A Ship Made of Paper (35 page)

drops that, too. He slowly wrests the platter from her. At first she resists, but then she seems to lose interest in creating any further havoc. She puts her hands up, steps back, like a criminal who has just been disarmed.

“You want to do the dishes? Do the fucking dishes,” she says.

He is so imprisoned by the grisly emotional logic of a love affair at its end point that he almost shouts, No, goddamnit, he will
not
be doing the dishes. True, Kate cooked the turkey but he, always the more domestic one in their sinking domestic partnership, was responsible for the cranberry sauce, the vegetables, the salad. And what is there to cooking a turkey? You put it in the oven, deck it out in some sort of Reynolds Wrap biohazard suit, peek in on it every hour or so, and in the meanwhile you can be sneaking little pulls on the old Absolut. But then, sanity and self-interest, not always boon companions, do a little synchronized swimming across his brainpan and he realizes that his relieving Kate of all household duties would be the very best thing he could do right now.

“Fine,” he says, “I’ll be glad to.You should get some rest.”

She looks him up and down, wanting to quarrel but too exhausted and too full of wine to bother speaking. She is wearing flowing black trousers, a white satin blouse, she has braided her hair up in a little deft twist, but all her beauty has fallen into a heap. She drags her feet as she trudges across the kitchen, the little squared heels of her black pumps scrape and bang against the floor; they are the noisy, tottering footsteps of a little girl wearing her mother’s shoes. Daniel doesn’t say anything more, he is afraid to look at her. He doesn’t want to do anything to im-pede the progress of her retreat. All he wants her to do is go upstairs, lie down, and then pass out, dressed, undressed, makes no difference.

He rinses the dishes, the glasses, the silverware, sticks everything that fits into the dishwasher, and then, thinking that if Kate is really going to pass out she will have done so by now, he creeps up the steps and looks into their bedroom, where, sure enough, she is not only in bed but under the covers, with the lights out. A little exhausted sigh of light from the hallways casts its pale dull depressive patina into the bedroom; Daniel can make out what seems to be Kate’s white blouse and the tips

[ 239 ]

of her shoes on the floor. So: she has undressed. Meaning: she is not napping, she is turning in for the night; this is not a pit stop, this is a crash.

Kate rarely mentions her brief husband, but more than once she has told Daniel that Ross loved to fuck her when she was passed out loaded. Alcohol was like cement blocks tethered to her sleeping brain, sinking it twenty fathoms deep, rendering her impervious to human voices, bark-ing dogs, sanitation trucks, phones, alarm clocks, light, cold, heat, shaken shoulders, kissed lips, fingers up her vagina, and, from time to time, full copulation. Every so often, however, she would be briefly aroused from her stupor and come streaming up to the surface of consciousness like a scuba diver swimming up through a thick red velvet ocean of wine, and catch Ross at it. She would either tell him to stop it, or she would not—both responses had their dark satisfactions.

The result of one of those sneaky copulations was Ruby, and now Daniel slips out of the bedroom and goes downstairs to check on the little girl, who has dozed off in front of the TV. Some nitwit in charge of pro-gramming has decided to show
Platoon
on Thanksgiving night.The Samuel Barber Adagio for Strings is on the soundtrack, its piercing melody accompanying the men as they kill and die in the lush jungle. Daniel digs beneath the sofa cushions and finds the remote, mutes the sound, hoping to protect Ruby, but the sudden absence of sound awakens her.

“Hey, Monkey,” Daniel whispers, hoping she will remain drowsy.

“What’s this?” she says, looking at the screen.

“Nothing,” he says, hitting the off button. “It’s time for bed.”

“What was that?”

“A movie.”

“Can I watch it?”

“You won’t like it, honey. It’s not for kids.” He sits next to her. “Are you feeling okay?”

She hates to admit it—mainly because she doesn’t want him to use it as an argument against her watching the TV. Nevertheless, she would like some sympathy, the occasional magic of an adult’s commiserating voice.

“My stomach hurts.”

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

“Still?” he asks.

She nods. She detects alarm in his voice and it brings tears to her eyes—the strange kind, the kind she knows will not be shed.

“Where does it hurt?”

“My stomach.”

“But where?”

She moves her hand in an indistinct circle around her abdomen, as if waxing a tabletop.

“Does it feel more throw-uppy, or more poopy?”

She shrugs, looks away, suddenly delicate. He has the feeling of having misspoken on a date.

“How long have you had it?” he asks. “Since dinner?”

“Every day,” she says. She reaches for the remote control; Daniel pulls it away from her, but she persists, and he gives it to her. She presses the on button and the set comes on just as one of the soldiers in
Platoon
catches a bullet in the back. Her face is so impassive, Daniel can’t tell if she has registered the image. She begins to scroll through the channels, one after the next, looking for a station showing cartoons.

“Where’s Cartoon Network?” she asks.

They have had a satellite receiver on their roof for months now, but with hundreds of channels to choose from, Daniel is still the only one who knows where the various networks and cable stations are on the scroll.

Even Kate, a hard-core aficionado of CNN, often asks Daniel for her show’s three-digit address. He is the one who brings the groceries home, who lugs them from the car, he is the one who mows the lawn, rakes the leaves, shovels the snow, salts the icy sidewalk, carries the firewood in from the shed and stacks it next to the hearth, he is the one who opens the flue in November and yanks it shut again in May, he is the one who pushes the reset button on the boiler when it inexplicably shuts down, who sets the Havahart traps for the squirrels in the kitchen, who traps the milk snakes in the dirt-floor cellar, who opens the windows so that the occasional bat can escape, he is the one who changes the batteries in the smoke detectors—what in the world will they do without him?

[ 241 ]

“It’s too late for cartoons,” he says to Ruby.

“What time is it?” A note of desperation in her voice—she knows what’s coming.

“Almost ten,” he answers, yawning.

“Where’s Mom?” she asks.

“She’s sleeping, too. Come on.” Daniel stands. He grips her by her armpits, the heat comes straight through the fabric of her cotton turtleneck. He lifts her, she grips his ribs with her knees.What if this is the last time he ever lifts her into his arms? Of course it’s not, he tells himself.

But he also knows that day will come. In the end, she may come to love him again, but first there will be hurdles to jump in a long steeplechase of hate.

The usual bedtime ritual for Ruby—the washing, the brushing, the stories, the back scratching—usually runs close to an hour, but tonight she allows herself to be put to sleep in twenty minutes, after which Daniel checks in on Kate again, and after that he goes downstairs, puts on his overcoat, and leaves. The night air is cold and tastes of wood smoke.The stars pulsate like wounds. He slides into his car, starts the engine, and backs away from the house without putting on his headlights.

When he is safely away from the house he switches on his lights and surprises two deer who have been standing on the side of the road. He wonders if he is making a terrible mistake—the kind you can never live down, the kind that defines your life, that creates a before and an after—

by leaving Ruby alone in the house with her mother. But he comforts himself: Isn’t that how the world goes? Aren’t there at this very moment millions of kids in their little beds, with their drunken parents right down the hall?

When he has put that proverbial country mile between himself and his house, Daniel realizes that once again he has no destination. The Bistro is closed for the holiday—though surely half its clientele could use a place to repair to—and he neither wishes nor dares to drive by Iris’s house. He finds his cell phone in the glove compartment and dials her number. One of Daniel’s clients, a postmarital stalker, from whom a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

Daniel has unconsciously learned certain desperate techniques of information gathering and track covering, has told Daniel that if you want to make a phone call and don’t want your number to show up on caller-identification hardware, or to have your number retrievable by the recipient’s pressing *69, then you can block your number from coming up by dialing *67 before making the call, which Daniel does now before dialing Iris’s number. His plan: If Iris answers, ask her to meet him at his office; if anyone else picks up, simply terminate the call.

The call is answered on the second ring. A man’s voice. Hampton.

Fucking hell.
Daniel hits the off button on his phone, tosses it aside, and steps on the accelerator, plunging the car deeper into the night.

Guided only by the logic and habits of driving, he speeds through the village and turns onto a little two-block stretch of frame houses, given the grandiose name Vanderbilt Drive; from there, he takes a left onto Hammersmith, to his office. Irma Thomas is playing on his tape deck:
It’s
raining so hard I can scarcely catch my breath
. . . He pulls into the driveway that leads to the parking area behind the building, which is just an unlighted patch of blacktop, with amateurishly drawn yellow lines indicating the parking space for each of the building’s clients, and he doesn’t notice Iris’s car until he is turning into his own slot and the outer edge of his headlights sweeps against the side doors of her blue Volvo.

He bangs his fist against the steering wheel, rocks back in his seat.

Iris has gotten out of her car, she is walking toward him. He opens the door. He hurries toward her, takes her in his arms.

“It’s you,” he says, talking and kissing her at the same time.

“I was just going to leave,” she says.

“Do you have time?”

She shakes her head no. “Do you?”

“Kate’s asleep. Passed out, actually.” It strikes him as a terrible thing to say, but even as he realizes that he proceeds to make it worse. “I actually feel nervous leaving Ruby alone with her.”

“You should go back. We both should.”

“How did you know I’d be here?” Daniel asks.

[ 243 ]

“I didn’t. I just had to get out of the house and I decided to come here. Hampton’s brothers Jordan and James—”

“I met James,” Daniel interjects.

“And his sister Victoria are completely obsessed with this fucking video game James brought over. All that brotherly competition, it’s really exhausting. And they’ve got Nelson all gooned up over it. It’s the worst kind of violent fantasy game for a kid like Nelson, but try telling that to Hampton. He just laughs, like there’s something cute and naïve about my concerns.”

“Leave him then, live with me.”

Without any particular change of expression, the look of frustration and anger on her face changes to melancholy, it’s like moving a radio dial the breadth of one cricket leg and hearing completely different music.

“Don’t,” she says. “It’s not funny.”

“Am I laughing? Am I even smiling?”

“Where were you all my life?” she says. “Why weren’t you there when it was time to get married? Where were you? What were you doing?”

“I don’t remember,” he says, pulling her close. “Let’s go upstairs,” he murmurs into her ear.

They have already been at each other a few times in his office; they have made love on the floor, with Iris on Daniel’s lap and Daniel in his chair, with Iris naked and bent over the desk, propped up on her elbows, her hands clasped as if in prayer, or with her arms outstretched and her hands grasping onto the edge of the desk for traction while Daniel empties himself into her from behind. As they walk in tonight, and Daniel turns on a floor lamp and then steps behind Iris to help her off with her coat, they both realize that more than any other single room, this utilitarian space, with its sense of grievance and redress in the glassed-in bookshelves, with its evidence of time wasted and time standing still in the standard-issue magazines on the low table in the waiting room, and the tax-deductible elegance in the blue-and-gold weave of the Turkish rug Daniel bought at an auction at a Holiday Inn across the river, this two-room suite, this place of business, this professional outpost of a man a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

who willfully jettisoned his main chance to make any kind of name for himself in his field, this is as close as anything they have to call their own.

Where in the world can they go? They have used her house, going from room to room, trying to find a bed in which they don’t feel criminal, they have parked like teenagers along various dirt roads and woodland paths, and they have been together at the Catskill Motel, the Bittersweet, the Stuyvesant Motor Lodge, a Sheraton, a Motel 6, the Flying Dutch-man, and in Cabin 3 of a squalid scatter of tiny tourist cabins calling itself the Morpheus Arms, always checking in under assumed names and paying in cash, sometimes only able to stay for a half hour, and never returning anywhere a second time.

“Where does everyone think you are?” he asks her, hanging her coat on the coatrack, and then putting his own over hers.

“Hampton’s mother wants some Pepto and I said I’d find someplace open and get it for her.” She glances at her watch, shrugs. “We actually have some in the house—Pepto-Bismol is to the Welles family what chicken soup is to Jews—but I just hid it in my purse so I could have an excuse to get out of there.” She takes an unopened bottle of the lurid pink liquid out of her pocketbook and shows it to Daniel.

He is thrilled by her cunning. Its dishonest, calculating nature doesn’t disturb him at all.

“Kind of low, isn’t it?” she says, dropping the medicine back into her bag.