Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 25

  Claire crossed her arms and walked off. With her brisk, determined gait and her long legs, she put a good twelve feet between us instantly. It was impossible to keep up. I hurried behind as best I could. She strode ahead, humming loudly “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” As I began to gain on her, she broke into a run. She bolted down into the fields, cutting through the rice paddy.

  “Claire!” I raced after her.

  But Claire was an athlete. Her lithe body zigzagged farther and farther away as she sprinted through the fields toward a point in the distance where two women in coolie hats were working.

  Pursuing her, I found I could barely breathe. I had to stop every ten feet or so with my hands on my knees. I was spitting up thick gobs of yellow mucus now. I couldn’t seem to get enough of it out of my lungs. When, coughing and gasping, I finally reached the point where Claire had stopped, I saw that she, too, was now bent over in the grass. But she wasn’t struggling to catch her breath. She was working. She’d grabbed a small sickle away from the older woman and was bent over beside the woman’s daughter, harvesting rice. In unison, Claire and the younger Chinese woman each grabbed a hank of rice the way you might grab a hank of someone’s hair, sliced it off near the roots with the sickle, and dropped it into a metal bucket. They were doing this in complete silence.

  The older woman stood over Claire, perplexed. Strangely, neither Claire nor the younger woman acknowledged my presence. They continued working together in sync, as if they’d been working alongside each other for years, as if what they were doing was totally natural and practiced.

  “Claire?”

  She continued thwacking away wordlessly.

  The older woman looked at me with resignation. Hurrying over to a small bamboo shed at the edge of the paddy, she returned with two more sickles and held one out as if to say: I suppose that you, too, have come to help us harvest?

  “Shay shay nee,” I murmured. The old woman squatted in the paddy beside me and demonstrated how to use it.

  For a while, the four of us harvested rice together in complete silence. It was hard work, but the rhythm of it quickly became hypnotic. Soon I was aware only of the curve of my back; the cool, damp feel of the rice in my fist; the hefty, weighted swing of my right arm; then the satisfying, fibrous tear of the rice coming free from the earth. Bend, grab, swing, rip. Bend, grab, swing, rip. All of us performed it together: Bend, grab, swing, rip.

  I felt as if I’d liquefied, transcended all boundaries of myself and seeped into the countryside around me: the geese overhead, the delicate thrash of trees in the wind, the simmering sunshine. Bend, grab, swing, rip. I was no longer an individual, but a bundle of sensation: my spine burning, the earthy musk of the soil, the plants sticking to my hands, the colors of the two Chinese women—red thread wrapped around the tips of their black braids, dusty navy blue uniforms, straw-colored hats—contrasting sharply against the incandescent green of the paddy.

  Bend, grab, swing, rip. The ground was rutted and wet. The air was clean and cool as water. The pile of rice mounted in the bucket.

  When Claire disappeared, I didn’t realize it right away. One minute she was bent over a few yards away from me, fervently hacking the plants; the next minute she was gone. I stood up, glanced around. There was nothing but a sea of green. I called out her name.

  The elderly Chinese women nudged me and pointed to a spot about ten yards away. There on the ground amid the tallest rice plants, Claire was lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest like a sarcophagus.

  “Claire?”

  She opened her eyes sleepily. “You ready?” she said dreamily. “Boy, is that sun hot.” She stood up slowly and brushed herself off. Tromping over to the Chinese women, she relinquished her farm implement, then strode purposefully back across the field toward the path.

  I hurried after her up onto the hiking trail. “Excuse me,” I grabbed her by the arm, “but what the hell are you doing?”

  She jerked away, her nose crinkling with disgust. “You said you wanted us to be more spontaneous. So? I was being spontaneous. I was literally going off the beaten path. Trying something new. What the fuck is your problem?”

  “My problem? What the fuck is your fucking problem? That’s what my problem is.”

  Did Lewis and Clark ever get on each other’s nerves? In the depths of East Africa, did Richard Burton and John Speke ever irritate each other so much that they just wanted to reach over and whack each other upside the head? Did Sir Francis Drake ever sulkily give his crew the silent treatment? What about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Did they bicker all the way up and down Everest? All I’d ever read about in school were glorious discoveries and epic adventures, undertaken with a seemingly blithe braveness and steadfast camaraderie. But now I’d nearly had it with Claire, and she’d clearly had it with me. This was the one dilemma I’d never anticipated during our trip. How on earth did people do it? Never mind finding the source of the Nile or circumnavigating the globe: Just traveling without killing each other was accomplishment enough.

  Claire and I trudged on, seething in silence. We were in the middle of a Chinese wonderland of geology, botany, and agriculture, but all I could focus on was a catalogue of personal grievances. Claire’s such a fucking narcissist, inventing all these little melodramas in which the entire world is allied against her all the time—as if people don’t have bigger and better things to do. And oh, is she spoiled! Who brings a Gucci wallet to the People’s Republic of China? And that way she flicks back her hair and elongates her neck like she’s so superior—and says please not like a question but as a definitive! And what’s with the picky eating? Who diets in a Third World country? And the prudishness! All that frigidity and judgmentalness and “Ew, a cockroach!” Can’t she just loosen up for a minute? Look at her with those guys at the café: She’s got a stick so far up her ass, it’s a wonder she doesn’t spit wood chips.

  To be fair, at this very same moment, Claire was undoubtedly assembling an equally damning assessment of me. Look at her, slutting around. She’s supposed to be this big feminist, but really she’s just boy-crazy. Why the hell didn’t she just stay home and hang out in that bar she worked at? Does she have any idea how pathetic she looks? She is sick, too, of my sloppiness—the pile of balled-up Kleenex on the floor by my bed is enough to make anyone psychotic. And that idiotic astrology. Oh, and my verbosity! Can’t I ever just talk in sentences instead of anecdotes? Does everything have to be a fucking story? What I need are editors, not friends. As for my in-your-face New York attitude? Maybe I think I’m being urban and sophisticated, but really, I just come across as vulgar and Jewish half the time. Honestly, I should see myself. I should get it through my head once and for all that the whole world does not in fact revolve around Manhattan.

  We were so busy stewing in our righteousness and indictments that we almost didn’t see the man standing directly before us in a clearing, holding a camera. A shaft of sunlight beamed down on him. His presence there in the woods was so incongruous, he appeared to have been conjured on the spot by a magician, brought to life by a handful of pixie dust. He was Western and quietly handsome: square-jawed and thoughtful-looking, with thick sandy hair and melancholy deep-set eyes. He raised his camera and aimed it directly at us.

  “Whoa,” Claire cried.

  The man lowered it, startled. “Oh. I’m so sorry,” he said. “I did not see you.” His accent was musical and difficult to place; I suspected he was Swedish. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties. He was dressed neatly in jeans and a polo shirt with a Windbreaker knotted around his waist. Although he was not much taller than Claire, he had a lean, well-proportioned body: solid shoulders and legs, arms faintly striated with muscle. “It is very beautiful here, yah?” he said.

  Claire shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

  “What are you?” she demanded, sizing him up baldly, evaluating the space between them. “Where do you come from?”

  “Me?” the man sai
d almost sheepishly. “Oh, I am German.”

  Claire glared as if he’d confessed to a crime. Yet I found him instantly adorable: so masculine but sweet-faced.

  “Are you lost?” I said “Do you want to walk with us?”

  “Oh, no. I am not lost,” he said with a modest laugh. “But I’m happy to walk with you. I have been trying to capture this landscape on film, but it is very hard. The postcards and photographs, they do not do it justice, I think.” He screwed his lens cap back on and slung his camera across his chest like a bandolier. When he raised his arms, I could see the smooth plane of his abdomen below his polo shirt.

  Claire sulked.

  “So, how long have you been in China?” he asked politely.

  She gazed off across the fields without responding.

  “One month,” I offered. “Just backpacking.”

  “Really?” said the man, turning to me. “I am impressed. I think that is a very long time in a place like this. It is very difficult.”

  Claire walked off, yanking leaves off the low-lying shrubs as she went.

  “Ignore her.” I rolled my eyes. “She’s been moody all day.”

  The man stared after her, frowning.

  “She’s recovering from a fever,” I said.

  The man smiled. His brown eyes crinkled; his face was like curtains parting.

  “We’re actually circling the globe,” I told him, trying to sound nonchalant. “India. France. Thailand. Egypt. You know. That sort of thing.”

  The man laughed. “Not in that order, I hope.”

  Nervously I giggled. Then I started coughing. Embarrassingly, I couldn’t stop. I doubled over, hacking and gasping, until I stumbled backward over a tree root. The man grabbed me around the waist to steady me.

  “Whoa.” I clung to him. He smelled wonderful, of linen and pine. Aware that he was embracing me, he drew back.

  “Uh-oh.” He laughed bashfully.

  “Well. This is weird,” I proclaimed. “Cute guy out of nowhere.”

  “Yah. It is really funny. I just run into you in the woods.”

  For a moment, we stared at the ground shyly.

  “Well, I guess I should say now, ‘Hello. My name’s Eckehardt.’ ”

  “Eckehardt?” I struggled to pronounce it.

  “Yah. Eckehardt Grimm.”

  “Grimm? You’re kidding me. Like the fairy-tale author?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  ———

  As we strolled along behind Claire, Eckehardt and I poured out our stories to one another. In his neat clothes (vaguely strange German versions of American sportswear: the proportions slightly off, the stitching thicker and too bright, the fabric stiffer, the brand names unheard of), Eckehardt didn’t resemble the other backpackers in China, who all had a scruffy, degenerate look to them. He was more adult somehow. He was in China as the very first German postgraduate student to attend a polytechnic institute in Nanjing as part of a new exchange program. The program had just ended and now he was finally on vacation. For three months he’d been the only Westerner on a Chinese campus—the only Westerner at all, in fact, wherever he went.

  “Oh, in certain ways, it was very nice,” he said. “I was treated like a king. The Chinese, they did everything for me. They made all my reservations. I was their special guest. They cooked for me, cleaned for me. Of course they also knew my every move, everything about me. The woman who cleaned my room, she went through all my things. Every day. Even my underwear. They read all my letters. It was quite funny. I go to the bathroom, and suddenly everybody else has to go, too.”

  Delightedly, I also learned that Eckehardt wasn’t married and didn’t have a girlfriend back home either, though there seemed to be a whiff of recent heartbreak around him.

  On a certain level, the whole conversation between us was just elevator music to me—an insipid, superficial rendition of a growing attraction transpiring beneath the surface.

  By the time we completed the circuit through the countryside and arrived back in Yangshuo, all two streets of it, I was fairly drunk with desire for this man—this man whom I’d known exactly fifty-five minutes. Claire was waiting for us at the entrance to the path, however.

  “So, mystery man,” she teased, sauntering over coquettishly, motioning to him with a serpentine flick of her hand. “You finally made it out of the wilderness.”

  “Yah.” Eckehardt laughed. “Though it’s not much of a wilderness when there’s a path right through it.”

  “Listen, I was just wondering”—she fingered the gold chain around her throat—“where are you staying tonight?”

  “Where am I staying?”

  Claire ran her fingers slowly through her hair so that it caught in the sun and glittered, then gave him a big doe-eyed gaze and a pout. Her attempts at seduction were so exaggerated, they were almost burlesque, a parody of someone genuinely flirting. Still, I felt like punching her. What was she doing?

  “You are staying in Yangshuo, aren’t you?” she said in a breathy little-girl voice, touching him lightly on the wrist. “Certainly you’re not sleeping out there in those woods.”

  Eckehardt looked flustered. He seemed to have as much trouble recognizing this strange character as I did. “Oh, I am staying here at a place called the Garden Guesthouse. They have put me in this room with two other people. I am hoping they are not too crazy.” He laughed nervously.

  “The Garden Guesthouse?” I exclaimed. “That’s where we’re staying. What’s your room number?”

  “Five.”

  “That’s our room.” For a moment I was ecstatic: I’d be sharing a room with Eckehardt! But then, I realized, so would Claire, and I felt a flood of resentment.

  “Oh, you are joking?” said Eckehardt. “I am sharing your room with you?”

  He looked from me to Claire. It was hard to tell whether he was smiling or grimacing.

  “Well then, sir,” Claire said extravagantly, with a small pirouette. “What do you propose we do for the evening?”

  Eckehardt said he’d hoped to take a boat excursion at night on the Li River to see the cormorant fishing. When he asked us if we’d like to join him, I noted with satisfaction that he looked directly at me, not Claire.

  “Of course I’d love to go,” Claire announced.

  “Well, me, too,” I said.

  “Good. Well. Fine,” Claire said. “Susie, why don’t you run ahead then, and buy us tickets?”

  “Oh, no,” Eckehardt said with a start. “Please, I will buy them. I have to go to the travel agent here. Tomorrow I am going first to Guilin by bus, then to Kunming on the train. Although I made the reservation days ago, you know China. Just picking up the tickets could take hours. So I will arrange the boat trip too, while I am there. I will meet you later at the restaurant?”

  He shot me a quick, private smile, which Claire, to my great delight, didn’t fail to register.

  As he headed off down the lane, I felt a tug of longing. Claire watched him too. She kicked at the dirt path with the toe of her Timberlands.

  “Oh, please. Don’t tell me you have a crush on a German now,” she said.

  “Why not? He’s totally cute. You were the one who said a person’s nationality shouldn’t matter.”

  “Jesus, Suze. He’s a homunculus. Look at him. He’s barely an inch taller than me.” She kicked a pebble across the footpath. “The Hun. Like Churchill said, ‘They’re either at your feet or at your throat.’ ”

  She spun around on her heels and blinked rapidly into the sunlight. “I’m going to Lisa’s café,” she said acidly. “Come or don’t come. Do as you like.”

  ———

  By early evening, the Green Lotus Peak Inn had become an open-air nightclub. Hurricane candles flickered on the tables, K.C. and the Sunshine Band blasted from the tape player, and overturned wooden crates doubled as chairs for an overflowing crowd. Simon and Gustav were clustered around a table with another German, a Bulgarian, and a Swiss guy, who were all taking t
urns tossing back shots of rice vodka. Each time one of them swallowed, everyone in the café cheered and began singing, “Aw, that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it… ” With the assortment of accents, it was quite a sound. The Bulgarian was wearing a Mao cap hanging over one eye that he intermittently pulled off and tossed in the air. When Gustav saw us, he started to wave me over, but Simon tugged on his sleeve and whispered something to him, and he stopped.

  The blender growled and the tttzzzztttt! of pancake batter splattering against the hot grill was constant. Other travelers slonked beer glasses together, shouted across the café, and tossed postcards to one another like Frisbees. Occasionally a local Chinese man trudged past, barefoot, carrying buckets of water suspended from a yoke around his neck, though no one seemed to notice him.

  No sooner were Claire and I seated than a group of British teenagers in matching polo shirts barreled into the café. “Tsingtao beer!” they shouted.

  They were high school students from Hong Kong on a class trip to China.

  “This country sucks,” a boy announced.

  “We’ve been here four days and all we’ve eaten is bloody cabbage. The food is disgusting!” said a girl beside him.

  “We hate China. We can’t wait to go home.”

  “Tsingtao!” they chorused. “We need beer!”

  Lisa maneuvered through this brouhaha with aplomb, gracefully setting down heavy platters of pancakes and beef stew in front of the travelers, then whisking away empty glasses and hugging everyone who entered. Watching her, I knew exactly what she was experiencing: The Green Lotus Peak Inn was not that different from the West End Bar where I’d worked that summer. Yet she never appeared to lose her cool or enthusiasm. The café was bathed in her goodwill. “Lee-sah! Lee-sah!” the crowd started chanting. “We love Lee-sah!”

  Finally she arrived at our table.

  “Please,” Claire said, gesturing to the empty chair beside her. “Sit for a minute? Talk to us? Lisa, you’re the only worthwhile person in this whole place.”

  Lisa smiled bashfully in the candlelight and adjusted the polka-dot ribbon in her hair. “Oh, you are so nice. Very kind girls, ” she said, touching Claire lightly on the shoulder.