A Ship Made of Paper (43 page)
Kate and Derek continue to talk about her new alarm system. Kate says that one of the reasons she agreed to move out of the city was that she liked the idea of living in a place where she wouldn’t have to worry about crime. Derek tells her that crime in Windsor County has gone up nearly ten percent in the past four years, though it’s been mainly in the larger towns in the south of the county. Then they talk awhile about the O. J. case, though here Kate has to be careful because Derek knows next to nothing about it, he keeps falling back on the simplest statements, like, “Man, that guy had everything, and now look at him.” They are doing their best to avoid the inevitable conversational juncture when they will begin talking about Daniel, whose behavior, motives, and present-day life have ended up at the center of their every conversation.
This time, it’s Derek who brings it up. “Any word from our wander-ing boy?” he asks.The way he talks about Daniel is different from how he discusses crime and safety. His voice when he mentions Daniel is toler-ant, bemused, and morally superior.
“As a matter of fact, I talked to him today.”
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“Really?” Derek says, his voice rising a little.
“He wanted to pick Ruby up at day care.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Well, it was just as well for me. I knew I was having the alarm sys -
tem put in, but they wouldn’t give me an exact time.”
“So? Is she going to spend the night there?”
“Yes,” she says. “I could use a night off.”
“Well, I guess it’s good for her to have a male role model or something.”
And now the subject is properly launched, it wafts above them like a big lazy balloon.
“This place where he’s living,” Kate says. “I finally got the courage to go over and take a look at it.”
“He’s over on Salter Turnpike.”
“A little suburban-style house, with a carport and fake shutters.” She stops herself, realizes that sort of architecture wouldn’t disturb Derek, that in fact his own house could be described like that. “And inside, really dreary. I asked him,‘Who decorated this place? Lee Harvey Oswald?’ ”
“Three years ago, I was called out on a domestic abuse on Salter Turnpike and the guy turned out to be my tenth-grade English teacher, Mr.
Machias. Man, I loved busting that guy, and he’s like trying to strike a bargain with me while I’m leading him out to the car, he’s saying, ‘Mr.
Pabst, we’re both men of the world.’ Men of the world. His poor old wife’s in there with a broken nose and a chipped front tooth and he’s trying to bond with me.”
“So what are you saying, Derek? That it’s a bad neighborhood?”
“Here’s what I think. There are no bad neighborhoods, there’s just bad people.”
Oh, thank you for your hard-won wisdom of the streets
. “Daniel looked really uncomfortable, having me in his house,” she says. “He was swaying back and forth, talking a mile a minute, and he had his hand sort of tucked behind him, massaging his kidney like he does when he’s very, very nervous.”
“He was nervous? He should be
ashamed
. He should be on his knees begging you to forgive him.”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Kate shrugs, but Derek is saying exactly what she wants to hear. She finds that she has a practically limitless need to hear her side of things af-firmed when it comes to the breakup of her household. Once, she would have guessed that she would want to preserve her pride, that she would put up a brave front and mount the traditional romantic defense of non-chalance, or philosophical acceptance. But that hasn’t been the case. Kate wants there to be no mistake in anyone’s mind about whose idea it was to separate. She is the wronged party, any spin on that is immoral. And whenever she thinks she has had her fill of pity, she finds that she has a craving for just one more helping.
“He looks terrible,” Kate says. “He must have lost at least twenty pounds, and he’s got these crepe paper dark patches under his eyes. His health is shot.”
“He shouldn’t even be talking to you about his health,” Derek says.
“He’s lost that right.”
“It’s not like cops and robbers, Derek, this is real life. Whatever he’s done, he’s still important to me. And if he’s developed some kind of heart condition . . .”
“He had a heart attack?”
“I don’t know what he had. But I do know he’s wasting away. And for what?”
“Hampton Welles,” Derek says softly.
“But that wasn’t Daniel’s fault!”
Derek nods. It is, in fact, what he, too, believes, but he doesn’t like to hear Kate say it.
“And I do think,” Kate continues, “that in terms of him and Iris, it’s been devastating to them. I think it’s hard for them to even see each other.”
Derek is entirely sure that Daniel and Iris are seeing a lot more of each other than Kate cares to realize—he has seen them coming out of the Windsor Bistro, seen her car in front of Daniel’s house—but he thinks better of making the point. Sometimes you can lose by winning.
“You’re a very brave lady, Kate,” he says. “I mean it.You’re really taking it well.”
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“Can I offer you another cup of coffee?”
“No, I better not. I’m having trouble sleeping anyhow. And this stuff is a whole lot stronger than anything I get at home.”
“Meow,” says Kate, making Derek laugh with such a burst of manic nervous energy that his face goes crimson. Kate looks at him with a mild gaze, but soon she is laughing, too, and they continue to laugh, as if her joke were a kiss and they wanted to prolong it.
And then the laughter subsides and they are left with each other and the silence, which Derek, finally, cannot endure.
“You ask yourself,” he says, shaking his head.
“What?”
“What you’d do in her particular individual situation.”
“Iris? With Daniel, you mean?”
“Whatever anyone says about it being an accident, Daniel lit the fuse.
What would you do with someone who did something like that to your husband?”
“Well, first I’d like to actually have a husband.” She realizes as soon as the words are out that it’s not a good or even acceptable joke. She knows Derek is attracted to her, that he has been coming around with the hope of one day taking her to bed, and she doesn’t want to encourage him, any more than she would want to absolutely discourage him. And, sure enough, the wisecrack has made him uncomfortable. He shifts in his seat, recrosses his legs.
“You know Hampton, don’t you?” Derek asks.
“A little.”
“What’s he like?”
“Extremely dignified, what people used to call a Credit to His Race.”
“Man,” Derek says, with a sad shake of the head, as he so often does when Hampton’s fate is discussed. He touches the hollow of his own throat, also a practically ritualized gesture between them.
“Poor Daniel,” she says. “I can’t help thinking Iris is sort of holding him hostage.”
“Hostage?”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“Psychologically.”
Derek glances away, as if this were a bit rarefied for his tastes.
“Daniel feels responsible . . . And Iris is no fool. She’s perfectly capable of manipulating the hell out of Daniel, without even half trying.
He’s doing her shopping, he’s mowing the lawn, he’s like her servant.”
“I can’t believe you,” Derek says. “You’re sitting here feeling sorry for him.The whole town’s talking about what a rat he is, and the person he hurt the most is feeling sorry for him.You’re a very understanding person.”
“I’m not understanding. I’m hurt. I feel incredibly hurt. It’s just . . .
well, it’s
Daniel.
He’s a sweet man. But he’s rootless, that might be the problem. I should have put it together when he came up with the plan to move back to this place. He wanted to be near his parents, strange as it sounds. All that unfinished business, it’s true what they say. Some of those unloved kids have the hardest time leaving home.They think it’s always just about to happen, the things they’ve been waiting their whole life for. And then they get fixated on the idea of passion, some big bang theory. You know what I mean? An explosion that will create, or re-create, the world. Maybe that’s why he got so attached to this woman, this woman who is really basically a stranger to him. He wants to be rescued from his own emptiness. And I think he sees her as the perfect mother, too—even though she was willing to throw her marriage out the window. But she’s very touchy-feely with her kid. Daniel loves that, because he understands it, and it’s what he missed. Then you take all that, and you mix in all of Daniel’s goddamned pro bono idealism, and his whole fixation on the
black
thing, and how they’re supposed to be more feeling than us, more emotionally present. All that nonsense.”
“Nonsense? You call what he did nonsense?”
“Daniel doesn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“But he has,” says Derek. “He’s lucky he’s not facing charges.”
“It was an accident, I think that much was obvious to everybody. It was just the worst horrible freak luck. That thing, that rocket goes off and severs poor Hampton’s carotid artery. God. It would have been better if he’d died right then and there.”
[ 299 ]
“He pretty much did.”
“That’s not true. He’s getting around, he’s walking, feeding himself.
He’s probably fucking that wife of his.” She puts her hands up as if to shield herself. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
A silence descends upon them. From outside the house, they can hear the blue jays raucously quarreling around the bird feeder; they seem perfectly willing to slaughter each other over a beakful of thistle. Sometimes it seems so obvious: the world is a place of relentless brutality, the only reason anything is alive is that it can kill something else.
Derek has left the window down in his car and the squawk of his radio drifts toward the silence of the early evening.
“Your radio,” Kate says.
“I can hear it.”
“What’s it saying? What’s going on?”
“Not a damn thing.” And then, in a moment of inspiration, he decides to risk it all in one sentence. Suddenly it’s easier than holding back, easier than pretending he has not been dreaming of Kate, has not fallen in love with her. All that has happened has happened for a reason, starting with Daniel getting kicked down the stairs and moving back to Leyden, and then the freak early snow, and those black kids terrorizing Kate, the whole karmic chain of events, including Marie Thorne getting lost in the woods. It all had to click together just so.
Kate is frowning at the open window, through which the noise of the police radio drifts.
“Should you be paying attention to that?” she asks.
He takes her hand. “Everything I really want to pay attention to is right here,” he says.
Despite his being in a constant state of tension from recalling and re-living the moment he lit the fuse of that Roman candle, despite his flulike feelings of remorse over breaking up his family, despite his constant worry over Ruby’s well-being, her psychological health, her physical health, and even her moods, despite his having taken down the photograph of the dear little girl because the sight of it on his beige bedroom wall makes him weep, despite the many times he has called her on the telephone when she seems indisposed, distracted, and does not want to talk, despite his taking her to feed the swans that live near the shore of a nearby monastery and turning around for a half minute and her disappearing for nearly ten minutes, despite having received numerous nighttime drink-and-dial telephone calls from Kate, despite his sometimes wondering how he could have thought for a moment that he could live without her, despite his having let down more than a few of his clients, despite the wreckage he has made of his practice, his career, and his reputation, despite his going from a respected and well-liked figure in his little town to a person about whom people gossip, of whom people do not approve, around whom people seem less than comfortable, despite the difficulties he and Iris have seeing each other since Hampton’s injury, despite his having developed a searing, steely pain in the middle of his heel, as if it has been pierced by an arrow, especially in the morn-
[ 301 ]
ing, when he can barely get out of bed the pain is so severe, despite the fact that his assistant, Sheila Alvarez, has turned contemptuous toward him, and snapped her fingers in his face and said, “Hello?” when he failed to answer one of her rapid-fire inquiries, despite Iris’s little boy’s continuing in his dislike for Daniel, his squirming away from his touch, glaring at him from across the Burger King booth, despite bouts of feverish nostalgia for his old domesticity, its regularities and comforts, despite his more or less despising where he now lives, where he has yet to get a decent night’s sleep, where he is obliged to buy cumbersome, backbreak-ing bottles of spring water because what comes out of the tap smells like leprous frogs, where the idiot landlord, who has never had a tenant before, continues to hover around, mowing the lawn on Saturday mornings, watering the scraggly, parsimoniously producing rosebushes, pruning the juniper bushes, which smell like cat urine, and who com-pulsively continues to chaperone Daniel’s relationship to the house as if the depressing little bungalow were a young virgin and Daniel himself a notorious Lothario, despite his having lost ten pounds of muscle and not an ounce of fat, despite wiry curls of gray hair suddenly appearing on his sideburns, despite his having begun fifteen books without getting to the end of any of them, this is the happiest he has ever been.
Much of this happiness is purely physical. It is an animal joy, a stunning erotic completeness such as he has never experienced. Daniel had always secretly believed that people who went on about their sexual happiness were exaggerating, they were like those restaurant reviewers who compare a bowl of soup to a glimpse of heaven. They were sexual gourmets, they were like those wine critics who justify their expense-account indulgences with words that not only elevated their simple human pleasure into some bold adventure of the senses but also claimed to be extracting arcane nuances of pleasure that only they could discern.
