Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven: A Memoir by Susan Jane Gilman

Author:Susan Jane Gilman [Gilman, Susan Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780446544689
Google: QVCjrlNYnP0C
Amazon: B001UL3ACI
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

———

Back at the hotel, Claire was gone. All our belongings were gone. Our room had been vacated, the beds stripped, though the door remained ajar and the lightbulbs still burned, casting ghoulish reflections over the wallpaper. “Claire?” I shouted.

Stupidly I checked inside the closets and the bathtub, as if she might be hiding in them. Just as I began to panic, she appeared behind me in the doorway.

“Oh, there you are,” she said dully. Her newly washed hair was tucked up in her towel, and she was dressed in her pin-striped pajamas, which had started to pill and turn gray. Her eyes were puffy and pink-rimmed. “I got us moved to a better room.” She turned on her heels and headed down the hallway, her flip-flops slapping against the linoleum.

Our new room was a mirror image of the first, except that the wallpaper was an angry red and the bathroom fixtures were mustard colored. “No bugs,” she said, blowing her nose. “I made sure.”

She’d taken the liberty, I saw, of unpacking our things and arranging our toiletries neatly on one of the shelves. Plopping down on the bed she’d claimed for herself, she picked up Lonely Planet and resumed reading, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I stood there, not knowing quite how to respond. I was beginning to feel like I needed a TV Guide just to keep track of her moods.

Slowly I removed my day pack and unpeeled the Velcro straps of my Reeboks. Inexplicably I felt compelled to do all of this as quietly as possible.

“Oh,” she said finally, looking up, “I forgot to ask. How was the wall? You didn’t sleep out?”

I shook my head and sat down on the mattress beside her. “Oh, Claire. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Please. I want to go back there with you. I want to spend my birthday on the Great Wall of China. Not like Trevor. No wild party. Just you and me. You really have to see it.”

I expected her to fight. But she just shrugged limply. “Sure. Okay. If that’s what you want.”

Then her voice broke. She started to weep.

“Claire?”

Her cry gave way to a wail. She covered her face with her hands.

I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Claire, what is it?”

For a moment she heaved with emotion.

“Oh, God,” she said at last, blowing her nose, “the day went so well at first. I rented a bicycle and went to the Grand Hotel Beijing and had tea, okay? Proper tea, like they might serve at the Plaza. They serve it with cream and gingerbread, and you sit in Western armchairs and listen to classical music, and it’s clean and warm and quiet, and it feels so civilized. Civilized and elegant—nobody’s spitting. Nobody’s frying vegetables in the gutter. And the waiters speak English. And then? Then I biked over to the Main Post Office, by Tiananmen, and put in a collect call home. It took an hour and forty-five minutes for

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