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job before I could get a promotion or a substantial increase.
She and I were okay. I didn't have any enemies. But hanging out
with her was increasingly becoming icky.
    "So how many guys did you sleep
with while over there, Moira?" was her second question, after "how
are you."
    No joke, I pretended to choke on a
spaghetti noodle. Just to give myself time to think. Arabella
wasn't like this before. But as time went on—as she neared forty,
maybe—she was getting more and more like this. Whatever this
was.
    The ex-boyfriend's name was
George, Australian with Filipino parents. He was Aussie in many
ways and Pinoy in others, and the balance was what probably made
him most attractive to me. Like me, he was someone and somewhere
without quite being it. Except he had more than two decades of a
head start. So it might be wrong of me to be calling him my
boyfriend. Truth was, he was a guy I had dinner with, and did stuff
with, for about a year, but I never felt that he loved me, and I
was pretty sure he was seeing other people.
    So one day I just said, no I wasn't going to do
stuff with him anymore, and he started going out with new assistant
manager Tamsin. I was the new girl too, when we started. He was the
type who did that.
    "What have you been hearing?" I
said, laughing it off. "Don't trust any of these
gossips."
    "So did you go out with
foreigners? Like, Americans, British guys? Or were they mostly
Filipinos?"
    After I freed myself from the
George delusion, I dated. Participated in "cultural exchanges" as
Roxie and I liked to say. But it wasn't easy to be suddenly
promiscuous when your flatmate was your mom's friend's daughter.
Not that she was a snitch, but it was weird. I was acutely aware
for example that every time her boyfriend visited they would
probably want to do stuff and didn't want them to feel like I was
in the way. (That weekend I bought huge headphones and a bunch of
movies to watch.) Surely she thought the same about me.
    The four other people at the table didn't even
notice how strange this was, which made me wonder if I was the one
going crazy. In fact, they continued having their own conversation,
about what VP so-and-so did at the annual meeting blah blah blah,
while I was left to fend for myself.
    "No, I didn't go out with
anybody," I lied, just to close the book on it.
    "You're lying."
    "Nobody liked me over
there."
    "You're lying. How could they not?
You’ve got that...look going for you."
    "What look?" I was curious about
this.
    Arabella was really going there.
"Educated Filipina."
    She meant it as a compliment, so I
didn’t dare think about what she considered an insult. Best to move
on. "Thank you, but no."
    "Nobody, the entire time? Five
years? Didn't you have a boyfriend or something?"
    I was too deep into this by now.
"Where did you hear that? There was nobody. I was living with a
very religious girl and she made me promise not to bring anyone
home."
    "But that's what their apartments
are for!"
    "Guys have flatmates,
too."
    The flats weren't huge. You'd run
into each other eventually, like on the way to get a glass of
water, and all the money spent on headphones and movies would have
been for nothing because you'd have to politely nod and acknowledge
the casual visitor wearing skimpy shorts.
    Over the years it became more like normal, but I
never got comfortable knowing that much about another couple (when
they fought, made up, broke up, hooked up) through sounds
overheard.
    So when the opportunity to buy a unit at NV Park
came up, I got a one-bedroom. Not going to be sharing.
    "Hotels? Motels?"
    "Too expensive."
    "Oh dear." Arabella looked over at
the others just to check if they were as shocked as she was, but
they were still in their own world. But she looked so sorry for me.
"Is that why you came back? Did you give up on finding a man
there?"
    Arabella, by the way, was eight years older than I
was, and also unattached. Her last serious relationship had ended
even before I met her at work. She