The Border of Paradise: A Novel (16 page)

But about education. I spent a lot of time attempting to distill a concentration of essential books. There was the Bible, of which I preferred the King James for its stride. I wanted him to know Latin, too, and I considered acquiring a textbook, and then moving on to Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars,
and so forth. We would need a dictionary, of course, a good one. We could find a copy of the abridged
Oxford English
somewhere, or have it mailed to us. We already had
Goodnight Moon.
He was reading that on his own before he was two, sounding out the words based on a teaching style that I cobbled together, pulling together consonants and vowels, singing the alphabet, and drawing letters onto sheets of paper. Until William was six and Gillian was four, I didn’t begin to teach my children in earnest, but I had a list of books that I wanted to keep in the house for them:
Physicians Desk Reference to Pharmaceutical Specialties and Biologicals,
a world atlas, a few dictionaries in other languages, a field guide to North American birds. I made a short list, and those books are all in the shelves now, save for the King James that Ojciec inscribed for me, and which I keep here with me in my briefcase but will soon enough find its way back home, I imagine, when the police arrive. I trust that my children will be able to take the reins from here.

After a year of living in Polk Valley, our existence had become tightly circumscribed. We three went into town only to purchase groceries and dry goods, because staying home was easier than trying to appear normal when I was ailing; and Daisy pressured me, too, stating that she felt stared at by what she referred to
as “strange people,” and I was too tired to explain to her that we, and not they, were the strange ones. We no longer went to Mass, although this was less a consequence of Daisy’s feelings and more due to my discomfort with attending church. After all, we’d had a civil, and thus secular, wedding ceremony, as Matka had suspected, and I did want to raise William to be a good Catholic, but how would I do it without Daisy’s help? At times I heard her chanting, singsong, to William in her language. I told her to stop, and we fought, and she cried, and I screamed at her that I wasn’t raising a foreign child in my own home; I reeled with how out of control my life had become. For a few weeks I took William to Mass alone, insisting that Daisy remain at home, but he seemed to understand his parents’ religious conflict. He stopped paying attention. He refused to stand and sit when he was supposed to, and he whined loudly for his mother, the embarrassment nearly killing me. I stopped taking him, and then I stopped going, too. It all felt pointless, too pointless.

It was this limited life that brought back the ghost of Marianne Orlich, never quite forgotten, who now possessed in my mind even more of the holy attributes that I’d once put upon her. I sat in the kitchen with William in my lap, sifting through flashcards while he placidly absorbed them, and he repeated things with his dull, thick tongue. I worried about his accent; he did have one. (And I tried to shake it out of him, but I’ll go to the grave with the knowledge that my boy, my own flesh and blood, sounds off-key.) As I absentmindedly turned the cards that my wife had so diligently made, I watched said wife as she stood at the counter and sliced potatoes. She was humming to herself a song that I didn’t recognize. With Marianne in my head I saw only the parts of Daisy that were decidedly not white. She was small, and her black hair was in a thick braid down her back, and with her left foot crossed over her right one I wondered why her feet, which I had once been so enamored by, were so tiny, and could think only of things like barbaric foot-binding rituals; when had such things ended, anyway? Her questions about Mass made me cringe. So did her blunt disbelief with regard to transubstantiation—these were all things that had hurried along our domestic conflicts. I wondered why I’d set such traps for myself. I was living with someone whom I loved, but in so many ways she was a stranger to me, and with our handicapped communication I felt lonelier than ever.

So to the painfully obvious question of why I had married this woman in the first place, I would say that I adored her sharp and almost jagged elbows; I loved how inappropriate it felt to remove her saddle shoes, which she still let me do as part of sex in our shoeless home, and I always unlaced them to reveal her white socks and what I then considered to be her marvelously shaped feet. I loved how she was mouthy when she got drunk and never pretended to be more decorous than she really was, but would occasionally slip into what she called
sa jiao,
a sappy, sloppy girlishness that made my nerves squirm with delight. She lounged in my bed under the mosquito tent, dressed in her unbuttoned silk blouses and underwear. She would sprawl out on my small bed, stroking her own hipbone with the back of her fingers as one would a cat, staring at the ceiling. At times I thought my heart would take a running leap out of my chest; at times all I wanted was to look at her forever. Why else do people fall in love? What sense does love ever make for itself, especially young love, which is so desperate to be satisfied?

“Nowak, let me tell you,” the lieutenant had said. “You
pay
, you
play,
but you never let them
stay
.”

When I had asked her to marry me, she laughed. She traced her finger in a thin oval on my bare and tanning side. “America?” she said. Her breasts were paler than the rest of her torso. Her upper arms were the darkest part of her. She had delicate hairs that sprouted from her areolae. I loved to bite her brown nipples till she moaned.

“Yes,” I said. “You can have anything you want.”

“Whatever I all want I have here. Why don’t you stay here? Stay in Taiwan, be here, be happy with me.”

“I can’t do that. I don’t speak Chinese. At least you know English.”

“At here everybody know me, I have power.”

“In America,” I said, kissing her forehead, “everyone will know you. I promise. I promise, I promise, I promise. My lamb. I promise you, you will have a good life with me.”

“I have a good life here.”

“I want to be with you. And so you must come with me.”

Nothing. She rolled onto her belly, the curvature of her back smooth as driftwood. “I’ll never leave,” she said. The ring, pure gold, was still in my hand.

We spent our days together in my apartment or at the Golden Lotus, and there was no in-between, which I believe led to a rapid
increase in the sexualization of our relationship. After I asked her to marry me and she said no, I searched for her in the ordinary places, but couldn’t find her for days, and I was afraid that I’d scared her off with my proposal. And I feared that the old insanity would come around again as I wandered the filthy streets of Kaohsiung with bicycles swirling around me, my armpits sweating, being followed by dogs with their ribs showing and their shrill barks sounding; I waited for the abyss of fear to open in my belly, pulling everything I’d managed to make of a life into that deep hole, but I thought I could scare it off with distraction. I spent several nights at the Golden Lotus so that I could drink—alone, chastely—with Mei-Ling, the first girl, and I asked her if she knew where Jia-Hui was. She shook her head. I reached into my wallet and pulled out three nights’ worth of yuan, which was nothing to me, but which I knew would be everything to her.

“This is yours. Not the mama-san’s. Yours.”

She pushed the money back at me. “I take your money, mama-san finds out, I get hit, kill. No.”

“I want to know what happened to Jia-Hui.”

Perhaps Mei-Ling heard something in my voice, because she went still then, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet. “The mama-san. Only because Jia-Hui is mama-san’s daughter is she alive. She is bad.” The word
bad
held weight. It loaded down the space between us with a thousand tons.

“Bad?” I echoed.

“The most dirty. People know Jia-Hui and the whites have sex for no money. But she is even more dirty. More bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mei-Ling gave me a hard look. “I know you like Jia-Hui. So many men like her. But she has a poison. I tell you, she is worse than animal and worse than whore.”

I pressed her for more, but she added nothing to what she’d told me already, so I weighed my options. Mei-Ling was frail and would be easy to bully. She reminded me of the girls I taunted in my youth, and it wasn’t so different now. If I hurt her it would only be a means to an end. I could break her wrist by clenching it in one disfigured hand. Even now, I wonder, what happened to Mei-Ling? Did she ultimately make a misstep? Was she killed for an error, or did she grow old in that whorehouse? Did a white knight carry her away on his pale, gaunt horse? I cared so little
about what she had to say about Jia-Hui’s poor standing. I was obsessed. I would eviscerate myself for Jia-Hui, but I did not hurt Mei-Ling.

On a night that is only important to my memory because of Jia-Hui’s role in it, I exited the bar. I walked home as I had done so many nights before. The few lights in the windows doubled themselves and shimmered. Dogs snapped at my ankles. They circled me in a ragtag pack, one not belonging to another, snarling and woofing in hopes of a scrap, or perhaps in hopes of devouring me. I walked and they followed, leaping. A Chinaman passed with his head down, looking briefly at me before hurrying elsewhere. Here she was to chase them away, my ghost-girl. I felt her grab my arm.

“Take me to America,” she said in a rush, her breath in my ear. She sank her face into the side of my head, whispering, “I want to marry you.”

Daisy finished cutting the potatoes. William laid his head against the inside of my elbow, signaling that he was tired of flashcards. Four o’clock: he needed a nap.

“William’s sleepy,” I said, still thinking of Daisy’s small feet, and my memory of Marianne’s larger ones, pink from traipsing inside wool socks and boots in the snow, the size of which she was embarrassed by. I lifted William into my arms, and he rested his face on my shoulder. I carried him into his room and settled him to bed. There was no such thing as a crib for our wee one; he slept in a twin bed with an assortment of stuffed toys. I tucked two bears around him and pulled the covers to his chin. He did not suck his thumb, as I had. He said, drowsily, “Love you.”

“I love you, too.” I kissed him on his crown.

Next I entered the master bedroom, which was sparsely decorated. I’d thought all women were interested in interiors, but Daisy was not. The only additions that she made to our bedroom were a few of William’s drawings—taped, not framed—to the wall above our iron headboard, and a corny, coral-colored vase of fake carnations that she’d bought from town and placed on her vanity table. I’d chosen the furniture: the wrought-iron bed, the matching mahogany night tables, the wardrobe with its
elaborately carved doors, and even the vanity table and mirror, which I’d assumed that Daisy wanted because she was a woman, and which she did use, though I never did know if it brought her pleasure.

I closed the door and locked it. The phone sat on my side of the bed, on my night table. My wife, after all, had no one to call.

“Number, please.”

I gave the switchboard operator the Orlichs’ number. I waited, and through the crackle of the line I heard a familiar voice: “Caroline Orlich speaking.”

“Mrs. Orlich,” I said.

“Who is this?” Did I hear something resigned, tired, upset?

“It’s David Nowak.”

“Oh. Well,” she said, “this is a surprise.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No. I’m completely unoccupied at the moment. Isn’t it true that you broke your mother’s heart a few years back?”

The fact that Mrs. Orlich knew this shocked me. Matka was a private person, and wouldn’t even have allowed anyone to know about my father’s death if it hadn’t been an unavoidable concession. Carefully I asked, “Do you speak with her?”

“No. I see her at the supermarket sometimes, but she’s always thought that she was too good for me. Look where that’s got her. Anyway, I heard from George that you had some kind of fight with her. That’s all. She looks miserable, by the way—skin and bones. Wrapped in furs like a bag lady. Why are you calling?”