The Other Side of the World (13 page)

The health care system (offering both Western and traditional Chinese medicine) was world-class, with easy access to doctors, clinics, and hospitals. There were banks on virtually every street corner, fitness centers, swimming pools, tennis courts, health clinics, and mini-markets attached to most condominiums, and a wealth of country clubs offering long menus of amenities. Singapore turned out to be, that is, nothing less than what Nick and the government claimed it was: a model of Western innovation and efficiency with, in its values, traditions, and people, an Eastern face.

I arrived the third week in July, when the monsoons were blowing through, and though this was a time of year with the least amount of rainfall, the monsoons brought with them intermittent, heavy thunderstorms and the year's most unrelentingly unbearable heat and humidity. When I had to be outdoors, I perspired so profusely that even my ears sweated, and I'd go through three or four shirts on some days (I kept spares in my briefcase). The heat and humidity turned out to be year-round companions, and despite Nick's warnings, I never stopped being undone by the toll they took on me, and came to live as much of my life indoors as I could: in air-conditioned offices, apartments,
stores, restaurants, and bars that were comfortable, clean, and cool.

Our college reunion had taken place in early June, at a time when I was living in New York and working on an interim basis as an English and social studies teacher at a private high school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where I also helped coach the tennis and baseball teams. I'd been enjoying the teaching and coaching, and, even more, the city's infinite offerings—concerts, museums, parks, restaurants, pubs, ballgames, women—along with the sheer insane diversity of the place.

I loved walking the streets—would set out ritually every Saturday morning and, using an old 1939
WPA Guide to New York City
Max had given me (a guide written and edited, he pointed out, by, among others, John Cheever and Richard Wright when they'd been young, unpublished authors), explore a part of the city I'd never been to before, mostly in Manhattan, but sometimes in the other boroughs. To understand New York, Max often said, you had to understand that despite its being a global center of commerce, entertainment, and ideas, it was also, in its essence, a set of villages, and seeing the city this way—through his eyes—made me feel, each week, as if I were setting off into the unknown—for neighborhoods that were discrete, exotic nations entire unto themselves.

I loved hearing the multitude of languages you'd hear on any given day—Spanish most of all, but also Russian, Italian, Hebrew, French, German, Japanese, Albanian, Indian, Portuguese, Yiddish, along with those (Hungarian? Roumanian? Farsi? Arabic? Finnish? Chinese? Korean?) whose music and cadences I had to guess at. I loved the contrasts: homeless people sleeping in doorways a few feet from apartment houses with multi-million-dollar penthouses; rundown, abandoned buildings side by side with bright new avant-garde, upscale restaurants (this was especially common on the Lower East Side, where Max's parents—my grandparents—had lived when they
came to America); blocks of high-rise apartment buildings that housed hundreds of thousands of people in an acre or two of concrete, while overlooking enormous expanses of lawns, ball fields, woodlands, and gardens in city parks.

New Yorkers were not overtly friendly—women, especially, would rarely return a glance or smile—but if you stopped and asked for directions, or for the time (I never wore a watch, so I could initiate conversations this way), New Yorkers were the most helpful people I'd ever known. I loved shmoozing with store owners, bargaining with sidewalk vendors, eating by myself in restaurants, overhearing conversations and lovers' quarrels, and, mostly, meandering along streets—Broadway especially, on Manhattan's Upper West Side (where I rented a one-bedroom apartment)—that overflowed with thousands of people I didn't know.

What I loved most, though, as I had when I was a boy, was riding the subways. And this time it wasn't so much the physical stuff that enchanted—the tracks and tunnels, rats and dirt and noise—but the mix of people. In any one subway car on any day of the week I'd get to see individuals of more varied and wondrous colors, shapes, dress, sizes, and ethnicities than most people in the rest of the world saw in a lifetime: Asian, Hispanic, Russian, Slavic, Scandinavian, black, white, old, young, tall, short, fat, skinny, disabled, disheveled, and decrepit. Sometimes I'd close my eyes as soon as I sat down in a subway car and make a mind-bet with myself as to how many different nationalities—how many different species of human being—I'd see sitting on the stretch of seats directly across from me. And if there was no doubling—no more, say, than one black man or one Asian woman—I'd tell myself I'd won double.

Living in New York for the first time in my life, what I also loved—how not?—was the feeling it gave me of being close to Max by imagining I was experiencing some of what he'd known when he was a young man growing up in New York
before he'd married, before he'd published, before he'd settled in Northampton, and before I'd been born.

Despite the fact that Singapore was, in its harbor, financial centers, and skyscrapers, a thriving center of global commerce, and that people who worked there worked at least as hard as people did in New York (until I worked with the Chinese in Singapore, I'd thought nobody worked as hard as New Yorkers), and despite the fact that it was amazingly diverse, both in its native population and in its expatriates and itinerant merchants, it seemed as different from New York as Amherst was from Bangladesh, and it seemed to exist merely and provisionally as a place, to use Nick's phrase, ‘for processing product.'

By the time I arrived, Nick had taken care of pretty much all my essential needs—apartment, car, work pass, health care, health club, insurance, domestic help—and all I had to do, and most of what I did do that first week, after I'd slept off jetlag, was to let him shepherd me from one bank, bureau, and agency to another.

Our company's offices were on the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors of a building in what was known as the CBD (Central Business District), with spectacular, unobstructed views of the marina area, the harbor islands (Coral Island, Paradise Island, Treasure Island, Pearl Island), and the Straits of Singapore beyond. Our company—Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited—produced and sold palm oil, and to do this, we bought, leased, developed, and managed palm oil plantations for which my responsibilities were pretty much the same as Nick's: to make sure that what we promised to deliver was delivered safely, and at the agreed-upon price. Our job was to monitor every stage of the enterprise—from contract negotiations to locating plantations and/or creating new ones, and from the deforesting of land to the planting and cultivation of trees, the hiring of workers, the harvesting of fruit, the transformation of fruit into oil, the shipping of either the fruit or the oil (crude
and/or processed), and the delivery and acceptance of product. What this meant, whether the oil was produced by small companies or large (in old-fashioned village ways or on modern industrial plantations), was that we were involved in what happened, and in the most literal way, on and in the ground.

My flight, via Hong Kong, arrived in Singapore early on a Sunday morning. Nick met me at the airport and drove me straight to his pad, where I slept for fourteen straight hours, after which, on and off for the rest of the week, starting early Monday morning, we made rounds of insurance and real estate offices, government agencies, law offices, and banks, and, still in a stupor—enhanced at breakfast that first morning by two Bloody Marys (heavy on horseradish and vodka)—I filled out forms, signed papers, nodded comprehension, had my photo taken some half-dozen times, and wrote checks. Nick showed me the apartment and car he'd picked out for me, got me settled in my office, and introduced me to people at work (two secretaries and three clerks, all Chinese, were assigned to me).

Whenever he had to excuse himself to take care of stuff that needed immediate attention, I sat in my office, gazed out at the harbor and horizon, and read through stacks of brochures, reports, and papers he'd assembled for me—mostly about the wonders of palm oil, which, I learned, had already passed bananas as the number one fruit crop in the world, and which could be used not only in the production of food, soaps, detergents, and cosmetics, but also as an inexpensive biofuel. Palm oil was
the future of the world
, brochures and company literature proclaimed, and who were we, Nick advised, to argue against such sublime prophecy? Others, however, I soon discovered when I went online to inform myself about palm oil—especially about what the creation of palm oil plantations were doing to Borneo and the environment—didn't see palm oil as anything like the pure blessing Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited claimed it was.

At exactly five-forty in the afternoon of my second Monday in Singapore, Nick announced that, our work done, it was time to play, at which point we headed for his favorite watering hole, The Sling Shot, located on the ground floor of one of the city's major waterfront hotels, with views both of the western end of the Tanjong Pagar wharves (they extended for more than three miles), and of one of the most extraordinary Hindu temples in the world, built, Nick informed me, in the middle of the nineteenth century by Indian convicts.

The amazing thing about The Sling Shot, and what delighted Nick about it, were not the views it offered through a huge plate glass window that was its southern wall, though the views were exceptional, but its interior, which had been modeled, and with impeccable fidelity to detail—including the long bar, panelled walls, potted plants, and (even) cigar smoke scent—after The Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

“Go figure, right?” Nick said. We ordered drinks, toasted our reunion, and then Nick talked about work, moving directly to what, he asserted, I would discover was at the heart of it all: contracts. Corruption was everywhere and assumed, bribes a legitimate and time-honored form of negotiation, and what might have been considered illegal or unethical somewhere else was here openly talked about in language that emphasized friendship and respect. But alongside this traditionally sanctioned trading of favors there was an obsessive formality and exactitude, a legacy of English rule, where
everything
you did—when you blew your nose, or pulled up anchor, or arranged to arrange for an arrangement that would lead to an arrangement—had to be authorized by a contract that was impeccably detailed, and, once signed, was honored in each and every particular and—the good news—could be trusted.

We had a second round of drinks, Nick talked about the chain of command in our company—who we reported to, who reported to us, who was and wasn't trustworthy—and then, as
we started on our third round—we were mildly pie-eyed, and Nick kept slapping me on the shoulder and exclaiming: “
You're really here
,
buddy! You did it! You're really here!
”—he signalled to the maître d', who brought a leather-bound book that he set down in front of me, a book handsomely tooled with gold and green curlicues, and one that seemed too thick to be a menu or wine list. I started to open it, but Nick stopped me, his hand on top of mine.

“Guess,” he said.

“A wedding album.”

“Close,” Nick said.

“A Chinese translation of
Triangle
.”

“Closer,” Nick said.

“A smorgasbord of Asian delicacies.”

“Bingo!” Nick said, and took his hand away.

I opened the book, began turning the pages, and found myself looking not at wedding pictures or elegant entrées, but at glossy photographs of beautiful young Asian women who might have been posing for Chanel or Oscar de la Renta ads in places such as
Vogue
,
W
, or
Harper's Bazaar
, except that the majority of them wore no clothes, and were doing things to themselves and other women you would never see in these magazines. In several pictures, there were two women, in some three or more (there were no men in any of them), and in some—I looked at Nick with alarm when I came to the first of these—there were girls who could not have been more than eight or nine years old.

Below each picture was a number.

“Welcome to Singapore,” Nick said, “where false advertising is frowned upon.”

“What you see is what you get?”

“And you
do
get it,” he said, and when he did, as if on cue, the maître d' returned, and placed a cordless telephone between us.

I had left the book open to a picture of a pretty Asian woman, perhaps nineteen or twenty, dressed in the familiar, somewhat
shapeless uniform of a Singapore Airlines flight attendant—a sweet, unrevealing batik print in blues, reds, and golds. She looked less voluptuous than most of the others, and—the word that came to mind even as I nodded to the maître d'—incongruously wholesome.

I lifted the receiver, tapped in the number below the photo, then placed the phone back in its cradle. A few minutes later, the maître d' handed me a small ivory-colored envelope. Inside the envelope was a card with a number on it: 747.

“The room, I assume,” I said. “And it's here in this hotel, right?”

Nick nodded.

“Here's the deal,” Nick said. “Much as I love hanging out with you, Charlie, I decided to be practical, and staying with me would clip wings, yours more than mine. This way, the journey can be as varied as you choose, and without me standing behind you directing traffic. And there's also this: since everything's a perk—we've got relocation allowances and expense accounts to make a teamster official envious—without you having to worry you're running up a tab on my turf. You can stay here, all expenses paid—and I mean
all
—until your apartment's ready.”