Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 5

  This time I dialed my grandmother. After a minute of excruciating static, I heard her raspy, brittle voice fizzing across the Pacific.

  “Susie?”

  “Grandma!” Her saying my name made me melt with homesickness and love. My heart throbbed anxiously in my rib cage. Oh, please, Grandma, don’t let me get on this crazy Chinese fishing boat! Tell me to come home! Back in New York, it would be twilight. I imagined my grandmother sitting at her dining table, the sky beyond her window blushing pink over Central Park.

  “Oh, Grandma! It’s so good to hear your voice. I miss you!”

  I expected her to say my name repeatedly. Whenever I telephoned, she always sighed, “Oh, Susie love,” luxuriantly, each intonation making me feel that she was stroking my hair, touching my cheek with fingertips as translucent and powdery as moth’s wings, pressing me to her bosom.

  Instead she bellowed, “What the hell’s all this nonsense about you coming home? You just got there. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Oh, Grandma, I’m so homesick—”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit, bubeleh. You stick it out. Enough with the melodrama.”

  “I am sticking it out,” I said, wounded. “Claire and I are sailing to Shanghai in a few minutes. It’s just, oh, Grandma—” I gulped, trying not to cry. Somebody had gouged a heart into the metal plating of the pay phone. I traced it with my finger. “It’s just so much harder—”

  “So who ever said travel was easy? You think it was easy when my whole family came over from Poland, not speaking a word of English? Where on earth did you ever get that fakaktah idea? Even on a package tour. They schlep you here, they schlep you there. You don’t know the language, where to look for the toilet. Now, at least, you have airplanes. Now, at least, when the stewardess isn’t looking, you can take a little Delta silverware and slip it into your purse—”

  “Oh, Grandma!”

  “Don’t ‘oh Grandma’ me. I don’t want to hear it. And I don’t want to hear about any more weepy phone calls home to your parents, either. They’re having a rough enough time of it. You’re not to add to their burdens, you understand? You’re twenty-one years old. You’ve got three thousand dollars, an Ivy League education, and an enormous pair of bazooms. The world should have your problems, bubeleh. Now you get your toches on that goddamn boat and sail to China.”

  With that, she hung up.

  For a moment I stood there, staring at the receiver.

  Claire sidled back over, sipping a Coke. “Uh-oh,” she said. “You don’t look so good, either. What happened? Your folks start crying and begging you to come home, too?”

  “Mm,” I said. “Something like that.”

  ———

  In our absence, the line for embarkation had only grown longer, but Gunter was impossible to miss. He towered above everyone else, a shaggy, walleyed giant with his meaty hands open by his sides, his belly like a presentation, an offering. Strapped to his back was the same small rucksack he’d been carrying the day before; on his massive frame, it looked ridiculous, like a child’s.

  “Nee how,” Gunter said, waving. He pointed toward the bay. “This Jin Jiang. I am thinking: she is not the kind of boat we are thinking she is.”

  As if on cue, a thunderous foghorn sounded, and a huge white cruise ship appeared, plowing straight for the pier.

  We watched, stunned, as it cut its main engines and maneuvered effortlessly into the slip like a massive wall sliding between us and the sky, obliterating the cityscape of Hong Kong behind it. There was a deep, reverberant rumbling, a tremble of the dock. Sailors leaned over the bow, shouting out orders and tossing coils of ropes down to men on the pier.

  “I don’t believe it,” Claire said. “We’re sailing to Shanghai on the fucking Love Boat.”

  ———

  When a boat sailing to Communist China in 1986 was dubbed exclusive, this is what it turned out to mean: We round-eyed, big-nosed Westerners were summoned to the front of the line and ushered up the gangway while the Chinese—hundreds of hoi polloi with their mountains of possessions—were left waiting behind the ropes on the pier below, roasting in the sun, looking on sloe-eyed while cargo trucks pulled up and unloaded their freight onto the melty asphalt, and the air filled with the oversweet stench of motor oil. Stranger still, no one seemed to question it. The crowd just stood there, docile and enduring.

  Meanwhile, a uniformed Chinese porter led Claire, Gunter, and me across a grand carpeted reception area with a voluptuous staircase, then down a hallway illuminated by brass wall sconces shaped like paper fans. Faint Muzak played over the PA system—a xylophonic rendition of the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love).”

  Although our cabin was barely big enough for all three of us to stand in at once—it wasn’t so much a cabin as a cabinet—compared to the Boston Guesthouse, it was a palace. Three modular bunks gleamed with serenity and corporeal order. Invisible hands had fastidiously arranged jasmine-scented guest soaps like party favors by the sink. They had even placed one of those paper belts around the toilet bowl announcing in both English and Chinese that it had been “freshly sanitized for your cleanliness pleasure.” A printed card in the ashtray explained—also in English—what times breakfast, lunch, and dinner were served in the dining room. Apparently we were not expected to prepare our own food after all.

  Claire frowned, tossed her sunglasses on the night table, and massaged the bridge of her nose. “Christ,” she groaned. “There’s even a swimming pool. What do you think we should do?”

  I flopped down on the bottom bunk. The mattress was cool and unyielding. I felt myself relax instantly. “Ooh, aah,” I said. “Comfy pillow.”

  “Yah,” said Gunter, hoisting himself onto the uppermost bunk. “I think I am liking the cool air.”

  A crease of vexation formed on Claire’s brow. “C’mon, you guys, this is not budget traveling. This isn’t what we signed up for.”

  “Look. This isn’t exactly a tragedy.” I laughed. “So we paid ninety bucks and wound up comfortable anyway. Why not enjoy it?”

  “Yah,” said Gunter, closing his eyes, his face positioned directly beneath the air conditioner so that the steady breeze tickled his beard. “Three meals a day for free? That is being quite a bargain!”

  “No, I will not enjoy it,” Claire said sourly, yanking open the door. “I’m going to see the head purser.”

  “And do what exactly?” I laughed. “Have him flag down a rowboat for us?”

  Claire slammed the door behind her with such vehemence, it was almost comical. I’d never seen her so incensed before.

  Gunter looked at me, perplexed. “Your friend,” he said, glancing at Claire’s backpack on the floor. “I am thinking. She is maybe a little crazy in the head, no?”

  “Nah.” I yawned. “Just moody. Just your typical Gemini.”

  After a minute I sat up. “I should probably go after her, though.”

  I found Claire above deck near the bow, her eyes shut, her face tilted like a mirror toward the sun, her hair blowing wildly around her in a corona of platinum.

  The Jin Jiang was already sailing toward the open sea. Somehow I’d missed the sonorous fart of the air horn, the lurch of the ship sliding away from the dock. Now the only vestige of Hong Kong was a purple-blue nipple on the horizon between the ocean and the air.

  A lone steward stood by a lifeboat. Otherwise, Claire was completely alone.

  “Where are all the other passengers?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Any luck with the purser?”

  She shrugged again. “No one on board seems to speak any English.”

  “You okay?”

  She turned to me desperately, her eyes welling with tears. “I mean, we tried, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And maybe Daddy won’t even find out that the Jin Jiang is not actually a fishing boat—”

  “Well, of course not. How would he?” The very idea struck me as bizarre; I didn’t follow
her logic. “How on earth would he find out if you never tell him?”

  Claire looked at me oddly then, her face furrowing. “You don’t understand,” she said in a low voice. “My father can do things.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She squinted out at the horizon, then down into the sea churning below us. “Ah, forget it,” she said with a forced little laugh, pushing away from the railing. “C’mon, Zsa Zsa. If we’re going to sail to Shanghai on the Love Boat, we might as well put on our bathing suits.”

  ———

  Evidently the masses gathered back on the Tai Kok Tsui pier had been waiting for an entirely different ship. The Jin Jiang was nearly deserted; the stewards stationed around the deck fidgeted like hosts at a party where the guests had failed to show up. At a loss for something to do, they continually mopped and remopped the floors and rearranged the lounge chairs as if, by expending enough effort, they might magically compel a ship full of people to materialize.

  Oddly, they all wore English name tags: JONNIE, TED, GEORGE. (Later we would discover that this was common practice in Chinese tourism.) Claire, Gunter, and I seemed to have our very own steward, ted, a man with a goiter who stood vigil in the corridor directly outside our door at all times.

  “Hello, I am Ted. I am your steward,” he recited whenever we walked past. Then he’d smile uneasily, revealing a mouth of graying, ramshackle teeth. “Where are you going?”

  Otherwise, the ship felt abandoned. In the “casino,” a lone bank of slot machines sat unplugged beside gaming tables shrouded in drop cloths. In the dining hall, only a few tables had been set up at the far end; the rest remained folded and stacked along the walls like ghosts of weddings and bar mitzvahs past. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one side of the room reflected blankly in the mirrors on the other.

  “Is this a cruise or a crypt?” I whispered. All Claire and I could hear as we moved through the ship was the deep, pulsing groan of engines.

  We had an unnerving sense, though, that activity was percolating somewhere. Occasionally, in my peripheral vision, I’d glimpse a lone waiter, scurrying across the far end of a darkened room with an enormous soup tureen. From somewhere beneath us came the rumbling of a cart rattling with glassware or cutlery. We sensed doors being hastily opened and bolted; people breathing in unison behind a porous wall; a heart, perhaps, embedded in the floorboards, thudding ominously. Walking through the corridors, pockets of cold air would suddenly pass over us like high-voltage shocks. We’d hear momentary voices: the high, shrill jabber of Chinese. But when we whirled around, we saw nothing. Nothing except a lone steward standing sentry in the hallway.

  “Hello, I am Ted,” he announced. “I am your steward. Where are you going?”

  “This place is creeping me out,” Claire said “It’s like a cruise ship after a hydrogen bomb.” She stopped abruptly, listening. After a moment, she said sotto voce, “You hear them?”

  “What?”

  “The voices.”

  I nodded.

  “Something’s going on here,” she whispered. “Something not good.”

  Only the pool area seemed to be functioning normally: striped lounge chairs, fluffy towels. The glitter and the thrash of the sea all around us, merging with the sky, felt symphonic. Seawater sprayed across the deck like diamonds.

  It was there that we met the few other passengers onboard. Martin was a jaunty, unshaven Australian who sauntered around in fraying shorts and flip-flops, a can of Tsingtao beer in his hand. In the span of an hour, he’d somehow managed to familiarize himself with the entire crew and given them all nicknames.

  “Nee how, sea horse,” he called out jocularly to a waiter, giving a little salute. “How’s about a round of Tsingtaos, ching, for my new friends here?”

  Martin was a linguistic anthropologist heading to China on a research fellowship. He was fluent in half a dozen languages. Or so he told us. It was hard for me to believe him, given his diamond stud earring and the glossy centerfold of Juggs magazine spread open on his lap.

  “Ay, I’m a scholar, luv,” he said, raising his beer, “not a corpse.”

  The other passenger we befriended was a leggy blond divorcee from Southern California. Cynthia Lukens strode onto the Jin Jiang in high heels with ankle straps and big white movie-star sunglasses, moving across the parquet as if jazz cymbals were tapping out a rhythm with her hips. As soon as she arrived at the reception desk, a bevy of cabin stewards flocked around her like eager-to-please chorus boys.

  Behind her, two little tow-heads barreled across the lobby, shrieking, “Cowabunga!”

  With a flying leap, the older, slightly knobby-kneed boy lunged at the smaller, rounder one and tackled him onto the carpet. The younger one, however, managed to roll over and straddle his opponent’s face, hollering, “Noogie patrol!” The older boy giggled, his squeals muffled by the other’s buttocks.

  The crew looked on, alarmed.

  “Boys,” the blonde said mildly. Instantly both children got up, brushed themselves off, and raced over to her. “If you two want to run around, do it outside.”

  “Aw, Mom,” they groaned in unison before dashing out.

  “Remember,” the blonde called after them cheerfully, “don’t push each other overboard.”

  Cynthia and her two sons, Anthony and Warren, ages seven and eleven, were backpacking through Southeast Asia for six months using the same Lonely Planet shoestring guide, water purification tablets, and youth hostel discount cards as the rest of us. In Hong Kong, in fact, they’d stayed at the Happy Family Guesthouse on the sixteenth floor of Chungking Mansions.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding,” Claire and I said almost in unison. “That shit-hole?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t bad at all,” Cynthia said breezily, reclining in her deck chair and kicking off her sandals. Her feet were pedicured, her toenails glazed a candy-apple red. “The boys really liked the ants,” she said. “They even made a game out of smushing them for math practice.”

  “Math practice?” I said.

  “Every morning, before breakfast, we do our math.” Reaching into her coral-colored handbag, Cynthia fished out a small tube of zinc oxide, dabbed a bit onto each of her fingertips, then massaged it neatly over her face and throat. She was classically California beautiful: blond, tanned, pert. Her disposition itself was sunshine. I suddenly wanted her to be my mother, too.

  “I made sure their teachers gave me all their homework assignments before we left so they won’t need to repeat a grade. Math is easy when you’re traveling. Time zone changes. Currency rates.” She smoothed the residual cream into the backs of her hands. “After we finish our lessons, we spend the day sightseeing. We’ve seen Hong Kong, Macau already. Now, of course, China. Then Indonesia, Thailand. Maybe India, if we have the time.”

  Claire and I stared at her, flabbergasted: an American housewife traveling with two little boys off the beaten path in Southeast Asia? It was beyond the range of anything we ever could have imagined. We were hugely impressed.

  “The way I see it, they’ll learn more this way than by sitting in a classroom.” Cynthia shrugged.

  Just then Warren raced across the deck and cannonballed into the pool, detonating a great explosion of chlorinated water. “Hey, Mom,” he shouted when he resurfaced, “did you see?”

  “Mom, look!” Anthony cried, bobbling after him, his chubby arms sheathed in inflatable plastic water wings the color of maraschino cherries.

  “They’re such great kids.” Cynthia gazed at them beatifically. “And they’re up for anything.” Almost as an afterthought, she looked at us. “Of course there’s one thing that does worry me a little, taking them through Asia like this.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Neither of them likes rice.”

  ———

  Later that morning, Gunter appeared on deck. “I am meeting someone new who is also traveling,” he announced. “This is Jonnie.”

  He presented a young Chinese man dressed in busin
ess slacks, a cheap, pressed shirt, a loosely knotted nylon tie.

  “Hello, I am Jonnie,” the man said melodically. “Your friend, Mr. Gunter, he has told me that you would all be interested to meet someone from Mainland China. Well, that is me.”

  With his boyish, wide-open gaze and his slim build, it was hard to tell Jonnie’s age. He could’ve been twenty-four or a full two decades older. His hair had been cut in a bowl shape, making him look vaguely like an Asian Paul McCartney. Certainly he had the same gentle sweetness about him, the same puppy-doggish wonderment, the same newly poured pancake look.

  Like a young politician, Jonnie began moving among us, earnestly shaking each of our hands, including those of Anthony and Warren.

  “Hello. Hello,” Jonnie kept saying agreeably and nodding. He spoke with precision and tenderness, like someone carefully measuring out tablespoons of sugar, wanting to ensure that everyone received an equal amount. “I would say ‘Welcome to China,’ but we are not yet there. Also, you should know, I do not live in China. I live in Ghana. I run Chinese restaurant in Ghana, but my home is in China. So maybe I am what you look for, maybe I am not.” He laughed, and we all laughed with him, tickled and enchanted.

  “Well, nee how there, Jonnie,” Martin saluted.

  “Nee how,” I parroted.

  “You speak Chinese, too?” Jonnie asked, surprised.

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. Yes. But not to worry. Then I teach you to speak Chinese,” Jonnie said enthusiastically, sitting down on the edge of a deck chair across from me and Claire. “I teach you everything you need to know about China. You tell me, please. Where are you from?”

  “America,” said Claire. She set down her copy of The Fountainhead and studied him outright.

  “Oh, America!” Jonnie exclaimed, his face illuminating like a flashbulb. “I love America!”