The Border of Paradise: A Novel (18 page)

That night I checked on our son, and came to find Daisy sitting at the kitchen table, sniffling and swiping at her eyes. She smiled. “Hi,” she said.

I’m ashamed to admit that the sight of her sadness irritated me. It shouldn’t have. I ignored her tears, and then I feared that she’d accuse me of infidelity, although she had no right to; I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d seen Marianne once. I’d spoken to her, and then I’d left her there in the kitchen baking bread as feelings roiled in my every cavity.

“William’s asleep,” I said. “How’s dinner?”

“Dinner will be at six o’clock,” she said.

I knew but never dealt with the fact that Daisy was prone to occasional fits of melancholy, which she always tried to hide from me, and her ability to make that effort causes me to suspect that she was crying more than I was witness to. I’ll never know why she cried, but maybe what’s most important is that she had so many reasons to cry, which leaves me with the conclusion that perhaps she was weeping for all of them at once. I hope that one day, if the luck that’s escaped me in this life can find me in the next, I can speak to her plainly. I would ask her to please tell me the story of her life, including the story of her life with me. She deserves that much, I know.

From moment to moment the air was like sheets, like walking through a hallway of clotheslines. Everywhere I went I was saddled with warnings. I went to visit Marianne again the next week, this time carrying a satchel of fresh cheese and a hunk of dark peasant bread, red grapes, wine. Fake-Marty-the-brother took his sister into the woods behind the monastery and he found her a great oak to sit beneath. Her face was beautiful in its plainness; she was happier than I could have hoped for. I was happy to see that she was happy, even if it was a tentative happiness. I could hope to have our old joy back.

“Once upon a time,” Marianne said, lying in the grass with her arms stretched overhead.

“There was a young man,” I said, “who had everything.”

“He had a cloak that rendered him admirable to the selected few.”

“There was really only one of the selected few.”

“Yes.” Marianne was, what, twenty-two at the time? It was autumn. The oak had shimmied off half its leaves. She said, “She was a girl trapped in a castle, and she had a cloak, but hers was tattered. And she adored the young man who had everything…”

“He lost it all, his mind, everything.”

She sighed. “Oh, the story is becoming sad.”

“It is a little sad, isn’t it?” I took the bottle of wine and corkscrew out of my satchel. Daisy and I rarely drank—she lacked the Oriental propensity to redden from alcohol, but still she preferred not to drink it, which I never would have guessed, given her origins; so I stopped drinking, too, remembering Matka and her dragon’s breath. But on this visit with Marianne I brought a bottle of wine, and I uncorked the bottle and drank. I handed it to Marianne, who held it with one hand at the neck before swallowing
from it with the help of her other hand tipping it back at its base, a thin stream dribbling down the corner of her mouth. I wiped the drips away, and she smiled.

Before I knew it I was corrupting her. The Marianne I visited this time felt fundamentally different from the one I’d seen before. This time I touched her arm, and then I was brave enough to touch her thigh. She didn’t move, but her stillness seemed like permission. The seduction was immediate. I yanked up her dress and waited for a reply. She went still again, and then I heard her breath, shallow and wanting, before she pressed her forehead against mine, and that was enough for me. I thought momentarily of consequences. I’m afraid that I could not be convinced of how terrible those consequences could be. We made love in a field absent of insects, with the only sound around us the crackling of the dead grass, the dry leaves, and the agonized sounds that slithered from the back of her throat. She wrapped her legs around my back. I thrust slowly and with concentration; we gulped air in turns. We were the center of the universe.

She went quiet as she gathered her clothes, and I watched her muscles move beneath her skin. I asked her what she was thinking. She shook her head. I put the remnants of our picnic in my bag, and when it was all finished she said, her teeth purplish, “You never think that you have an impact on people, David, but you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not careful, you think that you’re the only one that anything happens to. It’s blindness.”

I needed to leave, but I didn’t want to leave on those terms, so I waited. She asked me where I lived. I said Polk Valley. She wanted to know exactly where. I almost said that it would be better if she didn’t know, but I knew that to say so would be a slap in the face. I gave her a description without an address, and then I asked her why.

“I just wanted to know something about you that I didn’t already,” she said. “Having you here makes me think that nothing’s changed. I can’t afford to think that.”

I saw her a few more times. The next time, she was reluctant; her gestures were less hungry, but still she reached for me. When I saw her for the third time she looked sick. I told her, half joking, that she was a classic example of Catholic guilt. She told me that
I was ruining her, that she loved me, but she didn’t know what to do.

A month and a half later the air became frigid, and I went outside to have a cigarette when I opened the door and there was Marianne in her long-sleeved dress, which was damp at the armpits.

“David,” she said, and I thought I was imagining her until I opened the screen door and she looked behind her at a car in our driveway behind the Buick, holding up her hand to someone I couldn’t see, before coming into the hallway. As she and I walked into the living room Daisy poked her head in. She looked at Marianne.

“Hello,” Marianne said. She seemed as though she had just woken from an unsatisfying but much-needed nap.

They were in the same room now. Daisy came in and stood next to me, while Marianne sat on the sofa with her knees tightly pressed together, one hand atop the other in her lap. Daisy looked at me. “This is who?” she asked.

Marianne told my wife her name, and said that she was an old friend.

“Ah,” Daisy said.

“This is Daisy,” I said to Marianne. “Sweetheart,” I added, “could you please go play with William? I need to speak to Marianne alone.”

Daisy squeezed my arm, hard. “Okay,” she said.

When she left the room Marianne said, “She doesn’t know, does she?” and I was aware that my wife might be in the hallway, listening.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“No.”

She rested her hand on her belly in a way that I recognized from my wife long ago, so that Marianne didn’t have to say it, but she said it anyway: “I’m pregnant, David.”

“Oh,” I said, and I had no excuse for two fools who had hoped themselves untouchable.

She said that she had left the convent. I did not say the word
procedure,
though that was what came to mind. I knew that she
would never have one, regardless of whether she was in the convent anymore.

She looked like something that had been hollowed out and stuffed with wet feathers.

She said again that she didn’t know what to do.

And yet in my state I could think only about what the baby would look like. It would be a girl, and she’d be beautiful. But what did that matter to Marianne, who was pregnant and seated before me, whom I still loved and wanted to embrace in joy as the mother of my child?

“I’ll give you money,” I said. “I’ll write you a check right now.”

Marianne looked around the room, taking in her surroundings with her hand still resting on her belly. I realized that my checkbook was in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to leave the living room if Daisy was spying in the hallway. I preferred to remain ignorant, and the pregnancy was enough to contend with. Instead I reached for my wallet and sifted through it. There were five twenty-dollar bills, which I gave to her, and then I asked, “Where are you staying, if not at the convent?”

She said that she had just left the convent that day and had nowhere to go. I realized that she had come in with no suitcase and was likely to have no possessions. I had no idea who it was that had driven her to my home, or how she had determined my location. She was in my home because she’d earned the right, through my poor judgment, to trespass.

“I’ll write you a check right now,” I said, though I had said the exact same words before, and then I got up and barreled into the hallway, where Daisy stood illuminated by the hallway light. I avoided her eyes. I walked past her into the kitchen. As I sifted through the drawer where I kept my checkbook, my hands were fluttering of their own accord, reminding me of Matka’s winglike hands with their long fingers, and my mind spun with how fucked up everything was and what would my mother think? No matter what I did—even if I spent the rest of my life performing acts of goodness—here would always be the fact that I’d ruined Marianne’s life; perhaps worse, and selfishly, there would be an emptiness in me that could not be filled by anyone but Marianne.

I took the checkbook and Daisy was not in the hallway, but Marianne was still in the living room.

I said, “I’ll write you a check for…” and I scrambled for a number that seemed appropriate, but what was an appropriate number
for this type of situation, anyway? It seemed farcical. “… four thousand dollars. You can find somewhere to stay for a while.”

She took the check, not looking at it, and stuffed it into her dress pocket.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“I went to St. Joseph’s,” she said, “and found someone who could drive me.”

She was so beautiful. I had to let go of her now, truly; I have had to let go of her and everything else.

“Is there anything else you need?” I asked. “Is there anything at all that I can do for you?”

There was a long silence.

Marianne crossed the room. As she passed me I smelled the dark odor of her body, and a lingering trail of the oil from her hair, but neither of us made the effort to touch. I heard the wooden door open, and then the screen door. I heard both doors shut, and with the sound of their closing I didn’t allow myself to cry. Instead I went to the sofa and sat. I waited for Daisy to come. I am sitting now and waiting for—I’m not quite sure what I’m waiting for.

I have one last story. Jia-Hui and I were in the firefly village on the outskirts of Kaohsiung, where the ponds and banana trees were plentiful, and where my blood was being sucked out of me by mosquitoes that whirled and wheedled everywhere we went. It had taken more than two hours of walking to reach this village. I’d found the trip eerie; unlike the ramshackle, noisy, cosmopolitan Kaohsiung, the borderlands of the city were silent, and we heard nothing but our own footsteps as we traveled. The firefly village was far, Jia-Hui had said, because the bugs with blinking lights could not meet where there were so many people.

“Here there are many kinds,” she said, meaning the fireflies. “They come different times.”

And yet I didn’t see any as we stood on a small bridge, staring into the darkness with her small hand in mine. I supposed aloud that perhaps the recent rain had something to do with it. Maybe, I said, the fireflies wouldn’t come out if it had been raining.