The Border of Paradise: A Novel (34 page)

“Dammit, William,” she says, and turns her face away.

She needs to know that this is wrong. I could also slap her, but did I not just promise that I’d refrain from physical force? She is stronger; still, I could smash the back of her skull with a skillet, though I am sure that both crying and striking are the wrong avenues to walk—too weak, too off-putting, or both. What she needs is to be unbitten, and this I don’t know how to do.

At night, to know that she is two doors down, but not available to me, makes my skin itch. I press my face into the sheets and smell the bleachy, musky scent of us commingled, the sheet starched from the liquid of my insides. I haven’t washed the sheets since our honeymoon. Here is a mark of deep black from when she was bleeding, and though she cramped and gritted her teeth we’d made love anyway. I hug my knees to my chest. Mentally I go through the sheets, crawling over every inch of our atlas. The saliva spots of my mouth pressed and moaning against the pillow. The smell of clean hair, and of greasy hair that’s gone unwashed, which I love because it is completely her stench.

I don’t know how long this goes on. Forever. Hours. I climb out of bed and sneak into Gillian’s unlocked room. In the shadows she is snoring slightly at a low, steady octave. I can’t see her in the darkness, but I know that comforting sound. Her breathing staggers and slows. I lie on the floor beside the bed, hoping that the floorboards won’t creak, and I feel myself on a deerskin. The skin is short-haired, and when I press my body against it I try to derive sensations of life from it, a bed of flesh, but it is cold and smells like dust. I am falling asleep, and as I fall asleep lights flash behind my lids like a punch to the head. I am dazzled.

The next thing is Gillian shaking me. I am immediately awake. The beginnings of her exclamations are at first a haze. Then: “What are you doing here?” She repeats this a few more times, as though I’m incapable of English and she’s making sounds at that dog of hers. But then I hear her words curl themselves around my neurons and I realize that she’s angry, she’s quite angry, one could even say that she’s furious with me for coming into her room. She kicks me. Not hard. She lectures me about violating the borders of her room, where she was sleeping alone. She says “alone” pointedly. She tells me that I appear to have not understood her previous declaration. She says that I’m a jerk, but I hear a thread of fear running through the warp and woof of her voice. I’ve caused that. I apologize. She sighs. She says, “Don’t do it again.”

Dear Gillian,

I am embarrassed and annoyed that I’m having to resort to these envelopes and letters again, and taping them to your door as though I’m some sort of missive-bearing dove with a branch in its beak. I feel, to be honest, much less dignified than that bird. But when you spend the majority of your time away from home, and the rest of the time that you’re not out who knows where in your room, where you have made it interminably clear that you don’t want me, and I get your horrible looks when I do try to come in—so here I am, writing these letters, getting the tape, pressing them to your door. I can call this communication. Well, this is the second letter. It was hurtful for you to slip the unopened envelope under my door. I presume this means that you could do it again. So I could be writing this pointlessly. You may never read this letter, and I have to come to terms with that, as I’ve had to come to terms with everything these days.

I miss you. I don’t think I’ve made that clear enough. When I say that I miss you, I don’t mean to make you feel guilty or otherwise ill about yourself, simply because I’m miserable without you. I’m telling you that I miss you so that you’ll fully understand that I’m not just after you for the sexual reasons. I understand that you might feel as though I’ve forgotten about who we were before the honeymoon, but I never, ever did, Gillian, my sweet-as-sugar dearest heart, my wordplay partner,
the doe to my dear, the treble to my bass. And I could go on, about how I am one-half of a duet without my partner piece.

Such as: I could tell you that I remember the time that you first examined my dreams. Do you remember this? You were very, very small. You were three. I’d had a dream that Ma took me dress shopping in Sacramento, and in the dream I was excited to the point of having the faints. I woke up from the faints, which was waking up in the dream, and when I told you that I “woke up” in the dream (this was complicated for a five-year-old to explain to a three-year-old, I understand now) you asked me, “And what color was the dress Ma bought?” Something like that. I said, “It was black, with a bird painted on the skirt.” You said, “The dress was black because you’re afraid Daddy will die and Ma will fly away.” I swear that you said this, and you probably won’t believe me, but you said this. Perhaps you are a prophet.

So you can see that I remember things—I remember that, and I remember the games we played, and I remember how happy we’ve always been. We have always been happy.

W.

This letter is then slipped under my door again, unopened. I rip it into pieces—not small enough pieces, in my humble opinion.

Something in Gillian has changed, but an increase in happiness doesn’t seem to be it. She does seem more solid, as though she were porous before and is now achieving heft. When she eats fruit at the table she is really there and she is really eating fruit. When I say she doesn’t seem happier I mean that she doesn’t smile, or laugh, but she does seem to be more in the here and now. The flippancy that disturbed me earlier has simmered down, and in its place is a girl who still spends hours in her room with the door closed, but is present. I can’t explain it. When Gillian comes out of “her” bedroom, sometimes it’s like we’re strangers in a hotel. I’ve also never been in a hotel, but apparently our parents spent plenty of time in hotels when they were first married, and I’ve heard enough about them. The concept is bizarre to me, the expression something like “A home away from home,” as though you were attempting to escape something, but why escape, and
why are you escaping to something that is like home, but can’t be as good? And you pay for it, apparently. Gillian accuses me of not thinking enough, but that is stupidity.

Such a lovely girl, with such meanness available to her. She comes out of Ma’s room, holding a fistful of envelopes with the tops torn. “We have to think about money,” she says. As soon as she says it, I realize that there are small, forgotten things about Ma ad infinitum as yet unspoken, such as the fact that she was the one to get the mail, and we were never allowed to accompany her when she went down the mountain to retrieve it. Here is Gillian with the envelopes in her hands, the stripped envelopes with the stern typewriting between her fingers. I start to panic.

“Were you snooping in there?” I ask.

A growl rises from the back of her throat. “It’s not
snooping,
it’s trying to survive. Look. It looks like we have some receipts here. I imagine they’re from… checks that come from somewhere.”

She hands me a folded piece of paper, on which there are things like “Total Balance” and “Investment Returned” and “Allowance for 9/1/72-9/31/72.” The numbers are big, but big compared with what? There is a name, and a signature.

“Alan Topor?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He seems to deal with our money,” Gillian says. “I think. All of these envelopes have his name on them. And they all say an address with NY. Maybe he knew Dad back in New York.”

“Mmm.”

“Money, William. We need to think about money. Doesn’t this seem like a lot of it? Thousands of dollars of an allowance? Compared to a week’s worth of groceries? Are we rich, do you know? Can you imagine that we’re rich?”

“Do we seem rich to you?” is what I say. And then, “This is profoundly, profoundly morbid. I can’t believe you were snooping in there.”

She ignores this. “We’ll be fine as long as we keep getting the mail.”

“Are you listening to yourself? You don’t know the first thing about how to use a check. So you take it to the bank, if you can figure out where that is. We don’t know the first thing about banks. Can you just show up and get money? How will they know we’re Nowaks? We don’t exist outside of the property.”

“I’m sure we can figure it out,” Gillian says, and stares at the envelopes again. “I’m honestly not trying to be morbid. You’ve got to realize that this solves so many of our problems—you’ve got to see that we’re in an enormous amount of trouble if we don’t figure out what we’re doing. If these come monthly, we’re not going to starve. As long as we can figure out the money situation, we’ll be all right…”

Why don’t I care about such things? Is it because of the rejection and sleeping alone that I’ve fallen into despair? She’s still reading the letters, looking at the receipts. I don’t even ask her to hand them over. She is flipping through the papers in her hands and pulling sheets out of every envelope, examining, and in the haze of my fear I see her in my mind’s eye using the bedroom phone to call up this Topor fellow and getting money out of this somehow, after which she runs away and leaves me here, oh God.

“At some point, we’ll have to go through all of the things in her room,” she says.

“We?”

“Yes. As in you and me. There are probably plenty of things of importance in there.”

“It’s morbid,” I say.

“You’re incorrigible,” she says. “But if you won’t do it, I will.” She pulls back her lips in a faux snarl, and there is some food caught in between her teeth, something soft the color of bread, which reveals itself as she smiles. Faintly, like a burp: disgust, an unfamiliar feeling. I reach out and grab the papers from her. Then I begin to tear them as I exit to the kitchen, with Gillian yelling behind me.

“What are you doing?” she screams.

I turn on the burner and drop the pieces into the flame, and they curl and disappear quickly into ash.

She slaps at me, her hands on my shoulders and upper arm, but I barely feel them. Her eyes are lit green.

“I may love you more than anyone on this earth,” I say. “But I’m not helpless.”

Gillian whirls away from me and out of the kitchen. Ma’s bedroom door slams, its lock clicking into place. I am triumphant, though I know better than to gloat now that I, for once, have the upper hand. Should another letter come in a month, as Gillian
anticipates, I’ll deal with the new intrusion then. Much can change in a month, I remind myself.