Dream of the Blue Room (8 page)

Then, a month later, there I was in New York City, stepping off the plane into the chaos of LaGuardia Airport, and no one looked at me. No one bothered me. New York City welcomed me in a way my hometown never would; they didn’t care who I’d loved or what I’d been accused of. For all they knew, I was just another New Yorker.

“I’ve only been home a few times since then, but rarely a day goes by that Amanda Ruth doesn’t cross my mind. Is that strange?”

I think of Amanda Ruth, her desperate desire to see China, the picture books she kept hidden beneath her bed with artists’ renderings of the Forbidden City, the mountains of Guilin along the Li River, the bright lights of Shanghai. Taped to the wall inside her closet, behind her summer dresses, she had a black-and-white photograph of the Three Gorges. In the photo, walls of stone reached toward a strip of sky, which seemed small compared to the cliffs themselves, and between these cliffs lay a narrow reach of river, flat and shadowed. In the foreground was a small dark blemish that we discovered only after the photograph had been hanging in Amanda Ruth’s closet for months. We took a magnifying glass to the blemish and realized that it was a sampan. Beneath its U-shaped cover, through which a bit of evening light shone, we made out a miniature figure—a man, standing upright, steering with a long slender pole. Amanda Ruth and I looked at each other in startled silence. The sheer size of the Gorges, and of the river itself, was something we could not begin to comprehend. After a minute she put the magnifying glass back in the top drawer of her dresser and said, “Well, it’s obvious now. I have to go there.”

I was amazed by her self-assurance. Going to China seemed as unlikely to me then as winning the lottery or becoming president of the United States. “How will you ever get there?”

She laughed. “I’ll fly, doofus.”

The mist has thickened. As Graham and I head back to the bus, we lose our way. We take a path that looks identical to the original one, but instead of ending at the parking lot, it leads directly into the mouth of a cave. Only later does it occur to me that the rational action at this moment would have been to turn around, retrace our steps, and try to find the bus, which was scheduled to depart in half an hour. But I am attracted by instinct to the cave at the end of the path, as if we have arrived here by fate. The opening is just high enough for me to walk through without difficulty. Graham follows, bending deeply to enter. Inside, the ceiling is high. The cave is damp and cool, the dirt floor packed hard and smooth. The entryway allows a soft infusion of light, by which I can make out an old coal stove in the corner. A small bucket gathers dust by the stove. Graham moves into the light, plunging the cave into darkness. I can hear him breathing. He steps close to me. His mouth on my neck, his hand in the hollow of my back. And then he is kneeling before me, his hands trembling as he lifts the hem of my summer skirt. I feel the fabric brushing against the tiny hairs on my thighs, his hands touching mine, bidding me to hold the skirt around my waist, leaving me exposed in the cool darkness of the cave. He slides my underwear down my thighs, my knees, lifts one foot to release me, presses my inner thigh with his hand. My legs go weak. I clutch his shoulders, try to pull away so that I can lie down, desperate to have something solid inside me, to feel the weight of him pressing down, but he holds my hips firmly, refusing to let go. My cries echo in the closeness of the cave, and I am certain that, all down the mountain, people hear me.

I crouch and lean against the wall, all my energy gone.

He stands over me, only the outline of him visible in the strange light. I reach out, wanting to do something for him, but he catches my hands, holds them firmly. His strength surprises me. He leans down, pinning my arms against my sides, and kisses me, his lips still warm.

“The bus is waiting,” he says.

“Stay here.” I imagine a night alone with him, his long body laid out on the dirt floor, a coal fire glowing dimly in the corner of our cave. I feel primitive, undone, incapable of emerging into the light of day and reuniting with the other passengers, especially Dave, who will surely know just by looking at me exactly what has happened.

He pulls me up and for a moment we stand, his body pressed hard against me. Rather than experiencing the excitement of something new, a romance in the making, I feel as though the scene is dredged up from memory—not this particular cave at the end of this particular path—but a familiarity in our stance, something known in the smell of his skin, the heat of his hands, my own desperation. I try to trace the source of the memory, but it is lost, like a flicker of light at the far end of a darkened hall that disappears as you draw near.

At the bus, Elvis Paris throws his hands in the air and says, “We almost leave you!” but another couple has yet to return, and it is some time before we depart. Dave and Stacy are already on the bus, talking and laughing, sitting close together. Dave seems not to notice that I’ve been gone. I look at the back of his head, the little hairs growing at the base of his neck, and think,
I cheated on you
. It’s the first time in our entire marriage that I have done this. It strikes me as both monumental and predestined. How easily I crossed the line, from what I was to what I am—faithful wife to adulterer. I feel wracked by guilt and stunned by pleasure, simultaneously. I want to laugh and cry. I’m certain I must look different, sound different. As Dave and Stacy chatter in front of us, talking with the ease of old friends or lovers, Graham slips his hand under my thigh. If Dave were to turn around, surely he would see the guilt on my face as clearly as he can see the needle marks on Stacy’s arm. Would he be angry, sad, relieved?

Finally, the engine turns, the bus belches exhaust into the air, and we’re speeding down the mountain. Dark smoke rises from shacks along the winding road, black dust mingling with the rain. Everything is gray. Graham takes off his cardigan and wraps it around my shoulders. He reaches up to move a strand of hair from my face.

ELEVEN

In the winter when it rained, Amanda Ruth would sweep out the small iron stove in the boathouse, and I would take a box of matches from the old tin by the window. Amanda Ruth was deft at making fires. It was as if her touch contained enough heat to set the dampest mix of wood and paper burning.

I remember her fingers crinkling up the old newspaper, her hand disappearing into the darkness of the stove. The way she set the kindling in, piece by piece, crisscrossed one over the other—“four splinters of pine,” she said, “any less and it won’t light, any more and you’d be wasting.” And how she stacked the wood, those pale triangles with their earthen smell, first picking off any insects that had been hiding in the wood pile, because she didn’t want to burn them. She took a match from the box that lay open in my palm, struck it against the side of the tin—one hard, clean stroke—and the tip burst into flame. Then she held the match just under the edge of the paper. The edges of the kindling would glow bright orange, the heat slowly moving to the center of the stove, and then the wood itself would begin to smolder. “Done,” she’d say, closing the door and sliding the vent open all the way. I always marveled at the way she trusted her own instincts, closing the door before we could see the fire come fully to life. But moments later it always did—I’d hear the great
whoof
of air as the world within the stove combusted, and through the small vent the logs glowed red. We’d sit underneath a blanket on the creaking wooden floor while slowly the room began to heat.

Sometimes we would take stones from the river and arrange them on top of the stove. After a while, we wrapped the hot stones in dish towels, placed them beneath the blanket at the bottom of the mattress. The heat began at our feet and moved up our calves, our thighs, our bellies. Sometimes she held a wrapped stone in her palms, then placed her hands on my naked body, and I could feel her handprint like a tongue of fire, my skin beneath her touch ignited. I remember so vividly her warm hands, my fear, the smell of creosote, the rain beating on the tin roof, the dark river outside the boathouse, the dampness of the air, the sweat that formed in the dip of her collarbone as I began to shudder.

Later, when the room was warm and the fire had died out, we’d pierce jumbo marshmallows with unfurled metal coat-hangers. She taught me how to turn the marshmallow slowly, several inches from the glowing coals. The marshmallows burned our fingers. They were crunchy and sweet, the melted middle coating our burnt tongues white. I still see the outline of her face lit by the open stove, her small straight nose, the wild mess of her hair in the firelight. Her father was always trying to get her to comb it, but I could imagine nothing lovelier than Amanda Ruth’s hair, the softness of it in my fingers, the scent of it newly washed, still damp, strands of it clinging to her face.

It wasn’t just the fire. There were so many things she could do that I could not. She would take any odd mix of vegetables from the garden, a small basketful that seemed insufficient to feed us, and turn it into a feast, the deep fragrance of which filled the house for hours. From a few pods of okra, some lettuce leaves, an ear of corn, and a carrot she created dishes alive with color.

She could turn any old rag into a costume. A fifty-cent skirt from the D.A.R. thrift store, a pair of cloth sandals from K-Mart, a swath of red velvet from Hancock Fabrics: in her hands these disparate and discarded things became an elaborate outfit—too original for our town, where the girls all wore khaki skirts and Izod belts, polo shirts and Topsiders. “Nice outfit,” they’d say, tittering, but she didn’t care. Riding the bus to school over the two-lane road that wound through endless Mobile subdivisions, she imagined herself a daughter of China, held high in a golden chair on the shoulders of slick strong men up a misty mountain road. While the rest of us tried to fit in, to disappear into the unruly crowd and survive as one of its members, she learned to take pride in the difference that had been pointed out to her from earliest childhood—by her mother’s family, who called Amanda Ruth “mixed,” by the well-meaning but misguided teachers who sometimes identified her as “Oriental,” by the redneck boys who wouldn’t think of dating “that Chinese girl.”

I wonder sometimes if she can hear me. In Sunday school they used to tell us that the dead would always be with us, that if we loved them well enough in life their spirits would remain close by. But it is not a presence that I feel these fourteen years since her death—just a long and silent absence. Day after day, when I am alone, I find myself talking to her, not just in my mind but aloud, the way lunatics do on the streets of New York City, as if, in the barren air beside them, they can see the face of someone they once knew. They pause and laugh and nod their heads, as if they fancy themselves one half of a lively conversation. I envy them this illusion, the sound of other voices filling up the awful silence. I talk and talk, often embarrassed by the sound of my own voice in an empty room, or on the deck of this ridiculous ship, but she does not respond. Not once has she responded. Only in my dreams does she speak to me, and in that blurry space between consciousness and sleep, I try hard to stay inside the dream, just to keep her with me. But then I wake, and I know that I have conjured her, that any words she spoke were merely words of my own invention. Again and again I wake in the cool, sweet dark to find her, once again, gone.

TWELVE

In the dusky light the hills are a deep, luxurious green. The river itself is amber, thick with muck. Garbage rushes past: plastic shoes, paper cups and tin cans, beer bottles, a wicker basket, a pair of pants. Another body bobs down the river—the fourth I’ve seen—this one newly dead, the pretty face of a young girl emerging from a tangle of dark hair, a silver necklace glinting on her pale neck. A lone figure walks a riverside path, balancing a long pole on his shoulder. Both ends of the pole are heavy with baskets. Factory furnaces glow on distant hillsides. A pagoda shimmers in the rain, several of its tiles missing. Everywhere, these pagodas—remnants of China’s deeply aesthetic past, before industry was king.

“Famous Wind Moving Pagoda of Anqing,” The Voice says. “It is king of all pagodas.” I feel sometimes as though The Voice is wired to my brain, as if she knows what I’m thinking.

I turn to Graham. “Why is this one king?”

“Legend has it that the autumn moon festival brings pagodas here from all over the world to pay homage. It’s called Wind Moving Pagoda because it sometimes sways with the breeze.”

At the moment, the air is calm and the pagoda is perfectly still.

The door from the lounge opens and slams shut. Loud footsteps approach. A big man in a wide white hat and cowboy boots appears at the rail several yards away. Arms crossed over his chest, he surveys the riverbank. His wife sidles up to him. She wears a pink nylon jogging suit with gold trim, lots of gold bracelets and necklaces, big turquoise rings, shockingly white leather Nikes, tennis socks with little pink pompoms dangling from her ankles. The couple doesn’t seem to notice us.

“What a shame,” the man booms. His accent is unmistakable, the long deep drawl of Texas. “Just look at those hills over there. They could be gorgeous, no kidding, this place could be top-notch. If I could have a whack at it, do you know what I’d do? I’d tear down all those factories and shacks and ragtag apartment buildings. And then I’d put up a brand spanking new resort—the works—palatial rooms, marble floors, claw-foot tubs, a state-of-the art gymnasium. Hell, I might even level a mountain and add a golf course.”

“Sounds like paradise,” his wife says.

“And I’d hire these pretty little Chinese girls, and I’d make them wear those long silk dresses with the slits up to here, and they’d wait on you hand and foot. They’d fetch your slippers, do your laundry, give you a massage. They’d wear red lipstick, and fingernails out to here painted with white dragons. I’d charge an arm and a leg, and people would be lining up to pay for it. I’d put together a package deal—airfare to China, a cruise up the Yangtze, one week in the Oriental Palace.”

His wife corrects him gently. “You can’t say ‘Oriental’ anymore, hon. Let’s call it the Yangtze Jewel.”

“Yeah, the Yangtze Jewel. And it’d be like you’re in China, only better—because you’ve got all the comforts of home. We’d serve steak and potatoes, hamburgers and hash browns. It’d mean jobs for all these poor folks you see washing laundry in the river and selling wrinkled little vegetables and driving rickshaws. What a mess they’ve made of this place.”

“Indeed,” his wife says. She turns to me and Graham with a slightly surprised look, as if she’s just realized she and her husband aren’t alone on deck. “I tell you, the air’s so filthy I can’t even breathe. It ought to be illegal, what they’re doing to this river.”

Graham frowns in their direction.

The man hitches his pants over his enormous belly and says, “Well,” as if it’s the last word, the end of the matter. Then, as quickly as they came, they are gone. They retreat back into the glass walls of the lounge, a too-flowery perfume and the stench of cigarette smoke trailing after.

Our ship trundles along, its big engine humming, churning up silt and debris. Sampans and junks unlucky enough to be caught in our wake bob up and down like corks on the choppy waves. I think of Demopolis River and how it used to flow through Greenbrook and out into the Gulf, rich with fish and growing things. A couple of years ago, when I went home to Mobile to see my family, I took a drive out to Greenbrook. An entire section of the town along the river had been demolished. Where Amanda Ruth’s house used to stand, there was a huge shopping complex: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Pottery Barn, Chili’s, PetSmart, Payless Shoes. The river itself had been diverted. I had a lunch of green beans, macaroni and cheese, and banana pudding at a diner Amanda Ruth and I used to frequent, a diner fortunate enough not to lie in the path of destruction.

“What happened?” I asked Miss Betsy, the woman who’d run the place as long as I could remember. She had dyed black hair, enormous breasts, and crow’s feet made deeper by layers of dark foundation. There was a rumor that she’d once had an affair with Lyndon B. Johnson. She was one of those women who could have been forty or sixty-five; it was impossible to tell.

“Nobody here wanted the project,” she said, refilling my coffee. “Most of the property along the river belonged to a man named Grady Watson, and everybody leased from him. He lived on the river his whole life, and loved it just as much as he loved his wife and kids. But when Grady died, another developer came calling, and Grady’s kids saw dollar signs.”

Two miles of Demopolis River now run through a man-made concrete canal that forms the back border of the shopping mall and an adjacent golf course. The developer put in a few benches and a stand of azalea bushes, so the shoppers who purchase hamburgers and frozen yogurt cones and stuffed potatoes from the food court can watch the river rippling past. The complex is called River Eden Shopping Center, and, perhaps in the spirit of this misnomer, the developer allowed three giant old oaks that stood in the way of the parking lot to remain. Now the oaks are stapled with banners and flyers, and when something happens to inflame the public spirit—a missing girl or a national disaster—the oaks are adorned with big yellow ribbons. In the last ten years, Greenbrook has gone from a quaint town of 4,000 to a poorly planned suburban mess of 35,000. Big green swaths of land that used to hold a single home or cabin are now dotted with dozens of identical houses, placed primly on clear-cut cul-de-sacs with names like Oak Branch Court and Dogwood Grove.

At night, when the River Eden Shopping Center is closed, kids go down to the edge of the canal to smoke pot and drink beer and listen to music and have sex. Their used condoms mingle with beer cans and Cracker Jack boxes. The adults in town complain that kids have no respect for Greenbrook, but it is no wonder. Living in Greenbrook once meant living on the river. To be from Greenbrook was to know a certain smell of moss-hung trees after the rain, the specific sound of frogs on summer nights, the particular feel of the mud at the bottom of
your
river, Demopolis River, which was different from the algae-slicked bottom of Dog River or the crab-scuttled silt around Petit Bois Island or the silky white sand of Gulf Shores. To be from Greenbrook, in those days, was to be from a particular place.