Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“This is yours. Not the mama-san’s. Yours.”

She pushed the money back at me. “I take your money, mama-san finds out, I get hit, kill. No.”

“I want to know what happened to Jia-Hui.”

Perhaps Mei-Ling heard something in my voice, because she went still then, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet. “The mama-san. Only because Jia-Hui is mama-san’s daughter is she alive. She is bad.” The word bad held weight. It loaded down the space between us with a thousand tons.

“Bad?” I echoed.

“The most dirty. People know Jia-Hui and the whites have sex for no money. But she is even more dirty. More bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mei-Ling gave me a hard look. “I know you like Jia-Hui. So many men like her. But she has a poison. I tell you, she is worse than animal and worse than whore.”

I pressed her for more, but she added nothing to what she’d told me already, so I weighed my options. Mei-Ling was frail and would be easy to bully. She reminded me of the girls I taunted in my youth, and it wasn’t so different now. If I hurt her it would only be a means to an end. I could break her wrist by clenching it in one disfigured hand. Even now, I wonder, what happened to Mei-Ling? Did she ultimately make a misstep? Was she killed for an error, or did she grow old in that whorehouse? Did a white knight carry her away on his pale, gaunt horse? I cared so little about what she had to say about Jia-Hui’s poor standing. I was obsessed. I would eviscerate myself for Jia-Hui, but I did not hurt Mei-Ling.

On a night that is only important to my memory because of Jia-Hui’s role in it, I exited the bar. I walked home as I had done so many nights before. The few lights in the windows doubled themselves and shimmered. Dogs snapped at my ankles. They circled me in a ragtag pack, one not belonging to another, snarling and woofing in hopes of a scrap, or perhaps in hopes of devouring me. I walked and they followed, leaping. A Chinaman passed with his head down, looking briefly at me before hurrying elsewhere. Here she was to chase them away, my ghost-girl. I felt her grab my arm.

“Take me to America,” she said in a rush, her breath in my ear. She sank her face into the side of my head, whispering, “I want to marry you.”

Daisy finished cutting the potatoes. William laid his head against the inside of my elbow, signaling that he was tired of flashcards. Four o’clock: he needed a nap.

“William’s sleepy,” I said, still thinking of Daisy’s small feet, and my memory of Marianne’s larger ones, pink from traipsing inside wool socks and boots in the snow, the size of which she was embarrassed by. I lifted William into my arms, and he rested his face on my shoulder. I carried him into his room and settled him to bed. There was no such thing as a crib for our wee one; he slept in a twin bed with an assortment of stuffed toys. I tucked two bears around him and pulled the covers to his chin. He did not suck his thumb, as I had. He said, drowsily, “Love you.”

“I love you, too.” I kissed him on his crown.

Next I entered the master bedroom, which was sparsely decorated. I’d thought all women were interested in interiors, but Daisy was not. The only additions that she made to our bedroom were a few of William’s drawings — taped, not framed — to the wall above our iron headboard, and a corny, coral-colored vase of fake carnations that she’d bought from town and placed on her vanity table. I’d chosen the furniture: the wrought-iron bed, the matching mahogany night tables, the wardrobe with its elaborately carved doors, and even the vanity table and mirror, which I’d assumed that Daisy wanted because she was a woman, and which she did use, though I never did know if it brought her pleasure.

I closed the door and locked it. The phone sat on my side of the bed, on my night table. My wife, after all, had no one to call.

“Number, please.”

I gave the switchboard operator the Orlichs’ number. I waited, and through the crackle of the line I heard a familiar voice: “Caroline Orlich speaking.”

“Mrs. Orlich,” I said.

“Who is this?” Did I hear something resigned, tired, upset?

“It’s David Nowak.”

“Oh. Well,” she said, “this is a surprise.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No. I’m completely unoccupied at the moment. Isn’t it true that you broke your mother’s heart a few years back?”

The fact that Mrs. Orlich knew this shocked me. Matka was a private person, and wouldn’t even have allowed anyone to know about my father’s death if it hadn’t been an unavoidable concession. Carefully I asked, “Do you speak with her?”

“No. I see her at the supermarket sometimes, but she’s always thought that she was too good for me. Look where that’s got her. Anyway, I heard from George that you had some kind of fight with her. That’s all. She looks miserable, by the way — skin and bones. Wrapped in furs like a bag lady. Why are you calling?”

“I was wondering,” I said, God help me, “if I could — I’d like to get in touch with Marianne.”

“Is that right. Well, if you’re looking to scoop her up, you’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s living in a convent now.” She laughed. “Is that all you wanted?”

“I’d still like to talk to her,” I said.

“I don’t think they accept phone calls at the convent, dear. Probably too busy praying, and I haven’t spoken to her since she left. It’s somewhere out in California, out in the middle of nowhere. Near Sacramento. Did you know that Sacramento is the capital of California? Who knew?”

“What sort of convent is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, the kind where they pump out nuns like parts on an assembly line. The town is Killington, I just remembered. What an awful name. Killington. I can’t believe my daughter lives in a place with a name like that, can you? Like a land of murders.”

Killington. She was forty-five minutes away, in the next town over. My heart felt oversized, pumping rushes of blood to bloat my head full. Was this the greatest news of my life, or the most terrible? I vaguely recalled Marianne telling me of some dream to live in Northern California. Had I, without knowing it, steered my family in this direction?

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Is that all you wanted to know? These calls are expensive. I don’t even know where you are.”

“Nowhere. Good-bye,” I said, and hung up.

I sat on the bed with my hand on my chest. Had I imagined the conversation? Had Caroline Orlich really told me that her daughter lived a short distance from where I sat? Marianne was in a convent, of course, and I was married, with a son, but she was out there: no longer in Chicago, but doing what she’d wanted to do for so long, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that she was now so close to me, but an act of Fate. Because while I’d found a woman to marry, I’d never snuffed out my flame for that girl from the Pawlowskis’ Christmas party. If monogamy is measured in the heart, I must say that I’d never forsaken Marianne, the specter. In the marrow of my bones I’d carried her with me from New York to Taiwan, around the United States, and finally to Polk Valley.

My one regret was this: it was not that I’d lacked the courage to chase Marianne to Chicago, or even that I’d fled to the East and chosen to marry the woman I named Daisy, but that I had but one life with which to make such choices — and that damned inflexibility immediately left me greedy and grasping, with my hand still pressed against my sternum as though to hold in the heart beneath.

Within the week I told Daisy that I had business in Sacramento. She didn’t ask what that business was, but nodded, hugged me, and told me to be safe. “Be safe” was a habit of hers, and it makes me wince to think of it now, because I left this morning without saying good-bye to her or to the children, which means that I escaped the plea or superstitious ritual of hers. (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.) On the drive to Killington I lost myself in dreams. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t drive off the road; I was busy thinking about Marianne’s body, but it would be too simple to say that my interest was purely sexual. I had no intention of seducing her, because the Marianne I’d known as an adolescent would never allow herself to be seduced, and the Marianne who had chosen to become a nun would be even more impossible to bed. It was the substance of her that I wanted to be near. I loved anticipating the sight of her body, even if it was cloaked and hidden; but I also wanted to just talk to her, to hear her gentle voice, to ask her if she remembered the days on the roof, to remind her of eating cookies in her living room, which felt threadbare to me at the time, but now seems far warmer than my Polk Valley living room, which has a small bookcase, a sofa and easy chair, and the twin uprights, but not much else; I wanted to ask her if she ever thought of me, because I was lost and I often thought of her; I would tell her that I continued to pray, but that I felt as distant from God now as I did when I first lost my mind. Most of all — and here my eyes misted, and I could barely see the road — I wanted to tell her that I missed her.