tale, salty streaks across her cheeks had dried, when others had forgotten
that, once, her heart had been stripped bare, the memory of that brief, intensest folly would
mock her still.
She would run to the door, and find in the mail box a letter from Canada or the Arctic, or
some such place, and she would recognize that handwriting instantane­ously. Even as she
recoiled from those insidious memo­ries, she knew she would find nothing, not a line or a
phrase or secret intimation of what had gone on so long ago.
He would write about the weather, the food, the peo­ple, the economy, oh, anything, really, but
he would not write what she wanted to know: how he was, how he felt, whether he
remembered or cared or hurt or smiled. And she would discard that letter, even as she
had learned to discard so many other things before.