Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“Wait,” I murmur as I extricate myself — with difficulty.

“What?”

“Ma gave me some things,” I say, heading wardrobe-ward, unsteady. I begin to sift through the top shelf. “So you don’t get pregnant. You can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh.”

Standing at the foot of the bed with the box of condoms in hand, I remove the first square, placing the rest of the box on the floor, and try to tear the package open with my trembling fingers. Next I try it with my teeth. I am half drooling onto the slippery surface, but still the foil gives. Holding the half-foiled condom in one hand, I undo the drawstring to my trousers with the other; they fall to the floor. Gillian watches with an opaque and shadowy expression. Next I pull off my briefs. To my surprise, I feel no embarrassment. Rather, it is a thrill — half naked, exposed and dizzy — has the blood in my head truly all gone to my groin?

“Won’t you take off your clothes?” I ask. And, oh God, she does. She pulls her dress over her head and there are her small breasts, her pink panties, Gillian sitting with her knees pressed together and her hands properly folded in her lap. I climb onto the bed and put the condom beside her body because I am desperate to touch her, and there is so much flesh to revere; I am stroking her soft, concave belly the way she does, at times, the bear rug on her floor. I try to kiss her everywhere that I can see. Her naked form is constructed of sinew and bone, with broad shoulders curving upward to a graceful neck; her arms are taut, her waist narrow, her hips wide and boxy. Her navel is an abyss. I grab her curved hipbones.

“What are you doing?” Gillian asks.

“Shush,” I say, though it seems that breath has left me. “Lie down,” I say, and she does. I tug at her panties and yank them to her knees, revealing her tawny pubic curls, and as I push her legs apart I quickly see her soft and strange womanly parts. Dizzily I lean into her, inhaling the dank scent of those delicate lips, filling my brain with a muddy brown-black sensation. Involuntarily my hand moves. I squeeze myself and moan.

She asks, again, “What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry. Ma told me what to do. Just stay like that.” I stroke her shoulder. Before I remove my hand I realize that she’s shaking. The realization pulls me out of my reverie.

“You’re shaking,” I say.

“I’m sorry.”

“You — you don’t have to be sorry. It’s okay, just stay like that. I’m going to put this on now, I think. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure it out.” I fumble. I am aware of my breath hitching. “This is confusing. I think I put it on wrong. I don’t think I can use this one.”

Here she is, right in front of me, and I can’t even get inside of her. I go to the floor to get another one. Gillian is still lying on the bed where I left her, panties around her knees and trapping her legs akimbo, her parts gaping. She watches as I unwrap the condom, again with my teeth, and roll the rubbery disc on.

“Maybe we should kiss some more,” she says. She pulls her legs together and tries to sit up, but I’m on top of her, pushing her thighs apart with one hand and manipulating myself with the other. “Wait a second?” she says, and then we’re having sex; or at least I am pushing my way inside of her, briefly stopped by what I presume is her hymen, and then, with one final, desperate thrust I am filled with bliss. My body seizes. I utter nonsense and immediately ejaculate inside her, eyes closed and flooded with starlight.

But she is saying something. She is saying my name. The timbre of her voice compels me to open my eyes, and to my horror, mixed with the remaining fog of pleasure, I realize that she’s turned her head to the side and is crying. I immediately remove my body from hers and she curls like a pill bug, making small sounds. “It hurts. Why did you do it?” she says, and moves her hand between her legs. When she lifts her fingers to the moonlight we see a shadow, we see blood.

I embrace her. I sink my face into her perfumed neck. “Oh, sweetheart, don’t worry about the blood. Ma said that might happen. But I’m sorry I hurt you, xiao mei —I never meant to hurt you…”

When I awaken the morning after our consummation, I think for a moment that I’m still dreaming. David’s dragged Gillian out of bed again and she’s at it in the living room. It is, indeed, my sister playing, and in fact, a sunken part of my brain recognizes it straightaway as Scott Joplin, her favorite. But Gillian rarely gets up before I do — loves to sleep in. Moreso, she seems to have skipped her exercises. Finally, there’s something essentially wrong about the way she’s performing whatever it is that’s waking me up at four thirty on the day that our mother returns.

I sit up in bed and pull off the sheets. Immediately I think of the night before and that clownish pleasure, the prelude to a lifetime of love with her, and I grin to remember the look and feel of her body. She’d gone to the bathroom afterward, turning the light on as she left, and came back in a T-shirt and underwear with clean thighs and a toothy smile. (Her teeth, small and pointy, giving any smile of hers a bizarre gleam.) “Sorry about that,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “The blood shocked me, is all.” And then she told me she loved me and wished me a good night.

I dress and go to the living room, where Gillian sits with perfect posture at her bench. The lamp is on. This morning she’s dressed in a dreamy, silky thing with no sleeves, exposing her burnished shoulders, which reminds me of how mad I am about her shoulders. “Is that ‘Bethena’?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Bethena,” the song Scott Joplin wrote for his wife, Freddie Alexander, after she perished because of complications from a cold. So Mrs. Kucharski told us, which I have never forgotten.

“Isn’t that a little fast for ‘Bethena’?”

“I thought I’d play it a little fast today,” she answers.

“It sounds all right,” I say. “The syncopation is awkward.” Her hands swing at the wrists, back and forth over the keys. Suddenly her comportment dampens the thrill I’d felt in bed and replaces it with unease. “Ma said she’d be home in the evening today,” I add. “I’ll start cleaning the kitchen. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right.”

“Nothing’s troubling you?”

“Buddy,” she says, “what’s troubling me is trying to hold forth while playing this song to completion.”

I go to the kitchen, rebuked. For the rest of the day I am desperate to have sex again, the memory of the night before causing a strong and frequent recurrence of arousal. On occasion, in between jabs of mopping or sweeping, I put my hand on her hip or on the small of her back. She neither recoils nor leans into me. What a fickle, strange girl, I think, but I have, of course, no complaints, and I kiss her tenderly on the back of the neck as she wipes down the counters; I touch her side, and then the inside of her thigh. Finally she says, “There’s a lot left to do, ge ,” and though my fingers linger for perhaps a few more seconds than they absolutely ought to, I pull them back. “Maybe a little bit of kissing, if there’s time,” I suggest. There is not.

In the late afternoon, before the sun begins to drop out of sight, Ma arrives. “Take my suitcase, please,” she says, using the phrase bai tuo ; the suitcase is at her feet. I pick up the suitcase. Gillian stands behind me, and Ma looks over my shoulder at her as she adds, “Gillian, tea?”