A Ship Made of Paper (23 page)
“I want to go, too,” Ruby says.
“And I’ll be able to get a little writing done,” Kate continues. “Or at least try.”
“You’re going to put her on the back of a snowmobile for ten miles?”
“It was fun,” says Ruby.
“You put her on the back of the very same snowmobile,” Kate says,
“driven by the very same Samaritan who’s coming to rescue you.”
“That was an emergency. I was trying to get her home. I was trying to do the right thing. Jesus.”
“Please,” says Ruby. “It was so fun.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. It’s just not going to work.”
“I don’t see why not,” says Kate.
“Kate, you’re being ridiculous. Really. Enough.”
“It’s so boring here,” says Ruby.
“No!” Daniel says, his voice rising with temper and desperation. In the stillness of the house, it sounds as if he has shouted at the top of his voice.
Kate smiles a terrible, wounded, superior smile and shakes her head.
“One question,” she says. “How are you going to get back home after your . . . um, paperwork?”
“I’ll get back.” He is about to say
Trust me,
but he stops himself.
Daniel occupies himself while waiting for Ferguson by building up
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the fire and bringing in more wood. Nearly an hour passes, during which he almost loses hope of Ferguson arriving, but then he hears the manic whine of the snowmobile, and he races out to meet Ferguson, shouting his good-byes over his shoulder.
On the way into town, Ferguson fills Daniel in on the recovery effort.Though no snow has fallen since yesterday, trees continue to topple.
Highway crews and repair crews from the power company have made virtually no progress in clearing the roads. The trouble has not been the amount of snow—not much more than a foot has fallen—but that the thousands of trees on the ground have made every emergency vehicle virtually useless. Squads of men with chain-saws are all over the county—they’ve come in from every county in the state, as well as Con-necticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire—and they are cutting up and removing the slaughtered trees one by one. Estimates are that the middle of town should be electrified either by tonight or tomorrow morning; beyond that, some areas aren’t expected to have power for another three or four days, though Ferguson guesses it’ll be longer than that.
Ferguson is wearing a dark leather jacket, weathered and cracked, thick wool pants, and a pair of boots that look as if they’d once belonged to a soldier in the First World War.The smell of gasoline and oil is all over him. He wears amber-tinted ski goggles that are so smudged and scratched it’s a wonder he can see anything through them. His ears are as bright as freshly boiled shrimps and his graying hair whips back and forth in the wind as he speeds across a pasture, dodging trees, and then onto what Daniel guesses is Route 100, though all that indicates that it is a road at all are the occasional mailboxes standing iced and empty on their cedar stalks.
“An awful lot of people have been hurt,” Ferguson is saying, in his firm, penetrating voice. “And we’ve had fatalities. Traffic, fire, and heart failure.”
“Oh no, it’s so terrible,” Daniel says.
“It’ll be a field day for the lawyers,” Ferguson says. He looks over his shoulder and grins at Daniel.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Two black-and-yellow trucks from the power company are parked near an extinguished traffic light further down on Route 100.Two of the workers are standing around, drinking coffee and smoking, while the others cut an immense fallen oak into sections. A half mile later, there is a second crew, engaged in a similar task, and a quarter mile after that there is a third. Further off the road, the Schultz brothers, three long-haired, gray-bearded bachelors, who live in a hardscrabble compound in which they each own a trailer, and who drive fierce-looking pickup trucks with giant tires and furious bumper stickers directed against President Clinton, are hard at work chain-sawing fallen trees into three-foot lengths and heaving them into the backs of their trucks. Ferguson waves at them, and the brothers stare back expressionlessly, holding their saws like rifles, pointed down at the ground.
“They’re making the best of it. They’ll sell enough firewood to keep them in beer for the winter,” Ferguson says. “Fellows like the Schultzes, they’re the heart and soul of this county. They’re our muzhiks, our own God-fearing serfs, and if all the city people coming out here drive up land prices—those crazy brothers are going to be swept right out of here.”
Before reaching the center of Leyden, Ferguson makes a couple of stops, both of them to run-down, ranch-style houses, one occupied by an extended family of recently arrived Poles, the other lived in by an even more extended family of Mexicans. He keeps the snowmobile idling as he makes his quick visits, and then, assured that everyone is surviving the storm and its aftermath, he takes Daniel the rest of the way into town.
At the center of town, the sidewalks have been cleared and some of the larger trees have been cut and hauled away. Except for one of the gas stations, every business is still shut. Ferguson pulls to a stop in front of the Koffee Kup; though it’s closed, a couple of the waitresses are inside, mopping the floor. Daniel slides off the snowmobile and staggers back a little—his legs feel distorted and anesthetized.
“Thanks so much, Ferguson. I really do appreciate it.”
“Are you sure this is where you want me to drop you?” Ferguson says.
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He takes off his goggles, rubs his left eye with a kind of startling vigor.
“I could take you to Hampton Welles’s place, it’s only a couple blocks.
Your car’s still there, isn’t it?”
“No, this is fine.”
“Hey, look, if you need a lift back later on, give me a call.”
“It’s really awfully nice of you.”
“Is it? Susan says I act as if I were the great
padrone
and it’s my job to look out after all my little people. I just like driving this thing around.And I don’t exactly despise being out of the house, if you know what I mean.”
Daniel fusses with his car in Iris’s driveway, hoping to create the impression that he has only returned for his vehicle, but soon she comes out, puts her arm around his shoulders, and steers him indoors. He is cold and wet; she makes him a cup of coffee, pours a little bit of brandy in it, and then takes hold of Daniel’s chin and kisses him with fervor, openness, and engulfing warmth. They listen to hear if Nelson is busy in the playroom, and deciding that he is they begin to take chances.Thus begins the four days they will come to call the Rapture. He takes hold of her hips and presses her closer to him, hoping the pressure of her will relieve some of the agony of desire, and she lets out a soft moan of pleasure directly into his mouth. They sit at the kitchen table and keep an ear out for Nelson; they move their chairs closer so that they can touch each other, kiss, his hand is up her dress, she yanks her woolen tights down, opens herself to him, she is so concentrated on her own pleasure, she squints, and then suddenly it’s upon her and her mouth opens and her breath comes in little puffs, it’s like someone doing Lamaze, and when she comes it’s convulsive. It seems to Daniel that his relief will have to wait, and he is fine with that, just watching her come is enough, but she quickly turns her attention to him, and he is fine with that, too. What does matter is that the next day is Friday and Hampton arrives in Leyden. By now, the roads are cleared, and the power is sporadically restored; Red Schoolhouse Road is still dark, but Daniel has driven his car a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
back home the day before through a multitude of detours and now he can drive himself to his office, where he and Iris meet, with the blinds drawn, and the heat cranked up, and the door double-locked in case Sheila Alvarez should decide to put in an appearance, which she does not.
Saturday afternoon. Daniel brings Kate and Ruby to the train station because Kate has decided to stay in New York until power is restored in Leyden, and twenty hours later Iris calls: Hampton has gone back to the city. Daniel is at her house in minutes. They bathe each other, nervous that Nelson might awaken, but unable to exercise any more caution than locking the door. “I never realized white people could get so dirty,” she whispers to him, rubbing the soapy sponge onto his shoulders, smooth-ing the lather down his silky chest. “I look like a burn victim,” he says, holding his arm next to hers, comparing the colors. They make love in the guest room, out of some shared tact, and sometime during it Iris says, “I feel really safe with you, it’s such a pleasant way to feel,” and though she says it in a purely conversational tone, as soon as the words are out she bursts into tears, and he holds her, afraid to ask why she is crying. He leaves her house as dawn breaks gray and pink in the high innocent sky, home of God and all the angels; never has he known such happiness. He drives past the twenty-four-hour road crews, waving idi-otically at them,
bless you bless you all
. Iris is home from her seminar at two that afternoon, they have two and a half hours before it’s time to collect Nelson. Conversation, confession, and sex. “You’re killing me,” she says happily. Soon all the roads will be cleared, even the houses miles out of town will have power restored, Kate will be back, life will return to normal. He no longer looks kindly at the road crews, their around-the-clock busyness seems like some terrible meddling. One last night with Iris, a few more hours, and the ferocious sexual project reveals itself: they are tearing each other apart, devouring the flesh until nothing separates them.
As far as Daniel was concerned, this was torture. It might be better just to come out
with it, tell Hampton: I love Iris, and she seems to love me.We belong together.
We do feel bad. Oh shut up about feeling bad. Do you think he cares? He’d like
you to have brain cancer, that would be the sort of suffering he’d like for you.
Why are you offering up your stricken conscience—to make him feel you’ve
been punished sufficiently? Are you so afraid of him? And with that question,
Daniel at last connected to the core of what had been plaguing him from the moment he and Hampton set off together in search of Marie. It was not really about
conscience, after all. He’d been wrestling with his conscience for months now, they
were old sparring partners, sometimes he pinned it to the mat, sometimes it
slammed him, it didn’t really amount to much, it was a show, like the wrestling on
TV.And besides: the worst sort of remorse was preferable to what had preceded it, the
infinitely greater agony of longing for Iris. Remorse was the payment due for the
fulfillment of his great desire. And it was, finally, a payment he was willing to
make. No, it was not his conscience that churned at the center of him, making him
cringe inwardly when Hampton stepped too close to him. It was fear, physical fear.
Like many men who find love when they are no longer in the full bloom of vigor and health, Daniel has made a promise to himself to get back in shape. For a couple of nights, he tried doing calisthenics at a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
home, but it seemed disrespectful to Kate to be grunting out sit-ups in the same room they conduct their wounded, slowly expiring relationship. Those exercises were a kind of celebratory dance of health, and his workout wear of baggy cotton shorts and a baggier old gray T-shirt was in fact the uniform of his new devotion: they may as well have borne Iris’s name on the back. He is in training to be her lover. One day soon Kate will understand that the sexual Mount Everest Daniel is in training to scale has nothing to do with her, and when this grim domestic knowledge is complete Daniel does not want her to conjure a vision of him doing abdominal crunches on their bedroom floor.
As a less ostentatious form of body toning, Daniel decides to forego lunch and to spend the time vigorously walking through the village of Leyden, which now, nine days after the October snow, is just getting back to normal, with businesses long closed for lack of electrical power finally reopening, and employees finally able to show up for work. The mood of the town is festive, as if at the victorious end of a war. No one can get enough of talking about what befell them during the storm and the blackout, what they learned, what they lost, how they coped.
Daniel’s great story of the October storm, however, cannot be told, and its necessary suppression has dampened his normally gregarious nature.
He is content to replay memories of his days and nights with Iris without any interruption as he walks the circumference of the town’s commercial center. The problem really is that walking doesn’t feel like exercise, and as soon as he makes it once around the village, he realizes that he looks half mad speed-walking in his suit and street shoes, and also that he is too young for walking, speed or otherwise, to make much of an impact on him. On his second time through the village, he hears someone call his name, and though he has promised himself that he will ignore all distractions, he stops immediately and turns to face Bruce McFadden, an old friend from Daniel’s childhood days in Leyden.
“Hey, bro, what it is,” McFadden says in some vaguely self-mocking approximation of black street slang, putting his palm out for a little skin.
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McFadden, a tall, flimsily knit-together man, with long, lustrous brown hair, bright-green eyes, and a pale face with hectic bursts of color at the cheekbones, is about as black as a Highland fling, and normally he does not speak in anything approaching hip-hop patois. But a love of black culture is the original cornerstone of his friendship with Daniel, and Bruce still likes to black it up. And because, right now, Bruce doesn’t happen to know any black people personally, saying “bro” and talking about Satchel Paige and Miles Davis, Chester Himes, Howling Wolf, Antonio Vargas, Peaches and Herb, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Liston, Sonny Boy Williamson, and all the other black Sonnys, is something he saves for his occasional meetings with Daniel.
