Select Page

The End

by Claudia Tan

Preface

I remember signing up for this course in December last year, and telling myself that I would finally get down to doing this project and tell the story of my sugar relationship with Charles. I wrote about him for both my prose and poetry submissions, so that’s about 40% done.

I’m still writing about him for this 20%.

I know I said that I was going to do something about condoms for this multimedia project. I also said to myself that I would merely be having sex with Charles for money. But I was lying in both instances. You will find that in this sugar relationship, there are so many lies being told. And I can assure you that it is much scarier to lie to yourself and believe in those lies, than to lie to everyone else. Like when you are in denial that the sugar relationship is over.

The day we broke up, I binge watched so many romantic comedies, I lost count. I love romantic comedies, I love the formulaic way they bring you through the process of getting to know each other, falling in love, breaking up and getting back together for that happily ever after. In a way, they are a grown-up’s version of the fairytales we have been fed with as children. It feeds off our desire to find that special someone, the match made in heaven, the perfect other half.

But it also leaves us shaking and gasping for air when we realise that life fucks you over all the fucking time. And there is no happily ever after when you fall for a married man in a sugar relationship.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
13 Going on 30 (2004)
Love, Rosie (2014)
Sleeping with Other People (2015)

 

 Start

 My story with Charles starts with the second date in his car, five blocks away from home.

The week before, on our first date, he asked if I had a boyfriend. I lied. He also asked if I was still a virgin. I lied again. Finally, he asked me if I had ever orgasmed in my life, I didn’t lie about that. So he gave me my first ever orgasm in the passenger seat of his car, finger banging me. I would say that I saw fireworks behind my closed eyelids, or that I orgasmed so hard my whole body shivered.

But I would be lying.

I wasn’t supposed to be seeing Charles in the first place. It was morally wrong on all counts. He was

  1. married,
  2. bored with his marriage, and
  3. wanted some fun.

+ I needed the money = perfect arrangement.

Of course it was, or they wouldn’t call it a sugar relationship. It was a sweet deal for both parties, but laced with heaps of guilt. Like when you finish two servings of creme brûlée all by yourself and feel the sugar high coursing through you, only to regret it when you crash.

He didn’t even call me to end things. All I got was a letter: Calibri, 12, single-spaced.

I confessed everything to stop the police investigation into the source of the fb message and phonecall. We cant see each other again.

No matter how much I fooled myself into believing that he would do anything for me, it didn’t change the fact that I was nothing more than a sugar baby, easily tossed when trouble came knocking. My companionship, unlike his family, was transactional and temporal.

My companionship was $500 a week.

I was a whore, his wife the Madonna. When I went knocking to his house three Sundays ago, I saw the accusation in his eyes as he hissed, “You are psychotic!” at me. Words so sharp like these cut deeper than the knife his wife wielded at me. But I could see where he was coming from. It was a classic case of the Madonna/whore complex in our 21st century.

He desired me, hence he couldn’t love me. He loved his wife, hence he couldn’t desire her.

Be the Madonna, not the whore. Be the docile, most repressed version of yourself so that you can be a respectable woman, loved by the men you love.

My mother hung herself from the ceiling of our one-bedroom flat in Marsiling when I was four. For the longest time, I had always imagined her drowning and choking at her incompetence, her failure of being the perfect mother for me. Ten years later, I uncovered a box of her secrets. It revealed a neat line of letters queuing to fade away: I love you. I love you. I love you.

If there was anything I learnt about marriage from Charles, it was that repetition was bad. It made things boring. The black and white caused her to cry in Technicolor as her breath flitted away from her lungs like mosquitoes. The colour of the world drained from her vision into the blood that welled under her cheeks, and I should have known that no matter how many times I told my father how much I loved him, he never failed to sap that colour out of my world like he did to her. He never stopped and one day, he walked right out the door and never came back.

The only memories of him I have are of his handwriting that lined the cheques that appeared in our mailbox every month on the 24th. And I used to love long baths until I witnessed my father back home bathing in his blood one Thursday morning when I was too young to understand that when you slash your wrists, you cut open your daughter’s heart too.

I went to my gynae for my annual checkup the other day, and asked for a full STD screening. So she stuck a cotton bud up my vagina after warning me that it would hurt, and I gasped in pain. Years before, my mother would tell me not to play with fire. Always, always use condoms. The first time we visited Hotel 81, I nearly passed out from waves of nausea that rolled over me as I inhaled the highly flammable lemon-scented air freshener used in the hotel and the loud stares from the hotel receptionist. He used condoms ‘extra-large’ to boost his ego perhaps, or simply normal ones just didn’t fit.

Condoms are for protection but we stopped using condoms a long time back so can you imagine the sigh of relief when my examination with the doctor came back perfect. If only he could find perfection in the negatives. He found perfection in my negative bank balance and this morning I asked him if he thought if my drama was too much to handle because once upon a time it was too much for someone else to handle. But he told me that he loved me too much to care about baggages like this. And he also forget how people are too used to defining love by numbers.

We don’t always get the dream house, but we got awfully close.

Last Thursday night, we sat at the playground, sipping champagne and eating wine. I asked Charles if he’d ever leave his wife for me but he was uncertain, and this morning as we sat on my bed I asked if he said yes simply because he didn’t want to lose me. It’s hard to ascertain the reasons for conforming to some rules and not others.

This morning I also confessed to Charles that I have been sleeping with other men yet he didn’t even blink an eye. I dreamt about mermaids and flashing my boobs to old men in Korean for ten more won because I cannot afford the air fare home. Charles, when it came down to him, he was lost in translation. He was 58, but who cares when all he needed anyway was half a pill of viagra and a dash of spicy teppanyaki, perhaps a snapchat filter and having laughs about the ridiculousness of society and its expectations.

 End