Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know,” she said, frowning, and looked away.

“No,” I said, “what do you mean?”

She said, “ When , for a while, it looked like I was going to marry you. Don’t misunderstand. I did… love you. I did. Of what I know of love, that is what I think it was. I was torn between my spiritual calling and hoping to be a good Catholic as your wife. I must have spent hours praying over it, asking God what he wanted from me. Then there were my parents, who saw me as their meal ticket. All I had to do was marry you. But that all changed for them when you got sick.”

“I assumed as much.”

“I was glad to get away, but I’ll say this again — my feelings hadn’t changed when I left for Chicago. I need you to understand that. I was always very fond of you,” she said. “It just didn’t work out for us. But that’s all right, it seems. You have your family, and I have this. We’ve found our own ways, haven’t we?”

“Yes. You’re right,” I said, but I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

“I’m glad to see you, though. You’re looking… well.”

“Am I? Do you mind if I stand next to you?” I drew circles in the flour. I drew a heart without meaning to. Then I turned and kissed her cheek. She didn’t pull away, but I felt her grow rigid as I touched her.

“Please don’t make things difficult.”

“I’m not trying to.”

“You have a wife.”

“This and that are not mutually exclusive,” I said. “I’m here as a friend.”

“David,” she said.

“I’d still like to see you as a friend.” I wiped the flour heart onto the floor.

That night I checked on our son, and came to find Daisy sitting at the kitchen table, sniffling and swiping at her eyes. She smiled. “Hi,” she said.

I’m ashamed to admit that the sight of her sadness irritated me. It shouldn’t have. I ignored her tears, and then I feared that she’d accuse me of infidelity, although she had no right to; I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d seen Marianne once. I’d spoken to her, and then I’d left her there in the kitchen baking bread as feelings roiled in my every cavity.

“William’s asleep,” I said. “How’s dinner?”

“Dinner will be at six o’clock,” she said.

I knew but never dealt with the fact that Daisy was prone to occasional fits of melancholy, which she always tried to hide from me, and her ability to make that effort causes me to suspect that she was crying more than I was witness to. I’ll never know why she cried, but maybe what’s most important is that she had so many reasons to cry, which leaves me with the conclusion that perhaps she was weeping for all of them at once. I hope that one day, if the luck that’s escaped me in this life can find me in the next, I can speak to her plainly. I would ask her to please tell me the story of her life, including the story of her life with me. She deserves that much, I know.

From moment to moment the air was like sheets, like walking through a hallway of clotheslines. Everywhere I went I was saddled with warnings. I went to visit Marianne again the next week, this time carrying a satchel of fresh cheese and a hunk of dark peasant bread, red grapes, wine. Fake-Marty-the-brother took his sister into the woods behind the monastery and he found her a great oak to sit beneath. Her face was beautiful in its plainness; she was happier than I could have hoped for. I was happy to see that she was happy, even if it was a tentative happiness. I could hope to have our old joy back.

“Once upon a time,” Marianne said, lying in the grass with her arms stretched overhead.

“There was a young man,” I said, “who had everything.”

“He had a cloak that rendered him admirable to the selected few.”

“There was really only one of the selected few.”

“Yes.” Marianne was, what, twenty-two at the time? It was autumn. The oak had shimmied off half its leaves. She said, “She was a girl trapped in a castle, and she had a cloak, but hers was tattered. And she adored the young man who had everything…”

“He lost it all, his mind, everything.”

She sighed. “Oh, the story is becoming sad.”

“It is a little sad, isn’t it?” I took the bottle of wine and corkscrew out of my satchel. Daisy and I rarely drank — she lacked the Oriental propensity to redden from alcohol, but still she preferred not to drink it, which I never would have guessed, given her origins; so I stopped drinking, too, remembering Matka and her dragon’s breath. But on this visit with Marianne I brought a bottle of wine, and I uncorked the bottle and drank. I handed it to Marianne, who held it with one hand at the neck before swallowing from it with the help of her other hand tipping it back at its base, a thin stream dribbling down the corner of her mouth. I wiped the drips away, and she smiled.

Before I knew it I was corrupting her. The Marianne I visited this time felt fundamentally different from the one I’d seen before. This time I touched her arm, and then I was brave enough to touch her thigh. She didn’t move, but her stillness seemed like permission. The seduction was immediate. I yanked up her dress and waited for a reply. She went still again, and then I heard her breath, shallow and wanting, before she pressed her forehead against mine, and that was enough for me. I thought momentarily of consequences. I’m afraid that I could not be convinced of how terrible those consequences could be. We made love in a field absent of insects, with the only sound around us the crackling of the dead grass, the dry leaves, and the agonized sounds that slithered from the back of her throat. She wrapped her legs around my back. I thrust slowly and with concentration; we gulped air in turns. We were the center of the universe.

She went quiet as she gathered her clothes, and I watched her muscles move beneath her skin. I asked her what she was thinking. She shook her head. I put the remnants of our picnic in my bag, and when it was all finished she said, her teeth purplish, “You never think that you have an impact on people, David, but you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not careful, you think that you’re the only one that anything happens to. It’s blindness.”

I needed to leave, but I didn’t want to leave on those terms, so I waited. She asked me where I lived. I said Polk Valley. She wanted to know exactly where. I almost said that it would be better if she didn’t know, but I knew that to say so would be a slap in the face. I gave her a description without an address, and then I asked her why.

“I just wanted to know something about you that I didn’t already,” she said. “Having you here makes me think that nothing’s changed. I can’t afford to think that.”

I saw her a few more times. The next time, she was reluctant; her gestures were less hungry, but still she reached for me. When I saw her for the third time she looked sick. I told her, half joking, that she was a classic example of Catholic guilt. She told me that I was ruining her, that she loved me, but she didn’t know what to do.

A month and a half later the air became frigid, and I went outside to have a cigarette when I opened the door and there was Marianne in her long-sleeved dress, which was damp at the armpits.

“David,” she said, and I thought I was imagining her until I opened the screen door and she looked behind her at a car in our driveway behind the Buick, holding up her hand to someone I couldn’t see, before coming into the hallway. As she and I walked into the living room Daisy poked her head in. She looked at Marianne.