A Ship Made of Paper (40 page)

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of all days to overreact is anybody’s guess. Of one thing, however, Susan is certain: Marie will try to find a way of turning this irritating little drama to her own advantage.

“Be careful,” Susan announces, as the guests take the Roman candles out of the basket. “They pack quite a wallop.”

The search party files out of the foyer, onto the porch. Daniel and Hampton head south-southwest, across a ruined expanse of wild grass that soon leads to a dense wood of pine, locust, maple, and oak.

Once they are in the woods, the remains of the afternoon light seem to shrink away. The shadows of the trees—a shocking number of which have fallen to the ground from the weight of October’s sudden snowstorm—seem to pile on top of each other, one shadow over the next, building a wall of darkness. There had always been paths through the woods, made by the herds of deer that traversed these acres, or left over from the old days when there had been enough money to maintain and even manicure the Richmond holdings. But the October storm had dropped thousands of trees, and the paths are somewhere beneath them, invisible now. Daniel and Hampton can’t take two steps without having to scramble over the canopy of a fallen tree, or climb over a trunk, or a crisscross of trunks, slippery with rot. And where there aren’t fallen trees there are thorny blackberry vines that furl out across the forest floor like a sharp, punishing fog.

Here and there are little white throw rugs of snow.

“These vines are like razor wire,” says Daniel. Everything he says seems potentially disastrous, every word packed with black powder and a short fuse.

“Damn!” said Hampton. A snarl of vines has caught his cuffs, and as he yanks his leg free, the thorn tears his skin right through his sock.

“Are you all right?” Daniel says.They are halfway up a gentle slope—

it seems to Daniel that if they could get to the top of the hill, they might be able to see
over
the trees and gain some sense of where they are.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Hampton touches his ankle and then looks at his fingertip: red. “I just wish Ferguson took care of his own mess.”

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

“You mean Marie?”

“He’s sleeping with her in his house, with his wife there. Insanity.

What does the man expect?” Even now, he speaks formally, his voice deep and honeyed, every syllable distinct.

“Not this, probably.” Daniel stands ten feet from Hampton. He feels moisture from the forest floor seeping through the thin soles of his Sunday shoes. “Anyhow, are we really sure Fergie’s sleeping with Marie?”

“That’s what Iris tells me,” Hampton says. “Ferguson’s known Marie since she was a little girl. And since he and Susan don’t have children, it’s like a sublimated incest.”

“Is that what Iris says?”

“Hasn’t she said it to you?” Hampton asks, raising his eyebrows.

Oh Jesus, he’s closing in,
thinks Daniel.

They walk.The crunch of their footsteps.The cries of invisible birds.

Daniel cups his hands around his mouth and calls Marie’s name, silencing the birds. The noise of their footsteps on the brittle layer of dried leaves that covers the forest floor is like a saw going tirelessly back and forth. They have no idea where they are going.

They zigzag around fallen trees and swirls of bramble. Daniel walks in front. He looks over his shoulder. Hampton is having a hard time keeping his balance.

“I’m ruining these shoes,” Hampton says. He leans against a partially fallen cherry tree and looks at the sole of his English cordovan. The leather is shiny, rosy, and moist, like a human tongue.

“Are you all right?” asks Daniel.

Hampton nods curtly. “I hate the woods,” he says. “I don’t even like trees. I prefer landscape that’s flat and open, where you can see what’s out there.”

“Well, you’re a long-range planner,” says Daniel. “So that figures.”

Hampton frowns. He seems to be questioning Daniel’s right to be making glib generalizations about him.

“My wife tells me she sees a lot of you during the week,” he says.

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“Well, you know, the kids,” Daniel says. “Kate’s daughter worships your son. It’s Nelson this and Nelson that. Constantly.”

Hampton tries to remember the little girl’s name. He recalls it was the name of one of his aunts—but his mother has four sisters by blood and three stepsisters, and then all those sisters-in-law. Hampton was raised in a swirling, scolding vortex of large, vivid women.

“It’s like seeing what it’ll be like when Ruby falls in love,” says Daniel.

Ah, right: Ruby. Actually, none of his aunts had that name, no one came any closer to that than his aunt Scarlet, a well-powdered librarian, whose upper arms were like thighs, and who, nevertheless, was usually in a sleeveless dress, which displayed not only her fleshy arms but her vaccination, a raised opacity of skin and scar the size of a pocket watch.

And Scarlet wasn’t even her name—it was Charlotte, but one of the other nephews mispronounced it and Scarlet stuck.

Hampton presses a button on the side of his watch, the dial lights up like a firefly for a moment.

“It’s almost five o’clock.”

“It’ll be dark soon,” says Daniel. “I wonder if anyone’s found her.”

“This is so messed up.”

“Marie!” Daniel shouts, but his voice drops like an anvil ten feet in front of him.

“I have to be on the nine o’clock train tonight. That Monday morning train’s no good for me.”

Daniel keeps quiet about that, though he is by now, of course, fully aware of Hampton’s hours of departure and arrival. Infidelity is an ugly business, but it makes you a stickler for detail.You’re an air traffic controller and the sky is stacked up with lies, all of them circling and circling, the tips of their wings sometimes coming within inches of each other.

They reach the top of the small hill, but the sight lines are no better than below.The only sky they can see is directly above them, gray, going black.

“What do you think?” says Daniel.

“I think we’re lost,” Hampton says, shaking his head.

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

“Next they’ll be sending a search party after us,” Daniel says. He notices something on the ground and peers more closely at it. A dead coyote like a flat gray shadow. Sometimes at night, he and Kate could hear coyotes in the distance, a pack whipping themselves up into a frenzy of howls and yips, but this desiccated pelt, eyeless, tongueless, is the closest he has come to actually seeing one.

“What do you have there?” Hampton asks.

“The animal formerly known as coyote,” Daniel says.

Breaking off a low, bare branch from a dead hemlock, Daniel pokes the coyote’s remains. Curious, Hampton stands next to him. A puff of colorless dust rises up.The world seems so deeply inhospitable—but, of course, it isn’t: they are just in the part of it that isn’t made for them.

Here, it is for deer, foxes, raccoons, birds and mice and hard-shelled insects, fish, toads, sloths, maggots. Hampton steps back and covers his mouth and nose with his hand, as if breathing in the little puff that has arisen from the coyote will imperil him. Iris has often bemoaned her husband’s fastidiousness, his loathing of mess, his fear of germs. He has turned the controls of their water heater up and now the water comes out scalding, hot enough to kill most household bacteria. There are pump-and-squirt bottles of antibacterial soap next to every sink in the house; if Iris has a cold, Hampton sleeps in the guest room, and if Nelson has so much as a sniffle, Hampton will eschew kissing the little boy good night, he will shake hands with him instead and then, within minutes, he’ll be squirting that bright emerald-green soap into his palm.

An immense oak tree lies on the ground; Hampton rests his foot on it and then shouts Marie’s name. The veins on his neck swell; Daniel has a sense of what it would be like to deal with Hampton’s temper, about which he has heard a great deal from Iris. No wonder Iris hasn’t told Hampton a thing. She is afraid.
How could I have not seen it before?
Daniel wonders.
She has not told him, she will never tell him, and if she does Hampton
will kill her. Or me.

Discouraged, exhausted, Hampton sits on the fallen tree—and immediately springs up again. He has sat upon the Roman candle in his back

[ 277 ]

pocket and it split in two. He quickly pulls it out, with frantic gestures, as if it might explode, and tosses the top half of the candy-striped cardboard tubing as far from him as he can.

Now his back pocket is filled with the Roman candle’s black powder, a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, arsenic, and strontium.
If I kick him in the
ass, he might explode,
thinks Daniel. He has a vision of Hampton blasting off, sailing high above the tree line, smoke pouring out of his behind.

Suddenly, in the distance is a pop, and then a plume of iridescent smoke rises above the trees, a vivid tear in the dark silken sky.

“Someone’s got her,” Daniel says. “I just saw a flare.”

Hampton looks up. Only a small circle of sky is visible through the encirclement of trees. “What’s a damn blind girl doing out here? Even with eyes you can’t make your way.”

“She was raised here,” Daniel says. “Her father was the caretaker. She came back to look after him when he got sick. Smiley.”

“Smiley? What do you mean?”

“That’s what everyone called him. I used to see him in town when
I
was a kid.”

Hampton shakes his head. “These people, they’re living in another century.They got their old family retainers, their fox-hunting clubs, their ice boats, they play tennis with these tiny little wooden racquets, and New Year’s Eve they put on the rusty tuxedos their grandfathers used to wear.”

“They can be pretty absurd,” Daniel says. “They’re half mad, but it’s okay, if you have a sense of humor about it.”

“That was the first thing Iris ever said about you, how you have this terrific sense of humor.”

“Class clown,” says Daniel. “In my case, middle class.”

Hampton is still pinching black powder out of his back pocket, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. He tosses the powder into the darkness, as if scattering ashes after a cremation. He rakes a handful of dead leaves off of a wild cherry tree, one that is still standing, and uses them to wipe his hands. “I used to make Iris laugh all the time.”

“I used to make Kate laugh, too,” says Daniel. He says it because he a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

has to say something. He cannot simply let Hampton go on about Iris and not say anything in reply. It would be too strange, and it would be suspicious, too. “First couple of years, I had her in hysterics.”

He notices that Hampton’s shaved head has suffered a scrape.There’s a little red worm of blood on the smooth scalp.

“Kate doesn’t think you’re funny anymore?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Daniel says.

“Iris thinks you’re funny. Maybe you’re funnier around her.”

“Maybe she’s just very kind.”

“Or very lonely.”

As far as Daniel is concerned, this is torture. It might be better just to come out with it, tell Hampton:
I love Iris, and it seems she loves me.We
belong together.We do feel bad
. . . Oh, shut up about feeling bad. Do you think he cares? He’d like you to have brain cancer, that would be the sort of suffering he’d like for you.Why are you offering up your stricken conscience—to make him feel you’ve been punished sufficiently? Are you so afraid of him? And with that question, Daniel at last connects to the core of what had been plaguing him from the moment he and Hampton set off together in search of Marie. It is not really about conscience, after all.

He’s been wrestling with conscience for months now, they are old sparring partners, sometimes he pins it to the mat, sometimes it slams him, it doesn’t really amount to much, it’s a show, like wrestling on TV. And besides: the worst sort of remorse is preferable to what preceded it, which was the infinitely greater agony of longing for Iris. Remorse is the payment due for the fulfillment of his great desire. And it is, finally, a payment he was willing to make. No, it is not his conscience that churns sickly at the center of him, making him cringe inwardly when Hampton steps too close to him. It is fear, physical fear.

They continue 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 climb yet another hill.This one might have been steeper—because they both have to hold on to trees to pull themselves up—or else they are getting tired.

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And once they have scaled it, all they can see is more trees—except on one side, where there is a sharp drop-off, leading to what looks like a large pond filled with black water.

“We came from that direction,” Hampton says uncertainly. He points down the hill upon which they stand, and off to the left. The night is gathering quickly, the darkness rushes in like water through the hull of a ship, covering everything.

It seems to Daniel that they have walked
down
the hill, as well as walking up it. In fact, they may have traipsed up and down it three or four times. But he chooses to not argue the matter.

“All right,” he says. “I have no idea.” He touches the Roman candle in his back pocket. Maybe set it off right now, before it got any darker. But how much darker could it get? Better to save the flare for later, if needed.

“Do you know how to get out of here?” Hampton asks.

“No.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Fine, lead the way.”

They half walk and half slide down the hill, with their arms in front of their faces to protect themselves from the saplings.

The problem is there is no space to walk in; the woods have imploded. They seem to be walking in circles, corkscrewing themselves into oblivion, 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 is as if they are being toyed with. Isolated in their despair, they walk for half an hour without speaking.