Free The Border of Paradise: A Novel by Esmé Weijun Wang

“Excuse me?”
    I said it again. She looked at David. He said, “She said, ‘Delicious,’ _____.”
    “Ah. So,” she said, “is this your Oriental souvenir?”
    She may have thought that I didn’t know what souvenir meant, but David had bought me many: a flattened penny with the Statue of Liberty on it, a metal Times Square key chain for keys I didn’t own.
    I thought, Eat dog shit, and the place between my ribs stung.
    David said, “Don’t start.”
    “So who is she?” she asked. “I _____ she wants _____. Don’t tell me you’ve already married her?”
    He paused, and seemed unsurprised that she had guessed. “I have, actually.”
    “David!”
    “Well, I have ,” he said, and he did not sound the way I wanted him to, like a grown man, but like a child who was promised something and failed to receive it. He was tugging at his hair. I wanted to say, Stop it, and wished that he had the same self-awareness that I’d had in the taxi. “And,” he added, “I love her! I’m happy. I’m doing much better now.”
    “Oh, Davy. You were barely gone! The ______ still give me looks at ______! And already, a wife? Were you even ______ by a ______?”
    David said nothing. He gestured at the air.
    “Oh,” she said, and took a gulp of champagne before setting it down, but the glass was too fragile for her gesture to have force.“What do you expect me to say? How can I be happy, when she’s not even a ______ [emphasis]? Does she even know who Jesus is?”
    “I know,” I said, although all I knew of Jesus was that he was related to missionaries—the only Americans who came to Kaohsiung were missionaries and sailors, with David being a gadabout and an obvious exception. Fatty had encountered a missionary one day, she told me. Most missionaries in Kaohsiung spoke both English and Mandarin, but this one had not; he gave her a pamphlet with a pencil drawing on the cover of a man hanging on a cross, but her English was much worse than mine, and the missionary had given up on trying to explain. “He said something about a ‘word,’” she said, and I said, “Word means. What?” She shrugged. I could have said something to Mrs. Nowak about the word, but then she would have wanted to know more. She might even ask me what the word was as a test, and I had no idea even though I had thought very long about the puzzle. Maybe it was love, or happy, or man . But I knew it was not woman. There was no woman strung up beside the bad man, but that was because she was not important, made into a figure to be revered or reviled.
    When I said that I knew who Jesus was, Mrs. Nowak gave me a cross look. She said something that I didn’t understand even a little bit, and then she had another gulp of champagne.
    “We can go back to the hotel,” David said, a threat. He touched my shoulder.
    Yes, I thought, let’s go back to the hotel. I thought of the bed that was more comfortable than any bed I had ever lain in, where I could fall asleep and dream a million dreams without moving a centimeter. But then Mrs. Nowak’s face went soft and sad, and she touched her son’s shoulder.
    “No,” she said. Her voice sounded like the cracked shell of a tea egg, full of networked maps of where the injuries had been sustained, and then she wept, her free hand moving to her leaking eyes. “No, please stay. Don’t go. I think about you every day—where you are, if you’re okay…”
    “Oh, don’t cry ,” David said, seeming more frightened than irritated. He put down his glass and wrapped his arms around her. “We won’t go.” The back of his shirt was coming untucked. “I’m fine. Really, I’m okay.”
    I felt the need to vomit. I put my glass down, and everything swam. Without explaining myself I turned and walked down thehall until I found a small door, slightly open, and pushed my way inside. I ran the water to cover the sound of sickness, and then I vomited for a long while into the sink, the sour champagne burning my