Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No, no.” He looked crestfallen. “But one day”—he brightened—“I will go. I love America. Wizard of Oz. Hamburgers. Stevie Wonder—”

  “You like Stevie Wonder?” Cynthia laughed.

  “Oh, yes,” he exclaimed. Leaping to his feet, he began singing:

  I just called, to say, I love you—

  Although Jonnie’s English was excellent, he was unable to reproduce certain sounds. Instead of love, he said ruv, and instead of Susie and Claire, he said Sushi and Crair. His accent laid bare all his hopes and vulnerabilities. I suddenly understood why people struggled to get rid of their accents and teased others for theirs. An accent is a form of public nudity. Listening to Jonnie, I felt a strange mixture of bemusement and protectiveness. Soon enough in China, others would feel this for me.

  ———

  At lunchtime, we all sat together in the nearly empty dining room. The fact that we were all literally in the same boat created an instant sense of intimacy. Ironically, the fact that we would likely never see each other again only accelerated this. In this way, I suppose, travel is a bit like the Internet—there’s a protective anonymity to it. Cast into a situation with people you never have to see again and shielded from repercussions, you turn brazenly candid.

  As waiters set before us steaming bowls of egg-drop soup and pork dumplings, Martin told us about a tribe in Indonesia that demanded he dress up as a woman in order to meet with their village elder. “It was only after I was completely kitted out in lipstick, a bra, and an enormous flowered housedress that I realized my colleagues were playing a joke on me,” he chuckled.

  Everyone laughed—except Claire.

  She sat with uncharacteristic sullenness, pushing her food around with her chopsticks, bringing slices of beef and chicken to her mouth, then changing her mind and setting them down.

  “Mom,” Anthony begged, tugging at Cynthia’s forearm as she spooned prawns with chili sauce onto his plate. “Tell them the story of me and Warren. How we were born.”

  Cynthia found herself confessing to us that her pregnancies had been so risky, her doctor had required her to spend the last three months of each one in bed, completely immobilized.

  “Three months!” Anthony repeated with awe, unable to fathom such a thing. “Warren and me are the two most wanted children ever.” Impaling a prawn on a chopstick, he sucked into his mouth.

  “That’s ‘Warren and I,’ not ‘Warren and me,’ ” Cynthia corrected. “And that’s not how we eat. Use your chopsticks correctly, please.” She glanced sheepishly around the table. “I did want them fiercely,” she said softly.

  Claire stood up abruptly. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse me.” She dropped her napkin onto her chair. As she wobbled off clutching her stomach, I pushed my chair back to follow.

  “Susie. I’m fine,” she insisted. “Finish your lunch.”

  When I persisted, she said in a low voice: “Please. Let me be alone. Don’t make this a big deal.”

  Reluctantly I sat back down. “Don’t worry. She sails a lot,” I reassured everyone at the table, even as I glanced after her.

  Jonnie told us about his family then, his mother and father, an aunt and cousin, who all lived in a small village a day’s journey south from Shanghai. He hadn’t seen them in more than seven years.

  “Travel to and from Africa, it is very difficult,” he said. As he spoke, an uneasy silence came over the table. Even I knew enough then to know that there was far more to Jonnie’s story than he was saying—than perhaps he was permitted to say. After all, he spoke fluent English. He also had a Chinese passport, travel privileges, residency overseas; in 1986, these were almost unheard of for Chinese citizens. Most lived in a state of lockdown. They needed the government’s permission simply to change apartments. Clearly Jonnie was exceptional. But how? And why? We somehow sensed that it was rude, perhaps even forbidden or dangerous to ask.

  “Now, I am going home. I am bringing my family a refrigerator. I am bringing them tape deck,” Jonnie informed us happily.

  “Oh, so you’re one of the people with the refrigerator boxes,” I leaned across the table with my chopsticks to pluck two garlicky stalks of broccoli from a platter. “Claire and I were wondering what happened to all those people on the pier.”

  Jonnie looked pained. A hush fell over the table. I saw Cynthia shoot Martin a look. Martin shrugged. I looked at Gunter, but he was focused on picking the rice out of his bowl grain by grain with his chopsticks. It was impossible to tell if he was deliberately avoiding the conversation or just being Gunter. Clearly I had missed something crucial.

  A waiter hastily gathered up the remains of our lunch with a clatter, then set a plate of cut-up oranges on the table. For a moment, we regarded it uncomfortably.

  “Yes, I bring refrigerator to Dinghai,” Jonnie said finally. “Dinghai such a nice place. I wish all of you to come, meet my mother. Meet my father. Show them you are my new friends.” Then he turned to me. “Tell me,” he said. “What is it like in America?”

  ———

  When I returned to the cabin, I found Claire propped up in her bunk, writing fervently in her journal.

  “Is your stomach better?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, not looking up.

  “Cynthia and everyone were really worried about you.”

  Claire set down her pen. She seemed to consider this a moment. “They’re worried about me?” she said with an incredulous little snort, her pale brows arching. “Well, they should be, I guess. I’m onto them, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  She leaned in toward me. “Gunter?” she said. “Susie, do you think he’s really that oblivious?”

  I made a face. “Actually, I think he’s pretty perceptive.”

  “Exactly. He’s got a whole other hidden side to him.”

  “Well, he is German,” I said, pulling the last of my M&M’s out of my backpack. “Just play ‘Flight of the Valkyries’ and see what happens.”

  “No, seriously. How does a German just happen to be fluent in Mandarin? And Martin? With that earring? Do you really think he’s a professor? I mean, ‘studying languages in Borneo’ ”

  “It’s probably a line he uses to pick up women,” I suggested. “You know ‘Hello, I’m a cunning linguist.’ ”

  I expected Claire to laugh, but she didn’t. She shut her journal sternly and set it on the night table. “And tell me. Why would a woman take her kids out of school for an entire semester, especially when summer vacation just ended? Why wouldn’t she have left with them in June instead?”

  “I dunno,” I shrugged. Growing up in New York, I’d known numerous parents who’d pulled their kids out of school on a whim. Granted, they’d mostly been hippies—fathers in ponchos and clogs, braless mothers with harpsichords—and they’d taken their kids to join communes in the Ozarks or attend rainbow gatherings on Indian reservations. But the only thing that struck me as unusual about Melinda was that she was backpacking with a pedicure and a Hermès scarf.

  “Suze,” Claire whispered, leaning in close, “Cynthia is a kidnapper.”

  I stopped eating M&M’s and let out a whoop. “What? Oh my God. That’s brilliant, Claire. She’s actually a Romanian gypsy who moved to California to open a hair salon as a front for a white slavery—”

  “Please. I’m not kidding. Think about it. She’s divorced, right? I’ll bet she’s embroiled in a vicious custody battle. Her ex-husband hired some big-gun lawyer, so Cynthia yanked her boys out of school, put them on a plane to Hong Kong, and voilà! This sort of thing happens all the time, you know. But traveling the way she is, staying in places like Chungking Mansions, that’s the really ingenius part, you see. Because the feds aren’t going to be looking in the Happy Buddha Guesthouse. No. They’re going to be checking the Hyatts. The Hiltons. She could go undetected for months.

  “For all we know,” she added, gazing at the evacuation instructions mounted on the door
, “Martin’s in on it, too.”

  “Martin?”

  “Yes,” Claire said with gravity. “Martin. How do we know he’s not her lover? Sure, he and Cynthia seemed to meet onboard, but maybe they just planned it this way so her kids don’t suspect. How much do you want to bet that once our ship docks, they’ll just happen to end up traveling together?”

  I looked at her, awaiting some sort of punch line. But there was none. An uneasy feeling came over me.

  “What?” Claire said after a moment. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” I said. “You seem, I don’t know. Different. I guess I’m just not following you.”

  “I’m perfectly fine,” she sniffed, sweeping back her hair with a flick of her hand. But then she slumped forward and buried her face in her palms. “Oh, Susie. There is something else. It’s big and it’s secret. Promise you won’t freak out?”

  She glanced around the cabin dramatically as if she was afraid someone was eavesdropping. “This summer,” she whispered, “I had this thing. With this guy.”

  She sat back and gave me a fierce, freighted, prompting look.

  “Oh my God,” I said as the possibility unspooled before me. Cynthia’s confession during lunch—that was when Claire had stood up abruptly. “Claire. Are you pregnant?”

  “Oh no!” she cried. “But it’s complicated. In June, my father hired this new boat hand. An Israeli named Adom. Fresh out of the army. And oh, Susie. He was so gorgeous. I mean, when I saw him, I nearly died. He looked just like JFK Junior, except, you know, one of your people.”

  One of my people. Once certain Christians learned you were Jewish, that was the foremost way they defined you thereafter. Even if you had a zillion other outstanding characteristics, even if you didn’t keep kosher or go to temple, even if you were like me and had been educated by Presbyterians, Quakers, and a bunch of crackpot maharishis, you were regarded as almost a separate species. Jewishness marked you forever, like a radioactive isotope.

  This time I let it slide. “So you slept with him?”

  “Well,” Claire said slyly, letting her voice trail off. When it came to sex, Claire was surprisingly prudish. She spoke mostly in ellipses, bashful glances, allusive you knows.

  To be fair, there had never been much for her to tell. She’d had the same boyfriend since sophomore year at Brown. Parker had the number III after his last name and his hair parted so stringently to the side it looked like a toupee. He wore lemon-colored cardigans and webbed belts with little whales on them. He was so wholesome, he was basically neutered.

  Once when I’d asked her, “Where’s the wildest place you’ve ever had sex?” she’d replied earnestly, “On my stepmother’s Louis the Fourteenth reproduction couch.”

  When this failed to impress, she’d added quickly, “without the slipcovers.”

  “The thing is, Adom had to go back to Israel at the end of the summer,” Claire told me now. “And of course Parker kept coming down to visit… but from day one with Adom. Oh, Suze.”

  In a feverish whisper, she described how an attraction had roiled between them, how they’d watched each other across the deck, tension and longing carbonating the air around them as the yacht thrashed through the sea. Finally one evening after they’d docked back at the marina and Claire’s father had headed back to the house for a conference call, she’d been standing at the sink in the galley rinsing out a glass when Adom had come up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her hotly on the neck.

  “And it was like… Oh. My. God.” Claire rolled her eyes back in her head and let out a moan of ecstasy. “After that, any time my father and I took the boat out… I mean, Suze, it was un-be-lievable.”

  “So? Are you still in touch with him?”

  “That’s the thing. It’s complicated. You see, Adom is… Suze, he told me stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Well, I can’t be 100 percent certain, but, Suze,” she whispered, “I think he’s with the Mossad.”

  “You’re kidding.” I sat back and cackled. “He’s an Israeli spy? He told you that?”

  My skepticism and amusement seemed to wound her. “Well, obviously they can’t come right out with it,” she said defensively. “Like no one in the U.S. goes ‘Hi. I work for the CIA.’ But first of all, okay, what’s an Israeli guy doing at a yacht club in Hilton Head anyway? And second of all, I could tell from things he said. Little asides, details, observations. So now, with Gunter and Martin showing up like this—and they’re clearly not who they seem to be and they know all these languages—I can’t help but think that, you know, maybe they’re in intelligence, too, and somehow connected to Adom.”

  When she said this, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. For a moment I just sat there.

  Someone else, someone older, perhaps, might have been alarmed by such a confession. But my reaction, as it formed, was simply one of relief: So Claire Van Houten was as neurotic as the rest of us after all.

  Until now Parker had been the first and only guy she’d ever slept with. Yet some hot Israeli had just swept her off her feet and made her writhe. Now, she didn’t know what the hell to do with this. She hungered for him; she was clearly obsessing. But she couldn’t reconcile the fact that this monumental lay had been just some deckhand—a Jew, no less, with a thick, guttural Israeli accent—employed by her father for $6.50 an hour. And so she’d built him up, transformed him in her mind into something far more palatable and dashing. He wasn’t really a boat hand: why, he was actually a spy for the Mossad! Of course! We girls did stuff like that all the time: slept with underachieving, half-formed guys, then made them over in our minds, polishing them, nudging them up to the next level. We told ourselves that the guitar-strumming pothead we were fucking was really a future rock star, the waiter at the juice bar was really a poet.

  Sex was perhaps the one area where I felt I had far more expertise than Claire. And when it came to obsessing, I myself was a pro. The guy who’d broken my heart in college had been a bass player; I don’t know how many hours I’d spent imagining elaborate scenarios in which I became a famous blues singer who won him back, or how often I’d interpreted certain songs on the radio as signals that he still loved me and wanted me to call him.

  I looked at Claire tenderly. Then I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh. “Oh, Jesus, Claire,” I said. “You think Gunter and Martin are secret agents because you fooled around with some Israeli guy in Hilton Head?”

  “An Israeli guy from the Mossad,” she corrected. “How else do you explain what I’ve just told you?”

  I sat down beside her and touched her shoulder lightly. “Claire,” I said gently, “what I think is that you’re fantasizing a little too much about your hot yacht stud. You’re overheating. That’s all. It’s okay. Great sex will do that to you. Think of it”—I laughed—“as a sort of emotional culture shock.”

  She struggled to smile. “So I’m not crazy?” she said with uncertainty.

  I shook my head. “Nah, just horny. Welcome to my world.”

  She gave me a look of grateful relief, and we laughed. And that was that. She went back to writing, and I headed up to the pool.

  In retrospect, I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t dismissed her suspicions so quickly.

  ———

  That afternoon an announcement came warbling over the PA system: Ladies and gentlemen, today, for your entertainment pleasure, the Jin Jiang will show in the lounge the Hollywood movie Gone With the Wind.

  “Gone With the Wind?” Cynthia said. “Did I just hear that right?”

  “Oh my God,” Claire groaned, looking up from The Basic Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. “They have got to be kidding.”

  “Maybe it’s a revised Communist version,” I suggested. “Mammy and Miss Prissy overthrow Scarlett and Rhett as capitalist oppressors and seize the means of production.”

  Claire laughed. “Oh, that’s brilliant. They’ll re-ti
tle it ‘Gone with the Window Shopping.’ ”

  “Let’s all go,” Cynthia said, gathering up her guidebooks. “The boys love anything with horses and soldiers.”

  En route to the lounge, however, we took the wrong stairwell. We found ourselves in a low-ceilinged corridor in the bowels of the ship before a pair of dented metal doors that seemed to flap back and forth of their own accord. Each time they opened, they brought forth a great gust of noise: plates clattering, the sizzle of fat, piles of silverware raining metallically against each other, the occasional shattering of a dish, a baby crying, the violent pppzzzzztt! of water being tossed on a grill.

  Warren ran up and peered in. “Mom, it’s another restaurant.”

  Inside we saw a steaming hall crammed full of tables with hundreds of Chinese diners squeezed in around them. They were intently bowed over large tin bowls of muddy liquid from which they shoveled limp bits of grayish cabbage into their mouths with chopsticks. An oppressive cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the room, along with a sharp, sour smell of body odor, scallions, and wet cardboard. It was unventilated, and the wheeze and grind of the engines reverberated through it relentlessly. The din and the humidity were almost unbearable.

  “Mom,” Anthony asked tremulously, “who are all those people?”

  Soberly the five of us climbed back up to the second floor. There, we were greeted by a tsunami of refrigerated air, by the mellow, easy listening sound of Lionel Richie’s “Say You, Say Me” as interpreted by a Moog synthesizer, and by a steward in a polite white jacket who just happened to be waiting for us outside the stairwell.

  “Hello,” he said, revealing a mouth full of small, pointed teeth, “my name is Victor. I am your steward. Where are you going?”

  A VCR had been rolled into the lounge, and a dozen chairs arranged in an intimate crescent. But none of us was in the mood to go in anymore.

  For the duration of the voyage, Gone With the Wind played over and over, in one continual unedited loop. The crew never seemed inclined to shut it off; perhaps it had been pre-programmed. Heading to the dining room for breakfast each morning, we would hear Butterfly McQueen crying out, “Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies!” Coming in from swimming in the afternoon, we’d be treated to the sight of Scarlett declaring “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”