Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Jonnie pointed proudly to an enameled door on the left. “We get number one cabin. I tell them you very special guests.”

  He unlocked it, but the door wouldn’t open all the way; it banged against a rusty iron bunk bed. All told, there were three such bunks in the tiny cabin—one against each wall. The four of us squeezed inside. An elderly Chinese couple arrived, loaded down with a twin-size mattress stuffed into a garbage bag and three wicker baskets secured with packing tape. They elbowed their way in, dropped their belongings on one of the beds, then disappeared back into the corridor with what looked a like a bag full of dried ears.

  “Well, at least there won’t be any crowds in here staring at us,” I said as Claire and I surveyed our medieval bunks with their bare chain-mail mattresses.

  Claire sighed, pushed up the sleeves of her smoky gray cardigan, and slung her backpack onto the top bed.

  Jonnie sensed her dismay. “You want I find blanket for you?” he said anxiously. “You want I show you to ladies’ toilet?”

  Claire shook her head. Jonnie was like all the nice guys you always dated once but could never bring yourself to go out with again; his very goodness, obsequiousness, and eagerness to please somehow made him slightly repellent. He hovered. He smiled too much: The food, it is okay, yes? Do you like the hotel, it number one hotel, yes? You do not like the tea?

  While both Claire and I knew we should be prostrate with gratitude, we found ourselves bristling, experiencing his fussing over us as bossy and meddlesome even as we grew increasingly dependent upon him. We were still at that age when we regarded kindness as some sort of character flaw—the gambit of the weak, the elderly, the perennially uncool.

  Plus, in fairness, we sensed Jonnie’s desperation. Please take me to the American embassy: We heard this subliminally in every gracious thing he said to us. We tasted it in every cup of tea he insisted on pouring, in every extra bowlful of soup he urged us to eat. He naively believed that by virtue of simply being American, Claire and I could open the golden door for him—and we just couldn’t bring ourselves to tell him otherwise. Although we told each other we didn’t want to break his heart, that it was cruel to extinguish his hope, the truth was, we were simply too callow to level with him. We were afraid that if Jonnie stopped seeing us as his ticket to freedom, he would refuse to take us to Dinghai or help us navigate China. As long as he believed we were his salvation, he would be ours.

  Each time Jonnie smiled at me, though, with his pure, almost elated smile laden with admiration and trust—each time he began to sing in his sweet, earnest tenor, “I just called, to say, ‘I love you’ ”—I felt increasingly guilty.

  On our third morning in Shanghai, as we were walking across the bridge spanning Suzhou Creek, I said to him quietly, “Jonnie, do you understand that Claire and I—just because we’re Americans—it doesn’t mean we’re special, okay? Back home, we’re just students. Nobodies. We don’t have any influence with the American embassy here. Do you understand?”

  For a moment he paused. He blinked into the sunshine and smiled abstractly. Then he pressed his hands together, brought them to his lips, and nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said agreeably. “We go to American embassy in Beijing together. We are friends, yes?”

  Although both Claire and I were reluctant to tell Jonnie the truth, when I look back at the situation now, I wonder if on some level Jonnie wasn’t equally reluctant to hear it. All three of us, I suspect, tacitly agreed to pretend.

  ———

  The cabin was claustrophobic. Gunter and I opted to head out and explore while Jonnie lay back on his bunk listening to his tape recorder and Claire sat propped on her sleeping bag, writing intently in her journal.

  On our fourth afternoon in Shanghai, she’d turned to me with great solemnity. “Listen. I think it’s only fair that I tell you. I’ve got to do something that’s going to require me to go off on my own during the days.”

  We were sitting on a bench in Renmin Square. “Excuse me?” I said. Something in her tone made my heart lurch.

  “I’m working on a world curriculum,” she said distantly, twisting her watch around on her wrist. “A compendium of insights on all the nations we’re visiting. I have to profile their cultures, their histories, their outlooks. Eventually it will be adapted for grade schools, high schools, universities, and think tanks in Washington. It’ll be a prototype—you know, a sort of Proustian examination of the world today? But it’ll be practical, too. Kids like Cynthia’s boys, whose parents can’t take them to China and India, they’ll be able to access it like a database.”

  She squinted across the park, a steely look on her face, and fingered the gold horseshoe charm at her throat. In the shadowy light, her skin looked almost lavender. “It’s something I’ve just got to do,” she said. “It’s crucial. One day it might become a component of our national security.”

  Create a world curriculum? A Proustian examination? National security?

  To someone else, this undoubtedly would have sounded bizarre, disturbingly grandiose. But Claire and I had gone to Brown. Our classmates had talked this way all the time. The university practiced a sort of free-range intellectualism; students were routinely encouraged to design our own majors, create our own courses. I had friends who crafted independent study programs with names like “Ethno-Music-Semiology” in which they traveled to the Australian outback to play the didgeridoo for a year, then wrote a thesis about the meta-language of aboriginal music as deconstructed through psychoanalysis. If you were brilliant enough, creative enough, and inquisitive enough, the thinking at Brown went, then you should boldly forge your own academic path—no matter how crackpot or pompous it sounded.

  Which is exactly what I assumed Claire was doing now. China was making her feel stupid and irrelevant, so she was going to embark on a research project that would elevate her beyond mere tourist status and restore her sense of dominion. When she announced her “world curriculum,” all I’d felt was a niggling prick of envy. Why hadn’t I been so clever?

  “Cool. Can I help with the research?” I said. “We could do it together.”

  She frowned, her pale brow furrowing. “I’m sorry, but with the contacts I have to make—” Her voice trailed off. “Listen, please don’t ask me to explain. This is just something I have to do by myself, okay?”

  She patted the cover of her notebook into the side pocket of her leather saddlebag and stood up. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

  “What? You’re going now?”

  “I promise if I find out any really useful information, I’ll share it with you.”

  “But wait? Where—”

  Claire fixed her gaze on me. Her blue eyes appeared glacial. “Susie, please. I just need a little space to operate on my own, okay? Don’t make this difficult.”

  I sat back down on the bench heavily. “Oh. I’m sorry. I get it.” I tried not to betray my hurt. Before we’d left the States, we’d agreed that if we ever needed a little space apart, we should never be afraid to ask for it. It was unrealistic to expect we could spend every single moment of every day together for an entire year.

  Still, as I watched Claire saunter off through Renmin Square with her assured, athletic gait, her leather bag slung across her back like weaponry, her gold head bobbing with purpose, I felt a sting of rejection. We’d been in Shanghai barely four full days, yet already she needed to distance herself from me. With all my bleeding, cowering, and melodrama back in Hong Kong, I suspected I’d already exhausted her.

  Only after she was gone did I realize that she hadn’t told me where she was going, whom she was meeting, or even when she’d be back.

  ———

  Trevor Fisk was a sailor from a small town near Perth. He had the wispy goatee of a young pirate and slate-blue eyes that pillaged everything they looked at. His shoulders were pinioned with muscle. He was so swaggering and lascivious, he was practically feral. So of course, I was instantly attracted to him.

  I slammed into him
before I even saw him. After Claire abandoned me in the park, I’d headed back to the Pujiang. Rounding the corner in the lobby, I’d collided with him by the elevators.

  “Oi, watch it, girlie. Those are some of my best body parts you’re charging over,” he laughed, grabbing my elbow.

  Girlie. Only the Aussies could get away with that one.

  Meeting like this could’ve been a groaning cliché—except that as soon as he introduced himself, Trevor began showing off his tattoos to me as if they were art installations in a gallery. This was still a good decade before tattoos became the trendy accessory for every high school kid in Dayton and Scarsdale; in 1986 they were still, for the most part, the markings of an outlaw.

  “This here’s Leila,” he said, rolling up his right sleeve to show me a teal-colored, topless Polynesian woman with a bowl of fruit on her head. “Got her in Fiji. And this one here”—he turned and flexed his left triceps—“is Sofia. Got her in Bangkok.” Sofia the mermaid (also big-breasted, topless) gracefully swam up along his arm toward his shoulder.

  “How very unsexist of you,” I said drily.

  “Oi.” He grinned, rubbing his biceps with mock defensiveness. “It gets lonely out at sea. This way I always got me girls to talk to. But wait,” he said exuberantly. “You haven’t seen the pièce de résistance yet.”

  Undoing his pants with lightning speed, he pulled down his underwear and mooned me right there in the lobby. “Check it out.” Following the curvature of his right buttock was the name Trevor in elaborate curlicue script that looped off after the last r, culminating in a little smiling black-and-yellow bumblebee.

  It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to register anything close to shock. All I could think to say was “You got your own name tattooed on your ass?”

  “Oi. Could’ve been worse,” he laughed, yanking up his pants. “Could’ve had someone else’s name put there. Or could’ve had my own name misspelled.”

  “I’m sorry, but can I ask you something?” I rubbed my temples, trying to understand the turn the afternoon had taken. “Why on earth would you do that?”

  Trevor laughed again, a deep, happy, lecherous laugh. “Ah, who the fuck knows? I was drunker than shit. Somewhere in the Philippines, one of me mates said to me, ‘Trevor, you are so drunk right now, I bet you wouldn’t remember your own fuckin’ name if it was tattooed on your ass.’ And so I thought Why not? Bet him five bucks. And from what he tells me, I won, too! Of course,” he suddenly turned pensive, “I suppose if I’d been really smart, I would’ve had them tattoo it on backwards, so that way, when I looked in the mirror—”

  “Okay,” I held up my hand. “Getting the picture.”

  Sidling up to me, he snaked his arm protectively around my shoulder. His skin was warm and smelled of cloves. I could feel his biceps pressing against me, the tautness of his abdomen. “So how ’bout it, girlie?” he gave me a squeeze. “You’ve seen me good, me bad, and me ugly. Think you can handle me taking you out to dinner?”

  ———

  Trevor had been in Shanghai long enough to learn to say, “Another Tsingtao, please,” expertly in Mandarin. He took me to the Peace Hotel for dinner, then to a nightclub at the International Seamen’s Club on the Bund that “officially” did not exist.

  Stepping inside was nothing short of hallucinatory. In the center of an abandoned rococo ballroom was a huge table full of Sudanese men playing bongo drums accompanied by a lone Belgian accordionist. Backpackers, black marketeers, aid workers, entrepreneurs undulated to the beat, clinked bottles, and bellowed out rounds of increasingly incoherent toasts. The din was phenomenal.

  Trevor knew everyone. He was like the mayor of the nightclub. Leading me through the crowd, he introduced me to an Austrian woman dancing sinuously with a Senegalese man; to a half-Canadian, half-Indian man who called himself Tai and shouted over the music that he worked in computers; to a stunning Icelandic blonde who eyed me coolly and blew smoke rings over Trevor’s head; to a robotic-looking, square-headed German who said, “I am German. I am psychotic,” over and over while gulping beer; and to two highly amused Swedes, who, upon hearing I was American, felt compelled to launch into their own imitation of the Swedish chef from The Muppet Show.

  In the midst of all this, an elderly, rotund Chinese man went around hugging everyone and dancing in an artful, angular manner that reminded me of Kabuki. I had spent my teenage years in New York drinking illegally at Studio 54 and Danceteria, yet nothing came remotely close to this. It was Star Wars meets the UN.

  Trevor and I danced and drank; danced and flirted; flirted and drank, shouting to each other at close range over the music. It turned out he was a Libra, too! Oh my God! No wonder we’re so instantly compatible! We’re starmates! Let’s celebrate our birthdays together on the Great Wall, we cheered, collapsing into each other’s arms. Let’s have another toast! To Libra, the scales! until suddenly we looked around the International Seaman’s Club and realized it was empty except for a lone busboy stacking the chairs, and that we’d been dancing together for at least twenty minutes without any actual music.

  And then we were waltzing out on the landing and sitting on the cold stone steps of the Peace Hotel. It was after midnight.

  Swashbucklers, explorers, those mythological Greeks: Our legends are misleading. Most people who travel overseas—ostensibly on a quest—are fleeing something, too. Captain Cook set out not only to chart the Pacific but also to escape provincial England. Huck Finn was sprinting from the Widow Douglas. And although back in 1986 it never occurred to me that Claire Van Houten could be on the run from anything, I knew on some level that I certainly was.

  As we sat with our hands knitted, I found myself telling Trevor about the fault lines in my parents’ marriage. About my mother’s fierce mood swings. I told him how I’d watched my beloved little brother suffer and diminish from the tension—and about my father’s secret phone call to me at college to say he was thinking about moving out.

  “I mean, just how was I supposed to respond to that?” Without meaning to, I started to cry.

  Trevor reached over and pressed the back of his hand to my cheek. Staring somberly out at the river, he told me haltingly about how stultifying his hometown had been—the drunken marinade of it, full of posturing and gossip and petty Saturday-night brutality—and how his father had cut out when he was six. “Bastard even took my model train collection. Pawned it for beer money.

  “You and me, girlie.” He smiled sadly. “We’re not so different, are we?”

  It was one o’clock in the morning. We stood up stiffly, brushed ourselves off, and slowly made our way back through the shadowed pathways of Huangpu Park toward the hotel. The city was so quiet, we could hear the tide licking the seawalls. Although the night had turned bittersweet, once we found ourselves on the Suzhou Creek Bridge, we started kissing.

  And then suddenly we were kissing some more, and then we were sneaking into the women’s dormitory back at the Pujiang, tiptoeing past the sprawled and sleeping women and stumbling giddily out onto the wrought-iron balcony overlooking the streets of Shanghai, and we were kissing and shushing each other drunkenly and covering our mouths with each other’s hands to keep from making noise and then kissing some more, and then Trevor was kneeling down and lifting up the hem of my thin purple jersey tank dress, whispering “Just close your eyes now, girlie. Don’t look.” And as I felt the first wet flicker of his lips, I started to giggle again.

  When I told Claire about it the next morning at breakfast, however, she failed to find it funny.

  “Ew. You fooled around with that sleazy sailor guy from the men’s dorm? The one with his name tattooed on his butt?”

  I sat back. “How did you know about that?”

  “When I came off the elevator yesterday morning, he was showing it to two German girls. In fact he was showing it to everybody. Watch out, Suze, okay? That guy is a nut job.”

  She looked at me with displeasure and drew in a breath. She scratch
ed her neck. A patch below her left ear had grown raw and irritated. “Look, there’s something else. Early this morning, Jonnie stopped by. You were still asleep. Anyway, he’s already gone ahead and bought tickets for us to sail with him on the ferry to Dinghai. Tonight.”

  “What? Tonight?” I said. “But we never—”

  “I know. But he already paid for the tickets. And he’s even arranged for somebody with a car to bring us to the pier.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I don’t know about this.”

  She sat up stiffly, her nostrils flared, her arms crossed. “What’s not to know?”

  Her sharpness took me aback. “I just thought we didn’t want to be indebted to him,” I said.

  “And pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? I mean, I’m sorry, but how many of the other people here have gotten invited to someone’s Chinese hometown?”

  “I know. But, Claire, he thinks we’re going to help him defect.”

  She looked at me with annoyance. “What’s the problem? You don’t want to leave your sailor now?”

  “What? He’s not my—”

  “I thought you wanted to have great adventures, not just the usual—”

  “I do, it’s just—”

  “But, I mean, if you’d rather stay here with some little fling instead of boldly venturing off the map, far be it from me to—”

  “Claire, c’mon. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Okay, then,” she said in a tone that implied it wasn’t okay at all. “We’re going to Dinghai with Jonnie.” She grabbed her shoulder bag and started to get up, then thought better of it and plunked back down.

  “I’m sorry,” she groaned. She stretched her arms out over the tabletop and dropped her head down on them, her hair falling over her face, her bracelets sliding down her wrists. “I’m being an asshole.”

  “Well, you’re certainly not being fair.”

  “Oh, Suze.” She turned her face toward me helplessly. “I’m just so tired. I feel all filthy and gross. I’m not sleeping well. Everyone’s always watching us. There’s never any quiet.”