A Ship Made of Paper (48 page)

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

Courting Iris has cost a king’s ransom. Before he secured this little $1,400 per month tract house—he knows he is being robbed—he was spending hundreds of dollars per week on hotels, motels, and inns. He has spent $3,800 he can’t afford on a pair of diamond earrings Iris can’t wear. (Sometimes, she puts them on when she comes to see him, but mostly she forgets them, and last time when he asked why she wasn’t wearing them she said that diamonds make her think of apartheid, which struck him as unfair and aggressive.) He spends money on having her sidewalk shoveled and her lawn mowed when he is unable to take care of it himself. He brings bags of groceries into her house when the coast is clear, and leaves them on the porch when members of Hampton’s or Iris’s family are on hand, and he has never collected a penny in reim-bursement. He has brought her car into the shop for a new transmission and simply paid the bill. He bought her a purple-and-black Amish quilt that was hanging in the window of an antique store in town because when they walked by it one day she slowed down and looked at it. He forces himself to stop thinking of the tabs he has picked up, the munifi-cence that has been his second nature. He is not regretting it, not a gesture, not a penny. Receiving these things never failed to delight Iris, who, as it turns out, is becoming very careful with her money; Hampton’s cof-fers are rather full and his disability insurance is not only coming up with biweekly checks that approach what he was making before the accident but is also paying out for those occasional medical expenses his health in-surers manage to duck. Nevertheless, Iris’s frugality seems to be growing. She patrols her house, turning off lamps. Daniel has watched with amazement as she scratched a single postage stamp off a letter because the post office failed to cancel it and she thought it could be used again.

If anything is left over on her dinner plate, even at the humblest restaurant, she will ask the waiter to have it wrapped—a half of a baked potato, thirty peas, a chicken wing. One of the reasons Daniel often asks her to wear those diamond earrings is sometimes he suspects she has sold them.

[ 331 ]

Money money money.

Daniel’s phone rings and he lunges for the receiver. It’s only seven-thirty. He has not had time to settle on a plausible narrative why someone would call him this early, and there is a moment of pure fear before he hears Kate’s voice, which for some reason settles his nerves.

“I’m not waking you, am I?” she says. This is a continuation of an old relationship myth—because he sleeps less than Kate, she acts like he needs no sleep at all.

“What’s up?” he asks. He struggles to sit up in bed; as soon as he stirs, the shifting of his blood recalls the feel of her kiss five hours ago.

“Ruby is freaking out here. She’s just desperate for you to take her to school.”

“Really?”

“Can you manage it? It would mean the world to her.”

He suspects there is something less than the absolute truth in what Kate is saying. Ruby may have said she would like Daniel to bring her to day care, but it was most likely a matter of Kate asking her,
Would you
like Daniel to bring you to school today?
and Ruby saying okay. After all, months have passed since Daniel moved out of the house and not once in that time has Ruby requested his chauffeuring services. It seems more than coincidence that Ruby would suddenly ask for him on a morning when Kate is in particular need of a few hours more sleep, and after a night when she had kissed him. And Kate’s willingness to turn Ruby over to him is also a little suspect—she has been consistently grudging in allowing him to spend time with the little girl who was practically his stepdaughter. When permission is granted it is always qualified with the warning that he better not be taking her to Iris’s house, and that Iris and even Nelson not be included in whatever little plan might be in the offing. Nevertheless, Daniel is not about to turn down a chance to spend time with Ruby and he says he will be over to pick her up in twenty minutes.

He arrives, in fact, in less time than that. Although he comes here a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

regularly to pick Ruby up for their sad little dates, and, in fact, was just here a few hours ago dropping off Kate and Lorraine, he is taken somewhat by surprise by the loveliness and tranquility of the house and its acres. The rosebushes, after two reluctant summers, seem to have found their confidence and now are in full red-and-white flower. The lawn is a particularly luxurious dark green.The shutters have been painted at last; concrete urns ablaze with geraniums sit on the porch. Has the place ever looked so relaxing? A nasty little stab of envy. He lives in a crummy rented house. Iris’s house, though certainly adequate, is also rented. Of the three of them, Kate is the one with roots—and how strange, since it seems to him she is the one with the least reason to be in Windsor County. Kate has left the door open, which he takes to mean that the alarm system has been deactivated and he is to simply let himself in, but he knocks and waits for her nevertheless. She comes to the door and her eyes peer out skeptically beneath furrowed brows, she seems to be implying he is being deliberately difficult by not waltzing right in.

“Is she ready?” Daniel asks. Ruby hears his voice and races in from the kitchen, in practically maniacal high spirits. He hasn’t seen her in a couple of weeks and the first thing he notices is she has gotten a little chubby. In fact, she has gone from stocky to rather fat. Noticing this makes him feel petty and ungenerous, and he picks her up and holds her tightly, as if to make it up to her. “My God,” he says, without meaning to,

“you’re getting so big!”

“It’s nice of you to do this,” Kate says. She looks surprisingly fresh and composed, considering she usually requires nine or ten hours of sleep and is operating on four at the most.

“I’m so glad to have the chance. Is Lorraine still around?” He doesn’t even know why he’s asked, he’s simply lofting the ball back to Kate’s side of the net.

“She fled the countryside for the safety of the city. I looked out the window at six o’clock and there was a taxi in the driveway, and then I saw her running for it. I guess she was trying to make the six-twenty.”

[ 333 ]

She rakes her fingers through Ruby’s hair, untangling it, but keeps her eyes fixed on Daniel.

He gets Ruby out of there as quickly as decently possible—he cannot shake the idea that Kate has engineered this whole thing as a way of further implicating him in the life of his old family, and since he cannot fathom that there is the slightest possibility of his being drawn back into the old domesticities, it seems more humane to be brief and even a little remote. He makes only minimal eye contact with Kate as she hands him Ruby’s insulated snack bag, made of bright scarlet fabric with a Vel-cro flap.Yet when he has Ruby strapped into the child seat in the back of his car—he has kept the clunky gray-and-beige thing there despite his changed circumstances—he feels an unexpected swoon of loneliness and nostalgia. Buckling the straps of the seat recalls those mornings that now seem a lifetime ago when he began every day with Ruby, and the pleasures of those drives to My Little Wooden Shoe, when her sweet physical presence filled the car, and her little piping voice was like birdsong, and for ten minutes he could see the world through her unjaded eyes, ten minutes when the trees were goblins, the crows were looking directly at her, the sky was a zoo, and the grammar school a shining city on the hill.

“How’s everything going back there?” he asks. He reaches back to pat her but misjudges her position and touches nothing but air.

“Fine,” she says. She catches his fingers and squeezes them affectionately.

Oh I wish, I wish, I wish,
he thinks, though he could not say for certain what he wishes for.To be back with Kate? He does not believe that is the case. To have Ruby somehow belong to him? It’s out of the question.Yet there is something he longs for, something he has lost, and then, in a little flare of self-knowledge he knows what it is. The privilege of his own comfort. He has lost his easy life. He has lost Kate’s house, her conversation, her soft, beautiful hair—he can barely believe he is thinking this, but then: there it is. He has lost Ruby, he has lost sleep, he has lost his energy, he has lost his sense of humor, he has lost his sight in one eye, he has lost if not his mind then at the very least his untroubled mind. And a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

he has given it all away for something that seems to be slipping through his fingers.

When they are close to My Little Wooden Shoe, the familiar feeling of anticipation comes back to him, a pure and wild animal eagerness. Iris could very well be pulling into the parking lot at this very moment. It’s fifteen minutes past eight o’clock. He knows she has a nine o’clock seminar at the college. The nurse who helps look after Hampton on the morning shift sometimes brings Nelson to day care, but Iris tries to do it herself whenever possible, and now, beneath a low, soft, blue-and-gray early summer sky, Daniel speeds the last mile of the way.

Her car is there, its doors dappled with mud. Hurriedly, Daniel takes Ruby out of the car seat and carries her across the parking lot, the pebbles crunching eagerly beneath his feet.

Before he and Ruby reach the door, Iris comes out in what appears to be a great rush. She is wearing a maroon skirt and jacket, black high-heeled shoes. She looks hurried but hopeless. Nelson is beside her, trying to keep pace. Then Iris sees Daniel, with Ruby in his arms. Daniel’s first thought is that Iris will somehow misconstrue this, will think that he has spent the night at Kate’s house, or is in some aspect of reconciliation.

But Iris, in fact, does not seem to be speculating about anything.

“Mrs. Davis just called the school,” she says, moving right past Daniel. “She has to leave in fifteen minutes and there’s no one home to look after Hampton.”

“Oh no,” Daniel says, following after her. “What happened to Mrs. Davis?”

“What difference does it make? I have to get home. He’s sleeping, he won’t be up until noon, at the earliest. But he can’t be in an empty house.”

Daniel places Ruby on the ground and she and Nelson begin talking, smiling, and gesturing, like old friends in their mid-forties.

“You’re all dressed up,” Daniel says. “Are you supposed to be somewhere?”

“Yes.” She gestures helplessly, a mixture of temper and surrender.

[ 335 ]

“I’ve got a meeting with my advisor. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Fucking Mrs. Davis!” She doesn’t bother to lower her voice. “And now this one . . .” She waves in Nelson’s direction. “He’s insisting on coming home, too. May as well. No sense putting him in day care if I’m going to be stuck in the house no matter what.” She reaches toward Nelson, pulls him close to her, caresses his face, his head. For a moment he luxuriates in his mother’s love, but then, suddenly, he squirms away from her.

“I thought all those people were there,” Daniel says.

“They’re gone, they left early this morning. Who can stand it?”

“I can look after him. He’s sleeping. He won’t know. I’ll just be there.”

“You can’t do that,” Iris says.

“How long do you need?”

“An hour and a half, two at the most. No, I can’t. It’s too strange.”

“It’s okay. Don’t forget.” He smiles. “I have almost no career. All I have to do is make a couple of calls, I can do that from your house.” He is about to say,
It’s the least I can do,
but he stops himself. Iris is looking at him intently; it takes him a moment to realize why: she is trying to decide under what rules of conduct it would be permissible to have Daniel looking after Hampton, even if it’s only ninety minutes, even if Hampton will never know, even if there are the emergency phone numbers Scotch-taped onto the wall next to every phone in the house, even if this will never ever happen again.

“You’re not going to see him, you know,” she says. “Not unless you go upstairs and watch him sleep. And, Daniel, I don’t want you to do that.

I forbid you, I really do, I forbid you to do that.”

“I won’t. I wouldn’t. I’m trying to help you here, Iris.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay, then?” he says.

“Okay.”

“Good, then that’s it.” He is wringing his hands, trying not to touch her.

“I really appreciate it.You don’t have to do anything, all you have to do is be there.”

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

“You better hurry.”

“Thank you.” She is surprised how formal this sounds. She clears her throat. “I really appreciate it.”

“I’m glad to help. I’ll bring Ruby, okay?” As soon as he says it, he wishes he hadn’t, but he doesn’t want to complicate matters by taking it back. Besides, Ruby will take care of Nelson, which Daniel cannot really manage. And Kate will never know.

I love you,
Iris mouths.

He presses his hand to his heart, as if he has been stabbed.

“Ruby?” he says. “Would you like to go to Nelson’s for the first part of the morning?”

Iris doesn’t have time to drive back to her house, she doesn’t even have time to transfer Nelson’s car seat to Daniel’s car, and she certainly has no time to jolly Nelson out of his annoyance that he is not going to be spending the morning with his mother after all. Daniel makes his way to Juniper Street with the kids in his backseat, Ruby snugly strapped in, while Nelson, as if to announce his policy of total noncooperation with Daniel, refuses to keep his seat belt on. Each time Daniel glances into the rearview mirror, he sees Nelson glowering at him, and before long the boy’s antipathy becomes so wounding and, frankly, so irritating that Daniel feels it might be an appropriate act of discipline to slam his foot on the brake and send the boy pitching forward.

Mrs. Davis, a thin, tired-looking fifty-year-old black woman, is waiting nervously by the front door. She is so fretful that she doesn’t even in-quire as to why Daniel is coming there to look after Hampton, though she has never seen Daniel before. Perhaps his being with Nelson proves his legitimacy. She gives Daniel no instructions, nor does she offer any explanations or apologies. In fact, all she says is a quick hello to Nelson, and “Now I’m really late” to Daniel, and then she puts a tan ski jacket over her uniform, though it is at least seventy degrees outside.