A Ship Made of Paper (29 page)

“Everything okay up in the country?” he asks. “How’s Nellie?”

She doesn’t bother to answer. He doesn’t really expect an answer, he’s just recording the fact that he’s asked.Yet when they reach the main hall of the station, Hampton surprises her and repeats the question.

“Everything cool with Nellie?”

The simple, truthful answer would be: No. Nelson has been agitated, clingy, explosive, nagging, and oppositional. He has been putting Band-Aids on his hands and knees without any physical reason for doing so. He has been cruel to Scarecrow to the point where the usually patient and forgiving old dog will leave the room when she hears Nelson’s footsteps.

Every night since the storm—except when Hampton has been home—

Nelson has come into her bed between midnight and two and slept there until he woke both himself and his mother by peeing his pajamas. And when she has whispered to him, “Nelson, get up, let’s change your pj’s,”

he has screamed at her like some crazed motorist on the freeway after a fender-bender. This morning, when she was backing her car out of the

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driveway, he was straining to break free of Iris’s sister, who had driven her sporty little green Mazda up from Baltimore two days earlier to spend a little time with Iris before the weekend, and to give Nelson time to get used to her. Whatever level of trust and comfort he had reached seemed to be obliterated by the sight of Iris actually leaving: he was not only kicking and howling but he was also trying to sink his teeth into his aunt’s restraining hand.

“He’s okay,” Iris says. “He was nervous about my leaving, but he loves Carol, so that made it a little easier.”

“He’ll be fine,” Hampton says. He dislikes Carol, thinks of her as promiscuous, brassy, silly, unread; he cannot bear her prattling on about her real estate business. She is unmarried, her days are full of office tasks and her nights are full of boyfriends. Yet he cannot say anything critical of Carol, not now. It was, after all, his idea that he and Iris spend the weekend alone in the city together, and it was, he supposed, up to her to choose who would mind Nelson.

He knows that the energy is down between them right now and he has a pretty clear idea what the trouble is: she feels neglected, the romance of their life together has been subsumed by dailiness, it’s an old story, even the men he sees in business, with whom he almost never has a personal conversation, hint that their own clever wives grumble about the lack of attention being paid to them, even if the wives themselves are in business, making deals, returning calls through the night. And Iris feels isolated, maybe even abandoned up there in Leyden—it cannot help but add to the mix of Iris’s difficulties that she is swimming in a white sea.

And so, without exactly planning it that way, Hampton escorts her on a black tour of Manhattan: lunch at a black-owned, mostly black-frequented restaurant in the theater district, a place of large comfortable booths and Art Deco mirrors, where gorgeous black women in black pants and black silk shirts serve them crab cakes and collard greens, and after lunch a cab ride up near Harlem, where Hampton shows Iris a block of derelict brownstones a developer is in the process of snapping up. The developer is looking for investors and he has come to Hampton a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

to help him put together an offering statement, but what Hampton wants to know is if Iris thinks it might make sense for they themselves to put in one hundred thousand dollars, that way they could make a little money and do a little good, it’s always nice when the two can be combined. From Amsterdam Avenue, they go to a newly opened Black Culture Museum, which was inaugurated with some fanfare on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard a month ago, and which turns out to be not much more than a storefront but has a nice exhibition of nineteenth-century photographs.The place is filled with people whom one does not normally see in a museum—church ladies dressed like birds of paradise in their vermilion, chartreuse, and salmon dresses, and wrinkled old men in baggy suits.

After, Iris and Hampton take a taxi all the way down to Jane Street, through crawling, seething, honking Saturday traffic. Hampton, to keep himself from staring at the taxi’s meter, and to make the most of his time with Iris, does something that is not exactly his style: he begins to kiss her, right there in the cab, with the Chinese driver undoubtedly spying on them. Iris has always been the one pushing them to be a little cozier with each other in public, the one sort of thing that struck Hampton as exhibitionist, distasteful, and, frankly, unsafe—you never knew who would be triggered by the sight of two African-Americans kissing. And now, when he is not exactly in the mood for public display but nevertheless feeling that a little conjugal vulgarity might be just what the doctor ordered, he discovers that he has, alas, been successful in training Iris away from kissing in cabs: her lips barely respond to his, and when he presses them more forcefully against her, she gently shoves him away and looks at him as if he were a naughty little boy, or a fool. “I feel a little sick from that lunch,” she says apologetically. “I think the crab might have been a little off.” And then, as if she were systematically obliterating the day, like someone knocking the heads off flowers with a walking stick, she says, “I don’t think we should be investing in those apartment houses, Hampton, I really don’t. I think they’re depressing, and all those devel-

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opers are going to do is make them suitable for some gullible buppies and I don’t want to be a part of that.”

Back at the apartment, Iris looks at the eastern sky; a few clouds are tinged with the reflected red glow of the setting sun.The windows of the Sheridan Square buildings and, further east, Fifth Avenue, blaze iridescent orange. Below, the cars are suddenly turning on their headlights, the light streaming from them as cool as the moon. Hampton is in the bathroom and has been for several minutes. He has never gone into a bathroom without taking an inordinate amount of time. She has never asked him what takes him so long, she doesn’t know and has never wanted to know. Maybe he has some disorder he is keeping secret from her. Maybe he just needs to be by himself for fifteen minutes a few times a day. Right now, she is glad for the privacy; she cannot shake that sense of being un-prepared for an examination, or perhaps a cross-examination.

She sees Hampton’s reflection in the window, coming at her, super-imposed over the skyline, floating like a ghost. He has taken off his sweater and his T-shirt and, unless she is mistaken, he seems to be shim-mying toward her, in a kind of Calypso rhythm. Iris understands that Hampton, when he needs her, feels vulnerable and somehow trapped beneath the ice of his dignity. Often, he will cover his own desire with a protective irony. She has in the past found it endearing, but now his little dance seems ludicrous, and a little demeaning. He visits the pleasures of her body like a tourist who behaves on vacation in a way he never would dream of at home. And like the tourist who raves about the island hospitality, there is, in Hampton’s adoration of her, a bit of colonial condescension. She is his refuge from the hard realities of life. He has decided that she is more natural than he, more in tune with the primordial—motherhood, cooking, listening, fellatio, that sort of thing.

She goes to bed with him; to refuse him this afternoon would be unwise, unthinkable. She feels he is trying to impress her, to renew his claim on her, and, even as it breaks her heart and makes her feel she is the most unfaithful, unworthy woman who ever drew breath, all of Hampton’s exertions cannot a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

dislodge her mind from its secret orbit around her memories of Daniel.

Each of Hampton’s kisses is not only what it is but what it is not.

She puts one hand on Hampton’s chest, grabs his hip with the other.

She shrinks back from him until he is dislodged and then she turns over, presses her forehead to the mattress, puts her arms out over her head, raises up on her knees. He is covered in perspiration. He is behind her, she is beginning to pick up his personal scent making its way through the layers of Irish soap and Italian cologne. He is saying her name, low, gut-tural. Then there is a moment’s silence as he aligns himself with her and then she feels him going back into her. She squeezes herself away from him, grabs his cock, and then, rocking back, presses the head of it against her anus. She is relatively dry, but he is slick, oily. His breath catches when he realizes what she is proposing.

“Are you sure?” he whispers.

“Yes. Do it. Just do it.”

He sprawls across her, his weight is crushing. He opens the drawer of his night table and takes out a jar of some sort of coconut-scented cream.

Her eyes are closed now, she doesn’t want to get involved in the practicalities. She hears the plastic whisper of the lid being unscrewed, and then hears Hampton’s suddenly belabored, overly excited breathing. He scoops some of the cream up and then throws the jar onto the floor. He slaps the cream onto her, gruff and impersonal. She can feel the warmth of his fingers behind the slimy chill of the cream. And then he is astride her again. Whenever they have done this she has imagined her mother walking in. He is finished in moments.

He falls to his side of the bed, covers his eyes with his forearm.

“Did I hurt you?” he whispers, not looking at her.

“No. A little. I’m fine.” She is wondering what she will say when he asks her if she wants to come, too. But he is not his usual obliging self.

“I feel afraid of losing you, Iris.”

She is silent.The room has gotten suddenly darker, colder. She scrambles to get under the covers. The weight of Hampton’s body presses the sheet and blankets down on her.

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“Should I be?” he asks. He raises himself up on his elbows, looks at her through the corners of his eyes. She feels his keen, predatory intelligence.

He ought to have been a lawyer, he loves to come after you with questions. “Is there any reason I should feel as worried as I do?”

“What are you asking me, Hampton?” she manages to say. She has history on her side; he has been suspicious and jealous for the entirety of their marriage, and even before. “Is this why you asked me to come to the city? To ask me these
questions?
”

He is silent. She can feel him retreating, but it doesn’t feel like he’s going very far.

The Sleeping Giant is a huge white clapboard hotel, with shuttered windows and rickety iron fire escapes.The first time they arrived, just a few weeks into their relationship, it was on one of those dark-blue autumn evenings, when the last of the sunset outlines every hill. But today, the sky is cement, there will be no sunset, and their original room, which Kate has requested, is not as they remember it. Daniel and Kate stand there, looking at the four-poster bed, which looks noisy and uncomfortable, and which takes up more than half the room’s space, and at the little secretary desk, and the grim little GE television set on a metal rolling table, and the beige wallpaper with its pattern of overly vivid, practically rapacious peonies. Daniel sees the disappointment on Kate’s face. “I think there’s something sort of nice about this room,” he says.

“It’s changed,” says Kate.

“Well, we’ve all changed. The room’s probably having a hard time recognizing
us.
”

She feels the generosity of what he is saying and for a moment it draws her to him, but quickly it crosses her mind: he can
afford
to be generous, he is that happy, that full of life.

Now, at the Sleeping Giant, they leave their room, first for the main desk, where Kate uses the fax machine to send her article in to Lorraine, and then on to the Dragon’s Lair, one of the hotel’s two bars. It’s a dark a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

room, with old scarred tables and poster-sized photos of the Three Stooges on the wall. The free happy-hour snacks have a contemporary flair—little chunks of sesame chicken and fried plantain simmer in the aluminum warming trays—and the music is supplied by a heavy, open-faced young man in a turtleneck sweater singing songs by U2 and REM

and accompanying himself on the guitar.

“Sit, sit,” Kate says, pointing Daniel toward an empty table. “I’ll get us some drinks. What do you want? A Heineken?” She barely waits for an answer.As she hurries toward the bar, she calls to him over her shoulder, “Score us some apps.” She cringes at the sound of her voice—she sounds to herself like some office flirt. Still, she is glad she is the one talking to the bartender; she doesn’t want Daniel involved in how much she will be drinking.

The TV above the bar is tuned to a Saturday afternoon football game being played in Florida. The male cheerleaders are tossing the women high into the dark-blue air. The bartender is a man in his sixties, tall and stately, with delicate broken veins in his hollow cheeks and thick authoritative eyebrows. He looks like a New England Protestant patriarch, he should be a county judge, and Kate wonders what wrong turns have brought him to this place, standing behind a noisy bar wearing a red cut-away jacket and a black bow tie.

“I’d like a large Tanqueray martini, no olives, no ice, very dry, and a Heineken,” Kate says.

The bartender narrows his vaporous blue eyes, while his trembling hands, dappled like the hide of a fawn, worry the silver tops of the mix-ers slotted into the inside of the bar. “I’m going to have to see some sort of ID,” he says pleasantly.

“Are you serious?”

“A driver’s license, preferably.”

“You’re making my day.” She waits, but the bartender doesn’t move.

“What’s the drinking age in Massachusetts?” she asks. “Forty?”

When Kate gets back to the table, she finds Daniel has struck up a conversation with a couple at an adjoining table. The man, who appears to be about fifty, wears a heavy blue fisherman’s sweater; his short hair is

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the color of pewter, and his skin is richly, intensely black. The woman with him, who, as Kate approaches, has reared her head to let out peals of shrill laughter, is young and white. She wears a short, spangled skirt that Kate thinks would be risky even for a woman with long, slim legs.