A Ship Made of Paper (45 page)

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medical authority of the entire Richmond Memorial Hospital, where he had been head of Food Services for thirty-eight years. Then Hampton’s old friends, the Morrison-Rosemonts, up from Atlanta, and then more brothers, more sisters, his parents again, her parents again. She is running a bed-and-breakfast for the genuinely concerned, throwing in lunch and dinner, too. All of them have different ideas, different needs, different dietary requirements. Some are helpful, some are pains in the ass, and all of them, each and every one of them, wants, finally, to know the same thing: Who has done this thing to Hampton?

“Oh, the man I love, the man I will sneak out of here to see as soon as the coast is clear, as soon as I hear you snoring behind the guest room door,” is what Iris does not say. “A friend of mine named Daniel, it was an accident,” she also doesn’t say. “If you need someone to blame, then blame me,” is likewise on the list of unuttered things. But she can’t remain silent, she can’t refuse to answer their very reasonable question, she cannot drum her fingers on the side of her head and say “Da da da.” And so she tells the story again and again, drawing it out so it can seem she is not stinting on the details, beginning with the party at Eight Chimneys, the trouble between the Richmonds, the disappearance of Marie Thorne, the storm-wrecked woods, the flares, and on and on, and no matter which way she spins it the end is always the same—her silence mixes with the silence of her listener, and the two silences combine in the air and create a kind of Holy Ghost of the Unspoken, and that spirit looks down upon them and whispers:
a white man did this to him.

It’s late at night, one day or another, Wednesday, Thursday, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Daniel has fallen asleep in front of the TV set, with his hands folded in his lap and his feet up on the coffee table. It is a shabby threadbare sort of sleep, mixed in with the sounds of the movie he has been watching—
The Guns of Navarone
—as well as the still unfamiliar ruminations of his house. His dream life is thin and discontinuous, just images, moments, nothing quite memorable, it’s like reading the spines of a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

the books in a vast secondhand shop. Here he is decanting a bottle of red wine, trying to push a mower through wet grass, being driven to court by Anthony Quinn, and then Ruby appears, she looks overheated, as if she’s been running, she opens her mouth and instead of words or any human sound there comes the chime of a doorbell,
dingdong dingdong
. . .

Daniel awakens, his heart racing. He tries to get up but his legs are gran-ite. He grabs his trousers, pulls one leg off the table and then the other, it feels as if he’s been left for dead on the side of the road.The ringing of the doorbell is continuing. “Just a second!” he cries out.

He doesn’t have the presence of mind or the sense of self-preservation to ask who it is, he simply drags himself through the living room, passes beneath the little oval archway to the foyer, and opens the door to find Iris on his porch, wearing a sweater that is much too large for her—Hampton’s?—and dark glasses, though it is eleven at night.The air smells of night-blooming flowers.

“I need to see you,” she says.

He reaches for her, pulls her to him, and as he embraces her he feels a sickening twist of intuition: Hampton has died. She nuzzles her face into the crook of his neck. He pulls away to get a better look at her.

“Are you all right?” he whispers.

“I just had to get out of there.”

“What’s going on? Has anything happened?”

“Hampton’s mother is there, and his sister, with her daughter, Christine, this skinny ten-year-old nervous wreck, scared of her own shadow, constantly bursting into tears. They’re all nervous wrecks, and between them and the nurse there’s no room for me. I can’t pee without someone knocking on the bathroom door.”

“How’s Hampton?”

“The same. Every day, the same. Except stronger. He takes walks, he eats, but the speech thing, you know. He can’t leave the house because he cannot speak. He has one word. Da-da. Da-da, da-da. It means yes, it means no, it means I’m hungry, I’m cold, it means whatever he wants.

And believe me, everyone is meant to understand that this da-da means

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he wants a soft-boiled egg and that da-da means he wants a back rub.”

Her voice is level, slightly hard, but her eyes show the injury, the pity, and the fury of living with a man who has been ruined.

“It feels really strange,” Daniel says. “You know.That I’ve never seen him.”

“How can you? What would you do? Walk in? Pay him a visit?”

“I don’t know. But it just seems strange. I feel I should. After all . . .”

“Well, it just can’t happen.” She is startled by the harshness in her tone. “Maybe sometime,” she adds. “Just not now.”

“I need to take responsibility,” Daniel says.

“I’m taking responsibility,” Iris says. “Every day. And that’s enough.

He doesn’t even know exactly what happened to him. He certainly doesn’t think it had anything to do with you. I would have to draw him a series of cartoons, and he still probably wouldn’t understand. Come on. Please. I don’t want to talk about it. I need a break from all that.”

Brusquely, even roughly—he forgives and even enjoys the bullying haste of it—she leads him to the bedroom, pushes his shoulders. He falls onto the bed and she swoops onto him in a fury of need. He tries to speak against the sorrowful pressure of her kisses and their teeth click against each other.

He feels that she isn’t ready yet, but she wants him inside of her now.

Her sudden intake of breath whistles through her clenched teeth. Her eyelids flutter and she presses her fingers into his back, urgently. She whispers the details and the extent of her pleasure into his ear, and even as he feels the joy of being with and within her, a thought presents itself:
Why,
he wonders,
didn’t she let me make her ready before I entered her? Why
didn’t she let me touch her, why did she want me to push my way in?
It is a thought of surpassing pettiness—how could the man who once had longed so fervently for the chance to kiss the instep of her foot now quibble over the details of lubrication? But even as he continues to make love to her, even as he feels the sweat pouring off of him, even as he times his movements so as to bring her pleasure, to hear that stunned, despairing, and undefended little yell she makes, even as her grip tightens and he feels himself drawn into the inevitable engulfing swoon of coming, even now he cannot a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

repress the memory of that sharp little intake of breath.The conclusion is inescapable: the forceful penetration is what she is used to, that is what she once had with Hampton, and this is what her body craves, this is what she hungers for, and—right now—this is what she requires.

Yet somehow, through force of will, and by doggedly obeying the commands of his own desire, he is able to stay with her, and now they lie next to each other, panting and relieved. In the dim light of his bedroom-in-exile (he cannot imagine making his life in this house; he occupies it like a fugitive), Iris dozes off, her legs pressed together, her arms at her side, like a child miming sleep. A gentle snore hovers above her lips.

Daniel props himself up on his elbow and gazes down at her. Her breasts are nearly flat against her, the nipples elongated and with a slight droop from two years of nursing Nelson. Her belly gently swells with each breath. What if his child were growing in there?

Not wanting to disturb her sleep, and not trusting himself to keep from touching her, Daniel slips out of bed and walks as softly as he can into the front room. Naked, he sits on the sofa, finds the remote control under a cushion, and turns on the TV.
The Guns of Navarone
is no longer playing, and he flips through the channels looking for something that can hold his interest for ten or fifteen minutes, after which time he feels he ought to wake Iris. He settles on one of the all-news cable channels, where a black lawyer named Reginald McTeer is holding forth about the O. J. Simpson case. Daniel has often seen McTeer’s endlessly smiling, media-friendly face on TV. The program must have sent a crew to McTeer’s office because he is seated at a grand desk, with shelves of law books framing a view of midtown Manhattan behind him. recorded earlier today flashes on the bottom of the screen. McTeer is a stocky man in a dark suit and his signature ten-gallon cowboy hat, bright white with a red satin band. A picture of his light-skinned wife and their three fair children is on his desk, as well as photographs of McTeer enjoying his expensive hobbies and vacations—on safari, in the cockpit of his Mooney, on horseback, and with various well-knowns from the worlds of politics and entertainment. He speaks like a man comfortable with the

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sound of his own voice, with the exhorting enthusiasm of a preacher, or a Cadillac salesman.

“You know, Jim, all the media’s going crazy because Mr. O. J. Simpson got himself a team of first-rate lawyers. Everyone’s going on about justice for sale. And I say: more power to him. This is America, baby.

Everything’s for sale.You think the poor get the same medical care as the rich? Everything is for sale, top to bottom. What you’ve got to understand is that’s how the system works, that’s just what the man’s got to do.

In America green trumps black
and
white.”

McTeer smiles, and then suddenly the TV shows Jim Klein sitting in the cable station’s studio, watching McTeer on a large monitor. Klein, a silver-haired man in a blue blazer, once a newscaster for one of the networks, and now nearing the end of his broadcast career, swivels in his chair and faces another large monitor.

It’s Kate, in Leyden, sitting on the sofa in the living room. Daniel stares at her image for several seconds, not even entirely believing it is actually her. She looks relaxed. Her legs are crossed, her delicate, patri-cian hands are folded onto her lap. She wears a white blouse, a strand of pearls. As she speaks, her name appears in writing on the bottom of the screen: kate ellis author and simpson expert new york.

“You know, Jim, it’s very interesting,” Kate is saying, “and not without significance, that, for all his talk about the law and justice, and about the green and the white and the black, Mr. McTeer fails to mention that he was himself part of the original team of lawyers put together for Simpson’s defense.” As soon as she says this, the broadcast goes to a split-screen format and McTeer can be seen shaking his head, and waving his hand dismissively at the camera, clearly indicating that Kate’s comments are beneath contempt.

But Kate cannot see McTeer and she continues, undaunted, her cultured voice brimming with self-confidence. Daniel leans forward, his hands resting on his square, bare knees. She seems entirely herself, yet at the same time somehow perfect for television. It’s been months since he has seen her looking so relaxed. “Mr. McTeer was asked to be a part of a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

O. J.’s Dream Team and he declined.Why? Well, a statement Mr. McTeer made to the press last year should put his actions in a clear light. He said . . .” Kate glances at a little notebook she has left next to her on the sofa.With a lurch, Daniel recognizes it—it’s a little spiral notebook with a picture of a whale on the cover, which he bought for her two summers ago on a weekend trip to Nantucket. “ ‘Life is too short, and life is too precious, and there are still things on earth that money can’t buy.’ ”

“With all due respect, Ms. Ellis, you can’t believe everything you read in the press,” McTeer says. “There are more writers out there than you can shake a stick at, and some of them are putting groceries on the table by writing a lot of damn foolishness about O. J. Simpson.”

“Okay,” Jim Klein says. “Let me ask you something, Kate Ellis.You’ve been perceived by some as O. J. Simpson’s most potent enemy in the press, and there have been a few—and I’m sure you’ve heard this, so I’m not saying anything you haven’t dealt with, and I’m certainly not trying to imply any agreement with this statement—but some have said that your articles about the case . . .” Klein picks up a thick, glossy magazine and holds it up to the camera: the cover is a portrait of O. J., his skin several shades darker than its actual color, posed on a dark street, grinning, holding a pair of leather gloves in one hand, with the other hand hidden behind his back. “Show a certain insensitivity to the racial implications of the case against Mr. Simpson.”

“There are no racial implications, Jim. None that matter, anyhow.”

“Mighty easy for you to say, Miss Ellis,” McTeer says with a laugh.

“This is a murder case, Mr. McTeer,” Kate says. “Not a debate about civil rights.”

“Are you a lawyer in your spare time, Miss Ellis?” McTeer asks.

“No. But, if it matters, I happen to live with a lawyer, and a very fine lawyer . . .”

Instinctively, Daniel grabs the remote control, but then is unsure whether he wants to turn the volume up or down. He points it toward the set without pressing any buttons. Behind Kate, not quite in focus, is the fireplace, the mantel covered with framed snapshots of the three of them.

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“I fell asleep.”

Startled, abashed, as if caught with pornography, Daniel looks at Iris.

She, too, is naked, with one hand massaging her eyes and the other fig-leafed over her middle.

“A woman has been brutally murdered,” Kate is saying, “and there is at this point a good chance that the man who is clearly responsible for her death is going to go free. All the talk about racist cops . . .”

“What is this?” Iris asks, sitting next to Daniel, draping her leg over him.

“TV,” says Daniel.

“Who is she talking about?”

“O. J. Simpson. Who else?”

“I don’t know.”

“That this man has become some sort of rebel-hero to the African-American community,” Kate is saying, “is completely ludicrous, and offensive.That rappers and other prominent blacks are wearing ‘Free O. J.’

T-shirts is also ludicrous and offensive.We have to ask ourselves: Are we a nation of laws, or aren’t we?”