A Ship Made of Paper (19 page)

burst into tears, yes, yes, he could try to boo-hoo her into bed. It’s been done, what hasn’t happened in the history of seduction? But finally Daniel can do nothing. He watches her as she moves toward the door. Then, a miracle.The bingo parlor of his mind comes up with a clear thought.

“I’ll light your way,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “You can be like a watchman, those guys who carried a lantern and saw people home.”

“Useful work,” Daniel says, with a kind of manic encouragement in his voice, one that borders on hysteria, and then to himself:
Shut the fuck up.

He points the beam up and the light bounces off the ceiling and casts a pale gray glow. He walks behind her; her silhouette has put him into a kind of fugue state.

They have arrived at their destination: the master bedroom. He waits at the threshold, shining the light into the bedroom while Iris goes to the night table, opens a drawer, finds a book of matches, and lights a bedside candle.

[ 127 ]

He can no longer wait there for the impossible to occur. She is not going to ask him to lie with her in that bed. In fact, the quality of her silence now is pushing him away. She seems to have regained her balance.

The drug of the storm is wearing off, she is coming to.

“Why don’t I leave this flashlight with you,” he says.

“It’s okay. I’ve got one in here.”

He forces himself to smile, not certain she can see his face. “Sleep well, Iris.”

Here he is, standing practically in her bedroom, saying good night to her.
It’s enough,
he tells himself. He’s said
Sleep well, Iris,
he’s always wanted to say that.

But lying in that sofa bed, pinioned by the cold and the darkness, he finds that the miracle of saying good night to Iris is
not
enough. Desire blooms in the darkness, he is choking on its scent. He is tormented by her nearness—how can he be letting this chance go by? He tries to force himself to sleep, but sleep gets further from him the more desperately he pursues it. Sleep has never eluded him as maddeningly since the months directly preceding his fall down the stairs, an assault that left him with a whole new vocabulary of pain—searing, metallic, throbbing, dizzying, freezing, burning, electric—and an enduring dependence on painkillers. Percocet and Lortab didn’t really kill the pain, or significantly lessen it, but seemed to create a little chemical pavilion within his consciousness, a semipleasant place to which he could retreat and let the pain go on without him. It had not taken him long to increase his consumption from four pills a day to sixteen, and the number could have increased from there had he not, in a burst of self-preservation, stopped taking them altogether, leaving his body not only without its customary supply of synthetic endorphins but unable to recall how to make its own, as if the supply of opiates had lulled his body into a state of metabolic amnesia. At first, parts of his body that were not even injured began to throb and ache; he felt as if he had been dragged out of some weightless chamber and condemned to suffer the agonies of gravity.Then the wrist, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

the jaw, the ankles, the back—which never really got better—and throughout it all he was unable to sleep.

Which brought him to a couple of months of nightly sleeping pills and which bring him right now to remembering that Iris has sleeping pills, though of the over-the-counter variety. Daniel slips out of bed, steps through the darkness of the guest bedroom, and his foot lands on something furry and alive. He jumps back, frightened. He hears a low groan, and he turns on the flashlight. Scarecrow. She has been curled next to him all this time. She rubs against his legs, and when he bends to pat her she wiggles her hindquarters.

He finds his way to the bathroom. It’s small. Cold. White-walled, tiled, strictly utilitarian. Tub, toilet, sink. He is as careful and quiet as possible. To the right of the sink is one of those novelty gift mirrors meant to look like the cover of
Time
magazine, with the words HAMPTON

WELLES MAN OF THE YEAR embossed on the glass. To the left of the sink, a toothbrush holder affixed to the wall, with two brushes in it. A large and a small. He pulls out the one that is clearly Iris’s. It has a zebra-striped handle, pigeon-pink rubber gum massager at the end, unusually full head of bristles. He touches it against his lips.

Daniel props the flashlight onto the side of the sink and opens the medicine chest. Hampton’s shaving gear, four different kinds of children’s cough medicine, liquid aspirin. Sominex. He pries off the cap, only to find the foil safety seal still intact. He peels it back without really considering the audacity of what he is doing. He shakes two tablets out and then realizes he must take them without water. Fine, whatever.

Just then, the ring of a telephone. He switches off the flashlight, holds his breath, as if he were not an overnight guest making a trip to the john but a thief about to be discovered.A second ring. And then he hears Iris’s voice.

“Hello?”

Daniel grips the edge of the sink for stability.

“I was asleep,” Iris says.

In the darkness and stillness of the house, her voice is everywhere, it

[ 129 ]

is close, it is right next to him. “You know more about it than I do and I’m right here,” Iris says. And then, a little later, she says, “Okay, if the power’s still not on, we’ll get to the train station and come and stay with you down there.” And then, finally, “Me too, bye.”

Daniel knows what “me too” means.

Iris hangs the phone up and a moment later Daniel sees the glow from her flashlight as she comes out of her bedroom and down the hall.

Her footsteps are silent; the only way he can gauge her approach is by the brightening of the light. Should he pretend he was having a pee, quickly stand over the toilet? But what about the door—how can he be doing that with the door wide open? He could be washing his hands—but what sort of lunatic would be washing his hands in the middle of the night?

Not to mention there is no electricity, no pump, no water.

Iris walks into the bathroom and captures him in the beam of her flashlight. She is wearing sweatpants and a turtleneck sweater, slipper socks, and a brightly colored Egyptian cap. “Are you all right?” she says.

She reaches down to ruffle her fingers through the fur on top of Scarecrow’s upturned head.

“Yes. I’m fine,” Daniel says.

“I heard you in here,” she says.

“I’m okay.”

“I was going to check on the kids,” she says. A little exhaust comes out of her mouth as she speaks.

He steps into the corridor and they walk to Nelson’s room. Daniel turns off his flashlight, relying on hers. He is right behind her, with the dog at his side. The dog loves him, he feels this working in his favor.

Iris stops short, forcing contact. They collide softly, his toes on her heel, his chest against her shoulder blades.

She doesn’t so much step back as shift her weight slightly toward him, increasing the contact. Contact displaces the still water between them, and in the splash of it intimacy rises in the wake.

Daniel lowers his forehead so it touches the back of her head. They a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

are still. He breathes her in. She notches backward. His lips find her nape. She lifts her chin, exhales. He wraps his arms around her.

They have crossed a line, but it seems to him they have not ventured too far, not yet, they can still go back, no one will be the wiser.

Iris takes a step forward and Daniel releases her. They go to Nelson’s room. Nelson is in the upper bunk; he has flung off the covers, his legs stick out over the side of the mattress. Ruby is on the bottom, a slowly dimming flashlight poking from the bedclothes and casting upon her sleeping face a cold white light, like the shine of a dying moon.

“I want to tell you something,” Iris says, barely whispering. It’s as if she is willing to wake the children.

“Let’s go,” Daniel says, pulling softly on her. “We don’t want to wake them.”

In the hallway, she pulls the door to Nelson’s room three-quarters closed. “They’re really sleeping deeply,” she says. “They’re so cold, the poor babies.”

“Ruby always sleeps soundly.”

“I can’t sleep at all,” she says. “I never can. I doze, I go in and out. I think sleep is too much of a commitment for me.” She laughs.

“Maybe you have too much on your mind,” he says.
Is that it?
She is suddenly exotic to him, opaque and unknown. No, that’s not it. He just doesn’t
get
her, he lacks that little snap of instant understanding. He must concentrate, she is something he must
work
at.

Daniel remains silent. It is like sitting quietly in the woods, things come to you, the life of the forest forgets about you and resumes. After a few moments, his silence draws her out, she comes softly to the edge of it like a deer.

“I’m going to tell you the truth right now,” she says.

She sees alarm in his eyes and she places a comforting hand on the side of his face.

“I’m not going to say anything
bad
.”

“Okay.”

[ 131 ]

She is puzzled, she tilts her head, regards this strange creature.

“When I first saw you,” Iris says, “I liked you so much. I mean right away. It was a very strange experience.You seemed perfect.”

“That’s me, all right.”

“I’m serious. It was sort of frightening. First of all, you were taken and so was I.”

She’s talking about it in the past tense,
thinks Daniel.
As if now we were free
.

“And second, I mean the thing that was even more frightening was sensing that if we were to get together and something happened, if you turned out not to even like me, or if you took advantage of me, I would never recover from it. I just knew from the start it would be fatal.”

“I would never hurt
you,
” he says. He hears his voice in the strange dead air of that house.

“You wouldn’t mean to,” she says. She moves her hand away from him, but he catches her, presses his lips against her palm.The kiss goes to the pit of her stomach.

Ruby awakens. Their voices have found her in her sleep, carried her toward them. She calls for Daniel, her voice dry, cracked, and low.

Daniel goes back into the children’s bedroom, sits on the edge of her bed. He feels something poking at him, at his ear, the side of his head. He realizes it’s Nelson’s foot, waving back and forth, though Nelson is still asleep.

“Are you all right?” Daniel whispers to Ruby.

“Yes,” she says. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She raises her arms, as if it’s a matter of course that he will lift her, carry her.

When Ruby is finished, Daniel carries her back to Nelson’s bedroom.

Daniel carefully places Ruby onto the bed, she is practically asleep, but somehow the touch of the cold pillow awakens her. Her eyes are suddenly large, curious.

“We’re staying here all night. Right?”

“That’s right, Monkey,” he says.

She is silent. A minute passes; he imagines her asleep. But then her a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

cold fingers come to rest on the top of his hand. “I love you the most of everyone,” she says.

Daniel lies next to her, and Iris cannot sleep. Her thoughts skip like stones over water. Nelson, the storm, a Japanese maple her father planted in their front yard, which she was always convinced irritated the white neighbors with its unseasonable purple leaves . . . Iris has never been able to fall asleep next to someone with whom she was in bed for the first time; choosing someone always meant giving up a night’s sleep.

Making love as a teenager was easier—she had to end up in her own bed, alone, and she could sink into sleep as if it were a kind of innocence.

Even in college—and why why why did she allow her parents to talk her into attending Spelman, more than ninety percent black, a hundred percent female, a vast poaching ground for the men of Morehouse, brother-sister schools conceived, it seemed, for conception—even at college she developed a small reputation as the girl who always had to end up in her own safe little bed, the girl who says she has to get home because her teddy bear misses her.

It’s been years since she has slept with anyone but Hampton. She has a moment of intense pining for him as if he were oceans away, irretrievable, dead. She misses the ease and comfort of being with a man who has seen her body week after week, year after year, and who is, as far as she can tell, blind to its small deteriorations. It has all happened gradually, and he has failed to notice. Hampton’s criticisms of her are intellectual, spiritual, practical; he is more distressed by her forgetfulness than by her having grown older. He would rather her finish her doctorate—or junk it—than get a boob job. Even when it seems to her that Hampton holds her in contempt, his voraciousness for her body seldom varies.
I love your body,
he has said over and over, so many times and with such suddenness and dis-regard for her mood of the moment or what has been passing between them that she has come to find it an affront. It’s all he seems to praise, his entire celebration of her is confined to that simple statement. He does

[ 133 ]

not say
I need your advice
and he doesn’t say
You fascinate me,
he surely doesn’t ask her what is on her mind. He has little interest in her thoughts and sometimes she can barely blame him. But if her life is a little dull, then she sees no reason why that must be held against her, this life and her role in it is, after all, something they both made, it’s a joint project. And when she has the emotional energy to refuse to be silenced, to speak up no matter what, she can see him
pretending
to pay attention, while it is heart-freezingly, face-slappingly clear that his thoughts are elsewhere.

And after so disrespecting her, for him to look up and say how beautiful she is, how fucking hot she makes him: he may as well be saying,
Too bad
you’re not operating on my level.Too bad you’re an idiot.