A Ship Made of Paper (22 page)

“Well, thank God they didn’t,” Daniel says. He takes another sip of his martini and realizes that he has practically drained the glass.

When Kate veers closer he eases away from her. He is sure that he still reeks of last night, and then it strikes him that he ought to do some labor, something that might work up an exculpatory sweat. “I’m going to bring in some wood for the fireplace,” he says. She looks at him a little strangely.

The sky is a deep blue, almost purple, with a crescent moon bobbing up and down in a stream of passing night clouds.The temperature is mild; with a fire in the fireplace, they’ll be warm enough inside. Daniel stands for a few moments on the porch, where oak and ash logs are stacked against the gray clapboard of the exterior wall.The stillness and clarity of the evening are almost unbelievable—how could such tranquility follow such chaos? Daniel takes a deep breath, spreads his arms out:
Iris
.Two of the three old locust trees in the front yard are down, one has been split in two, the other has been completely torn out of the ground, its taproot unearthed. A few scattered stars pulsate, diamond chips in the velvet. He wonders if she is okay. She cannot bear the cold. She might have low blood pressure, she should have it checked. Maybe the road crews have already cleared out the center of town, maybe she’s already up and around.

Maybe the power has been restored on Juniper Street. He hopes so. She shouldn’t be sitting alone in a dark house. He wonders if Hampton, learning the extent of the storm, has returned to his family.

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

He brings in several armloads of firewood, and places them all carefully in the large iron ring near the fireplace.The air is dank in the house.

The smell from the fireplace is pleasant, however, and the three of them sit on the floor in front of it, enjoying its warmth and the comforting light. Kate continues to drink, though Daniel doesn’t know exactly what’s in her glass, and he doesn’t feel able to ask her. But watching her drink makes him want to get drunk—despite the risk—and he makes his way into the kitchen, holding a candle that drips wax onto his knuckles with each step. He comes back with half a glass of bourbon and sits down on the hooked rug in front of the hearth, where he and Kate have been playing Uno with Ruby. Normally, playing with Ruby like this is one of the things that make Daniel feel life is worth living, and the same could be said for sitting in front of a successful fire, getting a little loaded, even going to bed with Kate after she’d been drinking. But tonight, everything seems fraught and dreary. How can he be here, stuck, trapped, put into a position in which every word out of his mouth is a lie? How can he be going through the motions in this sad and threadbare life, a life that now is—

he hates to think it, but he must—little more than a terrible obstacle between him and simple human happiness?

Later that night, Daniel waits downstairs before going to bed, poking at the logs in the fireplace and hoping that Kate will have fallen asleep before he arrives in their bedroom. He extinguishes his candle when he is halfway up the stairs; all he can see in the darkness is the beady red lights of the battery-powered smoke detectors. He feels his way along the wall, down the hallway, and as quietly as possible into the bedroom. He takes his shoes off and gets into bed in his clothes—a pair of corduroy pants, beneath which he wears long underwear, two shirts, and a sweater, all of which he must wear for warmth, but which he also hopes will quarantine whatever evidence his body wants to give of last night’s frenzies. He is operating on three hours of sleep, which he doesn’t fully realize until he quietly slides into bed and an overpowering sense of exhaustion comes over him in slow, relentless waves.

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And Kate is not asleep. She rolls next to him and drapes her leg over his.

“What were you doing down there?” she asks.

“Hitting a log with the fireplace poker.”

“Oh, you man, you.”

“That’s me in a nutshell,” he says. She presses herself against his hip, and he feels panic rising in him. Because it would seem strange and possibly even brutal not to, he puts his arm around her, though the very act makes him feel compromised, and even jealous—if he is capable of committing these little endearments, then Iris could surely be doing likewise. At this very moment.

“Do you really think I shouldn’t call the police about those runaways being here last night?” Kate says.

“I don’t know. There’s not much they can do about it right now.” He really doesn’t want to talk, and he also senses that somewhere within this particular line of inquiry there lies trouble.

“You’re a tiny bit on their side, aren’t you?” Kate says softly, as if it were possible to lure him into believing she is not furious at the idea.

“Of course not. I hate that that happened. It was obviously terrifying.

It terrifies me to even hear about it.”

“Then what are you saying? That I should stop talking about it?”

“Kate. Of course not.”

“But it is.That’s what you’re saying, that I should stop talking about it.”

“Well, it’s not what I meant to say.”

“But it’s what you said.”

“Kate, I don’t know what to tell you here.You’re doing the subtext?”

“Yes, I’m doing the fucking subtext.”

“Ah, the
fucking
subtext.”
Shut up shut up,
he tells himself. But exhaustion, the bourbon, and acute sexual claustrophobia are having their way with him. He forces his eyes open. For a second he feels he might fall asleep—right in the middle of an argument.

“What?”

He tries to scramble back into the conversation, desperately. “If a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

you want to call the police, call them,” he says. “Or I will. I’ll call Derek Pabst.”

“Derek Pabst is an idiot.”

“Then I’ll call someone else. I’ll call the attorney general.”

“It’s a big joke to you.”

“No. It’s not. I don’t know what you want.”

“I want you to care about what happened to me.”

He wants to say that nothing really happened to her, but he manages to control himself. She continues with such vehemence, he may as well have said it.

“It’s because they’re black, isn’t it?” she says. “You feel protective toward them. Like they’re the victims, and the people who try to keep them under control are the bad guys.”

“That’s not what I think.” He digs his elbows into the mattress to raise himself, but he doesn’t have the strength.

“You’re going to turn into one of those ridiculous white guys who secretly think they’re black,” Kate says. “Where’s this coming from anyhow? You want to tell me?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think I’m black.”

“But you wish you were.”

“What I wish I was is asleep.”

“It’s like the Simpson case.When did you start believing that fucking O. J. is innocent?”

“I don’t think that.”

“Really? Do you think he’s guilty?”

“I don’t know! How could I know? I don’t have all the facts. And the trial’s still ongoing.”

“The trial’s still ongoing? The man butchered his wife, a poor girl who told her friends, ‘If anything happens to me, O. J. did it.’ Every reasonable person in America knows he’s guilty, including his own lawyers, and all you can say is ‘the trial’s still ongoing.’ ” These last words are delivered in that mocking rendition of the male voice that women do—

the voice of someone who’s just had a cinder block dropped on his head.

[ 151 ]

Is that what I sound like to you?
Daniel wants to say, in his eagerness to feel like the injured party. But even in the throes of passion, with all its attendant greed and narcissism, and with the self-centeredness and sociopathology of a man on the great emotional crusade of his life, Daniel cannot quite manage the moral contortion that would place himself squarely on his own side. His awareness that he is betraying Kate is too corrosively present. He is not only in love with someone else but he is keeping it a secret, and though there are surely worse things in the world that a man can do, there is nothing worse within a marriage, which is, he must finally admit, basically what he and Kate have. He would like to tell her that their time together is finished. They may have made a pledge to each other to be Swiss bankers of the heart, but banks fail. Still, he knows he cannot, must not tell her—telling the truth right now would likely put Iris in jeopardy.

“You know when you started thinking that O. J. is innocent?” Kate is saying.

“I never said he’s . . .”

“Right around the time you started talking about Iris Davenport.”

“Oh, come on, this is insane.
And:
you’re drunk.” He immediately regrets the aggression of this, but Kate seems not to have noticed.

“Does Iris think he’s innocent, too?” she asks.

“I have no idea.”

“Really? No idea? The whole county is obsessed with the case and you two have never mentioned it? That’s interesting.What do you talk about, then?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Nothing? You talk about nothing? You were at her house for a day and a night talking about
nothing?
”

“Don’t interrogate me, Kate.”

“You can’t invoke your Fifth Amendment rights in bed, buddy boy. All constitutional rights are waived between the sheets.”

“Then maybe I should get up. I don’t like being without my constitutional rights.”

“If you leave this bed . . .”

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

“Kate, this is insane. Can we please just sleep? O. J.’s asleep, the jury’s sleeping, the DA, everyone is.” He waits for an answer, counts to three, and then closes his eyes, and when he opens them again it’s morning, and he’s alone.

Daniel and Kate collect buckets of snow, using some of it to flush their toilets, and melting a portion to use as drinking water. Kate, who is usually glad to allow Daniel to look after Ruby, is today somewhat possessive of the little girl; it leads Daniel to believe that she is trying to give him a sense of what his future will be like without the love of Ruby as a constant in his life. But other than this, her demeanor shows little of last night’s suspiciousness and anger. When they are collecting the snow, she is playful, throwing little handfuls of it at Daniel. She makes him coffee.

She is full of praise for the new morning fire in the hearth. Nevertheless, by eleven that morning Daniel is feeling so confined and isolated in their house, and so wild with desire to see Iris, that he feels his level of frustration is starting to become hazardous not only from a psychological standpoint but even from a medical one.

He must get out of here. Living in these conditions, with these new dictates of communality and wall-to-wall togetherness, makes it impossible to even call Iris. He casts desperately about in his mind, trying to think of a way to absent himself and somehow make it into town, and then, at last, at around noon, he goes upstairs to their sad and chilly bedroom, where there is a working telephone, and he calls Ferguson Richmond.

“Ferguson,” he says, “Daniel Emerson here. I wonder if I could ask you a huge favor? If you’re going to be out and around on your snowmobile, I wonder if you could come get me at my house and bring me into town.”

“No problem,” Ferguson says without hesitating. “When do you need to go? Now?”

Daniel is overcome by Ferguson’s generosity and lack of inquisitive-

[ 153 ]

ness. “Yes,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed, “now would be fine.

Anytime. Thank you so much.”

He goes back downstairs, where Kate and Ruby are in the kitchen.

Ruby is on the floor, playing with plastic horses, and Kate is melting some snow in a large cast-iron pot. She plans to fill the sink so that everyone can wash their hands and face.

“Who were you calling?” she asks casually enough.

“Ferguson Richmond,” Daniel says.

“
Sir
Ferguson Richmond,” Kate says. She likes to make fun of the local gentry, but her own southern background, with its emphasis on family and gentility, gives her an enduring interest in such things, and Daniel has always suspected that she admires the Windsor County aristocrats more than she lets on. “So what is he? Your new best friend?”

“He’s actually going to do me a tremendous favor. He’s coming out here on his snowmobile and he’s taking me into town.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“It’s very nice of him.”

“Yes. It’s amazing. How far away is he? Eight miles, ten?”

“I don’t know. I guess ten. It’s what people always say about him. He’s this total reactionary and a snob, but if you actually put something right in front of him, a problem, a person in need, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you. He’s got bad ideas, but good feelings. He’s got this deep, almost heroic generosity.”

Ruby looks up from her horses. Her eyes are blurred and her skin is mottled; she looks like an abandoned child. “Where are you going?” she asks Daniel. She furrows her brow, purses her lips, to let him know she is worried.

“I need to go to work, sweetie,” he says. “I have to go to my office.”

“I want to go, too,” she says.

“Do you want to?” Kate asks the child. “Take a ride with Daniel and see what’s going on out there? Maybe some stores are open and Daniel can get you some Jolly Ranchers.”

Ruby begins to pick up her toys, in preparation for leaving.

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

Daniel is appalled that Kate would use Ruby in such a cynical, manipulative fashion.

“I’m just going to my office,” he says to Ruby.

“It’s okay,” she says.

He smiles, relieved.

“Your office is fun,” Ruby says.

“What are you doing?” he asks Kate, lifting his hands in exasperation.

“What am
I
doing? What are
you
doing?”

“I am buried in paperwork. I have a dozen crises brewing, and a dozen more on the horizon, and I have no choice, I have to get to my office.”

“Of course you do. But Ruby’s not going to stop you from doing your paperwork. And that way she’ll be a little less stir crazy.”