A Ship Made of Paper (16 page)
“You?”
“First of all,” she explains, “too dark. Second, bad hair.”
“You have wonderful hair,” Daniel says.
“You don’t know anything about my hair,” she says, laughing. “I can’t stand when people talk about my hair, especially . . . Anyhow, my family wasn’t part of their crowd. Hampton’s people are really amazingly provincial. They’re all intertwined with each other, mixed up in each other’s business. My folks had enough money, that wasn’t really a problem. I mean I wasn’t from the projects or anything. My father’s a hospital administrator, my mother taught kindergarten, before arthritis hit her. But I didn’t belong to any of the right clubs. I was
not
a Girl Friend a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
or a Jack and Jill. I didn’t know shit about Oak Bluffs or Sag Harbor. I think one of the things Hamp liked about me was I wasn’t perfect in the eyes of his family. I was his little rebellion. A dark-skinned girl, with rude politics. But . . . you know. The rebellion runs its little course and slowly but surely he turns into all those people who he swore he’d never be like. He really and truly wishes I was lighter, and I think he feels the same way about Nelson. And the really strange part of it is Hampton is obsessed with being black, he’s black twenty-four hours a day, it’s all he thinks about. He sort of dislikes white people, but at the same time he’s like most of us: He really wants white people to like
him
. And that, by the way, is the dirty little secret of the Africans in America. We really want y’all to like us.”
The electricity cuts out for about the time of a long blink, the world disappears, then shakes itself back into existence. When the lights come back, the digital clock on the stove flashes 12:00 over and over. Daniel and Iris sit across from each other, silent, waiting to see what will happen next. And then a few moments later, the lights go out, and this time they don’t come back on. This time it’s for good, they both can feel it.
The children cry out upstairs, with more delight than alarm.
“I love you,” Daniel says in the darkness.
Suddenly, in the distance was a pop, and then a plume of iridescent smoke rose
above the trees, a vivid tear in the dark silken sky.
“Someone’s got her,” Daniel said. “I just saw a flare.”
Hampton looked up. Only a small circle of sky was visible through the
trees. “What was a damn blind girl doing out here? Even with eyes you can’t
make your way.”
“She was raised here,” Daniel said.“Her father was the caretaker. She came
back to look after him when he got sick. Smiley.”
“Smiley? What do you mean?”
“That’s what everyone called him. I used to see him in town when I was
a kid.”
Hampton shook his head. “These people, they’re living in another century.They got their old family retainers, their fox-hunting clubs, their ice boats,
they play tennis with these tiny little wooden racquets, and NewYear’s Eve they
put on the rusty tuxedos their grandfathers used to wear.”
“Just a small percentage,” Daniel said. “They can be pretty absurd, but it’s
okay, if you have a sense of humor about it.”
“That was the first thing Iris ever said about you, how you have this terrific sense of humor.”
“Class clown,” said Daniel. “In my case, middle class.”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
In the city, Hampton comes home to what used to be his and Iris’s apartment and which is now his alone. It’s four rooms in a high-rise down on Jane Street, in the Village. On a block of picturesque town houses, most of them over 150 years old, the building is a twenty-five-story eyesore, but the saving grace is that once Hampton is inside he doesn’t have to see it, all he looks out on are tree-lined streets, and pastel blue, pink, gray, and cream brick Federal town houses, with their tiny backyards and steep tiled roofs and the crooked old chimneys right out of
Mary Poppins.
He’s taken the subway home, the most efficient way uptown after work. A taxi from Wall Street to Jane Street would take an hour, whereas the subway gets him there in ten minutes. And the cost is a token, not the fourteen to twenty dollars a crawling, ticking taxi would cost. Hampton is becoming more and more careful about spending money.This creeping fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with how much he’s making, because he’s making more money than ever before, and it has nothing to do with rising expenses, because his expenses are stable. It just seems that the older he gets, the more watchful he becomes about his expenditures.
He is still a long way from the miserly habits of his grandfather—who, according to family lore, held on to a dollar until the eagle grinned—and he will always disapprove of how his haughty, judging, acid-tongued mother would say things like “That Negro spends money like a nigger.” But lately it seems to Hampton a breach of taste to squander money. When shopping, he counts his change carefully, increasingly certain he is about to be cheated. On the train up to Leyden he looks with contempt at the passengers who have paid nearly double to ride in that dopey Amtrak Business Class. For what? A bottle of Saratoga water and the mandarin delight of sitting in a seat that is exactly like every other seat on the train, except that the upholstery is blue rather than red.Yet even carefully monitoring his own expenditures leaves Hampton unsoothed and insecure. He worries over his investments, suffers the manic fluctuations of the NASDAQ, the slow attrition of some poorly chosen mutual funds. But even more than he worries about the stock market, Hampton worries about Iris’s management of their household accounts. In his view, she remains a child
[ 109 ]
with money, without impulse control, with no sense of sobriety, or planning, or self-denial. Sometimes in the middle of the day, like one of those mothers you read about who are suddenly certain that their son has just fallen on some battlefield halfway around the world, Hampton will look up from his work and practically
feel
Iris making some ill-advised purchase, an antique rug, a digital camera that will never be used, a half gallon of organic milk at twice the price of regular milk, a full tank of premium gasoline, even though he has told her over and over that a friend who covers petrochemicals has assured him that the so-called high-grade gas doesn’t extend the life of your car’s engine by so much as an hour, nor does it protect the environment.
He is sitting in the L-shaped dining room, with its narrow window looking out onto Hudson Street. Rain is falling in sheets, it’s loud enough to drown out the usual sound of traffic, the taxis bumping over the cob-blestone street. He flips through today’s mail—statements from Smith Barney and Citibank, two phone bills, a Con Ed bill, requests to sub-scribe to magazines, buy golf clubs, upgrade home security, vacation in Portugal, switch credit cards, purchase vitamins, support the United Negro College Fund, and, on the bottom of the pile, an actual
letter,
with his name and address written in ink.
Eagerly he opens the envelope.The letter is from his old friend Brenda Morrison, now Morrison-Rosemont, sent from Atlanta, where she and her husband, Clarence, are doctors—he’s an allergist and Brenda’s a pediatrician.The letter is written on Brenda’s professional stationery, at the top of which the first and last letters of her name seem to be toppling over, held upright only through the efforts of two hardworking teddy bears. She has sent along a snapshot, and Hampton notes that Brenda’s weight gain continues unabated. She is now two hundred pounds, with two chins and working on a third. Hampton has known Brenda since they were children and she was a wild and bony thing, with scouring-pad hair and furious eyes, and enough of a survival sense to work her way into the Welles family fabric, first as Hampton’s sister’s best friend, and then as a kind of hon-orary Welles—Hampton’s parents ended up sending Brenda to college. In a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
the snapshot, she sits next to Clarence, with his prim little mustache, good-natured smile, his baby-blue turtleneck, and, on either side of them, golden retrievers, Martha and Ticonderoga, mother and son. The Post-it on the back of the picture explains:
Ti was the runt of Martha’s litter and we
just didn’t have the heart to give him away.But now he’s nearly eighteen months and
he still acts like he’s a baby. Except he think’s
I’m
his mommy.
Hampton finds himself staring at the note. He is stuck on the fact that she has spelled “thinks” with an apostrophe. A sharp twist of racial impatience goes through him, about how his people have had three hundred years to learn the language and here they are still misspelling the easy words.
Dear Hampton!
Hampton looks up from the letter. Why in the world would she put an exclamation point after his name?
How are you? You wanted us to send you some material pertaining to Clarence and my idea for a business—helping patients collect what is due to them from their insurance companies.Well, we’ve been hard at work on a prospectus, and if I do say so myself what we’ve come up with is pretty damn impressive! Unfortunately, the computer design company we entrusted with our work was in the process of moving. I’m sure you would have advised me against doing business with family, but Clarence’s nephew is really amazing with computers and graphics and that whole world I feel so uncomfortable with. Unfortunately, he’s pretty disorganized. I think he’s ADD or something, he just races from one thing to the next. I guess a lot of creative types have that problem.All this is to say, our work got lost in the shuffle. Clarence’s nephew was really upset and we all spent a whole weekend looking everywhere for the stuff. It was really heartbreaking and quite a pain in the butt, and it’ll set us back a couple of weeks. In the meanwhile, I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about you or this project.We’d still love to get this thing up and running and you are still our favorite investment banker. (All right, you’re the ONLY investment banker we know, but even if we knew others you’d still be our favorite!)
[ 111 ]
Amateur hour. Does she really expect him to raise money for her little cottage industry? Hampton senses her nervousness coming right through her handwriting. Just as he could once detect the hesitations, the soul-stammers of desire back in the days of courting and conquering women, so now, too, in these moneyed days of his early middle age, can Hampton radar out the slightest tremor of anxiety before someone delivers a pitch.That this fumble for poise should come from Brenda is sad, in a way—she’s like family and she doesn’t even need the money. But it also gives him the grim, burnt comfort of thriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable. He spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, only money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain, anything legal, and a few things a little less than legal, too. But Hampton’s proximity to this school of sharks is more than physical, he has made an
alliance
with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride of the damned. His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter of a percent less on a deal. Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream of fractions and deals that is the secret life of the world, that reality inside reality, the molten core of profit and loss that burns at the center of history and which everything else—temples, stadiums, concert halls,
everything
—
has been built to hide.
Clarence and I hope to be up in New York for a Conference of African-American Physicians Meeting from December 2–5. Clarence calls it the Funference of African-American Positions.We’d love it if you could join us for dinner or a show or anything on any of those days. If you could talk Iris into coming into Manhattan then we could make it a foursome. I hope you can tear her away from her school work. Maybe she can give us that Harlem Renaissance tour she’s been promising. Is her thesis still on the Harlem Renaissance—or has she changed her mind?
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Hampton stops reading. The rain continues to lash at the windows.
Thunder booms like an avalanche of boulders. He knew Brenda couldn’t get through a letter without a dig at Iris. Brenda couldn’t possibly care what Iris is doing to fulfill the requirements of her Ph.D.What’s Brenda, with her intellectual curiosity measuring something like 2 on the intellectual Richter scale, planning to do? Go to some college library and read Iris’s monograph?
Yet. His heart feels queer, as if it is suddenly circulating blood that is a little oily and a little cold. Hampton is vulnerable to the suggestion that Iris might not be in possession of a first-class mind. There is a vagueness to her, a lack of precision. Sometimes, he thinks this is a result of her profoundly feminine nature, yet in his line of work he meets dozens of women whose minds are scientific, logical, calculating, aggressive. Iris’s is not. Both she and Hampton have been explaining her long career in graduate school to themselves and to the world at large as somehow a result of an excess of intellectual curiosity, an unwillingness to be pigeon-holed, and the demands of motherhood, and Hampton is perfectly willing to stay within the confines of this official explanation.What he is not willing to say, except to himself, is that Iris is still in grad school, and no closer to the end than she had been last year, or the year before, or the year before that, because she is simply too confused to complete her work; that, in other words, the machinery of her mind is not quite up to the task. Did he consider her his
inferior?
No, not necessarily—in fact, not at all. She is a little abstract.Yet she is perceptive, she can see right through him to his tender, undefended deeper nature. She is the center of his emotional life.
