Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  When we finished our meal, Lee wished me happy birthday again and handed us each a thick bar of Swiss chocolate and a pack of Doublemint gum. We were beside ourselves. Suddenly, I understood what life must have been like for people during World War Two. Stockings! Chocolate! Then it occurred to me that this was what life was like for the Chinese every day. Everything was rationed. Everything was a luxury.

  “What’s your pleasure?” Lee asked. “They’ve got a bowling alley here, a pool, a disco.”

  Since I was the birthday girl, I got to choose, so of course I chose the disco. As we headed upstairs in the purring mirrored elevator, then walked down the plushly carpeted hallways, I did not see a single Chinese guest on the premises.

  Juliana’s Discotheque had a mirror ball and silly music videos playing overhead on an enormous screen. A clump of Westerners flailed and gyrated spastically to “One Night in Bangkok” and the theme song from Ghost Busters. While Claire and Lee sidled up to the bar, I walked over to the dance floor. Bananarama’s “Venus” thumped on, and I started dancing by myself.

  A compact, muscular African man slid over to me, took my hand, and started boogying. He was wearing an English Beat T-shirt and a black felt fedora.

  “I’m Chief,” he shouted over the music.

  “I’m Susie,” I shouted back. At the bar, Lee was leaning toward Claire and whispering in her ear intently. They were both holding wineglasses by their stems.

  “Say ‘Happy birthday,’ ” shouted Chief, pointing to himself. “Today’s me birthday.”

  “No kidding! Today’s my birthday, too!”

  He stopped dancing for a minute. “You’re bleedin’ kidding me!”

  “Nuh-Nuh. I just had a party today on the Great Wall of China,” I shouted. I loved saying that, loved hearing the way it sounded.

  Chief feigned offense. “You had a party. And you didn’t invite me?”

  “I didn’t know you.”

  “You do now. Where’re you from, Susie?”

  “New York. You?”

  “Grew up in London. Me mum’s half Jamaican, half British, and me dad’s African. I’m here visiting him. He’s the ambassador from Ghana.”

  We danced to one song, then another. Claire and Lee meandered onto the dance floor. I noticed Lee had his hand on the small of Claire’s back. I introduced them to Chief over the throb of the music.

  When Chief mentioned that his father was the ambassador to Ghana, Claire flinched as if she’d been stung. She stepped back and studied him outright, like a specimen.

  “Yeah.” I rolled my eyes at her. “And it’s Chief’s birthday, too. He says he’s twenty-one today. How ’bout that?”

  “She and me, we’re born on the exact same day,” he boasted, gesturing between us. Wrapping his arm around my waist, he drew me toward him. “So how ’bout it, luv? A birthday kiss to celebrate?”

  “Okay,” Claire said abruptly. “Time to go. We’re out of here.”

  Ten minutes later, in the taxi jiggling back toward our guesthouse, she was utterly silent.

  “You didn’t have to do that, you know,” I said. “I can handle myself. The guy was totally harmless.”

  “Harmless?” Claire said bitterly, turning to face me in the darkened cab. “Susie, you have no idea who that guy is.”

  “So? We were just dancing.”

  Her eyes bore into me. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “His father is the ambassador to Ghana? And our so-so friend ‘Jonnie’ was living and working in Ghana.”

  “So?”

  “So? Don’t you see the connection? Susie, how do you suppose this guy Chief just happened to know it was your birthday?”

  “Because I told him,” I said irritably. “He told me that it was his birthday, so then I said something like, ‘Gee, what a coincidence.’ ”

  “I see,” said Claire sourly. “And you don’t think that that was a setup? That he didn’t pretend it was his birthday just to engage you?”

  “Sure, I do—in order to get laid. Guys do that all the time. ‘Oh, baby, today’s my birthday. Oh, baby, tomorrow I leave for the army. Oh, baby, my dog just died.’ For all you know, he made up the story about his dad being an ambassador to Ghana, too. Guys talk shit all the time, Claire.”

  “Oh. You think so,” she said viciously. “You’re just lucky we have Lee on our side.”

  “Lee? He was totally all over you tonight, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “He has to act that way,” she snapped. “It’s his job.”

  “It’s his job? To do what? Pretend that’s he’s a lonely businessman hitting on you?”

  “Please,” Claire whispered. She held up her hand and shut her eyes, barricading herself against me. “Don’t ask me to explain. Stop asking me to say things that I’m not allowed to tell you.”

  “That you’re not allowed to tell me? Oh, please, Claire,” I said angrily, turning to face the window. “Enough with the melodrama already. Give it a rest, will you?”

  ———

  From then on, she boycotted me. She sat in our hotel room writing manically in her journal and speaking only when necessary, in monosyllables. After we bicycled to the train station to pick up our tickets to Guilin, she said, “I’ll see you at dinner. I’ve got appointments.” Before I could respond, she pedaled off.

  I had no idea what was happening. So we had an argument about a couple of idiot guys. So what? Nothing was making any sense anymore. All I could hope was that it would pass. I’d lived my whole life around mercurial people. My mother was practically her own weather system. When people got into a snit, I’d found, it was best just to tiptoe around and give them a wide berth. Soon enough, they’d get over it. Plus, I reminded myself, Claire was a Gemini—Jekyll and Hyde almost by definition. Wait it out, I told myself. She’ll come around.

  For two days I bicycled arduously around Beijing in the cold by myself. I went to the dreary, authoritarian People’s Museum. I went to the post office and spent two hours waiting in a Plexiglas booth for a collect phone call to go through to my parents, who turned out not to be home. Though I was reluctant to do it, I finally visited the Friendship Store. Entering it felt to me like crossing a picket line. I bought a three-dollar can of Coca-Cola and tried on a silk bathrobe.

  I wrote dozens of postcards. Later I would find out that only those in which I praised China got through to America; the cards on which I wrote “travel here is difficult” somehow never arrived. I wrote my friend Maggie a long letter on Grand Hotel Beijing stationery. When she finally received it, it had clearly been opened, read, and resealed. There were even Chinese notations on the outside.

  The more steeped in loneliness I became, the more florid my fantasy life grew. Jake was drinking tea with me, eating bean paste dumplings with me in the hutongs, making love to me illicitly on the banks of Qianhai Lake.

  If I heard a Muzak version of “Let It Be” in the Grand Hotel elevator, I decided it was an aural postcard from home. When I saw a young Chinese man selling boiled eggs on the street, I imagined he was my friend Steve Blumenthal from high school, who sold Larry’s Italian Ices from a pushcart in lower Manhattan. When I saw acupuncture needles in a window, I heard the voice of my grandmother. “Oh, Susie love, I am so proud of you.” Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn’t so completely on my own.

  On our last full day in Beijing, I begged Claire, “Whatever I did, I’m sorry. Just please be my friend again. Come out and play with me?”

  She raked her hands back through her hair and blinked rapidly. “Oh, sweetie.” She scratched the patch of redness beneath her ear, at the base of her neck. “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m just really, really tired, is all.”

  We took a city bus up to the Forbidden City. Outside the ticket booth, we were approached by a young Chinese man neatly dressed in a button-down shirt and a cheap, carefully knotted tie. He held a small red school notebook.

  “Excuse
me, but I am student at Beijing University,” he said. “My name is Sam. I come here to Forbidden City to practice my English. May I kindly ask you to employ me as your guide during your visit?”

  For the next two hours, Sam led us through the Forbidden City. His tour consisted mostly of escorting us through the site and reading aloud the English plaques that we could’ve just as easily read ourselves. Nonetheless, we were touched by his earnestness.

  The Forbidden City, he informed us, was believed to have been built with 9,999.5 rooms because 10,000 was considered the number of divine perfection; apparently even the emperors acknowledged that heaven was not possible on earth. Given that Claire and I came from a culture that named every trailer park, time share, and subdivision “Paradise Grove,” we found this impressive.

  Like so many other Chinese, Sam questioned us relentlessly about America: How can I learn about your political system? What books do you read? How come you say you are a democracy when so many people in America do not vote in elections?

  Oddly, his rapid-fire questions didn’t bother Claire. While she was increasingly suspicious of Westerners, she seemed to have become immune to the Chinese. She happily told Sam that her three stepbrothers all had advanced degrees, that her father was an extremely important American businessman, and that she herself was preparing to become a teacher “on a global scale”—which was, frankly, news to me.

  “A teacher?” Sam said, delightedly. “Do you think you could send me some books?”

  ———

  “That guy, Sam,” I said as we walked back from the bus stop. “It’s so sad, really. He’s brilliant, and he knows there’s this whole world outside that he can’t access. It’s got to be so frustrating, don’t you think?”

  But Claire wasn’t listening. She was standing transfixed on the pathway to our hotel. A few yards away, by the entrance, a large family of dark-haired, sepia-skinned tourists was climbing out of a taxi. The women were dressed in long peasant skirts and shawls. The one man—presumably the family patriarch—wore an embroidered waistcoat. His face was hawkish and mustached; as they unloaded their satchels, they laughed and chatted away in a language I didn’t recognize.

  “Oh, shit,” Claire murmured. “It’s them.”

  Yanking me by the arm, she dashed into the lobby, barked at the hotel receptionist to give us the key to room 107, then raced up the stairs.

  “Claire, what the hell—”

  She ran down the hall with me at her heels. She pulled me into our room, slammed the door shut behind us, and locked it.

  “Okay. Okay, that’s it,” she cried, panting. “That’s it. From now on, neither one of us is stepping outside.”

  “What?” I cried. “Are you crazy? Claire, they’re just tourists!”

  “That’s what you think. I know who they are. I’m not taking any chances. We’re eating dinner in here tonight. We’ve got peanuts and almond cakes. And then tomorrow we wait for breakfast to finish. Once everybody leaves, we get the bus to the train station, then spend the day waiting there instead, until we’re off—”

  “Oh, for chrissake, Claire.” I sat down on the bed. “You’re being totally irrational. I don’t even think they’re Arabs.”

  “Guilin is off the beaten path. We’ll be much safer there.”

  “They could be Romanian or Portuguese.”

  “We are not leaving until it’s safe, do you understand?”

  When she said this, I couldn’t deny it: A little alarm went off, a trigger wire of panic. She sounded nuts. But she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. She was Claire. And we were like conjoined twins at this point. We were Zsa Zsa and Genevieve, ten thousand miles from home—from anywhere. All we had was each other.

  And that’s when I first wondered: Could there be some truth to what she was saying? Maybe something devious was going on. Perhaps Claire and her father were actually working for an outfit like the CIA. It wasn’t that far-fetched, actually. The CIA routinely recruited from the Ivy League. They’d been at Brown just that past spring, in fact, trolling for new hires while my leftie friends protested outside. Claire was a Republican. This was the Cold War. Was it really inconceivable that she’d be working covertly for our government? Not at all. She really might know things that I didn’t. Certainly it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Now I was sounding crazy. I stopped and tried to calm myself down. This was all just the delirium of China, I told myself. A by-product of sleep deprivation and overactive imaginations. But then again, I couldn’t be sure. Whatever Claire was going through—whatever I was going through—it would pass. It simply had to.

  Yet I passed the night sleeplessly, visions of the CIA and the PLO tumbling around in my brain. As soon as Claire stepped into the shower the next morning, I hurried downstairs. I tried to explain to the desk clerk that I needed to make a collect call to the United States in private; was it possible to put a call through to the hall phone instead of to our room? Significantly, the word privacy does not exist in Mandarin. But after much pantomiming, the clerk seemed to understand.

  For the next two and a half hours, I waited. Claire went about packing her bags as if nothing were wrong, humming along loudly to Duran Duran on her Walkman. I could hear other guests tromping back from breakfast, locking and unlocking their doors, dragging their luggage downstairs. Our train didn’t depart for Guilin until seven p.m. that evening, but I worried my call wouldn’t go through before checkout at noon.

  Finally there was a pounding on the door. “Your call ready,” the clerk shouted. “You take in hallway. Quick!”

  Before Claire could react, I ran out to the telephone on the landing.

  Through the receiver, I could hear the crackle-static of the overseas line, then two operators speaking Chinese, then a dull, delayed ringing that seemed to be broadcast through an echo chamber. My heart thumped wildly. I crossed my fingers. Please pick up, I whispered. Please be home.Oh, Mom, I need to talk to you so badly. I need some perspective. It’s all getting a little crazy here. I don’t know which end is up anymore.

  A moment later came a click.

  “Hello?” my mother said. It sounded as if she were speaking in a wind tunnel.

  “I have a collect call from Miss Susan Gilman from Beijing, China,” a foreign operator announced. “Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes, I will,” my mother said quickly. There was another sharp click. “Hello?”

  “Mom!”

  “Susie—”

  “Oh, Mom. It’s so good to hear your voice!”

  “It’s good to hear yours, too,” she blurted. “But listen. Do you think you could call back in an hour? I’m sorry, but the World Series is on. The Mets are playing for the first time in seventeen years. And it’s the bottom of the tenth—the tenth inning of the sixth game, can you believe it? Boston’s up by one game, the score’s tied, the Mets have two outs, a man on third, and Mookie Wilson just made strike two. It’s unbelievable. I hate to do this, but can we talk later instead? Oh, my God. Wilson just hit a foul. Oh, my God. Look at that. I don’t believe it. Okay. Gotta go.”

  With that, she hung up.

  I stood alone in the hallway, stunned, staring at the black plastic comma in my hand. When I glanced up, Claire was behind me with our backpacks, looking like a hunted animal.

  “Are you ready? What are you doing?” She foisted my bag at me. “C’mon. The coast is clear.”

  Chapter 8

  Guilin

  THE TRAIN TO Guilin takes thirty-four hours. The only food we’ve managed to bring with us is six pastries from the French bakery and two greasy bags of dumplings. When our Chinese bunkmates see this, they grow concerned. Like aunts and uncles, they begin foisting chopsticks on us and little metal lunch pails full of rice and sautéed vegetables. Even though they have scarcely more food than we do, they urge ching, ching—please, please—insisting we share their dinners.

  A few hours later, their parental faces begin to blur. I grow woozy. My throat burns as if som
eone has ripped a bandage off it. By the time the train lurches to a halt in Guilin, I’m shaking. Claire bundles me in her thick Chinese army coat and eases me off the train. Rain comes down in sheets. The air smells botanical, of wet soil and leaves.

  A gold room pinwheels around me. Dingy wallpaper, a roaring toilet, a sizzling radiator splinter into shards, folding into patterns as if through a kaleidoscope. My teeth are chattering so hard, they feel like they’ll shatter. I’m sprawled on the stone floor of a temple—oh, the cold is so good against my burning face! Hundreds of flickering votive candles have been placed around me as if I’m a human sacrifice, and Buddhist monks wrapped in saffron robes waltz in, chanting in a procession. Jake suddenly appears draped in an ivory silk toga; he kneels down beside me and kisses me hotly, then begins making love to me with increasing violence, until my head is banging against the floor and throbbing in pain. His face melts, dripping between my fingers like plasma, and he turns into Trevor, standing before me in the Temple of Heaven with his arms crossed. I’m doing a striptease for him, but my clothes are endlessly layered. As soon as I remove one garment, another springs up underneath it. I’m hot! I’m suffocating! I want my clothing off! I tear and thrash, but when I finally disrobe, I’m just a smear of flesh, and Trevor is shaking me worriedly. “Are you okay?” I open my eyes. Claire’s face hovers over me. “Here. Drink some of this, ” she whispers, pressing a dented tin cup to my lips.

  The room tilts. The Mets are playing the World Series in Tiananmen Square. I’m watching first baseman Keith Hernandez pitching directly beneath the portrait of Mao Zedong, and Jonnie is sitting beside me on the bleachers eating popcorn. Shay shay nee. This is exactly what I need, he says, though his voice is Claire’s voice, and a Chinese man I don’t recognize is poking his head through a black lacquered doorway and eyeing me nervously. I’m telling you, she’s fine! Warren and Anthony ride bicycles back and forth between first and second base, waving. Someone is hammering the roof with a bicycle chain. “I can’t believe this is all they have to eat,” Claire fumes, opening her palm to reveal a huge cockroach.