A Short Story By Abigail Pesta

The night we got to Shanghai, Marcy and I were so tired that all we did was stay in the hotel and watch “The Sound of Music” on TV.

Never mind that it was dubbed in Chinese which neither of us spoke.

So the next day, we promised ourselves, we’d have an adventure. Which is how, 24 hours later, we found ourselves standing next to a creepy hearse-like limo at midnight, trying to decide how stupid we’d be if we actually climbed in.

The limo was piloted by a pair of twentysomething barflies we’d chatted up. Now they were inviting us out for a night on the town. Their names, Jimmy and Napoleon.

“Hop in,” Napoleon said. “We’re going to a nightclub with movie stars.”

Hmm, sounded suspicious. For starters, yeah this was back in the 1990s, but who says “nightclubs”? And what 25-year-olds drive around Shanghai, or anyplace really, in limos that look like this? I mean, lace curtains? 

Napoleon, in a leather jacket, leather hat and Mao collar, did look like someone trying to play the role of a mob kingpin, albeit a short mob kingpin. I could take him in a fight. Question: Did I want to?

Sure I wanted adventure, but this wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I’d imagined an weekend of strolling through street markets and eating delicious snacks. Club-hopping with tough guys six inches shorter than me? Not in the plan.

Napoleon was persistent and you had to admire his confidence. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked Marcy again. He barely came up to her chin. Marcy, by the way, is six-foot-two and looks like Nicole Kidman except blond.

He listed the places he’d take us. Bars full of beautiful people — filmmakers and novelists from Beijing, Hong Kong, “even Paris,” he said. 

Jimmy said far less. He mainly stood there and stared at the two of us, a pair of trophy dates from Mars.

Still, Marcy was ready to get in the car. She glanced meaningfully at me and raised just one of her eyebrows. The message was clear. Only an idiot would hesitate for even another second.

I surveyed the limo — long, foreboding and black, except for the incongruous white ruffled curtains on the rear windows — and ruminated for a moment about how I’d arrived at this choice.

We’d flown in the night before and checked into a funky hotel, a 1920s survivor on the riverfront from the days when the city was called the Paris of the East. Yes it was full of tourists, but a decadence-in-decline vibe still lingered in the slightly-too-dim hallway lights and the row of clocks on the wall above the check-in counter that gave the local time in places like Vladivostok. If you tried, you could still conjure up a feeling that there might be ghosts or double agents lurking in darker corners of the place, even if the people behind you at the counter were wearing cargo shorts.

Accentuating the hotel’s faded glory was the faulty plumbing. Don’t ask how I know this, but the first thing a traveler should do when arriving in a hotel is give the toilet a vigorous test flush. A moment of attention to the commode is time well spent when far from home, just to be sure it’ll be ready to hold up its end of the bargain later, when the stakes may be higher.

Anyway, our first toilet in the hotel wasn’t inspiring confidence so we asked for another room. A pair of bellhops sporting red hats and ill-fitting gold-buttoned coats smiled and snickered as the two towering foreigners flushed toilets in several rooms before expressing satisfaction with what they were seeing.

Small wonder that, afterward, we were perfectly happy to vegetate and spend the rest of the evening listening to Maria sing about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

So much for the first night.

Which brings us to night number two and the promise of real adventure. We spent the afternoon walking around the city and making our way toward a jazz bar a friend in Hong Kong had steered us to. 

We stopped along the way to eat at a street stall. Sadly for me, I found a bug in my meal. Goodbye, noodles. Marcy, undaunted, polished hers off. A small but telling sign of the differences in our idea of a good time, I suppose.

When we finally arrived at the club, a trio of musicians were playing Louis Armstrong tunes. I was hungry after the noodle fiasco, so we ordered drinks and dumplings. The drinks arrived quickly and so did Jimmy and Napoleon.

Like everyone else, they couldn’t tear their eyes from Marcy. We struck up a conversation, and gradually a crowd settled in at our table. As the evening grew long, the room became increasingly mesmerizing. Beautiful women in spaghetti straps. Beautiful men with flawlessly tousled hair. Dubious characters and their posses.

Around midnight the bar closed. Back to the hotel! I thought to myself.

But no. Instead, there we were, standing beside a weird limo with lacy curtains, with a 25-year-old guy in a leather hat rolling his eyes at my indecision.

A moment of awkward silence passed. The midnight air was so foggy and thick with pollution, you could barely see down the block. It gave the moment the feel of a 1940s movie where someone steps ominously from behind a lamppost.

I had made my decision. Taking a deep breath I was just about to tell Marcy, “No way am I getting into this hearse,” when Napoleon decided it was time to drop his go-to pickup line again. “Marcy, do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, trying to stand extra tall.

“I think we talked about that already,” Marcy said. Then she looked at me. “Now let's go!”

And with that, I figured, why not? And piled into the back seat.