A Ship Made of Paper (46 page)

“We are a nation of laws,” McTeer says.

“Who’s that freak?” Iris asks.

“Reginald McTeer, a lawyer.”

“And the foundation of our legal system,” McTeer continues, “is a man or a woman is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Without that presumption, there is no justice. And without justice there is no peace.”

Kate rolls her eyes. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t believe that O. J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.”

“I know plenty of people who have grave doubts about that, Miss Ellis,” McTeer says. “You should get out more.The whole world isn’t in the editorial offices of some fancy magazine. Go into the kitchen in some of the lavish restaurants where you eat and ask the people who have been cooking your food, ask them what they think, or ask the woman who cleans your house.”

“I’m the woman who cleans my house, Mr. McTeer, and I say he’s guilty.”

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

“She’s in your house,” Iris says.

“I know.”

“Look at the windows. It’s light out. When was this?”

Daniel puts up a hand to silence her. “Wait.” He has surprised himself. A few months ago he would have gone to practically any lengths to hear the sound of Iris’s voice and now he is shushing her. “I just want to hear this,” he adds softly. Then, still nervous that he may have hurt her feelings, he further adds, “It was videotaped earlier today.” He pats her knee reassuringly.

Iris grabs his hand, ferocious yet playful. She kisses the back of it, turns it over and kisses his palm, and then puts first one finger and then a second into her mouth, and sucks on them, and then, when he lets out a little involuntary whimper of pleasure, she slides off the sofa, positions herself between his legs, forces his knees apart—not that he resists her in any but the most perfunctory way—and buries her face in his lap, kissing his cock until it rises, at which time she moves her head back a little and accepts him into her mouth.

“We have witnessed a travesty of justice,” Kate is saying.

Daniel, his eyes closed now, gropes for the remote control and turns off the set.

Iris leaves shortly after. Daniel returns to his bed, which is full of the warmth and aromas of sex. He tries to sink into it, but sleep seems to have turned its back on him, and he gets dressed and drives into the village for a drink or two (or three or four—who cares?) at the Windsor Bistro, though it is after midnight. As he nears the Bistro and sees that its dark-red neon sign is still lit, bleeding its deep, pleasantly lurid colors into the black air, he feels a little swoon of pure gratitude for the place and everyone who makes it run: how monstrous the night can be without a place to go.

It’s crowded at the Bistro, more crowded than he’s ever seen it. Is the entire town wracked with desire, unable to sleep? Daniel stands near the

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entrance, next to the coatroom, which, now that it’s summer, is filled with elaborate arrangements of flowers. He looks in on tonight’s crowd, he is not quite ready to venture further in. It’s not as if the people here tonight are strangers to him—everyone in Leyden is familiar, to a certain extent—but they are not people he really knows, not people he can confidently call by name. They’re a boisterous bunch, gathered together in groups of six, seven, or eight, with wild laughter being the order of the night. Tonight’s customers are acting as if they were having their last manic round of grog on a sinking ship. The owner’s normally saturnine boyfriend, rather than playing from his usual repertoire of folk-rock torch songs, is leading some of the customers in “Rainy Day Women.”

And I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get stoned.

Daniel thinks of himself as one of the original customers of the Bistro, one of its founding fathers, but whatever favoritism Doris Snyder, the Bistro’s owner, used to show him is not available tonight. She works feverishly behind the bar, mixing margaritas with one hand and filling bowls of pretzels with the other, and when Daniel makes a little imploring gesture in her direction her eyes are as expressive as thumbtacks.

He finds a small, empty table in a distant corner and sits down, resigned to a long wait before he is served. He scans the room, looking for Deirdre, Johnnie Day, Calliope, or any of the other college-aged girls who have not yet managed their way out of Leyden, and who supplement their lives of pottery, yoga classes, organic garden design, and whole foods catering with employment at the Bistro. However, the first person with whom he makes eye contact is Susan Richmond, who is holding a beer mug and swaying to the music, like a shy person all alone who wants to appear to be enjoying herself.

An hour ago, she was back at Eight Chimneys, lying in her own bed, unable to sleep, and her mind in that vulnerable state had been seized with a desire to see her husband—it was as if wakefulness had compromised her mind’s autoimmune system, made it easy prey to resentment and longing.The jealousy was like rabies, it commanded her, the infection of it made her want to sink her teeth into something. She felt helpless a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

against its power. She paced through the vast gloom of her sighing, creaking house, turning on lamps, going into rooms she hadn’t visited in months, surprising the visiting Bulgarian folk dancers who were drinking gin and poring over old maps in the library, and then coming in on the busy chipmunks in the ballroom, the circling bats in the kitchen, and even braving a peek into Marie’s little cell.

Susan has agreed to let Marie stay on at Eight Chimneys. It seems less humiliating that way. The girl can stay but whatever happens between Ferguson and his blind whore must remain private, not only from Susan herself but from the outside world—particularly that, particularly the outside world. Yet despite the agreement, Susan knows that sometimes Ferguson and Marie slip off the property, and the Bistro is one of the places they go. Susan has come here to find them, and has not, though she has remained here for over an hour, partly to prolong the charade that she is simply out for a bit of night air and a couple of drinks, and partly because those drinks have made her drunk.

Her face lights up at the sight of Daniel. She has never held any particular fondness for him—in fact, his association with Ferguson and Marie, and then his so catastrophically injuring Hampton on her land, with
her
Roman candle, has put him in her “bad news” category. But tonight she responds to the sight of his familiar face with a wave and a broad smile of relief, because for her entire time in the Bistro she has not seen anyone she knows.

“Hello, there,” she says, seating herself heavily at his table. The scent of alcohol wafts off her skin. “What a crazy place!”

“Hello, Susan,” Daniel says, giving her name particular emphasis. He likes to use her name frequently when they happen to meet, largely because he is sure she is having trouble remembering his. “I must admit, Susan, I’m a little surprised to see you here.”

“Why do you keep saying my name? My God, it’s annoying.”

“I’m sorry. Annoying Susan Richmond is surely the last thing I want to do.”

“Is it because you think I don’t remember you? I know exactly who

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you are. You’re Daniel Emerson and you ditched your perfectly lovely, smart-as-a-whip wife.You’re one of the boys.” She fixes her large, bleary eyes on him, and then raises her mug in mock salute.

Daniel wonders how to respond to this—should he just take it in stride, pretend it’s nothing more than a little rough kidding—or should he strike back at her? A waitress comes to their table. Susan orders another beer, though her mug is far from empty, and Daniel asks for a cognac, and decides on the path of least resistance: he’ll pretend she means no harm.

But before he can say anything, Susan breathes up a bitter snort of laughter and wags her finger in his face. “When do people around here start living up to their responsibilities? You’d think that almost killing a man would have brought you up short, but from what I hear you and Iris are still going at it hot and heavy.”

“Hot and heavy?” Daniel is reduced to this, pointing out little excesses in diction.

“Yes. It’s curious, isn’t it? On the face of it, you and Ferguson couldn’t be less alike. He comes from all this historical tradition, and you come from nowhere. He’s all about contemplation and you’re all about work. But beneath it all, you’re both men, or aging boys, that’s more like it, and you’re carrying on in exactly the same revolting way.What my uncle Peter used to call ‘Letting the little head think for the big head.’ May I ask you a question?”

“Look, Susan, this isn’t—”

“What gives you the right, that’s what I can’t understand.What gives you the right to cause so much damage, and to hurt people? To really, really hurt people. And it’s the worst kind of pain, worse than slapping someone in the face, or stabbing them. Because what are you doing, when you get right down to it? You’re making a fool of someone.”

“Are you calling Kate a fool? That would be making a big mistake.”

“What would you think if right now your wife was home and feeling so brokenhearted that she decided to drink poison? How would that make you feel?”

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“Are you thinking of poisoning yourself, Susan?”

“Me? I should say not.”

“Then what makes you think Kate is?”

“Some people do just that.”

“Most don’t.”

“I just think that what you’re doing is very dishonorable, that’s all I’m saying. The whole thing is shabby.”

The waitress returns with their drinks and places them on the table.

“Doris sends these over with her compliments,” she says.

Daniel realizes that Doris is making up for the empty stare she dealt him when he first walked in, and then, quite without meaning to, he wonders if she would be making these liquid reparations if he were sitting with Iris instead of this bulky, somewhat ridiculous woman, with her blotchy white skin and fierce, entitled eyes. Iris has already given him the tour of Leyden and pointed out the various shops in which she is routinely treated like a thief, either physically trailed by an employee or constantly scrutinized by whoever is working the cash register. All the once benign spots of his youth.

The tour came last Saturday, when he dared to accompany her on an errand to the Windsor Pharmacy, where, in fact, the clerk treated her with friendliness and respect—since Hampton’s convalescence, she was a regular there and they’d come to know her. After she bought surgical gloves and a sheepskin mattress cover, they chanced a stroll down Broadway, with Daniel carrying her packages as if they were her books and he were walking her home from school. She would in all probability never have mentioned her run-ins with Leyden’s commercial class if Daniel hadn’t sighed and gestured to all the little shops and said, “Such a sweet little place, isn’t it?”

“Depends who you are,” she said softly, because it depressed her to have to talk about all of the instances of prejudice, the sheer rudeness that entered into practically every day of her life. Iris did not care to discuss the details of her life as part of the long and terrible story of Race in America—she thought she deserved both more and less than to be counted among the victims of racism. Yet there was something in

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Daniel’s voice when he called Leyden “sweet” that made her want to bring him up short. She wanted Daniel to know that
here
is where she was forced to sit for fifteen minutes before anyone came to take her order, and
here
is where she had to show three pieces of identification before they’d take her seventeen-dollar check, and
here
is where she would never buy a Danish backpack if her life depended upon it because the bitch who owned the store had rubbed the top of Nelson’s head, and then whispered to a friend,
It’s supposed to be good luck.

Daniel has not been paying attention to what Susan is saying, and when he forces himself to focus on her, widening his eyes in an approximation of interest, his attention is seized by the sight of Kate winding her way through the Bistro on her way to his table. Her friend and editor Lorraine Del Vecchio follows behind her. Both women wear sum-mery black dresses, with spaghetti straps, and both women carry snifters of cognac. Without any fanfare, Kate sits in the empty chair closest to Daniel, letting her breath out with a little sigh and allowing her shoulder to graze his for a moment. Lorraine, however, is left standing.

Nervously, his voice booming, Daniel introduces Lorraine and Susan, but Susan’s energy is turned onto Kate. “I was just giving your stupid man here a piece of my mind,” Susan says.

“Well, you have to be careful,” Kate says. “Daniel’s already of two minds about most things, and now if you’ve given him a piece of yours, that might be more mind than he can handle.”

Daniel feels a nostalgic twinge of gratitude toward Kate, for coming to his defense without seeming to, and for being so quick off the dime: her playful caste of mind, which was sometimes, during their time together, numbing and de-eroticizing, turns out to be one of the things he misses most about her.

“I saw you on TV,” Daniel says.

Kate makes a little yelp of dismay, covers her face, but spreads her fingers so she can peek out at him.

“Wasn’t she
fabulous?
” Lorraine says, pronouncing it so as to leave little doubt that she isn’t the sort of person who normally says “fabulous.”

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

“You were great,” Daniel says. “I loved the crack about cleaning your house.”

“That show goes on so late, I was sort of hoping no one would see it.”

“And she looked
fantastic,
” Lorraine says, again with comic, distanc-ing emphasis.

“You really thought I was okay?” Kate says to Daniel. “That means a lot, coming from you.” She reaches for his hand, pats it as if comforting him. Her touch is as warm as breath. Her perfume is a mixture of musk and orange. The lines around her eyes have deepened. She is wearing a delicate little cross that has half disappeared into her cleavage. “I didn’t even want to be home when they aired it. Lorraine’s here to distract me.”