The Border of Paradise: A Novel (7 page)

Mr. Pawlowski, then, having heard about my pathetic attempts, offered $20 million, and he would keep the name. I had always known he was wealthy, what with his extravagant car and lavish parties, and what funds he did need to raise were easily coaxed from his multitudes. What did I care if he took my place? I’d lost my marbles, or I was possessed. Either way, there was no hope for the future of the company with me at the helm. I made the choice to sell the factory, the brand, and the whole rest of a mess of it to Pawlowski. This is where the Nowak fortune is from. Half of it went to my mother, and the rest to me. This is the money that I’ve been living off of; this is the money that will be left behind for Gillian and William and Daisy when I’m gone, which ought to bring me a modicum of comfort.

News of the sale must have spread quickly, because it was only two days afterward that Mr. Orlich came to our door, his face flushed and blurry through the peephole like a poorly taken photograph, and I knew that if I opened the door I would only be inviting more of the bad fortune of which I already had an abundance. He rang the bell over and over, and then he resorted to banging with his fist. I had every intention of waiting him out. He could stand there and throw a tantrum if he wanted, I decided, and then I went upstairs, where the sound of his undoubtedly drunken anger continued to rage.

“What in God’s name is that?” I heard Matka call from her room. “Who’s there?”

“No one,” I said.

“Well, tell
no one
to go away.”

“He’ll go away when he’s tired.”

I had underestimated Mr. Orlich’s capability for persistence. He continued his campaign to have the door opened while I debated calling the police, and then I remembered that he was still Marianne’s father. To sully his name would do no good. For Marianne to know that I’d been the one to sully it was no better.

Finally I opened the door, and there he was, barking, “Why have a goddamn doorbell if you’re not going to answer it?” I couldn’t see Marianne’s face in his at all. He was, in fact, the exact opposite of her: the picture of a face so accustomed to scowling that it had hardened into cruelty.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I heard you sold your family’s company,” he said. “I heard you sold it for a substantial sum.”

“I did sell it.”

“And you want to marry my daughter. My Marianne.”

This was not how I had imagined asking for Marianne’s hand in marriage. I stuttered yes.

“What are your plans for this money you have now?”

I said nothing, noticing that he hadn’t asked to come in. I was grateful for this because I had no intention of letting him in, even if he was Marianne’s father. He smelled like liquor—I was becoming accustomed to the smell, thanks to my mother, and it made me anxious—and he seemed to be rapidly approaching some point.

“So what are you going to do with yourself? All day long, day after day.”

It was, in fact, a good question. My plans were to live off the money and try not to lose my mind, but Heaven help me if I allowed honesty to dictate the conversation.

“You’ve been after Marianne for some time now. She has known no other beau, as I’m sure you are aware. She is a pious, hardworking young lady. She is going to provide a home and children for you. That is your expectation, I guess?” He was gasping now, spluttering with rage and unwept tears and the desire to tear me limb from limb. “And what will you do then? In this home my girl provides for you? Have you considered it? Are you going to sit there in your fancy house, counting your money, and thinking of ways to embarrass her with your insanity? Because that’s all I can imagine you doing with no company, no job, no responsibilities.”

I opened my mouth and closed it. He was right. I was worth less than nothing, and would be worth less than nothing to his daughter. But I loved her, and I selfishly wanted to be with her no matter what this furious, drunken man was saying to me, even if it was the truth.

“So, then, David Nowak,” he continued, “why
did
you sell your family’s company? Because you’re a lunatic. Everyone knows that you are
fundamentally
incapable of living a functional life. And still we supported you. Gave you the benefit of the doubt. When people talked, my wife and I insisted on giving you a chance to prove yourself. To take forward everything your father has built. You dare insult me, my wife, my son, my daughter—
my daughter!
—by doing this—giving up the one thing that could save you. And now you think that you can be my son-in-law. Is
that
what you think?”

I was not going to say yes. I was not going to say no. I began to close the door, but Bunny Orlich was a quick drunk. He hurled himself against the door, and before I could realize what was happening his fist was slamming into my face with a noisy cracking sound, which sent me blindly backward and clutching at my nose.

“Do you hear me? Leave her alone, and I’ll leave you alone. But I find out you’re an even bigger idiot than I think, and your poor mother will be all alone in this big house of hers, with no husband to sleep next to and no son to see her on Christmas, and with two gravestones to lay flowers on.” He stared at me, flapping his punching hand. Had Matka heard? Was there even a commotion? There were drops of blood on his fingers. Matka in Monserrat. Matka underground. Please, never let her know about my Motel Ponderosa. Let her be dead.

Something was visibly wrong the next morning when Marianne came to my home, the sky blue-black behind her. Surely it pained her to be there, but she was that kind of girl—and I say “girl,” but she was a woman dressed in a floral blouse, a wool skirt; the girl whom I had loved was already grown, and the boy who I had been was still halfway in front of her and hardly a man.

“Your nose,” she said. She reached out as if to touch it, and then drew her fingers back. “I can’t believe he did that. And your eye. Oh, it looks so terrible. Is your nose broken?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

She began to touch my cheek with the very tips of her fingers, patting the skin.

I asked, “Did you sneak out of the house?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter. I’m so sorry.” She told me that she was leaving for Chicago. It was her parents, of course. They didn’t want her in Greenpoint anymore, never mind that I hadn’t attempted to see her since Mr. Orlich came. Better to assume the worst of me. She was so beautiful, and was growing only more beautiful by the day, I was certain of it. Her eyes had a perpetually soft sleepiness to them; her silvery hair was mixed with cream. Already I was ticking off her attributes in my mind
—good-bye, good-bye…

I said, “That’s ridiculous. They don’t own you. You’re an adult. We could marry. I have more than enough to sustain us financially.” Briefly I thought of Mr. Pawlowski. “You’ve always known this.”

“You want me to marry you. You think we can have a full and happy life together.”

“Yes. Of course. Why not? Isn’t that what you’ve thought all this time?” But when she raised her eyes to me again I saw how sad she was, and how plain her doubt was at that prospect, perhaps imagining herself as a nursemaid to me as I disappeared further into lunacy; then I felt the gentlest flicker of hatred in my rib cage, where all my love for her was living, and soon we were both crying out of stupidity and helplessness and uncertainty.

“Come in.”

“I—no. I do, I want to, but I don’t think I should.”

“Just come in. For God’s sake.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“To talk. To figure something out.”

“No, it’s all set up, I don’t have a choice. It’s my parents, I swear, it has nothing to do with how I feel.”

“You’re going to Chicago? And where will you go after Chicago?”

She wiped her eyes. “I don’t know! I don’t know anything. He said he would kill you. No matter where we went, David, he would find us.”

Quickly Marianne turned around and hustled her solid body down the stoop. I watched the back of her head and its inelegant, lopsided bun travel, bobbing slightly of its own accord, moving like a head gently agreeing yes, but it was only hope, I was frozen,
it was only a dream, and I finally called out, sure that she could still hear my voice: “I love you. Write to me.”

PART II

DAVID AND JIA-HUI

WIFE OF DAVID

JIA-HUI (1954–1968)

in translation

I
n Mandarin the words for suicide are
. In literal terms this means “self-kill.” My husband David has self-killed and it has been four months now. I knew this would happen once I found him crashed to the floor from attempting to hang himself. I knew that it was only a matter of time.

Or yes I knew this when I was first told that he was crazy by his own mother. But who can believe one’s mother-in-law, especially when that mother-in-law refers to you as a souvenir without batting an eyelash, and burns with anger in your presence simply because you exist and have small eyes and skin with the undertone of ripe star fruit. Or yes I knew that he would
while in a penthouse suite in San Francisco, when we were surrounded by luxury and William was in my belly, and I awoke to be confronted with a floor of broken glass. I’m afraid to admit that I was ever so naïve. What other things do I not know, when I thought I knew so much?

David was the one who changed my name. It was Jia-Hui Chen until I was nineteen, and who I was then bears little resemblance to who I am now at thirty-three, with two children and a dead husband who behaved as though we had always lived in this wooden home in these woods, in this former gold mining town like an inserted memory. I am much older, for example, than the Daisy Nowak who walked into Saks Fifth Avenue in the summer of 1954. In the air-conditioned building scented with perfume I stood next to my new white husband, who was willing to spend
“two thousand dollars or more” on his wife, whom he called an “Oriental lamb” not only to my ear in passionate love but to anyone willing to indulge him in listening; David, who only knew of money and not of pretty clothes; and I not knowing the ridiculousness of what two thousand American dollars meant, or the extent of David’s irrationality or wealth. But I looked at the salesgirl, whose hair was a helmet of distinct red curls, each a perfect sculpture, and I read in her round face the answer as the corners of her mouth pulled back and her eyes shot the accusation,
Who do you think you are?

I emerged from the multi-mirrored dressing room in the first dress, which exposed the soft hollow above my collarbones, and fit at the waist with a full skirt. I felt the flutter that I had known when, at the bar, David first put his scarred hand on my waist. When I felt it through the silk of my dress. (Fatty asked me later if the scarred hand was worse than the white men’s thicketed arms and legs. Was it worse than their pale koi bellies, she wanted to know.) The sight of myself in the multiple mirrors, dressed like a Hollywood starlet out of a song-and-dance magazine, was like seeing a chicken with the head of a lizard. I could never become the girl that the dress was made for, but would be an entirely new creature. I smiled. The black-haired girl in the mirror smiled. Blond David grinned like a child. You think that these details are not important, but they are. In Kaohsiung, as the daughter of a mama-san, I could have had the red-haired woman’s face kicked in by thugs. But as Daisy Nowak, wife of David? I could only smile.

Who are you
being an Oriental girl, the daughter of a mama-san and a mob boss father, a young woman who hunted girls to hire like a wolf in the woods.

One might think that a sixteen-year-old girl would be so young as to not have any power or authority over other females, especially ones who were older than she. Let me reassure you that this is not the case. A certain repertoire of cutting looks and bitch-mouthed retorts, plus a sharp sort of attractiveness, makes a girl like me as intimidating as any tattooed thug. Part of this was nature, but the other part was a consequence of the cutthroats
who raised me. I also had an uncanny ability to see past pouting lips and clotted-on makeup, deep into whether a girl could be transformed into a bar girl and, more important, a moneymaker. I had no formula for making such a decision; it simply came to me. Another girl in my position, had she a lesser eye, might have chosen a potential bar girl with predictably appealing characteristics. But on occasion I would select a rather flat-chested girl, with the secret knowledge that her flirtatious tentacles touched not only myself, but also anyone whose favor she wished to curry, and many of my mother’s best, and most eccentric, girls came to her from my cultivated choosing. By my eighteenth birthday I was seeing up to three or four girls a day for evaluation. Some, having heard that the Golden Lotus was a more hospitable refuge than their own sorry homes, had come to meet me at the market (always in the morning, before the heat descended, and when I was at my least ill-tempered). Others I’d found while prowling the streets, searching for girls running errands for their families. I’d ask them, “You want a better life?” as they hurtled past with their baskets and bags. Leery, yet grateful for the interruption, some would slow their pace. The pretty ones knew what I was after. No one would call Fatty pretty, which is why I had given her the job that I did.

With David I was the girl who, when we returned to the White Hotel, chopped apples and oranges with a cheap knife on the hotel desk, and who said, “Fuck!” (my first English obscenity, taught to me by a sailor with an ear like
) when juice got into a cut on her finger. And David said, “You don’t have to do that,” as I arranged them on a brand-new platter, and I said, “It is polite for your mother.” Because at the bar I was the slut who learned “Whiskey in the Jar” for the hilarity of the sailors, but I was also the girl who knew what it meant to have piety, with a mother who heaped too much pork and so many pomelos on the ancestors’ altar.

I brought that fruit platter to the Nowaks’ brown stone house. I wore a lemon-yellow sundress with an embroidered bodice and kept stopping my fingers in midstroke as I felt the thick stitching, correcting my motions so that it wouldn’t look like I was
caressing myself sexually, with the platter resting in my lap and my new purse the color of fresh milk beside me. The air, which walloped us as we got out of the taxi, reminded me of home with a slap of damp heat. David put his wallet back in his pocket and moved to the trunk to take our suitcase from the driver; David, who was taller than any other man I knew and gangly, and made a swallow’s nest of his hair by yanking it when he was nervous. I reached up and smoothed it down because I loved him. David said firmly, “So let’s go ahead and do this.”