A Ship Made of Paper (30 page)

Kate simply cannot help thinking this, that the black man might very well be blinded by the woman’s whiteness as well as her youth, and has not yet noticed her stockiness.

“Kate!” Daniel says, with an odd excess of enthusiasm, the way men do when they’ve been caught at something and are trying to pretend everything is just great.

Kate sits and Daniel makes the introductions.The man’s name is Erick Ayinde; his accent is a mixture of British and something else far more exotic, which Kate guesses is African.The woman’s name is Christine Kirk; she speaks softly, carefully, as if in vigilance against her real voice.

“Erick’s a private detective,” Daniel announces.

“Really,” says Kate. “Imagine.”

“Daniel tells us you’re a writer,” Erick says.

“I wish I had more time to read,” Christine says. “I love books. Do you think you might have written something I’ve read?”

“I’m not sure,” Kate says. “Tell me what you’ve read.”

Daniel has heard this reply before and knows he must laugh to cover the aggression of it.

“And what about you, Christine?” Kate says. She takes a long drink of her martini. Too much vermouth, it tastes slimy. “Are you a detective, too?”

“Yes, I am, an investigator,” Christine says, with a small, satisfied smile. She knows she has been underestimated. “Erick and I were in business together, but it got
way
too incestuous.”

“What kind of detective work do you mostly do?” Kate asks.

“Matrimonial?”

“Not so much of that,” Christine says.

“Mostly business and industrial,” Erick says.

“And missing persons,” says Christine. “Which I prefer.”

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“Do you mind if I ask you something a little on the personal side,”

Daniel suddenly says.

“The personal side is our bread and butter,” Erick says, smiling. He tilts back in his chair, drapes his arm around Christine.

“I take it you two are married?”

“Correct,” says Erick.

“Do you get a lot of hassle, being an interracial couple?”

Kate cannot believe he has asked this question. It is not so much its considerable impertinence, but that it reveals what is really on Daniel’s mind.

“Do you want to handle this?” Erick says to Christine.

“No, it’s okay.You go ahead.”

“Well, first of all, thank you for your question. Actually, Chrissy and I wonder why more people don’t ask us about this. Even our friends fail to ask us what it feels like to be going through this experience.”

Here, Christine interrupts. “Short answer? It’s extremely trying.

We’re always being looked at.”

“Or pointedly ignored,” adds Erick. “We live in Beacon Hill, in an up-scale neighborhood. So, in a way, we’re sheltered from some of the more virulent forms of racism.We live in a cocoon.Where we shop, where we eat, it’s not a problem.”

“I see things Erick doesn’t,” Christine says. “I see it in their eyes.”

“I can live with what’s in their eyes,” says Erick.

This is a fucking nightmare,
Kate thinks.
Our evening is being hijacked by
these people. And I have to sit here while Daniel fantasizes about Iris by proxy.

“But how does it affect your relationship?” Daniel asks. He has always had this earnest wide-eyed aspect to his personality, but it has never seemed so infantile and jejune to Kate before. She feels like dragging him from the bar by his hair. “It seems to me that it would either tear you apart or cement you together.”

“Oh, we circle the wagons, if that’s what you mean,” says Erick. “No question but that sharing the antipathy of small-minded people bonds us.

But that’s not our marriage’s source of strength.”

[ 205 ]

“Then what is?” asks Daniel.

His behavior reminds Kate of something her English publisher once said about Americans, how they can say more to a stranger on an airplane than an Englishman generally says to his closest friend.

“Well, what binds us is what people said would drive us apart—our differences,” Erick says. “The terrible trap married people fall into is believing that their spouse is actually a version of themselves, and that they will act as they act, want what they want, believe what they believe.

When the spouse fails to do this, when, let’s say for argument’s sake, the husband acts in some contrary way, the wife cannot help herself from believing he is doing so just to annoy her, or out of disrespect, whereas he may very well be acting in accordance with how he was raised, his own particular psychological dynamic, but she can’t see this clearly because she feels that fundamentally they are the same, two sides of the same coin, as much brother and sister as husband and wife.”

Kate looks in wonder at Daniel, who is rapt, as if this blowhard were some sort of fucking oracle. She casts wildly about in her mind, trying to come up with a gesture or phrase that could instantly extricate them, move them on to dinner or, better yet, back up to their room, their dear, old, immemorial room, where, Kate thinks, they can screw their way back into each other’s good graces.

“But with Chrissy and me,” Erick continues, “our differences are obvious and undeniable. I was born in Nairobi, educated in Wales and Montreal, and then Palo Alto, and she comes from Worcester, Massachusetts, her father was a policeman; and we bear this in mind, all of it, the whole curious burden of history. Our life together is a constant struggle to understand. We have no assumptions, and few expectations. It’s a journey, do you see?”

“I do,” says Daniel. “I see what you mean.”

“How’d you two happen to meet?” Kate asks. “I’m curious.”

“Erick was one of my professors at Boston College,” Christine says.

“ ‘Controversies in Twentieth-Century Criminology.’ ”

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Kate smiles. “Really,” she says, “I thought universities sort of frowned on things like that.”

“Kate!” Daniel says, admonishing her, but in a somehow teasing way, as if she were merely being irascible and eccentric.

If Erick and Christine feel insulted by Kate’s remark, they nevertheless remain serene. “How about you?” Erick asks. “How did you two happen to meet?”

Kate notices a familiar face on the TV above the bar—it’s a flushed, balding, stocky man who looks like a sinister presence in a German Ex-pressionist painting. His name is Otto Fisher and he is one of the networks’ main correspondents at the Simpson trial.What’s he doing on TV

on a Saturday?

“Shhh,” Kate says to Daniel, Erick, and Christine.They look at the TV

and Christine lets out a little groan of displeasure. “Bartender?” Kate calls out. “Would you turn the volume up? Please.”

Otto Fisher is standing in front of the courthouse in Los Angeles, looking hot and displaced in his dark suit with the bright-blue sky behind him. He has gotten word that one of the lawyers defending Simpson is threatening to quit the so-called Dream Team because he is objecting to the strategy of playing the so-called Race Card. The lawyer is quoted as saying, “As this trial has proceeded, it has become more and more about politics—especially the politics of
race
—and less and less about the letter of the law. I believe in Mr. Simpson’s innocence, but I also believe in the law . . .”

“That motherfucker,” Kate says, shaking her head. “He believes in the law like he believes in the tooth fairy.” She picks up her martini, discovers it empty. “He spends months helping to drag prosecution witnesses through the slime, and then suddenly he’s too delicate to stay on the case?”

“I’ve never seen such a fuss made over a trial in all my life,” Erick says.

“That glorified ambulance chaser is leaving because he knows O. J.’s going to be found guilty,” says Kate. “Mark my words. He’s covering his own fat ass. And he hates the new DNA guy, there’s total conflict between them.”

[ 207 ]

“You seem to know a great deal about the personalities involved,”

Erick says.

“Oh, forget it. I’m totally addicted to this trial.”

“I wonder why.”

“You wonder why?” Kate says. “The man killed his wife.”

“Probably, but who knows?”

“He killed his wife.”

“Well, surely he’s not the first man in history to commit such a crime. Why all the attention this time?” Erick says.

“Yes, I wonder,” says Christine.

“That’s ridiculous,” says Kate. “He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s great-looking, and he killed his wife. Why wouldn’t the world pay attention?”

“You don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that he’s a man of color married to a white woman?” asks Erick.

“You know,” Kate says, “if men of color murder their white wives, it’s still against the law.”

Erick is about to say something but stops himself and instead emits a breathy, contemptuous laugh.

“What about you, Daniel?” Christine asks. “Didn’t you say you were a lawyer?”

“I’m glad I’m not on the jury,” Daniel says. “I find myself thinking one thing one day and another the next. I was a huge fan of O. J.’s when he was playing ball.”

“No, you weren’t,” says Kate. This is mutiny, out-and-out betrayal.

Daniel seems to her to be actually making things up. “You don’t give a shit about sports.”

Erick places a twenty-dollar bill on his check and then stands up so abruptly he almost tips his table over. “I think it’s time for dinner, Chrissy,” he says in a tight, enraged voice. He makes a brisk Prussian nod in Daniel’s direction and says, “Good evening, Daniel.”

Daniel starts to stand up, but Erick gestures for him to remain seated. Christine gathers her purse and her angora shawl and in a few moments the two of them are gone.

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“My God,” Daniel says, shaking his head. He is visibly upset. “How did that happen?”

“I will quote Czeslaw Milosz,” Kate says. “ ‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.’ ”

“Is that what that was? The overwhelming sound of truth?”

His eyes look reptilian and blank as he says this, and Kate thinks,
I
have my work cut out for me.

They leave the bar with the vague thought of going on to dinner, not because either of them is hungry but because it is dark now and it just seems time. As they make their way toward the dining room, Kate takes Daniel’s arm and says, in a kind of haunted-house scared voice, “What if
they’re
having dinner now, too?” What she hopes for is that Daniel will shudder, too, and they’ll be bonded by their wish to see no more of Erick and Christine, and that, further along, the story of the old black detective and his dumpy young white wife will become a part of their own lovers’ folklore, taking its place in that shared history of mishaps and faux pas that constitute the fabric of all enduring relationships.

But Daniel is not amused. He stops short and then says, “You’re right, we can’t go in there. So? What do you propose?”

What she proposes is they go back to their room. “It’s too early to eat,” she says. “In the old days we never had dinner before nine o’clock, sometimes we’d eat at midnight.”

“That was in New York. If we wait too long out here, we’re going to end up with a bag of chips from some Seven-Eleven.”

“Well, at least let’s wait until nine, or even eight-thirty.” She wants to get him into their room. It’s time for her to be abject, it’s time for her to worship him, to go through all the phallocentric rituals. She tugs at him, she hopes it feels playful to him but she wonders if perhaps she’s pulling a little too hard. Everything’s a notch or two off, he’s really making her work for this, he’s putting her through the mill, and once she wins him back he will have to be punished for this, not severely, not even

[ 209 ]

so he will know he is being punished, but he will suffer nevertheless.
As
God is my witness, I will never be humble again.

Room 301. Now that they are back in their old room, it occurs to Kate that this four-poster bed with its dour Yankee spread and foam rubber pillows is hardly a monument to ecstasy.That first night together had been awkward, tense, a bit of a botch.
We accomplished it but we weren’t very
accomplished
is how she described it to a friend.There’s a lot to be said for establishing a friendship before sex, there’s a sweetness to it and even a possible synergy, but in their particular case all of those hours of conversation and chastity were not so much a prelude to sex as an alternative. She and Daniel had already established routines that had nothing to do with sex, they had learned to be relaxed with each other, they had developed a sense of safety, and as wonderful as those things were, they had very little to do with the fierceness and desire, the mindlessness and abandon of erotic joy. Their friendship cast a pall over their lovemaking.

The friendship needed not only to be overcome but jeopardized, re-nounced.

“Remember our first night here?” Kate says, sitting on the edge of the bed, patting the mattress and inviting him to join her. “We were so shy.”

“Yes,” Daniel says. “I remember it well.” His back is to her, he is standing at the window, looking out at the town’s main street. A truck is going by, the sound of its grinding gears like the roar of a lion. Workmen have set up ladders and they are braiding Christmas lights around the poles of the streetlights and through the branches of the maple trees.

“Don’t you want to sit next to me?” Kate says. She means for this to sound teasing, and that slightly pleading tone of voice is meant as a kind of send-up of the whole notion of a woman trying to get a man’s attention, but the satire is leaden. It’s too true to be amusing.

“You were really weird with the people down there,” Daniel says.

“I know, it’s fine. They’re off somewhere circling the wagons.”

“I don’t know why you did that,” Daniel says, shaking his head.

“Why were you so interested in them?” Kate asks. She can’t help hera s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

self, the self-righteousness in his voice offends her. “Because they’re an
interracial
couple?”