A Ship Made of Paper (7 page)

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begin to kiss, passionately. First one long kiss and then another and now the white guy is practically climbing on top of her. Desperate, Hampton turns to the woman next to him.
Get a load of that,
he says to her. And as soon as he says this to her, she claws at his face with her long fingernails.

He awakens, frantic with confusion and anxiety. He is not used to nightmares; normally, he isn’t even aware of his dreams. It takes him a moment to realize that he is safe, at home. He props himself up on his elbow to guard against falling back to sleep—that world, that terrible dream world of the train is still there, waiting for him to tumble back in. He forces his eyes open, looks to Iris’s side of the bed. It’s empty, the sheet in her space is cool. He is about to call out to her but then he sees her, standing at the window. She is wearing a baggy pair of men’s boxer shorts and a once-red T-shirt from which most of the color has been bleached.

There is a glow out there, rising up from the headlights of a car.

“Iris?” says Hampton.

She turns quickly. “You’re awake,” she says.

The light in the window is caught in the back of her hair. He can’t make out her features, but he senses from her voice and posture that he has interrupted her, or startled her. “Who’s out there?” he asks her.

“No one.” She turns, looks out again, as if to check her own story.

“No one.”

“I just had a nightmare,” he says, reaching his hand out to her, beckoning her to bed. He knows that he should not be so commanding—Iris has even told him as much—but the gestures of the favorite son, the always-sought-after man, come from the deepest part of him. To change these things would be like changing his voice, it would take constant vigilance. She finds him arrogant, but he doesn’t feel arrogant. It just seems to him that his being found attractive is a part of the natural order of things, and when Iris resists him, or is slow to respond, it irritates him, not because he is a potentate and she is his lowly subject, but simply because a mistake is being made.

The sight of those long, outstretched fingers illuminates Iris’s nervous system with a rage that ignites like flash powder. She wonders if she a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

ought to hold her ground or go to him. Sometimes she has the energy to resist him, but each time she does she enters into the conflict with the knowledge that it will extend through the night.

Hampton switches on his reading light. His cranberry-colored pajamas are streaked with night sweats. He sits up straighter, arranges his pillows, and then reextends his reach for her.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He pats the sheet on her side of the bed, indicating where he wants her to be. Sometimes she thinks about the men who have wanted to go to bed with her and whom she refused, the good men, handsome, clever, large-hearted men, and how strange it is that life would deliver her to this point: treated like a little dog who is being beckoned to hop up onto the sofa.

Okay, if that’s how he wants it. She bounds across the room, leaps onto the bed, falls forward onto her hands and knees, facing him. Then, completing her private joke, she lets her tongue hang out and she pants.

He counters with excruciatingly contrived tenderness. He strokes the side of her face. “We have to sleep,” he whispers.

This is night language, code; somewhere in the blind, improvised journey of marriage, sleep has come to mean sex. It has come to mean let me lose myself within you, let me begin the fall into the silent heart of the night between your legs. “Are you tired?” has become an invitation to make love; a loud yawn and a voluptuous stretch of the arms are supposed to function the way once upon a time his coming behind her and pressing his lips against the nape of her neck did.

She continues to pant like a dog, until his frightened, confused expression is replaced by a frown. She takes her place beside him. She lies flat, she feels her blood racing around and around, as if looking for a way to leave her body. Each time it makes its orbit around her, she feels warmer and warmer.

“I can hardly wait for you to finish your thesis and for us all to move back to New York,” Hampton says. This is meant to be a kind of sweet talk, signifying that he misses her, that he cannot carry much further the

[ 43 ]

burden of their weekly separations. But Iris knows what he is
really
saying: I hated those people tonight.

“I’m sorry it’s taking so long,” she says. She’s tempted to go back to pretending to be a dog, but she thinks better of it. She feels his long, hard fingers closing around her hand. He lifts her right hand and very carefully, emphatically, ceremoniously places it on his penis, and then he presses down on the back of his hand and lifts his hips up, as if responding to her, though he is only responding to himself.

She pulls her hand away from him—but before he can complain, she rolls over, drapes her leg over him. Lifting herself up on her elbow, she looks down at him and says, “Pretend you’re raping me.”

“What?”

“Don’t hit me or anything, but rape me, really really rape me, tear my clothes off and force yourself into me.”

“Are you serious?”

She nods yes.

“Iris,” he says, in a fatherly, admonishing tone. But her request has already had its effect on him. His hardness feels urgent, brutal. He grips the band of her shorts, gives it a tug, waits to see what she will do.

Iris rolls onto her back, she lifts her chin, closes her eyes. She is about to be erased, obliterated, but on her own terms.

“Who should I be when I do this?” he asks. His throat is dry, his voice has a small fissure running through it.

She feels herself softening at her center, the way a peach will if someone has dug their thumb in, softening, beginning to rot. “You’re just you and I’m me,” she says.

“This is strange,” he says.

“Shhh,” she answers. “Come on. It’s all right.”

She has a sense of him as completely under her command. She is controlling the situation, him, the night belongs to her at last. But then he surprises her. He tugs her boxers down, fast, with something expert and irrefutable in his movement—just one long pull and they are around her knees. And then before she can even take a breath he turns her over a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

swiftly and a little cruelly, and then the weight of him on top of her presses her nose and mouth into the mattress and all she can think is,
Jesus, he is really going to do this to me.

Daniel comes home, closes the door quietly behind him, and tiptoes with exaggerated care across a minefield of squeaking floorboards. He is like the henpecked hubby in a cartoon, sneaking back home after a night’s carousing. He sits on the steps, takes off his shoes, and ascends to the second floor in his stockinged feet.

Knowing it will only increase his agitation, in some hapless way courting the self-torture, he looks in on Ruby. His love for Kate’s child has taken on the harrowing qualities of a crime in the planning stage. She is the night watchman in a store he is going to rob, she is going to be in harm’s way. He has a dream of his own happiness, and if he is lucky enough to one day attain it, bold enough to seize it, man enough to keep it, that joy will be paid for, at least in part, in Ruby’s tears.

Her bedroom is so dark he cannot see her, but he hears her slow breathing. He feels a kind of thud in the center of his consciousness, as if he has just knocked something down to the carpet in the dark.

As he feared, Kate is waiting for him, fiercely awake. Her pillows are stacked up to support her back and she rests her head against the wall, exactly in the center of the bedposts. She has wrapped her arms around her chest and she flutters her fingers on her upper arms. Instinctually, his eyes scan her bedside table: a stack of books, a little tape recorder for the taking of her own dictation, a little blue Chinese bowl holding a United Airlines sleep mask and foam rubber earplugs, and—what he was looking for and what gives him the sour pleasure of a hypothesis confirmed—a bottle of zinfandel, in which she has made quite a dent.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For giving you a hard time, in the car.” It seems she means to be somehow repentant, but her words are delivered with a little tremor of

[ 45 ]

sarcasm on the edge, though he is not sure who is being mocked—he for being so touchy, or she for behaving badly?

“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s fine.”

“I had no right.”

“It’s okay. It’s just . . . you know.Talk.” He feels as if he is evading her conversation, she is the bull and he is the matador.

“I would like to apologize,” she says, her eyes narrowing. “And I would like you to accept my apology.”

“You did nothing and said nothing that needs an apology.”

She shakes her head, amazed at the depths of his treachery.

“You won’t even give me that?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t know what I was giving. I really have no idea what this conversation is about.”

She takes a deep breath, pours herself a little more wine, a scientifi-cally minute portion that splashes at the bottom of her tall glass. “Daniel, I have this terrible feeling about you. No, sorry, not about you. Sorry.

But about what’s happening to you.”

“It’s late,” he says. “I’ve had a long day, we both have.Tomorrow’s Saturday, we can talk tomorrow.” He has peeled off his socks and now he is stepping out of his trousers. For a brief moment he has allowed himself to wonder what it would feel like if he were getting undressed to get into bed with Iris Davenport, and now that the thought has presented itself he cannot get rid of it. It just flies around and around within him, like a bird that can’t find the window that let it into the house.

“It’s already tomorrow and I want to talk now. It’s no big deal, I just want to ask you a question. Is that all right? One teeny-tiny question? Or maybe not teeny-tiny, maybe more medium-sized.”

“You’re sort of loaded, Kate.”

She doesn’t mind his saying this. “Do you believe in love?”

“I don’t know. No.Yes. I don’t even know what you mean.”

“O. J. believed in love. Even though he’s lying about killing his wife, in his heart he knows he did it, and he might even think he did it for love.”

“I don’t believe in killing, if that’s what you mean.”

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

“You know,” Kate says, pouring herself more wine, less judiciously this time, “people think that
love
is what’s best in each of us, our capacity to
love,
our need for
love
. They think love is like God, and they worship their own feelings of love, which is really just narcissism masquerading as spirituality.You understand? If we say that God is love, then we can say that love is God, and that gives us the right to all these chaotic, needy, lusting, insane feelings inside of ourselves. We can call it
love,
and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to calling it God. But here’s a thought. What if God isn’t love? And love isn’t God? What if all those emotions we call love turn out to be what’s really worst in us, what if it’s all the firings of the foulest, most primitive part of the back brain, what if it’s just as savage and selfish as rage or greed or lust?”

“I don’t know, Kate. It sounds sort of counterintuitive.”

“Intuition? What is that? We intuit what we want to intuit. We never intuit things that are against our interests and desires. Maybe intuition is just one of the many ways we have of elevating desire, making it something mystical rather than base. Did you ever think of that?”

“No.”

“Love has become some insane substitute for religion, I think that’s what’s happened. And in this country it’s pounded in on us at all times, every radio station, every TV station, all the magazines, all the ads, everywhere, it’s like living in a theocracy, it’s like living in Jordan and people are shouting out lines from the Koran from the top of every mosque. Love, love, love, but what they’re really saying is:Take what you want and the hell with everything else. We’ve even changed the Bible to go along with this new religion. When I was a kid, people used to read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians as being about charity—it used to be faith, hope, and charity, remember charity? the humility of that?—but now they’ve changed the translation and it’s not charity at all, it’s love.

Big old encompassing love, spreading all over everything like swamp gas.

Love is like a crystal ball, you gaze into its cracked heart and you see what you want to see. It’s really scary. It feels like the whole culture has gone insane.”

[ 47 ]

Daniel is sure that the best thing would be to remain silent, he has re-cited to himself his own domestic Miranda rights, but he cannot resist saying, “I haven’t gone insane, Kate, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I know you haven’t, and I don’t think you will. I really feel as if I’ve found a kindred spirit in you. And this isn’t intuition, or some mystical crapola about our being cosmic twins, or that it was written in the stars, because, let’s face it, that’s not how life is, life’s a bunch of accidents, senseless. We improvise, we keep it together. But with you, it’s more. It feels nice. And that’s why if I were a betting woman, I’d put my money on us. I think we’ll always be together.”

He’s silent. Surely she doesn’t expect him to comment on this.

“We may have our hard times,” Kate says, “and we may have to take breaks from each other, maybe long breaks. But I don’t think we’ll ever be free of each other. And not because we’re the most romantic couple in the world, or anything like that. It’s a mysterious connection, a fucking mystery . . .” She laughs. “Or a not-fucking mystery, or maybe a fucking-once-in-a-while mystery. Who knows? But I was sure of it from the first time I met you, I just never told you.”

She’s silent and Daniel realizes he must say something. “Really?”

“Yes. I thought to myself, I’m never going to get away from this guy.”

“Did you want to?”

“And then I thought, And he’s never going to get away from me.” She rolls away from him but then slides over, pressing her hindquarters against his hip. “And I feel even stronger about it now. I just feel so grateful. I’ve got you, and Ruby, and my talent, and what’s left of my looks.”