Dream of the Blue Room Read online

  “What are they doing?”

  “Shedding their demons,” Graham explains. “In the old days, the Chinese believed that demons attached themselves to boats with an invisible cord. By crossing the bow of our ship so closely, they severed the line. According to their superstition, the demons have now tied themselves to this ship.”

  “So right now we’re dragging scores of demons?”

  “Yep.”

  I feel no need to end the conversation, or to move it to the next level. Every once in a while Graham slaps at a mosquito, or I shift in my chair to get more comfortable. I doze periodically through the night, never falling into a complete slumber. Whenever I open my eyes, unsure of my surroundings, I hear Graham’s voice nudging gently at the edges of sleep, reporting the time. “Two-fifteen,” he says. “We should be about seventy kilometers from Yangzhou.” And then, in case I’ve forgotten, “It’s me, Graham. We’re on the Yangtze. Your husband is below deck sleeping. You have succumbed to the charms of a strange man.”

  At 3:30, I stir and realize that my head rests on his shoulder. He has pulled his chair so close to mine, the metal frames are touching. His arm is propped on the shared armrest, and his hand dangles about an inch from my leg. My sarong has slipped up over my knee, exposing a length of thigh; if I were to lift my leg by a fraction, our skin would touch.

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes.” He lets his hand drop, and for a second his fingers brush my thigh, sending goosebumps down my leg. It has been months since Dave has touched me in an even vaguely sexual way. I let my own fingers meet Graham’s, just briefly. I tell myself it means nothing, that the touch was accidental, but I can’t help but feel that I’ve crossed some invisible line.

  I think of Dave and the woman he rescued two years ago from a burning car on the Palisades. I think of their monthly meetings at a coffee shop in Chelsea, the way Dave always checks himself carefully in the mirror before going to see her. These meetings are no secret. Dave has always sworn there is nothing to them, that he just feels some duty to be there for a lonely and grateful woman. I imagine them together, their knees touching under a small round table. I think of her sipping a glass of iced lemonade, watching him from that burned face, scarred and shiny from the accident. Though he has never told me, I believe that she loves him desperately. I believe she looks at my husband and sees the man who saved her life, the man who saves her once more each month by taking the C train down to Chelsea to meet her. I know she was beautiful once, before the accident, because Dave showed me a picture she had given him. I can’t help but wonder how many times the woman’s hand has touched Dave’s thigh in the intimate way that Graham’s just touched my own, how many times Dave has imagined what it would be like to do something more with this woman, to kiss her, or even take her to bed. But for all he may have thought of it, envisioned it, desired it, I want to believe he has not done so.

  “It’s not postcards,” I say, feeling suddenly intimate, ready to confess.

  “Pardon?”

  “In the tin. Not postcards.”

  “I figured as much. You’ve been holding on to that thing like it’s filled with diamonds.”

  “Kind of a long story.”

  “We’ve got two weeks.”

  So I begin to tell him about Amanda Ruth. I tell him about the ashes, how her mother came to me with the tin a few days after the funeral and said, “Amanda Ruth always wanted to see China. You’re the only person I know who might actually go there.” Amanda Ruth never knew the name of the village where her father was born, only that it was somewhere along the Yangtze.

  “I plan to scatter her ashes at the Three Gorges,” I explain. “I think that’s where she’d want to be.”

  I wait for Graham’s face to betray some mild amusement, some hint of disdain at this sentimental plan, but he just nods and says, “Makes sense to me.” Encouraged, I tell him things I’ve told no one but Dave, things I haven’t spoken of in years. I tell him about those long days on Demopolis River in Alabama, the way Amanda Ruth would steam big pots of rice and we’d eat with chopsticks out of small porcelain bowls we found at the flea market. How we stashed five-pound bags of rice in the closet of Amanda Ruth’s bedroom, because Mr. Lee threw away any he found in the pantry. Peasant food, he called it.

  I tell him about the photograph in the newspaper fourteen years ago. Alone in my old bedroom, home for Christmas vacation from Hunter College, I studied the photo with a magnifying glass, searching for answers. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and her neck was wrapped in a long pale scarf. Were it not for the strange angle of her leg, the stiffness of her pose, and the impossible tangle of her hair across the asphalt, one might even have surmised that it was just a photograph of a sleeping girl. “College Girl Slain,” the headline read. The town’s first murder mystery.

  When I’m finished with my story, I feel emptied out, slightly cheapened. “I haven’t talked about her this much in years. I didn’t do her justice.”

  “Try,” Graham says. “What did she look like?”

  “Long dark hair. Slender, but curvy. I wonder what she’d look like now.” I try to picture her, aged by many years, with little lines starting to form around her eyes; but in my mind Amanda Ruth is always seventeen, diving into Demopolis River, her bathing suit startlingly blue against the earthy brown of the river. Or she is a newspaper photo in black and white, laid out like a sleeping mannequin behind the skating rink. In the close-ups the police showed me during the interrogation, Amanda Ruth’s lips were parted, as if she had something to say but never got around to it.

  Suddenly the moon disappears. For a moment there are no other boats in sight, and I feel as if we’re alone in the dark dead center of the universe. Moments later a barge comes into view, the Red Victoria bellows out a warning, and the moon reappears, a faint orange hole in the black sky.

  “Your turn,” I say. “Tell me something.”

  “How about a poem?”

  “By whom?”

  “The twentieth-century Chinese poet Ping Hsin:

  Bright moon—

  All grief, sorrow, loneliness completed—

  Fields of silver light—

  Who, on the other side of the brook

  Blows a surging flute?”

  “That’s nice.”

  We’re still sitting on deck at five in the morning when the sky begins to lighten. Low hills have given way to mountains whose jagged peaks zigzag across the sky. Graham is dozing finally, his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms dangling over the side of the chair. His shirt is askew, his face marked by sleep.

  I could so easily lean over and touch him, and yet I’m entirely unprepared for whatever might come next. I would like to bring him into the conscious world with a kiss, like the prince in the fairy tale about the girl who sleeps through wars and centuries and famines. Instead, I touch his hand; he doesn’t stir. I leave quietly. A small group of passengers is awkwardly practicing tai chi by the pool, led by the cruise director, a twentysomething Chinese university student named Elvis Paris.

  I walk through the well-lit hallways. There is the rush of water through pipes, the hum of showers. I think of childhood vacations with my family in Alabama, rising while it was still dark out, backing down the driveway with headlights off, engine dead. Escaping, my father called it: his idea of adventure. On those mornings before the neighbors rose, the air damp and cool, the shapes of jasmine and azaleas barely visible in the dark, our small town in Alabama seemed as exotic and lush as China could ever be, a country newly discovered.

  Sometimes we would drive to Amanda Ruth’s, and she would be waiting on the front porch with her mother, her small red suitcase propped on the bottom step. My father would get out of the car, load Amanda Ruth’s luggage into the trunk, and open the door for her like a chauffeur. We rode with our thighs touching, made a tent with picnic blankets suspended over our heads, and in our secret cave Amanda Ruth told me long, made-up stories about her ancestors i
n China.

  In the cabin, Dave is sprawled across the bed. I undress and lie down. The full-sized bed feels oddly intimate. At home in New York City we have a king-sized mattress that takes up the entire bedroom; our bodies don’t touch all night. Didn’t touch, I correct myself. After twelve years of marriage, it’s difficult to think in past tense. I keep imagining the separation is some joke that Dave will grow tired of, keep hoping that one morning I’ll wake in our apartment at Eighty-fifth and Columbus to find him sleeping heavily beside me, the way he is now. A few hairs around his ears have gone gray. I put my face to his neck and breathe in; his smell is sweet and clean. He doesn’t wear cologne and has always smelled better to me than any other man. I haven’t washed his pillowcase since he moved out. Each night I go to bed with his pillow positioned neatly on the left side of the bed, but in the morning I wake with my arms around it. Each morning, still, I smell him, though the scent grows fainter by the day.

  At 6:15, a female voice booms from the loudspeakers mounted at regular intervals along the hallways: “Please come to Yangtze Room for delicious Chinese breakfast. Today for your pleasure we have many exciting activity.” Dave rolls over and lays an arm across my stomach. His arm is heavy, warm against my skin. I stroke it, feeling the fine hairs beneath my fingers, watching his face, wanting to hold him but not daring to. He opens his eyes, looks confused for a moment. Then recognition crosses his face; he is orienting himself to this ship, this cabin, this bed. He is orienting himself to me.

  “China,” he says, smiling. He raises his arms toward the ceiling, palms up, fingers interlaced, stretching until his knuckles crack. Love kicks in my gut. I know these motions completely, have visualized them every morning during the two months of his absence. It’s like a fingerprint, this waking ritual; no two people wake up in exactly the same way. It is so familiar that I feel, for a moment, as if we have returned to our life, our marriage, as if everything is in its right and proper place, as if my night on deck with Graham was a small infidelity I must carefully hide from a husband who still loves me.

  “What time is it?”

  “Early.”

  “When did you come to bed?”

  Because he does not know the difference, because he sleeps with the conviction of a dead man, because I could disappear for weeks at a time without attracting his attention, I tell him I came to bed at midnight.

  “Long day ahead,” he says, yawning.

  THREE

  There was more for Amanda Ruth on our warm river in Alabama than there will ever be for her here. In Shanghai, I walked through the crowds of people in button-down shirts and plastic sandals, the women in tan mini-stockings that circled their slender ankles; I peered beneath their broad hats, searching for Amanda Ruth’s face. But there was no one like her. Her mother made sure of that, with her wavy hair and narrow nose, her rounded hips swinging side to side in the smooth, close skirts that Amanda Ruth’s father followed all the way to Alabama, before he knew what an unkind place that could be for a Chinese man who had charmed a Callahan.

  “One of our own,” they said, “with one of them.” They said it loudly. They wanted him to hear.

  Several times in that glittering city hunched up to the banks of the Yangtze, I saw men who reminded me of Mr. Lee, the man whose face went from confusion to fury the day he found us in the boathouse—Amanda Ruth’s back arched above the floor, her long hair trailing the wooden planks as I covered her stomach and legs with kisses. Mr. Lee shouted his daughter’s name once, then toppled the grill, covering us with ashes. The burnt smell lingered in our hair that afternoon as we sat stunned on the floor where he had left us, afraid to move, afraid not to move. There was no smile in his catalogue of smiles for that moment, no upturned mouth to hide the fury of finding a daughter gone to the devil, a devil his wife taught him to believe in.

  “How could he resist her?” Amanda Ruth said every time she told me the story of her parents’ courtship. “She must have been the most glamorous missionary ever shipped out to San Francisco to save the sinners.” The pastor never considered that she would return with her own sin, the man whom she always introduced as “John Lee, American citizen,” though they had other names for him: Chinaman, Yellow Boy, Chink. For his wife he had given up every bit of his honor; he had none left to give up for his daughter.

  What would Amanda Ruth have given up? Nothing, or anything, depending on the time of day. She was as flighty as any American girl in the eighties, with her Reagan-era ego, her promise of eternal riches. Pizza Hut, Esprit, Madonna—the language belonged as much to her as to me. She taught me how to say “thank you” and “hello,” the only Mandarin words she knew, though they came out of my mouth as well as hers sounding ragtag and borrowed. “Shay-shay,” we said every time the clerk gave us change at the K&B, where we bought little teacups painted with Chinese scenes, cheap earrings in bright cloisonné colors. When we met by her locker at school, locker eight (a number for good fortune, she said), we greeted one another with “Ni hao!” She said it loudly, mockingly, as if to atone for the slight and lovely difference in her eyes.

  I listen to the river churning beneath me, and I think of the pair we were before that awful moment of discovery. Before my Dave and all the boys who came before him. Before Amanda Ruth became our town’s first murder mystery, her face a smeared collage of ink dots that made the front page for weeks.

  How could I forget those mornings beneath the pier—her skin shimmering silver like the silken belly of a fish, her hair river-sweet and sticky, our toes sliding together in the slick warmth of river water, schools of fish passing like quick feathers between our calves? Before she tried to prove she was the daughter her parents wanted.

  Saturday afternoons, she’d rinse her pantyhose carefully in the bathroom sink, then fling them over the shower rod so they’d be fresh for Sunday. They swallowed her up, those Sundays, those deacons who said to love God’s children but couldn’t love her father, those Bible studies where Jesus was nowhere to be found because the Jesus her parents had told her about could never stand to listen to all that gossip, all those crazy questions. “Amanda Ruth, is it true your daddy’s Oriental? Do you eat monkeys? Do you pray to Buddha?”

  “Boo-duh,” she mimicked, whispering on the phone with me. I imagined Amanda Ruth locked in her bedroom, which I knew as well as my own, except for the changes Mr. Lee had made after the incident in the boathouse. “He replaced all my Madonna posters with Andy Gibb!” she whispered, and even I had to laugh at that, her father’s idea of a normal American adolescence. More than anything, he wanted her to be a typical American girl.

  FOUR

  It was winter in New York City, and Dave and I were heading north on the Palisades for our tenth anniversary. We had reservations at a bed and breakfast in the Poconos, a place that promised a heart-shaped bed and satin sheets. Our marriage was going to pieces.

  Dave was driving slowly because there was ice on the road. We had been behind the same red car for several miles. Terri Gross was interviewing a famous composer on the radio, and they were talking about the role of the symphony in the twenty-first century. Dave and I hadn’t spoken since the George Washington Bridge. I’d tried to think of conversations we might have, topics I might broach, something impersonal that posed no potential for disaster. These days, there was so little we could discuss that didn’t lead to discord. More and more, we avoided conversation altogether. As our four-wheel-drive skirted over the icy road, I tried to pinpoint in my mind the moment when our marriage went wrong. But there was no set point, no big issue, no great infidelity that led us to our current state of disharmony. Instead, it had been a gradual slipping. Whatever cord connected us slowly and imperceptibly weakened.

  Despite this, I had hope. I still loved my husband. In my suitcase, there was a stash of fine silk underwear. Our room at the bed and breakfast had a private hot tub. I’d already spoken with the proprietor, who recommended a quiet place for our anniversary dinner—candlelight, champagne, c
hocolate—all the accoutrements of rekindled passion. I refused to simply bow out of this marriage.

  Up ahead, something flashed, a spot of sunlight on metal. The car in front of us shimmied left, right, lost control. “Hang on,” Dave said. He swerved into the next lane to avoid the car, which spun twice before skidding over the embankment. In a second, maybe two, it was over. Dave eased into the right lane and pulled onto the narrow shoulder. “Could be bad,” he said, backing in the direction of the accident. Cars flew past us at seventy miles per hour. Dave stopped, got out, peered over the embankment, down the cliff, where the car rested on its side, smoking, the driver-side door facing the sky. The cliff was steep, the car positioned about fifty yards down. Inside, someone was moving. “Call 911,” he said to me, then shouted down to the driver, “Stay calm. I’m coming to get you.”

  He went around to the back of our Jeep, opened the hatch, retrieved a rope, carabineer, knife, and climbing belt. I watched as he pulled these things out as if from a magic hat. After four rings the operator answered. I reported the necessary details. “My husband’s an EMT,” I added. “He knows what he’s doing.”

  Dave put on his belt, attached it to the rope. We secured the other end to the Jeep’s tow bar. As he began backing down the cliff, the hood of the overturned car burst into flames. “Hold tight!” he yelled down to the driver, then, to me, “Find some water! Take out the first-aid kit!” My heart raced as he plunged toward the fire. I reached into the backseat and pulled out a six-pack of bottled water, grabbed the first-aid kit from under the seat. Another car had pulled over. Three guys of college age got out and stood on the shoulder beside me, looking down, clearly uncertain what they should do. One of the young men began to scrabble down the cliff, but it was steep and icy and he didn’t have a rope; his friend reached down and pulled him back up. Meanwhile, Dave was dangling a few inches above the flaming car, perched precariously on a rock. Seized with terror, I found myself praying out loud.