Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

After the door closes behind him, Gillian asks, “Where does he go, when he goes away like that?”

“Oh, just around the corner, around the block.” I put on a big smile. “I’m really excited about your casserole,” I say, scooping her a shovelful. It smells like a home that I’ve never lived in. Gillian leans in and inhales the steam. She settles down in Marty’s chair. And though I haven’t had anything blessed in my life for years and years, I say grace with Gillian: “Thank you, Lord, for this, your bounty, our blessings.” I squeeze her hand.

Halfway through the meal, which is largely silent, Gillian says quietly, almost casually, “Don’t tell Marty, but I almost stabbed someone on the train.”

My fork is still in my hand, though my fingers loosen of their own accord. I grip the fork in a fist like a child, laying it down on the table.

She says, “I met a man on the train. He was going to rape me, so I took out my knife to scare him. I know where to put a blade so that an animal will die. I could have killed him if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to kill him. I only wanted to scare him.”

I try to imagine this scene. I see my daughter standing in the middle of a train car, wielding a dagger at some pathetic stranger, my daughter out of her mind with a fear that’s multiplied by the confusion that accompanies it.

“What did he do?” I ask.

“He just told me that I needed to put it away. It doesn’t matter what he said, only that I didn’t do it. But it’s true, isn’t it, that the world is a dangerous place? You can’t tell me it isn’t.”

I think no one is ever so crazy in love as with whomever they were in love with when they were seventeen, and when I was seventeen I was crazy, I mean positively loopy, about David Nowak, of all people. And what draws a seventeen-year-old to the thing that gets him going, that gets his cock so hard it hurts, depends on the kid, and even though I know saying that an infatuation or whatever gets guys “in trouble” is cliché—for example, when a man says, “I saw that girl and I was in trouble, let me tell you what”—I do mean it literally. When I first felt that stirring, years back, for the athletic thirteen-year-old who shared my new school and my new church and, eventually, even my family, I knew it was all over for me, I might as well have become a murderer.

Because I still remember exactly how, at seventeen, the back of David’s skull made me twitch, with the curve of its base leading to those two lines of muscle that came down to his neck, and he had these great arms. And I’m not saying that the men whom I was attracted to after that were all just like him, but they all had certain qualities of his. One or more. I had an encounter in the park with a younger guy who had David’s particular forearms, that same dusting of gleaming hair that I could see clearly even in the moonlight. Another cliché: to say someone “made me weak.” But it’s true that every time I saw someone like that I lost my moral fiber, I fell apart. I felt guilty about everything, especially things that made or make me happy, and it doesn’t take much time on the couch to figure out how that started. But when I met Leo — dear Leo — in Monterey, within three hours he’d already told me everything that I needed to know about myself, including the fact that I thought I didn’t deserve happiness. He told me before I even opened my mouth. And how I loved that! How could I not love that — someone who saw myself before I did?

Leo also said that had I loved God, and not men, at seventeen, things wouldn’t have turned out any better than they did for Annie. “Had you not renounced God,” he said, chewing on a piece of sourdough, “you would have shot yourself. Because wasn’t your father,” he asked, “the sort of man who kept a gun around?” And I laughed. Annie and I knew he kept it in that cigar box behind his two pairs of good shoes. I came close plenty of times to opening that box, even after I’d decided that God and the Bible were full of shit, even though to think that God and the Bible were full of shit, strangely enough, didn’t have much to do with how I feel or felt about my desires. And about that Colt.45—sometimes I thought my father would shoot my mother with it. Sometimes I spent nights awake, wondering if he would. I told Leo all about that. We were in the back of a bar in Monterey. Neither of us mentioned that we were homosexual, but we knew all the same.

I remember being dumbstruck by his face. Even though I suspected that he wouldn’t punch me for saying it, I was afraid to tell him, as badly as I wanted to, that he had beautiful eyes.

“You want to tell me something,” he said.

He was like a palm reader, or like a Gypsy with a glass orb.

I said, “Look. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I only let them touch me ,” and he nodded.

What do Annie and Gillian do? For the first week they do very little except talk, even though I’ve noticed that Gillian doesn’t say much about her growing up. She has stories about the woods and the deer and the insects. She speaks with an odd cadence, and occasional Nowak-isms come out of her mouth that make me cringe. But the ladies of the house don’t go anywhere. Not downtown or to Tahoe; not to San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. They are only satisfied by each other. Of course, I want Annie to be happy, but I have doubts. I bring Leo over, and Gillian gets nervous the way I used to when I saw lights flashing near the park at night. She goes into Annie’s bedroom and shuts the door.

I’ve told Leo everything about Gillian that I know, including the near-violence on the train. In my room I put my hand on the sleeve of his long navy overcoat. I look up at the fuzz between his proud eyebrows. Behind his head hangs a framed photograph of our mother in the corner; she is sitting at a table with a fishbowl, the bowl filled with water and one sad-looking goldfish.

“She’s got a long road ahead of her,” Leo says, “if, in fact, she’s been living in isolation, and perceives everything as a threat. And who knows? Maybe she was going to be raped.”

He removes his overcoat. Leo works in a printing shop, so he comes to me smelling of mineral spirits and ink and hands that never come clean. I’m hit by a waft of chemicals from the coat’s removal, and we sit side by side on the bed.

“Did I ever tell you,” he asks, putting his smudgy hand on my hand, “that my mother was stabbed when she was a girl?”

“No,” I say. I try not to be outwardly surprised by anything Leo says, which I first decided when he told me that he had his first sexual experience at the age of eight. I kept my face expressionless and listened to him tell me everything.

He says, “You know how people say, ‘She was never the same after that’?”

“Yes.”

“Well. I think my mother was never the same after that. She was a living wound. I could tell that just being in the world hurt her. I’d never met anyone else like that until just now, seeing Gillian.”

“Mmm. And what about Annie?”

“Annie’s tough. She’s been through her fair share.”

“Yes.”

“You have to be tough,” Leo says, “to be a woman. Everyone’s out to get you.” He lies on the bed and pulls me to him. “We have it easy, you and I, in comparison.”

“Yeah?”

“I know you don’t think so, but it’s true.”

“You’re right, I don’t agree. When you say that, I feel sick.”

He kisses the top of my head. “Let me tell you what happened to my mother. She was five or so, playing in front of her house. Her mother had gone inside for a moment. I don’t know why.”