Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  “Your father’s wrong,” I told Claire now. “There’s a difference between being a princess and not wanting to spend the night in an ant-infested shit-hole with guys in diapers jerking off by the elevator.

  “Look,” I said, “if it’s any consolation, I’m completely freaked out, too. In fact I’ve been freaked out since the minute we got off the plane.”

  “Really?” Claire sniffled.

  “Uh-huh, totally. The heat, the noise, the craziness. And the idea of going to China, this Communist country where no one speaks English—”

  “We don’t have to, you know,” she said quickly. “I mean, I was thinking. At least maybe we shouldn’t start there, you know? Maybe we should get our bearings somewhere else a little easier first. Like Bali.”

  “Bali?”

  “Sure. It’s supposed to have tropical beaches. Palm trees. We could go there, acclimate, and then if we feel like it, go to China.”

  “True,” I said after a moment. “I guess I was thinking of someplace even easier.”

  “Like?”

  “Chicago. Or Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s probably my speed.”

  Claire stared at me.

  “But they’re not even in Asia,” she said after a moment.

  “I know.” Then, unable to contain myself, I wailed, “Oh, Claire. I’m not like you. I’ve never traveled the way you have. You at least spent a semester studying in Paris.

  “No one ever tells you this,” I said despairingly, waving at the turquoise tiled walls, the bare, hissing light fixture. “All those travel magazines. People with their vacation photos. They just make it look so easy.”

  Claire looked at me sympathetically. Suddenly she clamped her hands over her mouth.

  “What?” I said.

  She shook her head back and forth like a horse breaking free of its bridle. Then she started laughing. “Oh, my God. ‘Let’s go to Bali. Let’s go to Philadelphia. There are ants in my bed.’ Suze, would you listen to us? What kind of wusses are we?

  “You know what this is?” Claire said. “Jet lag. And culture shock. The two of us are so exhausted and disoriented, we’re practically psychotic. So we’re getting freaked out. Over nothing.”

  Hugging myself, I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist.

  “I’m serious, Suze. You know my stepbrother? Dominic?”

  I nodded feebly. Claire had three stepbrothers, Alexander, Edward, and Dominic. They were all gorgeous, strapping, and redheaded, and I couldn’t tell one from the other. They treated Claire like their mascot. “Every time Dominic goes anywhere—England or just back to Wharton—the first night he arrives? He always has a meltdown. He gets obsessed with the bed pillows, the noises in the street.

  “So what we’re feeling here? It’s totally normal. We’ve just got to get through this first night, is all, and we’ll be fine.” She tilted her head at me, her hair falling across her forehead, her lips pursed. “Sweetie, you think you can sleep?”

  I shrugged.

  “Nah. Me neither, I guess.” She sighed and threw up her hands. “This place is a dump. But we just have to stick it out. Here. Move over. This way at least we won’t have to go it alone.”

  I rolled against the tiled wall and made room for Claire on the flimsy narrow bed. She was extremely thin and much taller than me—five-nine—a former dancer, a horseback rider, all legs and ribs and elbows and knees. As she wedged in next to me, we kept knocking up against each other, apologizing as we shifted about trying to get comfortable. The bed squeaked insanely. The air conditioner grunted and belched. Claire started giggling. “Oh my god! This is absurd!” she hooted at the ceiling. “Look at us!”

  Rolling onto her stomach, she propped herself up on her elbows. “Okay, right now, at this very moment, this feels like hell, right? But in the morning, I promise, Hong Kong will seem so much better.”

  She snuggled up against me and sighed.

  After a moment, she said, “Want me to burp ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ ”

  “Nuh-uh,” I said miserably.

  This was a talent she’d picked up from her stepbrothers. Normally it cracked me up. Now I worried it would only make me more homesick.

  “You sure? Okay. Well, you just let me know if you change your mind.”

  With a little flounce, she turned over on her side. From the way she went about adjusting her pillow, plumping and re-plumping it, I could sense her acceptance of our situation, her growing contentment with it, and this only made me feel more wretched.

  Amazingly, while I was growing up, my hippie mother had gone through an Eastern religion phase, during which she’d compelled us all to practice Transcendental Meditation and listen to a guru named Baba Ram Dass. “Be here now,” he’d instructed. “Live completely in the moment.” But the moment was all I ever lived in, and it made me fucking miserable. I could never see beyond whatever emotion had me directly in its grip.

  As she lay beside me, I knew that Claire was already seeing in her mind’s eye the Yangtze River, shining like mercury. She was standing in chartreuse rice paddies and talc-like sand. She was climbing the Great Wall and twirling ecstatically in the Temple of Heaven. Despite her trepidation, she was off—off and soaring above all expectation and constraint. Me, all I could see were filthy hotel rooms swarming with ants, yawning toilets, and demented men in diapers wailing amid the remnants of vegetables. All I could see were the other passengers from our flight, leaving Kai Tak Airport with their families in a great yarn ball of love, leaving me to bleed alone, scared and incompetent on the floor of a public bathroom. All I could see were street signs like hieroglyphics that I would never be able to understand, convoluted neighborhoods I would never be able to navigate, and the endless, interminable trek I would have to make beneath the weight of my backpack in an idiotic Bataan Death March of Tourism of my own making—to be endured across one alien land, then another, in order to finally make it home a year later deranged with exhaustion. All I could smell and taste was fear, hot as curry at the back of my throat.

  “You’ll see, sweetie,” Claire murmured as she finally began to drift off to sleep. “A few months from now, this will all just seem really, really funny.”

  Even then, when she said this, I had the terrible feeling that it wouldn’t.

  Chapter 2

  Hong Kong

  I DON’T KNOW how many of the world’s great explorers called home in tears immediately after they arrived someplace strange. I suspected I might have been the first.

  When we finally awoke—hours, days later—unable to discern if it was morning or night, Claire hopped out of bed positively mentholated with energy. “Wow, I feel so much better. Don’t you?” She pirouetted, grabbed her room key. “Let’s wash up, then go explore.”

  The moment I heard the arrhythmia of the shower in her bathroom, I yanked on my clothes, dashed out into the reception area, and begged Mr. Chung to help me.

  As the overseas operator tried the connection, I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist and bit down on my knuckle. Finally there came a click.

  “MOM?” I shouted. My voice echoed over a crackle of static.

  “SUSIE?” my mother shouted back. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “Hong Kong—”

  “Are you all right? The Van Houtens are worried. They haven’t heard from Claire.” Our voices overlapped, then cut each other off abruptly like fingers blocking and releasing an air valve.

  “We’ve both been sleeping. We’re really jet-lagged.”

  “Good. I’ll let them know you arrived.”

  “Oh, Mom, I’m really homesick. I’m kinda freaked out.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “I’m thinking of cashing in my plane ticket and just coming home.”

  There was a pause, a lunacy of high-pitched whistles. I heard my mother exhale. I imagined her standing over our kitchen sink in her purple leotard, filling a steamer with organic brown rice. She’d been uneasy about my trip from the be
ginning. At JFK, when I’d finally turned and headed down the gangway, her face was so wet and palsied with emotion, she could barely say goodbye.

  But now she shouted across the hemispheres, “What? You can’t just fly back home. You just got there. What are you going to do for money?”

  The week before my departure, I’d had a false pregnancy scare, followed by an unfortunate night of drunkenness, and a big fight over doing the laundry. We had our issues, my mother and I. Now, as I clutched the telephone receiver in Hong Kong, it suddenly occurred to me that her sobs at the airport hadn’t been those of a distraught parent at all. Rather, they’d been like those of a death-row inmate receiving a last-minute reprieve from the governor. I’d be departing the country for an entire year and inflicting myself on the Communists instead; she couldn’t believe her good luck.

  “No, if you come back, you have to have a plan,” she announced now. “I think you should stick it out in Asia awhile. You’ll see. In a few days, you’ll feel better.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “Listen. This call is costing us a fortune, and we’re about to sit down to dinner. I’m thrilled you called. Really I am. Tell Claire I’ll call her folks for her, and let me know when you get to China. Hang in there, girl. Your mama loves you.”

  With that, she hung up.

  I stood there incredulous, the gunmetal receiver heavy in my hand. Mr. Chung waited respectfully off to the side, pretending to sort a pile of tourist brochures.

  Of all my family members, my grandmother had always been my staunchest ally. For years, she’d fancied herself a Communist. When she wasn’t berating her housekeeper—whom she degradingly called “the domestic”—she’d sit back in a crushed velvet armchair with an enormous gin and tonic and speak glowingly of Trotsky.

  “You’re not a Communist, Ma,” my father would say with irritation. “You’re an alcoholic. There’s a difference.”

  Real Communists didn’t have country houses and tennis club memberships, he pointed out. Real Communists didn’t play the stock market.

  Luckily for me, though, my grandmother did. For a Bolshevik, she was somehow the only person in our family with any disposable income. When she heard I was planning to backpack around the world, she said ecstatically, “The only thing that could make me any happier, bubeleh, would be if you married a Negro.”

  Grasping both my hands, she whispered, “Years ago, I bought some bonds. Today, they’re worth three thousand dollars. I’m going to cash them. As long as you go to China, the money’s yours. Otherwise, you pay me back with interest.”

  Now, standing amid the file cabinets at the Boston Guesthouse, I considered calling her collect, too. But then, I knew exactly what she would say.

  ———

  Claire emerged from the bathroom smelling of peppermint castile soap. We’d each brought quart-size bottles for the trip; according to the label, it was 100 percent biodegradable and could be used interchangeably as shampoo, toothpaste, and laundry detergent.

  “So how’s this for a plan?” She flounced onto my bed, her towel draped around her neck like a stole. Whipping out a comb, she pulled it briskly through her hair. “We go get some breakfast, then head to the Chinese consulate to get visas. After lunch, we take the cable car to Victoria Peak.”

  I studied the mattress ticking as if I were actually considering this. Reaching behind her head, Claire gathered the damp skeins into a ponytail and secured it expertly with an elastic band. “Well?”

  Her gas-blue eyes fixed on me expectantly. On the floor, ants congregated around the drain.

  When Claire had urged me to travel with her that night at the IHOP, I hadn’t quite believed it. Claire Van Houten and me?

  Most of my time at Brown, I’d felt like geometry: a collection of unlovely, isolated parts that needed to be proven over and over. I’d sauntered around campus in miniskirts and fishnet stockings and gold leather ankle boots, trying desperately to convince people that I was this sophisticated and outré New Yorker. But I didn’t think I fooled anyone.

  As part of my financial aid package, I’d served turkey tetrazzini to my classmates at the dining hall for four years while dressed in a paper hat. Otherwise, all I’d managed to do at college was gain weight, have my heart broken, and write term papers with titles such as “A Post-Lacanian Analysis of Valorizations of Gender” that even my professors found tedious. Junior year, when my father secretly telephoned to tell me that he was thinking of leaving my mother, I’d checked into health services for a week.

  My friends had been equally neurotic—arch, hyper-articulate young women with asymmetrical haircuts and black eyeliner who sat around quoting obscure French feminists and rolling their own cigarettes. And yet, for women obsessed with liberation, they were as rigid and sensitive as tuning forks: Everything set them off. Freud offended them. Nonvegetarian lasagna offended them. The words fascinating, natural, and objective offended them. Money offended them, too—I suppose because, unlike me, they’d always had more than enough of it.

  Any time I made a smart-ass remark—say, if I suggested that we call our feminist coffeehouse Girls, Girls, Girls!—they glared at me with thinly veiled contempt.

  Claire, by contrast, had a laugh like a waterfall. You could hear its cadences building and spilling clear across the dining hall. Her great-uncle had donated a rare books collection to the John Hay Library. Her stepbrother Alexander had been roommates one semester with JFK Jr. Yet she was a standout in her own right. With her height, her cascade of pale hair, and her milky skin, she was hard to miss. Plus, she was smart. Whiplash, magna cum laude smart. Everything that I didn’t know, she did. Latin. Supply-side economics. How to play tennis. How to drive a car, change a tire, ride a horse. How to follow the stock market. How to read Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek. How to make chicken tarragon in our Soviet-style dormitory using only a saucepan and a fork. She was self-assured and utterly at home in the world in every way that I was not.

  Perhaps most importantly, she was kind. Rich, beautiful girls weren’t expected to take a special ed student to his prom. But on Claire’s bulletin board freshman year, I’d seen a snapshot of her in a fuchsia taffeta dress, smiling over a tuxedoed boy in a wheelchair. “Him? Oh, that’s Jimmy,” she’d simply shrugged. “A kid I used to tutor.”

  Okay, so she voted Republican. And she could listen to the Gary Numan song “Cars” fifteen times in a row. And she’d decorated her freshman dorm with puppy calendars. But in the end, I found her an enormous relief to be around. Striding purposefully across campus in her puffy white ski jacket, oblivious to her own dreamy-faced beauty—her hair dancing in the wind, catching in the corners of her mouth—she looked to me like normalcy. She looked to me like happiness. I secretly hoped that by traveling with her, some of her gold dust might rub off on me.

  Yet now, at the guesthouse, my gutlessness was palpable, ungainly. It filled the room like a hideous air bag. I’d been unmasked as the weak link, the albatross, the sissy.

  “Look, Claire,” I said after a minute. “I just. I don’t know. I still feel really, really… unsure.”

  She set down her tortoiseshell comb. “What’s to be unsure about?”

  I shrugged miserably.

  “Okay, look,” she said after a moment. “You’re still acclimating. And China isn’t exactly a luxury destination. But Suze, what’s the worst that can possibly happen to us? We hate the food? The hotels are uncomfortable? The scenery sucks? So what? We move on. But shouldn’t we at least try? We have the chance of a lifetime here. We’ll hate ourselves if we don’t seize it. It’s like Joseph Campbell says, ‘Follow your bliss.’ ”

  I gnawed at my thumbnail. “Usually whenever I follow my bliss,” I said quietly, “I end up with a rash.”

  Claire narrowed her eyes. “C’mon, Suze. I’m serious. We’ve been planning this for ages. We’ve come all this way—you can’t just back out now.” Her voice rose. I could sense her struggling to contain her frustration: the wild pony o
f it thrashing against the reins.

  “I mean, I’m sorry,” she declared, “But this is our big chance. We do this, and for the rest of our lives, we’re going to have this extraordinary experience under our belts. We’re going to know certain things that almost nobody else does. I mean, do you really think the world needs just a couple more Ivy League assholes—two more people like us who go on to become corporate weenies or lawyers, sleepwalking through life?”

  “I know, but—”

  “You want to be a great writer? Great writers always go abroad. Twain. Hemingway. Steinbeck. You think they just sat on their beds moaning, ‘Oh, I’m afraid. Oh, I’ll get a rash’ ”

  She leapt up, exhaled, and paced around the bed, vibrating with exasperation. “Okay, I’m sorry.” She pivoted around. “But I will not let you give into fear here. We’re going, Suze, whether I have to—I don’t know—throw you over my shoulders and carry you there myself. You are not leaving me to go it alone, and I’m not letting you back out, either. We are young and brilliant and capable. If we can’t do this, nobody can. We are going to fucking China.”

  Her words resonated in the air like a gunshot.

  For a moment I just stared at her.

  I leaned my head back and blinked desperately at the ceiling. “Claire,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. But I’m just not you, okay? I’m not.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. I felt so foolish. Whatever made me think I could do this?

  My pathos seemed to drain all the fight out of Claire. She sat down heavily beside me and sighed. After a moment, she got up, walked into the bathroom, and came back with a handful of toilet paper. She took a wad of it, dabbed her eyes, and handed the rest to me. Her own unhappiness was peculiarly reassuring. I blew my nose a couple of times, and so did she.

  “I’m sorry, I was too harsh,” she said finally. “I guess with all this newness… and the jet lag… I just really, really want us to go to China, is all.”

  She scanned my face with heartfelt concern, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. “Oh, Susie. We could have such an amazing time together. Just think of the adventures we’ll have. You may not have much confidence in yourself,” she said gently, “but, sweetie, I do. You are so smart and funny and sexy. And a great writer. You’re an amazing woman. Trust me. I have faith in you. You can do this.”