Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 21

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Claire muttered. She leaned against the counter tapping her foot, refusing to look at me. Her hair was frizzled with static. Her cheeks were wind-burned and swollen, giving her a wild, engorged look. With her long military coat, she was quite a sight.

  “What the hell do you have to do to get a goddamn train ticket in this country is what I’d like to know,” she announced to no one in particular.

  After ten minutes, Ed reappeared and handed us back our passports. “Okay. Yes. Here you are.”

  “How much are the tickets?” Claire asked.

  He ignored her and said something instead to the CITS woman in Mandarin. She tore off two slips of rice paper and slid them beneath the window toward us.

  “Next ticket to Guilin available in six days,” Ed said.

  “Six days?” Claire cried. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Sir, ching,” I said obsequiously, stepping demurely up to the window, “are you sure that perhaps there isn’t anything earlier—”

  “You know, back in America, my father is a very important businessman,” Claire said loudly. “We are special guests from America—”

  “You pay now. You come back in three day. You bring receipts, collect tickets. Then train leave three more day after,” Ed said. “You have two hard sleeper, foreigner price.”

  With a snort of disgust, Claire snatched the receipts up and shoved them in her purse. “When we come back in three days, do we have to wait again, or can we just walk straight up to your counter this time?”

  Ed pointed back at the first ticket counter. “When you come back, you take ticket. You wait on bench. When we call ticket number, you collect tickets.”

  “Of course. More tickets, more waiting. That’s all you have in this goddamn country. Tickets and waiting. Oh yeah, and phlegm.” She shook her head and looked at me. “I don’t see how the Chinese think they’re ever going to amount to anything in this world. Their whole fucking system is medieval.”

  ———

  The next morning, as we got dressed in shivering silence, Claire said, “I need to spend the day alone. I’ve got more business to attend to.”

  “More business?” Claire seemed to want to spend more and more time on her own, scribbling feverishly in her notebook and bicycling into the city for hours on end. “I’m sorry, but what kind of business?”

  She looked at me cryptically. “Sweetie, Libras shouldn’t ask questions.”

  I just didn’t have it in me to argue, so I rented a bicycle and pedaled despondently toward the city center alone. I arranged to meet Cynthia and her boys after lunch; until then I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. Just outside the Temple of Heaven, I got a flat tire again, and I had to walk the bicycle half a mile beyond the park before I could find someone in the hutong to repair it. By the time the bike was fixed, I was nearly in tears.

  My loneliness was outsized, festering. I felt as if I was starting to warp. To console myself, I imagined as I biked to Tiananmen Square that I was being filmed. So, Ms. Gilman, here you are, the only American biking along with thousands of Chinese through the streets of Beijing. Please tell the audience back home about how you’ve managed to function so well in such a radically challenging environment. I pictured vast, adoring audiences being wowed as they witnessed me purchasing a bunch of bananas on Qianmen Road. “My, isn’t that impressive?” they’d marvel as I sputtered the words hello, four, and thank you in Chinese to a fruit vendor. “What a linguistic genius.”

  When this fantasy ran its course, I cast about for something else to occupy my mind. Since Trevor was gone, I began imagining that my lover Jake was actually pedaling on a bicycle alongside me, urging me on. Since he’d backpacked through India, I thought he might be uniquely able to understand how you could travel to one of the most populous nations on earth, only to feel massively lonely and estranged. I began inventing conversations with him in my head. Ironically, it seemed that the best way to deal with the reality of China was to retreat into fantasy.

  Cynthia, Warren, and Anthony were waiting for me with their bicycles just outside the Forbidden City. It was their last day in Beijing; the next morning, they were taking a train to Guangzhou in order to cross the border back into Hong Kong on a hydrofoil.

  Cynthia shook her head incredulously. “It’s only been three weeks, but I feel like we’ve been here a year. Can you believe it? Time is so distorted in China. It’s like another dimension.”

  Warren zoomed ahead of us through the boulevards, pumping faster and faster on his peeling black bike. As we raced to keep up, the sun pressed wanly through the haze, warming the streets. The sky burned an unnatural cotton-candy pink. The squat tiled houses and corrugated storefronts whipped past. Part of what made Beijing appear so gray and industrial, I realized, was its total lack of commercialism—no billboards, neon signs, gaudy advertisements; no tantalizing piles of junky plastic goods in the shops. The only vibrancy was the crimson of the Chinese flag and the gate to the Forbidden City. And oh, yes. The enormous portrait of Mao.

  We biked to Behai Park, then up, down, everywhere. By the time they dropped me off at the Grand Hotel Beijing to meet Claire for tea, my legs were jellied. Balancing on her bike, Cynthia pulled a tiny pad out of her day pack and scribbled down her home address.

  “Please.” She pressed it into my hand. “If you’re ever in Southern California—”

  “Likewise,” I said, jotting my parents’ address on the inside cover of her guidebook, “if you ever want to take the boys sightseeing in New York—”

  As they pedaled back down Chang’an Boulevard, the three of them glanced back one last time and waved. Watching their blond heads bobbing, then dissolving into the sea of dark hair, I felt a stab of grief. I found myself already missing their unconditional warmth, their pioneer spirit. Any time I’d been with them, they made me feel like family. Now I would never see them again.

  ———

  He was a gangly man, with a narrow, pleasant face and a basketball player’s build: airplane shoulders, rangy arms, spatula hands. His legs were too big to fit beneath the table, so he jotted on a legal pad balanced on one knee, his tie flung carelessly over his shoulder. Although he was Asian, something about the oversize, unapologetic sprawl of him seemed strangely familiar.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but do you speak English?”

  He glanced up. “Let’s hope so.” He smiled, adjusting his glasses. “I grew up in Baltimore.”

  His name was Lee, and of course I could join him, he said. I dropped gratefully onto the empty chair across from his. The tea room was filled to capacity. Tired and ill-at-ease, I began to babble. Besides Cynthia and her boys, Lee was the first American I’d encountered in weeks. Thanks. I’ve just spent eight hours on a bicycle. I’m waiting for someone. God only knows where she is. I don’t mean to bother you.

  “It’s not a problem.” Lee capped his fountain pen and set it on the table. Gold cuff links like ampersands glinted on his wrists. “What brings you to Beijing?”

  When I shrugged and said, “Just backpacking around,” he whistled through his teeth. “Wow. This doesn’t seem like the kind of place you’d want to be on your own for any extended period of time.” He sat back and studied me, frowning. “I’m impressed, ” he said finally, as if he’d just decided. “Want some tea?”

  Lee was a Korean-American investment banker working for a small group of venture capitalists; this was his second trip to Beijing. He was staying at the Lido Holiday Inn on the outskirts of the city.

  “It’s almost hermetically sealed over there, but that’s just fine with me,” he laughed as he speared a slice of lemon and passed me the little plate. “They’ve got a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a ‘foreigners only’ supermarket. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but then again”—he smiled drily—“so is the rest of China.”

  As we traded stories, I learned that Lee had attended Harvard Business School, was an antique car enthusiast, and used to play squash
competitively. Although he’d grown up in Maryland “addicted to television and Oreos,” he now lived in Mayfair and spent the bulk of his time traveling to Singapore, Japan, and Korea on business. Only recently, now that Deng Xiaoping had implemented plans for modernization, was his company considering investing in China. But Lee was skeptical. “I just don’t see how this country is going to turn itself around anytime soon,” he said frankly. “Industrially, it’s anywhere between sixty to eighty years behind us, and that’s not even counting the rural areas. And the infrastructure is terrible.”

  As he stirred his tea, he looked wistful. He seemed accustomed to solitude. Lee was thirty-six. If we’d met in the States, we’d have had absolutely no reason to sit together and probably nothing to say. But here? We had that special camaraderie of the displaced, of sad people with suitcases.

  Claire arrived suddenly, in a flurry of apologies, carrying two enormous plastic shopping bags from the Friendship Store that knocked against the tables as she passed breathlessly through the room. I watched Lee watch her, taking in the sylph of her, the Chablis of her hair, her glistening, attenuated neck.

  He jumped to his feet and sought out another chair. “Please, allow me,” he said, circling around and pulling it out for her. Before she could sit, he grabbed her hand and shook it. “Your friend’s told me so much about you. Can I get you some tea?”

  Summoning the waiter, he insisted that Claire and I order something to eat from the little menu as well. Then he sat back, his face newly alive, and watched Claire as she went about settling herself in, sorting out her bags and her wallet and her Windbreaker as if she were nesting. When the waiter returned with two cheese sandwiches on a silver tray, Lee paid the bill and glanced at his watch. It was obvious from the look on his face that he was late.

  “Tonight, will you allow me to take you both out for Peking duck?” he asked. “There’s a famous restaurant right by Qianmen Gate. It’s the best in the city.”

  I spread our map out across the table and he circled the address for us with his fancy onyx pen.

  “Take a cab there,” he instructed. “I’ll pay for it. Just have the driver take you to this corner and I’ll be waiting on the curb.”

  After he left, Claire and I sat alone in the Baroque tea room, chewing our spongy cheese sandwiches. The processed yellow cheese stuck to the roofs of our mouths, making it difficult to talk, but it was a reprieve from the acrid, bone-riddled stir-fry we’d been eating all week at our hotel. The tea room had nearly emptied. From somewhere, a violinist played a concerto. A waiter in a white jacket stood woodenly beneath a dusty chandelier. It felt a little like being in a funeral parlor, though after the grimy hutongs and crowded boulevards, not unpleasantly so.

  “Lee seems nice, doesn’t he?” I wiggled my eyebrows. “I think he likes you, Genevieve.”

  Claire stretched her arms high over her head and closed her eyes. “Mmm,” she murmured.

  “I’ve missed you, you know,” I said. “I feel like I haven’t seen you for days.”

  Claire swallowed with difficulty and blinked at me fuzzily for an instant, as if she wasn’t quite sure who I was. “Sorry?” she said.

  An uneasy silence bubbled between us.

  Brushing the crumbs from my mouth, I tried again. “That’s so nice of Lee, isn’t it, taking us out to dinner tonight?”

  Claire reached across the table, plucked two sugar cubes with the silver tongs, and dropped them perfunctorily into her tea. “Well, we’re being looked after now,” she said. Drawing her cup to her mouth, she winked at me. “Don’t ask me to explain, but I’m pretty certain Lee is a friend of Adom’s. And they’ve been in contact. Through the bank. And Adom’s network.”

  “Excuse me?”

  But Claire refused to elaborate. She smiled faintly to herself and began humming. It was a moment of oddness. Yet I let it pass. It seemed Claire’s fantasy life had grown at least as fanciful and vivid as my own.

  Quite frankly, I didn’t know what else to say.

  ———

  For my birthday, God came to Beijing in the form of a lashing rainstorm. It began at midnight and tapered off before sunrise. When we awoke, the city was a revelation. The smog and dust had cleared, leaving in their wake a crystalline geometry of low buildings beneath a vivid turquoise sky. The fall air smelled of wet leaves and wood smoke. It was bracing and crisp. For the first time since we’d arrived in China, I felt like I could breathe.

  As the CITS bus wove its way through the ravine and the first segments of the Great Wall became visible, Claire pressed her face to the window and gasped, “Oh, that is beyond awesome. You’re right. It’s almost holy.”

  I jiggled in my seat with excitement—and relief.

  The night before, over dinner with Lee, Claire had continued to remain strangely quiet. While a white-jacketed waiter expertly carved up a duck in front of us, then bundled it into pancakes dabbed with plum sauce and scallions, it had fallen to me to keep the conversation going. While Lee and I laughed and drank bottle after bottle of Tsingtao, Claire sullenly picked at her food, unwrapping the pancakes and tweezing out slivers of scallions with her chopsticks. Several times, she excused herself to go to the bathroom, leaving most of her duck unfinished.

  During dessert, Lee invited us to come out to the Lido Holiday Inn for a special birthday dinner the following evening when we returned from the Great Wall. I was surprised when Claire accepted.

  “Well, why wouldn’t I?” she said archly. “He’s one of Adom’s contacts.”

  Now, as the two of us began climbing the Great Wall, she seemed restored, squealing with glee, pointing, pirouetting. “Hold this a moment, okay? But don’t look inside!” She thrust her big plastic Friendship Store shopping bag at me and twirled along the wall.

  “Oh, my God, Zsa Zsa, you were so absolutely right,” she said breathlessly. “This is un-fucking believable.”

  She, too, wanted to climb up high along the ridge. “But not too far. I want to make sure there are witnesses around.”

  “Witnesses?”

  She laughed mischievously and pranced ahead. “Okay, here!” she pointed to a section. When I caught up to her, she’d already hoisted herself up between the parapets. “Come.” She motioned to me to take a seat beside her on the stones. “Close your eyes.”

  I gripped the edge of the wall uneasily. The sun burned feverish orange cauliflowers beneath my eyelids, and I experienced a moment of vertigo. I could hear the wind over the mountains. Beside me came a rustling, a liquid plunk. Whatever Claire was doing seemed to be taking a long time. Then I heard a scrape of flint.

  “Okay, open!”

  Before me on the wall was a vanilla birthday cake with a lone fat red candle burning in the center and a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur.

  “Happy birthday to you!” Claire sang, handing me a stack of presents wrapped in brown paper.

  I gasped. “Oh my God. Claire, where on earth did you get all this stuff?” I looked at the cake, the gifts, our plastic collapsible cups thoughtfully placed beside the bottle.

  “It wasn’t easy.” She laughed. When I blew out the candle, she handed me her Swiss Army knife. “First piece is yours.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “A Western cake. How did you find this?”

  She grinned and waggled her finger at me. “Uh-uh-uh. I told you not to ask too many questions before your birthday, Ms. Libra. Really,” she said with a toss of her hair. “How could I possibly show up here today without something amazing planned? How could we not celebrate your twenty-second birthday on the Great Wall of China?”

  We sat slugging Baileys directly from the bottle (the collapsible cups, we discovered, would not stop collapsing) and eating the vanilla cake, which was dense and grainy, like cornbread. A couple of Norwegian tourists hiked by. “See, witnesses,” Claire pointed. “Please. Come join us.” She waved them over and curved her arm around me proudly. “It’s my friend’s birthday!”

  As we handed
them a slice of cake, they sang me “Happy Birthday” in Norwegian. Some Japanese women passed by and sang “Happy Birthday” in Japanese. Claire beckoned more tourists to join us. I got serenaded in Spanish, French, and Dutch and had my picture taken by a Swiss. Someone unwrapped a chocolate bar and passed it around. Someone else handed me a wildflower they’d picked near the bus. A Chinese man in a jumpsuit suddenly appeared with a broom—apparently the wall did have a maintenance staff, after all—and Claire coaxed him over, saying, “Ching? Ching?” until he nervously joined us for a slice of cake. Soon it was a multinational party. There were roughly eighteen people visiting the wall that day, and all of them got a swig of Baileys out of the bottle. Everyone sang together tipsily.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Claire said rapturously. “This is exactly how I imagined it. This is exactly what I wanted for you today. People from all over. The sunlight. The cake. Tell me that the world can possibly get better than this?”

  When the party finally broke up, it was close to sunset. Claire and I brushed the crumbs off the wall and picked up the litter. “Wait, open your presents,” she urged. Somehow, she had managed to buy me a paperback book of Chinese women writers translated into English. A bright yellow silk scarf. A pair of carved wooden combs. And a red velvet hat studded with sequins that looks like a cross between a skullcap and a fez.

  “I wanted to buy two of them and make them into an X-rated bra for you, but I could only find one,” she teased.

  I looked at her, my generous friend with her fine-boned face, her happy sense of conviction. She had bathed me in love. “Thank you,” I whispered, my eyes starting to tear. “This is the most beautiful birthday ever.”

  ———

  That night we splurged on a taxi. At the Lido Holiday Inn, Lee was waiting for us in the lobby. “Happy birthday,” he said, ushering us into the restaurant. “Order whatever you like.” We were seated on taupe-covered velveteen banquettes beneath an ugly modern chandelier. The menu was in English, the food Western. I was amazed how comforting this felt; when we’d returned from the Great Wall, I’d tried to put in a collect call to my parents. I’d waited for over an hour, but the operator couldn’t get a line out of Beijing. Now, seeing hamburgers, barbecue ribs, and spaghetti on the menu, I felt connected to home. I ordered the ribs, Claire the spaghetti; when they arrived, we saw they were barely disguised spareribs and lo mein. But I was too hungry and tired to care. This time it was Claire who did most of the talking while I sat chewing in a dreamy stupor.