by Walter Tevis
“You’re a tall person yourself,” I said. “What will happen when we dock in China? To me, I mean.”
“You’ll be interrogated and given living quarters. Much depends on your cooperation.” She lit another cigarette from the butt of the first, and then ground the old one out in one of my jade ashtrays. There was silence for a while, except for the rumble of the ship’s engines. I turned back to my game.
I was going for a back-rank checkmate with my queen’s rook, but I couldn’t get the proper file cleared of pawns. I leaned forward and tried to concentrate. Just as I found the move I wanted, she spoke. “I’ve never had an American lover,” she said.
I brought a knight to bishop five and looked over the board at her. “I’m not American anymore.”
“Nonsense. You’re the most American person I’ve ever seen. Like Abraham Lincoln.”
“That’s good company,” I said, “and I thank you for putting me in it. Lincoln was a genius and a man of heart.”
She looked at me as though appraising a minor artwork. “A big American man with a big sad soul.” She crossed her legs with the sound tight silk makes. “Just like you.”
“I feel more affinity with Billy the Kid,” I said, nervously. “But thanks anyway. If that actor hadn’t plugged Lincoln at the play it would be a different world. What if Chairman Mao had been gunned down in the fifties?”
“Chairman Mao made many errors.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But Mao was what China needed. You were lucky to have him all those years.”
“If one didn’t spend one’s time being rehabilitated.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Where is this ship going to dock?”
“At the Port of Celestial Winds, District Four.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Newly built by the People.” She looked me over silently again. I turned back to Myra’s board and tried to concentrate. Abruptly she said, “I’d like sex.”
“Jane, honey,” I looked up again, “I’ve got other things to think about. My heart wouldn’t be in it.”
She ignored that and stood up languidly. Then she arched her arms behind her back and unfastened the neck of her dress. I have a great weakness for the upper arms of beautiful women and I could hardly not see how fine hers were. Firm and perfectly white. While I watched in reluctant fascination, she let the dress drop to her ankles and stepped out of it. She kicked off her sandals. She was wearing scarlet panties and a thin gold necklace. Her body was as white as snow and without a flaw. Tiny white breasts and tiny white feet. I was getting hard. “Come on, Jane,” I said. “I’m not in the mood for this kind of thing. I’m fifty-three years old and well past my prime and I’m in love with a Scottish actress.”
She walked over to the sofa and sat beside me. “Take off your pants.”
“Come on, Jane,” I said, panicking. The tops of her shoulders were the best I’d ever seen. I blinked with unease.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said. And then, “Is your pubic hair blond too?”
“It’s got a lot of gray,” I said.
“You can lie back on the couch and I’ll undress you.”
“I tell you, Jane, you’re a splendid-looking woman. Enough to drive a man right out of his skull. But I wasn’t cut out for this… this gigolo thing. I have to pick my own times.”
She laughed at the word “gigolo.” “There’s nothing wrong with your servicing me. Chinese men enjoy the opportunity. Many of them are trained for it, in schools.”
At the word “servicing” I stiffened. I could run out onto the deck, or lock myself in the bathroom. Except that my perverse member was now so rigid there was no way I could stand up in those tight prison jeans.
“Mr. Kwoo,” Jane said, coolly, “you’ll need a good report from me when we arrive in China. If I say your thinking is confused it could cause you hardship.”
Jesus Christ! I thought. Am I going to have to do this like a whore? Can a man really do that and satisfy the lady in a state of panic? My member was answering this silent inquiry in the affirmative; it was undaunted. The eager son of a bitch. I felt betrayed by the same partner who had betrayed me the other way with Isabel.
I looked her over. She sure had a fine body, even though it looked as cold as ice. And I loved the red panties. What the hell, I thought. I used to sleep with a horse. “Okay, Jane,” I said. “But let’s go into the bedroom and do it right.”
“Here is adequate,” she said. She began to unzip my pants.
“Look,” I said, pushing her hands away, “I’ll do this myself.” I unzipped with care and freed myself. I slipped the pants off, and then my shorts. I was already barefoot. I started to get up.
She had already stood. Now she pushed on my chest, with alarming strength from a smallish person, and I sat back. “Just lie back, Mr. Kwoo,” she said. “I think your pubic hair is charming, with all those curls.”
“Jesus Christ, Jane, I’m no courtesan. I can’t just…”
“Yes you can. Clearly. Just lie back and relax.”
I think I was blushing. She was aroused to where she looked dangerous. Her nipples stood out like little Marines. “Okay,” I said, defeated. “Okay.” I lay back awkwardly, bending my knees to fit my frame to the couch.
She had peeled off her panties by the time I got there, and then she mounted me in a gung-ho way, as though she were a sailor and I a B-girl. I didn’t like it at all, but my sexuality was in another world, doing its business in the dark like an Old Testament fanatic. I wriggled despite myself and ground up into her with a twist. “That’s it!” she whispered and began pumping in earnest. I pumped back. She began kissing me open-mouthed, smelling of booze. Her nipples pushed into my chest. I began to feel smothered. She pulled back just in time and I could see her face twisted in some kind of unearthly concentration, her eyes upward and sweat on her porcelain forehead, with the bangs now sticking to it. I froze at the sight.
“Don’t stop now,” she said.
I started pumping again. From the waist down I was a satyr. But my better part was watching in alarmed detachment.
“Yes!” Jane hissed—not to me but to the ceiling. She grabbed my shoulders and I winced when her nails dug in. Then she went slack and fell across my chest.
I don’t know why that orgasm of hers didn’t provoke one on my part, but it didn’t. Suddenly I felt a physical need that was as potent as the need for air when you find it cut off. I started pumping against her limp body.
Abruptly she grew rigid, and then pushed off of me. “What the hell…?” I said, throbbing.
“I’m finished,” she said.
“Well, I’m not,” I said and reached out to grab her. She stepped back nimbly. I sat up, furious. My groin was beginning to ache. “I can rape you,” I said.
“I’d kick you first. You’d never forget it.”
She stood there sweating like an Olympic gymnast and I believed her. I leaned back on the sofa. I’d had a lot of practice at sexual frustration—at Isabel’s and at the Pierre afterward—and for a moment I gave up. “Suit yourself, White Heron,” I said.
“I have suited myself,” she said. She bent elegantly to the table by the pouf and took a cigarette. Her back was to me.
I was off the couch and had her around the waist before she could straighten up. I was careful not to hurt her or break a bone; but I had her on the floor in ten seconds. I looked down at her face. It was flushed but composed.
“If you rape me,” she said, “I’ll put you in prison.”
“Mourning Dove Soong likes me,” I said, breathing hard. “If you try that, she’ll have you in front of the Central Committee.” That was mostly bluffing, but it seemed to work. Her face for the first time lost some of its composure. “Then enjoy yourself, Mr. Kwoo.”
“I’m Ben Belson,” I said, “and I’m not going to rape you.” And I wasn’t. My member had finally bowed out of the fray.
***
Jane stayed out of my cabin f
or the rest of the trip. I didn’t see her again until a cold morning when I passed her on deck after coffee and then looked through mists over the port bow to see the coast of China. Right over there. Despite apprehensions and uncertainties, the thrill was exquisite; to sail the Pacific and then see China distant in the mist is an experience that goes right to the marrow of your bones and tingles the back of your skull like a morphine rush. I stared for a moment and then started doing side-straddle hops by the gunwale, wearing my red spaceman’s pantaloons, barefoot on the slippery metal deck. Jumping jacks, some people call them. I slapped my hands together over my head and hopped my legs out and in, saying hello to China. The ship’s whistle blew. I stopped and held my breath. We were turning starboard and I felt a heartrending throb as the screws adjusted to a new course. We steamed straight toward the China Coast.
The Keir Hardie docked at a long gray pier late that afternoon. The rain had changed to sleet and it was freezing cold. I had no coat. The dock city looked like Cleveland in the nineteenth century—dark satanic mills and grit in the air. Coolie longshoremen lounged on barrels at dockside, in Ghengis Khan hats and overcoats, smoking what might have been opium. The ship was docked by computer, and when it was done a huge red display suddenly lit up on the side of a plastic warehouse, spelling out in neon-like letters: WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA. My teeth chattered. I had thrown a blanket over my shoulders and was wearing my electronic running shoes, but I had no socks, having lost them sometime before in the Reagan Stir, and my toes were freezing.
One of the female crew members found me like this, swigging from my decanter. She approached me warily, as one might examine a sick grizzly.
“If you don’t watch out,” she said, pronouncing the word “oot,” “you’ll have pneumonia in the lungs.”
“Honey,” I said, “I have no coat or socks. This is it.”
“I’ll bring you something against it,” she said. “Hold on now.”
She jogged back to a stairway and down. A minute later she came back with a jacket, two pairs of socks, a pair of mittens and a tam. “The mate had these put by,” she said, handing them to me. The coat looked pretty small, but I thanked her from the bottom of my heart, went into my cabin again, and managed to get it all on—although my wrists stuck out of the sleeves of the mackinaw and it wouldn’t button over my chest. But the mittens were stretchy enough and the tam fit. It had a damn-fool red pom-pom on the top, which I managed to bite off and stuff in my pocket. I looked at myself in a closet mirror before going back out again. It was terrible, with the red silk pants and the rest of it. But what the hell; I stepped back out on deck, head high.
Jane was waiting for me, wearing an army uniform this time with the long gray overcoat and epaulets. A major’s insignia and a gray garrison cap. She looked like the Empress of Austria, or a Chinese Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.
“Well,” I said, holding my composure pretty well, considering my outfit and hers. “So you’re a soldier. I had no idea.”
“You look a fool,” she said, not without some pleasure.
“White Heron,” I said, “use your sadism on the troops. I’m not afraid of you.”
She lit a cigarette and said nothing. A moment later the gangway went down and the First Officer left the ship. There were four male noncoms with rifles standing at dockside. They must have marched up while I was changing clothes. One signed a paper the officer handed them, returned it, shouted something to the others and then led them up the gangway to where we stood. The leader saluted Jane, who returned it casually, her cigarette between the fingers of the saluting hand.
We marched down the gangway and onto the ancient soil of China. I didn’t exactly march, but stumped along because of the two pairs of wool socks stuffed into my running shoes. I was arriving in China even more clownishly than I’d arrived at Aynsley Field by spaceship. Well. Dignity was never my object in life.
They had a staff limousine—an actual nineteen-nineties black Cadillac with power windows and a glass partition; as far as I knew, the only one like it in America was under glass at the Smithsonian. Two flags of the People’s Army flew from fenders. A sergeant opened the door and I got in. It was a billionaire’s car if there ever was one; I felt immediately at home.
Two soldiers got in back with Jane and me, and sat on the jump seats. We drove in silence away from dockside. The coolie loafers puffed their long pipes and stared at us through the sleet. I relaxed against glove-leather upholstery and lit a cigar. Willynilly, I had my dignity back.
We drove about five miles past industrial buildings before hitting open country. The sleet had lessened; it was getting late in the day. There were houses surrounded by perfectly groomed fields. Pink tile roofs glistened wetly. I saw children playing in front of a barn; they stopped to wave as we drove by. I waved back. Old men drove gray steam tractors or red nuclear jeeps; there were vehicles everywhere. We passed a house with a table in its front yard where four old women sat at tea, their heads together in gossip. Pigs rooted at the edge of the house. An old man sat on the porch in an overcoat, reading a newspaper. Everybody was Chinese. A whole country full of Chinese!
A few miles later we drove by a four-story factory building painted bright blue. The sun was setting behind it. There were hundreds of electric cars in a lot near the gate, a sight America hadn’t seen for sixty years.
“What do they make there?” I asked Jane.
“Toy airplanes,” she said. “For export.” My God, I thought, Myra has one of those. I bought it at F.A.O. Schwartz.
***
Our destination turned out to be another airport. In a grim, institutional waiting room I changed into a fresh stratosphere suit—yellow this time—and was taken without ceremony to a Confucius 433 jet. Jane was my fellow passenger again. She stubbed out her cigarette while the pilot zipped down the runway; she covered her bangs with her helmet as we shot up for altitude like an arrow of Apollo, leaving behind us a plain that stretched twenty miles from the sea and ended in a vast range of blue mountains, now glowing in the setting sun.
“Where to?” I said into the intercom.
“Peking,” Jane said. “The Imperial City.”
***
We landed in darkness a few hours later. I was drowsy now and in need of food and rest. My seat on the plane was designed for a smaller race of person than I, and my ass was sore from it. I hadn’t had anything to eat since that breakfast coffee. When we started coming down I asked Jane if I could get a sandwich at the airport.
“No time for that, Mr. Kwoo,” she said as we banked into a landing curve.
***
Two girl soldiers marched us from the plane to a black electric Mercedes. My stomach growled. I lit a cigar. We drove down a dimly lit airport road and then through suburbs of row houses with an occasional corner grocery lighted brightly, where old people shopped. Where were the young? We crossed Chang An Avenue and came into a downtown district with a few bright lights but not many people. It was only nine-thirty, and this appeared to be Peace Blooms Square right in the heart of downtown. A few blocks from Tien An Men. Everybody must be at home watching television. I was gratified to see what appeared to be a drunk, asleep on a bench near a closed bookstore. An American tourist? We drove on. A few blocks from the square we stopped in front of what appeared to be a hotel.
“Where are we? “I said.
Jane answered in Chinese. “You will be a guest in the House of Comradely Love.”
I was marched past a grim lobby with four male clerks at a desk. We went into a gritty freight elevator and stared straight ahead as we went up eighteen floors and creaked to a stop. The door opened. The hallway had a gray linoleum floor, with cigarette butts. A dead geranium sat in a cracked pot near a barred window to my right; we turned left, past metal doorways to the end of the hall. There were four locks on the door. The girl who had brought us here produced four electronic keys and unlocked them one by one without getting any of the locks wrong. She stepped aside.
Jane pushed open the door into a single room. A bare twenty-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the ugliest hotel room I had ever seen. A cockroach scurried along a broken baseboard; the air smelled of cabbage.
“What the hell are you trying to do to me, White Heron?” I said.
She looked at me a moment and then spoke in English. “You should have been more cooperative. Aboard the ship.”
“Wait till Mourning Dove hears about this.”
“Mourning Dove Soong,” White Heron said, “is enjoying a long vacation in Tibet, at a monastery without viddiphone. She will be there meditating, indefinitely. I have been given charge of your case.”
I stared at her.
“Welcome to China,” Jane said, and clanged the door behind me. I stood transfixed in that cold, cabbagey room. In dim light I saw an oak dresser, a straight-backed chair and a sagging bed. A toilet without a seat was in one corner, and a dirty washstand with one tap at the other. There was no telephone, no TV, no bathtub or shower. There was no food. The one window had bars an inch thick.
***
I managed to sleep anyway, with my clothes on. There was a cake of rough yellow soap and I got fairly clean with it in the morning and then used the wet towel to wash some of the grit off the window. I looked down between bars eighteen stories to a park. It looked like Gramercy Park, in fact. I was stiff as a board and frightened. My joints ached and I was trembling with cold. I did situps and knee bends for ten minutes, trying not to think about breakfast. Trying not to think at all. They would hardly bring me to China just to starve me.
When I’d finished and was wiping off the sweat with my one other towel the door started unlocking. This time two men were waiting for me, in noncom uniforms. They escorted me silently to the elevator and punched the up button. We arrived at a kind of penthouse on the twenty-sixth floor, which turned out to be the cafeteria. A few old people were sitting at tables, drinking tea.