Dream of the Blue Room Page 8

  “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.

  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 re
dneck 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.