Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

After the girl danced for a while she opened the paper sliding door and called out, and then she came and sat next to me at the table on the floor. She still had that absent presence. She asked me what my name was. I told her.

“David,” she echoed.

“And your name?” I asked.

“Mei-Ling.”

We sat in silence. I didn’t touch her, and perhaps it was still leftover childishness that held me back, or a softness that came over me when I heard her gentle voice. In ten minutes there was a rap at the door, and she called out again before the door slid open. The fat girl I’d seen at the market came in with a tray with a bottle of liquor and two tumblers. She didn’t appear to recognize me.

“For you, whiskey,” Mei-Ling said. She watched as the other girl poured. They said something to each other in Mandarin or Taiwanese, the latter a pungent dialect derived from Hokkien, and the fat girl left us alone again.

Mei-Ling pushed one tumbler toward me and I touched it to my lips. She nodded, lifting her glass to her own swollen mouth. I swallowed. I grew increasingly drunk as the second girl popped in with more whiskey, and with Mei-Ling occasionally asking questions in broken English. What did I do? Did I like Taiwan? The drunker I got the more I saw her as a variety of different animals: doe, lynx, mouse, house cat. The whiskey splintered the air between us. She was only a girl, really, but with makeup on she looked older, her carmine lipstick forming a bow on her full lips, the heavy ermine-white powder on her face forming a feral apparition. Doe, deer, female deer, feline, fox. I’d succeeded in getting as far away from my old life as possible. Her hair, inky. Compact body. Small breasts hidden beneath her dress and not the heavy sway of Marianne’s, Marianne’s hair the color of the sun. Mei-Ling put her hand between my legs. The feeling of falling. Remember that I was a virgin. She grasped my hand and slid it up her leg to the softness between her legs where there were no undergarments, slipping my fingers inside her (soft as the inside of a raccoon) while she massaged my aching groin, and that was all it took — I shuddered and spasmed without meaning to, my body jolting as I ejaculated into my pants. I blushed, and then I hated her. With an inchoate and abstract desire I wanted to beat her senseless. I even saw the red handprint on her white cheek that I did not make. Red, white, black: those terribly dramatic colors. Even the room smelled violent.

Without letting any surprise at my ejaculation show, she moved so that we were separate beings again. Here was a small clean towel from out of nowhere. I undid my pants and wiped myself off like a child: disgusted, embarrassed. Meanwhile, Mei-Ling undid and then fixed her hair. It was my underwear, and not my trousers, that bore the brunt of the damage, which was a small relief. She patted her bun, and opened the door to call outside again.

An older woman in a heavy kimono came; later I would learn that this was Daisy’s mother, the mama-san. “Mei-Ling is requested to go,” she said. “You will come back. We would like to see you tomorrow.”

I nodded, surprised by her forthrightness, but already I was thinking of coming back. After the mama-san left, I said, “Goodbye, Mei-Ling.”

“Good-bye,” she said, surprised. “Okay?” And she sounded a bit frightened. I guess I must have seemed angry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d gotten knocked around in that place. Then she said something I hadn’t expected at all, which was “What happened?” And she pointed at my scarred hand.

“I hurt it,” I said. “I cut myself.”

She nodded. I didn’t know if she understood, so I took my grandfather’s knife out of my pocket, flipped it open, and pretended to slice the back of my hand with the blade. “Like this,” I said.

“Why?”

“Haven’t you ever gotten hurt before?”

“I gotten hurt. No…” She pretended to cut herself. “No like this. I gotten hurt…” And then she slapped herself, her head whipping to the side.

I laughed. It seemed the correct response at the time. And she laughed, too. We laughed a little hysterically, I’ll admit. I’d had a few glasses of whiskey, but she was, as far as I knew, sober, and had barely sipped her first drink.

When the laughter died down it seemed that we were adrift again, without connection — but having had that connection, I wanted more. So I said, “How long have you been a bar girl?”

“Pardon?”

“You are a bar girl? How long?”

“Pardon?”

“Forget it. Are you happy here?”

“Happy here…” She picked up her hand and swayed it back and forth. Comme ci, comme ça. “No one happy. Yes?”

And I got very quiet. I lay down on the tatami, and I covered my eyes with one arm so that I couldn’t see anything. In my mouth was the taste of all of that whiskey, and in my loins was the memory of spasms. I thought I wanted to come back. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything. I got up and left the paper room, wove through the sailors in their hats, stumbled into the hot air that felt like sickness. Now that I was away from home, I missed America. I thought of New York fireworks, and of the pews at St. Jadwiga that I knew so well, worn almost soft beneath our bodies, and I touched my slicked fingers to my mouth, which brought me no pleasure.

I wasn’t far from the entrance of the bar, and there was someone calling to me, I realized, through the haze of voices and dogs barking. When I turned I saw that it was the pretty girl from the market. It was true what the lieutenant had said — they didn’t all look the same. This girl had high cheekbones and a thin nose. She was wearing a striped and belted green dress, socks, Oxfords — the dress of a schoolgirl or aspiring bobby-soxer. Her hair, loose past her shoulders, hid the bruise on her neck. But I knew it was there, and the knowledge reinvigorated me.

“You forget your knife,” she said, and handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

“Mei-Ling tell me. You like Mei-Ling?”

I nodded. I was still drunk — the soggy air didn’t help that. But it was true that this girl was beautiful, and I felt momentarily brave.

“Do you want to come to my apartment?” I asked her.

She laughed. “You want sex?”

“I want you .”

“You want sex with me?”

“I want to spend time with you.”

“Spend time?” she said.

“I want to be with you.”

“Ah. I want to listen music,” she said, and delicately pinched her thumb and forefinger together in the distance between us, lifting them an inch or so in the air, and then swinging her arm in an arc before gently dropping them onto an imaginary record. “You have music?”

I nodded. She swayed slightly, rocking back and forth from foot to foot; from this she might sound like someone unsure of herself, or physically awkward, but Daisy has always been anything but awkward, and was merely hypnotizing me — and the serpentine symbolism of her movement does not escape me, but it’s never that simple, is it? She makes that swaying motion now only rarely. In fact, she usually stands quite still.

We went to the teahouse, up the stairs to my apartment. I fumbled for my keys, still drunk, and she said, “You are nice.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said.

“No, I know, I know,” she said, and wrapped her arms around my waist, pressing her warm lips to my shoulder. “You are a nice man.”

She waited for me to open the door. When I did, she slipped in past me and strode around the room, examining things such as a canvas rucksack, or my briefcase, or a pile of books that I imagined she couldn’t read, her fingers stroking the few shirts I had hanging in the alcove that I called a closet. I thrilled to anticipate the shape of her breasts beneath that belted dress, the curve of her ankles beneath those cream-colored socks that matched the paleness of her silly Oxfords exactly, and I wanted to be on top of her. No — I wanted her to be on top of me, controlling me, doing as she pleased with me. This Oriental girl would not mind seizing me. After all, according to the lieutenant, she had fucked plenty of white men because she enjoyed it.