The Border of Paradise: A Novel (21 page)

It was good for him to have projects, I decided, in the same way that I had decided that going into town was good for him. He had a small number of books that he had delivered to town for himself, and he brought them into the house with electric brightness in his face. He sat at the kitchen table and made lesson plans in a ledger. He had particular fountain pens that he liked to use with three kinds of ink, which he chose from depending on what he was writing about: green, red, and black. He bought pencils for the children. He also had plain notebooks with cream-colored canvas covers with labels like GENERAL VOCABULARY: WN and GENERAL VOCABULARY: GN.

When he started making these lesson plans, William was two and Gillian was a few months old. David was still using the flashcards with William, but he said that William was too old for
Goodnight Moon
and needed to learn more complicated things. I believe he once said that the most important thing for a parent was to raise his child to be intelligent. How stupid this sounds now, I know.

The second hobby that David took up was stuffing animal corpses, which started when he brought bags with him in the car to pick up the bodies of raccoons and skunks, and took home to empty in the shed out back. I wanted to ask him how could he do something so foul. But by then I chose my moments carefully, and I chose to say nothing. Once I went into the shed and saw his ghoulish animals with sewed-shut eyes on shelves and tables. This was when he was still learning the basic skills of taxidermy, and because he was a beginner the animals lacked their proper shapes and looked distended like monsters. I emitted a small scream and backed out of the shed.

“I saw the animals,” I said one morning, before either of the children was awake. Watery light rushed through the kitchen window, over our feet and shins. “Why do you want them? The animals in the shed.”

I thought this was a safe thing to ask, but he scowled. “It’s not a question,” he said.

I was confused. We were in a corner again. “Promise me, you lock the shed. I don’t want the children to go in there, get into trouble or get scared.”

“Fine.”

“And,” I added, “lock on the
outside
.”

It wasn’t so bad all the time, but I remember certain things that are impossible to repeat without ruining his face. The children were sometimes afraid of him. He would say, later, that he had never had a happy day. In the worst of it he would forget that he had ever experienced happiness, however fleeting, and we argued.
But what about this time?
I would ask.
When you did such-and-such? No,
he would say,
that was fakery, it was pretend, that wasn’t actually happiness.
It was not a lie so much as a sincere belief in an untruth. At least I imagine it this way, because I can’t stand the idea that he was never happy. He said this and it felt like he was being cruel. I wanted to ask him if he was happy when we were first married, or when we lived in San Francisco, but I was too afraid of what he would say. For comfort I told myself that it was a demonic trick of the spirit, but I recall this argument as one of the worst. I had left the house. William ran to the back door and I yelled at him to go back inside, I didn’t want him—it was one of the worst things I could say.

Happy things. We had Easters and birthdays. David loved Easter. We dyed eggs by making wire loops and dipping them in Rit. But the game, it turned out, was in hiding the eggs. He insisted on hiding them in tree branches so that the children would have to climb. We celebrated everyone’s birthday. We did not celebrate the Lunar New Year. I worry that this is harder than I expected it to be. By which I mean, the difficulty with which I am trying to remember our joys.

So when you say, “Did you ever wish that he would just end it?” do you expect me to say yes? What do you see me as? How human do you think I am?

Now that he’s dead I wonder why it terrified me so much more than, say, the threat of illness or a car accident, why his repeat attempts made me frantic at almost every moment of our married life. The impending suicide of my husband was a fear that was completely unlike, say, my worries that William would suffocate in his sleep. With David I learned that suicide was an utterly uncontrollable act disguised as the most controllable death possible. I have seen Western movies, and I will say that my marriage was like riding on a horse alongside a man who is on a horse that is not only unbroken and wild, but also has no care for itself, and will buck in any way possible to get its rider off. David had his
hands on the reins, but the horse didn’t care. He could stay on for a while but only for so long.

It made me miserable to be on guard always, to never say a word that could be interpreted as unkind, to do everything he wanted whether I liked it or not, to encourage him, to shield our children from his madness and yet to be unsuccessful in my poor attempts, to feel useless, to live with him, love him, be a dutiful wife, and know that it made no difference.

And what difference did it make? I would have gladly been miserable forever if I could only ensure that he would die of the flu. So I was doomed to ridiculous mental calculations and pleas:
David, could we remove the ceiling beams? Could we have a knifeless household, and tear meat with our fingers? Can you not go into the shed with that razor blade? Could all the belts go into a locked box; could all the shoelaces be removed and disposed of; could I have you hand over that tie because you don’t wear ties anyway? Please can I follow you from dawn till dawn so that I know you’re all right?
A few times he snapped at me. He said, “I’m not a child,” and I said quickly, “Of course not,” but it would have been so much easier if he were a child, and I could trap him in a room forever.

The children were eating
. Steam rose from their bowls in the cold morning kitchen. William had one knee up and had propped his forearm on that knee while he blew on the spoon. Already he was starting to develop David’s broody look, which I thought would please my husband. While the children and I ate
with pickles—they were American pickles and not the right pickles, which are small slices with a green-black exterior, but American pickles were better than nothing—David stood by the sink. He had said he wasn’t hungry. He had lost weight, and I was worried about the way his bones were showing through his open collar.

“Ai, sit properly,” I said to William, “you look like an animal.”

William kicked his legs under the table. “What kind of animal?”

“Not Noah’s,” David said.

“What?”

My husband said, “No, you’re not.”

(I did know, at that point, who Noah was—David was reading to them from the Bible. He was starting from the old book first. But I didn’t know what he meant when he spoke of Noah then.)

David reached to his side and threw an orange at William’s head. There was a fruit bowl on the counter by the sink; we kept it there to remind the children to wash fruit before they ate it. The orange hit William in the temple with a muted, dense sound, and then the fruit hit the table, clanking and heavy, and William, who had poor reflexes, reeled. To his credit, he didn’t cry, and the orange rolled onto the floor.

It could have been a moment we could have ignored, however difficult it would be. It was almost funny. It could be read as funny. But David said, “I hope you drown, I hope you drown,” and he began to head out the back door. We were all so stunned that none of us did anything, including Gillian, who was looking with round eyes. I mentally begged David to come back in and apologize. But no. He was on the porch, and it was snowing. He was in his undershirt and worn khakis. He was not wearing shoes and we all knew that this was ridiculous. The three of us called for him to come back. The orange was under the table, forgotten. He had never hit any one of us before. Had he meant to hurt William? The entire incident seemed so devoid of emotion, like an inversion of a Beijing opera. I told William to watch his sister, grabbed my coat, and put on my shoes. I ran out to follow David into the field. I kept thinking about how cold his feet must be. I was worried about frostbite.

And as I chased his back I thought, my heart banging like a fist on a door,
If he goes away, Gillian can be William’s tongyangxi. I will not be alone. Gillian is beautiful. She will be William’s tongyangxi. They will love each other as David and I do, together in our home, and I will not ever have to be alone.