Woo carried both the suitcases upstairs to their room. Camille followed him like a sleepwalker. He fumbled with the key in the dark (surely Motel 6 would have lights burning near the doors at night), checked once more to see that it was room 8, and then opened the door. The sight of the double bed filled his startled, exhausted body with a jolt of electricity.
“Woo Tai Tai,” he said brightly, trying to maintain his composure. “Welcome to your bridal room.”
“Woo Xiansheng,” she said, climbing into the bed. “Your wife is very happy.”
Woo turned the bedside lamp on and switched off the overhead light. Perhaps she would fall asleep immediately and he would not be faced with the frightening prospect of seducing her. Which was stronger? His desire to touch her or his desire to avoid touching her? He didn’t know. She seemed to have fallen deeply, prophetically asleep.
He leaned his face close to hers the way he had seen her do with the names of the smallest towns on the maps. Her orange-blond hair smelled of green apples and of the German wood of his father’s rolltop desk. He had thought it would smell of persimmons. This is not to say he was disappointed, no, not even mildly. He was fond of the unexpected fragrance, but it was yet another indicator of his lack of ability to calculate and predict in matters of Camille and/or in matters of the body. He continued to look at her face without touching it. He tried to understand its many parts, which moved, even in sleep. The happy slits of her eyes quivered as she slept and he could see the strange marbles of her eyeballs beneath the lids, crossing back and forth as if reading a hidden book.
There was a light dusting of freckles on either side of her elfin nose, so few in each sprinkle that the marks seemed like a mistake or an afterthought on the part of her maker. Between her nose and her lips was a slight valley dotted with fine downy hair, so pale in color that they were visible to him now for the first time. Her lower lip was larger than the upper; it looked almost swollen and he wondered if she was feverish. But her face was not flushed and he could feel without touching it that its temperature was cooler than that of his own. Her ears, which also surprised him by not detecting his approach, had lobes that were attached to the side of her face, so that the outline of the ear was one long continuous curve, unlike his own whose curves were interrupted by the separation of the lobe from the rest of the ear. He thought hers a less formed and simplified version of his own. His discovery of this recessive trait pleased him in some way and emboldened him to touch her.
Of all her many girlish and alien traits, he found her eyebrows to be the most exquisite. Made of the same persimmon color as her hair, the brows were orderly, as if their maker had measured and cut and counted each feathery piece by hand, assembled the arcs and then trimmed and combed them with a mechanical device. Woo touched each brow once with the tip of his middle finger as if painting them on. Ruan de, he thought. How soft. Softer than he could have predicted. Their softness made him all the more curious about the down valley above her lips. The fine pale hairs must be softer there in that ethereal slope, that tiny shadow. He thought to drag his tongue across the delicious ditch, but then Camille sighed heavily as if to warn him away. Better to let her sleep.
He took off his shoes and began to pad around the carpeted room in his socks. Through the picture window, he could see the dark shine of Lake Michigan. There were several boats in the dock and each one had a small light at its helm. The sight of the boats waiting to sail, the black water, filled him with sad thoughts and so he walked away from the window and set to unpacking their things.
He would leave the curtains open so that his wife might see the water when she woke up. All through dinner she had looked at it and pleaded with him to take her to the beach the next day. She wanted to see everything in daylight. She wanted to lie on the sand. Was it like the ocean? She’d wanted to know. Though he’d planned to take her to a penny arcade, he deferred to please her and to defray costs.
He opened her suitcase without thinking for a moment that she might see it as an invasion of privacy. He had nothing to hide. Why should she? He hung up her dresses and brought her yellow-and-white toiletry bag to the bathroom. He unzipped the bag and began rooting through its contents for her toothbrush, which he thought ought to be allowed to air-dry, to protect it and the bag from mildew. Camille had the good habit of brushing her teeth after meals, but he suspected that she seldom remembered to shake the brush after rinsing, and when she did, it was not with much vigor. Of course he had never witnessed her in the act of brushing, but he had made subtle inquiries.
He found her white plastic brush and its wet bristles without difficulty, though not before leafing past several other items including a tube of lipstick, two paper packages each marked “slender regular tampon,” a pair of tweezers, a beige compact, and a box of prophylactics still wrapped in cellophane, all of which electrified him. Though it was the sinister cellophaned box that delivered the deepest bolt to his body’s core. This was very bold of her. She had been thinking something about him. The most maddening currents of fear and electricity crept through his fingers as he studied the box. It contained twelve prophylactics and among the many words printed on its modest back were “pleasure,” “contact,” and “sexual intercourse.” Woo threw the box back in the bag, zipped the bag and pulled his hands away in haste, as if the items might electrocute him.
He stepped back into the bedroom carefully, afraid, now more than ever, to wake her. He hung his own clothes up next to hers, pulled out a few more necessary items (a fresh bar of Dove soap, a washcloth, a jar of peanuts, an orange, a Chinese-English dictionary, the latest issue of Reader’s Digest, and a pair of gray pajamas), and then stowed the suitcases in the closet. Then, as quietly as he could, he arranged the peanuts, reading materials, and orange on his nightstand and sat on the side of the bed that was farthest from Camille. Perhaps he should double-check the lock on the door, he thought. This he did swiftly. And the window. Was there one in the bathroom? He couldn’t remember. He brought his personal belongings into the bathroom and closed the door. Locked it. Leaned into the shower to look for a window and found nothing but a minty expanse of tile.
Woo ran the faucet until the water was hot and then began turning the bar of soap over and over in his hands in order to produce a generous lather. He carried a bar of Dove with him wherever he went—to the University, to the library, to the movie house. Whenever he felt anxious, he excused himself from the anxious-making situation and went to the nearest restroom to wash his face. The strong smell of the soap calmed him and the emollients left his skin feeling clean and elastic. Now he massaged the bubbles into his cheeks, breathed deeply and waited for the familiar sensation to relieve him. What was wrong with him? The Dove trick had failed. He checked the bathroom lock and then changed into his gray pajamas. The light cotton trousers that were usually so comfortable made him feel exposed. The fabric was quite thin, almost sheer! Could she possibly see through it? No such a thing. Ridiculous. Time for bed. You’ll feel more relaxed tomorrow if you sleep.
Woo slipped into the bedroom. He turned off the lamp and climbed as stealthily as he could into the bed. He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his breathing. The sheets were cold and slick, though his bride’s body emanated warmth from its brief distance. When he opened his eyes the room was filled with light and he was overcome by dread, thinking that morning had come. But only two minutes had passed. A large boat that he could now see was docking, its lights flooding their room. He closed his eyes again and when it was dark again, he opened them.
Without moving his body, he turned his head to look at Camille. Her head was turned away from him, her hair a silky, messy flame on the white pillow. Slowly, slowly he lifted the covers up so that he might look at her. It was then that he was reminded she had climbed into bed fully clothed. This fact relaxed him somewhat, for now he was comfortably occupied with how wrinkled her clothes were becoming. Without a hint of irony, he said to himself that he should remove her clothing immediately and
hang it up at once. There was the removal of clothing for the purpose of hanging it up and there was the removal of clothing for other purposes. Each form of clothing removal was, in Woo’s mind, easily compartmentalized, neither threatening to undermine the other, until, however, he reached out to unbutton the top button of his wife’s blouse. He paused and boldly pulled the covers down to the foot of the bed so that he might see everything, only then beginning to understand his own truest motives.
To his utter fright and delight there were only four buttons on her blouse, so that once he had unbuttoned two, he was already halfway to ecstasy or dread, he didn’t know which. He unbuttoned the third and fourth quickly, afraid again of waking her, and then realized that the real terror would be in pulling the blouse open to expose her. This he did and almost choked on the air that was racing to reach his lungs. By a much-needed brand of newlywed’s luck, he transformed the beginning of the choke into a subtle, even elegant throat clearing. He was determined to not wake her—not for fear that she would unwrap her sinister cellophane box, for that was swiftly seeming less and less sinister, but for fear that he might not complete his heavenly task of saving her wardrobe from wrinkles.
The skirt went next, side zipper, hook, eye, and then her red leather sandals with their crossed straps each fastened by a single sharp tooth of steel, and a red tongue of leather, easy to release. As he arranged her sandals next to his own black shoes, his restless child bride pedaled her bare feet twice as if on a dream-manufactured bicycle, and made a gurgling little dove noise. Was she cold, he suddenly wondered? To him the room seemed warm, it was summer after all, but he could not presume to know how she felt then. Should he leave her underclothes intact and cover her? The wrinkles, unfortunately, were no longer an issue.He scanned the room for a thermostat and was overcome with gratitude to the motel staff, to even the blind reader downstairs, for furnishing such a luxury, when he spotted a compact silver box mounted next to the bathroom door. He raised the thermostat to eighty degrees and turned to his love.
She was in what is called by sleep experts the “runner’s position.” Though Woo was no Freudian and he interpreted this change simply as an opportunity to unlatch and remove the elastic contraption that persisted in keeping her upper half secret from him. Her arms were languid and soft as he pulled them this way and that through the straps. His poor girl was being so good. Whether it was his accurate assessment of the depth of her sleep or his raving desire’s rationale, Woo became convinced that Camille would never wake. He moved quickly to her lower half and unrolled her lemon-yellow underpants slowly out and down over her plump curve. He fumbled during the final moments of untangling the yellow bonds from her ankles and feet. When the bonds were free from her body and her body free from its bonds, he turned her from the runner’s position so that she was on her back.
He looked at her. He watched her grow cold and stiff and then warm and soft again. He watched her return to the runner’s position and pedal her feet and turn her head. He grew self-conscious and tried to read his magazine in the near dark. This cycle lasted throughout most of the night. He would watch her sleep and then grow self-conscious. He would read his magazine and then grow impatient with its drab articles and idiotic cartoons. He would curse the insufficient light and then as if to punish himself, he would read on until he thought he would hurl the magazine at the picture window and then he would set it quietly down on the nightstand and resume looking at his nubile wife.
During these intervals he was ravenous and ate both the entire jar of peanuts and the orange, along with a roll of different-colored hard candies that he had found in Camille’s toiletry bag. Any chance he may have had of falling asleep was quickly reversed by this massive intake of protein and sugar. The room was hot and smelled of peanuts. In Woo’s opinion, a pleasant smell, a comfy cocoon. His pajamas were damp with sweat but he did not dare remove them. Between his lovely bride and his tasty snacks, his jangled nerves and his exhaustion, the night provided him with a seemingly endless supply of tortured insomniacal bliss. It was not until the sun began to rise over the lake and Camille began to stir, that Woo’s eyes closed at last. As he fought and then failed to stay awake, he pored over the maps in his head, revised his budget, and thought of the strangeness of the words honey and moon, were they two words or one? He reviewed the many words he had recently learned—snow leopard, zebra, flamingo, raspberry, sherbet, Milky Way, prophylactic, Maidenform—and thought it unlikely that he could possibly remember them all.
HE WOKE AT 11:00 a.m. and his first thought was of Pang and the terrible morning he’d slept past 8:00 a.m., a story he’d never told Camille. And then, corroborating his fear that laziness leads to disaster, he heard the sound of his child bride vomiting in the bathroom. Eat too much, he thought. Maybe learn her lesson.
“Camille.” He knocked softly on the bathroom door. “You need some help? Can I get you anything?”
“No,” she said, whispering. “Please go away. I don’t want you to see me. I’m sick.”
“Silly girl talking nonsense. Daddy doesn’t mind. His poor girl is sick, maybe need something, eh?”
“No thanks, please go away!”
Woo dressed quickly and went out to buy her some ginger ale, which he found for sale by the can in a vending machine behind the building. He returned to find her in an orange sundress on the floor, tracing the strawberry-red line of the map with her finger. She looked as ripe and as healthy as she had the night before.
“I’m better now,” she said, springing up and kissing his cheek. “I just ate too much. I think that’s all it was.”
“Drink anyway.” He opened the can, wiped its aluminum lip, inserted a straw (one of ten he had taken from the restaurant), and handed her the ginger drink.
She sucked on the straw obediently, collapsing her cheeks and puckering her mouth until her sucking noise resonated as air and droplets in the empty can. She was cured.
They spent the day at the beach, on Milky Way Motel towels. Camille lay in her white two-piece bathing suit watching the water, while Woo, hatted and in slacks, sat reading the last of his Chinese newspapers. He refrained from looking at her sun-lotioned body and concentrated instead on conjuring images of her he had on file from the previous night.
The kiss on the cheek this morning had been a puzzle to him. They were not in the habit of touching each other. He thought with pleasure of the possibility that Camille had been awake for part of or even all of his late night roamings and that the kiss had been a clue to him, an affirmative peck. Now he longed for Iowa, if not for Candy the clerk, then for the day to end and the night to arrive so that he might have a second chance.
“Joseph.” Camille pulled her hair back with a silver barrette. “Thank you for hanging my clothes up last night. I was so tired.”
“Sure, sure. Sleep in your clothes no good. Not comfortable. Too many wrinkles.”
“I really like that you did that.”
“You did?” He was alarmed at the possible meanings she intended. “Were you able to sleep?”
“Mmm, like a baby.” She tilted her face up to the sky and closed her eyes. “I thought you might be upset with me,” she said with her eyes still closed.
“Why upset?”
“Well, you know, it being our honeymoon and all. I sort of slept through it.”
“Sleepy girls need their rest, no problem.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“You talk nonsense. Anytime ask questions.”
“Did I like it?” she asked, sounding intrigued.
“Shenme like it? What’s the meaning of this question?”
“Do I have to say it? I just mean, you know, did I like it?”
“Shenme it? What is it?”
“What you did to me while I was sleeping.”
“Oh my golly, you’re some kind of crazy girl! Number one, while you’re sleeping I’m reading magazine, have some snacks. No such a thing do to you anything. Number two, you like so
mething you tell me, I’m not telling you! Huh!” he grunted, mildly offended.
“You mean you really just hung my clothes up?” Camille started to laugh.
“What’s funny?” Woo demanded. “Of course I’m hanging your clothes up for you. What do you expect?” He sounded shocked, as if the reckless thought of making love to her while she slept had never crossed his ancient, puritanical mind.
THERE ARE WOMEN who can articulate their wants quite clearly so that for even the most inexperienced of husbands, supplying those wants becomes easier. And there are men who can, without their wives’ lucid articulations, intuit their wants and expertly supply them. Neither Camille nor Woo were quite so fortunate. If just one or the other had been one of these types, the matter of their love-making would have been greatly simplified. But as it was, Camille had never been counted on to articulate anything before, much less something as embarrassingly intimate as her own physical wants, and Woo, a bachelor in the truest, deepest sense of the word, had never before supplied anyone’s wants but his own.
This they quickly learned during the series of long nights that unfolded in variously sized Motel 6s across the country. Each was patient with the other afterward. Their nights were tender even as they failed to satisfy. But the continuous lack of known demands coupled with the continuous lack of successful supply led to a relational revolt that took a toll on their waking hours. Each injured party responded in a different way to the crisis.
Woo lost interest in their evening ritual entirely. That is, he began by feigning a loss of interest that then conveniently turned genuine. Certainly at first, the electrical sensation he’d been experiencing in Camille’s presence threatened to derail his celibate mission, but eventually he found that the longer he ignored his own electricity, the less frequently the voltage flared up. He’d never felt quite so manly and utterly in control before and was relieved to be rid of that dangerous tangle of wires—so many variable bolts and sparks and invisible force fields exploding and firing without his permission. Better to maintain control of the charge, to ignite it and snuff it out for his own benefit only.
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