A Ship Made of Paper (27 page)
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Tonight, Lorraine has a cold, and she uses the first part of their phone time complaining about it. Lately, Lorraine has become a little screwy about her health. As she approaches thirty-eight, the age her own mother died of cervical cancer, Lorraine is more and more putting herself in the care of not only doctors but also an acupuncturist, a masseuse, an aromatherapist, two nutritionists, and even a psychic whose specialty is disease.
“I spent the day in bed,” she says.
“For a cold?” Kate asks, hoping her disapproval isn’t apparent.
“Yes, for a cold. And I was in a major O. J. mood. I really wanted to watch the trial in the privacy of my own home. Watching it at the office sucks, so many interruptions.”
“So? Did anything happen?” Kate could not watch today’s proceedings because, oddly enough, she was too busy finishing an article about the trial—an article that Lorraine herself had commissioned.
“I just had this wild premonition that he was going to crack, and stand up in the middle of the court and confess.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“I realize that. How’s the article going?”
“I should be done in a couple more days.” Kate feels the subtle change, she is suddenly in her writer-fending-off-an-editor mode. “Three at the most.”
“It’s not going to do us any good if the trial’s over.”
“The trial has got months to go.”
“Not if he confesses. What about Daniel? What’s his take on this whole thing? I mean, doesn’t he see it as a kind of indictment of the legal profession, this guy who has so obviously assassinated his poor wife and now he’s just dragging out the proceedings, thanks to the efforts of a team of high-priced lawyers, all of whom have probably entered into pacts with Satan.”
Kate is silent for a moment. “Daniel’s starting to make noises as if he believes O. J. is innocent.”
“You’re kidding.”
“He thinks racist cops might have tampered with the evidence. The Fuhrman thing. He thinks all sorts of things.”
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“He actually thinks O. J. is innocent?”
“I don’t know.” Here is the hard part. “Let me take a sip of wine and tell you what I really think.”
“Sip away.”
Kate finishes the entire glass, dabs her palm against her chin, where a single red drop clings, and then refills her glass.
“He has a wicked crush on this black woman and I think he’s tailor-ing his O. J. opinions to suit her fashion.”
“Oh, Kate, are you sure?” Lorraine’s voice sounds warm, motherly.
Lorraine’s compassion always comes as a sort of pleasant surprise, though she never fails to show it.
“No, not really. But . . . I’m pretty sure.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“Oh, just some local mom, a perpetual grad student, with an absen -
tee husband.”
“I’m not getting a clear picture.”
“Her name’s Iris. I really feel like killing her with my bare hands, I feel like O. J.-ing her. She’s reasonably attractive, in a freckly sort of way.
She has Adored Daughter Syndrome, she just sort of sits there and expects all this attention. She has some demented kid who Ruby likes, so there’s all these occasions to get together, Daniel and Iris.You should see them together. Daniel’s entire body becomes one big boner.”
“And you?” Lorraine asks.
“What do you mean? What about me?”
“Are you going to let this temptress take your boyfriend away?”
Lorraine is being far too lighthearted about this, and as a way of telling her so Kate lets that last remark hang in the air for a few extra moments.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Lorraine. When I first started noticing how fixated on this woman he was getting, I thought to myself: Oh well, who cares, live and let live, screw and let screw, whatever.”
“And now?”
“It’s getting to me. It’s having a perverse effect.”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“Oh yes, I know how that works. You’re starting to fall in love with him again, right?”
“Something like that. I don’t require a lot of care and feeding, you know. I don’t need to be adored, or ravished, I don’t need little poems slipped under my pillow, or a rose on my breakfast tray. But, I really do
not
want him to leave me. That really doesn’t work for me.”
“We’re such idiots.”
“It’s not as if I fell
out
of love with Daniel.”
“I know.”
“I’m used to him, with all the good and bad that implies. Anyhow, we had sort of an arrangement. We’re both moderates, you know what I mean? We hate excess, neither of us even likes
Romeo and Juliet
. I feel betrayed in that way, too. Suddenly, I sense this willingness in him to be crucified on passion’s cross. Ugh. He’s becoming a different person.”
“And then there’s the small matter of Ruby,” says Lorraine. “I thought he was so devoted to her.”
“I’m not even thinking about that. He’s not going to
leave
me. He would never do anything to upset Ruby. He worships her.”
“What’s the café-au-lait absentee husband like?”
“His name is Hampton.”
“Oh God, they have the best names. Hampton what?”
“Welles. He’s Ivy League,Wall Street, so bourgeois he makes Martha Stewart seem like Karen Finley.”
“And does he think O. J. is innocent, too? It would be interesting to find out.”
“I don’t know. O. J. may be a little dark for Hampton’s taste.”
Just then, Kate hears wracking coughs coming from Ruby’s bedroom. She has been in and out of respiratory sickness ever since the storm—the ride home on the snowmobile did her in.
“Can you hold on for a minute?” Kate asks.
“Did you get another call? Don’t take it.”
“No, Ruby’s coughing her brains out. I better look in on her.”
“Where’s Danny boy?”
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“Out. I’m not actually sure where.” As soon as Kate says this, two things occur: Ruby’s coughing stops, and a heavy, soggy sense of emotional panic settles over Kate. “Oh good,” she says, “false alarm,” while in fact she is just now feeling her first intimations of real alarm.
“He’s out and you have no idea where?” Lorraine says. “That’s not like him.”
“Well, lately it has been.”
“There’s nothing to do up there, nowhere to go. Where does he go?”
“There’s this place in town, a bar. Lately he’s been going there.”
“A bar?” Lorraine’s voice is full of the kind of scorn that tries to masquerade as incredulity.
“It’s not that extraordinary, is it?” Kate tries to sound bemused, but her blood has begun to race. She has an impulse to simply slam the phone down and get in the car, surprise the little fucker right in his new nighttime haunt.Yet just as she is about to hang up, she realizes the reason she has called Lorraine in the first place. “We had this monster snowstorm,”
she says.
“I know, I saw it on Fox. Weird.”
“We didn’t have electricity for four days, no heat, no water, nothing.
And we were trapped here, no cars were moving, every road was closed.”
“You should really move back to New York.”
“Last year a water main exploded under your street and your entire apartment was filled with mud.”
“True, but at least I had heat. I had lights, I could read. And I could leave, I could go to my health club, I could have a watercress-and-goat-cheese salad at Cafe Luxembourg.”
“It was sort of fun, getting back to basics, the three of us camping out.
And when the snow stopped the sun came out and it was sort of mild.”
“I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m glad the sun came out.”
“But for the first day I was here alone, and
that
was a little weird.”
“Where were Daniel and Ruby?”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“At Iris’s.”
“You’re fucking kidding.”
“And while I was here alone, some boys broke into the house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a home for delinquent boys, mostly black kids from the city.
Some escaped during the power outage and they ended up here.”
“Oh my God. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. They never even saw me. They came in to use the facilities.”
“They shit in your house?”
“In the toilet.”
“Well, that was civilized.”
Kate is about to say something and realizes her voice is suddenly not available to her, it seems submerged.
“Were you hiding?” Lorraine asks. “Where were you?”
Kate takes a deep breath.
Okay,
she thinks.
Steady
. “I was pretty scared,” she says. “These were not nice boys.”
“They could have raped you, killed you.”
“I suppose. A tree hit the house and they ran like hell.”
“A tree.” Lorraine snorts contemptuously. “And Daniel was at Iris’s house.”
“That could not be helped. He couldn’t get home.”
“The poor lamb. Listen to me, Kate. Okay?”
“No, please. Don’t be smarter than me about this, don’t open my eyes to the obvious, I don’t want to be pummeled with your insight.”
“I’m just—”
“I know. I’m just not ready. Anyhow, I’m getting out of here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To that bar Daniel’s been hanging out at. Windsor Bistro.”
“Good. And if he’s there with her—”
“He’s not.”
“Just remember, if O. J. can get away with it, so can you.”
After hanging the phone up, Kate sits in her chair and finishes her
[ 187 ]
glass of wine, waiting for her pulse to stop pounding. She goes to the window at the front of the house—the repairman who replaced the panes did a sloppy job and there are smears of putty on the mullions—
and looks out at the night. The sky is a steep dome of bright stars. The moon is pale and wafer-thin; it casts its light down on the split and toppled trees around the house; a little patch of brightness reflects on the chrome of her car’s back bumper.
She remembers: Ruby, with a kind of start, the way you do when you drive away from the house and suddenly remember you’ve left the stove on. How can she go to the Windsor Bistro and leave Ruby all alone? How far away is it? Ten minutes, okay that’s twenty minutes round-trip. Let’s call it twenty-five, allowing for petty delays. And all she would need is fifteen minutes at the Bistro. That’s forty minutes altogether, and possibly a lot less.
She walks into Ruby’s bedroom. The room is softly visible through the glow of a fairy princess night-light. Kate stands over her daughter’s—her captor’s—bed and gazes down at her. She sleeps on her back, with the satin border of the blanket drawn up to her chin. Her skin is creamy, her brows dark and sensuous. Deep childish breaths, with a little bronchial burr at the end of each one. Ruby is a deep sleeper, she plunges down through the barely lit terrain of her own inner life, one hundred fathoms deep, dreaming of gigantic doors and talking animals.
She almost never wakes during the night—even those wracking coughs left her sleep undisturbed.
Forty-five minutes,
thinks Kate.
She’ll never know
the difference.
Yet a moment later anxiety takes its customary spot in Kate’s consciousness, sits with the authority of an old fortune-teller and turns the cards over one by one: here is the child waking, she is calling your name, here is the furnace leaking noxious fumes, here is an invisible frayed wire festering in the wall, here is a thief, here is a kidnapper, and this card is five black boys coming back for who knows what. What are you thinking? What could possibly be in your mind? You are staying in this house. And he knows it.
The problem was there was no space to walk in; the woods had imploded.They were
walking in circles, continually tripping over vines, stumbling over fallen trees, getting scraped by branches, stomping into sudden pools of still water, sometimes walking right into a standing tree. It was strangely insulting, like being toyed with.
Isolated in their despair, they walked for half an hour without speaking.
Then, suddenly, a stretch where last month’s storm seemed to have done little
damage. They walked for three minutes without having to change course. And
though they didn’t know what direction they were going in, the mere fact of keeping a constant course gave them a bit of encouragement.They were not, after all, in
the middle of some vast uncharted wilderness.They were only a hundred miles north
of the city. How far could you go without ending up on some stretch of asphalt or
in someone’s backyard? But then they reached a devastated grove of locusts, the
saplings with bark spiked with thorns, like giant, petrified roses.There were so many
of them down on the ground, or leaning against each other in a swoon, that it
would have been impossible to get through them or past them even in daylight.
Nightlife. Daniel comes down the stairs. In flannel pajamas, a House of Blues T-shirt. Here comes the approximate orphan, here comes the almost father, here comes the world’s worst ersatz husband. But he feels none of these things. Night is the time of desire and love seizes him,
[ 189 ]
shakes him silly. Outside: a gay dancing little flurry of snow blows past the porch light. His heart sings like a cello inside his chest.
Being alive is a ceaseless project of self-forgiveness, and Daniel forgives himself. He knows he is acting badly. He knows he ought to be feverish with shame. But he’s not, he has resisted it, like those doctors who tend a ward full of infected patients but who themselves don’t fall ill. Daniel has resisted his own feelings of guilt, he has become immune to himself.
The beauty of the world is, finally, overwhelming, it’s too fragile, too perfect, he must turn away. He faces a wall and glances at the aerial photograph of his house hanging there. Last year two men appeared at the door, a squared-off pilot with a rough face and a failed mustache, a lanky photographer in Trotsky glasses and a Planet Hollywood satin windbreaker.
