Dream of the Blue Room (15 page)

“Ordinary sandals.”

“Yes, but they were leather. Haven’t you noticed that most of the shoes here are made of fabric or plastic? Second, her perfect pronunciation. The government probably sent her abroad to study, which is why her English is heads above that of anyone else you’ve spoken to here. The third clue, of course, was her luxurious apartment. I’m guessing the food she served was excellent.”

I think of the shark fin soup, a delicacy. “I feel pretty stupid.”

“Don’t. It’s happened to me several times. It’s unfortunate, too, because in general the Chinese are very hospitable.”

“The lunch was pretty good, though,” I laugh.

Graham has a hand in his pocket. At one point he takes it out, looks down at a small glass bottle filled with liquid.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The friend I just went to see is a pharmacist.”

“Is it for pain?”

“Sort of.”

It’s dark by the time we get back to the ship. Graham goes back to his cabin to rest. In the Yangtze Room, I listen to a lecture on Chinese cultural artifacts. The lecturer, a distinguished older Chinese woman who works at Beida University, shows us slide after slide of the Terra Cotta Warriors—life-size, cast in clay, thousands of them standing in formation in great rectangular hollows carved into the packed earth. Slides of other artifacts follow—vases and chairs, jade jewelry and elaborate altars.

The final slide is of White Crane Ridge, an eighty-yard-long strip of sandstone in the harbor of Fuling, engraved with pictures and Chinese characters. Dr. Tong points to a pair of stone carp engraved on the stone at the waterline. She explains that the fish were carved during the Tang dynasty, sometime before the year 763. The bellies of the fish represent the low-water mark at the time they were carved. By noting where the water rose on the fish, ancient river pilots could calculate the condition of the river ahead. The fish were only visible for about five months each year, in the heart of the dry season. The characters that cover White Crane Ridge were carved over many centuries by different dynasties, each entry noting the date the stone carp reappeared. “For more than a thousand years,” she continues, “the people of Fuling have looked to the carp as a sign of a good harvest to come.” She flips the light switch. In the brightness, White Crane Ridge is barely a shadow on the projection screen.

A voice in the back asks, “So what happens to them when the dam is built?”

“White Crane Ridge will be submerged by the reservoir, along with many temples and artifacts.”

She has barely gotten the words out of her mouth when Elvis Paris wrests the microphone from her hands. “China has many artifacts,” he says. “Much culture. These few things only a very small percent of China’s treasures. The people are China’s true treasure. The dam will bring electricity and progress to the people!”

Several hands go up, but Elvis Paris nudges Dr. Tong offstage and says, “Lecture is over now! Please go to Shining Pagoda Lounge to enjoy cocktails and traditional Chinese dancing!” The room begins to clear. As we exit, an unfamiliar man herds Dr. Tong into a corner, and the two begin to argue.

TWENTY

In all the years I knew Mr. Lee, only once did I hear him talk about China. Amanda Ruth and I were in our first year of high school. It was late at night in their big house in Mobile, and he and Mrs. Lee were talking softly in the den, which shared a thin wall with Amanda Ruth’s bedroom. That morning, Mr. Lee had received a phone call from his brother in Taiwan—a brother Amanda Ruth had never heard of—telling him that their father had died.

“All these years, I never knew your father was alive,” Mrs. Lee said. “I never knew you had a brother.” Amanda Ruth looked at me, realizing that her mother was as much in the dark about Mr. Lee’s life and family in China as she was. Amanda Ruth had read dozens of books of Chinese history, studying the pages, memorizing dates and place names, dynasties and warring factions, as if within those dense paragraphs she might find the key to her own soul. She knew about the horrors her grandparents must have seen—Japanese occupation, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. She had always believed that both of her father’s parents were dead.

Mrs. Lee, the daughter of Southern privilege who had defied her family and her town by marrying a man they referred to in whispered tones as “that Chinaman,” the woman who had never raised her voice to her husband, who had provided a safe haven for him in the small-minded world he had entered for
her
sake—was suddenly shouting. “How could you keep these things from me?”

Mr. Lee’s voice sounded tired. “You think I want to remember? Ever since I came to America, I’ve tried to have a life apart from all that sadness. I’ve tried to forget my family, especially my sister.”

“A sister,” Amanda Ruth whispered. She had never heard of a sister. On the other side of the wall, Mrs. Lee’s voice echoed Amanda Ruth’s amazement. “Where is she, this sister?”

“I never knew her,” Mr. Lee said. “She’s thirteen years my elder. By the time I was born she was already living in Shanghai.”

“Why did she leave home so young?”

Mr. Lee’s voice wavered as he told of the day in 1943 when men from the city came to his village. The men, who were well-dressed and polite, went to the school and chose about thirty girls, the youngest and prettiest. They told the parents they would take the girls to Shanghai and give them work in the silk factories. They promised good wages, a clean place to live, plenty of food.

“Chunxiao was eleven years old,” he said. “A baby. She didn’t want to go, but my parents insisted. It wasn’t until years later that we discovered that all of the girls had been sent to camps run by Japanese soldiers.”

“The comfort women!” Amanda Ruth whispered, horrified. I didn’t understand what she meant. On the other side of the wall, there was a long silence, then Mrs. Lee’s voice, incredulous. “My God. Your sister was in the rape camps.”

“She was younger than Amanda Ruth is now,” Mr. Lee said. A strange, guttural sound came through the wall. Mr. Lee was sobbing. Amanda Ruth and I sat on her bed, our ears pressed against the wall, shocked at this deluge of words and emotion coming from her father, the man who spoke so little. “They were treated like animals, worse than animals.”

We heard Mrs. Lee’s slippers moving over the floor. I imagined her standing beside Mr. Lee’s chair, hands on his shoulders. “It’s amazing that she survived,” Mrs. Lee said.

Mr. Lee went on to say that his sister’s camp had been liberated by the Allies fairly early. She was sent to a hospital in Shanghai to work. The family, however, thought she was dead. Years after the war, when Mr. Lee’s sister was in her thirties, she sent a letter to their parents. By then, their mother was already dead—drowned during one of the floods. Their father barely survived that letter. He contacted Mr. Lee’s brother in Taiwan, who went to Shanghai and found the sister cleaning toilets in a hospital. She looked like an old woman. He begged her to come back to Taiwan, promising her a good life, but she refused. She told him that he should forget her, that after what she had endured she couldn’t stand to be around other people. Over the years he wrote her dozens of letters from Taiwan, but she never responded.

“Last week, my brother received a letter saying she had finally returned to the village,” Mr. Lee said. The bamboo hut where the children grew up was gone. Wandering the streets she saw faces she knew, but no one recognized her. At the County Culture Office she pored through ledgers containing the names of the deceased. In one of them she found their father’s—it had been inscribed there only six months before.

That night, in the dark, ears pressed to the wall, we heard the story of Mr. Lee’s life—the life before Amanda Ruth’s mother, before San Francisco. When he was six, Mr. Lee and his nine-year-old brother were smuggled to Taiwan. For their passage, the brothers paid an exorbitant sum, money that had been sent to them by their mother’s brother, a shop owner in Taipei. Once there, Mr. Lee and his brother wandered the streets of Taipei, which were teeming with orphaned children.

“What I remember most is the sound of shoes,” Mr. Lee said. “The Taiwanese wore Japanese-style wooden shoes that were always clacking on the streets.”

After two weeks of wandering they found a butcher who knew their uncle. The butcher pointed the way to their uncle’s house. They arrived barefoot in tattered clothes, unwashed, hungry. Their uncle took them in and fed them, arranged for schooling, but their aunt and cousins hated the boys. They slept outside, beside the latrine, and after school they worked the streets, selling anything they could pilfer from their uncle’s house: bits of string, a near-rotten egg, a pocketful of rice. Despite his long hours of work, Mr. Lee excelled in school. By the time he was sixteen, he and his brother had secretly saved enough money to buy passage for one in the steerage of a ship bound for America. His brother insisted that, with his natural intelligence, Mr. Lee would be the one most likely to make it in America. Mr. Lee promised to send for his brother as soon as he had enough money. Mr. Lee was sick for most of the voyage, vomiting up the tiny rations of rotten rice served in dirty water. When he arrived in San Francisco, he had lost thirty pounds.

“I was a skeleton,” he said. “But I was in America.”

In addition to working fourteen-hour days at a spool factory, he posted signs on the bulletin boards at the University of San Francisco and got jobs washing clothes for wealthy students. For three years he had two thoughts. One was to drag himself out of poverty and become a success. The other was to make good on his promise to his brother.

In San Francisco Mr. Lee slept little, ate even less, saved money, and, three years later, wrote to his brother to say it was time. He would send him the money for passage to America. It was six months before he heard from his brother. He made a pot of tea, sat down on a cot that served as a bed in the basement room he rented, and ripped the letter open, afraid to believe, after his brother’s long silence, that he was still alive, afraid that the letter itself was only a dream.

His brother had found a wife. He had a child, a son. He had opened a stall selling Ming vases and antique chairs, stuff smuggled out of China by relatives who had no use for antiquity. Taiwan had become popular with wealthy Brits and Americans. They came to his shop, ogled the goods, some of which were true antiques, and some of which were cheap knockoffs. They paid outrageous prices. His wife was beautiful, his son strong, his life very good. “Come back to Taiwan,” he wrote. “Work for me.”

“What had I been doing those past three years if not working for him?” Mr. Lee said. “All my sweat and sacrifice, the flesh peeling from my hands from the bleach I used to wash the college students’ clothes, the skin beneath my eyes turning puffy from lack of sleep. I had taken almost nothing for myself, only meager rations of food, a new pair of pants and shoes and two new shirts each winter, a thin jacket. Everything else I saved for my brother to come to America. And now he had the arrogance to ask me to give up all my dreams and work for
him
in Taiwan.

“That day,” Mr. Lee said, “I vowed never to return.”

Long past midnight, we finally heard Mr. Lee getting up from the rocking chair, two pairs of feet sliding down the hallway to their bedroom. We heard their bed knocking rhythmically against the wall, Mr. Lee’s sobs, Mrs. Lee’s soft reassurances. We lay in Amanda Ruth’s bed, holding on to each other. That night I dreamt of the aunt Amanda Ruth had never known, a girl of eleven lying naked on a bed, rows of Japanese soldiers entering and leaving, entering and leaving, her throat parched, her body raw, her small mouth bruised and bleeding. When I woke at dawn Amanda Ruth was already up, sitting at the white wicker dressing table in front of the big round mirror. She was looking into her own face so intently she did not even notice me get up.

“I love the color of his skin,” she said. “I love the shape of his eyes and nose. I’ve always known, though, that when he looks at me that’s exactly what he hates.”

TWENTY-ONE

The night before we are scheduled to enter the gorges, I take the silver key from the pocket of my purse, open the closet, insert the key in the lock of the miniature safe. The door creaks open. There, inside the safe—the red tin. I place it on the table beside the porthole, run my fingers over the collage of photos I know by heart—Amanda Ruth as a baby, wrapped in her proud father’s arms; Amanda Ruth in her majorette’s costume with gold piping at the shoulders; Amanda Ruth sitting on the narrow bed in her dorm room at Montevallo. I am as drawn to Amanda Ruth now as I was at seventeen. I cannot help but wonder what turns my life would have taken if she had not died. Would I have eventually relegated her memory to that small part of my heart and brain that everyone reserves for their first love, their childhood infatuation? Or would the image of her haunt me even then?

Dave is in the shower. I hear the water running, cutting off, then the hum of his electric razor, the rush of the comb through his thick hair.

I look out the window, but can see only my own reflection. I’m angry with that familiar face—the tired eyes, the dimples slowly sinking into a permanent fixture, the hair that I cut too short after my thirty-first birthday and which now curls just above my collar. I am angry with myself for not promising my fidelity to Amanda Ruth, even though I know it is a contract I could not have kept. Still, if I had promised, she would not have come home that Christmas with Allison. They wouldn’t have been caught together in Amanda Ruth’s bedroom.

I think of Mr. Lee stepping down the hallway of his big house in Mobile, hearing a strange silence in his daughter’s room, and shoving the door open. I imagine him walking into that room with its pale green walls, its hidden photos of China, his eyes fixed in horror on his daughter and Allison. What possessed Amanda Ruth to be so reckless? It is almost as if she was flaunting her sexuality in front of her father, wanting to say “This is who I am!”

Mr. Lee was not the kind of man to engage in conversations with his daughter. In all the years I knew Amanda Ruth, only rarely did I hear Mr. Lee ask her any question that did not involve her grades at school. Perhaps it was the impossibility of discussion that motivated Amanda Ruth to act so brashly in her own home, surely knowing how great were her chances of getting caught. If she could not tell him who she really was, then she would show him.

I’ve played that scene over in my mind hundreds of times, certain that I could have prevented it. If only I could have been what Amanda Ruth wanted—a girlfriend, a partner, something permanent—she would never have been in her room that day with Allison. If only I had been able to devote myself to her, she would not be dead.

The bathroom door opens. Steam from the shower fills the room. The smell of soap, the knowledge of Dave’s clean unclothed body in this tiny room, the light touch of his feet on the carpet.

“Hey,” he says. “Are you crying?”

And then, behind me, Dave’s familiar bulk, the strength of his hands on my shoulders, the warmth of his breath on my neck, his fingers slowly massaging my back, touching my collarbone. This moment feels so natural—the way his body fills the empty space behind me, the way he wraps his arms around me, and says, “Baby, are you okay?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. His fingers so deft on the zipper of my skirt, the hook of my bra, all that fabric, damp from the rain, sliding off me, his warm hands taking over. I turn and unknot the towel from his waist. For a long time we stand this way, kissing, our bodies tilting as the boat dips and sways. In the beginning, when we first began sleeping together, everything was fast. An accidental brush of his arm against mine, a kiss on the back of the neck, his hand come to rest suddenly on my inner thigh—any touch could set us in motion. We made love as if there was a stopwatch running that might cut us off at any second. But years of waking up together, reading the newspaper over coffee, riding side by side in the car, eating peanut butter sandwiches at the little table overlooking Columbus Avenue—the cumulative effect of the shared activity of everyday life has made us patient in lovemaking. It is some time before we end up on the bed, and then the slow familiar rhythms take over. Tonight there is an added patience; both of us know, without saying it, that this is the last time.

Sitting astride him, his hands on my breasts, my knees pressing against his rib cage, I realize how difficult it will be to reach this level of physical intimacy with someone else. For twelve years we have shared a bed, along with our most strange and lovely fantasies. We know one another’s preferences better than we know our own. There is no blushing, no denial, no moment when one of us fears that the other would find our request strange or selfish. One of the blessings of being married is the right to make love like married people. What I fear most about the end of our relationship is the necessity of starting over again, learning someone else’s tastes from scratch, teaching someone out there in the world how to make me feel the way Dave has always been able to make me feel. He moves his hands down to my hips, presses his fingers into my back. He is looking straight into me; we have always made love with our eyes open.

The ship rocks, the engine hums, rain slaps the small round window. Outside, a dreary darkness. Inside, the yellowish light of a solitary lamp. The whole world smells wet, used up, malcontent. Dave jerks, pulls me to him, presses his face into my hair. “Baby,” he says.

I think of the first time I saw him, standing at a pretzel vendor on the sidewalk in front of Hunter College. He was wearing a brown suede coat that was slightly too big for him, and a two-day beard. He looked sleepy, but alert, surveying the street around him, as if he was willing to spring into action at the first sign of anything gone awry. When our eyes met he blushed—he would tell me later that I was looking at him so intensely it caught him off guard—but he regained his composure, paid the vendor, and slathered the pretzel with mustard before walking over to me and introducing himself.

It feels like a betrayal to be on this river, Amanda Ruth’s river, with Dave, while somewhere aboard this ship is yet another man to whom I have given my affections. But no man will ever hear the voice inside my head that carries on that monologue, the voice that speaks so clearly to Amanda Ruth, asking her forgiveness.

Amanda Ruth, do you know what you have done? I cannot kiss a man without seeing the yellow scarf, its simple pattern of small white flowers. I cannot take a man to bed without imagining a scene that never happened: my own hands on your neck, pulling the scarf tighter, tighter, until you cannot breathe.