The Border of Paradise: A Novel (13 page)

“Are they sisters?” I asked.

“They’re not sisters, no, they don’t really look anything alike,” he said. “You get used to looking at them after a while. They begin to look as different as Marilyn and Audrey.”

I thought she was beautiful, but how could I have? All that I saw was that bruise, and then my mind’s eye saw her on a bed, without her expensive clothes. That was my wife, Daisy, and her name was Jia-Hui then. They didn’t notice us. The two girls giggled and ate their shaved ice, and I continued to sink into filthy reverie until the lieutenant said, “Go talk to them. The pretty one speaks English well enough. She’s educated, somehow, despite being no better than the whores. Why, you could take her home with you this afternoon, I’m sure.”

“No,” I protested, embarrassed.

“Eighteen? Wealthy?” He nudged me with his knuckles. “Go on, go ahead. Her friend with the fucked-up arm will understand.”

Despite my refusal, the lieutenant grabbed me and pulled me toward the girls. The sight of these two tall white men rapidly approaching them caught the attention of both young women, who looked right at the lieutenant as he came forth with me in tow. Whereas the fat girl tensed and frowned, her shoulders lifting, the thin girl picked up her spoon and sank it into her bowl of ice, twirling it slowly as she waited for us to approach. Neither of them spoke.

“Do you remember me?” the lieutenant asked the thin girl, who crossed one leg over the other and brought a spoonful of ice to her mouth. Her lips glossed with sticky water. She shook her head as if she didn’t understand. She looked at the other girl and said something, and the other girl laughed.

“Let’s go,” I said to the lieutenant.

But the lieutenant was affronted, and would not come. “She knows me. This one does,” he said.

“Yeah,” the thin girl said, and it was this word,
yeah,
coming out of her mouth that surprised me—not
yes,
but the colloquial, broad
yeah,
as though she were Louise Bielecki on the playground, and I was holding stones.

“You slept with one of my men.”

She shrugged.

The fat girl obviously admired her, and, emboldened, said, “I work for little money. You want?”

And then the thin girl said to us, “You go away.”

The lieutenant frowned. He was a dignified sort, by most accounts; still, he was a navy officer, and in my experience of navy officers, they will brook no fools—not even a fool woman. He muttered, “China girl bitch,” before putting his hand on my shoulder, and walked us both away from them. I heard the thin girl mock, “White son of a bitch!” and both girls laughed again, the sound of a flock of proud birds.

Daisy, the baby, and I moved to Polk Valley in Northern California. It was there that I bought our small, absurdly cheap house from a man named Frank, whose parents had died in that house two weeks prior. This was in 1955, and I liked the place immediately despite its oddities. The water-stained wallpaper sometimes hovered from the wall in gluey strips. Frank and his brother had removed their parents’ furniture and goods, but for whatever reason had left the calendar collection hung, and from room to room all calendars exhibited different months and years, curling at the edges—1932, 1944, January, a sentimental and snowy December landscape that didn’t remind me of anywhere I’d ever been—and though a calendar in the middle of an entire wall, orphaned, made much less sense than a calendar beside a light switch, so it went that there were so many calendars, and all haphazardly placed. A wall in the living room lacked any paint or wallpaper. Drywall. But there were charms, too: pale and ornate molding along the crack between wall and ceiling, and around every entryway; a well-built shed; solid wood floors with dark knots; an unusually pristine stove. The house was laid out like a smaller version of the first floor of my parents’ brownstone, which may or may not have been a point of attraction. Unlike the Greenpoint house, there was no foyer, only the mouth
of a short hallway that led straight down to the master bedroom. Along the left, in order: a space for a living room, a bedroom, and the kitchen/eating area. Along the right, in order: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a third bedroom.

But the true win was the land. “Part of the deal,” Frank said as he hunched over a piece of paper pulled from his pocket, marked up with a rudimentary pen drawing of the area, “and here are the Sierras.” We owned the house and the raggedly triangular plot, with two points along the Sierras borderland and the third point deep in the woods that had no name, as far as Frank knew. We were close to the Yuba River, he said, but it was a substantial walk. No one called it the Yuba River, he added.

“What do you call it?” I asked.

“The river. Just the river.”

Frank took his money from us and was happy, and we took the house and the land from him and were happy. In March the Sierras were still puckered with frost, but the valley had already begun to warm, the snow melting into water running riverward. I hired men from the town to improve the house. These men reminded me of men from the factory in age and heft, and they coolly accepted my money, as they no doubt saw me as a wealthy, snot-nosed interloper, probably an orphan who’d inherited a boatload of cash and would eventually turn wild beauty into beastly lawns. The men came and I played with William on the porch while Daisy brought out a tray of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

There was nothing obviously inappropriate about the way my wife behaved in front of the workers. She barely spoke to them, though her English was passable by then, and she handed them their glasses of lemonade before coming to me and saying, “I bring one glass for you.” In front of the men she kissed my waiting mouth, and set a sweaty pitcher on the steps. She sat beside me and chucked William, who sat on my lap, under the chin. We’d named him William for no specific reason other than liking the name; no lineage, no homage to Shakespeare or the conqueror. The men had taken the lemonade while silently assessing her in the way that men do. I didn’t fault them. But I didn’t fault her, either.

It started with small isolations. First we were shut up in that San Francisco penthouse, where Daisy first saw me without my human mask on and did not leave—although in hindsight I ask
myself, How in the world could she have?—and next in the rural fringe of Polk Valley, America’s greatest producer during the Gold Rush, which I had chosen at random from the McNally map in the glove box. By instinct I was suspicious of how the world perceived us, so I thought a rural location would be a decent place to live our lives out in peace. A repeated survey of townsfolk demonstrated that there were, at maximum, two Negro families and one Oriental family, who, Daisy informed me, were Japanese, not Chinese. The still-fresh memory of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan gave her mixed feelings about the Okis. We had no feelings, one way or the other, about the two Negro families. We suspected that they were related to each other, as they appeared together more often than most merely friendly families, and the wife of one family had the same strong jaw as the husband of the other. We did wonder what had caused them to move to Polk Valley, which was blindingly white.

Polk Valley chiefly consists of two parallel streets: Main Street, divided into North and South, and Laurier Street, which emerges like a victorious snake from a Gordian knot of dirt roads and barely paved paths. Main and Laurier run parallel until Laurier tributaries into Main; the five blocks that follow are known as “downtown,” or simply “town.” Downtown is a hodgepodge of Old West historical buildings and saloons-turned-bars. South Main Street exits Polk Valley shortly after the town’s lone gas station, to continue in a no-man’s-land of brush and woods to Killington.

We live on a path that, as far as I can see, has no name. Our nearest neighbors, the Boones, are a half mile off, and they have never come to introduce themselves in our thirteen years of life together. I know that they’re called the Boones only because their box is the closest to ours at the end of Sycamore Road, where a clump of mailboxes holds each family’s mail. I’m not saying that Daisy and I live a monastic existence, but I’m suggesting that some vestige of that desire for solitude still thrives in me.

The reconstruction of our home took the bulk of April. We slept on the floor of the master bedroom with William between us. One night I jerked awake from a nightmare, and saw the shadow of a mouse scurrying across Daisy’s foot. I was sure that she’d notice, but she didn’t stir.

After the workers left our first major purchase was a huge, rectangular wood table—a disproportionate enormity in our small home. Like most inappropriate purchases, I hadn’t thought twice about buying it, let alone how it would get through our small doors. The table could not be dismantled, so I had the men come back and widen both the front door and the opening to the kitchen while the table stood, like an aggrieved houseguest, on the porch. Next came the bed, the mahogany bookcases and dresser, the food staples to fill the pantry, the cold goods to fill the icebox, the unmatched chairs for every room, the rugs more like carpet than the thinning Oriental rugs of my upbringing, the utensils to fill the drawers, the pots and pans, the lamps with delicate shades like butterfly wings, the lace curtains aflutter. A mix and match of the upscale, the backwoods. A home.

It bothered me that William didn’t look like me, no family resemblance at all. His hair was neither the inky black of Daisy’s nor the white blond of mine, but something in between that always reminded me of what a mutt he was, like a puppy of unknown origin, a head of hair the insignificant color of wet leaves rotting after a rainy autumn. And his face, too, was a mix of ours, but far more Oriental than mine. He had small eyes that peered out in perpetual suspicion, and though he did have jaundice as a baby, it turned out that he also had a yellow tinge to his skin as well, which Daisy claimed was my imagination; but how would she know, or be able to see it? She was blinded by adoration for her child, as any mother should be, not to mention having grown up being surrounded by individuals of the same shade. It’s the father who’s permitted to lack absolute absorption in his offspring. The fact that William didn’t look like me made me nervous, not because I feared that I’d been cuckolded, but because he was my own son and yet alien, looking like nothing I’d previously known. “Hold him,” Daisy would say, and she’d put him in my arms, and I’d become incredibly self-aware of whether I was feeling
absolute love
for our baby. For example, I had a fear that when she put William in my arms I would throw him out the window without realizing what I was doing, or drop him unintentionally
with my arms suddenly going limp of their own accord, not out of maliciousness or evil, but because I was lukewarm to my own child, and even my body knew it.

The nervousness that I felt around William in those early years may have been another symptom of the nervousness that I was beginning to feel about my marriage. We had finally settled down in a place that we could call our own, with a family that we could call our own. I saw Daisy as exotic; I assumed that, with her improved English, we’d be able to satisfactorily live together and love each other. I naively thought that love went beyond language, but in the foothills of Polk Valley, in our little house in the woods, I struggled with the fruits of these assumptions.

And who was there to tell? I longed to speak to Matka about my loneliness, but having earned her disapproval already, I hated to admit that I might have done something wrong. This was less about my dignity, and more about my fears of her worrying over my condition. I didn’t speak to her for years, and she didn’t know that William existed until he already had a sister, though she never met either of them. She may even have forgiven me a divorce, but that wasn’t what I wanted, even if I could have had one. Daisy was, and is, an excellent wife. Her fervent pursuit of mastery over the English language put Marianne’s Latin learnings to shame. She spent her days doting over our son; when William was asleep, she would dote over me. I am ashamed to say that this made me more irritable than pleased at times. In the first year of our life in Polk Valley we went into town frequently enough that people recognized us and knew our names no matter where we went, and she accepted this notoriety without complaint, despite the funny looks she received. I cringe to think of how embarrassed I became when we went into town and she’d attempt to speak English to someone, whether it be a shopkeeper or a cashier, because the listening party certainly couldn’t understand her. I became her translator in those situations, and it humiliated me. Yet this was actually a great accomplishment on her part. She was speaking a language that wasn’t her own, in a country that wasn’t anything like her own, with an aplomb that I couldn’t manage when I’d been overseas; and she was doing it because she loved me. To this day she’ll say things like “What happen to Joan?” and I’ll say, “Who’s Joan?” to which she’ll reply, “She every time buy canned pea and bag of potato at the supermarket.”
When I’m gone, she’ll still remember those people, though she’ll rarely see them, and she’ll still have our children. Of course we knew that this was coming. In San Francisco, an inkling blotting itself.