A Ship Made of Paper (26 page)

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feel like anthems in the confines of the Bistro, which, aside from being the only place in Leyden open past midnight, seems to have become a refuge for people whose deepest impulses have brought them into conflict with what society expects of them.There at the bar sits the principal of the high school with the new second-grade teacher fresh from college in Colorado.

There at the table next to Daniel’s sits Clive Mason, whose wife is dying of breast cancer, with his arm around Mary Gallagher, whose husband is a state patrolman serving three years in prison for grand larceny. And now they are joined by Ethan Cohen, who owns a women’s clothing shop next to the George Washington Inn, and Shane Chilowitcz, who teaches performance art over at the college, where he lives with his Polish wife, who is at home minding their six children.

Got no one to turn to

Tired of being alone

Feel like breaking up

Somebody’s home.

Ah, truer words were never sung,
Daniel thinks. He looks up from his book, habitually scanning the place for Iris. Though in the week he has been coming here every night, he has yet to see her, he continually expects her to walk in at any moment. It’s maddening to be constantly on the lookout for her, but it gives him a gambler’s fervid hope that something transforming is just about to happen.

The singer sways behind his keyboard, surrounded by customers, who are also swaying to the music—a few are singing along. It has become even more crowded around the bar. There are people standing three deep, talking, laughing with piercing animation, signaling the newly hired bartender for drinks.

Standing near the bar is Mercy, Ruby’s baby-sitter. She is dressed to look older than her age—plenty of makeup, a tailored brown jacket over a black scoop-necked blouse, ironed jeans, heels. She looks like one of the young women at the bank—sobriety and trustworthiness mixed a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

with a kind of singles-bar brassiness. She has been trying to get Daniel’s attention, and now that he has finally seen her she smiles and walks over to his table.

“Hello, Mr. Emerson,” she says. She has put so much color on her lashes it seems a struggle to keep her eyes open. She holds a glass of beer with a thin slice of lime floating in its amber.

“Hello, Mercy,” he says. He almost asks,
What are you doing here?
But, the custom of the Bistro prevents such snoopiness.

She takes his smile as an invitation to sit. She arranges herself carefully in the bentwood chair, as if she were taking her place on a jury.The rim of her glass is faintly red from her lipstick. “I’ve been thinking about that stuff you told me,” she says. Her voice drops to a whisper. “About becoming an emancipated minor?”

“It’s a big step, Mercy. It’s basically a desperation move.”

“I really have to get out of there,” she replies, and as she says it the man with whom she arrived at the Bistro strides from the bar to Daniel’s table. He is more than twice her age. His name is Sam Holland, he is one of the area’s writers, not the most celebrated but possibly the richest, and he is someone Daniel knows. A couple of years ago, just when Daniel, Kate, and Ruby were moving back to Leyden, Holland’s teenage son had gotten himself into a lot of trouble, and Sam had talked to Daniel about handling the kid’s defense.

Whatever chagrin Sam might feel about being away from his wife, or from being seen with a girl two years younger than his son, is nowhere in evidence as he thrusts his hand out and grasps Daniel with a manly grip.

“Hello, Danny,” Sam says. He is wearing a blazer, a white shirt, and blue jeans; his thick, suddenly pewter hair is swept straight back. “How’d your house make it through the storm?”

Daniel thinks about this for a moment. “We took a couple of hits,”

he says.

“We were decimated,” Sam says, with a wide, radiant smile. He has dragged a chair over and sits close to Mercy. Daniel imagines their knees are touching. “Were you home for it?” Sam asks.

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“Not in the beginning.”

“At least I was home,” Sam says. “That made it semimanageable.

Where were you?” he asks Mercy.

“At my girlfriend’s. They let us out of school early and like ten of us walked over to her house.”

“Party time,” says Sam.

“Kind of, if you call not being able to watch TV or wash your hands a party.”

“That’s exactly what I call a party,” he says. “That’s the trouble with your generation, you don’t know a goddamned party when you see one.”

He turns back toward Daniel. “So where were you when the storm hit?”

“I was at Hampton Welles and Iris Davenport’s house,” Daniel says.

“My girlfriend baby-sits their kid,” Mercy says. “He hit her on the head with like a toy truck. She had to get twenty stitches on her scalp, but you can’t see them because the hair’s grown back.”

“That’s a lot to endure for three-fifty an hour,” Sam says.

“Try eight,” Mercy says.

“Well, for eight dollars an hour I might take getting hit by a truck—

you did say it was a
toy
truck, didn’t you?” He looks at Daniel, as if he, at least, would understand the joke: the ways we disfigure ourselves in order to put bread on the table.

“No one wants to baby-sit that kid,” Mercy says. “He’s like really really mean.”

“He’s not even five years old,” Daniel says. “Maybe your friends are reacting to something else.”

Mercy, having no wish to antagonize Daniel, and, in fact, wanting only to keep him on her side, lowers her eyes.

“I have to go to the ladies’ room,” she says.

As soon as she is safely away, Sam leans closer to Daniel.

“I’m helping her with her homework,” he says, deadpan.

“Take her home, Sam,” Daniel says. “You really have to stop seeing her. Her father’s crazy and a cop, it’s going to end very badly.”

“I know,” Sam says.

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

“Don’t you worry about her, Sam? Do you know what happens to those girls? They end up dancing in a cage with spangles on their nipples.

You know what I mean?”

“Look, it’s not that simple. I could end up dancing in a cage somewhere, too.”

“You could end up in jail, is where you could end up. She’s a kid.”

“I love her. I’m drawn to her, and I don’t have a list of reasons why.

It just happened.You think I wanted this? My whole life is in the process of going down the drain.”

“Then do something about it.”

“I tried. Do you have any idea how foolish I feel, being here with . . .

with someone so inappropriate,” he says. “But the thing is, I can’t help it, I literally cannot help it. Everyone thinks being with a young girl is like finding the fountain of youth. The truth is, it’s just the opposite. First of all, I can barely concentrate on sex because I’m so busy sucking in my stomach. And then, when I get out of bed and I make these little groans, you know, the way a man does, the knee hurts, the back, a little sore shoulder, whatever.You groan, after forty-five you get out of bed and you make a little noise, I don’t care if you’re Peter Pan. So I get up, straighten myself out, and Mercy’s all breathless, panicked. ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’ she’s asking. ‘Nothing,’ I tell her, ‘absolutely nothing.’ And she says, ‘But you were making these noises.’ And I have to tell her, ‘Honey, that’s what you do when you wake up in the morning. You groan.’ And she nods, trying to be a good sport about it, but I swear to God, Daniel, I have never felt so fucking old in my entire life. These guys who think they’re going to get a second at bat in the youth league by hanging out with some young girl, they’ve got it exactly wrong. You want to feel young, find yourself some old broad and run circles around her.”

Tonight’s singer is finishing up; the applause sounds like rain on a tin roof. Daniel’s eyes habitually scan the room; he cannot let go of the dream of Iris suddenly appearing. He imagines her sashaying through this convivial throng, her sitting next to him, a tilted, slightly apprehensive look of arrival and surrender on her face, her bony knee knocking

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against him, her night voice an octave lower, cracked with fatigue, the whites of her eyes creamy, like French vanilla.

Through the pack of people comes Ferguson Richmond, grinning maniacally, wearing a pair of catastrophic brown pants, his hair slicked back. On his arm is the blind girl, Marie Thorne, who, though her eyes are secreted behind dark glasses, looks festive and in high spirits.

Ferguson greets him like an old friend, and Marie, too, is effusive. It makes Daniel think that the two of them have been talking about him, speculating about his having spent the night at Iris’s, and that now, seeing him here, at the nocturnal headquarters for the town’s transgressors, their hypothesis is proved. Without waiting to be asked, Ferguson drags two more chairs over to Daniel’s table. He sits Marie next to Daniel and then squeezes himself between Sam and Mercy. As he sits, he seems to notice for the first time how young Mercy is—in fact, he does an almost comic double take.

And then, with no apparent provocation, Ferguson reaches across the table and takes Marie’s hand and brings it to his lips, and he kisses her with loud, smacking sounds, almost in a burlesque of affection.The gesture is shocking and everyone at the table laughs, including Daniel, though the sight of Ferguson’s fantastically uncivilized behavior makes Daniel’s longing for Iris all the more excruciating.

Ferguson sees the dismay in Daniel’s face. “Seen much of the lovely Iris Davenport lately?” he asks.

“No,” Daniel says, in a voice not quite able to bear the weight of even a one-word answer.

“Old Daniel found himself at her house the first night of the storm,”

Ferguson explains to the rest of them, curling his fingers into quotation marks when he says “found himself.”

“So he tells us,” says Sam.

At home that night, Kate sips her way through a bottle of zinfandel and talks on the phone to Lorraine Del Vecchio, whom she thinks of as her a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

best friend, though now that Kate has moved out of New York City, they rarely see each other, and their phone calls, which even a year ago were daily, now take place only two or three times a month, though what they have come to lack in frequency they have made up for in duration. Except for her undergraduate years spent across the country at Reed College, where she studied Plato and abused amphetamines, Lorraine has never lived anywhere but Manhattan.When Kate first met her, Lorraine was an editor at
Cosmopolitan;
Lorraine had read Kate’s novel,
Peaches and
Cream,
and had fought to have it excerpted in
Cosmo,
only to be overruled at the eleventh hour by the editor-in-chief.

By the time the deal had fallen through, Lorraine and Kate had already established a telephone rapport. Lorraine loved Kate’s acerbic style, her pitilessness that didn’t stop with the skewering of subsidiary characters but also included the novel’s narrator, who was, Lorraine assumed, a stand-in for the author herself. But what Lorraine particularly loved about the novel was its depiction of the beauty business as a world of harpies from which intelligent girls must rescue themselves—in fact, it was precisely the novel’s send-up of dermatology, and its underlying fury at a world that attached such value to appearance, that prevented Lorraine from buying it for her magazine, where half the articles and nearly all the advertising were meant to encourage young women to be ceaselessly fretful about their appearance. When running a portion of
Peaches and Cream
was torpedoed at the last minute, Lorraine called Kate personally to break the bad news, and she sounded so distressed that Kate agreed to meet her for lunch at the end of the week.

Daniel had warned Kate about Lorraine. He didn’t know Lorraine, but he was getting a sense of the women who became Kate’s most passionate readers, and he had duly noted the expressions on their faces when they finally met Kate and realized that she, unlike her heroine or themselves, was quite beautiful. Like the heroine, Kate had been entered into Beautiful Baby contests when she was an infant, and her parents
did
openly grieve when her hair turned from blonde to brown, and they did give her Clairol rinses when she was nine years old and send her to bed with her hair

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wrapped in a scarf soaked in lemon juice, and when, at thirteen, a birdshot spray of pimples appeared on her forehead, her father, a doctor himself, sent her to a dermatologist in Washington, D.C.—but not, as it occurred in the novel, all the way to Zurich. The other indignities visited upon the novel’s teenage narrator—how she wakes up one day with virtually a full mustache, the involvement with a Santeria cult, her entire body being encased in defoliating wax, the liposuction performed at midnight like a backstreet abortion—were entirely fictional, as was the section in which the mother’s bridge club accidentally drops the narrator’s diet pills into their coffee, having gotten them confused with saccharin tablets, and the subsequent freak-out, during which the ladies go after each other like wildcats and one of them ends up dying of a heart attack.

“You’ve struck a chord with all women with unfortunate looks,”

Daniel said. “And when they see you they feel ripped off, like you’ve tricked them into believing you’re one of them.”

To Kate’s immense relief, the woman she found waiting for her at the Russian Tea Room was completely presentable, in fact, great-looking—

with short black hair, bright-green dramatic eyes, the serene, commanding face and ample bust of a figurehead carved into the prow of a whaling ship.

“Oh, look at you,” Lorraine exclaimed upon first seeing Kate. “You’re gorgeous, you bum.” She clutched her heart. “How could you do this to me?”

The accusation was made humorously and it might have been meant to flatter Kate.Yet she felt she had just been slapped in the face, and despite the fact that their rapport soon moved beyond what Kate considered the hallucinogenic stage—a kind of jokey alternative reality in which Lorraine pretended Kate was ravishing and she herself was homely and doomed—and onto a truer rapport, that first remark created a shadow presence in their friendship.This shadow presence insisted that Kate was the fortunate one and Lorraine, despite her well-paying job, numerous sexual adventures, supportive family, and brownstone apartment with a fireplace and two skylights, was the hard-luck case. It meant that Kate was somehow beholden to equalize things between them, by deferring to Lorraine.