The Border of Paradise: A Novel (40 page)

Even though what she wore in the fantasy varied (I was never concerned with this detail), she would always take the farthest seat in back so that I’d have to turn to watch her. Her knees would be a soft pink. She would be tall, like David, and charmingly gawky.

I’d know her instantly. I’d say,
Gillian?
And I might even repeat myself, because she’d be absorbed in thought, and ask again,
Gillian?

She’d look up from her hands—she always looked at her hands, which at first I thought was an attentive piano student’s habit, but which I now believe is a reflex born from always observing her father’s—and she’d stare at me.

Mommy,
she’d say, with complete recognition and a smile.

The fantasy ended there. There was no better climax and no need for resolution. I could and did replay this fantasy over and over. The fantasy was sometimes a way to try to get to sleep, a self-comforting tactic, and sometimes a way that my mind would torture me and keep me awake like a record skipping, skipping. It was one volume in a small library. Perhaps I never believed Daisy when she said that Gillian was dead. Perhaps I felt so much guilt for agreeing to give her up that I forced myself to pay the consequences.

What I didn’t realize until Gillian actually showed up at my home was that I’d had no fantasies about what would happen if Gillian were actually in my life. All of them were about the reunion and the surprise and the happy shock. What would I do with real-life Gillian? I hadn’t thought of that. What did young girls like? What did adolescent girls like? Perhaps it didn’t matter. The thing about a true-blue fantasy is that it’s based on the assumption that it will never come to pass.

“I’ve lost my job,” I tell her. She’s making a tuna casserole for dinner. I’d told her that we could go out and eat anything she wanted, but she wanted this, so she’s boiling macaroni. The touchy subjects of court, of police, of the way Nowaks live—all of it has been set aside for now.

“So you have no job. No work. That’s great,” she says. “Now you can spend all your time with me.”

“Yes.” I kiss her on the head. “That’s exactly what I wanted.”

“How will you have money, if you have no job?”

“We…” There is no way to explain right now where our money comes from. Finally I say, “We have money saved up.”

“What will Marty think?”

“Oh, he’ll be glad. He’ll be glad that I can spend time with him, and glad that I can spend time with you.”

“Will he?”

“Of course.”

“He won’t be jealous of me?”

“What? No, he won’t be jealous. He’ll be glad that you’re staying with us.”

She stirs the noodles with a wooden spoon. “Do you love him? I need pot holders.” She finds them, and she finds a colander. She drains the pasta over the sink, and a cloud of steam rises and consumes her, making her look like an angel, fogging her glasses. When she puts the pot back on the stove, she says, wiping her lenses with her finger, “Gosh, I can’t see a thing. Sometimes I can’t stand wearing these, you know? Anyway. I was thinking about William. Do you remember him?”

“Of course.”

A long pause. “I don’t think I was very good to him.”

“Sometimes it’s hard for siblings to get along. That’s normal.”

“I made him miserable. But I couldn’t help it. It was like something was wrong with me. I
know
something was wrong with me. I don’t know what siblings are like, really, except for us, but now I know I really tortured him. But you’re kind to Marty, I can tell. You take care of him, and you let him be happy, which is something that I wasn’t any good at.”

“I’m sure your brother loved you.”

“That’s not the point. You understand, because you’re a good
tongyangxi.
I can tell.” She gives me a sidelong glance. When I don’t reply, she continues: “Will we still go to court, Mrs. Kucharski?”

“I don’t know. I want you to be comfortable. I don’t want to make you do anything you wouldn’t want to do. But what was it you said? About a
tongyang
—?” I ask, and she stares at me like she’s trying to do complex multiplication in her head. She seems to want to say something, but doesn’t. Instead, she turns to the noodles.

When it’s time for dinner I knock on Marty’s door. He opens it and he stands there in jeans and a white T-shirt under a black sweater with a hole at the breast, his face vacant the way it is when he’s been staring at his papers for too long under a too-dim light.

I say, “Gillian made tuna casserole.”

“It smells good,” he says. He lingers at the door.

“Well, come eat then. I’ve got plates out for everyone.”

He says, “I’m going to, uh, meet Leo.”

“Right now?”

“Clear my head.” I realize he’s got loafers on. “I’ll eat some if there’s any left when I get back.”

After the door closes behind him, Gillian asks, “Where does he go, when he goes away like that?”

“Oh, just around the corner, around the block.” I put on a big smile. “I’m really excited about your casserole,” I say, scooping her a shovelful. It smells like a home that I’ve never lived in. Gillian leans in and inhales the steam. She settles down in Marty’s chair. And though I haven’t had anything blessed in my life for years and years, I say grace with Gillian: “Thank you, Lord, for this, your bounty, our blessings.” I squeeze her hand.

Halfway through the meal, which is largely silent, Gillian says quietly, almost casually, “Don’t tell Marty, but I almost stabbed someone on the train.”

My fork is still in my hand, though my fingers loosen of their own accord. I grip the fork in a fist like a child, laying it down on the table.

She says, “I met a man on the train. He was going to rape me, so I took out my knife to scare him. I know where to put a blade so that an animal will die. I could have killed him if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to kill him. I only wanted to scare him.”

I try to imagine this scene. I see my daughter standing in the middle of a train car, wielding a dagger at some pathetic stranger, my daughter out of her mind with a fear that’s multiplied by the confusion that accompanies it.

“What did he do?” I ask.

“He just told me that I needed to put it away. It doesn’t matter what he said, only that I didn’t do it. But it’s true, isn’t it, that the world is a dangerous place? You can’t tell me it isn’t.”

BRIEF THOUGHTS OF WOMEN

MARTY (1972)

I
think no one is ever so crazy in love as with whomever they were in love with when they were seventeen, and when I was seventeen I was crazy, I mean positively
loopy,
about David Nowak, of all people. And what draws a seventeen-year-old to the thing that gets him going, that gets his cock so hard it hurts, depends on the kid, and even though I know saying that an infatuation or whatever gets guys “in trouble” is cliché—for example, when a man says, “I saw that girl and I was in
trouble,
let me tell you what”—I do mean it literally. When I first felt that
stirring,
years back, for the athletic thirteen-year-old who shared my new school and my new church and, eventually, even my family, I knew it was all over for me, I might as well have become a murderer.

Because I still remember exactly how, at seventeen, the back of David’s skull made me twitch, with the curve of its base leading to those two lines of muscle that came down to his neck, and he had these great arms. And I’m not saying that the men whom I was attracted to after that were all just like him, but they all had certain qualities of his. One or more. I had an encounter in the park with a younger guy who had David’s particular forearms, that same dusting of gleaming hair that I could see clearly even in the moonlight. Another cliché: to say someone “made me weak.” But it’s true that every time I saw someone like that I lost my moral fiber, I fell apart. I felt guilty about everything, especially things that made or make me happy, and it doesn’t take much time on the couch to figure out how that started. But when I met
Leo—dear Leo—in Monterey, within three hours he’d already told me everything that I needed to know about myself, including the fact that I thought I didn’t deserve happiness. He told me before I even opened my mouth. And how I loved that! How could I not love that—someone who saw myself before I did?

Leo also said that had I loved God, and not men, at seventeen, things wouldn’t have turned out any better than they did for Annie. “Had you not
renounced
God,” he said, chewing on a piece of sourdough, “you would have shot yourself. Because wasn’t your father,” he asked, “the sort of man who kept a gun around?” And I laughed. Annie and I knew he kept it in that cigar box behind his two pairs of good shoes. I came close plenty of times to opening that box, even after I’d decided that God and the Bible were full of shit, even though to think that God and the Bible were full of shit, strangely enough, didn’t have much to do with how I feel or felt about my desires. And about that Colt .45—sometimes I thought my father would shoot my mother with it. Sometimes I spent nights awake, wondering if he would. I told Leo all about that. We were in the back of a bar in Monterey. Neither of us mentioned that we were homosexual, but we knew all the same.

I remember being dumbstruck by his face. Even though I suspected that he wouldn’t punch me for saying it, I was afraid to tell him, as badly as I wanted to, that he had beautiful eyes.

“You want to tell me something,” he said.

He was like a palm reader, or like a Gypsy with a glass orb.

I said, “Look. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I only let
them
touch
me
,” and he nodded.

What do Annie and Gillian do? For the first week they do very little except talk, even though I’ve noticed that Gillian doesn’t say much about her growing up. She has stories about the woods and the deer and the insects. She speaks with an odd cadence, and occasional Nowak-isms come out of her mouth that make me cringe. But the ladies of the house don’t go anywhere. Not downtown or to Tahoe; not to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. They are only satisfied by each other. Of course, I want Annie to be happy, but I have doubts. I bring Leo over, and Gillian gets nervous the way I used to when I saw lights flashing
near the park at night. She goes into Annie’s bedroom and shuts the door.

I’ve told Leo everything about Gillian that I know, including the near-violence on the train. In my room I put my hand on the sleeve of his long navy overcoat. I look up at the fuzz between his proud eyebrows. Behind his head hangs a framed photograph of our mother in the corner; she is sitting at a table with a fishbowl, the bowl filled with water and one sad-looking goldfish.

“She’s got a long road ahead of her,” Leo says, “if, in fact, she’s been living in isolation, and perceives everything as a threat. And who knows? Maybe she
was
going to be raped.”

He removes his overcoat. Leo works in a printing shop, so he comes to me smelling of mineral spirits and ink and hands that never come clean. I’m hit by a waft of chemicals from the coat’s removal, and we sit side by side on the bed.

“Did I ever tell you,” he asks, putting his smudgy hand on my hand, “that my mother was stabbed when she was a girl?”

“No,” I say. I try not to be outwardly surprised by anything Leo says, which I first decided when he told me that he had his first sexual experience at the age of eight. I kept my face expressionless and listened to him tell me everything.

He says, “You know how people say, ‘She was never the same after that’?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I think my mother was never the same after that. She was a living wound. I could tell that just being in the world hurt her. I’d never met anyone else like that until just now, seeing Gillian.”

“Mmm. And what about Annie?”

“Annie’s tough. She’s been through her fair share.”

“Yes.”

“You have to be tough,” Leo says, “to be a woman. Everyone’s out to get you.” He lies on the bed and pulls me to him. “We have it easy, you and I, in comparison.”

“Yeah?”

“I know you don’t think so, but it’s true.”

“You’re right, I don’t agree. When you say that, I feel sick.”

He kisses the top of my head. “Let me tell you what happened to my mother. She was five or so, playing in front of her house. Her mother had gone inside for a moment. I don’t know why.”

“To use the restroom. To check on the pie.”

“Something like that. My mother was playing and a man came up to her with a puppy on a leash. She was playing with the puppy and the man stabbed her in the back and strolled away. He left the puppy, which is a detail that I find excruciating. The knife remained in my mother’s back. She screamed. Of course, she tried to pull it out. Thank God she didn’t, or she would have died. My grandmother found her on the lawn with the puppy licking her ear and the knife sticking out of her body. I don’t know how she didn’t die. But you know how some people take a thing like that and never talk about it? My mom talked about it. She talked about it all the time. She showed me the scar. Marty,” he says, “be glad you’re not a woman.” I didn’t ask Leo what had happened to the puppy, although I wanted to.

The first man to take me in his mouth was another sailor. His name was, appropriately, Richard. He sucked me off and I fucked him in the fields; he seemed to have no control over his body, which went every which way, but God help me if I could give a shit. And then there was the lieutenant. After that, there was no stopping me from
officially
being a pervert. I was dishonorably discharged for being caught drunk and naked with another man on my ship. Still. Being caught was a relief, in a way. For a stretch of time I traveled Asia alone, and when I was tired of Asia I thought of my sister.

I found out through our mother that Marianne was already living in Sacramento at the time. I suggested, somewhat hubristically, that I join her, and she had no problem with that; in fact, she asked only a few questions, perhaps because she had her own secrets to keep. In the car on the way from the airport she told me about the second set of keys that she’d made for me. She told me about the job she had, how she was making her way as a secretary and then as a copy editor. But by the time we were having coffee in her kitchen she said, “I have something to tell you,” and then she told me, without going into detail, about what had happened with David. She was vague. I was jealous, though I tried not to be, that she had gotten her hands on him. It wasn’t until later that she mentioned that a baby was involved.

I told Leo a little bit about David, but not very much, and it was Leo who’d asked about it in a different way, saying, “Who was your first love?” I wanted to tell him,
You,
but the only thing that I know about love is that it makes you sick and starving, and Leo doesn’t make me feel that way, so I was honest, and he just smiled at me as if to say,
It’s not a test.

He’s the one who first made friends with Gillian. I let him in and hugged him; he walked to her and handed her something small and green, Gillian with her tangled blond head in Annie’s lap.

“Leaves of Grass,”
he said. “It’s a book of poems.”

“I thought we had all the books,” she said, and we didn’t say anything about this but knew what it meant, and when we tried not to look like she was wrong she knew that she was.

Leo brought her books: poems, cookbooks, plays, novels. After a week of this she asked him to stay in the living room and talk about e. e. cummings, which was like nothing she’d read before, she said. So they read together. While Leo read, Gillian looked at her hands, and Annie and I looked at each other—how the hell were we to react to any of this? And then Gillian started talking more, in a way that seemed like she was getting comfortable around us, but she still wouldn’t leave the apartment. Leo said that Gillian had left one life of isolation for another, and that Marianne knew this but seemed unwilling to change it.

“When I was trying to find your house,” Gillian said to Annie, “I saw things that scared me, but I knew that I had to get through them if I wanted to find you. But I remembered. I’m clever. Now I’m here, and I don’t see why I have to go anywhere.”

We celebrated Thanksgiving, which Gillian had never done before. I’d wanted Leo to have his Thanksgiving with us. I’d even asked him, as stupid as it was, and he smiled sadly at me and said that his daughters love Thanksgiving, which was something that I didn’t want to hear—but it was my fault for asking a stupid question. I try not to ask those questions. I try not to make things worse for him than they have to be.

I must have looked sad during the Thanksgiving preparations, mashing the potatoes with an air of melancholy, because Marianne turned to me and asked, “Marty, have you ever asked him to leave his family?”

“What?”

“Leo.” She blushed, not looking at me. “I was just wondering if you’ve ever thought about asking him to… leave them. To be with you.”

“No,” I said. “No, never.”

“I see how happy you are together, that’s all. And things are changing in this country.”

I didn’t say anything after that. Not about the politics of homosexuality. Nor did I say,
Leo loves his daughters and would never, ever leave them.
And especially not,
Being happy together has nothing to do with it,
even though it’s the truest thing I could have said, or could ever say, about us.

So on Thanksgiving it was just the Orlichs and the single Nowak, gathered around the table with the biggest turkey that Annie could find. I watched Annie carve the turkey, her face glowing.