A Ship Made of Paper (20 page)

Daniel seems to want to know everything about her. It’s his nature, there is nothing he can do about it. He will want to know if she has ever been unfaithful to Hampton before, and if she tells him she has, then it’s her guess that he will eventually want to know with whom, when, where, the reasons, and the results, and even if she says no, he will ask why not.

He will ask her what she dreams, how the day was spent, what she had for lunch, where she buys her clothes, the names of her relatives, the route she takes from her house to school. He will devour her with love bites, he will lick the surface of her as if she were a scoop of ice cream until she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears.

Iris reaches over Daniel’s sprawled body, with its deep sonorous buzz and smell of sleep, and she gropes for the flashlight on the night table. But it’s been knocked over in the commotion, it has tumbled onto the carpet, rolled onto the bare floor. She finally finds it, halfway under the bed. She hurries back to the nest of quilts and blankets, willing to awaken Daniel with the bounce of the mattress, but he sleeps through it all.

She switches on the flashlight. She puts her hand over its broad face to cut down on the silvery glare, and she points the beam of light at Daniel to inspect what she can see of his naked body.

The most puzzling thing is that he is naked at all. She wonders at the thermodynamics of this, how such white skin, which she imagines to be porous, diaphanous, and through which would pass all heat and light, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

how such pigmentless tissue could conceivably hold enough heat to allow him to sleep.

She moves the beam closer to him. A circle of light illuminates his chest. A sleek dark wave of hair rushes between his pectoral muscles.

That ivory-white skin and that dark body hair. She stares at it, struck at how barbaric it looks. It makes her think of the stooped figures in school-books, emigrating across ancient tundra two steps ahead of the glaciers.

How strange that whites ever compared black folk with apes, when it’s the whites
who are covered in hair.
Once, in college, Iris had entertained the idea of becoming a doctor; the notion—like so many of her inspired plans—had a short life span: by April she was bored with it, and by the end of the semester she could barely pass her finals. Still, she remembers: the dermis, the epidermis, subcutaneous tissue, dermal papilla, adipose tissue, the subpapillary network, and good old Meissner’s corpuscle, the name of which she could never forget and the function of which she could never learn. Back then, she thought of all the components of human skin that are absolutely identical for Africans, Japanese, Europeans, and how we are all so similar beneath those topmost layers. But now, in bed with a Caucasian for the first time in her life, what strikes her is the difference, stranger and more unsettling than she would have expected. She rubs her fingertip across an inch or two of Daniel’s skin, along the shoulder where the skin is bare, and cool to the touch, with little bumps, a kind of cottony grit. Without entirely meaning to, she slips a finger under his arm, feels the long silky hair, startling in its angora softness. A film of perspiration is on her fingertip now, she rubs it against her thumb, brings it to her nose, finds Daniel’s smell within the bitterness of failed deodorant like the meat of a pecan surrounded by its broken shell.

She places her hand over the face of the flashlight more tightly so only a faint light escapes as she points it toward his face. His bushy brows, his long, somehow unsturdy-looking nose, his thin lips, the dark growth of whiskers on his chin, as if someone had rubbed iron filings onto his jaw.

His hair rises in clumps in different directions. He looks slightly mad, pleasantly ruined.

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She had been thinking about him in this way for months. How had it begun? What first drew her? She cannot remember.The quality of his attention as he listened to her? The gentle seriousness, the way an angel would hear you, not necessarily able to grant your wishes but able to know exactly why you’ve made them. Talking to him was like running a handful of riverbed stones through one of those tumblers, the kind that turn pebbles into shining things, almost jewels.

Her first time in bed with a white man. How the sweat poured off him, how he whimpered, how the breath broke in his throat like something frozen that’s been stepped on, the copious, almost surreal amounts of semen that came out of him, the tireless frenzy of his fucks, his eyes staring at her, memorizing her, conquering her and surrendering at the same time.

Iris lifts the blanket and shines the flashlight further down Daniel’s body.
Am I really going to do this?
But she doesn’t stop herself, lets the light settle on his penis. Who was it who referred to every white man’s penis as Pete Rose? Was that her father? No, impossible that something so naughty would come out of his pursed, prim mouth, a man who said sug-arplums instead of shit. Her brothers? But they were so courtly around her—more dedicated than her parents to the exhausting, irritating project of keeping her the baby of the family. Yet someone had said it, and whenever she sees a picture of Pete Rose, with his schoolboy haircut and the Who Me? expression on his face, she invariably thinks: dick.Yet here, at last, is an actual white man’s penis and she stares at it, flaccid and pink, looking so unprotected, vulnerable, raw, and unsheathed, like something that belongs inside the body, its own body, that is, something you are not meant to see. Like the real Pete Rose, this particular member does not seem as if he’s going to make it into the Hall of Fame.

Yet he has pleased her, Pete Rose or not Pete Rose. He slipped in, and somehow the gentleness of the entrance, the unassuming, gracious, perfect guest aspect of his sexual presence caused in her an explosion of pleasure.

Suddenly, she remembers who calls the white penis Pete Rose. Hampton.

The thought of him creates a guilty nausea in her: he must never know.

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

But what was Hampton doing talking about Caucasian sex organs? She can’t remember. Surely some rant, some long riff of disparagement. Hampton, materially so well-off, so light complexioned, so privileged, seethes against the white world as if he were particularly oppressed, as if the indignities visited upon him had some greater resonance because they were happening to a man of his high quality. Even the gross misdeeds committed against less fortunate folk—the jailings, the beatings—were assaults against him, who perceived them so starkly and felt them so keenly.And so he feeds this disdain for whites into the furnace of himself, as if without it he would cease to be fully alive. His sense of white people is full of the feelings of in-justice—how easy life is for them, how their power contradicts Darwin, for surely they are not the fittest—but without any great passion for justice: Hampton admires white hegemony, envies it, and he wishes it were the other way around, he wishes that the privileges were all his, and that to be born into a black family, a special black family, that is, one like his, would be-stow on you the kind of birthright that the spoiled white brats took for granted. Inasmuch as possible, Hampton has chosen to live in that sort of world.The people he likes to be around, the people he does business with, drinks with, jogs around the Central Park reservoir with, are African-American strivers like himself, who feel all the proper respect for Hampton’s pedigree—a lineage of accomplishment and gentility that no white person would even recognize, with fortunes based on such peculiarly Negro enterprises, such as cosmetics for dark-skinned women, Cadillac dealerships, weekly newspapers servicing the folks in Newark and the South Side of Chicago, radio stations at the back end of the dial. Wherever Hampton travels, from D.C. to Boston to Detroit to San Francisco, there are people like him, more than willing to pay their respects not only to Hampton but to his lineage, because to celebrate what it means to be a Welles, they also af-firm the importance of their own family names, the majesty of their schools and clubs and summer resorts.They bow to one another as a way of genu-flecting to themselves; they kiss each other like smooching with a mirror.

Daniel murmurs something in his sleep, and Iris clicks off the flashlight.

She lies back in bed, rearranges her pillows, and recalls with a kind of

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thrilled grief the sounds he made while they were making love, the pigeon warble of mounting excitement, the sweet undefended cry of surrender.

The night has ended, the snow has finally stopped.Vast mountain ranges of vapor have been heaved up by the storm, but between the clouds and the horizon colors appear—pale blue, slate gray, and yellow. Inside the house it is light enough to read, light enough to lift yourself up on your elbows and look around the room and see the scatter of clothing on the floor.

Their noses are cold, their foreheads, their feet, the tips of their fingers. The furnace is still dead, the digital clocks are black.

“Good morning,” Daniel says. “Did you even sleep for one second?”

“I’m not much of a sleeper anyhow,” she says.

“I don’t think I slept, it was more like passing out.”

“It seemed,” she says.

“Did I snore?”

She shakes her head no.

“So, let me ask you,” he says. He presses himself against her. “Has the myth of Caucasian sexual prowess been put into clearer perspective?”

“Yes,” she says. “It has.”

Daniel’s smile slowly fades. He looks, in fact, unnerved. A little crack of cold air opens up between them as he shrinks back from her.

“You were wonderful,” Iris says. “You
are
wonderful. I can’t tell you how impressed I am. Seriously. Did your parents send you to sex camp?”

“Sex camp?”

“Don’t white folks have all these different camps for their kids—

baseball camp, weight loss camp, computer camp.”

He rolls next to her, gathering her closer. He is powerless not to. He has waited too long to lie next to her, he has yet to get his fill.

“I’m sore,” she says, removing his hand.

“You are?” he says, smiling.

“Aren’t you?”

It dawns on him. He reaches behind him, feels the small of his back.

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

“My back doesn’t hurt, which is a sort of Class B miracle. As for Mr.

Johnson, he’s been waiting for this his whole life.”

She laughs, though she doesn’t find it all that funny—what amuses her is his intention to amuse her.

She places her hands on Daniel’s shoulder, as if to give him a little shove. But the feel of his flesh fascinates her, derails her impulse to rough him up a little. She squeezes his arm and then kisses his shoulder, touches her tongue against his skin—he tastes like a wooden countertop upon which someone has not quite cleaned up a spill of molasses.

He wants to make declarations. He wants to tell her how long he has dreamed of lying next to her, and he wants to tell her how the reality of actually being with her has exceeded his most fervid imaginings—but he has already said these things. He has discovered little imperfections in her body—brackish breath as she grew tired, a kind of abdominal fullness that suggests one day she will have a belly—but, of course, in the state he is in, these things have only made her more desirable: they have made her real, they have made her
his.
He wants to tell her she is beautiful, but how many times can you say that in twelve hours without it becoming suspect? Yet, he must declare something. Is he, for instance, meant to go home now and pretend none of this has happened?

She seems to have gotten there before him. She looks at him with great seriousness and says, “Say something to me.Tell me what I want to hear.”

His first instinct is to declare his love, but something tells him not to.

“I’ll tell you this,” he says. “I’m not going to crowd you. I know your life is complicated.”

“It is,” she says softly.

“More than mine. If I lost everything, it wouldn’t be that much. I’m not married. I don’t have a kid.”

“You have Ruby.”

“She’s not really mine.”

“Yes she is, the way you love her. And if anything happened, you might never see her again. That would be so terrible.”

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“It’s not like you.You have a good life.You have your son, school, your life, everything. I don’t want to be a problem.”

“So what do you think of me? What do you think of a woman who’d fuck some guy in her husband’s bed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she should be taken out and stoned to death in front of a vast crowd.”

He smiles to let her know he’s kidding, but she doesn’t find it funny, and the timing irritates her.

“Well, nobody needs to know, do they,” she says.

“What are we supposed to do?” he asks.

“You think I’m going to change my whole life because you slept in this bed last night?” she says. Her voice is a little sharp, which she regrets.

But, really.

“Yes, I think I do,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m going to figure out a better way to feel. And in the meanwhile, I promise to behave.”

She makes a silencing gesture. She thinks she hears something, a noise from down the hall.

“Nobody’s awake yet,” Daniel says.

She listens again. He’s right; the house is silent. She hears the distant whine of a snowmobile, powering through the white enameled stillness of the world like a dentist’s drill. She kisses him.

“You’d better go back to the guest room,” Iris says. “Nelson could walk in here any second.”

“All right.” He leans out of the bed, as if out of a life raft, reaching down for what is left of the night’s wreckage—his shirt, his underwear, his pants.

She feels a sudden gust of desperation at the sight of him beginning to leave. What if this never can happen again? He looks at her over his shoulder as he gets out of bed. His reddish, slightly wrinkled little behind. She dives across the bed, grabs his hips, he makes it easy for her to pull him back into bed. When they have stopped rolling around, he has ended up below her, his head between her legs, his mouth kissing her a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r