Page 57 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

No, I am not acting. I am genuinely distressed, though perhaps not for the obvious reason. No, I’m devastated because Ivan died too soon. About a year too soon, I would say. And now we (me and Ivan’s body, that is) are stuck in New York, unable to go back to Indonesia because of his cunt of a sister. Let me catch you up. Go back in time, to that awful, horrific night in Oxford, where I was very nearly raped by an angry Frenchman.

After the cops came and took our statements, etc., I spent the night at Ivan’s hotel room, being very gently cuddled by him. I made it clear that Antoine didn’t manage to actually rape me before Jane came into the room and pushed him off me. Because I knew Ivan; he liked that I was a damsel in distress, but it would have been too much for him if I had actually been defiled. He didn’t propose that night. I suppose he thought that proposingthe same night some guy was killed in my room would be in bad taste. Or maybe he wasn’t planning to propose that night at all.

It didn’t matter. As it was, Antoine’s attack turned into the perfect catalyst for my relationship with Ivan. I told him I was too traumatized to stay in Oxford, and he whisked me away to London, where we spent the next few days dining at Heston Blumenthal and Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred restaurants. He seemed to think that the key to recovering after a traumatic experience was to eat foie gras and langoustines and shop at Burberry and Gucci. I mean, I don’t disagree. It’s a fine strategy.

By the time I “recovered,” he was besotted with me. I’d made it easy for him to fall in love with me. I was the perfect girl, one who challenged him in a coy, playful way that led to both of us tumbling into bed among shriek-giggles. I was vulnerable enough for him to feel like a big man, but not needy, not at all. Stable enough for him to want to take me home to see his family. I created a dream of us as a married couple—me, always happy to see him when he came home from work, running toward him—“Baby! You’re home!”—and jumping into his arms. I said I loved to cook and wanted to cook for him every day, morning and night. I would wear nothing but an apron so that when he came home, I would be the ideal wife: a sex slave who cooks.

He fell for it. He was so into this image of me as his forever-slave that at the end of the week, he asked me to go with him to Jakarta.

By then, I knew that Ivan was my ticket to the kind of lifestyle I deserved. Hard work may turn you into a modest millionaire, but it sure as hell isn’t going to give you access to mega yachts and private jets and mansions guarded by military police. So I said yes. We flew to Indonesia, and that was where I met his family.

His family, oh my. Where do I begin? I’ve watchedCrazy Rich Asians, I thought I knew what to expect, but Chinese-Indonesians are an entirely different breed. First of all, they are extremely tight-knit. When I say extremely tight-knit, I mean Ivan still lived with his parents. Oh yes. This is common in Chinese-Indonesian cultures. These people own several mansions and luxury apartments in Jakarta alone, but do they utilize them? Nope. They choose to live in the biggest one in North Jakarta, a behemoth of a mansion with eight bedrooms, a fully equipped gym, a ballroom, a home theater, and two Olympic-size pools, one indoors and one outdoors. It’s staggeringly luxurious, but I saw it for what it truly was: a gilded cage.

Ivan’s parents are incredibly controlling. You think you know controlling? You haven’t met these people. They controlled everything from Ivan’s diet (“He must eat bird’s nest soup every day!”) to Ivan’s bowel movements (“Have you been regular, dear?” they asked every morning, as if I wanted to hear about literal shit over my breakfast). From mouth to anus, they had to know what was going on.

No wonder Ani was half-insane by the time I met her in Oxford. Who wouldn’t be driven mad by these people? Ani in Jakarta was a shell of the person I knew in Oxford. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. In Oxford, she had been wild and carefree, switching boyfriends as often as she switched expensive purses. In Jakarta, she became unrecognizable; even her makeup was different. She was a good, pious Chinese-Indonesian girl—she went to church every Sunday, her outfits were stylish but above all modest, and she never, ever spoke back to her parents. Sometimes, I’d catch her regarding me with a calculating look. I’d tried, one night, to pry her open and find the real Ani,but she’d locked Oxford Ani up in a steel box. I didn’t blame her. I would’ve probably done the same if I had Ivan’s parents.

And oh, how his parents hated me. The dirty foreigner come to colonize their precious son. They tolerated me until Ivan announced one year in that we were going to be married, then they tried everything to break us up. They even tried to pay me off to disappear. A measly $2,000,000 they offered me to dump their son. As if anyone in her right mind would have taken that, after seeing their true net worth. I took the $2,000,000 and gave the money, tears streaming down my face, to Ivan. He stormed into their room and told them they were repulsive, then he gave them the ultimatum: Let us be married, or else he would move out (gasp!). They quickly relented after that, though they did make me sign a prenup.

Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, people with APD don’t necessarily like killing. I, for one, find it rather bothersome. Unhygienic. All that blood. (Between you and me, I feel that Antoine bled so much just to get back at me; that was exactly the sort of petty man he was.) I didn’t go into the marriage planning to kill Ivan. I didn’t have anything against him; he was always perfectly benign. That’s a very deliberate word choice, by the way. I’m a writer; I think hard about these things, and “benign” describes Ivan most accurately. He’s inoffensive, unthreatening, and I didn’t mind his presence much for the first few years of marriage. How many married couples can say that? Everyone is always so obsessed about being #blessed and #livingyourbestlife, and here I am, modest little Thalia, perfectly satisfied with benign. And I could have tolerated Ivan for a much longer time if not for hisabhorrent family. I’m the true victim here; I was given no choice but to kill him, because of the prenup.

Prenups. Aren’t they just the worst? They’re only there to protect the rich from the rest of us. But I saw the loophole right away: If Ivan and I had a divorce, I would get nothing, but if Ivan were to die... well, they failed to specify that in the prenup. So there was my answer, clear as day. All I had to do was wait until Ivan passed away.

I’m very good at waiting.

It took a while to figure out how to kill Ivan. For months after I decided to kill him, I continued playing my role as a dutiful Chinese-Indonesian wife. I followed him on his business trips to Shanghai and Dubai and bought decadent souvenirs for his parents—dates as fat as scarab beetles, ginseng more expensive than gold bars. Every gift I gave them, they came up with some reason to push aside. They only drank ginseng from South Korea, not from China. They found dates sickeningly sweet, never mind the fact that they inhaled sticky-sweet palm sugar syrup like it was water.

I accompanied his mother everywhere, carrying her snakeskin Birkin for her like a handmaid. I called her “Mama” and I called his father “Papa” and I called Ani “Saosao,” which means “sister-in-law” in Mandarin. Imagine being Ani’s sister. The sheer horror. Luckily, Mama and Papa didn’t much care for Ani either. They were all about Ivan.

My patience was rewarded when I was allowed to accompany Ivan on his annual checkup at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore. Mount Elizabeth is the most overpriced hospital in Singapore, so naturally, it’s teeming with Chinese-Indonesians. Chinese-Indonesians adore coming here for annual checkups. They’re paranoid and have too much money to knowwhat to do with, so every year, they subject themselves to extensive blood tests and scans to get reassurance that no, they’re not about to randomly drop dead. Ivan was no exception to this rule, but Ivan actually had something to worry about, because apparently, my husband had some hereditary heart condition that required a bit of monitoring. Belatedly, I recalled Ani’s comment all those years ago in Oxford, when she told Ivan not to punt because of his heart. I’d dismissed it as a stupid barb then, because of course, everything that came out Ani’s mouth was a barb.

“It’s fine,” his doctor assured Mama, Papa, Ivan, Ani, and me. (Of course, Mama and Papa and Ani had come with us on this trip. They, too, had a series of unnecessary tests to undergo at Mount Elizabeth.) “Still seeing a little bit of arrhythmia, but overall you’re in good condition.” He prescribed some medication and charged us $3,600 for this. Mama and Papa fussed over Ivan.My sweet baby, oh my poor darling. Talia(This was how they pronounced my beautiful name, butchering it so the Th-sound turned into a harsh T. Just one of the many transgressions that I dutifully jotted down in my little notebook.),you must take better care of him!

I nodded and kept my head lowered so they wouldn’t see my smile. A hereditary heart condition. Interesting. As soon as we got back to their apartment in Singapore—a penthouse off Orchard Road, one of the most sought-after districts in a city of wealthy expats—I nagged Ivan into bed and told his parents I was going to the pharmacist to find the best supplements for him. They nodded, satisfied at this over-the-top show of concern, and off I went. Once I was out of the apartment, I logged on to a VPN and did a search on his heart condition.

He had some sort of hereditary arrhythmia, which wasbasically just a fancy way of saying that his heart didn’t beat to the correct rhythm. For a rule follower like Ivan, this seemed a tad ironic. Fortunately for Ivan, thanks to his gaggle of attentive, well-paid doctors, his condition was kept under control. Unfortunately for Ivan, his poor, long-suffering wife was about to take what was rightfully hers.

At the pharmacist, I asked for “heart healthy vitamins and supplements” and selected the most expensive ones. Then I asked for a bottle of caffeine pills. I’ve just been so tired nowadays, I told the shopkeeper, and I hate the taste of coffee. The shopkeeper shrugged and gave me a bottle of their strongest caffeine pills. I asked if they had anything stronger, and they shrugged again and told me to Google it. Which I did. I found out that while caffeine pills held a comparable amount of caffeine to a cup of coffee, pure caffeine powder is a whole other story. A teaspoon of caffeine powder is equivalent to twenty cups of coffee. And, oh look, I could easily order them online. How very convenient. I practically skipped all the way back to the apartment.

I had to be very, very careful. Indonesia has capital punishment, and the police are largely in the pockets of the rich and powerful (i.e., Ivan’s family). If they even suspected foul play that involved me, I would either rot in an Indonesian prison cell or be killed quickly in the dead of night. No one would miss me; I didn’t have any close friends, and my only remaining relative is Aunt Claudette, who would be torn between sadness and relief at the news of my demise. The precarious position I’d put myself in, to be married into this tyrannical family.

So I did what I do best. I planned meticulously. And it was a plan that would take years. I couldn’t just cram a whole bottle of caffeine powder into Ivan’s mouth and call it done. No, Istarted off small. A sprinkle here and there. He started sleeping badly, tossing and turning in bed, waking up in the morning looking disheveled. I visited him at his office, where I’d subtly sabotage him—misplace an important document, change the numbers on his spreadsheet. Nothing that would actually derail and bankrupt the company (hey, I wanted that money), just little things that I knew would stress him out, so that when he came home in a bad mood, I could cluck over him, in front of Mama and Papa, and tell him he was working too hard, that it wouldn’t be good for his health. This was trickier to pull off than it should have been, because Ani was always hovering around like a wraith. Often, when I dropped by the office, I’d find her there, skulking around, butting into conversations and just generally trying to insert herself in Ivan’s business, so desperate to become relevant within the company. It was honestly pathetic, and very irritating as I would have to make sure she wasn’t paying attention to me while I changed numbers around.

Then I would hold off for a couple of months, helping out at his office to make sure things ran smoothly. No more caffeine. Just to make a clear connection that it was his work that was causing him stress and definitely not his loving, helpful wife. Then back to more powder, mixing it into his morning kale smoothies, his maguro salad bowl, his chicken soup, until he was worried enough to fly back to Singapore for another checkup. The doctor put him on a heart monitor for three days, which showed nothing of concern (I eased up on the caffeine then) and cost us over $20,000. You know how bloody hard it was to pull it off? I had publishing deadlines to meet, not to mention cons that I tried my best to attend, though at times I did have to turn them down, yet another reason I had to punish this awful family.

Once we came back to Jakarta, I started him back on the caffeine. It was actually rather fun, like a little game we were playing with each other. When the palpitations happened again, Mama and Papa insisted he fly to Japan for a checkup. Another doctor, another heart monitor.He’s fine, the doctor said.Is anything stressing him out?

His work, I piped up.I wish he’d take more time off from it.

Listen to your wife, the doctor said.

Good dog.

Yes, listen to Talia, Mama and Papa said.

I almost cried at that. Finally, all those years of hard work, trying to prove myself, that I was a good wife, had paid off. In fact, I was so moved by this that I decided to postpone killing Ivan. I wanted to bask a little in his parents’ approval. How crazy is that? The Chinese-Indonesian culture of sacrificing everything for your parents’ approval had actually managed to sink its claws into me. Mama and Papa’s approval was like a drug; they doled it out in stingy little pinches, and the more I got, the more I wanted. This part was my fault—I fully admit to it. I should’ve just gone ahead and killed him when I’d planned, but I let myself be distracted.

Obviously, it didn’t last long. After a few months of it, I got bored and resumed my plan. But by then, Kurt had started talking about leaving his wife for me. It soon became clear that I had to get rid of Kurt first. If anyone in Indonesia got wind of my affair, it would be all over for me. I tried, I really did, not to have to resort to killing him. I tried to break things off, plying him with all of the charms I had (which is a lot), but nope. Surly, selfish Kurt. If he couldn’t have me, then he’d make sure no one else could. Of course, killing Kurt meant that I probably shouldn’t kill anyone else for at least another year. It meantpostponing Ivan’s death, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but I could stomach it. I told you I was very good at being patient.

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