Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  So this is it, I realize. The ignominious end of our glorious trip.

  “EVERYTHING’S NOT OKAY,” Claire shouts. She grips me by the forearms. “DON’T YOU SEE? THE CIA AND THE MOSSAD AND THE FBI ARE AFTER US.”

  “Claire,” I say, but her voice is growing increasingly shrill, snowballing toward delirium.

  “Listen to me.” I grip her cheeks between my hands. “WE ARE NOT IN ANY DANGER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  She wrenches my hands away and starts punching and clawing at me, hollering, “GET AWAY FROM ME!”

  Eckehardt moves to pull her off me, but before he can, my hand swings back almost reflexively and I smack her hard across the face.

  The crack is sharp as a whip.

  Claire staggers back a moment, and we both look at my palm, stunned.

  “Claire. You’ve got to cool it now,” I whisper, my voice shaking. “You can’t be screaming like that here. You’re hysterical.”

  She stands there, panting, her hand on her jaw.

  “I’m sorry, but I had to do that,” I say tearfully. “Now, I want you to take a deep breath. Do you hear me? Breathe.”

  She inhales spasmodically, her low lip trembling.

  “That’s it,” I say. “Good. Now another.”

  She stands there for another minute, slowly breathing in.

  Then she bolts. She tears off down the street and runs around the bend.

  “Oh, fuck,” I say. Eckehardt and I run after her, but I can no longer keep up. My lungs just won’t absorb enough air. They feel cauterized and sore. Wheezing, I half run, half stagger. Eckehardt turns back to assist me. By the time we round the corner, Claire has made it up the dirt road. It’s the same road where the hourly bus from Guilin let us off just the day before. At that very moment, in fact, a bus is sitting there, chugging exhaust and discharging its passengers.

  Claire barrels headlong into the waiting crowd and elbows her way to the front of the line. A second later, I see her force her way onto the bus, her shoulder bag flouncing, her blond hair haywire.

  By the time Eckehardt and I catch up to her, the rest of the passengers have already crammed on board. It is so full, the driver is having trouble getting the automatic doors to clomp shut. It’s a tangle of bodies, bundles, poultry, plastic bags; everyone’s mashed together shouting and spitting. There’s no possible way of getting on, and there’s no possible way of getting anyone off, either. Claire has somehow managed to squeeze herself into a tiny space between the driver and the rest of the passengers, her back wedged against a Fiberglas partition. It’s only because she’s so tall and blond that I’m able to spot her in the crush.

  “Claire!” I shout as Eckehardt bangs on the half-folded door, calling out, “Ching! Ching!” and gesturing for the bus driver to stop.

  Claire turns in the direction of my voice. Her eyes look glassy and unfocused. But when she spots me, her face suddenly relaxes with recognition.

  “Sweetie,” she says softly, waving. Her voice is singsong. “Do you have any change for the bus? All I have is this.”

  She holds open her purse. It’s empty except for a tube of lip gloss and her traveler’s checks held together with a hair scrunchie.

  “Get off the bus!” I shout.

  “I can’t.” She reaches over her head and sweeps all of her hair languidly over one shoulder. She glances down at Eckehardt and me almost pityingly.

  “Listen, I just need a little space,” she sighs. “I’m feeling a little claustrophobic, is all. I just need some room to breathe. Take the next bus back to Guilin, okay? Bring all my stuff and meet me at the Osmanthus Hotel. I’ll have a bath, use a Western toilet, and I promise I’ll be better. I just need a little money, okay?”

  I don’t know what the hell to do. The driver is jamming the bus into gear. I try reaching past the passengers barricading the door, but no one can budge. I feel in my pockets. All of my Chinese money is back at the Garden Guesthouse; Eckehardt pulls some twenty-yuan notes from his wallet, balls them up, and tosses them to Claire over the crush of heads.

  “Thanks, guys. A steak dinner later, I promise,” she calls out, catching the money and slipping it into her bag. “Sorry. I’m just freaking out a little. I need to feel the road under me for a while and I’ll be fine.”

  The doors jerk shut. The engine growls, and Eckehardt and I are suddenly left standing in a puff of diesel fumes, watching the dented metal loaf of it lurch forward, then turn the corner and disappear.

  “Excuse me, but what the hell just happened here?” I grip the sides of my head incredulously. “Did you see that? Who was that?”

  “I think,” says Eckehardt worriedly, “that your friend has some real problems.”

  ———

  Back at the Garden Guesthouse, I discover that Claire really has left everything behind: her passport, her Gucci wallet full of Chinese money, $600 in American cash, her phalanx of credit cards, her international driver’s license—even her around-the-world plane ticket. Gathering it up, I find myself hating her.

  “Fucking little princess,” I mutter. “Acting out like that. Leaving me with all her shit so that she can go off and have a bubble bath. Who does she think I am? Her housekeeper? Her personal Sherpa?”

  Eckehardt watches me with consternation.

  “She grew up with a maid, you know,” I say. “She’s used to other people cleaning up her messes.”

  “Oh, Susie,” he says, shaking his head. “I do not think she was acting out.”

  “Oh, of course she was,” I declare bitterly, reaching for a pile of her dirty socks and stuffing them angrily into her pack. “Did you see how rational she was in the end, once she got on that bus? It was like, poof! All of a sudden, she’s not in any danger anymore. She just wants to hang out at a fancy hotel.

  “You know what?” I say suddenly, looking him straight in the eye, “she’s jealous because you and I hooked up. Every time on this trip, whenever a guy pays me more attention than he pays her, she gets all moody and bent out of shape and suddenly has these little crises.”

  Eckehardt stares at the ground.

  “I think I should tell you,” he says, “last night, after you’d gone back to your bed, she tried to sleep with me.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, no, no,” he says quickly, waving his hands. “It was not like that. But it was very strange. She woke me up and climbed into my bed.”

  I hurl down her canteen. “See, that’s exactly what I mean. It’s not enough that she’s rich and beautiful and probably going to law school next year, and that she’s Phi Beta Kappa and has this steady boyfriend back home. She just can’t stand it when I get the cute guys. She can’t stand not being the best at absolutely everything.”

  “She was crying,” Eckehardt says. “She was telling me about her mother being dead, and about how much she is missing her. And she is saying that she is trying to telephone her family, but that the phones here do not work. Maybe, yah, she is also jealous. But she was very troubled.”

  “When did this happen? You and I were up until at least three a.m.”

  “Four? Four-thirty?” He shrugs. “I told her to try and go to sleep. I said that I was thinking she would feel better in the morning. But when I wouldn’t let her stay in my bed, oh, she got very angry. She slapped me. She took her Walkman and stormed out.”

  I pause and stare at Claire’s blue rubber flip-flops in my hand. “Oh, Christ, Ecke,” I say.

  That’s when it hits me, when I allow myself to think the thought I’ve been refusing to entertain: Maybe my friend is not merely playacting. Maybe she truly is losing her mind.

  The paranoia, the secretiveness, the mood swings: I’ve been chalking all of it up, of course, to the stresses of travel, plus Claire’s own penchant for fabulism. You have to remember too that both of us at this moment are fresh out of college. We’ve spent the last ten years steeped in the histrionics of growing up. Back at Brown, our classmates staged hunger strikes to protest apartheid. A fraterni
ty bricked up its front patio to create a swimming pool, then filled it with beer; when they got expelled, they hired a skywriter to fly overhead during graduation in protest. After a guy in our freshman dorm got a C in engineering, he went to Japan to visit his brother for a week and ended up staying a year. My roommate got into the habit of picking coffee with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua each semester in order to sort out her “issues.” Another friend would regularly pound on my door at four o’clock in the morning yelling that it was an emergency, then rush in holding an album by Echo and the Bunnymen. “You have totally got to hear this song,” he’d shout, charging over to my turntable. “It’s going to blow the top of your fucking head off.” Another, after a breakup, slept on my floor for a week and ate nothing but Twizzlers. And then, of course, there was me—the queen of hyperbole—who’d checked into health services for a week after a distressing telephone call from my father.

  At this stage in our lives, Claire and I have a conception of “appropriate behavior” that is beyond operatic. And in China, certainly, nothing seems normal anyway; even the constellations are skewed. Is Claire mentally ill or merely freaked out? I honestly cannot tell.

  What is indisputable, though, is that it’s over. Claire’s psychological health is at least questionable, and dealing with her has propelled me to the edge of a nervous breakdown myself. Both of us are disintegrating. It’s time to go home. I’ve got to make arrangements as quickly as possible. I look at my watch. The next bus for Guilin leaves in forty-eight minutes.

  ———

  Lisa puts her arm around me as I explain. Although I deliberately omit the part about the CIA, the FBI, and the Mossad, once I describe Claire’s behavior out loud, it really does sound crazy.

  “Your friend, she very sick.” Lisa frowns. “This no good. This very, very bad.”

  “I’m going to have to take her home,” I say miserably. “Ecke went to get my bus ticket, but I really need to contact our parents. Is there any place here where I can make a collect call to America?”

  This is a long shot, I realize, but Lisa thinks for a minute, then leads me back behind the café, down a narrow wooded lane. At the end of it, beneath a willow tree, stands a wooden shack with a corrugated roof. It looks like a refreshment stand. Lisa knocks on the door. Inside, a man is sitting at a crude wooden table cluttered with packages of biscuits. She says something to him. For a moment he and Lisa seem to negotiate. Then he pulls out a rice paper notebook and hands me a pen.

  “Write down your name, address, and phone number you want to call,” Lisa instructs. When I finish, the man leads us around the back of the shed to what looks like an outhouse and motions for me to wait there.

  “Phone call maybe take long time,” Lisa says. “I must go back to café. You wait, yes?”

  I stand there by myself, staring out at the meadow and the jagged emerald karst. Even though it is early November, it feels like a lazy summer day; the air is humid and trilling with crickets. It is hard to reconcile this tranquility with the turmoil I’ve just experienced. It’s hard to believe we arrived here only a day ago. The gooey banana pancakes. Lisa with her polka-dot hair ribbon. Eckehardt revealed in the clearing. The stars, the brass rings glittering around the throats of the cormorants. Claire sobbing on the pebbled ground. Eckehardt kissing me, his fingertips tracing my clavicle. The entire sojourn in Yangshuo feels unreal. And yet it’s impossible to fathom that in just a few days, Claire and I will be back in the… Strangely, it’s hard to fathom us being anywhere else but here.

  Claire. At that very moment, her bus should be more than halfway to Guilin, weaving its way through the karsts. I imagine her shifting uncomfortably in her seat, hugging her purse like a shield, the bus jostling over the pitted road.

  Suddenly I get the terrible feeling that I should never have let her go off alone. How did I allow that? Did I have any choice? I try to imagine some way in which I might’ve convinced the driver to halt the bus, or barring that, gotten myself onto it. But nothing seems plausible, and besides, what would’ve happened then? We’d have left everything behind in Yangshuo—backpacks, passports, money—and it would only have compounded the problem, because then we’d have to turn around and find some way to come back. And what if she became irrational again? She’s taller, stronger, faster than I am. How on earth would I manage her?

  Pacing in front of the phone booth, I begin to grasp the enormity of what I may be up against.

  The man reemerges from the outhouse, gesturing. Miraculously, the call has gone through to America in only twelve minutes—record time.

  I pick up the heavy Bakelite receiver. There is a roar of static, then the distant ocean sound of my parents’ phone ringing. Back in New York, it is ten o’clock at night. “C’mon, damn it,” I murmur. But nobody answers.

  I scribble down my grandmother’s phone number and thrust it at the man, pleading, “Ching?” There’s now only twenty-one minutes until the bus leaves.

  Luckily, this time the connection overseas goes through almost immediately, and my grandmother picks up her phone on the second ring.

  “Oh, Susie darling. What a lovely surprise,” she cries over the hissing and sizzle. “How is China?”

  “Fine. Great. We have to come home immediately,” I say. “I can’t talk long, and I can’t go into detail. But I need you to call Mom and Dad, and tell them to contact the Van Houtens.”

  “But why?” says my grandmother. “You’ve only just left. And you worked so hard for—”

  “Claire is sick. We need to come home.”

  “Bubeleh, can’t you just get her to a doctor? Or put her on a plane—”

  “It’s complicated. She’s not sick physically.” I enunciate carefully. “Do you understand?”

  If at all possible, I want to avoid saying words like mental illness or nervous breakdown over the phone. The line keeps clicking whenever I speak; I suspect it’s being tapped.

  My grandmother thankfully grasps the situation instantly. “I see. Is she rational? Is she depressed?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But we need to come home.”

  “I see. Susie, is she a danger to herself?”

  “Again, I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think so. But I really can’t talk anymore, okay? I’m in this small village. There’s a bus leaving for the city soon. Can you please call everyone and explain? We’re going to check into this big Western-style hotel, and I’ll try to contact them from there.”

  “Absolutely, bubeleh. You take good care of yourself,” my grandmother says.

  Then, just as we’re about to hang up, she adds as an afterthought: “Oh, whatever you do, don’t let her out of your sight, you understand?”

  ———

  When Eckehardt returns from the travel agent, he has some bad news: The next bus to Guilin will not be leaving for another two hours. The Chinese apparently enjoy leisurely lunch breaks as much as the rest of the world.

  I tell myself that perhaps a two-hour delay won’t be that big a deal; perhaps the situation with Claire isn’t nearly as dire as I’ve made it out to be. Perhaps once she’s installed herself into the Osmanthus Hotel, ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, and reclined in a bathtub, she’ll feel clearheaded again. She might not even notice I’m late.

  But when I proceed to check out of the Garden Guesthouse, the proprietor starts yelling at me.

  “You friend, you friend,” he shouts, pointing angrily to the grimy metal clock on his desk and tapping on the number 4. He pantomimes sleeping, then someone pounding on the door.

  “Why she wake us up?” cries his wife, who pushes through the curtain dividing the office from their kitchen. She is carrying a huge tureen full of soup that slops onto the floor. “She wake us up two o’clock. She wake us up four o’clock. She wake us up five o’clock. She ask to make telephone. Who make telephone at five o’clock morning?” she demands. “Why she no sleep?”

  By the time I finish paying the bill, I’m nearly in tears.


  “Oh, God, Eckehardt,” I cry. “What am I supposed to do now? She’s going to be alone out there for hours.”

  I lean into him. He puts one hand on my hip, the other on the back of my head. For a moment, I stand there clutching him in the courtyard.

  “I’m from New York City. I’m supposed to be tough.” I sniffle. “I’m supposed to be able to handle stuff like this.” I gesture at Claire’s backpack. “But I can barely even carry her goddamned bag.”

  “Oh, I am afraid this is not a very good situation for you,” he says mournfully, touching my shoulder. “I think maybe I will come with you to Guilin, yah?”

  I glance up at him, blinking with disbelief, unable to believe my good luck, afraid that if I reveal the depth of my desperation and gratitude, he’ll change his mind. “But you wanted to see the karsts before you left. You were supposed to spend the whole day here.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t think that will be very much fun for me. I have to go to Guilin anyway for my train tonight. So I will just go a little earlier.”

  Eckehardt has known me exactly nineteen hours, Lisa twenty-four. But in the course of a single day, the two of them have become my family. They are all that stand between me and an utter free fall into helplessness.

  At the Green Lotus Peak Inn, I am so choked with emotion, I can barely eat lunch. Lisa stands before me in her apron and her cheap, lace-trimmed gingham blouse, gimlet-eyed and smiling. “Here, Susie,” she says, touching my shoulder, stroking my hair. “Special pancake for your trip. Chocolate and banana.” Her face has such innocence and yearning, it breaks my heart. I cannot bear to leave her behind. Sitting there, I can see the life she will be condemned to live: endlessly washing dishes for her husband, serving beer to foreigners. Most likely, she will have one child, followed by a series of forced abortions. She will do as she’s told by the local authorities, who control if and when Chinese citizens can ever leave their own province. If she does not keep her ambitions in check, she may very well be punished. Slowly her intelligence will curdle, her face will grow prematurely lined and weary, and in ten years’ time, she will look twenty years older and feel contorted and embittered. This moment—when she is young and radiant and still buoyed by the adventure of meeting people from around the world and learning to cook their favorite meals—this, I suspect, will be the sweet spot in her life. The high point. From here on in, her future is a treadmill, a foregone conclusion.