A Ship Made of Paper (2 page)

He is astonished by his own ardor. He is like a man who suddenly discovers he can sing, who one day opens his mouth in the shower and music bursts out of him, each note dipped in gold. But the timing is wrong.

He is thirty-six years old, he has commitments, and until now he gave no more credence to the transforming, commanding power of love than he did to the myth of Atlantis. Yet this desire, this overwhelming need to look at Iris—who he is convinced is not only beautiful but beautiful in a way that only he can fully appreciate, a beauty somehow designed especially for his eyes—is something he has allowed himself to succumb to.

What harm, really, can it do?

Daniel wants to do no harm, nor does he want any harm to come to him. In fact, he has moved back to Leyden, home of his bucolic, mediocre childhood, leaving a prosperous career back in New York City, largely because he had lived for months with the fear that either one or

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several African-Americans were going to beat him within an inch of his life, or perhaps go that extra inch and kill him. It was not an idle, racist fantasy; he had been told flat out that his time was near. He had unsuccessfully defended a black man accused of dealing drugs, and on the day of the sentencing, a short, mild-looking black man in a blue suit, a white turtleneck, and a diamond earring whispered to Daniel, “Keep your eyes open. You know what I’m saying?” Within a week, Daniel’s own dread had wound itself around him so tightly that he couldn’t see a person of color—a cleaning woman, a bus driver, acrobats and break-dancers in Washington Square Park, a bunch of high school kids horsing around on the subway platform—without thinking that this one, or that one, might be an emissary from his furious client. “I’m afraid of black people,” he finally said to Kate. It was the most shaming thing he had ever told another person. He felt like an insect, a fool. Kate, for her part, was entirely sym-pathetic.
And to think you defended that fucking idiot for free,
she kept on saying. Did anything she said make him feel better? He can no longer remember. He spent another two months crossing the street to get away from suspicious-looking blacks, spending a fortune in cab fares, exhausting himself with gasps and double takes, feeling weak and loathsome, and they caught up with him anyhow.

Daniel and Iris walk into the Koffee Kup together. Of the three breakfast spots in Leyden, this is the oldest, and the core clientele are natives of Leyden. It’s a simple, sparsely decorated storefront, with a high ceiling and overhead fans, a row of dark wooden booths, a long Formica counter, and a scattering of tables up front. The women who run it—

country women with checkered domestic lives and a penchant for teasing and wisecracks—open for business at six in the morning, when the truckers, contractors, and farmworkers gather for ham and eggs. Now that Leyden is changing, with more and more city people moving in, there are fancier and, to be honest about it, better places to have breakfast, but Daniel still frequents the Double K, where his parents took him for his first restaurant meal. He holds the door open for Iris, knowing there will surely be people here whom he knows, people to whom he a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

will have to nod, or greet, or perhaps even speak with. Kate, however, will certainly not be among them. It is not yet nine o’clock and she is probably still sleeping, or if she is awake she isn’t out of bed yet. She is probably pouring herself a cup of Viennese roast from the thermos he always places at her bedside before leaving with Ruby in the morning.

Daniel and Iris sit at a table near the front window. The youngest of the Koffee Kup waitresses, ponytailed and pierced Becky, brings Daniel a coffee and a glass of water, which is what she always does as soon as he sits down. She brings nothing for Iris and seems, in fact, not to register her presence.

“I think we’re going to need another coffee here, Becky,” Daniel says.

Becky looks momentarily confused, and then she turns and looks at Iris as if seeing her for the first time.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, her voice flat.

“Do you have decaf ?” Iris says brightly, smiling. She has a space between her front teeth.

“Do you want decaf ?” Becky asks. She heaves a sigh.

“That would be great,” Iris says to Becky.

What Daniel does not see: Iris’s foot is tapping nervously. The waitress’s slight stubbornness about the decaf is potential trouble. All Iris wants is for it to go unnoticed; the small rudeness is the sort of thing that her husband would be fuming about, if he were here right now. He’s thin-skinned, his radar for slights is always on, always scanning the social horizon for incoming missiles. Iris has sat with him in innumerable restaurants while he has glared at the waitress, gestured impatiently at the waiter, sent back the soup, sent back the fish, asked to speak to the manager, and let it be known with a few choice words that he was no one to be trifled with. And it’s not just in restaurants that this highly tuned sensitivity to insult turns what Iris always hopes will be a simple outing into a kind of despairing war against prejudice. At a Yankees game when the usher asks a second time to check his tickets, in the first-class cabin on a flight to Hawaii when the stewardess forgets to bring him an extra pillow and then tells him there are no more macadamia nuts, at the

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Jaguar dealership where the salesman will not let them take the car out for a test drive without xeroxing his license and taking an imprint of his American Express card.

“I guess they’re brewing up a fresh pot of the decaf,” Daniel says. “Are you going to have time?”

They talk about the children, and Daniel feels the minutes ticking away; it’s like feeling himself bleed to death. He wonders, wildly, if Iris remembers that he is not really Ruby’s father. How can he bring that up without it seeming small-minded? Iris’s coffee has still not arrived, and she checks her watch, looks quickly over her shoulder at Becky, who is at the far end of the counter leisurely chatting to an old man in a tractor cap and suspenders.

“I’m having such a hard time in school,” Iris says. “And I can’t be late for this meeting with my advisor. He already thinks I’m a flake.”

“He can’t think that.”

“I’m getting my doctorate in American Studies, and I can’t even figure out my thesis. I keep changing it.The thing is, I really want to get my degree, but another part of me would be happy to stay in school forever. It’s so much fun, and it’s not like I’ve got to put bread on my family table.”

“When I first met you, you were thinking about Thurgood Marshall.”

“That was my husband’s idea. Marshall was sort of a friend of his family.Well, there have been many changes of topic since then. God. All this time off from school, all this marriage and motherhood, it’s sort of gummed up my brain. I’m in a state of constant confusion.”

“I never liked school,” Daniel says, though it’s not true. He’s not sure why he said it.

“I like school. I just don’t like my brain right now.” Her laugh is soft, heartrending. She pushes the sleeves of her sweater up, showing her articulated forearms, dark and hairless. “I better get out of here,” she says.

“This is ridiculous.You didn’t even get your coffee.”

“It’s no big deal.” Her heart is racing; how long will it take him to figure out that the waitress is deliberately not serving her? “Anyhow, you said the coffee’s not very good here.”

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“Well, at least drink the water, the water’s excellent.”

Outside, they linger for a moment. “Becky was weird in there,”

Daniel says.

“Becky?” Iris can feel it coming; he is going to declare himself outraged on her behalf. He is going to be her prince in shining liberal armor.

“Yes, our waitress,” he says. He feels a quickening, he has found a way to say what he has wanted to say for so long. “The thing about Becky is she’s weird around beautiful women.” There. It’s said. He makes a helpless gesture, as if he were tossing up his life, seeing where it would land. He doesn’t dare look at her. “Because you are. So extraordinarily beautiful.”

“Oh.” She says it as if he were a child who has come up with something adorable. “Well, thanks.”

“I still owe you a cup of coffee,” he says. “How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she says.

He watches her as she hurries toward her car. Her generous bottom, her funny little run.The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as if promising that winter will never arrive. A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume of the slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river. What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as if you were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up into its arms as if you were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire?Yes, yes, all that and more.The world can crush you with its beauty.

Back in the city, Daniel’s firm had offices that took three floors in a stylish Art Deco building on Lexington Avenue, with astrological mosaics in the lobby, and arte moderne numerals over the filigreed brass elevator doors. But here in Leyden his place of work is as humble as his practice, two rooms in a wood-framed building near the center of town. It’s an ungraceful, stolid sort of building, the architectural equivalent of a schoolmarm, a nun, a maiden aunt; it once had been, in fact, a board-inghouse, from 1925 to 1960, owned by two musical, free-thinking

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German sisters, and run exclusively for local unmarried women—gen-teel shop-women, schoolteachers, and a woman named Marjorie Inger-soll, who had a small private income that she supplemented by giving painting and drawing lessons, and whose cheerful landscapes, with their agitated skies and roller coaster hills and valleys, are still displayed along the stairways and in the hallways. Now, the house has been turned into an office complex, where Daniel rents a two-room suite, where century-old locust trees scrape their branches against the windows at the wind’s slightest provocation. Eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, which back in the city would get him thirty square feet in Staten Island.

Daniel climbs the back stairs to the second floor, so lost in thought as he replays and what-ifs this morning’s meeting with Iris that he forgets today’s first appointment will be with his parents, who have announced that they wish to review their last will and testament. Daniel is not their lawyer; the meager bits of legal business they have generated throughout their adult lives have been handled by one of the town’s old-timers, Owen Fitzsimmons, an ectoplasmic old sort with funereal eyes and icy hands. Fitzsimmons was a longtime chiropractic patient of Daniel’s father’s, and while Mrs. Fitzsimmons was alive, the two couples took golfing vacations together to Phoenix and San Diego, formed a wine-tasting club that was quite a success in Leyden in the late 1970s, and one summer traveled together to Scotland and Ireland, where they stayed in castles, golfed, and came back home percolating with plans to retire and expatriate to what they continually referred to as “the British Isles.” When his parents called for an appointment, Daniel had wondered if there’d been some falling-out with Fitzsimmons, though that seemed to him unlikely. Daniel found Fitzsimmons both vain and dour, a chilly man in a worn blue blazer with some mysterious crest over the pocket. But then Daniel’s parents—Carl and Julia Emerson—were no less dour, and even shared with Fitzsimmons whatever circulatory difficulty it is that prevents one’s hands, fingers, and particularly fingertips from getting the blood flow necessary to keep them at a mam-malian temperature. Because their work entailed touching people, both of them were continually blowing on their hands to try to warm them.

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Daniel’s secretary is named Sheila Alvarez. She is a stout, round-faced woman. She wraps her dark braids so they sit like a woven basket on top of her head, and she wears complicated necklaces with tiny stones, bits of seashell, and pantheistic amulets. The least alluring of three daughters, she is one of those women who get stuck with the task of caring for aging, suffering parents, and when they died she was all alone in the world, and too emotionally spent to do anything about it. She has a far-flung network of women friends, with whom she is continually on the phone. She is, however, unfailingly efficient, and since getting ill last winter, when Daniel not only protected her job during a long convalescence but also paid for the hospital charges that the insurance company didn’t cover, she is fiercely loyal to Daniel, protective and vigilant, as if the office were under continual attack, or threat of attack, though, of course, it is not: it’s just a humdrum rural practice, with one criminal case for every ten real estate closings, and even the criminal cases rarely come to trial.

This practice barely affords him a decent living—in fact, he’s not really clearing much more than he pays Sheila—and it is as close to his former, sleek professional life as a campfire is to a blast furnace, and sometimes it is remarkable to Daniel not only that he has chosen this quiet, country life but that he finds it so agreeable. True, leaving New York was more like fleeing New York, but he could have chosen someplace with more people, better cases, more money to be made.Yet here he is, right back in Leyden, which, for years, every time he left it—during prep school, college, law school, after holidays, summers, the funeral of an old grade school buddy—he always assumed he was seeing it for the very last time. Kate, upon agreeing to move to Leyden with him, sensed that Daniel wanted to be near his aging parents, and, despite her misgiv-ings, she didn’t see how she could prevent him from fulfilling his filial duties. Though every story he ever told her about his parents made them seem as if they were monsters of reserve, two towering touch-me-nots who treated Daniel as if he were not so much their son as their charge, one of those boys from a nineteenth-century novel, a boisterous nephew left behind by a floozy sister, an orphan whose parents have disappeared

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under mysterious circumstances in India, a little human mess it had fallen to them to mop up.