The Border of Paradise: A Novel (6 page)

“You like it here?” Mr. Pawlowski asked. We were in his office after a week into my new position. The radiator was broken; I could see his words forming clouds in the cold air. He was planning to move up to my father’s office, which I’d wanted for my own. We were talking about how it would be better, in his opinion, if I took his soon-to-be-former room so that I could learn how to keep my eye on things.

“I like it fine.”

“Managing your school and work responsibilities all right?”

I resisted the urge to scoff and simply nodded. I was irritated that he wanted to take my father’s office. It was supposed to be mine, regardless of how little I knew or how much authority he commanded over the workers. At the time, I believed that were I really strong enough to be in charge, I would take control of the situation and tell him that he couldn’t have it—nonsense, in hindsight, for a young man following a full-grown adult every day like a mule.

“You’ll love this room,” he said. “Ah, the things I’ve done here. The conversations your father and I had. The decisions. You’re lucky to be getting a head start in the business world, Davy. You’ll learn a lot from me. I owe it to your father to help you out, same as he helped me out after your grandfather died. You do need help, you see. Running a business is no small potatoes. You don’t think it’s small potatoes, do you?”

“No.”

“Because that would be a mistake. Learn from me and you’ll learn from the best. I know you’re the one with the keys to the kingdom. Don’t think I don’t. I have to admit that I was a
little
bit hurt”—and here he held up his hand to indicate a centimeter of space between thumb and forefinger—“to know that you were taking over. But no hard feelings. You’re his only son—of course he would let you take over. Selling to me—well, he’d never do that, come to think of it—he’s too proud. The only thing—the
only
thing that surprises me—is that he gave you the company when you’re so young. That’s really the only thing. What other people say about your problems, your personality, that’s not something that I bother with. It’s really the life experience that I’m thinking about. But with me on your side, that won’t be a problem at all. I’ll guide you as though you were my very own son. Have I told you that I think of you as my very own son? If you like, I’ll tell Vicky to help you decorate your new office. She’s got an eye for the aesthetic. In fact,” he said suddenly, “since I think of you as my son, I want to ask you something. I don’t mean this to hurt you, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I mean it in the way that your father would be caring for you if he could. Davy, you seem quite fond of that Orlich girl.”

I shrugged, though I was cringing inside. He meant well; I already knew this, but I suspected something unpleasant coming as he thumbed the underside of his chin in upward strokes.

“Because—and again, I hate to say this, hate to even
suggest
this—but the Orlichs are not, shall we say, the most trustworthy of people. You know that they aren’t on the same level as we are, financially, and they have a certain amount of envy.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“It isn’t even Marianne who is being devious, most likely,” Mr. Pawlowski said, “but her parents. At one point, none of us knew them. They were new to our neighborhood, and we gave them every
opportunity to belong. But almost everyone sees their true selves at this point. They’re interested in—how shall I put this—what your family has, and what they do not. They live off of Mr. Orlich’s accounting income, which is serviceable, but they also live beyond their means. You can see this by the way they dress, the things they have. And the way that they can best get at a different life altogether is through Marianne. She seems like a good girl and loves her parents immensely, I would imagine, and probably would do anything that her parents tell her to.” He paused. “Do you see my point? You see my point. I don’t mean to burst your bubble. Your bubble isn’t burst, is it? Like I said, Marianne is a good girl. And that’s all I’ll say about that,” he said. “You just think about that. It’s part of growing up. You see eyes through the life of business and that’s when everything becomes business, everything as transaction. Are your hours up for the day? Should I drive you back home?”

I wanted to walk. The trip from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with all the public transportation included, would take a long time, but I didn’t want to be in the same small space with Mr. Pawlowski anymore, and especially not in his Rolls-Royce, which reeked of pipe smoke. As I walked, I was not following the rules of New York sidewalk etiquette; people practically shoved me into the street as they bustled by. But a movie reel was unspooling itself in my mind, with kisses and songs. I knew Marianne so well that I could summon, as though she were standing beside me, her reedy laugh. Frame by frame I asked myself,
Is this a lie? Could it be possible that Mr. Pawlowski is right—if not wholly, then at least partially?
He was a businessman. He’d acknowledged his own cynicism. He didn’t understand that Marianne accepted me without reservation, and so what if the piano company was a part of that? We gave and we took and we received mutually. We spent our afternoons running through alleys, chasing each other, the chaser always kissing the chased. The roof at St. Jadwiga, our second home and a safe haven. She wrote me letters, long letters, and signed them in slants and loops:
May our hearts be ever blessed.
I trusted her; I wanted to believe her, so I deliberately refused to believe that our love could be a lie.

My father died in November of my senior year. As the pallbearers lowered him into the ground I watched Matka shrink into
herself like a blooming flower in reverse, nothing but a bud afterward. My mother took a three-month-long holiday in Minnesota, where she drowned her anguish in the twenty-below chill with her sister, the “Midwestern harlot,” as my father had called her. Who knows what he would have thought of his wife hiding in a snowdrift town called Monserrat, drinking vodka out of the bottle and swaddled in fur. It was after Peter died, everyone said, that she lost her grip on her natural eccentricity; after all, what kind of mother would leave her son for three months after such a tragedy?

She came back at the end of winter. Her suitcase was gone, and so was the coat. She’d given both of them to Penelope, she said, who had barely anything. Gosh, you’ve never felt that kind of cold, she said. She was wearing a lot of makeup, but I could tell that she looked awful underneath. Her foundation didn’t quite match her sallow neck. Have I mentioned that my mother’s once-placid face, after my father’s death, now had a perpetually bewildered expression, as though to say,
How did I wind up here?
After she came back from Minnesota I was under the impression that she had become absorbed in the cold there, and that it was impossible for her to materialize fully as flesh and not frozen, fluffy water.

I am confident this is where the true sorrow—sorrow? I lack the correct word—began, when I learned that it is possible for
I hurt, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt
to be my only heartbeat.
Puh-lum. Puh-lum.
Of course, it seemed natural for me to grieve. Matka, after all, was grieving. My peers and teachers at school knew that Peter Nowak had died, and his son, David, who had just inherited the Nowak Piano Company not so long ago, surely must be grieving as well. Marianne, God bless her, particularly mothered me. She had a gift for not making me feel like a child even as she sat with my head in her lap, stroking my hair in silence.

All of this in hindsight seems ordinary. It was ordinary and then—when I realized I was mourning something more than my father—it turned into something monstrous. My despair sprang from an awareness that whatever I had suffered from before, whatever
neuroses
had been dormant for this brief period while my father slept and Marianne walked tall and golden by my side as my only companion, had returned. It was a feeling that eventually metamorphosed outside the realm of human emotion. This
unnameable thing I eventually called “vitaphobia” as a feeble attempt to get at the nastiness that was neurosis turned inside out—the fear of everything else turned into the fear of actually being alive. In simplest terms, vitaphobia was the fear of the sun shining or not shining, of opening my eyes or keeping them closed, of eating or not eating, of eating too much or too little, of darkness and light, of all the colors and hues of the rainbow, of every texture that my body could touch. Everything that I could register caused paralyzing fear, and the only solution to this that I could think of was to be dead. I am trying to keep this from becoming maudlin as much as I’m compelled to just open the window and scream, or writhe around on the floor right now. I ask the Lord,
Do you know what you’ve been asking of me for all of these years?
But of course.
And how can you ask me to continue? All those nights in the woods, praying, hoping for an answer I could use!

Yet I didn’t kill myself then. There was something keeping me alive that I’ve since lost: a pessimistic optimism. One frantic afternoon I tied a belt around my neck in my bedroom and yanked hard, but I choked for only a second before I pried the pathetic noose away from my throat and threw it across the room. I didn’t tell Marianne. In the worst of it, I wanted to protect her, which was my first adult instinct; but not telling someone that you’ve got vitaphobia is like telling someone that you’re not covered in blood when you are—it doesn’t work, and you look the worse for denying it. She came to my house and I could see the fear that slipped over her face like a mourning veil. I lay in bed and she prayed at the foot of it, usually the Memorare, over and over, but I slept through most of it, and even my sleep was painful and shallow. I dreamed of Matka. Where was she? When she spoke, hovering over my face, I smelled the faintly sweet burn of vodka on her breath, her teeth the color of piano keys. I conflated her and the Virgin Mary as she cradled my head in her lap. Eventually I was my old self again—though hardened and glossy, having gone through a crucible—and later, as an adult, the doctors would explain to me that this was the natural course of my illness; even unmedicated, there would be times when I was well and times when I was sick, but I didn’t know that for years, and I attributed my wellness or lack thereof to whatever seemed an appropriate precipitant, like the seasons, or, later, the ups and downs of my marriage, or a nasty encounter at the K & Bee Grocery.
It wasn’t a spiritual illness, they explained to me.
And what are your spiritual beliefs?
I asked them in turn. One said he was uncomfortable disclosing such a thing to a patient. Another said he was Lutheran. There were a few more, but even the Catholic one didn’t put his hand on my shoulder and say,
Go, then, to a priest, and have yourself exorcised.

“I did,” Marianne informed me toward the end of my senior year, “talk to Father Danuta. I said to him that you might be possessed. It was naive, of course, but he was kind. He listened to the things I said, and then he asked me some questions, like a doctor palpating a pain. He said that you were very sick, but that you weren’t possessed by the Devil, and that the Church performed very few exorcisms to begin with. Is it strange to say that I was—”

“Disappointed?”

“No, not that…” (But she was. At least a demon could be cast out.)

She finally said, “I was afraid for you. I didn’t know what to do for you but pray.”

Eventually I was functioning again, but what had happened to my mind left me hobbled, as if I’d been hit by a car instead, and with poor healing to show for it. I graduated with mediocre marks; I suspect I avoided failing entirely only because adults pitied me, couldn’t help me in any other way, were too embarrassed to offer a kind ear, and so raised my grades.
Good for you,
I thought as I stared down at some written exam of mine, too beaten down for truly enthusiastic sarcasm. At the top was written
70
.

And Mr. Pawlowski, my surrogate father now, squeezed me almost entirely out of any company matters, having me sign here and there on various dotted lines on papers I never read—not that I blamed him. What could he do, when I was the one who really owned everything, but could do almost nothing. Nothing, that is, but sell the company.

“If you’re going to sell, sell to George,” Matka said. “He knows what he’s doing.” But I still couldn’t forgive him for what he had said to me about Marianne, so I nodded and said, “Of course,” with no intention of following through; Matka would love me no matter what, though selling the company would give us both more than enough to live on for the rest of our lives.

There was a businessman from Maine who was interested in moving to New York. He was willing to keep the name intact, and
offered $10 million for the factory and everything associated with the factory, including its workers and unsold pianos. I tried to get more because I was proud and hurt, which is a terrible combination for partaking in a business deal. He said, “Don’t you have an adult to handle these things for you?” I said, “Fuck you,” and hung up.

I thought there would be more offers, and there was one man who had dealt with my father before and seemed serious about making a purchase. There were two caveats. First, he would change the name of the company to Norris & Sons. Second, he would pay $8 million for the company, and no more. Having said no to the previous man, I felt compelled to say no to this one as well.