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you,” I said. I didn’t blame Kat for being upset. She was the only Singaporean friend I’d kept in touch with through my years abroad, and I’d done a lousy job of it these past months. When Paul moved out, I’d emailed her the news, and then had failed to respond to her increasingly frantic messages.
    Kat wrapped a satin-encased arm around Frankie. They’d met once before during Frankie’s first visit to Singapore. “Welcome back,” Kat said evenly.
    I could tell she was trying to decide whether to mention Frankie’s weight loss. She was about to say more when a tall, well-built man, his face already flushed, backed into her.
    “Hello, watch where you’re going, you big oaf,” Kat said, only half kidding.
    The red-faced man found his balance. “Sorry, my dear,” he said with a gallant bow.
    Shaking her head in mild disapproval, Kat explained that he was her husband’s army kaki , a friend from his mandatory military service days.
    He was already taking Frankie’s hand. “Hello. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
    Frankie blushed and ducked her head, and for an instant, with her newly chiseled face hidden, she was my college roommate again—the girl I had to beg one of Paul’s friends to take to the Screw-Your-Roommate dance, and whom he promptly abandoned on the dance floor for the skinny redhead who lived above us. That evening, I left Paul with his boorish friends, and she and I, still clad in our strapless dresses, biked downtown for a late-night ice cream cone.
    “ Aiyah , Seng Loong, get out of here,” Kat said, playfully shoving the red-faced man. She led Frankie and me to the bar where she handed us each a champagne flute. “Ming,” she called to her husband. “Look who’s here. And come meet Frankie.”
    Unlike his wife, who floated about the room, waving her cigarette holder as if it were a natural extension of her arm, Ming shuffled over in the three-quarter-length dinner jacket and high-waist trousers that Kat must have picked out. A bead of perspiration trickled down the side of his face, and half of his dapper little moustache had come unglued and now dangled limply by his mouth. Ming was small and bug-eyed and had always looked slightly stunned behind the thick glasses he’d traded for contacts after he met Kat. When they first started dating, Paul and I placed bets on how long they’d last.
    Now I hugged Ming and told him how great it was to see him. I was about to introduce Frankie when we heard a loud pop. The trans music–spewing speakers snapped off, and a series of arpeggios rose from the back corner of the room. At the grand piano sat a short, bald man in a three-piece charcoal-gray suit. He inhaled dramatically before breaking into a flashy rendition of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” filled with improvised trills and glissandos . The dim lights glinted off his clean-shaven pate, and I recognized the classmate with whom I’d once performed a four-hands piano duet at our primary school’s National Day concert.
    “We should have Gretch take a turn,” said Frankie.
    “We should,” Kat agreed.
    “That’s right,” said Ming. “I forgot you played.”
    “Maybe after a few drinks,” I said to shut them up. Even though my old piano still stood in my parents’ living room, I hadn’t touched a keyboard since I’d sold my Steinway upright to a classmate last month—for extra cheap because she let me stack boxes of music books in her basement storage unit. The one thing I did bring home was the bulky, old-fashioned, wooden pyramid of a metronome I’d owned since college, but it sat forlornly on my night table, reduced to a large, impractical paperweight.
    The pianist played on, each verse more ornate than the last. Lyrics filled my head: They said someday you’ll find / all who love are blind / Oh, when your heart’s on fire / You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.
    As the piece came to a close, the pianist segued niftily into something from West Side Story . Two