A Ship Made of Paper (4 page)

He resists speeding over to the train station and instead drives home, out six miles east of town to Red Schoolhouse Road. It’s Kate’s house, her down payment, but surely his half of the monthly mortgage entitles him to feelings of ownership. It is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouse, calm and elegant like Kate herself, with French doors, an immense fireplace, ten acres, the remains of a barn.The dark gray night has healed over the gash of the sunset; a wind is coming off the river. When he pulls into the driveway, he sees an old winter-ravaged Dodge parked next to Kate’s impeccable Toyota, and when he lets himself in he sees Ruby in the living room, sitting on the sofa with her baby-sitter.

“Look, Daniel! I have a baby-sitter!” Ruby cries out, with incongru-ous elation.

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

The sitter is a high school girl named Mercy. Daniel figures Ruby’s joy must mean she has extracted a promise from Mercy to let her watch TV. He chats with the two girls for a minute, and then goes upstairs to find out where he is going tonight, since as far as he knew there was no plan in place.

He finds Kate in their bedroom, a dark-green room with odd angles, wide plank floors, a Persian rug. She is putting on lipstick and keeping an eye on the portable TV, which has become indispensable to her. The sound is off and she continually checks the set—sometimes in the mirror, sometimes turning around to face it—in order to see if there’s anything on the news about O. J. Simpson, who for the past several months has been on trial for the murder of his ex-wife.

“Any news?” asks Daniel, just to be polite.

“Nothing, same old, same old.”

“What if he’s innocent, Kate?”

“Yeah, right.”

“You got a sitter for Ruby?”

“You said you wished we went out more. So. Presto! We’re going out.”

“Great. Where we going?”

“Iris Davenport called this afternoon.” She glances at Daniel to see his reaction in the mirror. Nothing. She’s impressed. He’s standing up well to this. “She was trying to arrange something or other for the children. I’m sort of surprised she didn’t arrange it with you, that seems to be the way these things get done around here. But, anyhow, she mentioned that she and her husband were going to a concert tonight and the next thing I knew I had volunteered us to go along with them.” She turns toward Daniel, puts her hand against her throat. “Is that all right? And dinner after?”

“I thought you don’t like eating with strangers,” Daniel says, struggling to keep it casual. “I thought you don’t like watching them put food in their mouths.”

Kate’s attention is momentarily seized by something on the TV

screen, but it’s another black athlete, walking over a pulsating green landscape of little hills with a golf club over his shoulder. Tiger Woods.

[ 21 ]

How can there be no O. J. news today? Like millions of others, Kate has become obsessed with the case—with not only the defendant but the lawyers, the judge, the DNA experts. Stalled on her novel, unable to touch it, often unable even to think about it, she has become facile as a journalist and lately she’s been writing about the case, and since the jury is sequestered and she is not being paid for her objectivity, she has been having no trouble in clamoring for Simpson’s conviction.

“I thought you’d be happy I made these plans,” Kate says. “You mention her constantly. I figured it was time we got to know them, another couple, like actual grown-ups.”

“I mention her constantly?”

“I don’t know, probably not. I’m not trying to give you a hard time.

I’m trying to make you happy.” With rich, shining brown hair, smooth skin, and the scent of perfume on her, she glides to Daniel’s side. She would like to put her arms around him, but it might seem she was forcing the issue.

“You do
like
them, don’t you?” she asks. A surviving bit of her old southern accent stretches the “i” in “like.”

“I don’t really know him.”

“Do you like her?”

“Iris?”

She gives him a look. Of course Iris, who else are they talking about?

“Yes,” he says. “Sure. Why not? She’s Ruby’s best friend’s mother.

That’s got to be worth something. And she’s nice. She’s funny.”

“Tell me something funny she’s said. It’ll whet my appetite for an evening of unbridled hilarity.”

“Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “Last spring—”

“Last spring? You have to go
that
far back in time?”

“Actually, it was the summer. She got a mosquito bite, and I guess she was scratching it and scratching it.” His eyes shift away from Kate’s; he realizes he is talking himself into a hole. “And she turned the bite into a sore, you know how that happens. And so she took a pen and wrote ‘ouch ouch ouch ouch’ in a circle all around the bite.”

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

“That’s it? She wrote ouch on her arm?”

“You know what, Kate? I think we should call them and say we can’t make it.”

She wouldn’t mind doing just that, but she’s already set her course.

“Nonsense,” she says. She holds her pearls out to him and he comes behind her to fasten them. In her scoop-necked dress, Kate’s collarbones look as sturdy as handlebars.

“You look nice,” Daniel says. He seems to mean it. He even touches her hair. “You look beautiful.”

She cannot fully believe that Daniel has embarked on some flirtation.

It contradicts not only her trust in him but her sense of him. She met him when she was sick to death of eccentric, neurotic men. She had a year-old baby and a busted-up marriage, a successful novel and a contract for a second, and all she wanted from a man was clarity, kindness, and dependabil-ity. She distrusted despair, had an aversion to any kind of domestic drama.

Daniel back then had been a lawyer in the firm that represented Kate’s publishing house and he, too, was recently out of a shabby affair, this one with a woman who turned out to have a hair-trigger temper and a penchant for violence. Kate and Daniel used to joke with each other about being the last normal people on earth, and the joke turned into a kind of emotional contract; they were promising each other affection with tranquility, a life of measured gestures, respect for boundaries. It would be a levelheaded alliance; they would be Swiss bankers of the heart.

“I can’t believe you did this, put this . . . this evening together,” he is saying.

She watches his face, carefully. Despite her belief that he would never actually have an affair, he seems to be a man who wants to take a journey. He hasn’t booked passage, he doesn’t have a ticket, he doesn’t have the guts. Kate is certain that he has not betrayed her. It hasn’t gone that far, not yet. It’s still an affair of the mind. He thinks a love affair will rescue him. From what? Yet in a way, that no-idea-what’s-wrong sort of life might be exactly what he wants to be rescued from. Kate feels curious but removed. She has decided to let it play out.

[ 23 ]

She would like to take a closer look at Iris. Lately, he has been mentioning her, telling stories that have no point except to give him an occasion to say “Iris.” Kate, thus far, fails to see the appeal. Iris is ten pounds too thin, fidgety, psychologically evasive but physically a little
too
present, with a cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof quality to her, a woman used to being sought after, loved, but not really satisfied, used to adulation, a daddy’s girl, perhaps.

Of course, her blackness is a part of what draws Daniel to her, Kate is certain of this. All those blues records, all that soul music, and even gospel music, the man listens to Sam Cooke singing about Jesus and gets tears in his eyes, though he himself has no more belief in Christ than he has in the Easter bunny. He must have been preparing himself for this all along. Getting the soundtrack down for his big movie spectacular. The story of his life taking shape, the story of himself as a great romantic hero, crossing the color line. How passé! How pathetic! As if getting involved with an African-American could be the solution to his problems. As if it would give him something to believe in.The poor little unloved son suddenly draping himself in three hundred years of another people’s history, the invisible man taking shape beneath the swaddling of black bandages.

“Do I have time for a shower?” Daniel asks.

The night is chilly. A stiff westerly wind blows through the trees and black clouds are snapping at the moon. A steady procession of concert-goers march into St. John’s, where tonight the Leyden Musical Society is performing the
Messiah.
To Kate, even after three years in Leyden, it’s a procession of strangers, but Daniel knows most of the crowd by name.

She watches him waving, smiling at whoever makes eye contact. She is often exhausted by his outwardness. His smile can grate on her as if it were a cough. Kate realizes that in the vast literature of wifely complaints this doesn’t register with great intensity, but Daniel smiles too easily and she doesn’t care for it. The man smiles while he sleeps.

Yet even as he smiles, he’s craning his neck, on the lookout for Iris a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

and Hampton. Kate doesn’t mean to think in racial terms, but it seems to her that black people are always running late. Maybe it’s a bit of aggression toward whites, maybe with each other they’re as punctual as the six o’clock news. She watches Daniel, swiveling his head around like an adulterous owl.

“Daniel?” She pats him on the arm. “You look a little crazy.”

“I do?” He blinks, as if just awakened. And then they see them, moving quickly along Manchester Avenue, hurrying, arm in arm.

“Hello!” Daniel calls out, eagerly raising his hand as if he were a schoolboy with the right answer. Iris is wearing a gray overcoat, black pants, boots, a kind of African hat. Everything seems a couple sizes too large, she is like some goofy kid wearing her mother’s clothes. Not so with the husband. Hampton—his skin pale toffee, his emanation of coiled energy, his aura of wealth—is wearing a sumptuous, practically edible-looking cashmere coat, a paisley silk scarf with tassels. He has those round little glasses, steel framed, gentle, scholarly, that Kate identifies as deliberately reassuring, nonsexual, a little eunuchy, really, the signifying eyewear of the black professional.

Daniel kisses Iris’s cheek, and Hampton, seeing this, plants a quick kiss on Kate, with all the tenderness of a clerk stamping a bill paid.

The four of them make their way into the church. St. John’s is for Leyden’s upper-class Episcopalians, and for those who like to pray with their betters. It’s chilly, Spartan, like a lodge high in the Austrian Alps. All that woodwork, the fresh white flowers, and the Episcopalian flag that reminds her of the Red Cross. She and Daniel, and then Iris and Hampton, find places in a back pew. The orchestra is already tuning up as they arrange themselves. Daniel and Iris seem to be intent on not making the slightest eye contact.

Kate tries to keep her attention riveted upon the orchestra and the chorus throughout the concert.The conductor is Ethan Greenblatt, president of Marlowe College, a handsome young academic superstar with an explosion of curly hair and a fussy bow tie. He is pushing the musicians through the piece at breakneck speed, as if afraid of detaining the audi-

[ 25 ]

ence past its attention span. But from time to time, Kate must glance at Daniel. His eyes are closed, but she’s sure he’s awake. Hampton takes Iris’s hand, brings it to his lips, while she stares intently ahead. And then, Kate sees Daniel glancing at Iris.Their eyes meet for a moment, but it has the impact of cymbals crashing. It is a shocking, agitating thing to see. It’s like being in a store with someone and watching them steal something.

Afterward, the four of them walk to the George Washington Inn, where Iris has made dinner reservations. The Inn is redolent with Colonial history—low, beamed ceilings, wormy old tavern tables, an immense blackened fireplace. A high school girl serves them a basket of rolls, then comes back to fill their water glasses. She pours Hampton’s last and accidentally fills it to the very top; in fact, a little of it laps onto the table. “Oops,” she says, but Hampton looks away. His jaw is suddenly rigid. Iris touches his knee, pats it, as if to calm him down. With her other hand, she is dabbing the little dime-sized puddle with her napkin.

A moment later, a waiter appears to take their drink orders. Daniel and Kate are used to this waiter, middle-aged, vain, and formal. Hampton, however, sees the waiter’s extreme tact as an extension of the bus-girl’s spilling his water, and he orders a vodka martini in a surly voice.

“Use Absolut,” he says. “I’ll know if the bartender uses the house brand.”

Iris looks down at her lap; when she raises her gaze again she sees Daniel is looking at her, smiling. It startles her into smiling back.The two of them seem so happy to be gazing at each other, and Kate feels like Princess Kitty standing at the edge of the room and noticing the joy that floods their faces when Vronsky’s and Anna Karenina’s eyes meet. Kate wonders exactly how far along these two really are. Is it too late to stop them?

“So, Hampton,” Kate says, “tell me. I hear all about Iris from Daniel, but nothing about you.You’re in the city most of the time?”

“I come up here on the weekend,” Hampton says. “During the work-week, I stay at the apartment where we used to live before Iris got into Marlowe.”

“It’s a beautiful apartment,” Iris says. She glances at Hampton, who smiles at her.

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

“So what keeps you down in the city all week?” Kate asks.

“I’m co–managing director of the Atlantic Fund,” Hampton says.

“He’s an investment banker,” Iris says, in the same anxious-to-please tone in which she said their apartment was beautiful.To Kate, Iris sounds like a woman whose husband has complained about how she treats him in public.

“The Atlantic Fund provides capital to African-American business,”

Hampton says. “It’s sometimes difficult for black-owned businesses to get what they need from the white banking structure.” He cranes his neck, looks for the waiter. “Just like it’s hard to get a white waiter to bring you a drink.” He breathes out so hard his cheeks puff for a moment. “I’ve never come here, and now I know why.”