A Ship Made of Paper (32 page)

A door next to the receptionist’s window opens and Dr. Fox emerges, wearing a dark-blue suit, a white shirt, a blue-and-white tie. With his close-cropped hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and elegant goatee, he looks like a diplomat from a small Marxist nation. “Katherine? Daniel?” he inquires softly, with a kindly smile.

Kate stares at Fox with palpable amazement and then, despite herself, she begins to laugh. Daniel, who himself was not expecting a black a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

man, understands that Kate is feeling the irony of their having made an appointment with an African-American to discuss their domestic difficulties, but he nevertheless feels she is behaving badly.

If Dr. Fox senses some racial content in Kate’s laughter, he gives no evidence of it, and he ushers them into his office, a small, dimly lit room filled with books, green glass lamps, a small collection of antique typewriters. His window looks out onto an old apple tree that was split in two by the October storm. When they are all seated—Kate and Daniel in khaki director’s chairs, Fox in a tufted burgundy leather seat—the relationships counselor begins the session by asking them their names, their ages, what insurance they carry. His voice is steady, at once emo-tionless and insistent, it’s like being pulled over by a highway patrolman.

“We’re here because Daniel has been seeing another woman,” Kate suddenly says, no longer patient enough to allow Fox to collect the standard data.

Daniel is surprised at how raw this sounds. Every scoundrel he knows complains about being quoted out of context, but having his behavior reduced to the simple act of infidelity strikes him now not only as inaccu-rate but unjust.What about all the pointlessly lonely nights that led up to it? What about never having known passion?

“How have you come to this knowledge?” Fox asks, with funereal tact.

“It was quite obvious,” says Kate.

“I told her,” Daniel adds softly.

“Well, then,” Fox says, taking a deep breath. He pinches the skin around his Adam’s apple, purses his lips. “So let me begin with you, Katherine—and Daniel, you’ll have your chance to speak, too, but I want to begin with Katherine, if that’s all right with both of you. Katherine, this situation you find yourself in, how would you like to see it resolved?”

Kate’s face colors, and the sight of it stabs through Daniel. She is nervous to be here, humiliated, and she who is so deft with words seems tongue-tied.

“I want to save what amounts to my marriage,” she says, her voice

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barely more than a whisper. She clears her throat. “We may not have any official documents, but this relationship means a great deal to me. Certainly more than my actual marriage, which was just . . . crap. More than anything, I guess. And I miss my old life, I miss the way things were before all this chaos. If we could go back to that, back to that nice life, I think I would be willing to forget everything that’s happened since October.”

Daniel feels he is being lured into what a man in his position must never do: looking into the heart of the person he is leaving. He thinks for a moment that maybe he ought to get out of his chair and leave. He cannot offer her hope, nor solace. If Kate is here to protect herself, or to heal her wounds, then he should not be here. He is the cause of her pain, he is the source, that churning in her stomach, he put it there, that sense of exclusion and exile—it comes from him. But what can he do? He cannot be for himself and for her, too. Their interests are in collision. There is no middle ground.What he wants is what is tearing Kate apart, and he cannot and will not stop wanting Iris, Iris is the most real thing.

Fox strokes his goatee, and his deep, almond-shaped eyes seem to soften, which Daniel notes, as if trying to assess a juror’s sympathies.

“Can you say more about that?” Fox asks.

Daniel sits back in his chair, waiting for the sharp sting of Kate’s reply. He knows her well enough to imagine how irritating Fox’s insipid invitation must be to her.

But Kate tries to do what Fox has asked. “I’m very angry, and very hurt,” she says. “As Daniel knows. The atmosphere at home is obviously tense. Very tense. Practically unbearable. We’re all walking on eggshells.

We’re waiting to see what Daniel will do. I think even Daniel is waiting to see what he’ll do. He’s a decent man and very kind and he’s terrific with my daughter. I’m sure this whole situation is killing him.”

Fox turns briefly toward Daniel, not to elicit a response or any further clarification of Kate’s remarks but, it seems, just to see the expression on his face.

“And you say you were previously married,” Fox says.

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“Yes, to a man whom I wasn’t in love with. And about whom I rarely think. He has no relationship with my daughter, he lives in Hawaii on a little bit of family money, and he is completely irresponsible.”

“Which brings us to Daniel,” says Fox.

“I’ve asked him to stop seeing this woman.”

“I see,” says Fox. “And has he stopped seeing her?”

They’re talking about me as if I weren’t actually here,
thinks Daniel.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

In fact, he has seen her this morning, their parting is just three hours old, and he feels, as usual, half mad from either having just seen her or from being about to see her.Today, he accompanied her to an immense supermarket twenty miles south of Leyden and followed her up and down the aisles while she shopped for her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Despite everything, Iris was excited about the holiday, which was her favorite of all the holidays—a fact that confounded Daniel, who would have ranked it close to the bottom, rivaled only by Christmas in the categories of forced jollity, depressing cuisine, and awakened feelings of emptiness, isolation, and loneliness. Iris’s parents were coming in, as well as her sister, Carol, and her brother, Andrew, with his wife and two children.

Hampton’s parents would be there, too, along with his aunt Margaret, his sister Victoria, with her family, and his brother James, and the prospect of housing them all, the improvisation of beds and bedrooms, the finessing of small privacies, the worries over laundry, water pressure, the orchestration of bathroom times, Aunt Margaret’s sudden allergies to pecans and oysters, without which a proper Thanksgiving dinner was unimaginable to Iris, all these and a dozen more domestic preoccupations were absorbing Iris as she filled her cart with bags of cranberries, cartons of beer, gigantic bottles of seltzer and Coke, three pounds of butter, bags of marshmallows, a ten-pound bag of sugar, a twelve-pack of toilet paper.

Listening to her as he tagged along made Daniel ache with envy of all those people who were to be the recipient of her care. Imagine! Pressed into this marathon of housewifery and to somehow keep her enthusiasm and her love of family intact. She was an emotional genius. If only he

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could somehow escape the frozen Butterball turkey sitting sullenly in his own refrigerator, somehow be spirited away from the embattled dinner that waits to be served at his table at home, if only all the laws of logic and propriety could be suspended and he could find himself at Iris’s house for that meal, with Ruby at his side, and Hampton not only vanished but completely forgotten, gone like a puff of smoke.

“Daniel?” Fox is saying. “This is a heavy time for you, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” says Daniel, though not quite certain to what he is agreeing.

“I hear you.”

“Yes,” says Daniel automatically. “Thank you.”

“Is there something you’d like to say to Katherine right now? Let’s imagine we are in a little circle of safety, and we can say whatever it was that was in our hearts and there will be no blame, no blame at all. What would you like to say in the circle of safety?”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s good, Daniel, but you’re looking at me.”

He turns to face Kate. “I’m sorry.”

“We’re not really in a circle of safety, Dr. Fox,” Kate says. “We’re more like in a circle of hell.”

Daniel’s heart floods with fondness for Kate, a strangely nostalgic outpouring of remembered love, as if she were long departed.Wouldn’t it be nice if Iris said biting and sophisticated things like that? But wit is not the source of Iris’s allure. Hers is a different sort of grace, unadorned and total, the grace of the sea, the grace of angels, and sex.

And as for Kate: she is suffering, but how can he protect her from it, how can he even soothe her when he himself is misery’s messenger? The unmentionable truth is that he has moved on. No. Worse. He has moved
up
. He has entered a higher plane of feeling, a higher plane of devotion, and a higher plane of pleasure. How can he make Kate understand this? He is not only leaving her, he is leaving himself, leaving everything familiar behind, he is slipping over the border with only the clothes on his back.

“I didn’t think we’d have to talk about a certain aspect of this whole thing,” Kate says, crossing her legs, “but since we’re here and . . . you’re a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

here.” She gestures elegantly toward Dr. Fox. “It seems worth mentioning. The woman Daniel was, or maybe we should say,
is
seeing is black.”

“How is that relevant?” Daniel says, much more insistently than in-tended.

“Oh please, Daniel. It’s completely relevant.You always wanted to be black, and now you’ve figured out a way to be black by proxy.”

Daniel hazards a glance at Fox, whose brief, black eyebrows have raised up practically to his hairline. “Is this true?” Fox asks.

“About the woman being African-American? Yes. But, I’m sorry, I think there’s something a little bit racist in what Kate’s saying.”

“Daniel,” says Fox, “you’re looking at me.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to say this to Kate?”

“She heard me.”

“And she won’t dignify it with a reply,” Kate says.

“She’s practically making a living out of writing articles about O. J.

Simpson,” Daniel says to Fox, as if appealing to him, forging some sort of bond, and instantly feeling the folly of it as the therapist shifts in his seat.

“Are you still seeing her or not?” Kate says, her voice level, composed. She cocks her head as she looks at Daniel, somehow creating the impression that whatever he answers will come as a relief to her.

But he’s not convinced. It seems entirely likely to him that if he tells Kate he is still actively in love with Iris, and he sees her whenever possible, then Kate will not only suffer but she will retaliate.

He wishes that Iris would tell Hampton herself.
Soon,
she has said.
I
can’t,
she has also said. She fears him, fears the pain it will cause her, and is exhausted to contemplate the mess that will ensue. She worries about losing custody of Nelson—though surely Hampton could not delude himself into believing he was set up or temperamentally suitable to take care of the boy.

If it were up to Daniel, Hampton would already know.Then he would simply stay in New York, and those unbearable conjugal visits could

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cease. But Iris is more than reluctant to tell him, she seems terrified of the possibility, which makes him wonder if she fears Hampton will do some violence to her, that he will pummel her, that beneath that golden-brown exterior of affluence and elegance, family roots, princely entitle-ments, and fraternity-boy competitiveness lurks the narcissistic, sexually preening, and ultimately predatory black man who prowls, sulks, and rages through Kate’s articles on O. J.

“Well, are you or not?” Kate asks, her voice a little wobblier this time, like a tightrope walker working without a net who’s made the mistake of looking down.

If he tells her the truth, he will pay for it. She will try to put a wedge between him and Ruby. She will make his life hell.

“I’ve already answered this question,” he says.

“Answer it again,” says Kate.

He shakes his head no, thinking that in some malignantly petty way this silent No can be taken to mean that he isn’t seeing Iris anymore, or it could also mean that he doesn’t want to “answer it again.” He knows he is losing his honor with these infantile games with the truth, but, then, if he’s willing to lose his family why not jettison honor, as well?

“What do you think about that?” Dr. Fox asks Kate.

“About what? He hasn’t answered me. He shook his head, that could mean anything.”

“I’m not seeing her,” Daniel blurts out. “I’m not seeing Iris. Okay?”

Telling this lie isn’t as sickening as he’d anticipated, he was so close to it anyhow, it wasn’t difficult, he just let himself drift into it.

“What do you think about what Daniel has said?” Fox asks again.

Kate shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’d like to believe him.”

“You don’t believe me?” asks Daniel, as if incredulous.

“No. I don’t.”

“Then have me followed. Hire a private detective.”

“I have.”

Daniel’s first thought is of this morning, after he and Iris left the supermarket and drove north back toward Leyden—wasn’t there a car fol-a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

lowing close behind, a nondescript sedan, just the sort to be driven by some professional snoop? A mile into the drive they pulled into Windsor Motors; Iris wanted to check out the new Volvos, and Daniel would have gone anywhere for a few extra minutes with her. Had the sedan followed them in? They walked around the lot, a light snow fell for a few moments and then stopped. A salesman descended upon them. Iris pointed to a car she liked and the next thing they knew the salesman had slapped a pair of dealer plates on it and he was waving so long to them as Iris steered the new car out of the lot for a test drive, with Daniel in the passenger seat. Her eyes were brimming with tears.
What’s wrong,
he asked her. She shook her head, pulled out into traffic, started driving a little too fast.

He saw a tear roll down her cheek, he stopped it with his fingertip—remembering Kate once saying that human tears were filled with bodily waste, more toxic than piss—and then licked his finger clean.
You’re crying,
he whispered.
He just gave us the car,
Iris said.
He didn’t ask for identification, a credit card, nothing
. “
Here’s the keys, see you in a while, drive safely
.”