The Border of Paradise: A Novel (12 page)

“Not salty crab?” I asked. “Not an oyster pancake?”

“No, no,” he said, “but you look so happy.”

We ate at the desk side by side. He ate his hamburgers and I ate my food from Chinatown. The food, though familiar, had a different flavor from what I was accustomed to; still, it was better than a hamburger, and I pitied David for his limited diet.

I ate and ate. My arms and legs remained slender while my belly swelled. No longer able to wear my dresses, I lounged in underwear with my hand splayed over my navel, and said that I was going to give birth to a boy the size of Formosa. In San Francisco David laughed, and I delighted in being able to create that sound with my words. He laughed like a little girl, like a tickled child; it bubbled out of him in waves. He bought a radio and we
slow-danced around the parlor as I waddled; he came home with different things every day: a dictionary, magazines with bright covers, red lipstick in a fancy tube. He pulled wrapped caramels out from behind his ear. He sang to me a Polish folk song, and I mimicked, “
Matka, matka
,” while pinching his thin nose.

I redoubled my efforts to learn English, paging through the dictionary and
Life
magazine. I kept a notebook of new words, as I had in Kaohsiung, and studied it daily as I circled entries in the dictionary. In September David’s words, and the strings of them, came to me more clearly, and then more often. Fall passed with little fuss, accompanied by a light breeze that we allowed through the window until the end of November. By December I was large enough that my back hurt with too much standing, so we lay in bed in a valley of pillows. He’d put his hand on my belly as he spoke in low, conversational tones: “I know that one day, Daisy, you’re going to be able to speak a lot of English, and we’re going to be able to have real conversations. I’m going to be able to ask you about your family, and you’ll tell me all about what it was like for you, growing up where you did. We’re going to have a real nice life together. You, me, and the baby.”

“I now can speak English well,” I said. “I now know what you say.”

“Good.” He ran his hand up and over the hill of my stomach. “That’s very good, lamb.”

Sometimes he would bend me over the bathroom sink and make love to me from behind, tilting my face upward so that I could watch myself in the small, speckled mirror, and I was always bewildered by what I saw. The solid white shape of the man behind me, with his ghostly golden hair, as well as my own careful expression, which then, predictably, erupted into a sexualized grimace, and then I would avert my eyes for the ugliness of it. With my pleasure came ugliness. I had to remember this, and yet it did me no good.

There are moments I can pinpoint in my life where I look and say, “This is where it decayed.” Like the first bruises on a fruit that suddenly rots without warning.

One morning I woke up and the chandelier was askew. The paintings of flowers—even the flowers had seemed to wilt—tilted
on their nails. Our clothing was everywhere but not shed from our bodies; rather, someone had pulled them from their hangers and onto the floor and the chairs. I thought I was dreaming in the light and pulled myself and my heavy belly out of bed. I pressed my fingers into my skin and felt their strength: I wasn’t dreaming. It was February. Morning fog clouded the wide windows. I called David’s name, and when no one answered I checked the bathroom and then the parlor. What was new and what was old? How had I not noticed the paper containers stained with grease, the bags on their sides like fallen soldiers? David was gone, and I was too afraid to leave.

In the afternoon he came back with his peacoat buttoned and his shirt wrapped around his bleeding hand. I had been chewing the insides of my cheeks and flipping through old issues of
Life,
not reading any of it but needing to do something with my fingers.

“Your hand, what happened? You went to where?” In panic I pulled him to the sofa. He seemed confused. “Where?” I repeated. I tried to unwrap his makeshift bandage to see what had happened. He resisted, but my terror was stronger; I had never seen him behave this way before. His hand was covered in haphazard, deep gashes split with open sides: palm, back, fingers, a map on top of a map of scars, wounds so open that I thought the sides would never come together, and I pressed my own hand to my mouth to keep from screaming.

When Farmer Chu died, Fatty told me that her mother believed he had been possessed by a hungry ghost. My mother was not as superstitious as Fatty’s, and I wasn’t raised with such beliefs. But Fatty was adamant about the reasons for her father’s death. In his drunkenness he often wandered the streets at night, where any hungry ghost could have taken possession of his body. He could have encountered a snake or fox, or even fucked a beautiful ghost-woman in a neighbor’s field. Why else would he feed himself to pigs? I searched David’s coat pockets and found a bloody knife, and I cried. Yet I was in America. There were no hungry ghosts in America. I thought about Mrs. Nowak, and what she had said about her son: “He’s
crazy
.” The question was where the craziness came from. Was it in the spirit, or in the blood? I kept crying as I rewrapped the shirt around his hand. He sat on the couch until I told him to get into the bed, and he did that, like an
obedient child, still in his peacoat, and stared at the ceiling and muttered to himself.

I was afraid to leave David in the room alone. I washed the knife and kept it in my purse until I could throw it out the window. I disposed of it in the middle of the night, chanting prayers as I did so, and then I watched him sleep with a bloody rag wrapped around his hand, red spotting the sheets.

He slept for only one or two hours at a time. The rest of the time he continued to stare at the ceiling. Sometimes he talked to himself, or shouted. Maybe he was talking and shouting at me, but I wasn’t certain. I had a difficult time understanding what he was saying, and I didn’t know if it was because he was speaking nonsense, or because my English wasn’t as good as I wished it to be. I stayed awake by pinching myself, careful not to pinch myself too hard lest it disturb the baby, and I also sang to myself all the old songs I knew, and the American bar songs, too. I lay beside David in the bed, crawling under the blankets, and I sang to him, but after accidentally falling asleep once I stopped lying in the bed with him and walked around the bedroom instead, in circles like a mindless donkey.

Day and night came the same. The fog swelled against the windows, and then the rain, which pinged on the glass and then pounded at it.

I took his wallet on the third slow day and put it in my purse. I checked the room for anything dangerous before I left. I had to return quickly so that nothing could happen, but I had to leave because there was no more food, not a single stale bun or grain of rice, and I was both dizzy from hunger and afraid for the baby. I took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped into the daylight, where crowds were scurrying up and down the sidewalk, teeming with the small, icky motions of their arms and legs.

I had not been outside of room 333 in months, and the emergence felt like falling. The sky seemed larger—I wasn’t standing beneath the heavens, but feeling the heavens suck me up in all directions. In a cloud of voices I waddled toward the biggest street that I could find. I’d had to fashion clothing to accommodate my belly: one of David’s shirts, tied at the waist; a yellow dress turned upside down and tied with a leather belt for a skirt. Everyone looked, frowning at my getup—looked at me, my small-eyed face, the darkness of my hair. A woman stopped and
shook her dandelion head. I walked until I found a food store, and swiftly I picked up a loaf of white bread, a bag of oranges, and cheese, even though I had never liked cheese, but David did. I went to the counter, where a man with hair the color and sheen of tar was smoking a cigarette. He sorted through my things. No, I couldn’t care about the looks I received, or the shame, because I needed my thoughts to be so powerful that David would remain sleeping until I got back to the hotel. I was focusing with such concentration that I didn’t realize the man at the counter was speaking to me, but I didn’t care to understand because I needed to pay and leave, and I needed to get back to my husband or something terrible would happen. He said it again anyway: “ ______ Chinatown?”

I nodded. Of course. I paid him. To hell with him, to hell with Chinatown, to hell with all of them.

I could barely walk, so heavy were my things, so heavy was my belly, but I went back to the hotel. My heart was thumping, thumping, thumping. I gave the black man in the elevator a coin, and then I ran to the door. Again I felt myself on some kind of brink. I unlocked the door and I banged the door open and then closed as I went through the ruined parlor into the bedroom.

David was awake and sitting. His eyes were red. The skin beneath them sagged. “Where did you go,” he said. His bandaged hand lifted, and swatted at the nothingness in front of his face.

EROTICISM

DAVID (1954–1956)

I
admit that for too long I only knew my wife as erotic. I don’t mean that she was wild and thrashing, or frothing at the mouth with her hand up her skirts. I meant that she was exotic to me, and that was the primary pleasure that I derived from her, I confess.

One might ask: Do I regret that we hadn’t had a Catholic wedding? I regret that I had to, in a sense, instruct a blind man in the art of color theory. I met her on her terms. Off the plane after a long-haul flight, I felt the new air first, a wet blanket that smothered everything, that smelled of not-quite-rotting garbage and, faintly, sewage. On the cart into the port city of Kaohsiung, with the wheels rattling below me such that my teeth clattered and clacked unless I clenched my jaw shut, I heard the words of people cawing in the same steady waves as the warm air that never lifted, the same air that pressed against the windows like hands.

Taiwan wasn’t what I had expected. If you weren’t there when I was you can’t know what I mean. If you’ve been there recently, and seen the modernity of what was once a third-world country, you know half of it. Imagine the roofs barely held together and the billboards covered in mysterious slashes and dots. Such a conflagration was the only thing I could understand after New York. I’d gone down to my white bones. I’d scalped my skull, cracked it open, and seen the putrefying brain beneath. The last thing I wanted to think about was how hard it was to be a person and how hard it was to be alive.

In Taiwan I was staying in an apartment above a teahouse. Marty, of all people, had handled my arrangements, having joined the navy immediately after graduation. Though I waited, bereft, for a letter from Marianne, it was Marty whom I received a letter from that June, which began with apologies: for his father’s violence, his parents’ scheming, his sister’s behavior. Crede mihi, he wrote,
when I say that Marianne has less control over her life than you think.
He then went on to describe his life in Taiwan, which intrigued me—so many bicycles! Stray animals everywhere underfoot! Banana farms, and did I know bananas grew in bunches on trees? The letter ended by saying,
I know this must sound crazy, but I wanted to see if we could have a correspondence.

I didn’t write back to Marty right away. I felt that I should wait until I heard from Marianne before I spent any energy on her brother. His letter sat in a desk drawer while I tended to Matka, making her gin and tonics with just a splash of olive juice, the yellowy tinge clouding against the ice cubes. So many gin and tonics there were, and no letter came for one month, and then two months, and then three months, at which point I stopped hoping, or convinced myself that I had stopped hoping to hear from Marianne Orlich.

So I wrote Marty back; after all, I was lonely, too. I asked, among other things, if he could tell me anything about where Marianne was, or how she was doing. The reply, which took weeks to arrive, made no mention of his sister. I knew it was a deliberate omission, but what could I do? Soon Taiwan became so appealing that I asked if he could help me make arrangements. Really, though, it could have been anywhere. I just wanted to get away.

He’d planned my stay by contacting his former lieutenant, who was still active in the American intervention. I would meet Lieutenant Archibald Winner at a given day and time, and he would show me to my apartment. When the lieutenant had a spare moment, he would help me to acclimate myself to my surroundings. On the fourth day, I planned to meet up with Marty, who would be returning from a tour of the nearby seas.

The lieutenant liked me well enough. His smile was avuncular when I first met him, as though I were an old relative that he had grown up with, or perhaps lived on the same block as, for years. He was happy to do me favors. He was the sort who would have done well as one of Proust’s bourgeoisie, so aware of and respectful
of class was he. He called Michigan a shitty place, and referred to New York City as the center of the world with reverence. He was Protestant, but appeared to have no problem with Catholics. He was not Polish, but respected the Polish community “for their brio,” and was disappointed to hear that I didn’t speak Polish. This disappointment faded when he learned of my predilection for Latin. The lieutenant was in his late thirties, but had already gone entirely silver-gray, and had three deep lines permanently carved into his forehead regardless of facial expression. For long stretches of time he would disappear, I presumed due to his naval duties, and then he would show up at my flat above the teahouse, out of his navy whites, looking small and ordinary in a fresh T-shirt and khakis with dusty shoes on.

About the Golden Lotus he’d said, “It’s a place to go, if you want to meet pretty girls.”

“And you don’t?”

“Ah, well, it’s essentially a whorehouse, and I wouldn’t be able to keep my wife from knowing I’d dipped my pen in some other girl’s ink. She can read volumes in the twitch of my left eye. I go for drinks, for company, but I keep it in my pants.”

He asked if I was interested. I shrugged. We were the only two people in that teahouse with its low, screened windows. We sat on benches. Flies and mosquitoes sang and swam around us, their dances strange and ever present despite the violent zappers that hung from every window, each bursting occasionally into flame.

He said, “It’s not like your New York, is it? Not like anything else, either. I’ve been here for five months, and something new surprises me every day. It’s not just the food or the filth or the Orientals. It’s even the sun in the sky—it doesn’t feel like the same sun. The moon isn’t the same moon.”

Nothing was the same, but I was relieved by the difference. My neuroses had all but disappeared since arriving in Kaohsiung, though I missed Marianne. In her absence my hormones broke viciously through, and I spent hours regretting that I hadn’t, at the very least, felt her beneath her blouses and skirts when I had the chance. I was convinced that she would be softer than anything I’d ever touched—as soft as the centimeter of skin behind my earlobe, as soft as Matka’s chinchilla coat, the quality of skin as hot and damp as the inside of a mouth. The mere consideration of her body gave me a hard-on.

When I didn’t hear from Marty by the end of the fourth day, I mentioned him to the lieutenant. He pursed his lips, which I’d never seen a man do before, and then he said, “Martin is no longer in the navy, I’m sorry to say.”

“What? Why? When did that happen?”

“You’d have to ask him yourself.”

“Well, do you have his information? A contact?”

He shrugged.

I thought about going home, and then dismissed the idea. Nor did I complain about Marty’s flightiness, though I was curious about what I perceived as the suspicious circumstances of his departure; I’d gone around the world to experience something else, and it didn’t matter if Marty was or wasn’t there. I could fend for myself.

Later the lieutenant said, “The girls aren’t the same here. You’re how old? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Old enough to know a bit of the difference. You see it in their eyes. They don’t have much here. It’s not a wealthy country, but maybe not quite third world, either. You see it in the bars as though whoring were ordinary. There’s one girl I ran into when I was with one of my fellas, about to go in for some drinks and company. One of them—the Oriental girls, I mean—she took no money. She was dressed in Western dress. Not in one of those
qipao.
She was dressed like the girls back home, and that threw me off. Anyway, she had her eye on my sailor. Just grabbed his arm, laughed in a way that made my skin crawl, and tugged him in the direction of the big house behind the Golden Lotus, out by one of the northwest banana fields.”

“And he didn’t go.”

“Oh no,” the lieutenant said, sipping his tea. “He went! Seemed happy enough when he came back. It was no effort for him, and he didn’t have to pay. I asked him what it was like. He said it was heavenly. ‘China girls know how to move,’ he said.”

I tried to imagine this girlish apparition appearing. As a virgin it was harder still to imagine the sex, the moves, or that kind of female desire.

“‘Like a dream,’ he said. I would have thought he was lying, if not for the fact that I’d seen her myself. Almond-shaped eyes. Long black hair. Sexy as all hell. There’s no making that stuff up.”

I said, “That’s so strange.”

“Something about being here, I guess. There’s no dignity in it. It’s different here. There’s no dignity in the way these girls live.”

We changed subjects then, but the
jiu jia
lingered in my thoughts, as did the notion of an Oriental girl in Western dress—looking like Marianne in the garments she chose, but with a different species of face and pitch-black hair. I imagined her arching her body so that her belly pointed toward the sky and her soft breasts rose pale from her firm chest. When I returned to my flat, the window was open, breezeless, and I was sweating through my clothes. I turned on the radio. I went to my bamboo mat, parted the curtains of my mosquito tent, and lay down within its web, running my hand down the waistband of my slacks to feel myself, my nerve endings waiting for something to come into contact with, all the aching electricity of sex thrumming like cable wire, and an imaginary body made of swampy heat climbing on top of mine. I didn’t caress or linger, but squeezed and trembled. I closed my eyes and moaned between gritted teeth.

The lieutenant said, “You know, it’s possible to never go to the open-air market, if you eat street meats for every meal. But if you’re inclined to cook for yourself. . .” And he held up his cuttlefish skewer and thrust it in an easterly direction. “Or even if you don’t cook. It’s a madhouse, but may hold some interest for a man interested in foreign cultures.” I told him that I would go. How different could a market be? What kind of blood-soaked dirt forming red-black islands, hog heads’ eyes bulging white, the stink of fish and meat attracting looping flies? I went midweek. The lieutenant insisted on coming with me. He had a taste for what he called
lian wu,
a type of apple, and the oranges, he said, were sugar-sweet. Hurriedly he pulled out his cap, which was not a navy-issued hat but a Detroit Tigers cap, and he adjusted the brim such that the lines in his forehead were in shadow.

The nearest market to my teahouse faced the port and was propped up by ramshackle constructions made of tin and wood, shielding leathery women and men from further sun as they sat, legs open, elbows on their knees, behind their goods, which were laid out on the ground atop blue tarps. It was loud, very loud,
and the smell nearly knocked me over like the butcher’s back home, except with no ventilation and captive beneath a bell jar of heat. Everyone yelled at one another as though perpetually arguing, hollering again and again in surges of nasal noise.

After ten minutes of the lieutenant pointing out that exotic item and that unusual creature, some in buckets or flayed on tables, I had purchased exactly one bag of hard-boiled eggs stewed in soy sauce, and I’d had enough. If our olfactory senses are the most direct pathway to memory, what does it mean when every scent is strange?

Then the lieutenant stopped, grabbed my arm, and said, “There!”

He pointed at two girls at a round table, eating shaved ice. One girl was fat, the other thin. The fat girl laughed with her mouth wide open, head tilted back, her large breasts shaking beneath her blouse, and she wore sandals that exposed candy-apple-red toenails. Something was wrong with her arm. The thin girl beside her smiled, her hair tied up in a bun, exposing a long, slender neck with what was—I was sure of this—a hickey on the side. It was the only mottled and ugly thing on her otherwise flawless self. Oh, she was beautiful, of course, in a way that I didn’t understand. I was already beginning to fall for her without truly seeing. And I only sense this in hindsight, but I was filled with excitement over something foreign that could serve as a vessel inside which I could put all of my longings and hopes. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like where I’d come from. Therefore, I was forced to like something different. It’s really no different from any other exoticism—say, the exoticism of something so beautiful that to try to describe it falls into a series of clichés: “startlingly blue eyes,” “shiny hair,” “full lips.” Beauty, if you’re like most un-truly-beautiful people, is unlike the self, with its strangeness being part of what makes it novel, and therefore pleasurable. To love something different and inexplicable is a natural state of the human condition.

She wore, as the lieutenant had explained, expensive-looking Western clothing. I assumed, wrongly, that she was a kept woman. Her breasts were the size of my fists. She had pointy elbows. Later, I would adore these elbows beyond reason. Her legs were not bare like her friend’s, and she wore white kneesocks and
saddle shoes that looked as though they had been polished that morning. Her shoulder bag hung at her side, sadly drooping, cast away.

But the hickey. The hickey was dirt, it was sex. It couldn’t be brushed away, marking her till it disappeared of its own volition.