The Border of Paradise: A Novel (23 page)

These lustful years continued without much acknowledgment until the week when Ma came into the bathroom in her kimono, calling my name as I crouched in the tub. I hadn’t yet removed my clothes as I penciled a reply to Gillian on the wall (which is, and has been for years, littered with little messages between the two of us, including
A grout time for soap, Grout to see you,
and my newest addition,
I’m agrout to take a shower
). “Are you busy,
guai
?” Ma asked. I was, in fact,
agrout to take a shower,
but said it could wait. She pulled down the toilet lid and sat.

“You and Gillian played the most beautiful polonaise this morning.”

“She seemed pleased,” I said, finishing the
s
in
shower.
The polonaise had been Gillian’s idea, a sort of aesthetic compromise. When we duet Ma sits on the sofa with hands folded and leans forward, eyes closed, and she never applauds at the end of anything. David thought applause was tacky. He said that when a man clapped, he was producing the sound of an idiot covering up the lone marble rattling around in his head.

Ma said, “Well, of course. You’re both marvelous players, and she loves you as much as you do her. I know everything about you two, don’t you see.”

I turned in the tub, crouching, with pencil in hand.

“Why do you look so surprised? Such a beautiful, charming girl—of course you would be stimulated by her presence. And we’ve known since you were children, haven’t we? You were always meant for each other. You know this.”

My silence must have indicated concordance, because she stood then and began to fish through the medicine cabinet, the long arms of her garment dangling. A baggie of cotton swabs fell off a shelf and into the sink, which she ignored. “Daddy wasn’t too keen on the idea of having another child after you were born. Not because of you, but—oh, well,” she said, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which she proceeded to begin to smoke with the aid of a matchbook from her deep red pockets. Waving her hand in front of her face, she said, “But you seemed lonely, and so we had Gillian to keep you company. Just like with my girlhood friend—who ended up being quite happy, I’ll add. Such arrangements have their advantages over matchmakers, or the
American way. But now you truly love her, don’t you? You feel sick inside when she says your name, just as you feel incredibly happy when she does it, too, and you don’t know how the two mean the same thing?”

“Well,” I said, my hands twisting at this bit of monologue-as-explanation, with parts of it blurring into nonsense, and not knowing what to say next.

Ma moved on to say, kindly, “I couldn’t be happier at the way things have turned out. Love is a beautiful thing…”

Here a plume of smoke approached me, and I coughed, grateful for any excuse to postpone a response.

“… and so I’m making a trip to Sacramento. Longer than usual. Because Gillian has officially reached maturity. And so this is the week of… your honeymoon. At last.” (“Honeymoon” spoken in English.)

“Honeymoon,” I echoed. What I really meant was “Honeymoon!” but I was also shocked, and surprised. I knew what a honeymoon was. I’d heard glorious stories about David and Ma’s honeymoon, when they’d taken the Buick to places I couldn’t possibly imagine, and had sex in all of those places. It was a romantic idea, and one that I couldn’t replicate, but the house would be a place better than all of those other places. I would finally get to lavish my adoration upon Gillian; this idea pleased me.

“A week should give you plenty of time. I expect that things will be very different between you two by the time I come back, hmm?” And I pictured Gillian moving down the cold hall in a silk slip, the white fabric clinging to her small breasts.

“Is that all right?” I asked. “I mean, for Gillian? Will she be all right with that?”

She told me that Gillian knew that the time had come. She told me not to worry about that. But I had all sorts of questions, the step-by-step sex act itself being foremost. From the bloodied tissues in our shared wastebasket, combined with our excellent education in human biology, I also knew that Gillian was now, finally, fertile, and I couldn’t bear the thought of impregnating her yet, because the idea of Gillian becoming swollen and heavy went against all the lovely limpidness I loved so. And I certainly wasn’t ready to become a daddy myself, lacking so many basic skills required for the position, including how to write a check or open a bank account, let alone drive myself to the bank in the Buick.

Still, I was self-conscious enough to stay quiet about these matters, and I was relieved when Ma reached into a pocket beneath her kimono and said, retrieving a box, “Birth control, so you don’t get her pregnant. You must be careful. Pregnancy would complicate things. You could go to prison—understand? Are you listening?” With utter matter-of-factness she removed a foil square from the box, opened it, and pulled out a disc, which she then unrolled onto two fingers of her other hand. I nodded. “You put
this
on your penis when it’s hard. When you squirt out the white substance, you pull yourself out of her body before your penis becomes soft, and you roll this, the condom, which is the birth control, off. You tie off the end and you throw it away. Very easy.”

She tucked the box into the medicine cabinet. “Is there anything in particular that you want me to get from the city? Some sort of food? Razors?”

“No,” I said, “no, no.”

“I’ll get you some pears. You like pears.” She paused, staring at her reflection. “But besides the condom, there are other things you should know. You take off her clothes. You kiss her on the mouth while you take off her clothes, you kiss her wherever you want, until you put your hand to the place between her legs and feel that she is wet. This is when she’s ready for you to put on the thing I just showed you, the condom. Yes?”

I nodded.

“You put the thing on. You don’t have to go so fast, although you might want to go fast. There might be blood, the first time, when you put yourself inside of her, where the wetness is. The wetness should help you get inside. It helps the movement. You move so that it feels the way you want it to. Okay? Any questions? You’re not stupid. Neither of my children are stupid.”

“No, we’re not. Don’t worry.”

“But you’re concerned. You’re holding something back. Don’t think you can hold anything back from me. I know you best.” And she pulled out another cigarette and lit it, as if to signal that she was settling down for another round. I was afraid to ask her what I was truly thinking—that Ma seemed to want this very badly, although perhaps not as badly as I did, and I didn’t understand why.

“It’s a good thing,” I said.

“Of course it is,” she replied.

“Yes, a good thing.” I looked at the faucet. My face was swollen and distorted in the silver. “I think I’ll take that shower now,” I said, and she, who was leaning against the sink with her hip, nodded, shifted upright, and left, still puffing at her cigarette, and I began to worry about everything. In my ardor I dug through the bathroom garbage can. I found Gillian’s damp and drying bloody tissues and crushed them to my face. I loved her so. I
love
her.

The day that Ma drove to Sacramento she woke up early, wrote down her inn number, made us porridge, which we ate with fried eggs and pickles. She dressed in trousers and a white blouse. For most of the morning she checked her suitcase, but by eleven she was ready to go, and when Gillian and I stood in the hallway to send her off Ma told us the following: that we must be good while she’s away, meaning we mustn’t go into town by ourselves, and most important, she repeated that I must take care of my sister. We all knew what she meant most when she said we must be good, and the slight cut of her words when she said “take care, be safe,” switching to gently accented English, was there, too, though I didn’t turn to see Gillian’s face at that moment, when Ma reached down and picked up her suitcase. She then kissed and hugged us in turn before opening the door with her free hand. Ma and her plots for which my pulpy heart and I have no argument.

The door closed. Gillian and I looked at each other, our faces lost. Suddenly the door latched and locked with a rattling click, punctuating Ma’s absence and the onset of our honeymoon.

Gillian smiled. “So it begins,” she said, and I made a strangled laughing sound.

Two identical uprights stand back-to-back in the living room. I cannot let my little sister sit at her piano without sitting at mine and cranking out some sort of response. She never minds. She’ll tilt her head up and smile while delivering fifteen measures of bravura that make me all wet in the eyeballs. At times we duet
this way. Her musical preferences, mostly ragtime, are different from my Sturm und Drang, but we grew up with the same teacher—one woman in Sacramento, a big-haired, petite chain-smoker named Mrs. Kucharski—so I do know her Scott Joplin as well as she knows my Beethoven, which is to say, beyond decently.

Mrs. Kucharski! It is hard for us to play anything without remembering her. Her metronome, which sat on the modest piano, also an upright, ticked back and forth with the click of her tongue at her teeth. She noticed that I liked Bach and Beethoven before I did, and unexpectedly gifted me with record albums to take home and play, which I did, mesmerized by sounds that were as inexplicable as Heaven.

While Gillian shuffles around in the kitchen, china and silverware clanking, I sit at my bench and plunk out a graceless version of the opening measures of
Pathétique.

The sound summons her. Soon she appears with a bowl and spoon. “Ew,” she says. The spoon she sticks into her mouth and pulls back out with a pop. She breathes on it, then attempts to rest the spoon on the tip of her nose—an old trick of David’s. It clatters to the floor. She says, “Don’t know why it didn’t work.” Bends down to retrieve the spoon, drooping cloth, revealing the space between pale breasts. She rests her bowl of cornflakes atop my piano and lays her utensil beside it, finally settling beside me to reassert the confident opening notes. Her upper thigh is a millimeter from mine, downy and pale, unexposed to sun; her leg hair is the same color as the silky bun pulled loosely from her scalp. Strands leak around her ears. I want to put my palm on the top of her skull, cup it like a ball in my large hand. But I’m afraid. For years I’ve been afraid of touching her; I’ve longed for accidents of skin on skin, though what I truly want is to be able to draw a slit from sternum to pubic bone and hide inside her rib cage—the thought of which makes me both loathe my base self and flush with excitement all at once.

“You know,” I say brightly, for lack of something better to say, “David would lie underneath the piano while I played this. Do you remember?” She shakes her head. “I have a distinct memory of being, oh, six, seven or so, and him crawling underneath to lie on top of the pedals. I never asked him why he was doing it. I remember being afraid that I would accidentally kick him,
though. There’s not much space under there, not even for a seven-year-old’s legs.”

She very nearly trips up on a tremolo, I can tell. Her hands spread across the keys. She reaches across my chest, the sleeve of her cotton nightgown brushing against my shirt, the imagined warmth of her arm seeping through the cloth. I consider stopping. It isn’t a good memory.