Dream of the Blue Room (5 page)

On our last night, we sat at the end of the pier with our legs hanging over, submerged to our calves. The river was cold from the rain, murky from mud and silt that had floated downstream. Although the rain had stopped the grayness had not lifted; it would hang on for a couple of days, that stultifying softness that seems appropriate only for sleeping. We’d done our share of that, and now my whole body felt heavy, my brain soggy, my senses blurred.

“I have a surprise for you,” Amanda Ruth said.

“What kind?”

“A trip.”

“Where to?”

“The University of Montevallo has an exchange program with China, a sister city called Yibin on the upper reaches of the Yangtze. I’m going next summer. I want you to come with me.”

“That would cost a fortune.”

“I’ve done the calculations. If we both work parttime and take out student loans, we can do it.”

“It’s the other side of the world. We don’t speak Chinese.”

She laughed. “You can get a language partner at Hunter, and I’ll get one at Montevallo. Just watch. By May I’m going to win you over.” I didn’t tell her that going to China sounded about as plausible as going to the moon.

Amanda Ruth became serious. “What about us?” she asked. “Are we going to see other people?”

The question struck me as odd, forced me to think about us in a way I had not before. She was my best friend, the person I trusted most, the person I most desired to spend time with. But I had never thought of our relationship as one that could last in the way boyfriends and girlfriends could last, something that could be permanent. I assumed I would go away to college, have boyfriends, fall in love in the proper manner. The men I met in New York would be different from the clumsy and brutish boys I had known thus far; they would be sensitive and intelligent, they would have a softness to them, they would know how to please me physically. I didn’t think of myself as a girl who liked other girls. I loved Amanda Ruth; that was all.

Several minutes passed. A bullfrog called from across the river, its deep, awkward croak echoing in the stillness. The moon was low and full, the trees cast their shadows onto the river. Amanda Ruth moved slightly away from me on the pier, so that our thighs no longer touched. “You didn’t answer me.”

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“I’ve hardly thought of anything else.”

“What about dating?” I said. “Don’t you think we should date in college?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?”

“This is different.”

“How?”

I couldn’t look her in the eyes, couldn’t think of any answer that wouldn’t sound all wrong. Amanda Ruth was crying. “I get it,” she said.

“There’s nothing to get.” I put my arm around her shoulders. She resisted, but only for a minute. “We’re best friends,” I said. “We’ve had a whole summer together. Isn’t that enough?”

That night the rain returned, heavier now, as if the sky was emptying itself of every last drop of water. We brought fresh sheets down from the cabin and curled up on the old mattress in the boathouse. I felt the humid weight of the air bearing down on us as we lay there, holding on like sisters or cousins, listening to the deluge, awed by the lightning that flashed across the darkened sky. At some point I drifted off to sleep and dreamt that we were moving, swirling down the river in our own muddy version of the flying house in
The Wizard of Oz
. When I woke I realized that the little boathouse was shaking.

“Wake up,” I whispered.

“What is it?”

“I think we should go up to the house.”

I looked out the window and saw logs rushing past, big limbs ripped from trees, the white flash of a lawn chair, a mattress with its silver coils exposed.

“We’re probably under a tornado watch,” I said, reaching for the radio, but Amanda Ruth pulled me to her. She kissed my neck, slid her hand underneath my shirt. She rolled me onto my back and lay on top of me. Her hair covered my face. Thunder pounded the roof, the power of it reverberating in the flimsy walls. I listened for the shrill whistle of a distant locomotive. Growing up on the Gulf Coast, it was the sound I feared most. I knew how a tornado could fool you, how it sounded like a train but was really a dark funnel hurtling unchecked across the land. There were stories of bizarre deaths and miraculous survivals, such as a woman who was lifted from her bed while she slept, the sheets stripped from beneath her, before the tornado returned her to the mattress, unharmed. Small fishing boats were found miles from the owners’ houses, suspended in the air after the storm, the bow driven through the trunk of a massive oak tree. A baby was discovered alive in a bed of pine straw three days after a tornado snatched him from his mother’s arms.

Amanda Ruth shook her hair so that it tickled my face. She held my wrists down with her hands. “I’ll visit you at Christmas,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see them light the tree at Rockefeller Center.”

“And we’ll go ice skating in Central Park, and walk down Fifth Avenue wearing big hats.”

“And buy smelly cheese at Zabar’s?”

“Of course. And see a Broadway show.”

We kissed to seal the pact.

SEVEN

By late afternoon the river is deep yellow, and the air smells of something decayed. For miles the riverbank has been deserted, just bamboo huts and groves of orange trees. The sun is already low in the sky when Nanjing flares up ahead, a city of gigantic candles, dozens of refinery towers breathing flames into the dusky light. It smells as if the whole city is burning. The voice on the loudspeaker announces our arrival: “We are approaching beautiful Nanjing. Please find your leader for exciting tourism promenade into famous city of industry and culture.”

Slowly, people begin emerging on deck. Their pale, bloated faces show signs of an afternoon of drink, sleep, and Bingo. There is a great deal of blinking and yawning as the passengers adjust to the gloomy light of the rain-soaked afternoon. Elvis Paris appears at our side, green flag in one hand, clipboard in the other. “Nanjing is number one beautiful city of China!” he says, pointing to an imposing row of towers rising on the hill. “Nanjing makes all modern things for the good of the people. Petroleum, lead, zinc, iron.”

We pass under a huge, monstrously ugly bridge, which is lined with clusters of egg-shaped lanterns and supported by four concrete towers. The Voice calls out the landmark: “Yangtze First Bridge, amazing feat of Chinese engineering and work ethic of the people.” A huge red banner hangs from the bridge, the characters written large in white. All of the guides, including Elvis Paris, point to the sign in unison, as if on cue, and The Voice translates: “Love the Four Modernizations. Work Hard for the People.”

“What are the Four Modernizations?” Dave asks.

“Every Chinese child knows the Four Modernizations!” Elvis Paris says proudly. “Industry, Agriculture, Defense, Science.”

Elvis Paris must have seen the bridge dozens of times in his endless travels along this familiar route; nonetheless, he gazes up in undisguised awe. “This bridge is true symbol of modern China. Twenty thousand feet long. This bridge is very great, but the Three Gorges Dam will be greater.”

We find Graham, then wait for Stacy, who arrives several minutes after our appointed meeting time, wearing a blue denim minidress and loafers. “We almost left you,” Dave says, teasing.

“You wouldn’t have.” She’s looking at him the way I’ve seen so many women look at him over the years—that mixture of attraction and curiosity, amusement and, perhaps, hope. Dave’s not the kind of guy you notice immediately. His handsomeness is of a more subtle quality. I can’t count the times I’ve been sitting with him in a restaurant, halfway through the meal, when one woman, then another, and another, glances over and
sees
him. I know it’s happening because something crosses their faces—something quick and instinctual—before they look away. Then they’ll keep glancing back, trying not to be obvious, perhaps hoping to catch his eye. He’s not the kind of man who causes a stir when he walks into a room. Instead, women notice his presence slowly, like a vapor or a faint scent, like the music in the background that you don’t even know is there until a single odd note rises above the ambient noise. I’ve tried to analyze this quality in him, tried to figure out exactly what it is about the composition of his face, the measured gestures of his hands, that draws women slowly and inevitably toward him. Twelve years, and I’ve yet to pinpoint it. Even as I love him for his mystery, his ability to keep me guessing year after year after year, I know that I’ve lost any such mystery for him.

We hang back until the other passengers have departed, then make our way over the slippery gangplank. Graham leads us up a muddy stairway, then through a group of rumpled soldiers halfheartedly stacking sandbags. We pass beneath a canopy of sycamores, fragrant in the rain, and find ourselves beside a little stream that cascades toward the river.

“The Chin-huai,” Graham explains. “Mooring place of the legendary flower boats.”

“Flower boats?” Stacy says, digging in the soft sand with the toe of her shoe.

“When I first traveled to China twenty years ago, you could still see them here. A paper lantern glowed on every boat, and a girl in a bright silk dress stood at the stern. The girls held paper fans printed with the names of songs you could have them sing.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“Sure, but it was business. Each singsong girl had a couple of old men who accompanied her song with handmade string instruments, and when she was finished you had the option of spending the night with her on the boat. If you both agreed, the old men would disembark, the girl would put out the lamp, and you’d be left alone with her.”

“You talk as if you’d been with one of the singsong girls yourself,” I say.

Graham winks at me. “Maybe I have.”

I imagine Graham floating down the silver river, lulled by the sound of the singsong girl’s voice, the flicker of lights. I imagine him shuddering under her touch. There are no flower boats now, and the voices of the singsong girls, were there any here today, would be drowned out by the din of harbor traffic and the train rumbling over the bridge. The stream is almost clear though, and the occasional gum wrappers, Baiji Juice bottles, and tattered shoes that float downstream seem benign in comparison to the immense volume of garbage that litters the great river for which the Chin-huai is destined.

Graham leads us through a series of narrow lanes to a small storefront with a ceramic Buddha hanging in the doorway. A young couple sits at one of the tables, talking quietly. Two teenaged boys are smoking cigarettes by the window. They all turn to stare when we walk in. The owner greets us with laughter. She stands on her tiptoes and slaps Graham on the shoulders.

“I met her on my first trip up the river,” he explains, “and I’ve been coming back to this restaurant ever since.”

The woman chats for a minute with Graham, then gives Stacy, Dave, and me a good looking-over. She touches Stacy’s hair and feels the fabric of my dress, then gestures to show that she thinks Dave has very broad shoulders. She says something to Dave. Graham translates. “My friend wants to know how much you earn per year.”

Dave shrugs. “We get by.”

Graham translates the exchange. “How much exactly?” When neither of us answers, he laughs. “Get used to it. You’ll find that everyone in China wants to know how much you make.”

The woman seats us and shouts back to the kitchen, and immediately a young girl brings out a platter of boiled calamari. Within minutes large dishes begin appearing: pork in a rich red sauce, rice noodles with shredded beef, spicy green beans, tofu with diced chicken. She brings us two warm bottles of Tsing Tao beer, which she pours into four glasses.

“Jenny tells me you do business in China,” Dave says.

“Used to,” Graham replies. “Crane safety. In the eighties, with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the whole country went wild with construction. New shops and apartment buildings started going up all over the place. Loads of money to be made by foreigners and Chinese businesses alike. My company’s job was to make sure the cranes were safe for the workers.”

“What made you get out of the business?”

“The Three Gorges Dam. The government was extolling the virtues of the dam, and people were making money hand over fist. I admit I saw dollar signs, just like everyone else. But the more I read about the project, the more uncomfortable I felt.”

“Isn’t the dam supposed to create power?” Dave asks. “Control flooding?”

Graham shrugs. “That’s what they say. And maybe, to a small extent, it’s true. But, ultimately, the cost is too great. I’ve been up and down this river dozens of times. I can’t imagine just plugging it up. It’s all very sad.”

The conversation dies out. Around us, the sounds of the city: On the street, hundreds of bicycle bells jingle. Vendors shout at passersby. A group of elderly men just outside the doorway slap mahjong tiles onto a table and tick off their scores in loud, excited voices. Occasionally they burst into laughter. Beyond the red curtain that separates the dining room from the kitchen, dishes crash. Stacy eyes her beer without drinking it and I shift a fish head around on my plate. The dead eye gazes up at me. Graham seems lost in thought. Dave, meanwhile, is listening, looking around, taking in everything. He thrives on pandemonium. For Dave, the noisier it is, the clearer his focus. I can tell by the way he sets his chopsticks neatly on each side of his plate, like a fork and spoon, and rearranges the napkin on his lap, that he’s about to launch into a line of questioning.

“Graham,” he says. “I understand you have Lou Gehrig’s disease.” I give Dave a little kick under the table, but he persists. “Are you in pain?”

Far from being offended, Graham seems utterly at ease with the question. “Yes. I’m in quite a lot of pain, in fact. Not at this moment, but there’s rarely a week when I’m not knocked flat by it at some point. It’s not the muscle atrophy, but rather the side effects—the aches and swelling.”

“God,” Stacy says. “That sounds awful.” She struggles with a piece of calamari, which slides through her chopsticks and lands in her lap.

“How do you deal with it?” Dave asks.

“At first I didn’t. I cried like a baby, spent a lot of time in bed with the remote control and
Baywatch
. I had to keep the TV on, because when it was quiet my mind went berserk. I’d just sit there envisioning myself in the end, wheelchair-bound, taking liquids through a feeding tube. After a couple of months, I did a reality check. I decided the best thing I can do is live a little more each day. That’s why I’m here—to spend my last days in the place I love.”

“I read this book,” Stacy says, “about a guy with Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Having given up on the chopsticks, she picks up a piece of calamari with her fingers and pops it in her mouth. “It was really inspirational.”

“I probably read it too,” Graham says. “For a while, I read everything that was published on the subject. I could recite the statistics in my sleep. Twenty percent survive five years. Ten percent make it ten years.” He catches my eye. “But I’m not planning to stick around until this disease turns me into an invalid.”

“A few years back I was called out on an attempted suicide,” Dave says. “Forty-nine-year-old woman. She’d tried to hang herself from the light fixture in her dining room, but the rope broke and her daughter found her on the floor an hour later. Turns out she had ALS. Just didn’t want to live like that.”

Stacy clears her throat. Graham glances around the table and says, “Cheer up, mates,” but there’s nothing cheerful in his voice. After that, no one says anything for a minute. Graham lifts his bowl and drinks off the last of his soup. The waitress is immediately by his side, ladling more into his bowl.

“I’ll tell you what this disease has done for me. It has taught me to recalibrate pain. When I was nineteen, I spent six months in a body cast following a motorcycle accident. Now, those six months seem like a picnic. I’ve reached a new threshold, a new standard by which to judge all other pain. Let me demonstrate.” He says something to the waitress, who brings him a matchbook. Graham strikes the match against the side of the box, then holds it just below his open palm. The tip of the flame touches his skin, but he doesn’t flinch. He holds it there until the flame reaches the end of the match; I lean forward and blow it out.

“Bravo,” Dave says.

Graham holds his palm out for us to see. A small dot in the center of his broad hand is singed black. The entire waitstaff has gathered around to look. A pretty girl with a thin white scar stretching from her left eye to her cheek points at Graham and shouts words I can’t understand. The old woman says something that makes the staff and patrons laugh, then shoos everyone away from our table.

“You get my point.” Graham shifts in his seat; his leg brushes mine. “That stunt I just pulled was uncomfortable, of course, but how bad can it be when you know it’s going to end in a few seconds? Chronic pain is an altogether different beast. There’s no getting out from under it. I look back at that nineteen-year-old boy in the body cast, and I envy him.”

Dave spears a piece of pork. “I think we all envy ourselves at nineteen.”

Dave, I know, sees Graham in terms of the particular case, the disease itself, in the impersonal light of reason. Dave is unencumbered by emotion. Each time he goes to work, he sees terrible things. His response to these things is professional, exact, rational. He looks at a young girl bleeding from a gunshot wound and thinks, “How can I help this girl survive?” If it is clear his patient will die, he thinks, “What can I do to make her comfortable for now, until it’s over?” I wonder sometimes if he looks at me and sees a useless person. While he’s saving lives, I’m telling women with platinum cards which handbag to wear with their tailored silk suits, which earrings to pair with the Hermès scarves. I wonder, sometimes, if this is why he moved out: I simply cannot compete with the ongoing drama of his job.

“And you?” Graham says, looking at Dave.

“Me?”

“What’s the greatest degree of pain you’ve ever endured?”

“That’s easy. A couple of years ago I had a cracked tooth. It became infected at the root. The dentist, Dr. De Salvo, dug around in there for more than an hour. When he went to pull the thing, it shattered. He had to yank each piece out individually. Because the infection was at the nerve, it all had to be done without any Novocain. By the time he was finished, I had passed out. When I came to, he was standing above me, apologizing. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Apparently, he’d left the nerve exposed. I went home pumped up on drugs, and sometime in the middle of the night the drugs wore off. Ouch.”

“He was crying like a baby,” I say.

“This guy?” Stacy says. “Crying? That’s hard to believe.”

What I remember most from that time is the intensity of feeling I had for Dave. Seeing him in pain made me look at him, at us, in a new way. Suddenly, this man who had always been so sure of himself in every situation was vulnerable. Dave had always been the rescuer, but during those brief days, he had to depend on me. Years before, my fondness for him had evolved into love because he was there when Amanda Ruth died; he had known exactly what to say, ushering me through those first horrible days and weeks after her murder. Although I hated seeing Dave in so much pain, I secretly relished his weakness. I watched over him like a careful mother. For the first time in our marriage, I felt that he needed me, that I was the one in control of the situation.