Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  Scarlett flounced, Atlanta burned, and Rhett scoffed, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” over and over, their ghostly blue images flickering out through the porthole across the vast dark Straits of Taiwan, heard and seen by no one.

  ———

  To entertain ourselves, Claire and I debated. We debated whether Tess of the d’Urbervilles had been raped or seduced. We debated whether sci-fi novels qualified as art. We debated: Whose life would make a better musical, Socrates’ or Dolly Parton’s? We debated about which was more user-friendly, astrology or The Basic Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Okay, I argued for astrology. In my defense, I’d brought along Linda Goodman’s Love Signs simply because I didn’t own a guitar or a harmonica. Ideally, I believed, travelers abroad should carry something with them to endear themselves to the natives. Since I couldn’t play a musical instrument, I figured I could always read people their horoscopes. No matter how skeptical they were, people everywhere always seemed to love hearing about themselves.

  Plus, truth be told, astrology was my own secret little self-esteem program. Whenever I felt riddled with anxiety, I flipped to my horoscope at the back of a magazine for guidance. If I felt particularly bad about myself, all I had to do was open up Love Signs and read about how fabulous I was for simply being born in October. According to Linda Goodman, Libras were endowed with an innate “intelligence, charm, gentleness, and emotional balance.”

  “Oh, please.” Claire rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, where I come from, we believe in free will and self-determination. You want real wisdom?” Opening her paperback at random, she read: “‘One has to test oneself to see that one is destined for independence and command—and to do it at the right time.’ C’mon. There’s far more truth in that than insisting that everything is predetermined and that the whole world is divided into twelve personality types.”

  To annoy me, she referred to astrology as “hope for lazy people.” To annoy her, I began calling her book her Nietzsche Board.

  It was silly and good-natured, and it was like we were back at Brown, bantering at a café. But every once in a while, a look would pass over Claire’s face like a shadow across a prairie. “Excuse me,” she’d say abruptly. “I need to go do something.” She’d hurry across the deck and disappear for a while. Sometimes she’d reemerge sullen, other times with a pirouette and a wave. I assumed she was thinking about Adom.

  Cynthia leaned over to me. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said softly, removing her sunglasses, “but your friend. Are you sure she’s all right?”

  “Oh sure. She’s fine.”

  Cynthia frowned. “The other day?” she said hesitantly. “She told me she kept hearing voices.”

  “Oh, those.” I nodded. “Yeah. I was hearing them, too. They were from that kitchen down below, though we didn’t realize it at the time.” I laughed. “We really freaked out. We’re a Libra and a Gemini, you know. So we’re like two total drama queens.”

  ———

  Yet even then it began to dawn on me just how little I actually knew about Claire. The witticisms; the bitching about food, roommates, term papers; the romantic confessions that passed for intimacy at college somehow fell short here. One afternoon as we were sunbathing, I rolled over on my side. “Tell me about your mom,” I said. “What was she like?”

  Claire propped herself up on her elbows and stared out at the sea. “There’s not much to tell, really,” she said, rubbing her midriff. “I barely remember. She died when I was three. Car accident. We lived in Arlington at the time. Virginia. I don’t remember if Daddy was there or not. I think he was away. All I remember was our chocolate lab, Ruffles, who was blind in one eye, barking a lot. He seemed to bark for days. And our housekeeper, Sonja, kept giving me bowls of strawberry ice cream, even for breakfast.”

  Claire made a little lopsided face. “I guess I cried. My grandmother thought I was too little to attend the funeral. Mostly what I remember about my mother was a pair of these pearl-drop earrings she used to wear. Clip-ons. And me playing with them, snapping them open and closed. And a sweater she had with this thick yellow, white, and navy blue stripe across it. I have an image in my head of her pushing me on the swing in our backyard, saying ‘Up, up, up’ with her hair tucked under this chiffon scarf to keep it from blowing. But I’m not sure if that’s a memory or something I got from a photograph.”

  The afternoon sun was lowering. Claire’s profile appeared stark against the sky.

  I said dumbly, “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged without taking her eyes off the horizon. “People always act like it was this great tragedy. But the truth is, it’s hard to miss something you never really knew, you know? The year after she died, Daddy married Lady Macbeth—ugh—but then I also got Dominic, Alexander, and Edward, these three amazing new brothers who played with me all the time. We had this fort in this tree. And Sonja was still there. So in a weird way, it was like there was this party after—I don’t know—all this quiet.”

  Around us, the ocean heaved. We were too far from land for any seagulls to appear. There was nothing beyond the railing but a great plain of blueness.

  “I suppose I could get all bent out of shape about it.” She sighed. “Sometimes I used to get really sad, thinking about how great it would be to have my mother. And I’d imagine her talking to me from on high, you know. But her voice was never her voice. It was always the voice of Florence Henderson. And I’d imagine her looking like Florence Henderson, too, instead of like she did in the photos. How pathetic is that?”

  “It’s not pathetic at all,” I said. It seemed that virtually everyone who’d grown up watching The Brady Bunch had dreamed at one time or another of trading their own parents in for Florence Henderson and Robert Reed. I know I certainly did.

  Claire sniffed. “Sometimes I feel like people want me to dwell on it. But I just can’t. It’s just too vague. Besides, like Nietzsche says, ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger,’ right?”

  She swung her pinkened legs over the side of her deck chair and stretched. “Which reminds me”—she reached for her leather bag—“I probably should do some more reading.”

  Suddenly she nudged me. Across the deck, Martin and Cynthia were standing by the railing. He was leaning in close to her, murmuring something; she was tossing her head back into the wind and laughing. “See?” Claire whispered. “What did I tell you?”

  ———

  On the third afternoon, Jonnie shouted from the bow of the ship. “Look!”

  We ran over to the railing and saw the People’s Republic of China looming off the starboard side. Against the sky in the distance, the granite-colored mountains looked like the jagged line of a heart monitor, an EKG reading reflecting my own sudden panic.

  China.

  For three days, the salt air had lulled me. For three days, despite Claire’s protests (“Why can’t we eat the real Chinese food that everybody downstairs is eating?” she’d asked the headwaiter. “Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “You no like that. This food much better.”), I’d managed to eat without my stomach seizing up. For three nights, I’d been rocked to sleep in the amniotic sac of my bunk bed, soothed by the sea. For three days, all of us had been a kind of family.

  But Martin had colleagues awaiting him in Beijing. God only knew what Gunter had in mind. Cynthia had reserved a room for herself and her boys at a big foreigners’ hotel that had to be booked months in advance through CITS. Once we docked the following morning, Claire and I would be on our own again.

  I squinted across the water as if it might be possible to actually see the Chinese. I imagined them pulling rickshaws and performing tai chi in the parks, cooking stir-fry and working in factories—all one billion of them, indifferent to our arrival.

  I had no idea how we’d get from the pier to downtown Shanghai. The port wasn’t even on the map in our guidebook. Would there be taxis available? Was there even a bus?

  “Wow,” Cla
ire gasped, standing on tiptoes by the rail. “We’re here.”

  “China,” Jonnie said, gazing at the coastline. I tugged lightly at his sleeve.

  “Jonnie,” I said softly. “How do you say in Mandarin, ‘I’m scared’ ”

  “Sushi, why you scared?” Turning away from the coastline, he regarded me with a mix of compassion and sadness. Perhaps more than any of us, Jonnie knew what it was like to be a stranger in a strange land.

  I tried to shrug it off. “Just a little nervous, that’s all. We don’t even have a hotel—”

  “No need to be scared,” he said emphatically. “Please do not worry. When we get to China, you and Crair are my guest. I have many friends in Shanghai. We know good hotels, good restaurant. We take you there. We give you tour. You not have any problem. Shanghai is beautiful city and we take good care of you. Then you come home with me. You come meet my family in Dinghai. You see the real China.”

  “Really?” Claire clapped. “You’d do that? Show us your hometown?”

  “Yes,” said Jonnie. “Special honor.”

  “Oh. That. Is. Awesome,” she cried. “Jonnie. You’re amazing!” She gave a little twirl against the railing. “Of course,” she added quickly, “you know we’re totally fine on our own, if it’s too much trouble.”

  Jonnie beamed. “No trouble at all. I show you very special places. You meet my friends.”

  I exhaled. The prospect was almost too fabulous and too much of a relief to contemplate. “Are you sure?”

  Jonnie nodded. “We make a big feast, big special meal for you. You do not worry. You be my guest.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Claire. And I could tell what she was thinking: that we were going to get to see the real China far beyond anything in any guidebooks. That we were on the brink of something spectacular. That already we were earning gold stars, extra credit, an A+. “How can we ever thank you?”

  Jonnie continued smiling his same boyish, exuberant smile. “Maybe I go with you to Beijing later,” he said almost casually. “I show you around Beijing. And then maybe you take me to American embassy. Maybe I be your guest then.”

  Chapter 4

  Shanghai

  IT WAS BARELY daybreak when we were ushered down the gangway with our backpacks. In case we’d had any doubt that we were now in a Communist country, at four o’clock that morning, rapid-fire Chinese anthems began playing at full volume over the PA system.

  Jerking awake, we scrambled out of our bunks. In distinct contrast to our days at sea, the mood aboard the ship was one of anxiety. Now that the Jin Jiang had docked in Shanghai, no one was allowed out on deck. The stewards stopped smiling and nodding agreeably; instead, they tromped through the boat, pounding on cabin doors and ordering people out into the corridor. “You take bags now,” they barked. “You go to dining room.” It didn’t feel like we were disembarking so much as being evacuated—or perhaps arrested. Through the portholes, we couldn’t see any trace of Shanghai or even daylight, only inky black circles like giant, unblinking pupils staring back in at us.

  Within half an hour, we were all fed tea and a greasy fried egg slapped on a piece of white bread, then herded into the reception hall with our baggage, at which point, we waited and waited, eyeing each other with trepidation. Clearly we were in a different sort of territory now. We sat fondling our cameras, wondering just what awaited us on the other side of the hull. Only Anthony and Warren lay motionless, pressed against Cynthia in heavy-lidded, liquidy half sleep. Gunter sat in a corner, ppffuuuhhffing as he studied his guidebook.

  Although Claire and I assumed he’d be heading off on his own, he’d said to us that morning, “So Jonnie, he will be showing you around, yah? I think that I will be coming with you.”

  This had irritated us to no end. Gunter, with his Luftwaffe accent and incessant chewing—Gunter, with his marshmallow temperament: Gunter had been getting on our nerves. Just the way he audibly exhaled, the way he galumphed into a room, then stood there expectantly, smack in the middle of everything, filling up the space like a La-Z-Boy recliner without ever really being present. His mind was inverted somehow. He seemed more captivated by a scrap of Chinese newspaper or the rivets on his backpack than by any conversation taking place directly in front of him. Getting his attention was like trying to operate a shortwave radio. Although this might have been due, in part, to the language barrier, in retrospect, I suspect he may have had Asperger’s syndrome. At the time, though, Claire and I only experienced him as frustrating.

  Claire herself was in high spirits. “Finally!” she sang. She paced the reception hall, pantomiming tennis serves and ballet positions, then sat back down again and jiggled her leg. She looked around expectantly. She chewed a piece of gum. She spit it out. She leafed through our guidebook. She brushed her hair absentmindedly, then sighed C’mon already at the ceiling. She took out her Instamatic, insisting we photograph each other for “before” pictures. Then she accidentally sat on it and broke it.

  “Piece-of-shit camera,” she laughed, trying to piece the chassis together. “Ah well. Maybe it’s for the best.”

  “You can use mine.”

  “Oh, you are too sweet. Nah, it’s probably better this way. If you have a camera, you sometimes get so busy taking pictures you forget to actually see stuff. Hey”—she glanced mischievously at my Instamatic—“want me to sit on yours too? Watch out!” she giggled and did a little butt wiggle. “Here comes the ass of mass destruction!”

  Cynthia glanced over at us, frown lines on either side of her mouth like inverted parentheses. “Hey you two,” she said, clearing her throat. “Are you going to be okay once we disembark?”

  Claire did a little plié. “Sure. Why wouldn’t we be?” She stopped and crouched down to examine something at the baseboard. “Oh my God. Look. It’s a Chinese ladybug. Nee how!” She hooked the Walkman headphones over her ears. “Time for one last shot of Oingo Boingo before we hit the mainland.”

  Cynthia watched us uneasily.

  “We’re okay,” I said, not entirely convincingly. I held up our Lonely Planet guidebook. “See. Bible.”

  “Cynthia, please. Don’t worry,” said Claire, pulling the headphones away from her ears. “Jonnie is getting us a hotel.” She pressed a button on her Walkman and began tapping out a tattoo in the air in time to the music only she could hear.

  Cynthia and I watched her. I envied Claire’s confidence. Maybe that’s what it was like to be rich: If you grew up with housekeepers and deckhands, you took it for granted that other people would take care of your problems. I scanned the reception hall. Jonnie was actually nowhere in sight. His absence filled me with a mixture of dread and relief. Maybe you take me to American embassy. Maybe I be your guest then. I was pretty sure I’d heard him correctly. His words made me leery. It was unclear exactly what kind of quid pro quo we were tacitly agreeing to by accepting his hospitality. Did he merely want to visit the embassy and get his picture taken beside the American flag? Somehow I doubted it.

  But now Jonnie hadn’t even shown up for breakfast. Maybe we were better off going it alone: We could just swan-dive into Shanghai and hope to God we didn’t go splat! on the asphalt.

  The ship’s air-conditioning had been turned off. The reception hall grew yeasty with body odor and listlessness.

  At five a.m., there was still no sign of Jonnie. Chinese officials in military regalia boarded the ship and moved from passenger to passenger, checking our passports, visas, paperwork. Quickly we gathered up our tourism paraphernalia and stashed it, then stood rigidly at attention, shining examples of purity and rectitude. We Americans, I noticed, smiled winningly, as if this might not be merely a border control, but a dental inspection.

  An official grabbed Claire’s passport, then mine. After a disconcertingly long time, he stamped them and handed them back without once making eye contact. There came a great metallic drumroll and a voluminous rattle; suddenly the hatch opened. All the stewards began shouting at once and motioning toward the
doorway. “Okay, you go out now,” they barked.

  We stumbled outside, tripped down an aluminum plank, and found ourselves discharged onto a rotting pier in the predawn chill of the People’s Republic of China.

  We were greeted by the briny smell of seawater and the mournful caw of gulls. The sun had only just risen, bronzing the world with light. We were nowhere near a city. We were standing on a small rural fishing wharf.

  The water beside the pier teemed with rudimentary bamboo boats bobbing and knocking against each other like buoys, old tires lashed to their sides. Beyond them was a muddy quay lined with crumbling concrete stalls whose thatched roofs were collapsing in places; piles of sodden, tangled netting and decaying cabbages lay abandoned in the grime. A handful of men in flip-flops and coolie hats crouched in the dirt, waving away flies, chewing something fibrous. Farther down, a few in Mao jackets straddled rusty bicycles.

  Besides the gulls, the only sounds were that of a lone dog barking and the rhythmic slap of water against the pier. Occasionally one of the men would summon up a great mouthful of phlegm from the depths of his throat, making a haaaccchhh sound like a windup before a pitch. Then he spit into the dirt by his feet, leaving a jewel of saliva glistening in the dust. As we would soon learn, China rained phlegm.

  It felt not just foreign, but other-dimensional, as if we’d stepped off the Jin Jiang into a nineteenth-century sepia-toned photograph. It was as if we’d gone to sleep, then woken up a hundred years earlier—Rip Van Winkle in reverse.

  Bicycles and battered carts began pulling into the dirt lot at the end of the pier. Beside it was a squat, arcaded building that looked like an abandoned aviary. Inside, I could see two officials at a desk and a large blackboard covered with Chinese characters. Some of the Chinese passengers from the Jin Jiang began forming a line in front of it. Others crammed their bundles hurriedly into the backs of arriving wagons, trucks, and dented, corroding cars. There were great gales of shouting, engines chugging, axles squeaking. I searched frenetically for Cynthia and her boys, but they had disappeared. Through the sea of heads, I glimpsed a tall white man in a leather hat folding himself into the back of a small, mud-splattered sedan. Behind the windshield, I thought I saw a blonde with a scarf tied over her hair twisting around to assist him, but I couldn’t be sure. “Martin?” I shouted across the quay. “Cynthia?” The car door slammed shut. The sedan backed up with a squeal, then gunned forward and vanished in a plume of dust.