The Border of Paradise: A Novel (15 page)

When the laughter died down it seemed that we were adrift again, without connection—but having had that connection, I wanted more. So I said, “How long have you been a bar girl?”

“Pardon?”

“You are a bar girl? How long?”

“Pardon?”

“Forget it. Are you happy here?”

“Happy here…” She picked up her hand and swayed it back and forth.
Comme ci, comme ça.
“No one happy. Yes?”

And I got very quiet. I lay down on the tatami, and I covered my eyes with one arm so that I couldn’t see anything. In my
mouth was the taste of all of that whiskey, and in my loins was the memory of spasms. I thought I wanted to come back. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything. I got up and left the paper room, wove through the sailors in their hats, stumbled into the hot air that felt like sickness. Now that I was away from home, I missed America. I thought of New York fireworks, and of the pews at St. Jadwiga that I knew so well, worn almost soft beneath our bodies, and I touched my slicked fingers to my mouth, which brought me no pleasure.

I wasn’t far from the entrance of the bar, and there was someone calling to me, I realized, through the haze of voices and dogs barking. When I turned I saw that it was the pretty girl from the market. It was true what the lieutenant had said—they
didn’t
all look the same. This girl had high cheekbones and a thin nose. She was wearing a striped and belted green dress, socks, Oxfords—the dress of a schoolgirl or aspiring bobby-soxer. Her hair, loose past her shoulders, hid the bruise on her neck. But I knew it was there, and the knowledge reinvigorated me.

“You forget your knife,” she said, and handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

“Mei-Ling tell me. You like Mei-Ling?”

I nodded. I was still drunk—the soggy air didn’t help that. But it was true that this girl was beautiful, and I felt momentarily brave.

“Do you want to come to my apartment?” I asked her.

She laughed. “You want sex?”

“I want
you
.”

“You want sex with me?”

“I want to spend time with you.”

“Spend time?” she said.

“I want to be with you.”

“Ah. I want to listen music,” she said, and delicately pinched her thumb and forefinger together in the distance between us, lifting them an inch or so in the air, and then swinging her arm in an arc before gently dropping them onto an imaginary record. “You have music?”

I nodded. She swayed slightly, rocking back and forth from foot to foot; from this she might sound like someone unsure of herself, or physically awkward, but Daisy has always been anything but awkward, and was merely hypnotizing me—and the serpentine symbolism of her movement does not escape me, but
it’s never that simple, is it? She makes that swaying motion now only rarely. In fact, she usually stands quite still.

We went to the teahouse, up the stairs to my apartment. I fumbled for my keys, still drunk, and she said, “You are nice.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said.

“No, I know, I know,” she said, and wrapped her arms around my waist, pressing her warm lips to my shoulder. “You are a nice man.”

She waited for me to open the door. When I did, she slipped in past me and strode around the room, examining things such as a canvas rucksack, or my briefcase, or a pile of books that I imagined she couldn’t read, her fingers stroking the few shirts I had hanging in the alcove that I called a closet. I thrilled to anticipate the shape of her breasts beneath that belted dress, the curve of her ankles beneath those cream-colored socks that matched the paleness of her silly Oxfords exactly, and I wanted to be on top of her. No—I wanted
her
to be on top of
me,
controlling me, doing as she pleased with me. This Oriental girl would not mind seizing me. After all, according to the lieutenant, she had fucked plenty of white men because she enjoyed it.

Daisy turned to me. “Shall we,” she said, and I loved the word
shall
in her mouth, its formality, “listen?”

“What do you want to listen to?”

“Mmm,” she said, pressing her lips together, “you have what?”

“Well, let’s see. I have,” I said, “see here, I have a lot of classical music, like Mozart and Beethoven and Bach, but especially Beethoven. I love Beethoven. Have you heard Beethoven?”

“Beethoven?”

I hummed, as best as I could, the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony. She shook her head. The notion of someone having never heard the Fifth Symphony surprised me. Then again, I reminded myself, we were fundamentally different. I went to the record player and I took the requisite record, tilted the sleeve, and let the black vinyl slip into my hand, and as I arranged the system to play I could feel Daisy watching from behind me, so close that her head was almost resting on my shoulder. I felt electricity flickering between us in that small space, and my back went hot and prickly sensing it.

The symphony began. I turned to look at Daisy and saw that she was curled up on her side, with her wrists positioned such
that her paws pressed against her chin. With her eyes closed, she looked even more like a child, even with her lip color and rouge. And after ten minutes had passed, and after she had still not moved, I wondered if I’d made the wrong decision in having this girl come over. I was no Don Juan, and she was making no attempt at being a seductress. I was about to ask her if she liked the music when she exhaled suddenly in a rush, and then snored very lightly, but it was still a snore, and I was annoyed in the way that a young man is annoyed when a beautiful girl prefers falling asleep to Beethoven over unbuttoning his strained pants. But what could I do? I removed the needle from its groove. Still, she did not move. I wondered if she was deprived of sleep. The bruise at her neck, exposed, stared up at me like a black eye. As I went to my bed to fetch her a sheet, I realized that she couldn’t sleep there; the mosquitoes would eat her alive.

So I tapped her on the shoulder, and then I shook her lightly. Her eyes opened.

“You’ll be bitten by mosquitoes,” I said. “Sleep underneath the tent.”

“Mosquitoes?”

I mimicked an insect, flapping my arms and making a whimpering, whining sound, and then I pointed at the bed. I parted the curtains of the tent and climbed inside, and then I said, “Come here.”

She did, and then she fell asleep again. I lay beside her, aching, and put my arm around her, which she didn’t seem to mind. I tried not to touch her with my body from the waist down. I pressed my face against her arm and breathed the scent of her skin, which smelled like nothing, but felt warm. Even though she was asleep, I already felt less alone, and I think this is how I began to fall in love with her. You feel alone and something comes to take away the knife-edge of your loneliness. The more mysterious, the better; there’s less to prove you wrong. I lay next to her for hours before falling asleep myself, and in that time I felt myself coasting on waves of anxiety that dipped down into black relief, and then I floated gently onshore. I rested. In the morning I awoke, and I was unsurprised to see that she’d left without saying good-bye. But instead of feeling angry or annoyed, as I had before, my flesh was suffused with tenderness for her. For her, I was no ordinary man, but someone whom she felt comfortable
enough with to sleep beside. I evoked no anxiety in her. She’d slept like a child. It was a revelation, and I was moving on.

My relationship with Catholicism had fluctuated to a low ebb in my time overseas, but when I discovered the beauty of St. Joseph’s Church I immediately loved its charming stained-glass windows and modest pews, which were not unlike the ones in St. Jadwiga back home, and I told Daisy that I would like to take our family to church on Sundays, which she only vaguely seemed to understand, but agreed to nonetheless. The morning before we went to church we sat at the kitchen table, where I attempted to summarize Catholicism in the simplest way possible. As I began to deliver my explanation I realized that Catholicism was, in fact, difficult to explain to a non-Westerner without verging on ridiculousness. Daisy nodded gravely at everything I said, but I wouldn’t have blamed her if she thought I was spouting gibberish.

When we arrived at St. Joseph’s, Daisy seemed bewildered by the rituals. She tried to mimic everything that I did, though she crossed herself in the wrong order, and was slow to realize when we were to stand and sit; I strained to appreciate her efforts. William sat in her lap with
Goodnight Moon
in his, ignoring the ceremony and rites until it was time for Communion, and when I stood to approach for the wafer and wine, he reached for me, the book sliding to the floor with a bang.

“No,” I whispered, hoisting him by the armpits to sit him back down again, “you two stay here.”

“I want,” William said, and he wasn’t loud about it, but people began to look at us—which they did anyway, because of the kind of people we were.

“No,” I said, panic rising hot behind my breastbone, and I told Daisy, “Keep him in his seat,” before I hurriedly exited the pew and into the line. I looked back, and my family was the only one still seated; I flushed at seeing their dark faces, including William’s miserable one. He looked like he was about to shout. As I took the host upon my tongue I closed my eyes and saw, behind my lids, young, smiling Marianne patting the pew beside her.

After Mass had concluded, and we exited St. Joseph’s into the frigid air with our coats on, Daisy said, “We do this every week, Ba?”

“I hope so,” I replied. We were in a small crowd of Polk Valley denizens who chattered about potlucks, none of which we were invited to, and my wife looped one arm through mine while holding William with her other. She asked, within earshot of everyone, “How there is so many of Jesus’s body to eat?”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it. I drew my family away from the crowd. “It’s very complicated,” I said. We made our way to the car. “It’s—it’s very complicated. When your English is better, I’ll explain it to you.”

Later that night, as we settled into bed and I turned off the bedside lamp, Daisy said, “I like church.”

“Yes, lamb?”

“Yes.”

“What do you like about it?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything more, and in the dark I thought she’d fallen asleep. Finally she said, “Many times, I do not understand you. Church helps me.”

“It helps you to understand me?”

“A little bit.”

“How?” I asked, but the question would be fruitless before it was even planted. I couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to explain.

“I see you love something,” she whispered. She reached for my hand, and we intertwined our fingers, and we said good night.

I admit that I was, and am, an elitist. I didn’t want my son to wait until he was seven to begin his schooling when I felt that he was smart enough to begin serious learning when he was four or five; after all, it’s not uncommon for expert pianists to begin their lessons so early, and yes, William did learn to play a scale when he was three, when I began to teach him what I knew on an upright at home. I didn’t dare attempt to have a Nowak shipped out to us from the factory; there was no way that I’d slip past undetected. So I’d found our homey, well-worn secondhand Nowak upright in the city paper for a perfectly reasonable price.

He would not go to school with other children. Daisy and I agreed on this together. Neither of us wanted him to be shunned or mocked for his otherworldly looks. And she wanted to keep him close; there was nothing more she needed than to be with him at
all times, pulling him to her whenever he wandered within arm’s length, and lifting her eyes to observe him every few moments like clockwork. Twice she tentatively brought up the notion of a second child, for William’s sake, but I stood adamantly against this. I, the Catholic, felt guilty about but insisted on contraception, not wanting to feel the same eerie sense of alienation that I suffered with William, and I hated that sense for existing. Of course I did not hate him. I’m not a monster when it comes to my only boy. I know all too well from my own father-son relationship that such relationships are complicated, and I tried—oh, I tried!—not to let William feel unloved, unwanted. I hope I haven’t failed in this.