You and Me, Girlie

03.12.10 | 10:19 AM ET

Trevor Fisk was a sailor from a small town near Perth. He had the wispy goatee of a young pirate and slate-blue eyes that pillaged everything they looked at. His shoulders were pinioned with muscle. He was so swaggering and lascivious, he was practically feral. So of course, I was instantly attracted to him. I slammed into him before I even saw him. After Claire abandoned me in the park, I’d headed back to the Pujiang. Rounding the corner in the lobby, I’d collided with him by the elevators.

“Oi, watch it, girlie. Those are some of my best body parts you’re charging over,” he laughed, grabbing my elbow.

Girlie. Only the Aussies could get away with that one.

Meeting like this could’ve been a groaning cliché—except that as soon as he introduced himself, Trevor began showing off his tattoos to me as if they were art installations in a gallery. This was still a good decade before tattoos became the trendy accessory for every high school kid in Dayton and Scarsdale; in 1986 they were still, for the most part, the markings of an outlaw.

“This here’s Leila,” he said, rolling up his right sleeve to show me a teal-colored, topless Polynesian woman with a bowl of fruit on her head. “Got her in Fiji. And this one here”—he turned and flexed his left triceps—“is Sofia. Got her in Bangkok.” Sofia the mermaid (also big-breasted, topless) gracefully swam up along his arm toward his shoulder.

“How very unsexist of you,” I said drily.

“Oi.” He grinned, rubbing his biceps with mock defensiveness. “It gets lonely out at sea. This way I always got me girls to talk to. But wait,” he said exuberantly. “You haven’t seen the pièce de résistance yet.”

Undoing his pants with lightning speed, he pulled down his underwear and mooned me right there in the lobby. “Check it out.” Following the curvature of his right buttock was the name Trevor in elaborate curlicue script that looped off after the last r, culminating in a little smiling black- and yellow bumblebee. It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to register anything close to shock.

All I could think to say was, “You got your own name tattooed on your ass?”

“Oi. Could’ve been worse,” he laughed, yanking up his pants. “Could’ve had someone else’s name put there. Or could’ve had my own name misspelled.”

“I’m sorry, but can I ask you something?” I rubbed my temples, trying to understand the turn the afternoon had taken. “Why on earth would you do that?”

Trevor laughed again, a deep, happy, lecherous laugh. “Ah, who the fu*k knows? I was drunker than sh*t. Somewhere in the Philippines, one of me mates said to me, ‘Trevor, you are so drunk right now, I bet you wouldn’t remember your own fu*kin’ name if it was tattooed on your ass.’

And so I thought Why not? Bet him five bucks. And from what he tells me, I won, too! Of course,” he suddenly turned pensive, “I suppose if I’d been really smart, I would’ve had them tattoo it on backwards, so that way, when I looked in the mirror—”

“Okay,” I held up my hand. “Getting the picture.”

Sidling up to me, he snaked his arm protectively around my shoulder. His skin was warm and smelled of cloves. I could feel his biceps pressing against me, the tautness of his abdomen. “So how ‘bout it, girlie?” He gave me a squeeze. “You’ve seen me good, me bad, and me ugly. Think you can handle me taking you out to dinner?”

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.

Yet now, standing alone by the railing on the outer deck of the ferry, I knew better. It had been a sweet, ephemeral moment, nothing more. Already it seemed very far away. Around me, families huddled on straw matting they’d brought, their belongings piled against the bulwarks like barricades. Crates of live poultry. Bags of clicking crabs. Bundles of bok choy, newspaper, and clothing. As the ship chugged through darkness, I could hear the swishing against the hull, the leviathan throb of the engines. In the moonlight, the silhouette of the mountains on the shore looked like ripped black paper against the sky. I had no idea where we were heading. None of the maps had Dinghai on them. I felt a shiver of ecstatic terror. Except for Trevor, not a single person in the entire world knew that I was on board a night ferry right now, plowing through the darkness in the East China Sea. Since our arrival in Shanghai, Claire and I hadn’t been able to contact our families. I stared at the black water forlornly. In the end, I realized, this was all there ever really was: dark mountains, a turbulent sea. A boat hurtling through a vacuum toward an unknown port. The true condition of anyone once you stripped them of their loved ones, their culture, and their passions was just this: Loneliness. An incurable longing. Insecurity. And grief.

Suddenly I started to cry. I felt foolish, but then, who would hear me?

Who would even care? I leaned against the railing, feeling pitiful and forsaken.

I pulled out a Kleenex and blew my nose unglamorously.

In the distance, a man began singing. It took a moment for it to register. At first I was certain I was imagining it. But from across the deck came the thin, fragile, unmistakable words:

Country roads, take me home,
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, Mountain Mama

John Denver? Who the hell was singing John Denver? A few yards to my left, a slim young Chinese man in a white button-down shirt and Mao pants was pressed against the railing. His head was thrown back, his eyes closed, his small, tapered hands pressed to his heart.

Take me home, country roads

“Country Roads” had been one of the preeminent songs of my childhood. My whole family sang it in the car when we drove up to Silver Lake—a bungalow colony north of Manhattan where we went to flee the heat every summer. It was a song of gilded late-afternoon light shimmering on the lake, of walking barefoot on dirt roads after a rainstorm, delighting in the mud and the thrum of crickets from the marshes near the handball court. It was the song of uncomplicated happiness, of a time when my family was at its best—before my parents’ marriage began shredding, before my father began disappearing and my mother began storming through our apartment slamming drawers and screaming with frustration. It was the song from when I was six years old and felt loved and serene, when I never felt a yearning to be anywhere else. Now, halfway around the world, a young Chinese man just happened to be singing it beside me in the darkness aboard a ferry bound for a hidden recess of the People’s Republic of China.

I hear her voice,
in the morning hour she calls me
The radio reminds me of my home far away

He seemed strangely unfazed when I drew up beside him and began singing along. We sang as if it were the most natural duet in the world, as if it had been preordained, the two of us harmonizing without once glancing at each other, just gazing straight ahead at the sea in tandem. When we finished the last verse, however, we turned and shook each other’s hand. “Nee how,” I gushed. “Oh my God. Do you know what that song means to me? I spent my whole childhood singing it.”

The young man smiled at me glassily. I realized he had no idea what I was saying. He didn’t speak a word of English.

How the hell had he learned an American folk song? This was 1986. People were still listening to record albums on turntables. The Internet and MP3 files were more than a decade away. MTV was an American novelty. There was no independent television in China, no pop radio, no Western movies, and in some places, no electricity. And yet—John Denver? Gesturing, I managed to persuade the young man to come with me to find Gunter.

“Gunter, this man was singing a song from my childhood. Please,” I begged when we’d found him. “Ask him how he learned it.”

Gunter translated. The young man’s name was Wen. “Wen is saying that he has learned this song a long time ago from his English instructor. But he is saying that his instructor only teaches him the song phonetically. He says he does not know the meaning of the words. He is asking to you to explain them, please.”

I had Gunter tell Wen that “Country Roads” is about a man who is far from his mountain home in West Virginia. Everywhere he goes, he misses it and hears its beauty calling to him. He yearns for the country roads to carry him back there.

When Gunter finished, Wen looked at both of us sadly. He spoke at length to Gunter.

“He is saying he is understanding the song very well,” Gunter relayed. “He is saying in China, many people are being made to work very far away from their homes. He is saying that many people in the world are missing this West Virginia.”

The three of us were quiet for a moment. Some things needed no translation at all.

Reprinted by arrangement with the Hachette Book Group, from the new paperback edition of Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman.

 

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