The Border of Paradise: A Novel (26 page)

When I awaken the morning after our consummation, I think for a moment that I’m still dreaming. David’s dragged Gillian out of bed again and she’s at it in the living room. It is, indeed, my sister playing, and in fact, a sunken part of my brain recognizes it straightaway as Scott Joplin, her favorite. But Gillian
rarely gets up before I do—loves to sleep in. Moreso, she seems to have skipped her exercises. Finally, there’s something essentially wrong about the way she’s performing whatever it is that’s waking me up at four thirty on the day that our mother returns.

I sit up in bed and pull off the sheets. Immediately I think of the night before and that clownish pleasure, the prelude to a lifetime of love with her, and I grin to remember the look and feel of her body. She’d gone to the bathroom afterward, turning the light on as she left, and came back in a T-shirt and underwear with clean thighs and a toothy smile. (Her teeth, small and pointy, giving any smile of hers a bizarre gleam.) “Sorry about that,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “The blood shocked me, is all.” And then she told me she loved me and wished me a good night.

I dress and go to the living room, where Gillian sits with perfect posture at her bench. The lamp is on. This morning she’s dressed in a dreamy, silky thing with no sleeves, exposing her burnished shoulders, which reminds me of how mad I am about her shoulders. “Is that ‘Bethena’?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Bethena,” the song Scott Joplin wrote for his wife, Freddie Alexander, after she perished because of complications from a cold. So Mrs. Kucharski told us, which I have never forgotten.

“Isn’t that a little fast for ‘Bethena’?”

“I thought I’d play it a little fast today,” she answers.

“It sounds all right,” I say. “The syncopation is awkward.” Her hands swing at the wrists, back and forth over the keys. Suddenly her comportment dampens the thrill I’d felt in bed and replaces it with unease. “Ma said she’d be home in the evening today,” I add. “I’ll start cleaning the kitchen. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right.”

“Nothing’s troubling you?”

“Buddy,” she says, “what’s troubling me is trying to hold forth while playing this song to completion.”

I go to the kitchen, rebuked. For the rest of the day I am desperate to have sex again, the memory of the night before causing a strong and frequent recurrence of arousal. On occasion, in between jabs of mopping or sweeping, I put my hand on her hip or on the small of her back. She neither recoils nor leans into me.
What a fickle, strange girl,
I think, but I have, of course, no complaints, and I kiss her tenderly on the back of the neck as she
wipes down the counters; I touch her side, and then the inside of her thigh. Finally she says, “There’s a lot left to do,
ge
,” and though my fingers linger for perhaps a few more seconds than they absolutely ought to, I pull them back. “Maybe a little bit of kissing, if there’s time,” I suggest. There is not.

In the late afternoon, before the sun begins to drop out of sight, Ma arrives. “Take my suitcase, please,” she says, using the phrase
bai tuo
; the suitcase is at her feet. I pick up the suitcase. Gillian stands behind me, and Ma looks over my shoulder at her as she adds, “Gillian, tea?”

My mother takes a step farther into the hallway and closer to the bare, hanging bulb, kicking off her shoes and nudging them toward the wall, which is already crowded with shoes and sandals.

Gillian retreats down the hall to the kitchen, and I follow Ma into her room, left exactly as before except for the removal of a few spritzes of perfume, where I place the suitcase flat on her bed and wait for the inevitable interrogation. After David died the master bedroom became a shrine to his death, not in framed and nostalgia-soaked photographs, or trinkets from their fourteen-year marriage, but in absolute ascesis. The scroll ink paintings of chickens and other fat and feathered friends, the landscape oil paintings, blobbed and scraped—wall decorations, in general, gone. So when I say that I sit on the bed without the engraved wooden headboard, which I enjoyed tracing with my thumb as a small and less desirous boy, I mean that I am sitting in a very nearly empty room (bed, vanity table, dresser—all mahogany), on a bed with one pinned bedsheet and one flowered comforter that is the cheeriest thing in the room, waiting for
How was the initiation, the coming together? How are you and your sister doing
, ge? Or maybe she won’t ask at all. Maybe she’ll let me tell her first, or maybe she’ll merely watch for touches or looks. She seems tired and slightly stooped. Ma sits next to me, pulling a matchbook and cigarette pack out of her skirt pocket, and lights a cigarette.

“How was the city?” I ask, moving behind her to rub her shoulders. Her head lolls to one side. She moans. I ask her about the
city every time she goes into Sacramento to buy tofu and other things that she can’t get in Polk Valley. Every time, I expect and receive the same answer.

“Oh,” she finally says, exhaling, “it’s never any good, really. Thank you—that feels wonderful. William, you can’t get much done in the city that you can’t get done in town, and you can’t get much done in town that’s better than being at home. And how was it, being here for the week? I hope I left enough food?”

“We ate well. Things were fine.”

Inhale. Exhale. “What about you and Gillian, then? I expect you bonded?” (I have translated what she actually said to the silly word
bonded,
as though the physical act stuck us two like glue. As it happens, her tone was equally blasé.)

“We did.”

“Good. That’s enough, thank you.” I shift beside her and she smiles, brightening, and pats me on the arm. “You’ll be sharing a bedroom from now on. It will probably be Gillian’s because of the size, and we can use your room for the altar. Move some things around. It’s so good to see you”—and here she embraces me tightly, even with the burning cigarette in her left hand—“and to see your sister looking so well. I really missed the two of you. And I won’t be doing that again, I promise. All right. Let’s go have some tea,
hao ba
?”

In the kitchen, Gillian is sitting at the table, stripping strings from pea pods. The strings go on the table; the pea pods she drops into a bright blue bowl. “Ma,” she says, “how was the city?”

“Well, I had a terrible time sleeping in my hotel,” Ma says. “Sirens kept me up all night long. I’m lucky a bullet didn’t come through the window while I was lying in my bed.”

“How horrible.”

“There’s something about being away that pretty much steals everything good from your memory. I’d almost forgotten how quiet it is here.” Ma crosses the room to sit. I wonder if she’ll mention the bedrooms or if I will have to reveal our new situation to Gillian, who has her eyes half shut under Ma’s touch, a pea pod in her right hand. It does make me nervous when Ma goes into town. Our lessons with Mrs. Kucharski ended when she, shortly after David’s death, fell down what Ma explained was an “elevator shaft”—a terrible accident and a nightmare of
bad machinery that we had not and would never experience, thank God!—plunging her into darkness and leaving her body crumpled and broken below.

When the teakettle shrieks Gillian opens her eyes, drops the pod into the bowl, and, with great reluctance, moves toward the stove, which she does by uncoiling her legs and stretching them in the direction of where she means to go. Minutes later we all have tea in small white cups with small white handles. Gillian is sitting across from Ma and me now, with her brow furrowed adorably as she cups the tea in her hands. A greasy strand of hair has fallen across her right eye, and I can see from a distance that her glasses are smudged as usual, but it only endears her to me.

“Ma says that I’m to move into your room,” I say.

“I see.” Her thumb rubs the circumference of the white cup, back and forth, eyes fixed on the wooden table.

After tea I go to the sink with my cup. Gillian comes up behind me to do the same. I am very aware of Ma watching as my hand alights on Gillian’s shoulder.

“So we’ll start moving things,” Gillian says. “My room is a mess, though. Might not get it all done tonight,” and then she pecks me on the cheek.

Before we move Gillian asks Ma if they may speak in private. They go into the master bedroom, closing the door behind them, and I go to the bathroom, where I stare into the small toothpaste-speckled mirror. I already look steady to myself, a young man ready to take on the responsibilities of having a
tongyangxi.
Still, looking at myself in the mirror compounds a niggling anxiety: that Gillian mightn’t be attracted to me at all, and that this face and body are nothing arousing to her.

In the fluorescent bathroom light I straighten my shoulders. I brush my bangs from my face.

Hold steady, Captain,
I tell myself,
hold steady.

We start moving things that evening. Gillian shoves her rickety wardrobe to make room for mine; she pushes her trunk of dead, wild things against the far wall and beneath the windows. We talk a little, but not much. “Is this okay?” I ask occasionally, not wanting to invade, though that’s exactly what I’m doing as I cram my postcards in the blank spaces between hers, forming a mosaic; take up space in her bed and on her bear rug; and I’ll have her body, too. No—not just her body, but her soul, which is a slippery
thing by comparison. When I lift a slip to toss it into the wardrobe, she says, almost plaintively, “Please don’t
hurl
my things, William,” and, as if I won’t notice, rearranges my drawing of a dandelion such that it’s below her meadow Polaroid. At one point she disappears into the bathroom and reemerges with her face wet, her nose rabbit-pink. But then again, she does smile at me all night, and when I smile back at her I feel the connection solid between us. Ma fries up slices of tofu with soy sauce. We eat, Ma beams, and it’s all extremely pleasant. After we’ve played a nocturne together (Ma falling asleep, one arm dangling off the sofa), I wash up while Gillian dresses in a new, flimsy night-thing, probably brand new from Sacramento, and I ready myself for bed.

On this night, I am more prepared for the event of her body, though its power over me remains the same. It’s not her breasts, though I do enjoy them, which are fist-small and firm, with large pink nipples. I favor the crook of her elbow, where I drag the smooth part of my fingernails. Though her breasts are not my greatest pleasure, I do like the space between them where her bone presses against the skin; but I like the white marks more, I like the way they ripple crooked in the dim light; I like her belly, soft and slightly round, with a smattering of blond hairs leading from navel to groin. But most of all, it’s the smell of her that kills me; the top of her head smells like oil and lemony shampoo. Tonight, I pull her to her feet. I kneel and she stands silently as I tunnel up under her filmy skirts. I press my nose against her cotton panties, which are adorned with bows and polka dots the color of red, yellow, and orange button candies. I yank them down.

“Oh,” she says.

My face turns upward between her thighs, and she cries out, “Please stop—”

“What?” I ask. My voice sounds harsher than I’d intended. “I’m sorry. What?” I say again, softening the word so that the punctuation afterward resembles a comma, an ellipsis.

“It—it frightens me,” she says. “Please—don’t…”

“I frighten you? How?”

She hastily pulls up her panties. She says, “You become someone different, is all.”

I blush. I wrap my arms around her legs and kiss her wrinkled white knees; I lean my forehead against them. My arousal has
gone completely. I let go of her, moving to the bed. I don’t know what to do with my hands or eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say.

She murmurs, “It’s okay.”

“I must’ve temporarily lost my mind.”

“Maybe we should send you to Wellbrook,” Gillian says, and I am relieved to see a faint smile. I crawl under the covers and say, “I’ll leave you alone. I’ll stay right here. A foot of space between us.” How could I ever make her unhappy? Slowly I inch closer to her and fall asleep, with my face muffled against the soft space between her shoulder blades.

Tonight I awaken, stirred by noise, and she is across the room from me in a moonlit bookcase shadow. She is absently crouched over a sketchpad with a pen in her hand. I look at her and the soft frankness of her pose, the way her knees splay indecorously, touches me. She doesn’t look up or notice. I make no sound. She draws or writes—though, by the gesture, it seems like drawing—and pauses, lifts the pen to her mouth, and sucks on the tip, ink spotting her tongue and lips. The pen returns to the paper at her feet.