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Kelley White Cheap Hotel, California, 1982 We were still couples then, newly married, you and your sister, our brother-in-law. We did not know the marriages would fail in a little more than a dozen years. I do not recall how we came to take the trip, how we came to travel together, driving, it must have been a rental car, south from San Francisco, where you had Hong Kong relatives, to Los Angeles, I do not know why we made the trip, what destination. I remember we pulled over to look at the ocean through coin-operated binoculars, the kind of thing my father would never pay to do. There is a picture of me, looking as normal as I have ever looked, styled hair, bright summer dress. I look worried, perhaps it is annoyance at the camera, perhaps I sensed the difficulties ahead. I think we saw the Chinese Theater. You were, after all, Chinese. And driving too late we turned in at a hotel with a vacancy, one room for two couples, the clerk grinning, and we could see a little TV screen behind him, mounted on the wall of his little room, black and white, constantly shuffling scenes of empty rooms. Your sister took the tiny room with the double bed separate from the main room which was red red red. Red plush bedspread, red faux velvet chairs, toilet, sink, chipped shower stall. You would not undress. I do not know if our companions did in their little room behind the door. You thought the bed might be diseased, showed me stains, and when we lay on our backs we saw the mirror, gold-flecked and huge above us. You knew there was a camera behind it. That we would be watched. Movies. Sold. We’d be pornography. We’d never know who might have seen us. You stayed awake. Eyes white. Flat on your back. I curled toward you on my side as I would curl later toward our new-born son. I slept. I dreamed flesh moving above us, never touching, just flesh, moving, like the damned at the doors of hell. |