A Ship Made of Paper (33 page)

She sniffed back what remained of her first response to this novel situation, and then looked at Daniel with something utterly wild, something practically feral in her expression, as if she had just entered a realm in which more was permissible than she had ever dreamed.

“Look at his face,” Kate says to Dr. Fox. “You must be somewhat of an expert on the faces men make when they are totally fucking busted.”

Fox’s clock is digital so there isn’t even a ticking, all that can be heard is the long
shhhhh
of the white-noise machine, like the sound of an enormous punctured balloon. And then, from another of the center’s offices, the sound of a muffled male voice crying out, “Not at meal time, that’s all I’m asking. Not at meal time!”

“What’s that?” Kate asks.

“Somebody else’s misery,” Daniel answers.

“Not that. That.”

“It’s the white-noise machine,” Fox says.

“Ah,” says Kate, smiling. “Then shouldn’t it be whining?” She starts to laugh.

[ 225 ]

“I can’t believe you hired someone to follow me around,” says Daniel.

“Well, I didn’t. But I’m never going to forget the look on your face when you thought I had.”

“All right,” says Fox. “I’d like to try something here, if that’s okay with you two.”

“He still hasn’t answered my question about whether he’s seeing her or not.”

“What I’d like to try . . . ,” says Fox.

“Just a second, Dr. Fox. Please? There’s no point going forward with this little session, if Daniel’s not willing to answer my question.”

“He did answer your question,” Fox says, his voice rising with alarm, which Daniel notes with relief for himself and a feeling of some pity for Kate—poor Kate, fifteen minutes into therapy and she’s alienating the doctor.

“Let me tell you something about Daniel, Dr. Fox. He’s not terribly straightforward. He’d rather lie than hurt someone. He’s a negotiator.

No, here’s what he is.” She uncrosses her legs and then recrosses them in the opposite direction. “He’s like an orphan. He’s always covering his ass, making sure he doesn’t get sent back to the home. He doesn’t feel as if he belongs anywhere. He moves back to his hometown—and moves me back with him, by the way. He has no idea why. His parents cut him out of their stupid little will? He barely reacts. He wants something big to happen to him, something to tell him who he is, or make him something.

There must be a name for that, he must be a type, or something. He can tell you anything. He may end up saying that he’s black. I wouldn’t be surprised. People like him can never tell the truth, because they don’t know the truth. He’s a sweet guy, and a good man, and despite his behavior he’s really pretty ethical. But Daniel’s been spinning his own feelings for so long they’re a mystery even to him.”

Fox nods, somewhat sagely, but when he strokes his goatee, his fingers are trembling. He clears his throat and murmurs something about

“trust issues,” and something further about that most unfortunate “circle of safety.”

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

Abruptly, Kate reaches over and squeezes Daniel’s knee as hard as she can. She speaks to him through curled lips and clenched teeth.

“Say something.”

“Do you love me, Kate?” he asks, his voice soft, almost sleepy. The pressure she exerts on the muscles right above his knee is vaguely painful, but relaxing, too. The physical punishment seems to siphon off some of the other, more persistent agonies.

“That’s really not the issue here,” Kate says. “Anyway, of course I do.”

“I’ll take that as a no,” he says.

“You see? I can’t win.”

“All right, then let me ask you this . . .”

“It’s better to just express your own feelings,” Fox says. “And not ask questions.”

“I agree,” says Daniel. “But let me get these questions out of the way first.”

“He said no questions, Daniel,” Kate says.

“You’ve had your chance to cross-examine me. Now it’s time for the defense.”

“The whole idea of couples counseling,” Fox says, “is to keep you
out
of court.”

“Have you ever felt the kind of love for me,” Daniel says to Kate, “that you’d rather die than live without me?”

“What do you want me to do? Audition?”

“I’ll make it easier for you. I don’t think you ever have, at least not toward me. And I think it’s a sad life, and a waste of heart. We are capable of it. If I am, then you are . . .” He points to Dr. Fox, who seems to be staring at him with alarm. “And you are, too. We all are. It’s in our wiring, in our DNA, it’s the poetry that we all are capable of writing, if we can find the goddamned courage.”

“I think you have lost your mind,” Kate says, slowly taking her hand away from him. “Who are you? The fucking Johnny Appleseed of Love?

How can you say these things to me?” She looks for a moment as if she is

[ 227 ]

going to be furious, as if she is going to scream at him, smack him, rake him with her fingernails, but then her face crumples and she begins to cry. She takes a handkerchief out of her handbag and covers her eyes.

If she thinks what he says is awful, she should hear what he does not say. He is here trying to mollify Kate, when what he might really be interested in is shaking her until she sees how he has changed, that he is no longer the emotionally anemic man she somehow chose. He wants to ask her:
Have you ever made love for six hours barely stopping? Have you ever had
nine orgasms in a night? Have you ever seen me weep from the sight of your
beauty? When was the last time we slept in each other’s arms? Have you ever seen
my savage side? Have you ever known me to be absolutely helpless with passion?

Has anyone ever stuck their tongue up your ass? Have you risked disgrace for me?

Have you made a double life and been willing to hurt another person for the love
of me? Have you ever been willing to give up everything for another person? You
wouldn’t even do that for Ruby.

Fox finally releases them, and they hurry out of his office, angry and ashamed, with their eyes down, their faces closed.They have made an appointment for next Wednesday, but they both know they will not keep it.

Neither of them ever wants to be in this place again. The medicine here cannot cure them.

The November sky is the color of a cellar sink; a cold wind blows through the parking lot as Daniel follows at a safe distance behind Kate on the way to her car. She lets herself in and he waits there for a moment, giving her a chance to pull away without him, if that’s what she wants to do. His car is at his office, a ten-minute walk, which he would prefer to being in cramped space with Kate.Yet he cannot bolt out of the parking lot and make a run for it; despite the danger, he feels the logic of life, the rules of decorum insist that he get into the passenger seat, close the door behind him, strap on his safety belt.The car’s engine turns over.The radio comes on, a blur of excited talk that Kate instantly switches off.

“Ready?” she says. And then, without waiting for his answer—he was about to say sure, fire away—she throws her car into reverse and backs a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

it quickly and without hesitation across the center’s small parking lot, straight into the front end of a blood-red Toyota. Daniel is hardly dislodged from his seated position, but Kate, lighter, has pitched forward and banged her forehead against the steering wheel. She barely reacts to this, not so much as touching the oozing welt with her fingers. She throws the car into drive, her car extricates itself from the Toyota, and she drives it headlong into a gray Honda parked on the other side of the lot. By the time the center empties out—no one inside has failed to hear the twisting metal and shattering glass—Kate’s car is immobile and she and Daniel are screaming at each other.

The next morning, desperate to see Iris and to tell her what has happened at the counseling center, Daniel brings Ruby to My Little Wooden Shoe at the normal time, but to his ravishing disappointment Nelson is already there. As he helps Ruby out of her jacket, Daniel’s eyes search the suddenly grim and airless little day care center in case he has somehow overlooked her presence, in case she is talking to a teacher, or maybe helping out in the kitchen. Stiff with unhappiness, his fingers fumble with the buttons, and Ruby looks up at him with dismay.

Nelson, seeing Ruby, comes to her side and tugs at the sleeve of her shirt. “Come on,” he commands her. Generally, Ruby is compliant around Nelson, but today she resists. She raises her little square hands toward Daniel and puckers for a good-bye kiss, while Nelson glowers at them both.

“Okay, you guys, have a great day,” Daniel says.

“I don’t even like you,” Nelson replies, raising his eyebrows, extending his lower lip, shrugging.

Ruby is appalled by what Nelson says. Her cheeks blaze as if slapped.

“Yes you do!” she fairly cries. “He’s my dad.”

“No he’s not,” says Nelson. He smiles as if Ruby has walked into his trap.

To complete his mastery of her, he takes Ruby’s arm and pulls her away.

Daniel drives away from My Little Wooden Shoe, with no destination

[ 229 ]

in mind, only vaguely aware of traffic and the fact that he is in charge of a heavy moving machine. His mind is not so much processing information as pinned beneath it, pierced on one end by the absence of Iris and on the other by the fact that Nelson is harboring a great malevolence for him. At the end of the winding, residential road that the day care center shares with a scatter of one-story houses, where Daniel would normally turn right to head toward the village and his office, he instead turns left, which brings him to Chaucer Street, which in turn empties out onto the state highway leading six miles north to Marlowe College. He presses the power button on his cell phone to tell Sheila Alvarez he’ll be in an hour or so late, but the battery has worn down and the phone remains dark.

I’ll call my office when I get there,
he thinks.

But get where? All he knows is that there’s a good chance that Iris is at the college, and a good chance that if he drives over to Marlowe there is hope of finding her.

Life, it seems, can be really very simple: you feel where you want to go, and you go there.You let your legs take you. At least the body, dog that it is, tells the truth.

Seventy years ago, Marlowe College was a sleepy, mediocre Episcopalian school with an enrollment of five hundred young men. Now, it is nondenominational, with four thousand students, twenty-four hundred of them women.The original old buildings still exist—ivy-covered, gray stone buildings, with leaded windows and burgundy slate roofs—but they are now overwhelmed by the modernist additions, the glass-and-steel fitness center, the broken geometry of the art center, the Bauhaus-ian dorms. The campus has grown, but it is still only thirty acres, with one north-south road winding through it, and another going east to west, and now Daniel is navigating his car, driving slowly as students stroll across the road without so much as a cautious glance. The air, cold and humid, is like a soaking sheet. A couple of very large crows land on a power line and swivel their heads toward each other as the wire sinks beneath their weight.

Daniel finds Iris’s car in the parking lot between the gym and the stu-a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

dent center, and he decides she’s more likely in the center and tries there first, where he immediately spots her, in the cafeteria, seated at a small wooden table in the company of a prematurely gray, olive-complexioned man in his late thirties. He wears a silk shirt and a long, luxurious scarf, and he holds a pen as if it were a cigarette as he leans toward Iris. Iris is dressed in a smart black skirt and a dark-green chenille sweater, with a silver bracelet and matching earrings. Daniel, struck by the sight of her, and then further struck by seeing her in conversation with the handsome man at her table, freezes in his tracks. A steady stream of young students flows past, parting ways to walk around him. Daniel is fixed to his spot, suddenly gravely dubious about having come here, and feeling a sick stir-ring of jealousy at the sight of Iris seated with another man.Within moments, however, Iris happens to look in his direction and gestures for him to come and sit with her. She doesn’t ask what he is doing here, and, of course, gives no indication that they are anything but two people whose children go to the same preschool. She introduces him to John Ardizzone, who, it turns out, is her newly appointed thesis advisor in the American Studies Department. Daniel, though unasked to account for his sudden appearance, says that he has come to use the college’s library to check up on some local history as a part of his research about Eight Chimneys, but as soon as he is embarked on this unnecessary fiction he regrets it and simply lets it trail off. Ardizzone quickly excuses himself, saying he has a departmental meeting. He taps his pen a couple of times, as if dislodging an ash from its tip, and, before hurrying off, he tells Iris that he likes her new ideas for her thesis and he hopes she can have a draft of it before the end of the spring semester.

“You have a new thesis?” Daniel asks, as soon as Ardizzone is safely away.

“Yes. So, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m stalking you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s strange seeing you here.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “It’s strange seeing you with your clothes on.”

“Don’t excite me,” he says.

[ 231 ]

“You missed a spot shaving,” Iris says, touching his upper lip. Her short hair glistens and her fingers smell of the oil she has rubbed into her scalp. “Are you having trouble facing yourself in the mirror?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“I’ve given myself over to a higher power,” Daniel says, smiling. “And you’re it.”

“Sounds convenient.”

“It’s a lot of things, but if convenient is on the list, I haven’t noticed.”

“It’s okay,” Iris says. “I’m not trying to hassle you. But I’m finding this very difficult.”

“I’m sorry, Iris. I don’t know what to do.”