The Border of Paradise

WIFE OF DAVID. JIA-HUI (1954–1968)

In Mandarin the words for suicide are . In literal terms this means “self-kill.” My husband David has self-killed and it has been four months now. I knew this would happen once I found him crashed to the floor from attempting to hang himself. I knew that it was only a matter of time.

Or yes I knew this when I was first told that he was crazy by his own mother. But who can believe one’s mother-in-law, especially when that mother-in-law refers to you as a souvenir without batting an eyelash, and burns with anger in your presence simply because you exist and have small eyes and skin with the undertone of ripe star fruit. Or yes I knew that he would while in a penthouse suite in San Francisco, when we were surrounded by luxury and William was in my belly, and I awoke to be confronted with a floor of broken glass. I’m afraid to admit that I was ever so naïve. What other things do I not know, when I thought I knew so much?

David was the one who changed my name. It was Jia-Hui Chen until I was nineteen, and who I was then bears little resemblance to who I am now at thirty-three, with two children and a dead husband who behaved as though we had always lived in this wooden home in these woods, in this former gold mining town like an inserted memory. I am much older, for example, than the Daisy Nowak who walked into Saks Fifth Avenue in the summer of 1954. In the air-conditioned building scented with perfume I stood next to my new white husband, who was willing to spend “two thousand dollars or more” on his wife, whom he called an “Oriental lamb” not only to my ear in passionate love but to anyone willing to indulge him in listening; David, who only knew of money and not of pretty clothes; and I not knowing the ridiculousness of what two thousand American dollars meant, or the extent of David’s irrationality or wealth. But I looked at the salesgirl, whose hair was a helmet of distinct red curls, each a perfect sculpture, and I read in her round face the answer as the corners of her mouth pulled back and her eyes shot the accusation, Who do you think you are?

I emerged from the multi-mirrored dressing room in the first dress, which exposed the soft hollow above my collarbones, and fit at the waist with a full skirt. I felt the flutter that I had known when, at the bar, David first put his scarred hand on my waist. When I felt it through the silk of my dress. (Fatty asked me later if the scarred hand was worse than the white men’s thicketed arms and legs. Was it worse than their pale koi bellies, she wanted to know.) The sight of myself in the multiple mirrors, dressed like a Hollywood starlet out of a song-and-dance magazine, was like seeing a chicken with the head of a lizard. I could never become the girl that the dress was made for, but would be an entirely new creature. I smiled. The black-haired girl in the mirror smiled. Blond David grinned like a child. You think that these details are not important, but they are. In Kaohsiung, as the daughter of a mama-san, I could have had the red-haired woman’s face kicked in by thugs. But as Daisy Nowak, wife of David? I could only smile.

Who are you being an Oriental girl, the daughter of a mama-san and a mob boss father, a young woman who hunted girls to hire like a wolf in the woods.

One might think that a sixteen-year-old girl would be so young as to not have any power or authority over other females, especially ones who were older than she. Let me reassure you that this is not the case. A certain repertoire of cutting looks and bitch-mouthed retorts, plus a sharp sort of attractiveness, makes a girl like me as intimidating as any tattooed thug. Part of this was nature, but the other part was a consequence of the cutthroats who raised me. I also had an uncanny ability to see past pouting lips and clotted-on makeup, deep into whether a girl could be transformed into a bar girl and, more important, a moneymaker. I had no formula for making such a decision; it simply came to me. Another girl in my position, had she a lesser eye, might have chosen a potential bar girl with predictably appealing characteristics. But on occasion I would select a rather flat-chested girl, with the secret knowledge that her flirtatious tentacles touched not only myself, but also anyone whose favor she wished to curry, and many of my mother’s best, and most eccentric, girls came to her from my cultivated choosing. By my eighteenth birthday I was seeing up to three or four girls a day for evaluation. Some, having heard that the Golden Lotus was a more hospitable refuge than their own sorry homes, had come to meet me at the market (always in the morning, before the heat descended, and when I was at my least ill-tempered). Others I’d found while prowling the streets, searching for girls running errands for their families. I’d ask them, “You want a better life?” as they hurtled past with their baskets and bags. Leery, yet grateful for the interruption, some would slow their pace. The pretty ones knew what I was after. No one would call Fatty pretty, which is why I had given her the job that I did.

With David I was the girl who, when we returned to the White Hotel, chopped apples and oranges with a cheap knife on the hotel desk, and who said, “Fuck!” (my first English obscenity, taught to me by a sailor with an ear like ) when juice got into a cut on her finger. And David said, “You don’t have to do that,” as I arranged them on a brand-new platter, and I said, “It is polite for your mother.” Because at the bar I was the slut who learned “Whiskey in the Jar” for the hilarity of the sailors, but I was also the girl who knew what it meant to have piety, with a mother who heaped too much pork and so many pomelos on the ancestors’ altar.

I brought that fruit platter to the Nowaks’ brown stone house. I wore a lemon-yellow sundress with an embroidered bodice and kept stopping my fingers in midstroke as I felt the thick stitching, correcting my motions so that it wouldn’t look like I was caressing myself sexually, with the platter resting in my lap and my new purse the color of fresh milk beside me. The air, which walloped us as we got out of the taxi, reminded me of home with a slap of damp heat. David put his wallet back in his pocket and moved to the trunk to take our suitcase from the driver; David, who was taller than any other man I knew and gangly, and made a swallow’s nest of his hair by yanking it when he was nervous. I reached up and smoothed it down because I loved him. David said firmly, “So let’s go ahead and do this.”

It was all a dream; I was sleepwalking through everything. We were going to tell his mother that we were married. We were even going to, depending on the level of our bravado, tell her that I was pregnant, though the child in my belly was barely a month old and not yet stirring, and only known to us because of my otherwise precise menstrual regularity and symptoms of soreness and sickness. We were visiting her during our honeymoon early in July. We did not know what we were going to do after that. But Taiwan already felt very far away, as if it were itself a dream, and there was nothing around us to remind me of its fragments. The wisps of memory were already fading and being replaced by this also dreamlike reality. David banged the knocker twice.

A woman came to the door. I knew that she was Mrs. Francine Nowak right away. She had his blond, nearly white hair pulled back with no fringe, and the same twitchy mouth, which jerked slightly as it smiled as if on a hook.

“Davy,” she said, hugging him, patting him on the back as though he could break, and then, looking over his shoulder: “You brought a friend.”

His father was dead and he had told his mother nothing about me. He was a simple man and had not wanted a big wedding, and we had gone to the town hall. He was passionate and had wanted to marry me as soon as possible, without his mother’s interference, and we had gone through all the hoops, the visa and paperwork, to do it. He loved his mother, but she had grown, in his words, difficult over the years. My English was both good enough to assume this was the case and bad enough to cause misunderstandings. This peculiar state of being in the vaguest language space was enough to paralyze me if I thought too much about it, because there was much that I could misunderstand. In Taiwan I had been proud of my ability to manipulate language to my advantage. Here I was lucky if I understood most of a sentence.

“Her name is Daisy,” he said.

“Charmed,” Mrs. Nowak said. “I didn’t ______ you were bringing someone. You really should have told me — I haven’t ______ prepared. I _____ she can sleep in the ______ room.”

David said, “It’s ______ hot.”

She backed into the hall, pulling the door open as she did so, and she stood behind the door as we entered until we were inside (her disappearance strange for a moment), at which point she pushed the door shut and double-bolted it. The air was cool and thick with pipe smoke — but who smoked a pipe in this house of a dead man? I looked deep into the brown stone house, which had entryways into other rooms on either side and opened into a large room at the end, where I saw plush green sofas and a lamp. In the safety of her home Mrs. Nowak now looked at me more closely.

“I cut this fruit for you,” I said, still holding the plate.

“You ______ did,” she said. “Bring it into the kitchen. I have some ______ ______. David, I’ll bet you haven’t had a good ______ in _____.”

“Don’t you live alone?” David asked.

She nodded; she looked like he had accused her of something.

“Well, it ______ of pipe smoke,” he said.

“It’s a new bad habit, you could say. We all have them.”

“I suppose,” David said, “that we do.” He glanced at me briefly and smiled. Already I was unmoored. Mrs. Nowak began to walk down the long hall as we followed. I looked at the photographs on the red velvet walls, including one of David at a grand piano. The Nowaks used to make pianos and that was the source of the Nowak fortune; that much I knew. Then we turned to the right and entered a kitchen more glorious than any of the stony kitchens I had entered in my nineteen years. The stove gleamed white, with two oven doors beneath it. The cabinets were the pale pink of watermelon milk. Buttery containers of three sizes sat on the countertop, and they were the exact color of the yellow tiles.

“ ______ for your friend?” Mrs. Nowak asked, moving to the icebox. She removed a large bottle.

“She’s never had it,” David said. “I don’t think she has. Champaaaagne?” he asked. I shook my head, smiled. He asked if I wanted some. I nodded. The less I said, the better it would be for all of us. “You can put that down,” he added, pointing at the platter, and I looked for a suitable surface.

Mrs. Nowak took the fruit from me. She was smiling again. She wanted to speak to David alone about me, but instead she retrieved three tall, thin glasses with single legs while David popped open the bottle, and he poured me a glass of something full of bubbles. I waited for them to drink first before I took a sip, but if there was anything I knew how to do, including crying only when I wanted to and dancing the twist, it was how to drink. I didn’t startle when it went down my throat and I felt like I was inhaling water.

“Delicious,” I said.

Mrs. Nowak said, “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 the hall 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 throat as it returned, and then I rinsed and wiped the sink with toilet paper before rinsing my mouth. When I looked in the oval mirror, I saw that my lips were pale again, and I realized that my purse was still hanging from my elbow like a forgotten limb. I threw the soiled toilet paper into the trash and reapplied my lipstick.

For the longest time I found bathrooms in America to be comical. American bathrooms, no matter where we were, seemed palatial in comparison with Taiwanese bathrooms, which were, at their best, little more than outhouses even in a wealthy home. To void oneself in this American bathroom was to sit in a jewelry box with jade-colored wallpaper. A closer look and I could see a print of tiny women with parasols. I pulled down the toilet lid and sat, not eager to return to the kitchen. My new life was broken. Everything was concealed by the secrets of language, and even that which was spoken was concealed by another layer of secrecy that I could sense on my skin but not fully understand.

By the time I returned to the kitchen, Mrs. Nowak was gone, and David was pouring himself a glass of what looked like whiskey. In my pregnant state I could smell its familiar odor from where I stood.

“Your mother is where?” I asked.

“Lying down,” he said. He raised his glass. “Gan bei.”

I toasted him with my champagne. The tiny click made my back teeth hurt.

“Were you sick?”

“Yes.”

“I told my mother that you weren’t used to the champagne. So that she wouldn’t ______.” He pointed at my stomach. For the most part, he was good about using words that I could understand, and I was good at asking him about the ones I didn’t know. Still, we were in a place with a woman who knew him much better than I did. I didn’t have the words to pierce through my confusion. My blood mouth filled with sand.

David’s childhood bedroom was bare except for a white wooden bed and white nightstand, a white dresser, and a single poster of strange and painted shapes, which now hangs, curling, in William’s room. He said, looking around, “The __________ of my child ______.”

“What?”

“Sorry,” he said. “At home it’s easy — it’s easy for me to forget what is okay to say to you. I’m sorry about my mother. She loves me. I’ve always been close to her. Understand?”

“Yes,” I said, and sat on the bed. He sat beside me, his glass half-empty. I said, “Your mother is beautiful.”

“Well. Yes. She — in the past, people would turn their heads to look at her as we walked down the street. But she never really ______ or cared. God. All that about Jesus. I’m sorry. She has certain ideas about me.”

“Yes.”

“I came here to show her that I was okay, because I know she worries. But this has been a mistake. We can leave. We won’t eat dinner here. We’ll go back to the hotel, just the two of us.”

“Yes.”

He lay onto the bed, as if merely speaking of these possibilities exhausted him. The small amount of whiskey left in his glass, held aloft, sloshed and dripped onto the sheets. “Come here,” he said, and awkwardly lifted his glass to the nightstand.

My heart sighed. I curled up beside him in my fancy dress, avoiding the wetness of whiskey, and pressed my face into his ribs. He rubbed my head in slow circles, and I thought, I am happy, I am happy, I am happy. I inhaled the aftershave he had splashed on that morning that smelled of something dark and sour, like small animals and the color brown and himself. When we lay together there was no need to speak, and I preferred it that way because when we didn’t speak we could be any husband and wife, with no struggle in it. We lay in that bed and kissed tenderly, and then we took our set of matching luggage and left. I imagined Mrs. Nowak lying in bed with a towel over her forehead. She didn’t try to say good-bye.

David and I took a taxi back to the hotel because I didn’t like the subway, and he was hemorrhaging money in those days. David booked a new room, and then he was hungry; he liked diners to the exclusion of all else, and for the longest time I thought that all American restaurants were diners, and that all American menus contained hamburgers and french fries and malts. This particular diner was cramped with people smoking cigarettes and chatting loudly in their booths, if they were lucky enough to have a padded red booth. David and I sat in dirty-white hard-backed chairs at a sticky table.

By then my husband had tufts of hair sticking out all over, as though a dog had been chewing on his head. He no longer seemed all right about leaving the brown stone house. I imagined that he felt guilty about abandoning his mother: a sad woman who had the same mouth as he did, who likely gave him everything he wanted all of his life, and only wanted his attention and love in return. It suddenly felt selfish to leave without acknowledgment, and I pitied Mrs. Nowak, even if she had called me a souvenir.

The waitress came. “I don’t know yet,” David said. “We’ll have some coffees. Black.”

He kept looking through the menu. I looked, too, but there weren’t any pictures. The only words I recognized were hamburger and eggs, and I didn’t want either of those things. I watched him as he flipped from the front to the back, from the back to the front, and again. Finally he put down the menu. I smiled at him. I imagined that the right thing to say would be clear to me if we didn’t have a language barrier. He was staring not at me and my smile, but at something in the center of the table. When the waitress came, he took the coffee from her and drank his without waiting for it to cool. I could have said, “ .” I could have said, I love you. I could have kept smiling until my face broke. I could have cried. But I didn’t know what he was thinking, and I could only guess.

“There’s nothing to eat here,” he said, and got up. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and threw some money on the table, and I followed him out of that diner into the open air. We stood on the sidewalk, where no one could bother to move us as the crowd flowed every which way. We might have stood there until we grew roots and turned into coconut trees if not for the sudden shift in the wind, which started from a single woman sighing, shaking her head, and saying, “ ______ me,” because Americans were always muttering to themselves and sounding annoyed by unknown slights, and like all the disgruntled people before her, the woman kept walking, though she continued to wag her head from side to side. But more people noticed what she had seen, and then we, too, looked at the man on the roof across the street.

I don’t remember what he looked like except for the hat he wore, which was a newsboy cap of the kind that David wore sometimes to protect his head in the rain. The man on the roof would back away from the edge, and then return to it with a new enthusiasm, even peering over to such an extreme that I knew for sure he would fall, even accidentally, but he didn’t make a decision one way or another, causing people to yell things at him that I didn’t understand — to jump? or to save himself? — and I thought of Fatty’s father, Farmer Chu, who had starved his pigs and then thrown himself into their pen to die. My mother refused to say that Fatty’s father’s death was tragic because Farmer Chu was batshit insane, and if he was so crazy as to feed himself to his own pigs, he deserved to die, did he not? When people did things that she didn’t understand, my mother would always tell me that they were batshit insane, probably to keep me from doing them. I thought of Farmer Chu’s hand dangling from a pig’s mouth as I looked at the man on the roof.

David said, “He’s only three stories up.”

“Pardon?”

“Three stories. Three floors?” He gestured with his bad hand, holding it parallel to the ground and then miming the distance: one, two, three. “He won’t die. He’ll break his legs, but he won’t die.”

“So why he is doing this?”

“I suppose he wants to do something.”

“Break his legs?”

“Kill something,” David said. “But he won’t die.”

I understood the words, but not the meaning. I said, “Dangerous.”

“He’ll be all right,” he said, and started walking. I followed him two blocks to another diner, where we sat at a booth and ordered corned beef hash with fried eggs, and he ordered a strawberry milkshake for me, which was my favorite at the time. So suicide has always followed me, you see.

David wanted to go back to the brown stone house. A whim, or the sudden breeze that cut through the heat, or the four cups of black coffee had changed his mind — no, I knew that it was the man on the roof who did, or did not, die that day that pushed him back. David had been so calm, watching him. Now he was resolute about going back to his mother. In the taxi he reached over and held my hand. “My Oriental lamb,” he said, and kissed the side of my head, breathing into my hair.

We pulled up to the curb.

Mrs. Nowak answered the door again and said, “David!” I saw that she’d been crying, and had not bothered to fix her makeup. “You’ve come back,” she said. “Where did you go? I didn’t think you’d come back,” and she opened the door wider. She said, “I’ll start dinner.” It was approximately three thirty. I could barely remember the woman who had frightened me so upon first arriving at the house — a woman who had been scared out of being and left this ghost behind. “Help me cook,” she said to me. David touched my shoulder and said, “All right,” after which I pulled my skirts around me and followed Mrs. Nowak down the hall, back to the kitchen. I wondered how she could possibly cook anything in that white dress of hers.

“We’ll have an early dinner tonight,” she said, looking at the stove and the icebox, at everywhere but me. “We’ll cook David’s favorites — some old ___________ that he likes.”

She tied on a full-length pink apron without offering me a covering of my own, even though my dress was clearly more expensive than her dingy tablecloth of a garment, and we worked in silence, which was a relief. She passed me food to chop and clean, and I caught on to the essence of the dishes being prepared without trouble. There was something with pork knuckles, which she butchered expertly, and potatoes, which I washed and peeled with a paring knife. I took care to be deferential to my mother-in-law. I even avoided brushing up against her as we moved in the kitchen from the counter to the stove to the ovens, but this choreography may have been because I dreaded the feeling of her skeletal body against mine.

Still, neither of us relaxed, and finally she said, chopping in a way that punctuated her every syllable, “I-love-my-son. Do-you-un-der-stand? I do not want you here for his money. I do not want you to take ______ of him. All right?”

I kept my face blank, though what she wished to express was probably lost on me. What was I not supposed to take from him? His money? That wasn’t what I wanted; I’d had money in Kaohsiung. Was I supposed to tell her that I didn’t understand? Was it best to pretend that I did?

“Do you know? Do you know what I’m talking about? He’s ___________.” She repeated these final two words with emphasis. “Oh, for _____, what do you understand? He’s crazy. Do you understand that? Crazy. David… he’s very _____. He was _____. And if you know that, and if you’re taking _____ of him because of it, I’ll figure out a way to send you back. I don’t care if you’re married. Whatever kind of marriage you have, it’s not one I _____, and I doubt the government ______ it either.”

She watched me for a reaction, but I had none.

“I do not want to take something from your son,” I said. Crazy, that I understood. His mother seemed certain of this. Indeed, she’d been crying in our absence — but for what reason? David’s craziness, or her son’s unacceptable marriage? My own mother thought I was crazy, and to my face she’d called me a pervert and a whore. But David and I were bonded now, with our baby in my belly and rings on our fingers, and I had to remember where I was now, and how impossible it was to return to where I’d been.

(Is this the moment when my fate could have gone in a different direction? Or had the doors already closed behind me?)

As I searched for something more to say, or waited for Mrs. Nowak to say something in reply, we both heard the piano intoning its solid, clean sound. In Taiwan only people who were both wealthy and of high class owned a piano, and my mother was one but not the other. I stopped chopping onions so that I could catch the melody, which drifted like a kite on a soft wind.

Mrs. Nowak sighed. She said, “You can always tell who’s playing by the way they touch the keys.” She leaned against the counter with her eyes closed, listening. “If you’re really going to be his wife, you need to take care of him. Promise me that.”

“Yes,” I said, and I meant it.

That was the last time I saw David’s mother. It was one day, that July day in that brown stone house, when I cooked with her and made a promise that I couldn’t keep. I tried to send her some of his ashes, but they were returned to me. Apparently she had moved away from New York after David left Wellbrook, because mothers know their sons; he said something once about her being from the middle of America, and I assume that is where she went in the end, like an animal crawling into a hole to die. He called it the “heart’s land.” It sounded like a safe place to me.

Fatty had come to look for a job. She wanted to work for the Golden Lotus, and when she approached me at recruitment hours, where I sat at my usual shaved ice stand, I laughed upon seeing her plump body and misshapen arm cloaked in a buttoned blue dress. She had no redeeming physical features — not a prim, aquiline nose in the middle of that doughy face, nor a clear complexion to make up for the abundance of her body. She was simply not pretty, and also simply fat.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

A thinly lipsticked smile. “No.”

“I seek out girls for the Golden Lotus, not pigs for the slaughter.” I waved my hand at her. “Leave me alone.”

She seated herself across from me, bringing with her the odor of a sweaty body mixed with cheap Western perfume. Who knew where she had gotten those few precious sprays? She said, “You’re Jia-Hui Chen, the mama-san’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

Fatty was looking quite comfortable. Despite myself, I was intrigued by the lump beneath the upper sleeve of her dress.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” I asked her.

“I broke it,” she said. “It didn’t heal correctly.”

“There are doctors who can set bones, you know.”

“You’re right,” she replied, and smiled again. “I want to work at your mother’s bar.”

“Ah, that again.”

“I’m a virgin.”

“Many girls are virgins. And many of those girls don’t look like a sow in a dress.”

Did she flinch? Do I imagine it, now?

She said, “I am the tongyangxi to my brother. My parents bought me when I was a little girl, when both my brother and I were too young to understand marriage. My parents had expectations. But my brother didn’t want to marry me, in the end, when I turned out fat.”

The tradition of raising girls as tongyangxi, the sisterly wives to their adoptive brothers, was already taking on an old-fashioned flavor at this time. But there were still families, even in a major city such as Kaohsiung, who sought out impoverished young girls for marriage to their sons.

Fatty continued: “My father broke my arm. I was not taken to a doctor, and then my family kicked me out. I need to make money, and my arm prevents me from doing manual labor. I can’t find work as a maid, I can’t work in a field or farm, I am good for nothing. But I am sure, Jia-Hui, that I have more personality than any of the girls in your bar. I’ll entertain the men who come while the other girls offer their bodies. I can live from nearly nothing. I request only shelter and food.”

“My mother,” I said, “will never allow it.”

“Ask her.”

“She’ll beat me for even suggesting it the second she sees you. I’m sorry. If you were less fat, there is a chance that—” and I wanted to say, she could overlook your arm, but there was suddenly something so tragic about it that I couldn’t speak the words.

“I know I’m fat,” she said. “I can’t help it.” She looked right at me. “They told me not to eat rice. So I didn’t. Then they said, ‘No meat, only vegetables; I did that. I did lose some weight, but not enough for my brother. Then they said, ‘You can’t eat anything at all,’ and it made no difference even though I was starving. So if you say no, I’ll leave you alone. I have enough experience with eating bitterness.”

“No,” I said. But she didn’t move. And then I said, “Wait.”

It wasn’t that I never heard tragic stories in my line of work. It wasn’t that this girl had been beaten or starved. I saw plenty of that. I met girls who were raped by their fathers and their brothers and their uncles and gangs of men who tore their bodies open. I met girls who had scars up and down their backs from bamboo cane lashings. So you become accustomed to this kind of thing. I couldn’t hire them all. What ghost then possessed me to give Fatty my day’s pocket money, and to ask her to come see me the next day at the same stand at ten A.M.? For a long time I believed that it was temporary madness. Now I think that it was when she said about her fatness, “I can’t help it.” It was the helplessness being voiced in combination with her certainty that she had other things to offer besides her helplessness, her fatness, her arm. She also looked me in the eyes, which almost no one did, and I admired that.

After we left New York City, David wanted to show me America. With heaps of cash he bought a Buick, and we filled it up: spare change, aluminum foil gum wrappers smelling of wintergreen, empty bags of potato chips, our clothing thrown on the backseat, our sweat seeping into the fabric. I didn’t know a place could be so big, or that one piece of land could be so different from one place to the next. It was mountains and jagged red holes in one place and flat as a steel plate in another. In Kaohsiung things were sea-foam green, and if they weren’t sea-foam green, they were gray-black sand, and if they weren’t gray-black sand, they were the color of banana leaves drying in the sun, or the wet crimson of a bar girl’s mouth. In America people were the color of milk and the inside of a split piece of wood, dark as char, smooth as caramel. From state to state there were more souvenirs than I could fit in the tote bag that we’d purchased for that very reason, each souvenir representing a state or monument we visited while I said, “Beautiful,” and I said this about everything with honesty.

My mouth hurt from speaking English. The muscles around my lips and my cheeks ached. In my dreams voices stretched into long, silly words that meant nothing, and I woke up saying “milk” or “glass” before tumbling back into the sleep of nonsense dreamers. Soon I vomited over and over at the side of the road while David reached over and rubbed my damp neck, and then I craved all kinds of things: hot buns filled with pork, cold and briny seaweed, red bean popsicles. The sudden craving was monstrous, like a thing already in my mouth that could not be tasted or swallowed and just between my frozen teeth with a jaw stuck open, and my longing for these foods was not a longing in my stomach but something jammed deep in my throat. I awoke in fancy motels with mouthfuls of blood, the insides of my cheeks chewed ragged and raw, and I spat and spat into porcelain basins while clutching my belly. I was inconsolable in the most beautiful of hotels and I sobbed on a ledge of the Grand Canyon, where I was sure that my longing would push me in. David said, over and over, “Oh, sweetheart.” He understood the vomiting as morning sickness and something that all women experienced in pregnancy. He understood the mood swings as common, and understandable for a biological process that would result in the production of a human being who was our baby and our joint accomplishment. He washed the blood out of my pillowcases. He stroked my hair, and I loved him. And yet I continued to vomit everything that I put into my mouth, my throat hot as my eyes watered and burst bloodshot, until finally I pushed away a basket of french fries that sat before me in a blue-and-white-checkered diner, where the flies landed and rose, and I was resolute: I would not, and could not, eat those french fries, hamburgers, or bowls of chili any longer. If I continued, I would vomit until the baby, whom I suspected was a boy because of his sense of entitlement, dried up in my womb. But how could I explain this? Instead I said, “I am not hungry.” In fact, I was hungrier than I had ever been in Kaohsiung.

I drank milk. I could have cold milk from bottles through a straw like a child, and our baby would not force it back up. David bought a dairy crate and put it in the backseat. Every hour he reached behind his seat and handed me a sweaty bottle, from which I drank while watching the scenery. Still, I craved the taste of things I couldn’t have, including their delicate saltiness, the unique pillow of a crushed flat between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and in my hunger and bloody craving the milk took a pink tinge to it, reminding me of the strawberry milkshakes I no longer wanted.

“You need to eat,” David said. He dragged me from diner to diner. All the names ran into one another. “You need meat. Vegetables.” I shook my head, starving, teeth itching.

We were at a truck stop near Eugene, Oregon, with lights that flickered like sleeping eyelids. I sat in front of a closed menu and a glass. I didn’t want milk. I was, in fact, tired of that clotted feeling on my tongue and the mucus it formed in the back of my throat. I was exhausted from not eating, and David seemed exhausted, too, as he blinked and blinked.

“Why don’t you take a look at the menu?” he said. He hadn’t asked me to look at a menu in days.

I opened it. I looked at the words. They were all the same words that I’d seen in every other diner in America. I closed it. David asked me what I wanted. The restaurant shimmered, felt dangerous. I said, “A hamburger.”

The hamburger came. It was the size of my hand, and the top had a crease like the inside bend of an elbow. Even thinking about it made my stomach lift. I looked at the limp pink tomato inside, the pale lettuce. I moved my hand from my lap as if to touch it, or to pick it up, and then, under no will of my own, the hand lifted and pushed the plate away. Whip-fast, David reached out and grabbed my wrist. This is it, I thought. I went limp with his hand wrapped around my wrist, which grabbed so tight and held me for so long that I thought my fingers would go numb. David let go. Finally he said, wearily, “I don’t understand.”

Of course he didn’t understand. We didn’t understand each other except when we were touching, and neither one of us could crawl into the guts of the other. But the pain in my arm woke me.

I said, “Our baby does not want America food.”

“Our baby doesn’t. What does our baby want? Does our baby want Taiwan’s food?”

I nodded.

He tugged at his hair. I was sure that he would leave me. The lights continued to flicker. The air filled with late-night smoke. “All right,” he said. “Well, we’re not going to get it here.” He raised his hand for the check.

Our journey, once slow and meandering, became hurried as he drove to San Francisco, the Old Golden Mountain. I drank milk in the passenger seat to survive and filled the backseat with empty bottles that tumbled and clanked at sharp turns, but I did not vomit, and he only stopped at truck stops to buy himself burgers, which he ate one-handed with ketchup dripping down his palm while driving south. We went through the never-ending grasses, which were fields, and I dreamed hazy dreams of the boy growing and snarling inside of my belly.

David persuaded the owner of the Hotel Grande Royal to let us live in the penthouse for as long as we could pay. I never saw money change hands, but we stayed in room 333 until William slipped out of me, howling, on March 8, 1955, in the four-post bed.

Our room was as extravagant as the Nowaks’ brown stone house had been. A velvety parlor beside the bedroom, crammed with knickknacks — coral-colored crystal vases, tins filled with spiced potpourri. The same delicate, reflective surfaces all over, forming mirrors upon infinite mirrors. A pink chandelier. A grandfather clock that did not chime, but loomed in a corner with a grave face. The bed was its own marvel: four-poster, king-sized, with pillows piled atop layers of custard bedding. In that bed I could lie and look up at the tin ceiling, which yielded an unfurled and floral universe. We spent more time in that bed than we did anywhere else in that suite, including the claw-footed tub, the chaise longue, or the white sofa in the parlor. I would not be surprised if, when the maids finally entered almost a year later and stripped the bed of its comforter and sheets, the women saw the shapes of our bodies burned into the mattress. Why leave? Why would we want to?

The Hotel Grande Royal was six blocks, David told me, from Chinatown. Despite our proximity, I refused to see that Oriental facsimile for fear of my heart and liver being seduced by the old dream. No, best to write down the names of the dishes on a scrap of paper and have my white husband go and bring things back for me. Best to have David bring me the dishes the baby craved: oily bags of sweet for breakfast and for lunch. The first thing that he brought back was a bamboo basket of soup dumplings, and, like a mutt, I took my basket of treats to the corner. With no concern about appearances, I sat on the chaise longue and lifted a saggy dumpling to my lips, barely getting the lukewarm to my lips before it burst and spilled hot juice down my chin and into the space between my swelling breasts. My eyes dampened, then wept. My shoulders shook with joy. I devoured for three weeks, and then I craved , which took David three days to find; but the salt in those crumbs of fish on top of fried rice satisfied me more than that of any greasy paper boat of fries. David watched with fascination as I ate. He had eaten only street meats in Kaohsiung.

“Not salty crab?” I asked. “Not an oyster pancake?”

“No, no,” he said, “but you look so happy.”

We ate at the desk side by side. He ate his hamburgers and I ate my food from Chinatown. The food, though familiar, had a different flavor from what I was accustomed to; still, it was better than a hamburger, and I pitied David for his limited diet.

I ate and ate. My arms and legs remained slender while my belly swelled. No longer able to wear my dresses, I lounged in underwear with my hand splayed over my navel, and said that I was going to give birth to a boy the size of Formosa. In San Francisco David laughed, and I delighted in being able to create that sound with my words. He laughed like a little girl, like a tickled child; it bubbled out of him in waves. He bought a radio and we slow-danced around the parlor as I waddled; he came home with different things every day: a dictionary, magazines with bright covers, red lipstick in a fancy tube. He pulled wrapped caramels out from behind his ear. He sang to me a Polish folk song, and I mimicked, “Matka, matka,” while pinching his thin nose.

I redoubled my efforts to learn English, paging through the dictionary and Life magazine. I kept a notebook of new words, as I had in Kaohsiung, and studied it daily as I circled entries in the dictionary. In September David’s words, and the strings of them, came to me more clearly, and then more often. Fall passed with little fuss, accompanied by a light breeze that we allowed through the window until the end of November. By December I was large enough that my back hurt with too much standing, so we lay in bed in a valley of pillows. He’d put his hand on my belly as he spoke in low, conversational tones: “I know that one day, Daisy, you’re going to be able to speak a lot of English, and we’re going to be able to have real conversations. I’m going to be able to ask you about your family, and you’ll tell me all about what it was like for you, growing up where you did. We’re going to have a real nice life together. You, me, and the baby.”

“I now can speak English well,” I said. “I now know what you say.”

“Good.” He ran his hand up and over the hill of my stomach. “That’s very good, lamb.”

Sometimes he would bend me over the bathroom sink and make love to me from behind, tilting my face upward so that I could watch myself in the small, speckled mirror, and I was always bewildered by what I saw. The solid white shape of the man behind me, with his ghostly golden hair, as well as my own careful expression, which then, predictably, erupted into a sexualized grimace, and then I would avert my eyes for the ugliness of it. With my pleasure came ugliness. I had to remember this, and yet it did me no good.

There are moments I can pinpoint in my life where I look and say, “This is where it decayed.” Like the first bruises on a fruit that suddenly rots without warning.

One morning I woke up and the chandelier was askew. The paintings of flowers — even the flowers had seemed to wilt — tilted on their nails. Our clothing was everywhere but not shed from our bodies; rather, someone had pulled them from their hangers and onto the floor and the chairs. I thought I was dreaming in the light and pulled myself and my heavy belly out of bed. I pressed my fingers into my skin and felt their strength: I wasn’t dreaming. It was February. Morning fog clouded the wide windows. I called David’s name, and when no one answered I checked the bathroom and then the parlor. What was new and what was old? How had I not noticed the paper containers stained with grease, the bags on their sides like fallen soldiers? David was gone, and I was too afraid to leave.

In the afternoon he came back with his peacoat buttoned and his shirt wrapped around his bleeding hand. I had been chewing the insides of my cheeks and flipping through old issues of Life, not reading any of it but needing to do something with my fingers.

“Your hand, what happened? You went to where?” In panic I pulled him to the sofa. He seemed confused. “Where?” I repeated. I tried to unwrap his makeshift bandage to see what had happened. He resisted, but my terror was stronger; I had never seen him behave this way before. His hand was covered in haphazard, deep gashes split with open sides: palm, back, fingers, a map on top of a map of scars, wounds so open that I thought the sides would never come together, and I pressed my own hand to my mouth to keep from screaming.

When Farmer Chu died, Fatty told me that her mother believed he had been possessed by a hungry ghost. My mother was not as superstitious as Fatty’s, and I wasn’t raised with such beliefs. But Fatty was adamant about the reasons for her father’s death. In his drunkenness he often wandered the streets at night, where any hungry ghost could have taken possession of his body. He could have encountered a snake or fox, or even fucked a beautiful ghost-woman in a neighbor’s field. Why else would he feed himself to pigs? I searched David’s coat pockets and found a bloody knife, and I cried. Yet I was in America. There were no hungry ghosts in America. I thought about Mrs. Nowak, and what she had said about her son: “He’s crazy.” The question was where the craziness came from. Was it in the spirit, or in the blood? I kept crying as I rewrapped the shirt around his hand. He sat on the couch until I told him to get into the bed, and he did that, like an obedient child, still in his peacoat, and stared at the ceiling and muttered to himself.

I was afraid to leave David in the room alone. I washed the knife and kept it in my purse until I could throw it out the window. I disposed of it in the middle of the night, chanting prayers as I did so, and then I watched him sleep with a bloody rag wrapped around his hand, red spotting the sheets.

He slept for only one or two hours at a time. The rest of the time he continued to stare at the ceiling. Sometimes he talked to himself, or shouted. Maybe he was talking and shouting at me, but I wasn’t certain. I had a difficult time understanding what he was saying, and I didn’t know if it was because he was speaking nonsense, or because my English wasn’t as good as I wished it to be. I stayed awake by pinching myself, careful not to pinch myself too hard lest it disturb the baby, and I also sang to myself all the old songs I knew, and the American bar songs, too. I lay beside David in the bed, crawling under the blankets, and I sang to him, but after accidentally falling asleep once I stopped lying in the bed with him and walked around the bedroom instead, in circles like a mindless donkey.

Day and night came the same. The fog swelled against the windows, and then the rain, which pinged on the glass and then pounded at it.

I took his wallet on the third slow day and put it in my purse. I checked the room for anything dangerous before I left. I had to return quickly so that nothing could happen, but I had to leave because there was no more food, not a single stale bun or grain of rice, and I was both dizzy from hunger and afraid for the baby. I took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped into the daylight, where crowds were scurrying up and down the sidewalk, teeming with the small, icky motions of their arms and legs.

I had not been outside of room 333 in months, and the emergence felt like falling. The sky seemed larger — I wasn’t standing beneath the heavens, but feeling the heavens suck me up in all directions. In a cloud of voices I waddled toward the biggest street that I could find. I’d had to fashion clothing to accommodate my belly: one of David’s shirts, tied at the waist; a yellow dress turned upside down and tied with a leather belt for a skirt. Everyone looked, frowning at my getup — looked at me, my small-eyed face, the darkness of my hair. A woman stopped and shook her dandelion head. I walked until I found a food store, and swiftly I picked up a loaf of white bread, a bag of oranges, and cheese, even though I had never liked cheese, but David did. I went to the counter, where a man with hair the color and sheen of tar was smoking a cigarette. He sorted through my things. No, I couldn’t care about the looks I received, or the shame, because I needed my thoughts to be so powerful that David would remain sleeping until I got back to the hotel. I was focusing with such concentration that I didn’t realize the man at the counter was speaking to me, but I didn’t care to understand because I needed to pay and leave, and I needed to get back to my husband or something terrible would happen. He said it again anyway: “ ______ Chinatown?”

I nodded. Of course. I paid him. To hell with him, to hell with Chinatown, to hell with all of them.

I could barely walk, so heavy were my things, so heavy was my belly, but I went back to the hotel. My heart was thumping, thumping, thumping. I gave the black man in the elevator a coin, and then I ran to the door. Again I felt myself on some kind of brink. I unlocked the door and I banged the door open and then closed as I went through the ruined parlor into the bedroom.

David was awake and sitting. His eyes were red. The skin beneath them sagged. “Where did you go,” he said. His bandaged hand lifted, and swatted at the nothingness in front of his face.

EROTICISM. DAVID (1954–1956)

I admit that for too long I only knew my wife as erotic. I don’t mean that she was wild and thrashing, or frothing at the mouth with her hand up her skirts. I meant that she was exotic to me, and that was the primary pleasure that I derived from her, I confess.

One might ask: Do I regret that we hadn’t had a Catholic wedding? I regret that I had to, in a sense, instruct a blind man in the art of color theory. I met her on her terms. Off the plane after a long-haul flight, I felt the new air first, a wet blanket that smothered everything, that smelled of not-quite-rotting garbage and, faintly, sewage. On the cart into the port city of Kaohsiung, with the wheels rattling below me such that my teeth clattered and clacked unless I clenched my jaw shut, I heard the words of people cawing in the same steady waves as the warm air that never lifted, the same air that pressed against the windows like hands.

Taiwan wasn’t what I had expected. If you weren’t there when I was you can’t know what I mean. If you’ve been there recently, and seen the modernity of what was once a third-world country, you know half of it. Imagine the roofs barely held together and the billboards covered in mysterious slashes and dots. Such a conflagration was the only thing I could understand after New York. I’d gone down to my white bones. I’d scalped my skull, cracked it open, and seen the putrefying brain beneath. The last thing I wanted to think about was how hard it was to be a person and how hard it was to be alive.

In Taiwan I was staying in an apartment above a teahouse. Marty, of all people, had handled my arrangements, having joined the navy immediately after graduation. Though I waited, bereft, for a letter from Marianne, it was Marty whom I received a letter from that June, which began with apologies: for his father’s violence, his parents’ scheming, his sister’s behavior. Crede mihi, he wrote, when I say that Marianne has less control over her life than you think. He then went on to describe his life in Taiwan, which intrigued me — so many bicycles! Stray animals everywhere underfoot! Banana farms, and did I know bananas grew in bunches on trees? The letter ended by saying, I know this must sound crazy, but I wanted to see if we could have a correspondence.

I didn’t write back to Marty right away. I felt that I should wait until I heard from Marianne before I spent any energy on her brother. His letter sat in a desk drawer while I tended to Matka, making her gin and tonics with just a splash of olive juice, the yellowy tinge clouding against the ice cubes. So many gin and tonics there were, and no letter came for one month, and then two months, and then three months, at which point I stopped hoping, or convinced myself that I had stopped hoping to hear from Marianne Orlich.

So I wrote Marty back; after all, I was lonely, too. I asked, among other things, if he could tell me anything about where Marianne was, or how she was doing. The reply, which took weeks to arrive, made no mention of his sister. I knew it was a deliberate omission, but what could I do? Soon Taiwan became so appealing that I asked if he could help me make arrangements. Really, though, it could have been anywhere. I just wanted to get away.

He’d planned my stay by contacting his former lieutenant, who was still active in the American intervention. I would meet Lieutenant Archibald Winner at a given day and time, and he would show me to my apartment. When the lieutenant had a spare moment, he would help me to acclimate myself to my surroundings. On the fourth day, I planned to meet up with Marty, who would be returning from a tour of the nearby seas.

The lieutenant liked me well enough. His smile was avuncular when I first met him, as though I were an old relative that he had grown up with, or perhaps lived on the same block as, for years. He was happy to do me favors. He was the sort who would have done well as one of Proust’s bourgeoisie, so aware of and respectful of class was he. He called Michigan a shitty place, and referred to New York City as the center of the world with reverence. He was Protestant, but appeared to have no problem with Catholics. He was not Polish, but respected the Polish community “for their brio,” and was disappointed to hear that I didn’t speak Polish. This disappointment faded when he learned of my predilection for Latin. The lieutenant was in his late thirties, but had already gone entirely silver-gray, and had three deep lines permanently carved into his forehead regardless of facial expression. For long stretches of time he would disappear, I presumed due to his naval duties, and then he would show up at my flat above the teahouse, out of his navy whites, looking small and ordinary in a fresh T-shirt and khakis with dusty shoes on.

About the Golden Lotus he’d said, “It’s a place to go, if you want to meet pretty girls.”

“And you don’t?”

“Ah, well, it’s essentially a whorehouse, and I wouldn’t be able to keep my wife from knowing I’d dipped my pen in some other girl’s ink. She can read volumes in the twitch of my left eye. I go for drinks, for company, but I keep it in my pants.”

He asked if I was interested. I shrugged. We were the only two people in that teahouse with its low, screened windows. We sat on benches. Flies and mosquitoes sang and swam around us, their dances strange and ever present despite the violent zappers that hung from every window, each bursting occasionally into flame.

He said, “It’s not like your New York, is it? Not like anything else, either. I’ve been here for five months, and something new surprises me every day. It’s not just the food or the filth or the Orientals. It’s even the sun in the sky — it doesn’t feel like the same sun. The moon isn’t the same moon.”

Nothing was the same, but I was relieved by the difference. My neuroses had all but disappeared since arriving in Kaohsiung, though I missed Marianne. In her absence my hormones broke viciously through, and I spent hours regretting that I hadn’t, at the very least, felt her beneath her blouses and skirts when I had the chance. I was convinced that she would be softer than anything I’d ever touched — as soft as the centimeter of skin behind my earlobe, as soft as Matka’s chinchilla coat, the quality of skin as hot and damp as the inside of a mouth. The mere consideration of her body gave me a hard-on.

When I didn’t hear from Marty by the end of the fourth day, I mentioned him to the lieutenant. He pursed his lips, which I’d never seen a man do before, and then he said, “Martin is no longer in the navy, I’m sorry to say.”

“What? Why? When did that happen?”

“You’d have to ask him yourself.”

“Well, do you have his information? A contact?”

He shrugged.

I thought about going home, and then dismissed the idea. Nor did I complain about Marty’s flightiness, though I was curious about what I perceived as the suspicious circumstances of his departure; I’d gone around the world to experience something else, and it didn’t matter if Marty was or wasn’t there. I could fend for myself.

Later the lieutenant said, “The girls aren’t the same here. You’re how old? Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Old enough to know a bit of the difference. You see it in their eyes. They don’t have much here. It’s not a wealthy country, but maybe not quite third world, either. You see it in the bars as though whoring were ordinary. There’s one girl I ran into when I was with one of my fellas, about to go in for some drinks and company. One of them — the Oriental girls, I mean — she took no money. She was dressed in Western dress. Not in one of those qipao. She was dressed like the girls back home, and that threw me off. Anyway, she had her eye on my sailor. Just grabbed his arm, laughed in a way that made my skin crawl, and tugged him in the direction of the big house behind the Golden Lotus, out by one of the northwest banana fields.”

“And he didn’t go.”

“Oh no,” the lieutenant said, sipping his tea. “He went! Seemed happy enough when he came back. It was no effort for him, and he didn’t have to pay. I asked him what it was like. He said it was heavenly. ‘China girls know how to move,’ he said.”

I tried to imagine this girlish apparition appearing. As a virgin it was harder still to imagine the sex, the moves, or that kind of female desire.

“‘Like a dream,’ he said. I would have thought he was lying, if not for the fact that I’d seen her myself. Almond-shaped eyes. Long black hair. Sexy as all hell. There’s no making that stuff up.”

I said, “That’s so strange.”

“Something about being here, I guess. There’s no dignity in it. It’s different here. There’s no dignity in the way these girls live.”

We changed subjects then, but the jiu jia lingered in my thoughts, as did the notion of an Oriental girl in Western dress — looking like Marianne in the garments she chose, but with a different species of face and pitch-black hair. I imagined her arching her body so that her belly pointed toward the sky and her soft breasts rose pale from her firm chest. When I returned to my flat, the window was open, breezeless, and I was sweating through my clothes. I turned on the radio. I went to my bamboo mat, parted the curtains of my mosquito tent, and lay down within its web, running my hand down the waistband of my slacks to feel myself, my nerve endings waiting for something to come into contact with, all the aching electricity of sex thrumming like cable wire, and an imaginary body made of swampy heat climbing on top of mine. I didn’t caress or linger, but squeezed and trembled. I closed my eyes and moaned between gritted teeth.

The lieutenant said, “You know, it’s possible to never go to the open-air market, if you eat street meats for every meal. But if you’re inclined to cook for yourself. .” And he held up his cuttlefish skewer and thrust it in an easterly direction. “Or even if you don’t cook. It’s a madhouse, but may hold some interest for a man interested in foreign cultures.” I told him that I would go. How different could a market be? What kind of blood-soaked dirt forming red-black islands, hog heads’ eyes bulging white, the stink of fish and meat attracting looping flies? I went midweek. The lieutenant insisted on coming with me. He had a taste for what he called lian wu, a type of apple, and the oranges, he said, were sugar-sweet. Hurriedly he pulled out his cap, which was not a navy-issued hat but a Detroit Tigers cap, and he adjusted the brim such that the lines in his forehead were in shadow.

The nearest market to my teahouse faced the port and was propped up by ramshackle constructions made of tin and wood, shielding leathery women and men from further sun as they sat, legs open, elbows on their knees, behind their goods, which were laid out on the ground atop blue tarps. It was loud, very loud, and the smell nearly knocked me over like the butcher’s back home, except with no ventilation and captive beneath a bell jar of heat. Everyone yelled at one another as though perpetually arguing, hollering again and again in surges of nasal noise.

After ten minutes of the lieutenant pointing out that exotic item and that unusual creature, some in buckets or flayed on tables, I had purchased exactly one bag of hard-boiled eggs stewed in soy sauce, and I’d had enough. If our olfactory senses are the most direct pathway to memory, what does it mean when every scent is strange?

Then the lieutenant stopped, grabbed my arm, and said, “There!”

He pointed at two girls at a round table, eating shaved ice. One girl was fat, the other thin. The fat girl laughed with her mouth wide open, head tilted back, her large breasts shaking beneath her blouse, and she wore sandals that exposed candy-apple-red toenails. Something was wrong with her arm. The thin girl beside her smiled, her hair tied up in a bun, exposing a long, slender neck with what was — I was sure of this — a hickey on the side. It was the only mottled and ugly thing on her otherwise flawless self. Oh, she was beautiful, of course, in a way that I didn’t understand. I was already beginning to fall for her without truly seeing. And I only sense this in hindsight, but I was filled with excitement over something foreign that could serve as a vessel inside which I could put all of my longings and hopes. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t like where I’d come from. Therefore, I was forced to like something different. It’s really no different from any other exoticism — say, the exoticism of something so beautiful that to try to describe it falls into a series of clichés: “startlingly blue eyes,” “shiny hair,” “full lips.” Beauty, if you’re like most un-truly-beautiful people, is unlike the self, with its strangeness being part of what makes it novel, and therefore pleasurable. To love something different and inexplicable is a natural state of the human condition.

She wore, as the lieutenant had explained, expensive-looking Western clothing. I assumed, wrongly, that she was a kept woman. Her breasts were the size of my fists. She had pointy elbows. Later, I would adore these elbows beyond reason. Her legs were not bare like her friend’s, and she wore white kneesocks and saddle shoes that looked as though they had been polished that morning. Her shoulder bag hung at her side, sadly drooping, cast away.

But the hickey. The hickey was dirt, it was sex. It couldn’t be brushed away, marking her till it disappeared of its own volition.

“Are they sisters?” I asked.

“They’re not sisters, no, they don’t really look anything alike,” he said. “You get used to looking at them after a while. They begin to look as different as Marilyn and Audrey.”

I thought she was beautiful, but how could I have? All that I saw was that bruise, and then my mind’s eye saw her on a bed, without her expensive clothes. That was my wife, Daisy, and her name was Jia-Hui then. They didn’t notice us. The two girls giggled and ate their shaved ice, and I continued to sink into filthy reverie until the lieutenant said, “Go talk to them. The pretty one speaks English well enough. She’s educated, somehow, despite being no better than the whores. Why, you could take her home with you this afternoon, I’m sure.”

“No,” I protested, embarrassed.

“Eighteen? Wealthy?” He nudged me with his knuckles. “Go on, go ahead. Her friend with the fucked-up arm will understand.”

Despite my refusal, the lieutenant grabbed me and pulled me toward the girls. The sight of these two tall white men rapidly approaching them caught the attention of both young women, who looked right at the lieutenant as he came forth with me in tow. Whereas the fat girl tensed and frowned, her shoulders lifting, the thin girl picked up her spoon and sank it into her bowl of ice, twirling it slowly as she waited for us to approach. Neither of them spoke.

“Do you remember me?” the lieutenant asked the thin girl, who crossed one leg over the other and brought a spoonful of ice to her mouth. Her lips glossed with sticky water. She shook her head as if she didn’t understand. She looked at the other girl and said something, and the other girl laughed.

“Let’s go,” I said to the lieutenant.

But the lieutenant was affronted, and would not come. “She knows me. This one does,” he said.

“Yeah,” the thin girl said, and it was this word, yeah, coming out of her mouth that surprised me — not yes, but the colloquial, broad yeah, as though she were Louise Bielecki on the playground, and I was holding stones.

“You slept with one of my men.”

She shrugged.

The fat girl obviously admired her, and, emboldened, said, “I work for little money. You want?”

And then the thin girl said to us, “You go away.”

The lieutenant frowned. He was a dignified sort, by most accounts; still, he was a navy officer, and in my experience of navy officers, they will brook no fools — not even a fool woman. He muttered, “China girl bitch,” before putting his hand on my shoulder, and walked us both away from them. I heard the thin girl mock, “White son of a bitch!” and both girls laughed again, the sound of a flock of proud birds.

Daisy, the baby, and I moved to Polk Valley in Northern California. It was there that I bought our small, absurdly cheap house from a man named Frank, whose parents had died in that house two weeks prior. This was in 1955, and I liked the place immediately despite its oddities. The water-stained wallpaper sometimes hovered from the wall in gluey strips. Frank and his brother had removed their parents’ furniture and goods, but for whatever reason had left the calendar collection hung, and from room to room all calendars exhibited different months and years, curling at the edges—1932, 1944, January, a sentimental and snowy December landscape that didn’t remind me of anywhere I’d ever been — and though a calendar in the middle of an entire wall, orphaned, made much less sense than a calendar beside a light switch, so it went that there were so many calendars, and all haphazardly placed. A wall in the living room lacked any paint or wallpaper. Drywall. But there were charms, too: pale and ornate molding along the crack between wall and ceiling, and around every entryway; a well-built shed; solid wood floors with dark knots; an unusually pristine stove. The house was laid out like a smaller version of the first floor of my parents’ brownstone, which may or may not have been a point of attraction. Unlike the Greenpoint house, there was no foyer, only the mouth of a short hallway that led straight down to the master bedroom. Along the left, in order: a space for a living room, a bedroom, and the kitchen/eating area. Along the right, in order: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a third bedroom.

But the true win was the land. “Part of the deal,” Frank said as he hunched over a piece of paper pulled from his pocket, marked up with a rudimentary pen drawing of the area, “and here are the Sierras.” We owned the house and the raggedly triangular plot, with two points along the Sierras borderland and the third point deep in the woods that had no name, as far as Frank knew. We were close to the Yuba River, he said, but it was a substantial walk. No one called it the Yuba River, he added.

“What do you call it?” I asked.

“The river. Just the river.”

Frank took his money from us and was happy, and we took the house and the land from him and were happy. In March the Sierras were still puckered with frost, but the valley had already begun to warm, the snow melting into water running riverward. I hired men from the town to improve the house. These men reminded me of men from the factory in age and heft, and they coolly accepted my money, as they no doubt saw me as a wealthy, snot-nosed interloper, probably an orphan who’d inherited a boatload of cash and would eventually turn wild beauty into beastly lawns. The men came and I played with William on the porch while Daisy brought out a tray of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

There was nothing obviously inappropriate about the way my wife behaved in front of the workers. She barely spoke to them, though her English was passable by then, and she handed them their glasses of lemonade before coming to me and saying, “I bring one glass for you.” In front of the men she kissed my waiting mouth, and set a sweaty pitcher on the steps. She sat beside me and chucked William, who sat on my lap, under the chin. We’d named him William for no specific reason other than liking the name; no lineage, no homage to Shakespeare or the conqueror. The men had taken the lemonade while silently assessing her in the way that men do. I didn’t fault them. But I didn’t fault her, either.

It started with small isolations. First we were shut up in that San Francisco penthouse, where Daisy first saw me without my human mask on and did not leave — although in hindsight I ask myself, How in the world could she have? — and next in the rural fringe of Polk Valley, America’s greatest producer during the Gold Rush, which I had chosen at random from the McNally map in the glove box. By instinct I was suspicious of how the world perceived us, so I thought a rural location would be a decent place to live our lives out in peace. A repeated survey of townsfolk demonstrated that there were, at maximum, two Negro families and one Oriental family, who, Daisy informed me, were Japanese, not Chinese. The still-fresh memory of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan gave her mixed feelings about the Okis. We had no feelings, one way or the other, about the two Negro families. We suspected that they were related to each other, as they appeared together more often than most merely friendly families, and the wife of one family had the same strong jaw as the husband of the other. We did wonder what had caused them to move to Polk Valley, which was blindingly white.

Polk Valley chiefly consists of two parallel streets: Main Street, divided into North and South, and Laurier Street, which emerges like a victorious snake from a Gordian knot of dirt roads and barely paved paths. Main and Laurier run parallel until Laurier tributaries into Main; the five blocks that follow are known as “downtown,” or simply “town.” Downtown is a hodgepodge of Old West historical buildings and saloons-turned-bars. South Main Street exits Polk Valley shortly after the town’s lone gas station, to continue in a no-man’s-land of brush and woods to Killington.

We live on a path that, as far as I can see, has no name. Our nearest neighbors, the Boones, are a half mile off, and they have never come to introduce themselves in our thirteen years of life together. I know that they’re called the Boones only because their box is the closest to ours at the end of Sycamore Road, where a clump of mailboxes holds each family’s mail. I’m not saying that Daisy and I live a monastic existence, but I’m suggesting that some vestige of that desire for solitude still thrives in me.

The reconstruction of our home took the bulk of April. We slept on the floor of the master bedroom with William between us. One night I jerked awake from a nightmare, and saw the shadow of a mouse scurrying across Daisy’s foot. I was sure that she’d notice, but she didn’t stir.

After the workers left our first major purchase was a huge, rectangular wood table — a disproportionate enormity in our small home. Like most inappropriate purchases, I hadn’t thought twice about buying it, let alone how it would get through our small doors. The table could not be dismantled, so I had the men come back and widen both the front door and the opening to the kitchen while the table stood, like an aggrieved houseguest, on the porch. Next came the bed, the mahogany bookcases and dresser, the food staples to fill the pantry, the cold goods to fill the icebox, the unmatched chairs for every room, the rugs more like carpet than the thinning Oriental rugs of my upbringing, the utensils to fill the drawers, the pots and pans, the lamps with delicate shades like butterfly wings, the lace curtains aflutter. A mix and match of the upscale, the backwoods. A home.

It bothered me that William didn’t look like me, no family resemblance at all. His hair was neither the inky black of Daisy’s nor the white blond of mine, but something in between that always reminded me of what a mutt he was, like a puppy of unknown origin, a head of hair the insignificant color of wet leaves rotting after a rainy autumn. And his face, too, was a mix of ours, but far more Oriental than mine. He had small eyes that peered out in perpetual suspicion, and though he did have jaundice as a baby, it turned out that he also had a yellow tinge to his skin as well, which Daisy claimed was my imagination; but how would she know, or be able to see it? She was blinded by adoration for her child, as any mother should be, not to mention having grown up being surrounded by individuals of the same shade. It’s the father who’s permitted to lack absolute absorption in his offspring. The fact that William didn’t look like me made me nervous, not because I feared that I’d been cuckolded, but because he was my own son and yet alien, looking like nothing I’d previously known. “Hold him,” Daisy would say, and she’d put him in my arms, and I’d become incredibly self-aware of whether I was feeling absolute love for our baby. For example, I had a fear that when she put William in my arms I would throw him out the window without realizing what I was doing, or drop him unintentionally with my arms suddenly going limp of their own accord, not out of maliciousness or evil, but because I was lukewarm to my own child, and even my body knew it.

The nervousness that I felt around William in those early years may have been another symptom of the nervousness that I was beginning to feel about my marriage. We had finally settled down in a place that we could call our own, with a family that we could call our own. I saw Daisy as exotic; I assumed that, with her improved English, we’d be able to satisfactorily live together and love each other. I naively thought that love went beyond language, but in the foothills of Polk Valley, in our little house in the woods, I struggled with the fruits of these assumptions.

And who was there to tell? I longed to speak to Matka about my loneliness, but having earned her disapproval already, I hated to admit that I might have done something wrong. This was less about my dignity, and more about my fears of her worrying over my condition. I didn’t speak to her for years, and she didn’t know that William existed until he already had a sister, though she never met either of them. She may even have forgiven me a divorce, but that wasn’t what I wanted, even if I could have had one. Daisy was, and is, an excellent wife. Her fervent pursuit of mastery over the English language put Marianne’s Latin learnings to shame. She spent her days doting over our son; when William was asleep, she would dote over me. I am ashamed to say that this made me more irritable than pleased at times. In the first year of our life in Polk Valley we went into town frequently enough that people recognized us and knew our names no matter where we went, and she accepted this notoriety without complaint, despite the funny looks she received. I cringe to think of how embarrassed I became when we went into town and she’d attempt to speak English to someone, whether it be a shopkeeper or a cashier, because the listening party certainly couldn’t understand her. I became her translator in those situations, and it humiliated me. Yet this was actually a great accomplishment on her part. She was speaking a language that wasn’t her own, in a country that wasn’t anything like her own, with an aplomb that I couldn’t manage when I’d been overseas; and she was doing it because she loved me. To this day she’ll say things like “What happen to Joan?” and I’ll say, “Who’s Joan?” to which she’ll reply, “She every time buy canned pea and bag of potato at the supermarket.” When I’m gone, she’ll still remember those people, though she’ll rarely see them, and she’ll still have our children. Of course we knew that this was coming. In San Francisco, an inkling blotting itself.

For example.

By the eighth month in Polk Valley I could not spend too much time in the house, and would pace the hallway, the kitchen, and the living room until Daisy suggested that I go for a walk. By then it was November and colder than it had any right to be in my vision of California. I learned that in winter, in the foothills and mountains, it would snow, and there would be snow in the field behind our house, and it would pile to the top of the porch steps and whisper dangerous secrets that only I could hear. But in November it was simply cold.

She held William — who was already clever by then, and had a perpetually solemn and nearly melancholic expression on his face — up with her hands so that he hung high in the air with his feet dangling. She nipped at his naked toes, and he stared at her until he finally turned away, wriggling, and this rejection made me sick. Daisy’s response was to pull him closer, and to murmur things to him in a language that I didn’t understand.

“Please don’t do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Don’t talk to him in Chinese. I don’t understand what you’re saying, and he’ll get confused.”

“He is Chinese baby.”

“He’s an American baby.”

I tugged on my heavy boots, a wool sweater over long johns, an overcoat, a scarf. I put on an old hat with fur earflaps, and I opened the back door. I looked out at all the land before me, but even the sight of the field and the trees beyond the field didn’t calm me, not with the irritation climbing my throat.

“Bye-bye,” Daisy said. “Say ‘Bye-bye, Daddy.’”

I didn’t turn around.

“You think you will go where?” she asked me.

“Into the woods,” I said, “to get a bit of fresh air. I won’t be long.”

I walked out onto the back porch, where we had a rocking chair and a few label-less tin cans with my cigarette butts in them, and I walked into the field, feeling a shadowy fear put its finger to my heart.

But I’d been wrong about the possibilities of the land. The air was good. It was the sort of air that I’d come to Polk Valley for, fresh and unsullied by the smells of people and their machines, and I felt better almost immediately. In the clean air sounds rang out; the crunch of my boots pressing into the snowy field crackled for what seemed like miles. I saw a pinecone that looked like a corncob, and another one that looked like an armadillo, though there were no trees till I reached the line of the woods, and when I reached the line of the woods I saw that these tightly packed pinecones were everywhere if I only kept watch for them. I walked deeper and deeper into the woods without thinking and without concern for whether I would be able to find my way back. It was my land, wasn’t it? How pathetic it would be, to be lost on my own plot. And just when I was about to turn around and pick my way back (I had some sort of half-assed notion of following my own tracks back to the house), lost in my thoughts and the pleasure of getting to know my property, I saw a long shape lying in the dirt behind a tree a few yards away.

I steadied myself. The head of a deer — a buck? No horns. A young deer, then, or a doe. Dark, wide eyes open, frozen. I thought about the animals I’d seen at the American Museum of Natural History. Those creatures brought new meaning to the phrase “still life,” and here was an animal, dead, with guts still inside — did blood congeal? — and how had this deer or doe fallen without a predator to kill it? Illness, then. It was probably full of poisoned maggots feeding on poisoned blood. Yet I walked toward it, and when I saw its entire length spread out before me, tears pricked my eyes, and I sat on the dirt in front of the animal. I thought about touching it. Its face was so peaceful, unlike my father’s in his coffin, whose face had been twisted in unceasing agony even in death. But here was this animal that could very well be resting, and just as I sat down in front of it with all intentions to enjoy its calm presence, I blinked, and it was gone.

But what could I do with a moment such as that one, or with the hundreds of moments like it afterward? I have been to Wellbrook several times; I have been to doctors. My options have been psychoanalysis, electroshock, or medication with more side effects than treatment functions. There is no taught method of coping. What the doctors never told me is that a percentage of the crazy are also living a crazy lifestyle. Others are more fortunate. For them, being mad is like a cold. They don’t even call it an illness. They say, I was melancholy, I was under the weather. I was panicking in the supermarket by the grapefruits and my hands went numb, but now I’m sitting in front of the television with a glass of wine and some pills, and I’m doing all right.

I do miss my adolescence, when they simply called me a victim of neurosis.

The doctors said, Try this, try that, try this, never, You’re a lunatic for life, so that every time it came up it was a surprise in the way that a paper cut is surprising.

Maybe the key is to not be surprised.

The doctors don’t give you much in the way of options, which is why so many of us madmen choose to go full stop. As though the problem were a matter of, say, picking the right location or knife or piece of rope, and not the horror of knowing one’s own wretched selfishness. Such solipsism: a crime with a punishment worse than death. I am fully aware of the choices I’ve made.

I walked back to the house. By then it was getting dark, and with the dark came a deeper cold. I stepped onto the porch and saw, through the window, Daisy in the kitchen with William. Only the overhead kitchen light was on, and because Daisy and William were sitting beneath it, their heads were suffused with a white glow; her dark one and his slightly lighter one were both encircled by halos of light. The religious nature of this image was not lost on me. She had a book open on his lap. She was reading to him in her slow words, words that sounded incorrect to my American ear, but wasn’t it enough that she was trying? Without her, I was alone. Without me, she was alone.

I opened the screen door and then the back door, and Daisy finally looked up at me.

“American book,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Goodnight Moon.”

“You take him,” she said. “I will make dinner.”

I came up behind her and put my hands on her thin shoulders, feeling the taut muscles that connected to her bones. I leaned into her and sank my nose into the crown of her head where the hair was soft and thick, and I breathed in her warm hazelnut smell. William fidgeted. I heard his small hands slap the pages of the book, and I said, “I love you.” I waited for my heart to pound in the old way; I swear that I wanted it to so badly, but it only beat steadily enough to keep me alive.

“I love you,” she said.

“We have a nice family.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to be all right,” I said, and then I added, “I love you.”

“Yes. Here, take him.” She closed the book and put it on the kitchen table. She handed me the baby. I sat at the table and lifted him into the air, swaying him from side to side. He kicked like a frog swimming and laughed. I thought, How could I ever ask for more than this?

On the first visit to the Golden Lotus I was assigned to a petite creature whose limbs gyrated like she was made for sex. She was the kind of thing that I could reach out and eat like a ripe, skinned mango. I watched her wriggle her hands up and down, moving them in slow spirals around her body, and then she bent over so that her ass was in my face. How she did this in the constricting qipao I do not know. When I was younger I would have been embarrassed, but I was no longer, as I had conveniently forgotten my faults. The point of sex, then, is to become an amnesiac regarding the horrible parts of the self and to absorb oneself only in the friendliness of sensation — to be inhuman for once. I let her degrade herself in front of me because I’d paid money for her and this was what she was, a fleshy being swaying before me for the purpose of my arousal, the only thing that could get my mind off my self because I did not want to think of my self. I wanted to only think of warm skin wrapped around me, and I had paid enough money, hadn’t I? All I was good for was money.

After the girl danced for a while she opened the paper sliding door and called out, and then she came and sat next to me at the table on the floor. She still had that absent presence. She asked me what my name was. I told her.

“David,” she echoed.

“And your name?” I asked.

“Mei-Ling.”

We sat in silence. I didn’t touch her, and perhaps it was still leftover childishness that held me back, or a softness that came over me when I heard her gentle voice. In ten minutes there was a rap at the door, and she called out again before the door slid open. The fat girl I’d seen at the market came in with a tray with a bottle of liquor and two tumblers. She didn’t appear to recognize me.

“For you, whiskey,” Mei-Ling said. She watched as the other girl poured. They said something to each other in Mandarin or Taiwanese, the latter a pungent dialect derived from Hokkien, and the fat girl left us alone again.

Mei-Ling pushed one tumbler toward me and I touched it to my lips. She nodded, lifting her glass to her own swollen mouth. I swallowed. I grew increasingly drunk as the second girl popped in with more whiskey, and with Mei-Ling occasionally asking questions in broken English. What did I do? Did I like Taiwan? The drunker I got the more I saw her as a variety of different animals: doe, lynx, mouse, house cat. The whiskey splintered the air between us. She was only a girl, really, but with makeup on she looked older, her carmine lipstick forming a bow on her full lips, the heavy ermine-white powder on her face forming a feral apparition. Doe, deer, female deer, feline, fox. I’d succeeded in getting as far away from my old life as possible. Her hair, inky. Compact body. Small breasts hidden beneath her dress and not the heavy sway of Marianne’s, Marianne’s hair the color of the sun. Mei-Ling put her hand between my legs. The feeling of falling. Remember that I was a virgin. She grasped my hand and slid it up her leg to the softness between her legs where there were no undergarments, slipping my fingers inside her (soft as the inside of a raccoon) while she massaged my aching groin, and that was all it took — I shuddered and spasmed without meaning to, my body jolting as I ejaculated into my pants. I blushed, and then I hated her. With an inchoate and abstract desire I wanted to beat her senseless. I even saw the red handprint on her white cheek that I did not make. Red, white, black: those terribly dramatic colors. Even the room smelled violent.

Without letting any surprise at my ejaculation show, she moved so that we were separate beings again. Here was a small clean towel from out of nowhere. I undid my pants and wiped myself off like a child: disgusted, embarrassed. Meanwhile, Mei-Ling undid and then fixed her hair. It was my underwear, and not my trousers, that bore the brunt of the damage, which was a small relief. She patted her bun, and opened the door to call outside again.

An older woman in a heavy kimono came; later I would learn that this was Daisy’s mother, the mama-san. “Mei-Ling is requested to go,” she said. “You will come back. We would like to see you tomorrow.”

I nodded, surprised by her forthrightness, but already I was thinking of coming back. After the mama-san left, I said, “Goodbye, Mei-Ling.”

“Good-bye,” she said, surprised. “Okay?” And she sounded a bit frightened. I guess I must have seemed angry, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d gotten knocked around in that place. Then she said something I hadn’t expected at all, which was “What happened?” And she pointed at my scarred hand.

“I hurt it,” I said. “I cut myself.”

She nodded. I didn’t know if she understood, so I took my grandfather’s knife out of my pocket, flipped it open, and pretended to slice the back of my hand with the blade. “Like this,” I said.

“Why?”

“Haven’t you ever gotten hurt before?”

“I gotten hurt. No…” She pretended to cut herself. “No like this. I gotten hurt…” And then she slapped herself, her head whipping to the side.

I laughed. It seemed the correct response at the time. And she laughed, too. We laughed a little hysterically, I’ll admit. I’d had a few glasses of whiskey, but she was, as far as I knew, sober, and had barely sipped her first drink.

When the laughter died down it seemed that we were adrift again, without connection — but having had that connection, I wanted more. So I said, “How long have you been a bar girl?”

“Pardon?”

“You are a bar girl? How long?”

“Pardon?”

“Forget it. Are you happy here?”

“Happy here…” She picked up her hand and swayed it back and forth. Comme ci, comme ça. “No one happy. Yes?”

And I got very quiet. I lay down on the tatami, and I covered my eyes with one arm so that I couldn’t see anything. In my mouth was the taste of all of that whiskey, and in my loins was the memory of spasms. I thought I wanted to come back. I didn’t know a damn thing about anything. I got up and left the paper room, wove through the sailors in their hats, stumbled into the hot air that felt like sickness. Now that I was away from home, I missed America. I thought of New York fireworks, and of the pews at St. Jadwiga that I knew so well, worn almost soft beneath our bodies, and I touched my slicked fingers to my mouth, which brought me no pleasure.

I wasn’t far from the entrance of the bar, and there was someone calling to me, I realized, through the haze of voices and dogs barking. When I turned I saw that it was the pretty girl from the market. It was true what the lieutenant had said — they didn’t all look the same. This girl had high cheekbones and a thin nose. She was wearing a striped and belted green dress, socks, Oxfords — the dress of a schoolgirl or aspiring bobby-soxer. Her hair, loose past her shoulders, hid the bruise on her neck. But I knew it was there, and the knowledge reinvigorated me.

“You forget your knife,” she said, and handed it to me.

“Thank you.”

“Mei-Ling tell me. You like Mei-Ling?”

I nodded. I was still drunk — the soggy air didn’t help that. But it was true that this girl was beautiful, and I felt momentarily brave.

“Do you want to come to my apartment?” I asked her.

She laughed. “You want sex?”

“I want you.”

“You want sex with me?”

“I want to spend time with you.”

“Spend time?” she said.

“I want to be with you.”

“Ah. I want to listen music,” she said, and delicately pinched her thumb and forefinger together in the distance between us, lifting them an inch or so in the air, and then swinging her arm in an arc before gently dropping them onto an imaginary record. “You have music?”

I nodded. She swayed slightly, rocking back and forth from foot to foot; from this she might sound like someone unsure of herself, or physically awkward, but Daisy has always been anything but awkward, and was merely hypnotizing me — and the serpentine symbolism of her movement does not escape me, but it’s never that simple, is it? She makes that swaying motion now only rarely. In fact, she usually stands quite still.

We went to the teahouse, up the stairs to my apartment. I fumbled for my keys, still drunk, and she said, “You are nice.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said.

“No, I know, I know,” she said, and wrapped her arms around my waist, pressing her warm lips to my shoulder. “You are a nice man.”

She waited for me to open the door. When I did, she slipped in past me and strode around the room, examining things such as a canvas rucksack, or my briefcase, or a pile of books that I imagined she couldn’t read, her fingers stroking the few shirts I had hanging in the alcove that I called a closet. I thrilled to anticipate the shape of her breasts beneath that belted dress, the curve of her ankles beneath those cream-colored socks that matched the paleness of her silly Oxfords exactly, and I wanted to be on top of her. No — I wanted her to be on top of me, controlling me, doing as she pleased with me. This Oriental girl would not mind seizing me. After all, according to the lieutenant, she had fucked plenty of white men because she enjoyed it.

Daisy turned to me. “Shall we,” she said, and I loved the word shall in her mouth, its formality, “listen?”

“What do you want to listen to?”

“Mmm,” she said, pressing her lips together, “you have what?”

“Well, let’s see. I have,” I said, “see here, I have a lot of classical music, like Mozart and Beethoven and Bach, but especially Beethoven. I love Beethoven. Have you heard Beethoven?”

“Beethoven?”

I hummed, as best as I could, the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony. She shook her head. The notion of someone having never heard the Fifth Symphony surprised me. Then again, I reminded myself, we were fundamentally different. I went to the record player and I took the requisite record, tilted the sleeve, and let the black vinyl slip into my hand, and as I arranged the system to play I could feel Daisy watching from behind me, so close that her head was almost resting on my shoulder. I felt electricity flickering between us in that small space, and my back went hot and prickly sensing it.

The symphony began. I turned to look at Daisy and saw that she was curled up on her side, with her wrists positioned such that her paws pressed against her chin. With her eyes closed, she looked even more like a child, even with her lip color and rouge. And after ten minutes had passed, and after she had still not moved, I wondered if I’d made the wrong decision in having this girl come over. I was no Don Juan, and she was making no attempt at being a seductress. I was about to ask her if she liked the music when she exhaled suddenly in a rush, and then snored very lightly, but it was still a snore, and I was annoyed in the way that a young man is annoyed when a beautiful girl prefers falling asleep to Beethoven over unbuttoning his strained pants. But what could I do? I removed the needle from its groove. Still, she did not move. I wondered if she was deprived of sleep. The bruise at her neck, exposed, stared up at me like a black eye. As I went to my bed to fetch her a sheet, I realized that she couldn’t sleep there; the mosquitoes would eat her alive.

So I tapped her on the shoulder, and then I shook her lightly. Her eyes opened.

“You’ll be bitten by mosquitoes,” I said. “Sleep underneath the tent.”

“Mosquitoes?”

I mimicked an insect, flapping my arms and making a whimpering, whining sound, and then I pointed at the bed. I parted the curtains of the tent and climbed inside, and then I said, “Come here.”

She did, and then she fell asleep again. I lay beside her, aching, and put my arm around her, which she didn’t seem to mind. I tried not to touch her with my body from the waist down. I pressed my face against her arm and breathed the scent of her skin, which smelled like nothing, but felt warm. Even though she was asleep, I already felt less alone, and I think this is how I began to fall in love with her. You feel alone and something comes to take away the knife-edge of your loneliness. The more mysterious, the better; there’s less to prove you wrong. I lay next to her for hours before falling asleep myself, and in that time I felt myself coasting on waves of anxiety that dipped down into black relief, and then I floated gently onshore. I rested. In the morning I awoke, and I was unsurprised to see that she’d left without saying good-bye. But instead of feeling angry or annoyed, as I had before, my flesh was suffused with tenderness for her. For her, I was no ordinary man, but someone whom she felt comfortable enough with to sleep beside. I evoked no anxiety in her. She’d slept like a child. It was a revelation, and I was moving on.

My relationship with Catholicism had fluctuated to a low ebb in my time overseas, but when I discovered the beauty of St. Joseph’s Church I immediately loved its charming stained-glass windows and modest pews, which were not unlike the ones in St. Jadwiga back home, and I told Daisy that I would like to take our family to church on Sundays, which she only vaguely seemed to understand, but agreed to nonetheless. The morning before we went to church we sat at the kitchen table, where I attempted to summarize Catholicism in the simplest way possible. As I began to deliver my explanation I realized that Catholicism was, in fact, difficult to explain to a non-Westerner without verging on ridiculousness. Daisy nodded gravely at everything I said, but I wouldn’t have blamed her if she thought I was spouting gibberish.

When we arrived at St. Joseph’s, Daisy seemed bewildered by the rituals. She tried to mimic everything that I did, though she crossed herself in the wrong order, and was slow to realize when we were to stand and sit; I strained to appreciate her efforts. William sat in her lap with Goodnight Moon in his, ignoring the ceremony and rites until it was time for Communion, and when I stood to approach for the wafer and wine, he reached for me, the book sliding to the floor with a bang.

“No,” I whispered, hoisting him by the armpits to sit him back down again, “you two stay here.”

“I want,” William said, and he wasn’t loud about it, but people began to look at us — which they did anyway, because of the kind of people we were.

“No,” I said, panic rising hot behind my breastbone, and I told Daisy, “Keep him in his seat,” before I hurriedly exited the pew and into the line. I looked back, and my family was the only one still seated; I flushed at seeing their dark faces, including William’s miserable one. He looked like he was about to shout. As I took the host upon my tongue I closed my eyes and saw, behind my lids, young, smiling Marianne patting the pew beside her.

After Mass had concluded, and we exited St. Joseph’s into the frigid air with our coats on, Daisy said, “We do this every week, Ba?”

“I hope so,” I replied. We were in a small crowd of Polk Valley denizens who chattered about potlucks, none of which we were invited to, and my wife looped one arm through mine while holding William with her other. She asked, within earshot of everyone, “How there is so many of Jesus’s body to eat?”

I opened my mouth, and then I closed it. I drew my family away from the crowd. “It’s very complicated,” I said. We made our way to the car. “It’s — it’s very complicated. When your English is better, I’ll explain it to you.”

Later that night, as we settled into bed and I turned off the bedside lamp, Daisy said, “I like church.”

“Yes, lamb?”

“Yes.”

“What do you like about it?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything more, and in the dark I thought she’d fallen asleep. Finally she said, “Many times, I do not understand you. Church helps me.”

“It helps you to understand me?”

“A little bit.”

“How?” I asked, but the question would be fruitless before it was even planted. I couldn’t imagine how she’d be able to explain.

“I see you love something,” she whispered. She reached for my hand, and we intertwined our fingers, and we said good night.

I admit that I was, and am, an elitist. I didn’t want my son to wait until he was seven to begin his schooling when I felt that he was smart enough to begin serious learning when he was four or five; after all, it’s not uncommon for expert pianists to begin their lessons so early, and yes, William did learn to play a scale when he was three, when I began to teach him what I knew on an upright at home. I didn’t dare attempt to have a Nowak shipped out to us from the factory; there was no way that I’d slip past undetected. So I’d found our homey, well-worn secondhand Nowak upright in the city paper for a perfectly reasonable price.

He would not go to school with other children. Daisy and I agreed on this together. Neither of us wanted him to be shunned or mocked for his otherworldly looks. And she wanted to keep him close; there was nothing more she needed than to be with him at all times, pulling him to her whenever he wandered within arm’s length, and lifting her eyes to observe him every few moments like clockwork. Twice she tentatively brought up the notion of a second child, for William’s sake, but I stood adamantly against this. I, the Catholic, felt guilty about but insisted on contraception, not wanting to feel the same eerie sense of alienation that I suffered with William, and I hated that sense for existing. Of course I did not hate him. I’m not a monster when it comes to my only boy. I know all too well from my own father-son relationship that such relationships are complicated, and I tried — oh, I tried! — not to let William feel unloved, unwanted. I hope I haven’t failed in this.

But about education. I spent a lot of time attempting to distill a concentration of essential books. There was the Bible, of which I preferred the King James for its stride. I wanted him to know Latin, too, and I considered acquiring a textbook, and then moving on to Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and so forth. We would need a dictionary, of course, a good one. We could find a copy of the abridged Oxford English somewhere, or have it mailed to us. We already had Goodnight Moon. He was reading that on his own before he was two, sounding out the words based on a teaching style that I cobbled together, pulling together consonants and vowels, singing the alphabet, and drawing letters onto sheets of paper. Until William was six and Gillian was four, I didn’t begin to teach my children in earnest, but I had a list of books that I wanted to keep in the house for them: Physicians Desk Reference to Pharmaceutical Specialties and Biologicals, a world atlas, a few dictionaries in other languages, a field guide to North American birds. I made a short list, and those books are all in the shelves now, save for the King James that Ojciec inscribed for me, and which I keep here with me in my briefcase but will soon enough find its way back home, I imagine, when the police arrive. I trust that my children will be able to take the reins from here.

After a year of living in Polk Valley, our existence had become tightly circumscribed. We three went into town only to purchase groceries and dry goods, because staying home was easier than trying to appear normal when I was ailing; and Daisy pressured me, too, stating that she felt stared at by what she referred to as “strange people,” and I was too tired to explain to her that we, and not they, were the strange ones. We no longer went to Mass, although this was less a consequence of Daisy’s feelings and more due to my discomfort with attending church. After all, we’d had a civil, and thus secular, wedding ceremony, as Matka had suspected, and I did want to raise William to be a good Catholic, but how would I do it without Daisy’s help? At times I heard her chanting, singsong, to William in her language. I told her to stop, and we fought, and she cried, and I screamed at her that I wasn’t raising a foreign child in my own home; I reeled with how out of control my life had become. For a few weeks I took William to Mass alone, insisting that Daisy remain at home, but he seemed to understand his parents’ religious conflict. He stopped paying attention. He refused to stand and sit when he was supposed to, and he whined loudly for his mother, the embarrassment nearly killing me. I stopped taking him, and then I stopped going, too. It all felt pointless, too pointless.

It was this limited life that brought back the ghost of Marianne Orlich, never quite forgotten, who now possessed in my mind even more of the holy attributes that I’d once put upon her. I sat in the kitchen with William in my lap, sifting through flashcards while he placidly absorbed them, and he repeated things with his dull, thick tongue. I worried about his accent; he did have one. (And I tried to shake it out of him, but I’ll go to the grave with the knowledge that my boy, my own flesh and blood, sounds off-key.) As I absentmindedly turned the cards that my wife had so diligently made, I watched said wife as she stood at the counter and sliced potatoes. She was humming to herself a song that I didn’t recognize. With Marianne in my head I saw only the parts of Daisy that were decidedly not white. She was small, and her black hair was in a thick braid down her back, and with her left foot crossed over her right one I wondered why her feet, which I had once been so enamored by, were so tiny, and could think only of things like barbaric foot-binding rituals; when had such things ended, anyway? Her questions about Mass made me cringe. So did her blunt disbelief with regard to transubstantiation — these were all things that had hurried along our domestic conflicts. I wondered why I’d set such traps for myself. I was living with someone whom I loved, but in so many ways she was a stranger to me, and with our handicapped communication I felt lonelier than ever.

So to the painfully obvious question of why I had married this woman in the first place, I would say that I adored her sharp and almost jagged elbows; I loved how inappropriate it felt to remove her saddle shoes, which she still let me do as part of sex in our shoeless home, and I always unlaced them to reveal her white socks and what I then considered to be her marvelously shaped feet. I loved how she was mouthy when she got drunk and never pretended to be more decorous than she really was, but would occasionally slip into what she called sa jiao, a sappy, sloppy girlishness that made my nerves squirm with delight. She lounged in my bed under the mosquito tent, dressed in her unbuttoned silk blouses and underwear. She would sprawl out on my small bed, stroking her own hipbone with the back of her fingers as one would a cat, staring at the ceiling. At times I thought my heart would take a running leap out of my chest; at times all I wanted was to look at her forever. Why else do people fall in love? What sense does love ever make for itself, especially young love, which is so desperate to be satisfied?

“Nowak, let me tell you,” the lieutenant had said. “You pay, you play, but you never let them stay.”

When I had asked her to marry me, she laughed. She traced her finger in a thin oval on my bare and tanning side. “America?” she said. Her breasts were paler than the rest of her torso. Her upper arms were the darkest part of her. She had delicate hairs that sprouted from her areolae. I loved to bite her brown nipples till she moaned.

“Yes,” I said. “You can have anything you want.”

“Whatever I all want I have here. Why don’t you stay here? Stay in Taiwan, be here, be happy with me.”

“I can’t do that. I don’t speak Chinese. At least you know English.”

“At here everybody know me, I have power.”

“In America,” I said, kissing her forehead, “everyone will know you. I promise. I promise, I promise, I promise. My lamb. I promise you, you will have a good life with me.”

“I have a good life here.”

“I want to be with you. And so you must come with me.”

Nothing. She rolled onto her belly, the curvature of her back smooth as driftwood. “I’ll never leave,” she said. The ring, pure gold, was still in my hand.

We spent our days together in my apartment or at the Golden Lotus, and there was no in-between, which I believe led to a rapid increase in the sexualization of our relationship. After I asked her to marry me and she said no, I searched for her in the ordinary places, but couldn’t find her for days, and I was afraid that I’d scared her off with my proposal. And I feared that the old insanity would come around again as I wandered the filthy streets of Kaohsiung with bicycles swirling around me, my armpits sweating, being followed by dogs with their ribs showing and their shrill barks sounding; I waited for the abyss of fear to open in my belly, pulling everything I’d managed to make of a life into that deep hole, but I thought I could scare it off with distraction. I spent several nights at the Golden Lotus so that I could drink — alone, chastely — with Mei-Ling, the first girl, and I asked her if she knew where Jia-Hui was. She shook her head. I reached into my wallet and pulled out three nights’ worth of yuan, which was nothing to me, but which I knew would be everything to her.

“This is yours. Not the mama-san’s. Yours.”

She pushed the money back at me. “I take your money, mama-san finds out, I get hit, kill. No.”

“I want to know what happened to Jia-Hui.”

Perhaps Mei-Ling heard something in my voice, because she went still then, and when she spoke again her voice was quiet. “The mama-san. Only because Jia-Hui is mama-san’s daughter is she alive. She is bad.” The word bad held weight. It loaded down the space between us with a thousand tons.

“Bad?” I echoed.

“The most dirty. People know Jia-Hui and the whites have sex for no money. But she is even more dirty. More bad.”

“What are you talking about?”

Mei-Ling gave me a hard look. “I know you like Jia-Hui. So many men like her. But she has a poison. I tell you, she is worse than animal and worse than whore.”

I pressed her for more, but she added nothing to what she’d told me already, so I weighed my options. Mei-Ling was frail and would be easy to bully. She reminded me of the girls I taunted in my youth, and it wasn’t so different now. If I hurt her it would only be a means to an end. I could break her wrist by clenching it in one disfigured hand. Even now, I wonder, what happened to Mei-Ling? Did she ultimately make a misstep? Was she killed for an error, or did she grow old in that whorehouse? Did a white knight carry her away on his pale, gaunt horse? I cared so little about what she had to say about Jia-Hui’s poor standing. I was obsessed. I would eviscerate myself for Jia-Hui, but I did not hurt Mei-Ling.

On a night that is only important to my memory because of Jia-Hui’s role in it, I exited the bar. I walked home as I had done so many nights before. The few lights in the windows doubled themselves and shimmered. Dogs snapped at my ankles. They circled me in a ragtag pack, one not belonging to another, snarling and woofing in hopes of a scrap, or perhaps in hopes of devouring me. I walked and they followed, leaping. A Chinaman passed with his head down, looking briefly at me before hurrying elsewhere. Here she was to chase them away, my ghost-girl. I felt her grab my arm.

“Take me to America,” she said in a rush, her breath in my ear. She sank her face into the side of my head, whispering, “I want to marry you.”

Daisy finished cutting the potatoes. William laid his head against the inside of my elbow, signaling that he was tired of flashcards. Four o’clock: he needed a nap.

“William’s sleepy,” I said, still thinking of Daisy’s small feet, and my memory of Marianne’s larger ones, pink from traipsing inside wool socks and boots in the snow, the size of which she was embarrassed by. I lifted William into my arms, and he rested his face on my shoulder. I carried him into his room and settled him to bed. There was no such thing as a crib for our wee one; he slept in a twin bed with an assortment of stuffed toys. I tucked two bears around him and pulled the covers to his chin. He did not suck his thumb, as I had. He said, drowsily, “Love you.”

“I love you, too.” I kissed him on his crown.

Next I entered the master bedroom, which was sparsely decorated. I’d thought all women were interested in interiors, but Daisy was not. The only additions that she made to our bedroom were a few of William’s drawings — taped, not framed — to the wall above our iron headboard, and a corny, coral-colored vase of fake carnations that she’d bought from town and placed on her vanity table. I’d chosen the furniture: the wrought-iron bed, the matching mahogany night tables, the wardrobe with its elaborately carved doors, and even the vanity table and mirror, which I’d assumed that Daisy wanted because she was a woman, and which she did use, though I never did know if it brought her pleasure.

I closed the door and locked it. The phone sat on my side of the bed, on my night table. My wife, after all, had no one to call.

“Number, please.”

I gave the switchboard operator the Orlichs’ number. I waited, and through the crackle of the line I heard a familiar voice: “Caroline Orlich speaking.”

“Mrs. Orlich,” I said.

“Who is this?” Did I hear something resigned, tired, upset?

“It’s David Nowak.”

“Oh. Well,” she said, “this is a surprise.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No. I’m completely unoccupied at the moment. Isn’t it true that you broke your mother’s heart a few years back?”

The fact that Mrs. Orlich knew this shocked me. Matka was a private person, and wouldn’t even have allowed anyone to know about my father’s death if it hadn’t been an unavoidable concession. Carefully I asked, “Do you speak with her?”

“No. I see her at the supermarket sometimes, but she’s always thought that she was too good for me. Look where that’s got her. Anyway, I heard from George that you had some kind of fight with her. That’s all. She looks miserable, by the way — skin and bones. Wrapped in furs like a bag lady. Why are you calling?”

“I was wondering,” I said, God help me, “if I could — I’d like to get in touch with Marianne.”

“Is that right. Well, if you’re looking to scoop her up, you’re barking up the wrong tree. She’s living in a convent now.” She laughed. “Is that all you wanted?”

“I’d still like to talk to her,” I said.

“I don’t think they accept phone calls at the convent, dear. Probably too busy praying, and I haven’t spoken to her since she left. It’s somewhere out in California, out in the middle of nowhere. Near Sacramento. Did you know that Sacramento is the capital of California? Who knew?”

“What sort of convent is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, the kind where they pump out nuns like parts on an assembly line. The town is Killington, I just remembered. What an awful name. Killington. I can’t believe my daughter lives in a place with a name like that, can you? Like a land of murders.”

Killington. She was forty-five minutes away, in the next town over. My heart felt oversized, pumping rushes of blood to bloat my head full. Was this the greatest news of my life, or the most terrible? I vaguely recalled Marianne telling me of some dream to live in Northern California. Had I, without knowing it, steered my family in this direction?

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“Is that all you wanted to know? These calls are expensive. I don’t even know where you are.”

“Nowhere. Good-bye,” I said, and hung up.

I sat on the bed with my hand on my chest. Had I imagined the conversation? Had Caroline Orlich really told me that her daughter lived a short distance from where I sat? Marianne was in a convent, of course, and I was married, with a son, but she was out there: no longer in Chicago, but doing what she’d wanted to do for so long, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that she was now so close to me, but an act of Fate. Because while I’d found a woman to marry, I’d never snuffed out my flame for that girl from the Pawlowskis’ Christmas party. If monogamy is measured in the heart, I must say that I’d never forsaken Marianne, the specter. In the marrow of my bones I’d carried her with me from New York to Taiwan, around the United States, and finally to Polk Valley.

My one regret was this: it was not that I’d lacked the courage to chase Marianne to Chicago, or even that I’d fled to the East and chosen to marry the woman I named Daisy, but that I had but one life with which to make such choices — and that damned inflexibility immediately left me greedy and grasping, with my hand still pressed against my sternum as though to hold in the heart beneath.

Within the week I told Daisy that I had business in Sacramento. She didn’t ask what that business was, but nodded, hugged me, and told me to be safe. “Be safe” was a habit of hers, and it makes me wince to think of it now, because I left this morning without saying good-bye to her or to the children, which means that I escaped the plea or superstitious ritual of hers. (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.) On the drive to Killington I lost myself in dreams. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t drive off the road; I was busy thinking about Marianne’s body, but it would be too simple to say that my interest was purely sexual. I had no intention of seducing her, because the Marianne I’d known as an adolescent would never allow herself to be seduced, and the Marianne who had chosen to become a nun would be even more impossible to bed. It was the substance of her that I wanted to be near. I loved anticipating the sight of her body, even if it was cloaked and hidden; but I also wanted to just talk to her, to hear her gentle voice, to ask her if she remembered the days on the roof, to remind her of eating cookies in her living room, which felt threadbare to me at the time, but now seems far warmer than my Polk Valley living room, which has a small bookcase, a sofa and easy chair, and the twin uprights, but not much else; I wanted to ask her if she ever thought of me, because I was lost and I often thought of her; I would tell her that I continued to pray, but that I felt as distant from God now as I did when I first lost my mind. Most of all — and here my eyes misted, and I could barely see the road — I wanted to tell her that I missed her.

Right as I crossed the border into Killington, I made my plans. I decided that I’d claim to be Marty. I feared that I wouldn’t be allowed to enter without being a direct relation. And yet I was terrified that Marianne’s disappointment upon discovering my lie would make her angry, and that she’d send me away without a chance to explain. When I arrived at Killington I drove aimlessly, not sure of what to do or where to go until I found a filling station, and asked the attendant if there was a convent in town. He said that there was. I asked him, a tautly muscular young man with a mild overbite, if he knew where the convent was. He asked if he looked like the kind of guy who would know where a convent would be, and I said, “I suppose not.” I asked him if he knew how I could find out where the convent was. He shrugged and looked over my head at the mountains. I reached for my wallet and gave him a five-dollar bill. “And how can I find out,” I said, “where this convent is?”

He put the bill in his pocket and went into the garage, and when he returned he said, “The convent’s the Monastery of the Sacred Heart, on the only hill in Killington.”

As I drove toward the singular hill, I saw a bar on the main road. It, like most buildings of that area, and of Polk Valley, resembled a saloon, complete with swinging doors and a block-font sign, which read THE MINE SHAFT. I wanted courage. I parked the Buick in the dust, and I entered the open bar, where I sat on a stool and spoke to no one but to order my drinks. I knocked back whiskey till my face went numb. Yet I was in possession of all of my faculties. I didn’t stumble, I didn’t slur. I merely felt more confident when I thought of what was to come. I took care to rinse my mouth with soda, and then I paid my tab and stepped into the light, where the light was so blinding that I felt myself surrounded by angels.

At the convent I said I was Marianne’s brother, Marty, and the abbot directed me to her. I entered the kitchen in a daze. I was aware of a long counter and a long wooden farm table at the center of the room. On the wall closest to the door hung a crucifix and several small paintings in frames, but I only glanced at those; Marianne, standing alone, was all that I truly saw. She was making bread, with her hands and forearms covered in flour. Lumps of dough sat on the counter on wax paper.

Marianne turned, wearing a shapeless brown dress beneath a simple white apron at her front, and her likeness was that of a drab female bird. Her face had matured and thinned — the rounded cheeks were pulled sharply inward, and her nose gave her face a leaner, more beaky profile — but her lips were the same soft shade of blessed pink, her eyes green-blue, and when I say “drab” I mean no insult; only that her looks were more modest than Daisy’s spectacular ones, and simultaneously more angelic. Her face tensed. She said, “David? How did you know where I was? They told me it was Marty. Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you,” I said. Her face was as holy as anything in that convent, I thought. Her head was uncovered, which surprised me, and my eyes traveled from her face to her hair, and her hair glowed, the experience of it like opening a window in a stuffy house. But I had to deal with the reality of where I was, and with whom I was speaking. I did try to rein in my heart. I struggled to remember that we were two human beings, each with our own commitments. (At her throat lay a simple cross. On my left ring finger clung a simple band.)

Marianne took a stool from the farm table and dragged it out. Flour dusted the seat. “Sit,” she said. “I need to deal with these loaves before they turn to stone. I’m not the best baker, but I’m learning.” As she punched the dough, she said, “They told me that Marty was here. I thought you were going to be Marty. You know,” she added, her fists thudding steadily, “they would’ve let you visit me, regardless. Our order isn’t known for being strict. You didn’t have to lie about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes. Well, it isn’t as bad as all that. I don’t mean to sound cross. I’m glad to see you — it isn’t as though I forgot about you.” These last words disrupted her movements for a second, and then she continued. “You look unhappy.”

“Is that a divinely inspired insight?” I asked, trying to joke, but feeling like death.

“No. I just know you.” She smiled. “Do you still pray?”

“Yes. And with my son, too.”

“Your son,” Marianne said, and paused again. She lifted the loaf and moved it, replacing it with the next ball of dough before resuming her small movements. “So you have a son. Goodness, how time flies. What’s his name?”

“William.”

“William. I’ll add him to my prayers. And your wife?”

“Daisy.”

“I’ll pray for Daisy, too.”

She was polite enough to ignore my uncontrollable twitching. How serene, I thought. Why was it so simple for her? Daisy’s name from her throat had a wretched effect on me. I imagined that the name, which in that moment I found anything but charming, had caused Marianne to feel safer in my presence, but I didn’t want her to feel safe. I wanted her to be on edge and shaking with complicated emotions, the way that I was on edge and shaking because I wanted to throw myself at her and run away all at once. I wanted her to be vulnerable, and even to come over and put her flour-flecked hand on mine. My eyes settled on a vase on the counter by the sink. Coming out of the clear glass was a sprig of something with round green leaves, and a number of bright pink flowers sprang here and there from its branches. From that counter she overlooked a lawn with trees, and I saw women huddled in the dirt outside, digging and planting.

“Well,” she said. “I’m going to be doing this for a while. Then I have prayers at four. Don’t you have somewhere to be? I don’t expect that you have a job now. Or do you? Where does your wife think you are?”

“I don’t have a job, no. And I told Daisy that I was visiting a friend.”

“Ah. That you are. Funny how quickly things change. You look so grown-up now.”

“And you,” I replied, “said that you would devote your life to God. Here you are.” I wanted to add, You never wrote, but I knew that to say so would jeopardize everything.

“Yes. It took some doing. My parents weren’t pleased. But it was God’s will. You know that summer, when I was doing volunteer work with Father Danuta? When I was praying all that time? I was asking. I was searching for guidance.”

“I remember. You came to my house. You were cleaning out that widow’s house, and I barely saw you for months.”

“Well. My father was drinking, which I’ve forgiven him for, and more importantly, I’m not afraid of him now. At the time, though, I was terrified. I would have done anything he told me to. The whole family did.”

We both thought of my broken nose and my black eye. I saw it flicker across her face as it danced through my brain.

She said, “You know, my family never tries to make contact with me these days. That’s why I was so surprised when the abbot told me Marty had come. I haven’t seen him since he left for the navy, do you know that? I hope I didn’t seem angry when you came in. It is truly good to see you. I just miss my family.”

“I wasn’t offended.”

“This is the life I’m meant to live, but it isn’t without sacrifice.”

I said, “I admire that.”

“In a way,” she said, “it’s easier than you might think. Doing a thing that some people consider difficult — it’s a lot easier when you don’t have options. Or no longer have options.”

“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.

“Hello,” Marianne said. She seemed as though she had just woken from an unsatisfying but much-needed nap.

They were in the same room now. Daisy came in and stood next to me, while Marianne sat on the sofa with her knees tightly pressed together, one hand atop the other in her lap. Daisy looked at me. “This is who?” she asked.

Marianne told my wife her name, and said that she was an old friend.

“Ah,” Daisy said.

“This is Daisy,” I said to Marianne. “Sweetheart,” I added, “could you please go play with William? I need to speak to Marianne alone.”

Daisy squeezed my arm, hard. “Okay,” she said.

When she left the room Marianne said, “She doesn’t know, does she?” and I was aware that my wife might be in the hallway, listening.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“No.”

She rested her hand on her belly in a way that I recognized from my wife long ago, so that Marianne didn’t have to say it, but she said it anyway: “I’m pregnant, David.”

“Oh,” I said, and I had no excuse for two fools who had hoped themselves untouchable.

She said that she had left the convent. I did not say the word procedure, though that was what came to mind. I knew that she would never have one, regardless of whether she was in the convent anymore.

She looked like something that had been hollowed out and stuffed with wet feathers.

She said again that she didn’t know what to do.

And yet in my state I could think only about what the baby would look like. It would be a girl, and she’d be beautiful. But what did that matter to Marianne, who was pregnant and seated before me, whom I still loved and wanted to embrace in joy as the mother of my child?

“I’ll give you money,” I said. “I’ll write you a check right now.”

Marianne looked around the room, taking in her surroundings with her hand still resting on her belly. I realized that my checkbook was in the kitchen, and I didn’t want to leave the living room if Daisy was spying in the hallway. I preferred to remain ignorant, and the pregnancy was enough to contend with. Instead I reached for my wallet and sifted through it. There were five twenty-dollar bills, which I gave to her, and then I asked, “Where are you staying, if not at the convent?”

She said that she had just left the convent that day and had nowhere to go. I realized that she had come in with no suitcase and was likely to have no possessions. I had no idea who it was that had driven her to my home, or how she had determined my location. She was in my home because she’d earned the right, through my poor judgment, to trespass.

“I’ll write you a check right now,” I said, though I had said the exact same words before, and then I got up and barreled into the hallway, where Daisy stood illuminated by the hallway light. I avoided her eyes. I walked past her into the kitchen. As I sifted through the drawer where I kept my checkbook, my hands were fluttering of their own accord, reminding me of Matka’s winglike hands with their long fingers, and my mind spun with how fucked up everything was and what would my mother think? No matter what I did — even if I spent the rest of my life performing acts of goodness — here would always be the fact that I’d ruined Marianne’s life; perhaps worse, and selfishly, there would be an emptiness in me that could not be filled by anyone but Marianne.

I took the checkbook and Daisy was not in the hallway, but Marianne was still in the living room.

I said, “I’ll write you a check for…” and I scrambled for a number that seemed appropriate, but what was an appropriate number for this type of situation, anyway? It seemed farcical. “… four thousand dollars. You can find somewhere to stay for a while.”

She took the check, not looking at it, and stuffed it into her dress pocket.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“I went to St. Joseph’s,” she said, “and found someone who could drive me.”

She was so beautiful. I had to let go of her now, truly; I have had to let go of her and everything else.

“Is there anything else you need?” I asked. “Is there anything at all that I can do for you?”

There was a long silence.

Marianne crossed the room. As she passed me I smelled the dark odor of her body, and a lingering trail of the oil from her hair, but neither of us made the effort to touch. I heard the wooden door open, and then the screen door. I heard both doors shut, and with the sound of their closing I didn’t allow myself to cry. Instead I went to the sofa and sat. I waited for Daisy to come. I am sitting now and waiting for — I’m not quite sure what I’m waiting for.

I have one last story. Jia-Hui and I were in the firefly village on the outskirts of Kaohsiung, where the ponds and banana trees were plentiful, and where my blood was being sucked out of me by mosquitoes that whirled and wheedled everywhere we went. It had taken more than two hours of walking to reach this village. I’d found the trip eerie; unlike the ramshackle, noisy, cosmopolitan Kaohsiung, the borderlands of the city were silent, and we heard nothing but our own footsteps as we traveled. The firefly village was far, Jia-Hui had said, because the bugs with blinking lights could not meet where there were so many people.

“Here there are many kinds,” she said, meaning the fireflies. “They come different times.”

And yet I didn’t see any as we stood on a small bridge, staring into the darkness with her small hand in mine. I supposed aloud that perhaps the recent rain had something to do with it. Maybe, I said, the fireflies wouldn’t come out if it had been raining.

“No, no,” Jia-Hui said, “firefly use umbrella.” She let go of my hand to mimic opening an umbrella over her head, and I laughed. She was going to marry me. I didn’t know what had changed her mind, but she would be mine.

She’d wanted me to see the firefly village before flying to New York the next day. It was important, she said, for me to see the most beautiful thing in her country before we left it and got married in my country. In the meantime, I was still trying to think of a fitting American name for her. I thought something floral might be appropriate.

A spark. A shimmer. “See”—as the world lit up around us—“so, so much firefly,” Jia-Hui said.

Amen.

KNIFELESS. JIA-HUI (1956–1968)

Years ago I was putting William to bed when someone came to our home, but no one ever did, not then and not now. The three of us lived far from the nearest neighbor, miles up the mountain from town, and the voice seemed like nothing. But then I heard David. He said, “Marianne.” After William settled in, I came into the living room and there was a white woman in a brown dress, sitting on the sofa with her hands in her lap. She introduced herself as Marianne.

“This is Daisy,” David said. “Sweetheart, could you please go play with William?”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t. I went to the hallway instead, and I listened with my big ears. This is how I learned that the flat-bellied woman carried his baby inside of her. When I heard this, I quickly gathered my senses. I said to myself, You can’t shatter open. Instead of crying, I stumbled to the kitchen and made chamomile tea. When the water boiled I pressed my finger against the hot kettle, and I left the finger there for a few seconds before removing it. The skin was then bright pink, and a shape lifted from the flesh to form a proud, puffy blister. I sat with my teacup at the table and lifted it to my mouth. My tongue burned to sandpaper, which shocked me out of numbness. So what was this? What did it mean, to be woken to this life here?

When David finally came into the kitchen after the blond woman left, and he saw me sitting with my empty cup, quiet as a stump, I had already explained the situation to myself: he was a man; I knew what men did; I had, from my smallness to adulthood, served girls to men just like him. As a result, there could be no disappointment, only naïveté, in forgetting that he was the same. But I was surprised to see that he was scared, that his face had gone the same color as his hair. He was as frightened of my opinion as he was frightened by knowing about the pregnancy.

“Daisy,” he said.

I said nothing. I was angry at him for being weak, and I was despairing, too. What can I say about love now when I could barely express how I felt about him to his face when he was alive? It seems unjust to expose myself this way when he couldn’t understand me even after all of my efforts, which afforded us hundreds of words of English that were kilometers from enough. Fatty, at least, had understood everything.

“You listened,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Daisy, that was a woman that I had one time with. It was a single time, and a terrible, single moment. I was drunk, very drunk… I don’t love her. I love you, Daisy. You’re my wife. I can’t live knowing that you hate me. Daisy, I’m begging you. Go ahead, _________ me.”

“______?” I asked.

“______. To have something happen to me. Because I’ve done something bad.”

“Punish.”

“Yes.” A pause. “Daisy, please say something,” he said.

It wasn’t the correct tea that I was drinking, or even the right kind of cup, and I was not in Taiwan.

“It is okay,” I said. “We later talk about this. William will in a moment wake up.” I was horrified to discover inside a want to cry.

“Daisy,” he said.

He was the father of another woman’s child. The other woman would birth the child and that child would have blond hair. It would have light eyes and skin and it would look like him and not me. Never would it look anything like me. David watched me rinse the teacup, dry it, and put it back in the cupboard. I was doing everything right. He watched me leave the room, but as I passed him, he didn’t touch me, and I was glad.

When I came to William, who was still asleep, I sat on the bed and lifted him into my arms. He stirred without waking. I put my hand on his back and rubbed my hand in circles, more to soothe myself than to soothe him, and his legs twitched against my body.

He opened his eyes. “Ma,” he said, and I said, “, my baby.” He nestled his face into my shoulder, I laid him back down, and then I lay down next to him and closed my eyes. I put my arm over my child. I fell dead asleep. I didn’t expect David to come in. I am sure that he was afraid to.

And this ritual of tea-making, and going to bed, was the same thing that I did years later, after the phone rang and rang and I didn’t answer it, because David had left that morning as he was so prone to disappearing, and he was the one who always answered the phone. The phone rang again. It was not until the third attempt that I answered, but I had a terrible chill.

“Is this Mrs. Daisy Nowak?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you sitting down?” he asked.

But that was a different time, and a different shock.

For months we said nothing about the white woman. It could have been four months, maybe less. To an outsider I’m sure that we looked the same as we had before. But I think even William noticed the difference between us, when David went from room to room like a ghost. The way that he touched me changed; his good hand would, for example, alight on my shoulder, nervously rubbing the outermost layer of my clothing, and when we slept in the same bed he edged toward me so that his lower back pressed into mine, but he did this with less confidence, while at the same time he seemed scared to let us ever not be touching in our unconsciousness. I thought I could feel him strain to stay aware enough to be touching me in that casual way even as he tried to fall asleep. I noticed everything. I was sad to notice them, but I did.

He had started to bandage his hand again. I said nothing. Blotches of blood seeped through the gauze.

On the last day of this there was a knock at the front door, and I knew before David let her in that it was the white woman. This time I was on the living room sofa, playing games with William, and David said her name again with the same amount of solemn moderation. I was already in the living room and what could he do? He could bring her into the kitchen and talk to her there, but it would be ridiculous if he avoided me and had to pass the entryway of the room with Marianne for me to see, and it was possible that the white woman would turn to me, and we’d look at each other with embarrassment, or fear, or too much politeness.

I think that he thought the same thing, because he brought her into the living room. It was the obvious wrong choice, which made it the right choice. She was wearing the same dress that she’d worn when she first arrived, although it looked funny now that her belly had grown low and round like a ripe yellow melon, and when I had a good look at her I saw that she was as miserable as I was. Her unwashed hair, oily and limp, was the color of a beard of white corn. Still, I admitted to myself, she was pretty in the ways of white women. We had one sofa and one easy chair. David let her sit on the easy chair, and he sat next to William, who sat between us.

“Daisy, this is Marianne. Marianne, Daisy,” he said, although he had introduced us before.

We said hello to each other. William looked up at me, and I smoothed his bangs down over his forehead.

“I’m sorry to have come back,” Marianne said. “But I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Do you need help? More help?” David asked.

Marianne: “Money again?”

“Money… Tell me what you need and I’ll try to provide it for you.”

“David… I left the ______. I’m pregnant. I have no husband. What am I supposed to do? Will you tell me? Don’t just push money at me.” As she spoke her eyes darted toward mine, zigzagging between David and myself. “Does she understand?” she finally asked.

“She understands most things,” my husband said, which I hated.

The woman began to cry, quiet and dignified.

David said, “Do you want us to take the baby?”

This made Marianne cry harder.

He looked at me. I said, “That is not my baby.”

“Baby?” William asked.

“We’ll talk about it, Marianne,” David said. “If it’s something you want to do.”

I wanted to say, I am your wife, not her, but I held my tongue.

David went to the kitchen. Eventually Marianne stopped crying and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She said to me, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry that this is happening,” and still I didn’t speak to her.

My husband came back with a glass of water. He held a check in his other hand. She took a few sips and passed the glass back to him. She said, “I can’t raise a baby on my own.”

“We’ll talk about it,” David said again.

Marianne stood.

“Wait,” David said. He handed her the check. “I know you don’t want this, but you need it.”

She took the check and looked at it briefly before putting it in her pocket. “For the baby,” she said. She turned toward the hall and was gone.

David stood in the middle of the room. Now that the stranger had left, William crawled into my lap and pulled on my lips. When David continued down the hall and into our bedroom, I felt betrayed as soon as the door clicked shut, so I didn’t follow, because so what if he suffered? He deserved to suffer for what he had done. Instead I absorbed myself in playing with William, who was in a bright mood, and he said in Chinese, “Sing me a song?” I sang about a little girl carrying a doll and walking though the flower garden. The doll cries and calls for its mother, and the birds laugh at her crying. It’s a common song.

The distraction worked for a while. At the same time, David was hanging himself in the bedroom. There are high beams in every room. I was playing with our child, and David was tying a rope to a beam. I don’t know how he learned to tie a knot like that, but he hadn’t thought about the strength of the rope, which might have been half rotten in the damp of wherever he retrieved it from, or maybe he knew that it was a gamble. I heard a crash and I screamed. I wouldn’t have had such a reaction if the sound were less violent. It was the sound of something gone truly wrong, and not just a lamp knocked over. It was declarative.

There was no answer after I cried out. I lifted William, who was crying, into my arms, and I hurried to the bedroom. I yanked at the locked door. William said, “What’s bad?” I yelled David’s name again, and when he didn’t answer I took William to his room, sat him on the bed, and said, “Stay.” Then I closed the door. He was scared. I didn’t blame him for his fear. He shrieked for me, but I couldn’t let him see.

I am glad for flimsy doors and the strength of frightened wives. With a hammer from the kitchen I smashed a hole in the door and reached inside to unlock it, the splinters scraping my skin like teeth. When I stepped inside I saw that a swaying rope, like a fishing line that had nonchalantly lost its prey, was hanging from a ceiling beam, and David was on the floor, lying next to a toppled chair with the rope’s remainder around his neck. I thought, You’re a coward. You can’t leave me here. I think I may have also thought, This is it, but I thought this so many times between then and the end, when what felt like possible endings were not really endings, when he died a little bit more by the year, by the month, by the day. And yet I’m surprised that I didn’t actually think he was dead. It was shock, I think, that let me believe he could be alive, and it was that which coaxed me into going to him. I could save him. It would be like bandaging his bad hand. If only I could make the blood go away. If only I didn’t have to see the redness everything would be all right. I rubbed at the floor with my bare arm until I remembered that I had to tug at the loop around his neck. I was numb as I untied the rope chafing against his skin, and I shook my husband, thinking it was possible that he had so badly hit his head that he would be gone quickly. It was possible that he would die, and it was possible that he would live, but either way his death was staring at me whether it was now or later, then or now — the possibility of suicide had come into the house like a stubborn relation, and it would never leave until it got what it wanted, or until we rid ourselves of it, and what was the likelihood of either? In that way his attempt was an awakening like the one during our honeymoon, when he’d stayed in bed for weeks and said nothing. But I didn’t think he would die, back there in San Francisco. What had I thought? Perhaps something about his problem being surmountable.

I’ll also note that before I took on more responsibility in the house, I had no idea how to contact anyone for help, I had so little power then. All I could do was wait and shake him and hope that he had not broken his back. As I knelt there I thought, Would it have been so bad to stay in Taiwan? Was it really so urgent that I leave? I could have gone to Taipei, Taichung, or even Pingtung, and perhaps my disgrace would not have followed. Perhaps it would have been better than this.

After a few minutes he opened his eyes. I didn’t think to kiss him, or say that I was glad. Nor did I think to yell. I stared at him and I said nothing.

“Oh God,” he said. “My leg.” He gestured. Only then did I realize that it looked wrong. And then he said, “I didn’t mean to live.”

The only way I could respond was to be kind. But his attempt to hang himself woke in me an inconsolable fear. I stopped sleeping more than five hours in any night. I had trouble falling asleep, and when I awoke before the sun rose I found it impossible to sleep again. Opening my eyes immediately triggered panic. I started smoking, too, which pushed down the terror a little. He’s been gone for months now and I still feel this panic, as it’s a fear that never leaves — the fear of the disappearance of things, and of people. This is a fear that all people must have, because we’re all dying every second of our lives. Some of us choose not to think about this. And some of us do forever.

Now I have exactly two attachments. Notice that I include the girl. Of course she’s an attachment, because I raised her regardless of where she had come from. The question is never whether I agreed to take the baby, but only to make sense of how I am supposed to live my life now, and to ask myself how so much tragedy has befallen me in this way. Knowing that this white woman had suffered at David’s hands, I concluded that the baby shouldn’t be punished for its existence. I told David right away, while he had his leg set, that I forgave him. What choice did I have about any of it?

He had me call Marianne, who was staying in a hotel in Sacramento. He thrust the phone at me like a weapon. She began to cry as soon as I said hello. “My baby,” she said.

“I want to take care your baby,” I said. She kept crying, and in hearing her cry I was angry at being surrounded by so much weakness. I added, “I will love your baby like the child is my own blood.”

“God bless you,” she said.

David disappeared to aid Marianne in the birth when the time came, and he came home with a baby in his arms. That was Gillian, and when I saw him come into the kitchen, holding her with a tenderness that I’d never seen before, I nearly screamed, but I was sitting with William in my lap, so I did not. William reached for her with wide eyes.

David said she was beautiful, but I had no opinion. She had only light fuzz on her scalp when she came into our home, whereas William, as a baby, had plenty of dark, thick hair. Her eyelashes were so light that it looked as though she had no eyelashes, and her cheeks were rough and flushed. I told David that I thought she had a rash. He said that was the way babies looked. Not our baby, I wanted to say.

For some time we were on two teams; Gillian’s presence soothed him in a way that I couldn’t. He carried her everywhere. He fed her. He changed her diapers. To make up for this I doted on William. Two-year-old William was at first intrigued by the baby, but before long he’d repeat “Where’s Baba? Where’s Baba?” if we were alone together, and he began to say it even if all four of us were in the same room, which I think says something.

I wanted to be generous to Gillian, I really did. I struggled to overlook where she’d come from, and I sang Chinese songs to her, which was my version of kindness. After she lost her redness and her white hair came in, I saw that she looked like the angels of magazine advertisements, and David claimed that she would be a stunning woman in her years.

But golden sons remain their mothers’ flesh long after they’ve grown. This is truest for immigrants, who have no homes either in country or by blood; immigrants only have the homes that they create. I knew as soon as I first held William that he would cause me pain as a man because he would leave me for his own life, as David left Mrs. Nowak with my hand in his years ago, and I’d have the same frightened, angry look to my face when he did, the departure of a son from his mother being the worst betrayal of all. What would I do when William grew up? What would I do when he wanted a girl of his own? I’ve become so frightened of having nothing. I need to have my hands on everything at all times to make sure that it won’t disappear. “Never leave me,” I used to whisper to William in the bed, when the three of us slept with our limbs everywhere and touching, and he’d laugh his father’s old, bubbly laugh as though I’d said a great joke — because I brought him pleasure and milk; because he loved me most.

After the first try I’d look at David and think, You’re leaving me.

He’d go out into the woods and I’d think about what it would be like if he never came back.

I thought of Fatty, the failed tongyangxi, the girl who wasn’t beautiful, not like Gillian; yet she’d brush her lips against the back of my neck, and my heart would respond with quickness. It would be easier for my children. Gillian could be William’s bride if he loved her, if I raised them right. Yet for years my notion of reprising the old ways remained only a notion: I still hoped that David would live.

While downtown he talked to storekeepers about the price of milk. He chatted with the kids about a green Cadillac, or a tree crowded with invisible birds. William and Gillian each moved in strollers, with each parent pushing his or her favorite child, and the kids absorbed who knows how much of it. But they liked his attention, as I did. We all wanted his light, which showed its face and lingered in his mood at times despite everything. So he would live, I thought, as long as I kept that light going, as long as I could stoke the flame.

But for him it was an exhausting act. It took no time for me to see how tired it made him, and in the spaces between having to interact with others he went dead. In the Buick, especially, on the drive home, that silence became petrifying, and I would have thoughts about him jerking the wheel and plunging us off a cliff, or heading straight for a tree, because cold, still silence meant no boundaries and no rules of behavior. He was similarly comfortable with us at home. He was the most frightening when the showmanship left him and he felt no need to please, and I’d never seen someone get so dangerously quiet. I’m not saying that his silence was a prelude to beatings or storms. He almost never struck us. He never threw tantrums. It was the silence. It was either listless and half dead, or tense and unable to be loosed. In the beginning of it I thought, David is not himself when he is quiet. Then I realized that the real thought was David is not himself in town. We would come home and he’d go straight to the couch and lie there. He was too tall for the couch, but he would tuck in his legs slightly and stay.

It was no surprise, then, when he announced in bed one morning that he no longer wanted us to go off the mountain, because Polk Valley was full of idiots. His main example was Sam, a mechanic from the gas station who had the magical ability of showing up wherever we went.

“He is not bad,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” David said. “I’m tired of seeing his face.”

“How are we going to get anything if we don’t go to town?” I asked.

“I’ll go by myself. If you want something,” he said, “you can tell me and I’ll get it for you.”

I said, “I’m going to go for a walk.” This I rarely did. He was the one to go out into our property while I cared for the children, but I was suffocated and went into the field. I wandered around the perimeter in the dead field. In my old life I knew the names of plants and birds, but I didn’t know them here either then or now. Everything was nameless and I experienced them as they were in my waking dream.

David had two projects the year that Gillian came to us. The first was homeschooling. He thought Polk Valley idiocy was the result of Polk Valley schooling. He’d gone to private schools his entire life and there was no such thing in Polk Valley, which he thought was hideous. (When he explained the concept of “private” and “public” schools to me, all I understood was that private meant “good” and public meant “bad.”) He had gone down to the only grammar school in Polk Valley to speak to the teacher, and when he came back he was wild with fury about things that I didn’t understand, but evidently meant that there was no way whatsoever that our children would go to a Polk Valley school and get a “secular” education. (This also made no sense to me, because in Kaohsiung there were no educational options. If you were lucky enough to go to school, as I had been, you were very lucky indeed. Poor families scrabbled to have their children go to the local school.)

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.

Now when I enter the children’s room, and they are lying in their beds on opposite sides early in the morning, with the curtains drawn and their faces barely showing, I can hear their breaths in tandem, the sound of one sound. William can’t sleep when his feet are showing; he must always have them covered. Gillian’s developing breasts form small hills beneath her sheet. Here is her hair that I brush one hundred times every morning. I adhere to the sound of their sleep not just because I know they are alive when I hear their inhalations and exhalations, but because in sleep they are simply there.

After the incident with the orange I told David that I wanted to learn things. When he asked me what I meant, I said, “Well, you never taught me to drive.”

“What else?” he asked. His mind would wander off at times, but sometimes he seemed to be present, and when he was present, he was less upset. We were in the bathtub. At that time he refused to bathe unless I was in the bathtub with him. I think he was afraid of the water. I always got in with him, and I washed his hair in the manner that I washed, say, Gillian’s. In the bathtub I couldn’t help but look at David’s body. He was never in the mood for sex anymore; yet while the two of us were in the bathtub, naked and wet, I felt myself stirring and unable to help myself. I still lusted after him, can you imagine? If I forgot that he in fact looked awful and I didn’t see his bones rising through his skin and his wasted and soft muscles. And I was no longer conscious of his hand, which he kept wrapped in bandages most of the time now. He was making small gestures toward sanity. He tried; he really did make efforts. I still loved him.

“Mostly I need to learn how to drive, so that I can go into town. I also need to be able to get money if I need it,” I said. “Right now I need to ask money from you when I need it.”

He was quiet. He stirred the water with his good hand; the other hand was draped outside of the bathtub, where I couldn’t see it.

I knew that this was tricky. By asking him these things, I was letting him know that I no longer felt safe having him in charge. I was telling him that he was troubled and that I knew it. I may have even been hinting at the worst. If he said no, I had little recourse. I’d have to accept it or force it, and I doubted I would be able to do the latter.

He said, “You think I’m not going to keep you safe.”

When he said this, I wanted to take it all back.

“I want to have skills,” I said.

David sighed. He was behind me in the tub and his legs were on either side of me. He took his good hand and put it on my pale knee, which was sticking out of the water. I had paid so much attention to his bad hand for all of those years that I had forgotten what nice hands he really had. He had long, thin fingers, not knobby; the back of the good hand was smooth, with blue veins below the surface. There were hairs, but not many. They were hands that knew pianos and the skins of animals and a body. My body.

“You’re a good wife,” he said. “But you know what this means, don’t you?”

“I’m not giving you permission,” I said.

“I don’t need your permission.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll teach you anything you want to know,” he said.

“Promise me,” I said, and that was all — because I couldn’t bring myself to finish, because I knew he wouldn’t answer.

He took the Buick around the side, on the dirt and gravel, and I followed on foot. He nosed past the house to the field out back, knocking over a garbage can in the process and spraying trash over the dirt, and when he got out of the car he gestured at the driver’s seat. “Here you go,” he said. “Just sit right here.” I went to him, and I wrapped my arms around him without rising on my toes. “What?” He said this softly. He kissed the top of my head, patting my sides with his hands.

In the passenger seat he drank an icy bottle of Coca-Cola. He spoke calmly about the ignition, which I used to bring the car to a rumble. He informed me about the gearshift. “Shift slow,” he advised.

I stuttered the Buick around the field, rocking across its bumps and molehills, pressing the weight of the vehicle into the frosted grass, making maps of where I’d been. And even though I would call his mother later that day, and Mrs. Nowak would beg me to help David with so much force that I would have my husband sent to Wellbrook the day after that, which seemed like a sign of hope; even despite this, I could see the end already as clearly as I could see the far trees beneath the sky, with white above and white below. David slurped at the soda with his lips hooked over the glass mouth, and then he kept the empty bottle between his thin legs. I stopped the car occasionally, trying to park, and then, after releasing the parking brake, I would turn the ignition again.

“Ease into it,” he said.