The Border of Paradise: A Novel (9 page)

David’s childhood bedroom was bare except for a white wooden bed and white nightstand, a white dresser, and a single poster of strange and painted shapes, which now hangs, curling, in William’s
room. He said, looking around, “The __________ of my child ______.”

“What?”

“Sorry,” he said. “At home it’s easy—it’s easy for me to forget what is okay to say to you. I’m sorry about my mother. She loves me. I’ve always been close to her. Understand?”

“Yes,” I said, and sat on the bed. He sat beside me, his glass half-empty. I said, “Your mother is beautiful.”

“Well. Yes. She—in the past, people would turn their heads to look at her as we walked down the street. But she never really ______ or cared. God. All that about
Jesus.
I’m sorry. She has certain ideas about me.”

“Yes.”

“I came here to show her that I was okay, because I know she worries. But this has been a mistake. We can leave. We won’t eat dinner here. We’ll go back to the hotel, just the two of us.”

“Yes.”

He lay onto the bed, as if merely speaking of these possibilities exhausted him. The small amount of whiskey left in his glass, held aloft, sloshed and dripped onto the sheets. “Come here,” he said, and awkwardly lifted his glass to the nightstand.

My heart sighed. I curled up beside him in my fancy dress, avoiding the wetness of whiskey, and pressed my face into his ribs. He rubbed my head in slow circles, and I thought,
I am happy, I am happy, I am happy.
I inhaled the aftershave he had splashed on that morning that smelled of something dark and sour, like small animals and the color brown and himself. When we lay together there was no need to speak, and I preferred it that way because when we didn’t speak we could be any husband and wife, with no struggle in it. We lay in that bed and kissed tenderly, and then we took our set of matching luggage and left. I imagined Mrs. Nowak lying in bed with a towel over her forehead. She didn’t try to say good-bye.

David and I took a taxi back to the hotel because I didn’t like the subway, and he was
hemorrhaging
money in those days. David booked a new room, and then he was hungry; he liked diners to the exclusion of all else, and for the longest time I thought that all American restaurants were diners, and that all American menus contained hamburgers and french fries and malts. This particular diner was cramped with people smoking cigarettes and chatting loudly in their booths, if they were lucky enough
to have a padded red booth. David and I sat in dirty-white hard-backed chairs at a sticky table.

By then my husband had tufts of hair sticking out all over, as though a dog had been chewing on his head. He no longer seemed all right about leaving the brown stone house. I imagined that he felt guilty about abandoning his mother: a sad woman who had the same mouth as he did, who likely gave him everything he wanted all of his life, and only wanted his attention and love in return. It suddenly felt selfish to leave without acknowledgment, and I pitied Mrs. Nowak, even if she had called me a souvenir.

The waitress came. “I don’t know yet,” David said. “We’ll have some coffees. Black.”

He kept looking through the menu. I looked, too, but there weren’t any pictures. The only words I recognized were
hamburger
and
eggs,
and I didn’t want either of those things. I watched him as he flipped from the front to the back, from the back to the front, and again. Finally he put down the menu. I smiled at him. I imagined that the right thing to say would be clear to me if we didn’t have a language barrier. He was staring not at me and my smile, but at something in the center of the table. When the waitress came, he took the coffee from her and drank his without waiting for it to cool. I could have said,. “
.” I could have said,
I love you.
I could have kept smiling until my face broke. I could have cried. But I didn’t know what he was thinking, and I could only guess.

“There’s nothing to
eat
here,” he said, and got up. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and threw some money on the table, and I followed him out of that diner into the open air. We stood on the sidewalk, where no one could bother to move us as the crowd flowed every which way. We might have stood there until we grew roots and turned into coconut trees if not for the sudden shift in the wind, which started from a single woman sighing, shaking her head, and saying, “ ______ me,” because Americans were always muttering to themselves and sounding annoyed by unknown slights, and like all the disgruntled people before her, the woman kept walking, though she continued to wag her head from side to side. But more people noticed what she had seen, and then we, too, looked at the man on the roof across the street.

I don’t remember what he looked like except for the hat he wore, which was a newsboy cap of the kind that David wore sometimes to
protect his head in the rain. The man on the roof would back away from the edge, and then return to it with a new enthusiasm, even peering over to such an extreme that I knew for sure he would fall, even accidentally, but he didn’t make a decision one way or another, causing people to yell things at him that I didn’t understand—to jump? or to save himself?—and I thought of Fatty’s father, Farmer Chu, who had starved his pigs and then thrown himself into their pen to die. My mother refused to say that Fatty’s father’s death was tragic because Farmer Chu was batshit insane, and if he was so crazy as to feed himself to his own pigs, he deserved to die, did he not? When people did things that she didn’t understand, my mother would always tell me that they were batshit insane, probably to keep me from doing them. I thought of Farmer Chu’s hand dangling from a pig’s mouth as I looked at the man on the roof.

David said, “He’s only three stories up.”

“Pardon?”

“Three stories. Three floors?” He gestured with his bad hand, holding it parallel to the ground and then miming the distance: one, two, three. “He won’t die. He’ll break his legs, but he won’t die.”

“So why he is doing this?”

“I suppose he wants to do something.”

“Break his legs?”

“Kill something,” David said. “But he won’t die.”

I understood the words, but not the meaning. I said, “Dangerous.”

“He’ll be all right,” he said, and started walking. I followed him two blocks to another diner, where we sat at a booth and ordered corned beef hash with fried eggs, and he ordered a strawberry milkshake for me, which was my favorite at the time. So suicide has always followed me, you see.

David wanted to go back to the brown stone house. A whim, or the sudden breeze that cut through the heat, or the four cups of black coffee had changed his mind—no, I knew that it was the man on the roof who did, or did not, die that day that pushed him back. David had been so calm, watching him. Now he was resolute about going back to his mother. In the taxi he reached over and held my hand. “My Oriental lamb,” he said, and kissed the side of my head, breathing into my hair.

We pulled up to the curb.

Mrs. Nowak answered the door again and said, “David!” I saw that she’d been crying, and had not bothered to fix her makeup.
“You’ve come back,” she said. “Where did you go? I didn’t think you’d come back,” and she opened the door wider. She said, “I’ll start dinner.” It was approximately three thirty. I could barely remember the woman who had frightened me so upon first arriving at the house—a woman who had been scared out of being and left this ghost behind. “Help me cook,” she said to me. David touched my shoulder and said, “All right,” after which I pulled my skirts around me and followed Mrs. Nowak down the hall, back to the kitchen. I wondered how she could possibly cook anything in that white dress of hers.

“We’ll have an early dinner tonight,” she said, looking at the stove and the icebox, at everywhere but me. “We’ll cook David’s favorites—some old ___________ that he likes.”

She tied on a full-length pink apron without offering me a covering of my own, even though my dress was clearly more expensive than her dingy tablecloth of a garment, and we worked in silence, which was a relief. She passed me food to chop and clean, and I caught on to the essence of the dishes being prepared without trouble. There was something with pork knuckles, which she butchered expertly, and potatoes, which I washed and peeled with a paring knife. I took care to be deferential to my mother-in-law. I even avoided brushing up against her as we moved in the kitchen from the counter to the stove to the ovens, but this choreography may have been because I dreaded the feeling of her skeletal body against mine.

Still, neither of us relaxed, and finally she said, chopping in a way that punctuated her every syllable, “I-love-my-son. Do-you-un-der-stand? I do not want you here for his money. I do not want you to take ______ of him. All right?”

I kept my face blank, though what she wished to express was probably lost on me. What was I not supposed to take from him? His money? That wasn’t what I wanted; I’d had money in Kaohsiung. Was I supposed to tell her that I didn’t understand? Was it best to pretend that I did?

“Do you know? Do you know what I’m talking about? He’s ___________.” She repeated these final two words with emphasis. “Oh, for _____, what
do
you understand? He’s
crazy.
Do you understand that? Crazy. David… he’s very _____. He was _____. And if you know that, and if you’re taking _____ of him because of it, I’ll figure out a way to send you back. I don’t
care if you’re married. Whatever kind of marriage you have, it’s not one I _____, and I doubt the government ______ it either.”

She watched me for a reaction, but I had none.

“I do not want to take something from your son,” I said. Crazy, that I understood. His mother seemed certain of this. Indeed, she’d been crying in our absence—but for what reason? David’s craziness, or her son’s unacceptable marriage? My own mother thought I was crazy, and to my face she’d called me a pervert and a whore. But David and I were bonded now, with our baby in my belly and rings on our fingers, and I had to remember where I was now, and how impossible it was to return to where I’d been.

(Is this the moment when my fate could have gone in a different direction? Or had the doors already closed behind me?)