"Where are we going? Do you even know where it is we are going maybe?" Elise asked for the sixth time.

"How am I supposed to know where we're going," Larry said, as frustrated with his wife as with the driving, "everything's in Chinese."

Elise slumped deep into her seat, arms folded in front of her breasts. "You are an idiot." Somehow those four words sounded so much more intimidating in her French accent, and Elise knew this and thickened the inflection according to the situation. Once Larry found the accent attractive, once he found it arousing. Now he found it infuriating.

Larry knew that accent, that expression, that posture—no good could come of this. "Listen, I told you, I thought it would be an adventure. We haven't had many adventures lately." He looked over to see if the shot hit home, but there was no reading Elise's face. "You remember when we first started traveling together twenty years ago? Man, we lived for adventure."

"You see there are too many cars," she said, sinking deeper into her sulk, "and we can't even stop. There is no place to park. Where do cars park in Beijing?"

It was true, not only were they hopelessly lost in search of their five star hotel—but they had to keep driving around and around because there was nowhere to put the car if they stopped. When Larry was in Beijing twenty-five years ago there were almost no cars. The roads were filled mostly with bicycles. He had visions of driving through the streets of Beijing in his rented car as almost a God of the road. The Chinese in their Mao shirts would defer to him, stop politely and wave as he went by. For some reason, even though he had changed over the last twenty-five years, he expected that Beijing would remain the same. "I didn't think there would be so many cars," he said softly. Where did they all go at night? Did they just go in a continuous loop, one person handing off an idling car to another when they were done with it?

"It is Beijing," Elise said, "there are so many people. You are an idiot." It was an easy thing to say now that they were drowning in a sea of headlights and bizarre horn sounds. "Why don't you try and ask someone directions?"

"Who am I going to ask directions? Who?" Larry asked. They were in the middle of a five-lane road. All the roads in Beijing seemed to have five lanes, and they all seemed to go in only one direction. No matter how much he tried to ease the car to one side or the other, he always seemed to wind up back in the middle after the next turn. It was a strange maze that he couldn't quite grasp. "Besides, who am I going to ask? Everybody speaks Chinese."

"We should have taken the tour," Elise snapped.

Larry threw his hands in the air, and then grabbed the steering wheel tight in a panic. They discussed this again and again over the last six months. "We don't take tours—we're world travelers—you remember Elise," he said as if explaining to a six year old. "I traveled around China with a backpack when most Chinese had never even seen a Westerner."

"Then where is the hotel Mr. World Traveler?" Elise asked accusingly, as if Larry was somehow hiding it from her on purpose.

Larry banged his hands on the steering wheel, just before screeching to a stop. Another light. There were lights every fifty feet in Beijing and they were amazing in their complexity. There were always at least five directions to go, none of them straight, with an arrow for each direction. Each arrow was timed, the seconds ticking off in large, orange numbers. You knew how long each arrow was going to last, but you never knew which arrow was coming next. Larry had no idea what direction he was supposed to be going, so picking an arrow was an arbitrary exercise. Larry's only principle in deciding which way to go was to not pick the first arrow—there was no way something convenient could also be helpful. "We will get to the fucking hotel, all right?" Larry said, completely confused about how they were going to get to the hotel.

"We are just going to drive, around, and around, and around, phhhttt."

Larry could feel his skin crawling off his bones. "Yeah, yeah, sure, we're going to die in this car, right Elise?"

"You are going to kill me in this car," Elise said angrily.

"Why would I kill you?"

"So you can marry one of these Chinese women you like so much, yes?" she said pointing her finger at the outside world, which was of course filled to the brim with Chinese women.

"What are you talking about?" Larry was trying to sound nonchalant, but it was true he had been really attracted to Asian women of late. And these small women with blue-black hair and perfectly rounded asses were always at the center of his fantasies.

"You think I don't know. Of course I know. Every time you see a Chinese woman you stare. I know, she knows, the world knows," Elise said, making it sound like the world was indeed privy to his fantasies. "This is why you come to China, so you can look at all Chinese women, and nobody knows you are looking."

"And kill you and marry my favorite?" Larry asked in mock innocence.

"Yes."

"Then why did you want to come to China?"

"Because all the woman, are all Chinese," Elise said, as if this should be explanation enough.

Larry made his turn and had somehow guessed right, finding himself in the outer lane next to a busy sidewalk. He felt he had to take this chance. He slowed the car down to a crawl, rolled down his window, and shouted out, "KingWing hotel?" Nobody paid any attention. "Does anybody know how to get to the KingWing hotel?"

"What are you doing?" Elise growled.

"You told me to ask for directions. I'm asking for directions."

"In English! You hear yourself? You are asking in English. This is Beijing. They don't speak English."

"I don't speak Chinese," Larry explained very slowly, pulling out the words. "You want to ask them in French?"

"You are an idiot."

Larry rolled up his car window with as much anger as a human being could put into rolling up a car window and put his foot on the gas. Within seconds they were in the middle lane again. "So what do you want to do?" He was tired of making all the decisions. He wanted Elise to take some responsibility so he could call her an idiot.

"I know you are having an affair," Elise said.

Larry's first response was to think how this statement might help them in finding the KingWing hotel. It took him a few seconds to realize that his wife was accusing him. "I'm not having an affair, Elise."

"Yes, you are, I know this," she said, as if she actually did know this, except she couldn't know because Larry wasn't having an affair.

"You tell me then. You tell me exactly what you know."

"That little bottle of Viagra you have that you are keeping in the back of the cabinet," Elise said, referring to some Viagra Larry got about six months ago after a conversation with his brother convinced him it might improve their marriage. On his next trip to the doctor—Larry refused to use a special trip as the commercials demanded—he asked his doctor about it. He expected some type of congratulations, his doctor extending his hand and yelling jovially, "So you've finally decided to take care of your penis and ask me!" That is what the commercials claimed would happen, without a doubt.

Instead Dr. Mulder frowned and shook his head. "It's not a cure all you know." He was a dour man, a worthwhile quality when discussing ailments of the liver, but a bit off-putting when chatting about the vagaries of your sex life.

Larry brought the bottle home and put it in the back of his medicine cabinet. He didn't even know Elise knew about it. He didn't try and hide the bottle. He was just afraid to talk to her about it directly—and he had to, Dr. Mulder said there had to be a well-defined plan.

"I counted them you know," Elise said.

Larry gripped the steering wheel a little bit tighter. Why did she do these types of things? And why did they have to have this conversation now, driving around Beijing? "So?"

"I counted. It says ten on the bottle, but I only counted nine," Elise said, pounding her index finger against the glove compartment.

"You think I'm having an affair on one Viagra pill?"

"One is enough, no?" she said, "especially for you."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Larry asked, wondering if Elise had been conferencing with Dr. Mulder about his libido. He was on the brink of defending an affair he wasn't having. "I'm not having an affair Elise, and that's it."

"Where is your little pill then?" she demanded.

Larry gritted his teeth. This was going to be difficult. "I was using it for a test."

"To test if you want to have an affair." Elise said, finishing a thought that wasn't there.

"To test to see if I could get an erection. I didn't want to build this up into this big thing and then not get an erection." This was all Dr. Mulder's fault, and Larry hated him. He didn't want to go on with the explanation. He looked over at Elise who was staring straight ahead with a puckered face. "We have to find the hotel—I really need to take a dump."

"What kind of test?" Elise screamed, waving her arms over her head so that her long red fingernails scratched against the roof of the car. "What kind of test do you do?"

"We're going to get in an accident," Larry said softly, pretending to look for the hotel.

"You tell me right now!"

Larry could feel the skin on his face beginning to tighten against his skull. "I took a Viagra and I watched a porno film to—you know, to see if I could get hard." He could feel Elise staring straight through him, burrowing out the inside of his head. He was beginning to wish he just told Elise he was having an affair.

"You are disgusting," she said in her thickest, most guttural French accent, the one she saved for the most repulsive of circumstances. "It was an Asian sex movie wasn't it?"

"No," Larry said shaking his head, even as he felt his face burning.

"Ah," Elise said waving her finger at him, "I know it, I know it. Yes, you are disgusting." She leaned back in her seat dejected. "Perhaps you feel I am disgusting."

Larry looked over at her and felt guilty over the despair that registered on her face. When he had met her on a nude beach in Thailand twenty years ago she was perfect, you could bounce a quarter off of her stomach. She was traveling with a young French man—with the same perfect body, and perfect hair to match. Larry won her away through a combination of his own goofy ineptitude, and her partner's indifference to anything but his own body and hair. They traveled the world together those first few years with the goal of making love on a beach by each of the world's five oceans. But time had taken its wages out of Elise's body, and added too many inches to his waistline.

"I don't think you're disgusting," Larry said a little bit too weakly, understanding the moment the words were out that he would have been better off saying nothing.

"You are old and fat," Elise said, heaving out the words. "Why don't you stop and take your precious dump then?"

Larry looked to where Elise was pointing. It was obvious from the international signs that it was a public bathroom, with an attendant out front collecting entrance fees, which meant that it was clean and well kept. "No, no, I think I'll wait till we get to the hotel."

"We may never get to the hotel," she said with manufactured calm, "I think it is better for you if you go now. Look, look, I think you will like to look at the bathroom attendant too."

Larry couldn't help himself. He took a closer look at the young girl sitting at the table in front of the bathroom. She was kind of cute for a toilet attendant. Maybe she moonlighted in Asian porn movies. "I'm going to wait."

"Go!" Elise demanded.

"No."

Elise smiled. "Because it will be a hole in the ground, no? You are afraid you are too fat and you will not be able to squat over this hole in the ground without falling over. And then your precious Asian woman will have to come and rescue you from the toilet with the shit hanging out of you."

Larry bit down on his lower lip. Elise was right, that was pretty much what he was afraid of. Now you could bounce a quarter off of Elise's ability to get to him. "Can we just drop the subject please?"

Elise pulled her shoulders down, perhaps realizing she had scored a little too direct a hit. "We have become the people we made fun of twenty years ago," she said sadly.

Larry nodded. He remembered when they were young and beautiful and traveled the world like vagabond royalty. They were always at the center of a group of seasoned travelers—adventurers who understood the exotic countries they visited so much more genuinely than the bleary-eyed, ugly tourists being led by the hand by obsequious tour guides—always on the look out for clean, Western toilets so they could sit and not squat. The tourists had the money, but Larry and Elise, and those they traveled among had the experiences. That's what they kept telling themselves. And if one day they should have money they would never become everyday tourists. Larry wondered where the people they once traveled with were now. Had they all become like the two of them?

"We should have taken the tour," Larry said, feeling like a giant weight was being lifted from his shoulders.

"Driving around like this is stupid," Elise said, casually dropping into the rhythm of thought that comes from twenty years of sharing life.

"Maybe the hotel will be able to arrange something for us."

"We will never find this KingWing hotel," Elise said, becoming excited again. "We will drive around Beijing forever."

Larry slowly edged his way to one of the outer lanes and stopped the car before the next traffic light. The cars behind him started honking wildly and they were showered with curses. Larry didn't care. He looked over at Elise and they both got out of the car without saying a word. They pulled their rucksacks from the trunk. Larry hailed a cab, letting two go before he was able to find one with air-conditioning.

"The KingWing hotel," Larry told the driver as they got in the cab.

"Quickly, my husband needs a toilet," Elise added.