Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

It was all a dream; I was sleepwalking through everything. We were going to tell his mother that we were married. We were even going to, depending on the level of our bravado, tell her that I was pregnant, though the child in my belly was barely a month old and not yet stirring, and only known to us because of my otherwise precise menstrual regularity and symptoms of soreness and sickness. We were visiting her during our honeymoon early in July. We did not know what we were going to do after that. But Taiwan already felt very far away, as if it were itself a dream, and there was nothing around us to remind me of its fragments. The wisps of memory were already fading and being replaced by this also dreamlike reality. David banged the knocker twice.

A woman came to the door. I knew that she was Mrs. Francine Nowak right away. She had his blond, nearly white hair pulled back with no fringe, and the same twitchy mouth, which jerked slightly as it smiled as if on a hook.

“Davy,” she said, hugging him, patting him on the back as though he could break, and then, looking over his shoulder: “You brought a friend.”

His father was dead and he had told his mother nothing about me. He was a simple man and had not wanted a big wedding, and we had gone to the town hall. He was passionate and had wanted to marry me as soon as possible, without his mother’s interference, and we had gone through all the hoops, the visa and paperwork, to do it. He loved his mother, but she had grown, in his words, difficult over the years. My English was both good enough to assume this was the case and bad enough to cause misunderstandings. This peculiar state of being in the vaguest language space was enough to paralyze me if I thought too much about it, because there was much that I could misunderstand. In Taiwan I had been proud of my ability to manipulate language to my advantage. Here I was lucky if I understood most of a sentence.

“Her name is Daisy,” he said.

“Charmed,” Mrs. Nowak said. “I didn’t ______ you were bringing someone. You really should have told me — I haven’t ______ prepared. I _____ she can sleep in the ______ room.”

David said, “It’s ______ hot.”

She backed into the hall, pulling the door open as she did so, and she stood behind the door as we entered until we were inside (her disappearance strange for a moment), at which point she pushed the door shut and double-bolted it. The air was cool and thick with pipe smoke — but who smoked a pipe in this house of a dead man? I looked deep into the brown stone house, which had entryways into other rooms on either side and opened into a large room at the end, where I saw plush green sofas and a lamp. In the safety of her home Mrs. Nowak now looked at me more closely.

“I cut this fruit for you,” I said, still holding the plate.

“You ______ did,” she said. “Bring it into the kitchen. I have some ______ ______. David, I’ll bet you haven’t had a good ______ in _____.”

“Don’t you live alone?” David asked.

She nodded; she looked like he had accused her of something.

“Well, it ______ of pipe smoke,” he said.

“It’s a new bad habit, you could say. We all have them.”

“I suppose,” David said, “that we do.” He glanced at me briefly and smiled. Already I was unmoored. Mrs. Nowak began to walk down the long hall as we followed. I looked at the photographs on the red velvet walls, including one of David at a grand piano. The Nowaks used to make pianos and that was the source of the Nowak fortune; that much I knew. Then we turned to the right and entered a kitchen more glorious than any of the stony kitchens I had entered in my nineteen years. The stove gleamed white, with two oven doors beneath it. The cabinets were the pale pink of watermelon milk. Buttery containers of three sizes sat on the countertop, and they were the exact color of the yellow tiles.

“ ______ for your friend?” Mrs. Nowak asked, moving to the icebox. She removed a large bottle.

“She’s never had it,” David said. “I don’t think she has. Champaaaagne?” he asked. I shook my head, smiled. He asked if I wanted some. I nodded. The less I said, the better it would be for all of us. “You can put that down,” he added, pointing at the platter, and I looked for a suitable surface.

Mrs. Nowak took the fruit from me. She was smiling again. She wanted to speak to David alone about me, but instead she retrieved three tall, thin glasses with single legs while David popped open the bottle, and he poured me a glass of something full of bubbles. I waited for them to drink first before I took a sip, but if there was anything I knew how to do, including crying only when I wanted to and dancing the twist, it was how to drink. I didn’t startle when it went down my throat and I felt like I was inhaling water.

“Delicious,” I said.

Mrs. Nowak said, “Excuse me?”

I said it again. She looked at David. He said, “She said, ‘Delicious,’ _____.”

“Ah. So,” she said, “is this your Oriental souvenir?”

She may have thought that I didn’t know what souvenir meant, but David had bought me many: a flattened penny with the Statue of Liberty on it, a metal Times Square key chain for keys I didn’t own.

I thought, Eat dog shit, and the place between my ribs stung.

David said, “Don’t start.”

“So who is she?” she asked. “I _____ she wants _____. Don’t tell me you’ve already married her?”

He paused, and seemed unsurprised that she had guessed. “I have, actually.”

“David!”

“Well, I have ,” he said, and he did not sound the way I wanted him to, like a grown man, but like a child who was promised something and failed to receive it. He was tugging at his hair. I wanted to say, Stop it, and wished that he had the same self-awareness that I’d had in the taxi. “And,” he added, “I love her! I’m happy. I’m doing much better now.”

“Oh, Davy. You were barely gone! The ______ still give me looks at ______! And already, a wife? Were you even ______ by a ______?”

David said nothing. He gestured at the air.

“Oh,” she said, and took a gulp of champagne before setting it down, but the glass was too fragile for her gesture to have force. “What do you expect me to say? How can I be happy, when she’s not even a ______ [emphasis]? Does she even know who Jesus is?”

“I know,” I said, although all I knew of Jesus was that he was related to missionaries — the only Americans who came to Kaohsiung were missionaries and sailors, with David being a gadabout and an obvious exception. Fatty had encountered a missionary one day, she told me. Most missionaries in Kaohsiung spoke both English and Mandarin, but this one had not; he gave her a pamphlet with a pencil drawing on the cover of a man hanging on a cross, but her English was much worse than mine, and the missionary had given up on trying to explain. “He said something about a ‘word,’” she said, and I said, “Word means . What ?” She shrugged. I could have said something to Mrs. Nowak about the word, but then she would have wanted to know more. She might even ask me what the word was as a test, and I had no idea even though I had thought very long about the puzzle. Maybe it was love, or happy, or man . But I knew it was not woman. There was no woman strung up beside the bad man, but that was because she was not important, made into a figure to be revered or reviled.

When I said that I knew who Jesus was, Mrs. Nowak gave me a cross look. She said something that I didn’t understand even a little bit, and then she had another gulp of champagne.