By the time we finish primping and napping, he is already back from Sutton Place. Mr. Van Houten, he reports, had been just as eager to take care of business. “Tell the girls thanks again,” he’d told my father. “We’ll talk more once they’ve rested.” Without blinking, he then cut my dad a banker’s check for almost twelve thousand dollars. My father insisted on including a fee for Sandy’s nursing services, too. Mr. Van Houten had been happy to pay it.
By noon, Mr. Van Houten’s check has already cleared. My father arrives home with a thick envelope. He tosses it on the dining table, and a landslide of hundred-dollar bills spills out. The jade-green money is everywhere, fluttering to the floor like leaves.
———
What worries me however, is the inevitable phone call. All day long I turn it over in my mind, formulating how exactly to phrase things.
None of our parents, you see, know the details yet. All they learned from my distressed phone calls from China was that Claire had become mentally ill, experienced a breakdown, and become a danger to herself. But beyond that, they do not know the specifics. The only question the Van Houtens have ever asked about Claire’s mental state during the crisis is: “Is she rational?”
Now they are going to require a list of her symptoms in detail: her increasingly paranoid delusions, the fact that she was hearing voices, the fact that she disrobed publicly and went into a river and nearly killed herself, albeit inadvertently. And I am the one who is going to have to give it to them.
Finally, around four p.m., the telephone rings. Mr. Van Houten is on one line, Claire’s stepmother on another, and their family doctor in New Canaan, Connecticut, connected via conference call.
“We are truly sorry to have to bother you,” Mr. Van Houten begins, his voice shaking. “But as you can imagine, we have so many questions.”
Their doctor starts by asking me about Claire’s physical state: her diet, what medications she’d been taking, if she’d ever run a fever. For about half an hour, I answer these as carefully as I can. We all know what he is really leading up to, and as he works his way through his list, the line grows tense and I feel my heart pounding harder and harder as I try to devise the least painful way to explain things.
Finally the doctor takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he says, “I need to know, too. Was she at all sexually active during the trip?”
No, I tell him. Not at all. “But she was having some romantic fantasies that—”
Before I can finish, I can hear all three parties on the other end of the phone exhale.
“Okay then,” the doctor says with relief. “Thank you so much for all your time. I think that’s all we need to know, don’t you, Drummond?”
“Yes, I think so,” says Claire’s father. “Thank you so much again, Susan.”
With that, they hang up.
———
Later that evening, however, there is one more phone call. It is from Parker. He is at a pay phone on First Avenue, several blocks from the Van Houtens’ corporate apartment.
“No one wants to hear the truth,” he says soberly. “I realize it can’t be pretty. But if anyone’s ever going to really help her, someone needs to know.”
Forty-five minutes later, he is at my parents’ doorstep. He is dressed in the same down vest and Bass Weejuns he was wearing that morning at the airport. His hair is still immaculately glued across his forehead like a hairpiece, though he is no longer wearing a webbed belt with little whales on it. He is smaller than I remember him being at school. He is barely Claire’s height and compactly built, a sort of miniature man with sad, watery green eyes. He holds out a small tin of expensive Danish butter cookies as a house gift for my mother. “I am so, so sorry to disturb you,” he says.
My mother ushers him over to our dining room, sets down a bottle of bubbly water, then leaves. It is just Parker, Sandy, and me now. He takes a sip from his glass and looks at me bleakly.
“Okay,” he says, bracing himself. “Start from the beginning.”
And so, meticulously, I begin. I tell him everything in all its terrible unfurling: Claire’s cryptic comments; her mounting belief that the CIA, the FBI, and the Mossad were keeping tabs on us; her secret forays to do business in Beijing; how she became convinced that the PLO had gotten involved. I tell him about her fear of other tourists, her bizarre attempt to give away her broken camera, her lying down like a corpse in the middle of the rice paddy. And then I get to Yangshuo with Lisa, the tantrums, the nocturnal phone calls, and then to the final, horrible, prolonged denouement. I do not embellish, nor do I flinch. I present to him not only Claire but myself as well, as accurately and dispassionately as I can, the two of us in all our nakedness, fallibility, and confusion—with the police, with each other. Per Parker’s instructions, I do not spare him any of the details.
That is, except for one. When I mention Adom, I present him only as someone Claire developed a crush on from afar, then cultivated into a romance entirely in her own head. For all I know, this might have actually been what happened after all. And if it wasn’t, well. When I look at Parker’s sad green eyes—unflinching in their loyal, brave love—it seems to me there’s been enough heartache already.
———
In the days that follow, I take Sandy on a whirlwind tour of New York City—the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, the Brooklyn Bridge—“to see what all the fuss is about.” To my great satisfaction, she is impressed. We also take me to a pulmonary specialist, who immediately orders a series of blood tests and X-rays, then informs me that I have severe bronchitis and a bacterial infection similar to mononucleosis.
“How long have you had this?” he asks. When I tell him about six weeks—that I contracted it in Shanghai—he asks me what the hospitals are like in China.
“Terrible,” I say. “Why?”
“Because if you hadn’t come back here when you did, you would’ve ended up in one.”
He puts me on a high-level dose of antibiotics for a month and orders me to come back in seventy-two hours. When Sandy asks if I can possibly fly back to Asia next week, the doctor says, “Only if she wants to do it in an oxygen tent.”
Sandy looks crestfallen. But I secretly feel like I’ve been given a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I will have at least a month now to wriggle out of returning to Asia altogether.
At the Liberty Travel Agency, Sandy alone books a return flight to Hong Kong for the end of that week. Then I take her to the galleries in SoHo. My favorite coffeehouses in Greenwich Village. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Yet here’s what we do not do: see the Van Houtens. Although I’d expected we’d speak to them regularly—and perhaps visit Claire—oddly, they do not call us, and anytime I telephone the corporate apartment of Sutton Place, no one answers.
———
A week later, my parents drive Sandy to the international terminal at JFK Airport, where I myself had departed back in September.
“So listen, lady,” Sandy says at the final call for boarding. She adjusts her small purple backpack with a shrug, then plants one of her hands firmly on each of my shoulders like a sergeant conferring an order on a corporal. “You’ll meet me in Hong Kong in three weeks. I’ll call you as soon as I get settled back there, and we’ll confirm exactly where and when. You got that? In the meantime, just book yourself a ticket and don’t worry. Kyle and I will be waiting for you.”
I nod vigorously. “Thanks,” I say. “You’re amazing.” As she turns and heads down the gangway toward the plane, I wave insanely, brimming with admiration for her. I shout, “Travel safely. See you soon!” And yet I know that I am lying. I will never see her again. I will never head back to Asia. I just do not have it in me to get on another damn plane and begin traveling with a backpack all over again. The departure lounge is the proverbial fork in the road; Sandy has taken one direction, I the other. I tell myself I’m really okay with this.
———
When I was little, I used to have indulgent li
ttle daydreams in which I was declared dead purely by accident. Before I could set the record straight, however, my funeral would be held, and I’d get the thrill of witnessing it from behind a potted plant in the chapel. After listening to all the glowing eulogies given about me, I’d nonchalantly reappear to revel in my friends’ and family’s adoration, their euphoric disbelief.
After I see Sandy off to Asia, this is not too dissimilar from what happens in New York. My friends in Manhattan who said goodbye to me just two months earlier have essentially given me up for dead (which is what New Yorkers tend do if somebody ventures beyond the Hudson). Now suddenly they find me waiting in their lobbies, sitting at tables at the restaurants where they’re bartending, leaving surprise messages for them on their answering machines. My friend Maggie works at Tiffany’s. When I appear like a ghost in the china department and say “Yo, babes” she nearly drops a $420 gravy boat. Every time someone squeals and throws their arms around me, I experience a thrill of love.
I even manage to hook up with Jake again. “Whoa, look at you,” he says, gallantly flinging open the door of his parents’ East Side apartment. “The adventurer has returned. What happened? Tell me everything.” Sitting across from him on the sofa, however, I find myself struggling to reconcile the flesh-and-blood guy before me in a rumpled pin-striped shirt with the lover I fantasized about during my loneliest hours in Beijing, who accompanied me through the grimy, chaotic hutongs, then decomposed in my arms as I hallucinated with fever in Guilin. When he hands me a glass of wine and marvels, “I can’t believe you’re back already,” he has no idea of the surreality he’s participated in over the past seven weeks.
Oh, but it’s great to be home! To be waking up in the same bed that I’ve slept in since I was eight, to be walking down all the familiar streets, reveling in the craziness and familiarity that is New York, New York! Even my parents seem to be just the way they used to be, but better. They’re easy with each other, walking to Zabar’s hand in hand on Saturday afternoons, contentedly reading the Sunday Times in the morning sunlight. Our family life is surprisingly cozy and tranquil.
And yet after about two weeks of reuniting with all my dearest friends, I find myself feeling slightly like a war veteran—agitated, displaced, out of sync with the culture. While my friends around me are consumed with their entry-level magazine jobs, nightclubbing, grad school applications, learning computer languages, their new roommates in their new shared walk-up apartments—while they rehash jokes from movies and episodes of Cheers I haven’t seen and obsess about their unpublished poetry, their acting auditions, their thighs, their workouts, their student loans—I find my mind straying back to China, to Jonnie seated among his family in Dinghai and the old man in Beijing who helped us fix our bicycles, to Lisa waiting tables amidst the karsts of Guilin. I think of all the women washing clothing and vegetables in plastic buckets in the gutters. Of Tom meeting us clandestinely in the azalea bushes. I see the throngs of people clogging the overpass on Nanjing Road, their Mao uniforms inky blue, the gray street below slick with rain. The phosphorescent rice paddies. The little girl with pigtails stepping forward shyly to welcome us before a crowd of beaming onlookers in Hangpu Park. I see the tangles of bicycles. The dumplings sizzling in hot sesame oil in a filthy wok. The profound kindness in the eyes of the people, again and again and again.
Whenever I think of these things, I feel an exquisite pang of longing.
I find myself starting to feel oddly depressed; it’s almost like I know too much simply to be in the moment anymore, to enjoy what I used to relish so uncritically. I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.
I am terrified to go back to China, to reactivate all that anxiety. Being unleashed into an incomprehensible culture felt paradoxically like climb-ing a mountain and plunging over a precipice. If I learned one thing by going abroad, it is that I am not by nature an adventurer. For all my bravado, I am hesitant, nervous, neurotic. I am a parochial New Yorker.
And yet.
Three weeks later, to my great shock and surprise, my parents see me off at JFK again with the same backpack, the same eight-item wardrobe, the same Lonely Planet guidebook, and this time a small deck of Aquarian Tarot cards instead of heavy Linda Goodman. In my hand is a one-way ticket back to Hong Kong, courtesy of the Van Houtens, and Sandy is meeting me at Kai Tak Airport, just as we’d planned, although this time, we’ve agreed, I’ll check into the Holiday Inn for a few nights until I can get acclimated. From Hong Kong, maybe we’ll go to Bali. Or Thailand. We’ll decide once I get there. We don’t have any concrete plans. We’ll just go where the world takes us, until we see all that we can see and absorb all that we can learn. I find myself craving this, even though I am still terrified. As I walk toward the gangway, waving goodbye again to my teary-eyed parents, my heart is beating violently, like a bird breaking free of its cage, and my hands are clammy and sparkling with fear. But I smile and I turn and I go.
It seems I’m that sort of girl after all.
Afterwards
I NEVER SAW Claire Van Houten again.
That morning in November in 1986 when I deposited her into the arms of her father, she ducked down into a limousine outside LaGuardia Airport and vanished from my life.
When I boarded the plane back to Hong Kong four weeks later to resume traveling, I had no idea that I would, in fact, end up circumnavigating the globe just as she and I had planned that spring night back at the IHOP. I trekked through Bali, Jakarta, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, then soldiered on to Western Europe and the Middle East. All told, I ended up traveling ten months.
Since then I’ve acquired more stamps in my passport than I’d ever dreamed. As a journalist, I’ve covered assignments overseas in Poland and Austria. As a teacher, I’ve led students on an educational tour of Britain. As a tourist, I’ve been lucky enough to tromp through Red Square in a miniskirt and dance salsa on the beaches of Venezuela.
On our first wedding anniversary, my husband, the Amazing Bob, and I move to Switzerland. His international employer sends him around the world. We go on safari in Tanzania, kiss at the Taj Mahal.
In October 2005, Bob is invited to a conference in Beijing. As luck would have it, I have a writing assignment: Hong Kong Disneyland is opening. As far as irony goes, this is the jackpot. Walt Disney was a rabid anti-Communist. Now his Magic Kingdom will be singing “Be Our Guest” to the biggest Communist regime on the planet. The working title of my article is “Mickey Mao.”
While we’re there, Bob and I decide to retrace my steps from 1986. We’re able to do this because China now has a network of domestic airlines that makes it easy to hop from Beijing to Shanghai to Guilin in a matter of days. In another sign of just how much has changed, I now think that paying $110 for a plane ticket is a bargain.
There have not yet been the epic earthquakes, floods, or 2008 Olympic Games. Widespread visuals of twenty-first-century China have not yet been broadcast around the world. Only a few stock tourist images have repeatedly appeared. So everywhere we go is a revelation, a shock.
On the highway from the airport, the air is so thick with particles, our taxi seems to be hurtling into a void. Beijing is now permanently engulfed in a blizzard of pollution, a chemical snow. Ghoulish clusters of fifty-story buildings rise out of the smog. Outlines of modern office buildings—miles upon miles of them—slowly take shape. We pass a stadium, a riot of overpasses. Boulevards converge, huge tributaries of honking cars.
At the hotel, white-gloved porters take our bags and usher us past an Armani boutique into a soaring glass atrium. A cool, cathedral hush fills the lobby. “Hello, Ms. Gilman,” says a blond receptioni
st. “We’re overbooked, so we’ve upgraded you to a suite.”
The suite is bigger than our apartment back home. A plasma-screen TV is embedded in the wall above the marble Jacuzzi.
The Temple of Heaven is closed for renovations. Most of the hutongs where Claire and I ate dumplings have been bulldozed. Tour groups are led through the few remaining alleyways in bicycle rickshaws.
At the Wangfujing pedestrian mall, a bank of televisions throb with music videos of an Asian rapper named Will performing a hip-hop song, “Will Is MVP.”
“I’m back, yo, you like it,” he shouts, aping Eminem. “Shay shay nee. MVP.”
A private air-conditioned taxi with a guide whisks us to the Great Wall. A cable car has now been constructed at Badaling to transport visitors directly to the top, and a miniature roller coaster careens down the side to a snack bar. As Bob and I climb the stones with thousands of other tourists, we see power lines and cell towers.
Our guide, Tina, a giddy young woman in her twenties, wears rhinestone cat-eye glasses and tangerine-colored lipstick, her hair in a dozen loony barrettes.
“I take you for traditional Chinese refreshment, yes?” she says, playing with the ring tones on her cell phone.
Before we can protest, the car pulls into a Chinese Friendship Store, where we are subjected to a twenty-minute hard sell for what looks like drinkable potpourri, silk pajamas, and decorative jade snuffboxes. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Tina is getting a kickback.
“They should rename it,” Bob says afterward as we flop down on our bed at the hotel with a bag full of cloisonné chopsticks and a canister of lichee tea. “The Great Mall of China.”
“Are you spelling that M-A-L-L or M-A-U-L?” I snort.
“Both,” he laughs.
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 37