Dream of the Blue Room (7 page)

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says, lying down. Moments later he is asleep. In the low light I look at him, the clean lines of his face, the gentle way his hair falls over his forehead. The boat rocks softly. It’s Red Bingo night, and I can hear the faint hum of the party upstairs. I imagine Graham in his cabin, which is probably identical to ours, save for a slight difference in color scheme. I picture him in bed, turned on his side, his arm hugging a pillow. I wonder if he wears socks to bed. I wonder if he showers before turning in. Does he sleep in his underwear? Does he talk in his sleep? Then I remember him saying that he suffers from insomnia, and I rearrange the picture: he stares out the porthole at the pale orange glow of the moon.

Dave is snoring softly. The ship sways gently, a giant cradle rocking through the night.

EIGHT

In the night the river turns silver, the mountains shine down upon it, the air goes cool and wet. This is the China Amanda Ruth wanted, her moonlit landscape, her Land of the Dragon. The villages we pass become magical in darkness, carnival-like and throbbing, though in the day they seem filthy, overcrowded, rubbed raw by industry. Rows of shabby apartment buildings crouch along the riverfront, and in the air there is a stench of coal. The mist mingles with black ash and factory smoke. It takes all of my energy just to breathe.

The daytime is for Dave. With Elvis Paris as our guide, we tramp through ancient villages, allow ourselves to be dragged from one bizarre tourist trap to another. We could be any married couple, viewing bright Buddhas and crumbling temples, parks gone stiff with cement. Stacy is always at our side. One afternoon, passing through what was once a famous opium den, she tells us that she’s had her own addictions, drugs and alcohol. “Sober six months,” she says. “That’s the real reason I’m here. My parents wanted to get me away from everyone I knew.”

Dave livens up when she says this, looks her over the way he might scan an emergency case, and I know he’s sizing her up for track marks, bloodshot eyes, visible signs of decline. After that, he pays her even closer attention, keeping her always in his sight, as if at any moment he might be called to pull her back from the abyss.

Every now and then Dave shares with me a private joke or remembers some moment from our past, calling up our common history. In these moments, as we walk through the crowded streets, keeping the green flag in our sight so as not to become lost from the group, I almost forget how things have become between us: that we do not make love, that we choose words with edges. For a moment I allow myself to believe that Dave might be coming around. But back in our cabin, when I try to kiss him, he allows the kiss for only a couple of seconds before closing his mouth and backing away. It is the fifth night of the cruise. Time is running out.

“So what’s the schedule like tomorrow?” he says, turning his back on me to undress.

I thumb through the tour pamphlet. “Temples. World famous hanging coffins. A traditional Chinese opera.”

He places his shoes side by side at the foot of the bed, folds his used socks before dropping them in the laundry bag. “I wish I were in New York.” Then, seeing my disappointment, he says, “Sorry. I’m having fun. Really. It’s just—you know, travel. Hard on the system.”

I unbutton my blouse to reveal a new black bra, trimmed with red ribbon, which I optimistically bought for this trip. Dave glances at the bra, then looks away as if he hadn’t seen it. “I guess we’re up early again tomorrow.” He starts laying out his clothes for morning. Suddenly ashamed of my body in front of this man who has no use for it, I go into the bathroom to change.

“What did you think of the dinner?” he says through the door. “Those dumplings weren’t half-bad.”

I want to scream at him, “This is the end of our marriage, and you want to talk about dumplings?” By the time I finish getting ready for bed, Dave is already beneath the covers, eyes closed, his breath gone slow and even.

I sit on the edge of the bed, nudge his shoulder. “Dave?”

“Hmmm.” He opens his eyes briefly, closes them, rolls over so that he is facing the opposite wall.

“Can we talk?”

“It’s late,” he moans. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow you’ll be with Stacy.”

He opens his eyes just long enough to say, “I’m beat.” Within moments he is asleep again.

Watching him, I feel myself sliding into some other skin. I feel older, wiser, my mind is sharp and clear. I remove my nightgown in the dark, pull a loose dress over my shoulders and strap my sandals in the dark, feeling every place my fingers touch. Even my feet tingle at the brush of my hands against them. I fasten the tiny buttons down the front of my dress. All my thoughts have turned to sex.

On the deck I find Graham. He stands against the rail, waiting for me.

“You came,” he says.

“I did.”

“I’m surprised you showed up.”

“Why?”

“I keep thinking you’ll come to your senses.”

He has not so much as kissed me. But there is something so intimate in the way he stands beside me, our elbows touching lightly on the rail, or sometimes, when we are sitting, our upper arms pressed together, it is as if we have made love hundreds of times. I make unnecessary adjustments just to bring us close, brushing hair out of my face so that when I lower my arm, my hand falls a half inch nearer to his.

“Your friend,” he says. “Amanda Ruth. How did she die?”

“She was strangled.”

“Who did it?”

His words recall the headlines from the local paper fourteen years ago. “College Girl Slain: Who Did It?” splashed across the front page in large type the day Amanda Ruth was found. The next day, they ran the same headline, only this time it was larger and a subhead had been added: “Police Question Chinese Father.” On the third day, the same words again, larger still—as if the mystery itself made the news grow more interesting. And this time a new subhead appeared, even more sinister than the last: “Lesbian Love Triangle Suspected.” Sitting in my old bedroom, staring at the paper, I immediately thought of Allison, Amanda Ruth’s girlfriend from Montevallo whom we’d had dinner with the day before Amanda Ruth was killed. Then it occurred to me:
triangle. A third person. Are they talking about me?

What I don’t tell Graham is that the most logical suspect was the one I wouldn’t allow myself to ponder—because I could not stand to think that the killer could be someone whom Amanda Ruth trusted so completely. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“I’m sorry.” He places his hands on my shoulders, rests his chin on the top of my head. He takes a deep breath, and I feel myself coming undone. Minutes pass.

“Why didn’t I meet you ten years ago?” he says finally.

“It wouldn’t have worked.”

“How do you know?”

“Ten years ago I was twenty-two. You were forty-three. That’s cradle robbery.”

“You’re right. Five years ago then.”

“Twenty-seven and forty-eight. That’s still a tough number. I would have been your midlife crisis. Those things never work out.”

“We could have been the exception.”

A small boat passes, crammed with young people. The boys are wearing shiny, colorful shirts, the girls dark lipstick and very short dresses. Chinese pop music blares from the speakers. A young man raises a beer in our direction. “Gambe!” he shouts.

“Gambe!” Graham shouts back.

The boat disappears into the darkness, music and laughter trailing after. Graham is standing so close to me that I can feel his chest moving in and out as he breathes. His hands slip slowly off my shoulders, down my bare arms, until they enclose my fingers. He moves even closer, so that my body is pressed against the rail. My knees go soft. A wrecked mattress drifts by.

“I’ve never cheated on my husband.”

Graham presses into me. He moves his hands over my hips, my stomach. The moon is deep red, the river is black, his fingers are hot on my skin. He presses his mouth against my ear. “I’m fifty-three,” he says. “Why is it that I can’t think of a better line than the one I’m about to use?”

“And what line is that?”

“I want to make love to you. Right here. Standing up.”

He puts his hand on my waist and begins counting buttons downward. It seems like forever before he reaches number four, slips the button through the eye, and slides his hand inside my dress. It takes all of my energy and will to say, “Really, I’m still married.”

He refastens the buttons. “Then why are you here?”

“I’m sorry.”

He kisses my head. “Go to bed. I’m going to see you tomorrow. You’re going to change your mind.”

Even as I’m walking away from him, not looking back, I know that he is right.

NINE

Do you remember, Amanda Ruth, how I would pull you down? The river made you love me, the skin of your eyelids quivered beneath my lips. It was the heat that brought us together, shucking clothes to get to the skin, lying naked on the wooden planks that buckled from the damp. My fingers trailed the shadows newly formed beneath your breasts. The first time I tasted that electricity in you, I brought my mouth to yours and made you taste as well.

“This is you,” I whispered, and you wouldn’t let me go, you made me kiss you hard until we heard your parents’ voices on the porch. There was something clean and warm in me that left the moment I found out that you had died. It comes back to me, that warmth, here on this river with Graham.

TEN

The
Red Victoria
sidles against the pontoon that will take us to shore, a scraping of metal on metal. Minutes later, sitting in pairs face to face, we form a deceptive foursome. From our arrangement—Stacy and Dave on one side, Graham and me on the other—anyone might guess that we are two happily married couples.

We board a bus near the docks for a ride up to Mount Lushan. Our first stop is Dongling Temple. The street outside the temple is packed with buses and Chinese tourists. Street vendors are doing a busy trade in film and postcards. The air is sweet with incense. There’s a stall where you can buy small black plastic boxes manufactured by monks. If you put your ear to the box and listen, you can hear, beneath the static, the faint sounds of monks chanting.

“This temple is birthplace of the Pure Earth sect of Buddhism,” Elvis Paris proclaims through a megaphone. We make our way toward the entrance. “Is almost two thousand years old.” He points to big glass jars set up on either side of the temple doors. “Feel free to make offerings to the gods.”

After several people, including Dave, have dutifully dropped coins into the jars, Elvis Paris laughs. “Today most Chinese people do not believe these superstitions, but maybe is good luck! Bring you very rich! Please, no photos inside the temple.”

One can imagine how the shapely, brightly painted temple, in quieter times, may have been beautiful, may have inspired a sense of inner peace. Today, however, the crowds and the general atmosphere are reminiscent of Disney World. A couple of monks in bright robes hang out in doorways, looking bored and slightly annoyed, staring at the tourists. At the entrance to the temple, Graham purchases a pack of incense sticks from an old woman in rags. Inside, he lights the sticks one by one, kneels, places them on an altar at the foot of a towering golden Buddha. He stumbles as he tries to stand. I take his elbow and help him up. “You okay?”

“I trip sometimes. It’s nothing.”

I nod toward the incense smoldering on the stone altar. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a religious man.”

“Never have been. But it can’t hurt.” I look up to see Dave watching us from a distance.

Within twenty minutes Elvis Paris is herding us back to the bus. Stacy and Dave end up sitting together, and Graham and I take the seat behind them. Stacy has purchased one of the black boxes. “Listen!” she says, holding the box to Dave’s ear. “Close your eyes and shut everything out.” Dave presses his ear to the box.

“Hear it?”

“I heard something.”

Stacy slips the box into her daypack. “I think I’ll become a monk. Live in the mountains and eat roots and berries.” This is the first time I’ve seen her in a short-sleeved shirt. Her arms bear an intricate patchwork of scars. “Did you ever want to just drop everything and go? Just become someone new?”

“Many times,” Dave says. He’s looking out the window, and I’m wondering who he is: this man I married. Could he really give up everything, start a new life in some foreign place? I’ve always thought of him as the stable one, secure, but now I imagine him, alone with a new haircut, a single suitcase, and his camera, checking into a dark motel in some city I’ve never been to—Detroit or Philadelphia or Montreal. The night he told me he was leaving, I found myself staring at him when he wasn’t looking, wondering if I’d ever known him. I noticed things that I wasn’t certain I’d seen before: the scar across his nose had a tiny blue mole at its tip, the second toe on his right foot was slightly longer than the first. That night while he was sleeping, covers kicked to the foot of the bed, I took the camcorder from its case. I sat in the big leather chair by the window, pressed record, and made a movie of him sleeping. I wanted to capture every detail—the placement of his legs, the graceful arc of his hand draped over the edge of the mattress, the pattern of his breathing.

The bus makes its way in stops and starts through the jumble of street life, and then we are on the outskirts of Jiujiang. Thatched huts and low cement barracks line the road. A woman in a coat, long pants, and heels—strange in this dismal heat—leans out the door shouting our destination at the city-dwellers who stand on the roadside. If a would-be passenger hears his destination called, he simply runs alongside the bus, and the woman shouts to the driver, who slows long enough for the passenger to scramble up the steps, clinging to whatever he can find.

Gradually the barracks and thatch huts begin to thin, giving way to limestone bungalows scattered high on the hills, remnants of the British heyday in China. Passengers leap fearlessly off the moving vehicle and disappear into the foliage. The air grows chilly as we ascend into mist. Banana palms march up the hillside. Released from the traffic of Jiujiang, the driver pushes the rusty bus to its limit. The road becomes a series of hairpin curves, and we swing so rapidly around them that I’m sure we’re going to careen over the cliff. I am reminded of family trips to the Blue Ridge Parkway when I was a little girl—my mother begging my father to put both hands on the wheel as he sped over narrow mountain roads, gazing out at the bluish clouds far below, steering with a single finger. Twice Amanda Ruth came with us on those mountain vacations, and we’d sing church songs and play car bingo in the backseat while my mother clutched the door handle in terror and my father hummed the melodies of Kenny Rogers.

The higher we climb, the more lush the vegetation becomes. There are azaleas and peach blossoms, sycamore trees and weeping willows. If the China we have seen until now has been a hodgepodge of cement and mortar, factory furnaces and coal dust, Mount Lushan is the inspirational stuff of Chinese poetry and painting. I wish Amanda Ruth could see this. The tops of pavilions peek above thick stands of trees, and the landscape is littered with temples and pagodas that, Elvis Paris tells us, date from the Tang dynasty. The whole mountain is in bloom. Waterfalls glitter. The air smells faintly of tea.

Cameras click and camcorders hum as Elvis Paris draws our attention to various landmarks. He points to a series of peaks rising above the trees and says, “Wave to the Five Old Men,” then to a hazy darkness in the distance, saying, “Who dares to enter the Cave of the Immortals?” I imagine Elvis Paris dressed in khaki shorts and army-green shirt, standing at the bow of one of those Jungle Cruise boats in Disney World, steering tourists toward Monkey Island.

Finally the bus pulls into a circular parking lot and screeches to a halt. We stumble out on shaky legs. Stacy unfolds a map and points to a spot she’s marked with a red X. “The old tea grove,” she says to Dave. “Want to go see it?”

“Sure.” As an afterthought, he turns to me. “Do you mind?”

As soon as they’re out of sight, Graham takes my hand. “Just you and me, then.”

“Looks that way.”

“There’s a great old pavilion just beyond that cluster of banana palms,” he says.

We pass a waterfall that splashes clear water onto the cobblestone path. I take off my shoes and feel the wet stones against my feet. “How are you feeling?”

“Tops.”

“Isn’t that a good sign? Maybe you’re getting better.”

“Don’t think I haven’t had those fantasies myself. On the days when I’m feeling healthy, I go into denial, make up all sorts of scenarios in which the ALS goes into remission, or the doctors discover I’ve been misdiagnosed. But there’s always the next day.” He cups his hands to catch the water, then drinks from his palms. “Try it.”

I hold my hands beneath the falls; the water chills my fingers. It tastes sweet and slightly green. “We could stay here,” I say. “Just start over, like Stacy said. Live off the land. Build a tree house, like the Swiss Family Robinson.”

We reach the pavilion, where the whole world seems to span out beneath us. Graham stretches out his arm, points, and names each landmark for me. To the east is Poyang Lake, glowing a milky green. To the west is a vast plain crisscrossed with fields of corn. To the north, the Yangtze, a massive brown ribbon spooling out endlessly.

“You know, the term
Yangtze
is a foreign invention,” Graham says.

“What do the Chinese call it?”

“Chang Jiang.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Long River. Or simply Jiang.
The
River.”

From here it looks more like an ocean than a river. In comparison, any other river seems a mere nicety, a stream. I think of Demopolis River, so beloved to me in my childhood. How insignificant that meager body of water would seem to the millions of people who live on the banks of the Yangtze.

Graham moves behind me and puts his arms around my waist. I allow myself to engage briefly in the fantasy that Graham and I made this trip together, that we are going home together, that we have stood this way many times before.

“There’s a legend about Lushan tea,” he says. “Only virgin girls were allowed to pick it. It was the most delicate tea you can imagine. These days Lushan produces hardly any tea. They export rice instead.”

We stand for a few minutes in silence. Every place my eye rests, I find a new wonder—waterfalls, caves, groves of flowering trees in full bloom—all of it appearing and disappearing seductively as the mist moves over the mountain. “It feels like we’ve stepped into a painting.”

“Or a dream.”

“How old were you the first time you came?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Weren’t you married then?”

“Yes. My wife was from Beijing. I met her at the university in Sydney, first love and all that. China was very different then. There was less traffic on the river. You couldn’t take these big cruise ships. We had to do a lot of wheeling and dealing to be allowed on one of the Chinese steamboats.”

I’ve seen hundreds of these boats as we’ve made our way upriver. They cower in size to the
Red Victoria
, and are far more crowded. Often, the water is dangerously high on the sides of the boat, so it looks as though one unexpected wave would sink it. Laundry forms a high canopy around the deck. While the passengers on our ship retreat to the air-conditioned interior, where they can nurse cool cocktails and watch through large picture windows this unfamiliar world passing by, the Chinese passengers crowd the deck, practicing tai chi, eating, smoking, singing, pressing against the rails, shouting greetings to other ships. The Chinese travelers seem almost to live on their ships, to have settled in, whereas on the
Red Victoria
, you get the feeling that many passengers already have one foot mentally on the plane back home.

“What was it that originally drew you here?” I ask.

“In a roundabout way, I suppose it was my mother. She always wanted to be back in her bed at night, so she never ventured beyond a one-hundred-mile radius around our house in Perth. As a child, I wanted desperately to go to Sydney and Melbourne, to New Zealand and London, but when we got in the car for a road trip, I knew it would never last more than three or four hours, and the longer it took to get to a place, the less time we would stay. It was as if my mother had a mental odometer. When it clicked over to a certain number, an alarm went off in her head, and, no matter if we were a mere ten miles from the eighth wonder of the modern world, she’d say, ‘Better stop now.’ I could always tell, though, that it was a struggle for her. I think she wanted to be adventurous. She read travel books voraciously, and could tell you bizarre details about the people of the Aleutian Islands or the history of Iceland.”

Graham nuzzles his face into my hair. I feel my back sinking into his chest, amazed at how comfortable I am with him. Some instinct tells me to pull away—there are only eight days left on this cruise, eight days before I return to New York and he to Australia. I wonder if we will ever see each other again once this trip is over. I imagine the letters I will write to him, quietly erotic, their honesty fueled by distance. I imagine his letters slowing down, and then the weeks and months when none come, when I have to assume that he has died. I still have the letters Amanda Ruth wrote to me when she went away to Montevallo. In them, she declared her love without reserve, as I did in mine, although Amanda Ruth’s letters became fewer and farther between as the semester wore on. In November she sent a picture postcard of the Little Pigeon River; on the back she had scribbled a note about a trip she’d taken to Tennessee with a girl named Allison. After that, her letters stopped altogether.

“Have you done much traveling?” Graham asks.

“I’ve been to most of the States. And I once backpacked through Europe with Dave.”

“What do you think of China?”

“To be honest, if it weren’t for Amanda Ruth, I never would have come. Now that I’m here, my curiosity is piqued, but I think I took the wrong approach, with the westernized food and the organized tours. It seems like the real China is out of reach.” I twist around in his arms. “What about you? Why China? Why not Alaska or Paraguay or India?”

“Most places are too accessible these days. China’s still a challenge. It’s still foreign. It will always have secrets I’m not privy to. The best travel is the type that requires a car, a bus, a plane, a train, a boat. I want to go far enough away that there’s no possibility of getting home in a day or two.”

“I’m just the opposite. I like the idea of my bed, my clothes, my pots and pans. There’s something peaceful to me about New York City.”

“New York seems like a strange place for a girl from Alabama.”

“After Amanda Ruth died, Alabama never felt quite right. I saw a side of human nature I never want to see again.”

“The murder, you mean.”

“No. The stuff that followed. The locals were like sharks circling in for the kill. They wanted blood, humiliation. I was afraid to leave my house because everywhere I went, people stared and pointed.”

I don’t tell him just how bad it got—that pastors preached sermons in which Amanda Ruth, Allison, and I were perverts and villains. One of the papers even ran an editorial with the headline “Protecting Our Kids from Lesbians and Gays,” as if gays were hanging out on street corners, lying in wait to convert innocent children. It bordered on mass hysteria; I felt as if I’d been caught up in some strange Kafkaesque plot.