A Ship Made of Paper (24 page)

Except for a few years in Albany, where he went to medical school, Bruce has never lived outside of Leyden. He is a part of a thriving medical group, but his personal life is conducted at the very pinnacle of circumspection—no one has any idea what he does when the sun goes down, if he drinks, or sits alone watching television, or whether or not he has a lover, and what the gender of that lover might be. Even Daniel, who loves Bruce, cannot say what the mysterious doctor has devised for getting through the nights.

“Why are you walking around like that?” Bruce asks Daniel, standing in front of the luncheonette, with a half-eaten tuna sandwich in one hand and a paper napkin in the other.

“Exercising,” says Daniel.

“You can’t get exercise walking around like that, man.You want exercise? I’ll teach you the greatest of the white man’s sports.”

With that in mind, Bruce convinces Daniel to meet after work at Marlowe College, where Bruce is going to teach Daniel how to play squash.

It’s Friday; Hampton is coming back to town, and Daniel is grateful for the diversion, the company. Rather than go home and get his Nikes, shorts, and a T-shirt, Daniel buys all these things new and arrives at the gym a few minutes before his five o’clock date with Bruce. He immediately goes to the glass wall overlooking the college’s swimming pool, an a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

immense turquoise parallelogram surrounded by red and white tiles—

Iris is a swimmer and Daniel is hoping that luck is on his side.

But the pool is empty. An elderly man, probably a professor, with an enormous bald head, ears as large as fists, a barrel chest from which fur rises up in fifty separate geysers, sits in a wheelchair at the edge of the pool, grimacing at a young man with light olive skin and shoulder-length hair, probably his physical therapist.The sight of the old man fills Daniel’s heart with urgency: time passes, bodies decay, every day spent without love is lost forever, the time cannot be recaptured or made up for. The professor’s legs are as thin as a child’s. He wraps his trembling, chim-panzee arms around the young man’s neck and allows himself to be hoisted out of the chair and lowered into the deep end of the pool, just to the left of the double-decker diving boards. As soon as the old man is in the water, he disappears, and Daniel for a moment thinks he is the witness to a tragedy. But then the old man emerges; he has swum to the center of the pool, and he continues to propel himself with breast strokes, expelling water from his mouth in a long arcing spew.

Bruce arrives, and Daniel follows him into the locker room. In the large, windowless room, with its industrial gray carpeting and the smell of sweat and chlorine in the air, a dozen or so college students are in various states of undress. Their movements are nervous, they dress hurriedly, with elaborate bashfulness about their young, fit bodies, slipping into their shorts while they keep a towel wrapped around their midsec-tions, showering in their bathing suits. The older men, the guys in their fifties and sixties, display without shame their deteriorated bodies, their flaccid bellies, hunched backs, saggy asses, and flamboyantly uneven testicular sacs.

“Did you hear the news about those kids who broke out of Star of Bethlehem?” Bruce asks.

“What happened?” Daniel cannot hear any mention of them without a feeling of anxiety and remorse.

“Fucking crime spree, baby. All up and down the river.” Bruce smiles, shakes his head, it’s hard to say if he means to be rueful or admiring.

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“I guess they’ll catch them sooner or later,” Daniel says.

“I wouldn’t bet on it. Cops up here are not used to anyone giving them any resistance.”

Daniel and Bruce begin to undress and Bruce asks the inevitable question: “Where were you during the storm?”

“Actually, I was trapped in someone else’s house for the first day of it.”

“Oh my God, I would hate that,” Bruce says. He tosses his loafers into the locker.

Daniel glances around the locker room to see if anyone is within earshot. Several lockers to the right, a skinny, gloomy-looking man in his late fifties, breathing heavily, bathed in sweat, unfastens a complicated knee brace.

“I was at Iris Davenport’s house. I ended up spending the night there.”

Daniel has promised himself never to mention this, but now he can’t quite recall why it’s so important to keep the secrecy intact.

“Iris Davenport? What a fox. She looks a little like Whitney Houston, don’t you think?”

“Not really.”

“She’s been to my office. Confidentially? I tested her for glaucoma. It runs in her family.”

“When?”

“Months ago. She’s a pretty girl,” Bruce says in a distant voice, as if he were piecing together his memory of her as he speaks. “Her eyes are fine, by the way.”

“Yes,” says Daniel. “I could walk into her eyes and never come back.”

Bruce glances away, clears his throat. “Whatever,” he says. Then he adds, “What’s she like, anyhow? I found her sort of hard to get a read on.”

“She’s honest, she’s steady, she’s always present. She’s pure without being a puritan. She’s liberated without being a libertine.”

“All right. Now you’re starting to frighten me.”

Daniel blushes; in the company of another man, the pitch of his own ardor seems suddenly absurd. “I’m being undone by this whole thing,” he murmurs. “I’m totally in love with her, Bruce.” The relief of finally being a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

able to say this to another person has upset his balance, the way you would lose strength in your legs and stumble forward after finally being relieved of a load of firewood.

“Oh dear,” Bruce says. His sneakers are laced; he stands up and puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder and gives it a comradely pat. “It’ll pass,” he says, as if to comfort Daniel. “Let’s not even talk about it.”

The squash courts are on the second floor of the gym, a row of five white rooms with hardwood floors, the back wall of each made of shat-terproof glass so that the games may be observed. All of the courts are empty when Daniel and Bruce arrive; they take court number one and Bruce teaches Daniel the rudiments of the game, beginning, as is the masculine custom, with the rules. Bruce seems fixated on the rules, rattling them off in a stern fashion, as if suspecting that Daniel might be trying to figure a way around them. When they finally begin to hit the ball, Daniel is confused by how little it bounces, how its hollowness and softness render it practically inert, and he wonders how this game will ever provide him with exercise. But the ball becomes livelier as it heats up, and after twenty minutes on the court Daniel is breathing heavily and feels the first trickle of sweat going down his spine.

They hear the thump of a ball being hit on an adjoining court; another game is in progress.

“You’re a good beginner,” Bruce says. “Want to get a drink of water?”

They open the glass door and walk out into the broad corridor, at the end of which is a water cooler. The first thing Daniel sees is Iris sitting on one of the brightly colored red-and-black benches in the hall. His heart flaps like a toucan in a cage. Iris sits there, with Nelson draped languidly on her lap. She wears a copper-colored down vest, a Baltimore Orioles cap, jeans, and rubber boots. She glances at Daniel, and then looks away. Surely she has known all along that he is here, they all must have seen him through the glass on their way to court two. Is this really her strategy? That they should ignore each other? It doesn’t seem wise.

And he is, of course, incapable of carrying it out.

“Iris!” he calls out, as if seeing her here were one of life’s funny little

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surprises. He grasps Bruce by the elbow and steers him over toward Iris.

“I believe you two know each other,” Daniel says. He feels hot breath on his leg and looks down. It’s Scarecrow, hitched to a dark-blue leash, wagging her tailless hindquarters and panting excitedly. Daniel is unreasonably happy to see her, as if the old dog had risen from the dead.

“Scarecrow! Are you a member of the gym?”

“Hello, Iris,” Bruce says. Noticing the confusion in her face, he adds,

“It’s Dr. McFadden.”

“Oh yes, I’m sorry. I . . .”

“I’m out of context.” He gestures toward his long legs. “You never saw me in shorts.”

Daniel chooses to take this remark as somehow scaling the pinnacle of wit. In the midst of his laughter, he notices that Nelson is scowling openly at him, an exaggerated grimace, completely unencumbered by any sense of social grace. He is like a bad actor miming displeasure in a silent movie. Quickly, Daniel diverts his own attention to the squash game taking place in court two.

Hampton is playing against his younger brother, James. James Welles has his brother’s—and, indeed, his entire family’s—light copper complexion, but his appearance is far from Hampton’s carefully groomed, businesslike image. While Hampton wears tennis whites, James is dressed as if to go fishing with a bamboo pole: in cutoff jeans, a faded rust T-shirt torn at the shoulder, black sneakers splattered with paint, and no socks at all. He has the merry and defiant eyes of a boy who always knew he was his mother’s favorite, no matter what sort of trouble he caused. He has recently grown a little scraggly beard—hardly a beard, really, just three sprouts of whisker, a kind of Fu Manchu fountain springing from the center of his chin. His long hair is a complex nest of braids, culminating in a thick, glistening ponytail.

Daniel stands behind the glass wall and watches transfixed. James moves around the court as if scarcely subject to the laws of gravity, bounding and whirling, airborne, his braids flapping, his shoelaces flapping as well, letting out little yelps of pure animal joy, his youthful, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

handsome face alight with the bliss of his own physicality. The ball hits against the back wall, and James runs after it with the antic, spendthrift energy of a pup, in fact he overruns it, but no matter—he returns the ball by hitting it through his wide-open skinny legs, punctuating the circus shot with a whoop and a raised fist.

Hampton’s reply to his younger brother’s showboating is to return the ball in the most rudimentary, formal, and correct way possible. In fact, all of Hampton’s moves on the court could be used in an instructional video, the way he cocks the racquet over his head before each stroke, the way he bends his knees, his short, punchy follow-through, his return to the center of the court after every stroke. His movements are dogged, mechanized, and tireless. The only emotion he shows is a slight reddening around the ears and throat when James makes a particularly unorthodox shot, since these are met with squeals and cheers from Nelson.

“Don’t cheer against Daddy,” Iris whispers to her boy.

“Uncle James is funny,” Nelson says.

Bruce catches Daniel’s eyes.
Let’s go,
he mouths. Daniel shakes his head and Bruce sighs impatiently.

Daniel forces himself to turn away from the game, though by now it feels as if the fate of his love affair with Iris
requires
that Hampton be van-quished. “How are you doing?” he asks Iris.

“I’m all right. Nelson’s Uncle James is visiting us.”

“I see that,” Daniel says. Daniel has always been moved by the quality of Iris’s mothering; her kindness and her aptness around Nelson have appealed to Daniel so deeply that it is practically an erotic experience to see her with her boy, but just now Daniel wishes that she would speak only to
him
.

Still, he goes along with it. “Are you pretty excited to see your Uncle James?” he asks, directing his question to Nelson, who at first seems not to have heard him, and who then leers at him, first pursing his lips and then showing his little milky teeth.
Of course, now he hates me. He
doesn’t quite understand what he saw, but he’ll never forgive finding me in his
mother’s bed.
“And how about you, Scarecrow?” Daniel says, squatting

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down to the dog’s level. “Everything copasetic?” By way of an answer, the dog launches herself toward Daniel, ramming his eye with her wet nose.

“What’s the score?” Nelson screams at his father and uncle. He squirms out of Iris’s lap and hits his hard little hands against the glass wall. “Who’s winning?”

“I am,” James says, flipping his racquet up and then catching it by the handle. “I’m on fire, I’m unconscious, I can’t be stopped.”

Nelson doesn’t shout in triumph, but he squeezes his hands into fists, goes rigid, and whispers to himself: “Yes.” Nelson’s expressions are exaggerated, feverishly intense; it’s difficult to say whether these grimaces and gestures come from some molten, unmediated part of him, or if they are deliberately theatrical and insincere. Whatever their source, there is something troubling about them.

Hampton, in the meanwhile, has hit the ball in a slow, lazy arc over James’s head, who then bats it wildly, with an equally wild accompanying whoop.The ball sails across the court, barely reaching the front wall, which it grazes, before dropping dead and unplayable, another point for the younger brother, who celebrates by spinning around on one foot with his arms outstretched.

James, having won the point, serves, and Hampton makes his usual methodical return—it’s art versus science. James returns the shot with a dazzling and picturesque behind-the-back stroke, but from that moment on Hampton proceeds to dismantle him, wearing him down with his own refusal to lose. Hampton rallies to win the game 9‒7.

Nelson has retreated to Iris’s lap, and he sits awkwardly on her, his legs dangling, his arms folded over his chest, outraged over some shady business. Bruce, uncomfortable with standing there in light of what Daniel has told him, and also anxious to use his workout time, has gone back to court one, where he hits the ball to himself. Daniel, however, is powerless to move. He must see the match out to its bitter end. He has been crouched a few feet from Iris, as if he were a squash scout studying the game, looking for new prospects. He doesn’t dare say anything to Iris, though he continually looks at her reflection in the squash court’s a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r