The Border of Paradise: A Novel (42 page)

Now Leo and I are on the sofa, alone in the apartment without the women. Our faces are men’s faces in an apartment of lace and green glass bottles. He slouches in his seat, which he never does; his posture is always impeccable.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Tired?”

He looks sideways at me and smiles. “Yeah. Sure.”

I say, “Let’s go to the ocean.”

We take a cab to his apartment—his wife isn’t home, is at a doctor’s appointment with the children—and we drive his car for hours, through valleys, to Stinson Beach, riding the skinny rope of road until we reach the shore. He parks. I get out and the wind is whipping the hems of our clothes. Barely anyone
is around. We are, as always, careful not to touch, not even by accident. I don’t believe in God, but this is the closest that I’ve ever felt to him—in this place, always the same shore, where everything is the same dull shade of gray and holding the earth together with one gluey hue.

A young couple sits on a blanket on the sand, surrounded by twists of kelp and, nearby, one imperious gull. A man walks his black Labrador. I stand with my hands in my pockets next to Leo, who also has his hands in his pockets, and I say what I’ve been thinking during the entire drive, which is “We should go after them.”

“I have to get home,” Leo says, “but
you
should.” Then he turns and is on my mouth, is kissing me in front of no one and possibly everyone despite legalities, despite what’s proper, despite comfort. His lips are cold and chapped; his hands are on my arms, his firmly pressing fingers against my ribs as if we were dying.

AFFLICTIONS

(1972)

I
n the car to Polk Valley both mother and daughter are afflicted, with Gillian exhibiting paroxysms of guilt: biting the middle joints of her fingers, leaving deep grooves. Her arms itch. When she looks at them she sees that hives have sprung up from wrist to elbow. She scratches the perimeter of one island and says, apropos of nothing, “I had to leave him.” At this, Marianne’s head tilts.

Gillian says, “If I didn’t leave him, I couldn’t have found you. I never would have found out that I had a different mother all along. It makes so much sense, though. You were the only outsider we saw for so many years.”

Marianne wants to ask,
Why couldn’t William come with you?
but to speak this would be accusatory. She has one eye on the road and one eye on Gillian, whose ad hoc pixie haircut is beginning to grow out in uneven patches. Again her beauty is coming through, a light through a crack. Marianne tries not to dwell on how this beauty reminds her of her own beauty, steadily fading since she moved to Sacramento, or maybe lost in the convent or during the pregnancy. Gillian fidgets with the window crank and rolls it down, rolls it up, then rolls it down again. She has changed back into her own green dress. She has her tote with her—her clothes, her undergarments, a bottle of barbiturates and another of opiates and tranquilizers that she found in the bathroom among other partially full bottles, her knife, a garnet ring that she took from Marianne’s jewelry box, her half of the wishbone, her Bible. Objects of safety, is what she tells herself. Talismans.

She had taken the pills in the middle of the night because she recognized them from the
Physicians Desk Reference,
which Ma referred to every so often for reasons of health, and Gillian knows those pills could kill her if only she took them all. Already she has been preparing herself for arriving at the house, their “home sweet home,” and finding William dead by suicide or other tragedy; and should this happen, she would want the escape hatch by which to end her own life; she would want to follow her brother and her mother and her father. A lineage of Nowaks, gone hand in hand from the valley to the shadow of Death, where she would likely go soon enough anyway—beyond what she’d already known from Ma about murder and muggings and unpreventable accidents, she’d found a newspaper on the train that spoke of a man who had killed people (“serially” was the term, he was called a “serial killer”); the serial killer apparently killed for no reason, which was a fresh horror that Gillian could barely contemplate. And this particular escape hatch of suicide is more of an idea than intent. She hasn’t thought it through.

Out of Sacramento already, the environs quickly change from small city to suburbs. There are fast-food chains in orange and yellow—colors meant to stimulate the appetite—and homes exactly identical, or mirror images, of one another. Gillian is thinking about William sliding his hands up her legs, pinching the inside of her thigh until it burned pink; and her telling him that she didn’t like it, and him saying he was sorry. Always he was so sorry, so easily sorry, so easily made to feel guilty, and what difference did it make? She knows that Marianne Orlich loves her in particular, but was always kind to both children, and Marianne would feel generously even toward a boy she only remembers as somewhat of a piano prodigy and a lover of Beethoven sonatas. Maybe she will remember his thick, thick hair. She will be wondering, Gillian knows, why Gillian abandoned her brother. Gillian will have to have a good answer for this. She is stuck fast to the word
abandon,
not realizing that she is not, in fact, the older and therefore allegedly more independent one; that an outsider may see the situation as the following: William may have decided to stay at the house for his own reasons, or that he may be, in fact, doing fantastically by himself.

She’s been reading Randy’s notebook. Most of it is about Cassie, whom he calls “C.” In the notebook he details her body and
behavior with what seems like astounding precision, to the point where Gillian feels she knows Cassie herself—has been
inside
C’s body (both sexually and spiritually), has possessed C’s thoughts. This privilege unnerves as much as it excites her. What, then, does it mean that Randy and C are no longer lovers? How many of these sorts of obsessive connections is Randy supposed to make before he dies? Exhausting.

“I have to pee,” she tells Marianne.

They find a gas station with an accompanying convenience store. While Marianne sits in the car, Gillian goes inside. Marianne can see Gillian walk to the back of the store with stiff and anxious limbs. She can see Gillian trying the knob to the door inside.

In the gas station, Gillian can’t help but think about the K & Bee, which felt significantly more dignified than this place—this place with its rows of unintelligent snack foods and candies. Staring openly at her like a stock boy, the presentation of cheap snacks in bright colors is as tempting as that kid with the blotchy face and long limbs, and licks a similar excitement up her belly. While she waits for the door to open she takes a box of Lots-a-Fun Candies and turns it over in her hive-covered hands, looking at the purple box and the oblong shapes. The typography makes her think of someone shouting. These things Gillian finds charming, and she falls into the old reverie. She smiles, unable to help herself.

“Hey, girly. You need a key for the bathroom.” It is the man behind the counter with long hair like Jesus.

Gillian comes back to the car, tapping on the window. The passenger door opens.

“You didn’t use the bathroom?” Marianne asks.

She slides in, slams the door. “It needed a key.”

“No one was there to give you the key?”

“I don’t know.” Gillian is picking at her cuticles. “Forget it.”

“Honey, you need to go. I’ll come with you, okay?”

Gillian hesitates. Eventually, they enter the convenience store together. The convenience store clerk—stoned—looks at the two of them, a woman and what he presumes is her daughter. The daughter will grow up to look like the mom. Already he can see it. The daughter’s beauty will turn handsome, with lines around the eyes and cheekbones sticking out of her now-soft face.

“The key to the restroom,” Marianne says.

The clerk has both elbows on the counter and is leaning forward as if settling in for a long conversation. He looks behind him at the key on a hook beside a sign for cigarettes. “You gonna buy something?”

“Sure.”

He hands over the key—a single small key on a thin ring, the entirety of which could easily be flushed down a toilet, and has already almost landed in the bowl several times.

Marianne gives Gillian the key. “Go ahead,” she says.

Gillian takes the key and goes back to the restroom.
TOILETS
, the door says in marker. She slides the key into the opening and turns it before yanking on the knob. She turns the knob the other way. It clicks without gratification. Her panic intensifies; she is unaccustomed to locks and keys. She looks back and sees that Marianne is talking to the clerk, pointing at something behind the counter on the wall, inattentive to her needs.

“Help!” she yells, her panic surprising even herself.

By the time Marianne comes to the back of the store, Gillian is shaking. Marianne hugs her. “Oh, honey,” she says. She takes the key and opens the door, hurrying her daughter in. The bathroom expels odiousness; there is toilet paper everywhere, and Marianne sees a shit smear on the floor and maybe on the wall. Gillian looks around, absorbing it all, and Marianne directs her to the toilet, which Gillian sits directly on after yanking down her panties without arranging any tissue on the seat—Marianne doesn’t say anything about it, but she thinks about it. If she’d had more time, she would have. The sound of Gillian’s pee is remarkably animalistic, and Marianne tries to think of the last time she was with someone like this, them openly urinating in front of her.
This is my daughter,
she thinks.
Things like this happen with a daughter.
She waits to feel a burst of love for this, but no such burst comes.

After Gillian rinses her hands in the sink, which provides no soap, above which there is no mirror, the two of them exit the bathroom.

“I just need to finish buying something before we go, okay?” Marianne says.

Gillian says, “I want to leave right now.”

“One minute.” She goes to buy cigarettes; Gillian’s eyes flick back and forth. She scratches her arms with both hands and suddenly sprints to the back of the store, grabs her candies, and
hands them to Marianne. After Marianne takes them Gillian turns away, ignoring the transaction.
Do you like candy?
Marianne wants to ask.
Tell me something true.

They return to the car. Gillian’s hives are intensifying, with a patch on her face growing hot, and then she says, “I said I wanted to get out of there. Why didn’t you listen?”

Marianne pulls out of the gas station parking lot and they are on the road again, the sun blurring their eyes. Both are so tall as to almost touch the top of the car—Gillian with her short hair, Marianne with her twisted and lazy updo. “I had to buy something,” she says, “because you used the bathroom. When you go to a store and use their bathroom, you need to spend money on something.”

“Why?”

“Because—bathrooms in stores are only for customers, honey. People who buy things.”

“Why?”

“That’s how they make money.” She looks over at Gillian. “I’m sorry. Try to take a nap. You can recline the seat and take a nap, okay?” Again, a lump like ice stuck too hard to swallow, making it hard to feel anything but fear. She is in over her head, she is sure of it, and yet she still reaches over and pats Gillian on the knee the way she would pat a strange dog. “Pull the lever on the side and lean it back.”

“I don’t want to stop again.”

“We don’t have to stop again.”

“I’ll hold it. I’ll go in the grass.”

“Okay.”

Gillian looks out the window. “There are no people like me, are there?” she says, thinking of William and the state he must be in now. Has he even left the house? How much food did she leave him? Why did she have to be the maternal one, the one who cared about their fate? She cranks down the window and out go the candies, ricocheting down the road. “I’m a monster,” she says.

“You’re not a monster. You—”

“No.”

And Marianne thinks,
My poor baby, my poor baby who almost stabbed someone, probably for putting his hand on your shoulder, you poor, inconsolable child.

“Why weren’t you
there
?” Gillian finally asks, and starts to cry.

“I’m sorry,” Marianne says, wiping at her own face, “forgive me, forgive me.” She squeezes Gillian’s shoulder as she drives.

The roads turn to highway and they are moving quickly again with the valley all around them, hills the color of awakening grass, Gillian’s head turned with a wet face, pretending to sleep but really looking and thinking,
There is so much of the world.
Again one of the Nowak books, the world atlas, comes to mind; Eden was a place, and so, too, were Greece and Rome; so, too, were Africa and South America. And here she is seeing the spaces in between the only places she knows. How much more of the world can there be? The possibilities feel unfathomable, infinite. She pictures herself playing her familiar piano and peering over the top to see William, his head bobbing, his ecstatic fingers leaping, and she remembers him pressing his face against the warmth of her back in the sun in the endless long meadow, and she remembers her father and mother and William and herself sitting around the dinner table with
golonka
and a broiled fish and mustard greens. In her memory William pelts an insult at her for being grumpy: “The crabbiest crustacean of them all.”

Mother and daughter left at 12:43
P
.
M
. and it’s now 1:22
P
.
M
., with Gillian having just woken from a nap she didn’t mean to take. Her hives have faded but aren’t entirely gone. While she was asleep, Marianne quietly sang Carpenters songs to herself and smoked one-fourth of the pack of cigarettes she purchased from the Jesus-man’s machine; the Camels gave only borrowed calm. On the left and later on the right is a steep drop-off, with only stunted guardrails to keep them safe. When Gillian turns to her, her face light pink, Marianne asks, “How did you sleep?”

“I closed my eyes. It just happened,” Gillian says. She sits up straight. “Where are we?”

“Still on the highway.”

“I dreamed about my house,” she says. “William is going to give up if we don’t find him. He’s not strong—you don’t know him like I do. No one does.
You’re
not a
tongyangxi
—I know without you telling me.”

“No,” Marianne says. “I don’t think I am.”

“I’m William’s
tongyangxi.
I mean, his Eve. I was supposed to be. I was, for a while. I…” She props her glasses up her nose. “Then I ended it… It was about love, but I couldn’t do it anymore,
I couldn’t keep letting him…It was making me crazy how foolish it made him, but I knew I was the fool because I couldn’t. Now I’m thinking, maybe my parents were the crazy ones. I don’t know.”

Christ,
Marianne thinks, and she tries to say something normal.
The two of them. The brother and the sister. What did I do? They ruined her. I ruined her.
She entertains the thought of driving off the road, but catches herself, knowing what a melodramatic and stupid gesture that is. She’s not David. She will not commit suicide under any circumstances. She will fix this. No, she won’t cry anymore, but waits for her throat to relax and the pain to relent. She nods instead, gritting her teeth behind her lips.

“William, though, I made him so sad. It’s not okay, what I did to him. He called me his fish, when he felt like being sweet. Can you go faster?”

Marianne still can’t talk and won’t shake her head, so she nods again and drives with all of her muscles stiffening.

“What a beautiful day,” Marianne says finally. “I don’t remember this route being quite so beautiful.”