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You and Me, Girlie

Trevor had been in Shanghai long enough to learn to say, “Another Tsingtao, please,” expertly in Mandarin. He took me to the Peace Hotel for dinner, then to a nightclub at the International Seamen’s Club on the Bund that “officially” did not exist. Stepping inside was nothing short of hallucinatory. In the center of an abandoned rococo ballroom was a huge table full of Sudanese men playing bongo drums accompanied by a lone Belgian accordionist. Backpackers, black marketeers, aid workers, entrepreneurs undulated to the beat, clinked bottles, and bellowed out rounds of increasingly incoherent toasts. The din was phenomenal. Trevor knew everyone. He was like the mayor of the nightclub. Leading me through the crowd, he introduced me to an Austrian woman dancing sinuously with a Senegalese man; to a half-Canadian, half-Indian man who called himself Tai and shouted over the music that he worked in computers; to a stunning Icelandic blonde who eyed me coolly and blew smoke rings over Trevor’s head; to a robotic-looking, square-headed German who said, “I am German. I am psychotic,” over and over while gulping beer; and to two highly amused Swedes, who, upon hearing I was American, felt compelled to launch into their own imitation of the Swedish chef from “The Muppet Show.”

In the midst of all this, an elderly, rotund Chinese man went around hugging everyone and dancing in an artful, angular manner that reminded me of Kabuki. I had spent my teenage years in New York drinking illegally at Studio 54 and Danceteria, yet nothing came remotely close to this. It was Star Wars meets the UN.

Trevor and I danced and drank; danced and flirted; flirted and drank, shouting to each other at close range over the music. It turned out he was a Libra, too! Oh my God! No wonder we’re so instantly compatible! We’re starmates! Let’s celebrate our birthdays together on the Great Wall, we cheered, collapsing into each other’s arms. Let’s have another toast! To Libra, the scales! until suddenly we looked around the International Seaman’s Club and realized it was empty except for a lone busboy stacking the chairs, and that we’d been dancing together for at least twenty minutes without any actual music. And then we were waltzing out on the landing and sitting on the cold stone steps of the Peace Hotel. It was after midnight. Swashbucklers, explorers, those mythological Greeks: Our legends are misleading. Most people who travel overseas—ostensibly on a quest—are fleeing something, too. Captain Cook set out not only to chart the Pacific but also to escape provincial England. Huck Finn was sprinting from the Widow Douglas. And although back in 1986 it never occurred to me that Claire Van Houten could be on the run from anything, I knew on some level that I certainly was. As we sat with our hands knitted, I found myself telling Trevor about the fault lines in my parents’ marriage. About my mother’s fierce mood swings. I told him how I’d watched my beloved little brother suffer and diminish from the tension—and about my father’s secret phone call to me at college to say he was thinking about moving out.

“I mean, just how was I supposed to respond to that?” Without meaning to, I started to cry.

Trevor reached over and pressed the back of his hand to my cheek. Staring somberly out at the river, he told me haltingly about how stultifying his hometown had been—the drunken marinade of it, full of posturing and gossip and petty Saturday-night brutality—and how his father had cut out when he was six. “Bastard even took my model train collection. Pawned it for beer money.

“You and me, girlie.” He smiled sadly. “We’re not so different, are we?”

It was one o’clock in the morning. We stood up stiffly, brushed ourselves off, and slowly made our way back through the shadowed pathways of Huangpu Park toward the hotel. The city was so quiet, we could hear the tide licking the seawalls. Although the night had turned bittersweet, once we found ourselves on the Suzhou Creek Bridge, we started kissing.

And then suddenly we were kissing some more, and then we were sneaking into the women’s dormitory back at the Pujiang, tiptoeing past the sprawled and sleeping women and stumbling giddily out onto the wrought iron balcony overlooking the streets of Shanghai, and we were kissing and shushing each other drunkenly and covering our mouths with each other’s hands to keep from making noise and then kissing some more, and then Trevor was kneeling down and lifting up the hem of my thin purple jersey tank dress, whispering “Just close your eyes now, girlie. Don’t look.” And as I felt the first wet flicker of his lips, I started to giggle again.

When I told Claire about it the next morning at breakfast, however, she failed to find it funny.

“Ew. You fooled around with that sleazy sailor guy from the men’s dorm? The one with his name tattooed on his butt?”

I sat back. “How did you know about that?”

“When I came off the elevator yesterday morning, he was showing it to two German girls. In fact he was showing it to everybody. Watch out, Suze, okay? That guy is a nut job.”

She looked at me with displeasure and drew in a breath. She scratched her neck. A patch below her left ear had grown raw and irritated. “Look, there’s something else. Early this morning, Jonnie stopped by. You were still asleep. Anyway, he’s already gone ahead and bought tickets for us to sail with him on the ferry to Dinghai. Tonight.”

“What? Tonight?” I said. “But we never—”

“I know. But he already paid for the tickets. And he’s even arranged for somebody with a car to bring us to the pier.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I don’t know about this.”

She sat up stiffly, her nostrils flared, her arms crossed. “What’s not to know?”

Her sharpness took me aback. “I just thought we didn’t want to be indebted to him,” I said.

“And pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? I mean, I’m sorry, but how many of the other people here have gotten invited to someone’s Chinese hometown?”

“I know. But, Claire, he thinks we’re going to help him defect.”

She looked at me with annoyance. “What’s the problem? You don’t want to leave your sailor now?”

“What? He’s not my—”

“I thought you wanted to have great adventures, not just the usual—”

“I do, it’s just—”

“But, I mean, if you’d rather stay here with some little fling instead of boldly venturing off the map, far be it from me to—”

“Claire, c’mon. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Okay, then,” she said in a tone that implied it wasn’t okay at all. “We’re going to Dinghai with Jonnie.” She grabbed her shoulder bag and started to get up, then thought better of it and plunked back down.

“I’m sorry,” she groaned. She stretched her arms out over the tabletop and dropped her head down on them, her hair falling over her face, her bracelets sliding down her wrists. “I’m being an asshole.”

“Well, you’re certainly not being fair.”

“Oh, Suze.” She turned her face toward me helplessly. “I’m just so tired. I feel all filthy and gross. I’m not sleeping well. Everyone’s always watching us. There’s never any quiet.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“And it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, going home with Jonnie. I mean, we can’t pass it up, can we? I promise we’ll let him down gently. When the time is right, I’ll think of something. I mean, we’re young, we’re bright—”

“And you can burp ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ” I conceded.

Claire gave me her most dazzling smile, her upper lip stretching above her teeth like a ribbon. “Think of the stories we’ll be able to tell. It certainly beats smuggling wristwatches, no?”

I said that I supposed it did.

“I owe you.” She stood up, flung her hair over her shoulders, and smiled at me indulgently. “Go. Take a few hours to say goodbye to your crazy tattooed love boy. I’ll pack up our stuff and deal with the hotel.”

Trevor, dressed in nothing but cutoff shorts, was sorting through a mountain of dirty laundry on top of his bed. “You’re leaving me already?” he cried when I told him the news. “But you’re my dream girl. And we’ve only just ... Okay. Quick.” He pulled me across the hall to the women’s dormitory, which, unlike his, was empty.

Afterward he said, “Where will I find you again? Where are you going after this village?”

“Beijing.” I traced the outline of his Leila tattoo with my finger. It was odd to be in the arms of a man whose arms were literally covered with other naked women; it felt like competition. I flashed on Tom, punished by the Chinese authorities for owning an old Playboy.

Trevor reached for my guidebook and pointed to a map of downtown Beijing. “October nineteenth, it’s me birthday. We’ll meet here, just outside the Forbidden City. Fourteen hundred hours. That’s the time I was born.”

I smirked. “Will you have a password, too?”

“I’m serious, girlie.” He tossed aside the book and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “We’ve got a date. We said we’d celebrate our birthdays together on the Great Wall of China. So? Let’s do it. One of my mates says we can even sleep out there—”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Sleep out on the Great Wall.”

Trevor gave a low, wicked laugh. “Oi. The Communists don’t give a sh*t what we do. They’re too busy policing their own.”

“It’s not the Chinese government I’m worried about.” I wiggled my eyebrows.

“Aha! Just you wait, then.” He laughed, nuzzling my neck. “I’m going to take you all over Beijing. Do forbidden things to you in the Forbidden City, undress you in the Temple of Heaven ...”

At the time it had all seemed so promising and possible. Of course we would meet up weeks later and find each other. Of course we would live out some epically tawdry romance. We were two Libras, charmed, seductive, and daring. We were up for anything. We were not so different after all.

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