A Ship Made of Paper (28 page)
For three hundred dollars they offered to fly over the house and take a picture of it from above. “We can see ourselves as God sees us,” Kate had said, strangely enthusiastic about the idea. The finished product was delivered six months later when the barnstormers were back in Windsor County, and it hangs now in the living room, behind the green sofa.
Daniel, whose lover’s heart has sprouted wings, now is airborne himself, and he enters the photograph in full flight, hovering above his own house and its snow-dappled ten acres. The smoke from his chimney, a slightly darker gray than the cold, sunless air, rises up, stings his eyes. His arms are extended, he swims away from it, wondering if at any moment he will come crashing down to earth but somehow knowing he is safe.
He points his hands upward, hears the whoosh of the air as he zooms toward the dawn moon, which remains fully risen, stuck in the sky like a coin frozen beneath a thin sheet of ice. He tucks his chin in, peers down at the little town—the cold air crashes like cymbals against his eyes.
There is the river, a blue-gray serpent upon whose chilly scales the wan-ing moon reflects. The mountains to the west are humped in mist and darkness; the lights of a few houses and headlights flicker like the sparkle of dew on the coat of a sleeping bear.
He flies in through the window of his parents’ bedroom, where Carl a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
and Julia sleep side by side on their backs, as still as carvings on a sar-cophagus. The electronic numbers on their digital clock, burnt-orange, pulsate in the darkness of the room. On Julia’s side of the bed, the night table is stacked with books, but all Carl’s table holds is a lamp and a wristwatch, as if he already knows everything he cares to know. Upon the old Crouch and Fitzgerald trunk at the end of the bed, where extra blankets and fragile quilts are packed in mothballs, they have lain their matching plaid robes. The tidiness and modesty of the room makes Daniel ache with love and a mysterious sort of pity, a pity that is also the deepest kind of respect.The room smells of liniment, eucalyptus, deter-gent, and slow human decay. Daniel hovers above them, wanting to touch them but hesitating, for either he is incorporeal or they are. He rests his ear near his father’s chest, listens to the ruminative thump of the old man’s heart. It is time to start spreading all that forgiveness he has been giving to himself.
Thank you for feeding me, thank you for sending me to
school, thank you for staying the course.
He kisses Julia’s cool forehead, a smooth stone in a rushing stream.
Thank you thank you.
He backs out through the window, the branches of a tall hemlock scrape against him as he gains altitude. He sees a police car, the beams of its headlights are going from side to side. He flies alongside it. His old friend Derek Pabst is at the wheel, sipping from a Styrofoam coffee cup, his uniform cap on the seat beside him. He has xeroxed pictures of the boys who escaped from Star of Bethlehem taped to the dashboard of his car. He is driving fast, his lips are gray and pursed, they are like a wall through which no words can penetrate. Derek pulls off the county road and speeds across a short, singing bridge onto an unpaved road. His tires churn up long choking curls of dust.
Daniel is above the river now, sailing past the mansions. He enters Eight Chimneys. Squirrels are in the entrance hall, wildly chasing each other around. The air is cold in the old dank house, colder than outside.
He hears a sound and finds Ferguson in the huge, cluttered, far from clean kitchen in his pajama bottoms, standing in front of the refrigerator, scratching idly at his pale bare chest. He suddenly grabs the heel of
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a roast beef and a carton of orange juice, and he heads back upstairs with it, with Daniel following. On the second story of the house, Ferguson turns right, walking past a dozen closed doors, until he comes to the staircase to the third floor, where once the servants lived. Marie is waiting for him at the top of the stairs, naked. Her little tangle of pubic hair looks particularly black against her colorless skin. The skin around her nipples is wrinkled with cold. She stands on her toes, writhing with happiness and anticipation. “Hurry,” she whispers. “I’m so thirsty.” As soon as Ferguson is on the landing, Marie takes the carton of orange juice from him, sniffs it, and then drinks it down. She finishes with a loud, comical
Ahhhh,
shakes the carton to make sure it’s empty, and then lets it drop and puts her arms around her disheveled, confused lover. He lifts her up as they kiss, she wraps her legs around him.
Daniel flies to Iris’s house with one beat of his winged heart, blessing every house beneath him as he sails toward his beloved. She is in bed, awake and alone, propped up with the pillows behind her, and her portable computer resting on the hammock of blanket between her knees. He lights next to her, puts his arm around her, nuzzles her neck, kisses her cheekbone, the corner of her eye, and looks at the screen.
Dear
Daniel,
she has written, but that is all. Her fingers rest on the keys.When Kate writes, her expression is avid, she is being fed and enjoying every bite, but Iris has a kind of shyness even within the privacy of her own thoughts, as if she is observing one part of herself while the other is half hidden behind a pillar.
Thank you,
he says to her. Surely there is some way she can hear this.
Thank you for being so beautiful, thank you for not being too beautiful for me,
thank you for your life, thank you for your breasts, let me touch them, can you feel
that? That’s my hand, this is my mouth, thank you for being so open and wet,
thank you for putting me in your mouth, thank you for grabbing at the sheets
when I kissed you between the legs, thank you for digging your fingers into my
back, thank you for letting me sit at your table, thank you for letting me play with
your dog, thank you for looking at me with your deep clear eyes . . .
Iris lets out a long sigh and shuts her computer off. She reaches right a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
through him as she places the little Compaq on her night table. She puts the pillows back in their normal places and lies flat, pulls the covers up to her chin.
And it is then that it strikes him: this will not end well. He has exceeded his capacities, he has somehow gotten more than he deserves, he has the sudden terrible knowledge that happiness of this magnitude can only lead to sorrow. Joy lifts you up and joy casts you down.
Now she is turning off the lamp on the night table. Her touch is too emphatic, the lamp totters, but she catches it before it falls, sets it right.
Good girl
. He lies next to her in the darkness, no living ghost has ever loved more fervently. He brings his nose almost into the crook of her neck and breathes her in, the smell of laundered cotton, and some ineffable spice.
Airborne again, flying close to the treetops, heading home. He slips into his own bed, Kate is sleeping deeply. A scent of alcohol comes off her skin. He props himself up on one elbow, disentangles a few of her hairs that have gotten stuck into the moist corner of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” he whispers into her ear.
She opens her eyes. She looks damaged, badly used. “What did you say?” she asks.
They continued to walk, hoping to find a clearing, a way out. Once, most of this
land was pasture, grazed by cattle, but it hadn’t seen a plow in over a hundred
years and left to its own had become a wild place.They climbed yet another hill—
this might have been steeper because they both had to hold on to trees to pull themselves up, or else they were getting tired.
And once they had scaled it, all they could see was more trees—except on one
side, where there was a sharp drop-off, leading to what looked like a large pond
filled with black water.
“We came from that direction,” Hampton said uncertainly. He was pointing
down the hill upon which they stood, and off to the left.The night was gathering
quickly, the darkness was rushing in like water through the hull of a ship, covering everything.
Kate has prevailed upon Daniel to take a day and a night away from home, together, and he cannot decently refuse her.They leave Ruby with Carl and Julia, and then head out of town on County Road 100A, a curving blacktop that winds its way past Leyden’s two surviving commercial dairy farms—sagging wire fences, Delft-blue silos, black-and-white Holstein cows—until it runs into a T-junction, at which they turn onto the road to Massachusetts, where Kate has booked them a room—
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
their old room, their first room—at a huge ramshackle hotel in Stockbridge called the Sleeping Giant Inn.
On the drive, Kate reads to Daniel from the article she has just written about the O. J. Simpson case. As Kate reads, Daniel is silent, his jaw set, his eyes hooded—she has never seen him pay such fanatical attention to highway conditions, even the shadows of the wind-rocked hemlocks make him brake, he is continually readjusting his side and rearview mirrors, changing the tilt of the steering wheel, checking the gas and temperature gauges, anything to escape her two thousand words on O. J.
Kate realizes that bringing up the case is not the best way to begin their Saturday getaway, but, perversely, she is unable to refrain. She isn’t about to pretend that she has the slightest sympathy for a man who so wantonly committed murder and who is now trying to buy his way out of it. And she cannot help but feel that if she can only find the right fact, the right tone, the right line of logic, then Daniel himself will snap out of his ridiculous spell and see, as everyone else she knows and respects sees, that O. J. is as guilty as the Boston Strangler, or Richard Speck, or any of the other monsters.
“What do you think?” she asks. They are just turning off the Taconic, onto the road to Stockbridge, where there is an old roadside diner, with a neon sign showing a vast, noble Indian.
“Inadmissible,” he says.
“Probably,” Kate answers. “It’s for a magazine.You know? For people sitting under hair dryers.” Yet she cannot let his legal point stand un-questioned. “But why couldn’t such information be used in court? It
is
relevant that he’s been violent in the past, it helps establish a pattern of solving domestic issues in a completely brutal manner.” No, this is not what she wants them to be talking about, but she can’t give up the search for the right words, the verbal alchemy that would bring him around.
Even as she drills through layer after layer of murk, she keeps her hopes up for the ultimate strike, that surging thrilling gusher of epiphanous recognition.
“I think if I were accused of some terrible crime,” Daniel says slowly,
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seemingly as reluctant as Kate to discuss this case, “a lawyer or a writer could probably find some old girlfriend who’d be willing to trash me.”
“Well, I certainly never would. No matter what anybody said, I would always think you were a good man.”
He glances at her and colors. It looks for a moment as if he might even cry, and Kate thinks to herself:
Good. One for my side.
The early afternoon train from Leyden pulls into Penn Station, and Iris, who has slept most of the ride and who nevertheless can barely keep her eyes open, stands up unsteadily and pulls her black nylon travel bag down from the overhead rack. She has packed one change of clothes, a nightgown, a plastic zippered bag full of toiletries (including her diaphragm), and a couple of thick, heavy books—what Hampton calls, in his Johnny Carson voice, “weighty tomes”—she has been meaning to read for thesis research purposes, and which take up more room than everything else she has brought with her to New York. She has settled into a kind of fugue-state of emotional neutrality, allowing the two hours’ silence and the rhythmic rocking of the train to lull her into a strange, sad peacefulness.
She realizes this time in the city alone with Hampton may well require of her a degree of watchfulness, a certain deftness of emotional maneuvering.
The arrangement is that she will taxi down to the apartment, and Hampton—who is meant to play squash at the Downtown Athletic Club with a Jamaican rum bottler—will meet her there no more than half an hour later. But as soon as Iris steps off the train, she sees Hampton waiting for her on the platform, craning his long neck and trying to pick her out of the stream of arriving passengers. She knows this is meant to pleasantly surprise her, but the sight of him makes her spirits plummet.
He looks like a teacher striding down the rows of desks, passing out the questions to a surprise quiz.
He sees her. He raises his hand to signal her and she sees that—horrors—he is holding a long-stemmed rose. He has undoubtedly bought it a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
from one of the vendors right here in Penn Station, but nevertheless he waves the flower at her, to signal her that this Saturday in Manhattan is meant to be one of high romance.
“What happened to your squash game?” Iris says, as Hampton kisses her cheek, takes her bag off her shoulder and hefts it onto his.
“I wanted to meet you,” he says.
This leaves the question about his squash game unanswered. It isn’t like Hampton to put personal life over business—actually, Iris has always
liked
this aspect of him—and she suspects he is here on the warm, smoky, stinking-of-diesel-fuel platform because his game has been cancelled.
She lags behind him as they make their way out.There’s an escalator, but Hampton always chooses the stairs, for the sake of fitness. She admires his body as she walks behind him. He is wearing his Saturday at-tire: khaki pants, a white polo shirt under a dark-green cashmere sweater, brown loafers. Even his casual clothes are carefully chosen, crisply ironed, but of course there are no casual occasions for Hampton, not at the dinner table, not in bed, and certainly not out in public.
