A Ship Made of Paper (5 page)

“Have we really been waiting that long?” asks Kate. “It seems like we just sat down.” She looks to Daniel for confirmation, but all Daniel can manage is a shrug. He is on a plane and he has just heard something in the pitch of the engine’s roar that makes him feel the flight is doomed.

“God, that music was so wonderful,” Iris says.

“The first time I heard Handel’s
Messiah,
I was four years old,” Hampton says, his eyes on Kate. “My grandmother was in a chorus that performed it for Richard Nixon, at the White House.” This comment is in keeping with remarks he’s been making since they left the church. Already they’d heard references to his grandfather’s Harvard roommate, his great-grandfather’s Presbyterian mission in the Congo, his mother’s spending five thousand dollars on haute couture in Paris when she was eleven years old, his aunt Dorothy’s short engagement to Colin Powell, the suspicious fire at the Welles vacation compound on Martha’s Vine-yard. He boasts about his lineage in a way that Kate thinks would simply not be allowed from a white person.

“Thurgood Marshall was a friend of the family and he was there, too, of course. Unfortunately, he fell asleep after ten minutes. Gramma said they all sang extra loud to cover Justice Marshall’s snoring.”

Kate wonders if Hampton is trying to put Daniel on alert. He, too, must sense what’s happening. She has to admit that she is enjoying this

[ 27 ]

foursome more than she’d dared hope. It captures her imagination in some creepy, achey way, like sucking on a tooth that’s just starting to die.

“Is this the same grandmother who played the cello?” she asks.
Maybe
if you thought a little less about your grandmother’s pedigree and a little more
about your wife, she wouldn’t be squirming in her chair and eyeing my boyfriend.

“No, the cellist was Abigail Welles, of Boston, my father’s mother.The singing grandma was Lucille Cox, of Atlanta, on my mother’s side.”

“I have many Coxes in my family,” Kate says. “On my mother’s side, many of them from Georgia, too.”

There is a brief silence, and then Kate says what she guesses must be passing through everyone’s mind. “Of course, there’s a chance that one of
my
Coxes held one of your Coxes in slavery.”

“In that case,” says Daniel, lifting his wine glass, “dinner’s on us.”

For the first time that evening, Hampton smiles. Beaming, his face grows younger. His teeth are large, even, and very white, and he casts his eye downward, as if the moment’s pleasure makes him shy. Kate can imagine the moment when Iris first saw that smile, how it must have drawn her in and made her want to fathom the secret cave of self that was his smile’s source.

“Hampton,” Kate says. “That’s an interesting name.”

“My family’s full of Hamptons,” he says. “We come from Hampton, Virginia. A few of us attended Hampton University, back when it was Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute.”

“Hampton Hawes,” says Daniel.

“What?” says Hampton.

“He’s a jazz piano player, West Coast.”

“Daniel knows everything about jazz,” says Kate. “And blues, and rhythm and blues.”

The waitress arrives and presents them with yellowfin tuna, coq au vin, filet mignon, risotto funghi. “Look,” says Iris, “everything looks so good!”

“Is that tuna?” Hampton asks, peering at Iris’s plate.

Every marriage, Kate thinks, seems to have one person wanting what’s on the other’s plate.

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

Iris smiles, but she doesn’t look pleased. “Do you want some?”

“Okay, a taste.” He watches while she cuts her sesame-encrusted tuna in half and then transports it carefully to his plate, next to his charbroiled slab of steak and French fries and homemade coleslaw. He doesn’t offer her so much as a morsel of his food.

“Iris doesn’t share my interest in family traditions,” Hampton says, cutting into his steak.

“All I ever said is that sometimes they can be a little limiting,” says Iris, trying not to plead, but Kate can tell she would like to. “In America you can make your own history.”

“Dream on, my sweet,” says Hampton.

“All right, then I will. And in the meantime, can we just relax and enjoy being alive?”

“So you work on Wall Street?” Kate asks.

“Does that surprise you?” asks Hampton. “That I’m an investment banker?”

“Yes,” she says, “I thought maybe you were a tap dancer.”

Hampton smiles, points his finger at Kate. “That’s funny,” he says, instead of laughing.

“I wrote a piece last year about the stock exchange,” Kate says. “I love all those men crawling over each other and shouting out numbers as if their lives were hanging by a thread. And then the final bell rings and everyone cheers and goes out for drinks. I loved the whole thing, including the bell and the drinks.”

“That’s not what I do. But I’d like to read your article.”

“Oh no, please, no. The only way I can churn that crap out is to tell myself that absolutely no one will ever set eyes on it.” She catches the waitress’s eye and gestures with a twirl of the finger: more drinks over here. “It’s just to pay the bills. And wrap fish.”

“Do you mostly write about financial topics?” Hampton asks.

“What I’m supposed to be doing is working on my next novel, but that’s been the case for quite a while. So in the meanwhile, editors call me up and I give them whatever they want. It’s amazing how easily the

[ 29 ]

stuff comes when you don’t really have your heart in it. Right now, I’m doing a piece about the O. J. trial and about this woman artist calling herself Ingrid Newport.”

“What kind of artist is she?” Hampton asks.

“She’s sewn up her vagina,” Kate says. She can practically
hear
Daniel’s heart sinking. He worries about her when she drinks. And then he does something that strikes her as
intolerable
. He actually looks over at Iris and shrugs.

“They keep on assigning me these sexual mutilation pieces,” Kate says. “It’s becoming sort of my specialty. My little calling card.” Is this putting Iris in her place? Kate has no idea. Iris may be one of those rare monsters: a person of unshakable sexual confidence. “I tell them, ‘Hey guys, how about a piece about the reemergence of the lobotomy as an accepted psychiatric practice,’ but, no, they say, ‘What we really want is fifeen hundred words on Peter Peterson, that guy in Dover, Delaware, who crucified his own penis.’ They all tell me I write so well about gender issues, by which they really mean sex. I guess I should be pleased. No one ever said I did anything well when it came to sex.” Kate laughs. “But now I’m getting a lot of O. J. assignments, so that’s good. Have you all been following the case?”

No one’s taking the bait on that one. Getting this crowd to talk about O. J. would be like trying to convince them to take off their clothes right there in the restaurant. Kate feels sour and self-righteous, the way you do when you seem to be the only person willing to face something ugly.

Iris’s eyes are locked on her meal. She seems to be hurrying to finish it before Hampton tucks into it again. Kate watches her hands as they delicately maneuver her knife and fork. She finds her cute but hardly irresistible. Lean body, broad shoulders, big behind. Kate feels sorry for black people with freckles, it’s like they’re getting the worst of both worlds.

“You know what we should have done?” says Daniel, his voice bright silver. “Kept the kids together, with just one baby-sitter.”

“Wasn’t I lucky to have found someone like Daniel?” Kate announces.

“When my marriage broke up and I was left with my kid, I thought I’d a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

be alone forever. But Daniel’s a better parent than I am.” She waits for Daniel to contradict her, but he doesn’t. “Well, maybe not
better,
but he is so good to Ruby.”

“She’s a great kid,” Daniel says softly.

“She is,” says Iris.

“And she so loves Nelson,” Daniel says. His face colors, and he looks to Kate for relief. “Doesn’t she? How many times has she talked about him? Right?”

“Kids can fall in love,” Kate says. “In fact, in childhood, we may be at our highest capacity to just go head over heels for another person. I was in love with a little boy when I was five years old. A little black boy with the perfect little black boy name: Leroy. Leroy Sinclair.” She signals the waiter for more wine. In for a penny. “His mother cleaned the little medical arts building where my father had his office. He was a real butterball, Leroy. Just as fat as a tick, but with the most charming, lazy smile, a real summer-on-the-Mississippi smile. He wore overalls and high-topped sneakers. His mother had to take him to work and apparently she fed that poor boy sweets all through the day to keep him quiet. I used to go to Daddy’s office every Saturday and Mrs. Sinclair—”

“You called her Mrs. Sinclair?” Hampton asks.

“Not at the time.We called her Irma. She weighed two pounds, shoes and all.”

“Poor Leroy,” says Iris.

“I used to read to Leroy. I was precocious. I’d bring a book every Saturday and read to him while Daddy worked in his office, two hours of paperwork, nine-thirty to eleven-forty-five, every Saturday, to the minute. I used to read Leroy these bedtime books, right there in the middle of the day, sitting on the inside staircase of this little medical arts building out on Calhoun Boulevard. And Leroy had all this candy his mother gave him, stuffed in his pockets, little red-and-white mints, but-terscotch sucking candies, all fancy wrapped . . .”

“She probably took them from one of the houses she cleaned during the week,” Iris says.

[ 31 ]

“Yes, I suppose she did. Stolen sweets. What could be better?” She narrows her eyes, lets Iris draw her own damn conclusions. “I read him
Goodnight, Moon,
and he put his head right in my lap and closed his eyes and I patted and rocked him and he pretended to fall asleep. And when I was finished with whatever I was reading, I kissed the palm of my hand and pressed it against his cheek, over and over, hand to my lips, hand to his cheek. And I remember thinking: I love Leroy. I love Leroy Sinclair.

And just saying those words put me into a kind of hypnotic trance.”

The high school girl has cleared the plates away. The waiter hovers over to the side, waiting for a break in the conversation.

“And then one day I saw my father talking to Mrs. Sinclair,” Kate is saying, “and I knew she would never be allowed to bring Leroy to work with her again. And I was right. The next time I saw him, maybe two years later, he was on his way to his school and I was with a couple of my silly, awful little girlfriends from Beaumont Country Day School, and I called to him across the street—Hey, Leroy—and he just looked at me as if I was the most ridiculous thing he had ever seen, and he didn’t say a word.

But whose fault was it? We were both caught in something so large, and so terrible. His people came over in chains and my people sat on the porch sipping gin. Something that begins that badly can never end well . . .”

Kate looks around the table, smiling.

“How about you, Hampton?” she says. “Did you ever fall in love with someone not of your race?” If he finds this offensive he gives no indication—but Kate quickly looks away from him, throws her slightly bleary gaze first at Iris, and finally at Daniel. “Anyone?”

[ 2 ]

Once they were in the woods, the remains of the afternoon light seemed to shrink
away.The shadows of the trees—a shocking number of which had fallen over to
the ground from the weight of last month’s sudden snowstorm—seemed to pile on
top of each other, one shadow over the next, building a wall of darkness. Once,
there had been paths through the woods, made by the herds of deer, or left over
from the old days when there had been enough money to maintain and even manicure the Richmond holdings. But the October storm had dropped thousands of
trees and the paths were somewhere beneath them, invisible now. Daniel and
Hampton could not take two steps without having to scramble over the canopy of
a fallen tree, or climb over a trunk, or a crisscross of trunks, slippery with rot. And
where there weren’t fallen trees there were thorny blackberry vines that furled out
across the forest floor like a sharp, punishing fog.

The evening was not a success. After Kate’s story about Leroy, the silences became prolonged. When Kate ordered an after-dinner cognac, neither Iris nor Hampton ordered anything, putting Daniel in the position of having to order a cognac for himself, which he feared might create the impression that he and Kate were both heavy drinkers. As soon as Kate drained her snifter, Hampton announced that they had promised their baby-sitter an early night, and it was over.

[ 33 ]

In the car, Daniel and Kate do not speak. Daniel has the car’s cassette player tuned low. Etta James singing “Love’s Been Rough on Me,” then Buddy Guy doing “Hold That Plane.” When Albert King’s “I Found Love in the Welfare Line” comes on, Kate rouses herself out of her torpor and hits the off button. “No singing Negroes, please.”

“Fine. Whatever you like.”

“Are you feeling like Herman Melville, darling?” Kate asks, her breath rich and fermented.

“Am I?”

“ ‘In the soul of a man there is one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the half-lived life.’ Did you have a little peek at Tahiti and now you have to go home to your half-lived life?”

Daniel remains silent. He doesn’t want to argue with Kate, doesn’t want to spar with her, to feel the flick and jab of her. He is content to be driving and thinking about the various little gestures Iris made during the dinner. He thinks about what she ate. He thinks about how she had refolded her napkin at the end of the meal and placed it next to her plate, good as new. He thinks about her expression as she listened to the others speak, a quality of appreciation and grace, as if her mind lapped up information like a cat with a bowl of milk. He thinks about how she continually turned her wedding ring around her finger, as if it might be im-peding the flow of her blood. She had been wearing that perfume that he had come to associate with her—Chanel No. 19. A few weeks ago, in the city, he had gone to Saks and sniffed thirty tester bottles before finding which fragrance was hers, and then he bought a small bottle and kept it in his desk at the office.
May I help you? May I help you?
The clerks on the main floor had kept trying to make themselves available to him. But they couldn’t help him; nobody could.