A Ship Made of Paper (8 page)
She presses herself harder against him. “I know what you’re thinking.
She’s drunk, she’s drunk. Once again. But I’m not. I was, maybe. Back at the restaurant, with those terrible people. But I’m sober now, and meaning every word. I couldn’t get drunk if I tried.”
“Have you been trying?” Daniel asks.
He regrets saying it. It sounds so put-upon, so long-suffering. But the words are out, there’s no way to take them back. He waits for her reply, already devising how he will defend himself. But the plans aren’t a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
necessary. He has not hurt her feelings, he has not irritated her. She is breathing deeply, and a few moments later her breaths deepen with a little aural fringe of snore.
Outside, an owl screeches in triumph. From farther away comes the manic whoop of coyotes. The colder it gets outside the more the creatures of the night seem to celebrate their catches, the triumph of having survived another season. The world belongs to those who can satisfy their hunger. The rest are food. Even the stars in the sky shine out the story of their own survival.
They had no idea where they were going.They walked.The crunch of their footsteps.The cries of invisible birds. Daniel cupped his hands around his mouth and
called Marie’s name, silencing the birds.The noise of their footsteps on the brittle
layer of dried leaves that covered the forest floor was like a saw going tirelessly
back and forth.
They walked up a hill, zigzagging around fallen trees and swirls of bramble.
Daniel walked in front. He looked over his shoulder. Hampton was having a hard
time keeping his balance.
“I’m ruining these shoes,” Hampton said. He leaned against a partially fallen
cherry tree and looked at the sole of his English cordovan.The leather was shiny,
rosy and moist, like a human tongue.
The next morning, Daniel takes Ruby with him to a new bakery in the village, where he plies her with chocolate croissants and chocolate milk. Daniel recalls Iris having mentioned this place—chrome and glass, with a sort of 1940s feel, overpriced, but with comfortable, long-legged chairs lined up facing the huge window overlooking Broadway—
and he sits there with Ruby, ostensibly reading the paper and drinking espresso, but in reality watching for Iris or her car. After an hour of this maddening activity, during which he is unable to read more than a few a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
headlines, and the coffee tastes like scorched ink, he takes Ruby back home with a cup of latte and a cranberry muffin for Kate, who, to his surprise, is awake and dressed when they return.
“Where was everybody?” she asks.
“Breakfast,” he says, handing her the takeout bag.
“What did people eat in pre-muffin America?” Kate asks, peering into the bag. She notices Ruby, whose mouth is ringed with chocolate and whose T-shirt is spotted with it. Kate looks questioningly at Daniel.
“That’s what happens to little girls whose mothers sleep late,” he says, surprising himself with the bite of his own voice.
“I want to play with Nelson,” Ruby says.
It seems strange to Daniel: as his heart swells from the added freight of love and desire, it becomes in its fullness less and less substantial, until it is like a feather in a stiff wind, unpredictably blowing this way and that, spiraling up, plunging down, rocketing sideways at the slightest provocation—the lucky-sounding ring of the phone, the melancholy shift of the afternoon light, the hum of an oncoming car. He has resisted all morning the treacherous impulse to plant in Ruby the idea that she and Nelson get together today, but now, God bless her, she has come up with the idea all on her own, and his spirits soar.
“I don’t think so,” Kate says. “Nelson’s father is home and that’s their private time over at Nelson’s house.”
Ruby looks at Kate, squinting, wringing her little hands, as she tries to think of some counterargument to this. But the combination of Kate’s professional needs and temperament has made the concept of “private time” sacred. Still, Ruby cannot hide her disappointment, and she even manages to enter into a brief, unsuccessful negotiation, during which Daniel stands transfixed, unable to shake the feeling that his happiness hangs in the balance.
In the end, Kate prevails. Not only can Ruby not go to Nelson’s house, but Nelson cannot come to hers. And when Ruby counters with all she has left—“Then I’m going to be so bored”—Kate says that maybe they can all go to Lubochevsky Farms, where the enterprising owners
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have devised a way to get tourists and even some of the locals to pay for the privilege of harvesting the annual raspberry and apple crops. Daniel is taken aback by Kate’s suggestion. He cannot imagine her climbing the rickety stepladders, filling the flimsy baskets with apples, enduring the sunlight and the hefty autumnal bees. And then what? Eat the apples? In three years of knowing her he has never seen her take a bite of an apple.
No. There is only one explanation. She is concocting this little outing as a way of roping him in, and when Daniel realizes this he reacts like someone jumping away from an onrushing car.
“I have to go to the office,” he says. He feels the desperation of a gambler: if he can just sit at the table, then maybe he can catch a card.
“On a Saturday?”
“Sorry. It happens.” He is experiencing that bicameral lunacy of a man with a secret life; he is talking to Kate, making his excuses, arrang-ing his features in a way that would suggest regret. He is already gone.
“I need to work, too,” she says. “I’ve got two O. J. articles going, and both are due.”
“What is with you and that case? I thought you were a novelist.”
“He butchered his wife and might end up walking. I know we like to cheer for the African-American side, but there is a question of justice at stake. I’m sure even Iris Davenport would agree with that.”
It is unnerving to hear her say Iris’s name, and he shifts his eyes, afraid for a moment that he might give himself away, though he is beginning to wonder if there is much secrecy to his secret life. He might be no better hidden than an ostrich with its head in the sand and fat feathered ass in the air.
“Why don’t we split the day, then?” he says. “All I need is two or three hours. I can take them now or I can take them in the afternoon. Or I can take them at night, for that matter.” It really doesn’t matter. All he needs is to get out of this house for a couple of hours. But as soon as that thought crosses his mind, it is replaced by a second, more urgent idea.
He should go first, then Kate could work in the afternoon, and then he could take more time away in the evening. That way he could have as a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
many as six hours. To do what? That part hasn’t been worked out yet. To cruise by Iris’s house? To patrol the village in search of her car? To sit at his desk dialing and redialing her number?
“All right,” Kate says, her voice measured, a little cool. “Then you go first.” He knows she is onto him. He can feel the pressure of her intelligence and her deep common sense. He feels like a half-wit miscreant tracked by a master sleuth.
His sense of impending exposure quickens his pace, and in minutes he is out of the house, in his car, and on his way to somewhere or other.
From the house on Willow Lane to his office in the middle of town is a ten-minute drive and one that could, without any loss of travel efficiency, bring him past Iris’s house, if he should choose to take that route, which he does.
The Saturday has turned warm; it’s already October, winter is next.
Daniel drives past the familiar landmarks of his childhood. Putnam Lake, with little puckers of silvery light caught in its waves, ringed by tall blue spruce; Livingston High School, surrounded by cornfields, its asphalt parking lot in the process of receiving freshly painted yellow lines; the infamous ranch house where his old friend Richard Taylor lived with his drunken parents, where you could walk right in without knocking, where there was no housekeeping, no food, no supervision, where the lamps did not have shades, and where Daniel drank his first whiskey when he was eleven years old, smoked his first joint at twelve, and, that same year, got into a ferocious fist fight with Richard’s deaf older cousin.
The Taylor place was one of a dozen houses around Leyden where Daniel spent his time after school, where he slept on weekends, where he hid like a little desperado. In those grim but somehow fondly remembered childhood days—when he was his own man, needed by no one, responsible to no one, when the unanimous possession of his self was a pleasure that outflanked every deprivation and annoyance—he would rather have been anywhere in the known world than in his own home. He would rather have slept in school than in his parents’ house.
His parents were latecomers to parenthood, vegetarians, Congrega-
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tionalists, campers, tall gray people with solitary tastes for reading, hik-ing, and the brewing of homemade beer. They were in their forties when Daniel was born, and by the time he was a teenager they were nearly sixty, their habits thoroughly calcified. The foods they liked, the Mozart that soothed them, their ten o’clock bedtime and their six-forty-five rising, their hour-long ablutions, their Canadian Air Force exercises, their aversion to moving air (no air conditioners, no fans), their daily porch sweeping, their dishes, cups, and silverware cleaned in kettles of boiling water—these were the things that Julia and Carl Emerson revered.These were, in their minds, the cornerstones not only of civilization but of sanity; without them they would be plunged into madness.
When Daniel entered their lives they taught him not to touch the vases, which antique carpets to avoid, which lamps were safe to use. He was not to run, jump, or shout. He was not to play the stereo console in their parlor, nor was he to use the electric typewriter, the adding machine, the juicer, the blender, either of the vacuum cleaners, or the electric toothbrushes. Above all, the back half of the house was off-limits; this was where the Emersons saw their patients. Here was the waiting room with its intriguing collection of offbeat magazines—from
Preven-tion
to
The Saturday Review
—the dark walnut apothecary case filled with amber bottles of vitamins, the vanilla plastic skeleton hanging from a hook, and the his and hers chiropractic tables—neither of them ever worked on someone of the opposite sex. Here came everyone from beefy back-strained farmers to neurasthenic housewives, here backs were cracked, hips were realigned, toes were pulled, fingers were popped, heads were yanked suddenly to the left or right, moans were moaned, and for some reason that Daniel never could fathom, people returned again and again.
Daniel continues his drive along the outskirts of the village.There are tourists in town today—the weekend, the splendid color change, when the maples turn to flame and the oak leaves are the color of honey. It strikes him as funny that the town has become a tourist destination; he cannot imagine how the day-trippers pass the time. There are jokey a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
T-shirts for sale that say Paris London Tokyo Leyden. There are homemade jellies to be purchased. But the bagels here aren’t as good as in the city, and the same goes for the breads, the pies, the croissants. Shoes, slacks, dresses, hats—all are cheaper and better in New York.The restaurants are merely adequate. The antique stores have been shopped clean and now sell items from the 1970s. Still, every weekend, except for the long dead of winter, there are at least a hundred new arrivals, parading up and down the two-block commercial center, with an ice cream cone in one hand and a T-shirt in the other, glancing shyly at the locals and delighting when someone nods back or says hello.
Not far from the high school is the town cemetery, where the head-stones are thin as place mats and worn smooth and illegible over time. It was to this graveyard, in the company of all that Colonial dust and the ceaseless squirrels, that Daniel used to go when there was no one left to visit and it was still too early to go home.With the marker of one of the Stuyvesants to support his back, Daniel read the books of his youth—
Salinger, Heller, Baldwin—and, in his thirteenth year, before his parents released him from their benign bondage and sent him off to a third-tier prep school in New Hampshire, it was here that he wrote poetry for the first and only time in his life.
They were not great poems or even good poems, they were not by most standards really poems at all.They were poetry as he understood it, the poetry of which he was capable, and they ran through the changes of longing and desolation, seduction and heartbreak, trust and betrayal like a hamster on a wheel, celebrating lips he had never kissed, eyes into which he had never gazed, caresses he had yet to enjoy. They were for Baby, they were for Darlin’, they were for Janey, though he knew no one by that name, they were for Suzie, and though he did happen to know a Suzie, he did not love or even like her. In each of these poems, Daniel was alone, carrying within him a heart that ticked like a bomb. A great many of them began:
And I walk . . .
One went
And I walk through this night / with
only one light / and that’s my heart, darlin’, burning for you
. Another:
And I
walk and I walk and I walk and I walk / And wherever I go I’m looking for you.
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But who was this “you”? She did not exist. There were girls in his daily world whom he liked and who seemed to like him, but they could not be fit into the staggering, narcoticized world of his desire, the atmosphere was not conducive, it made them shrivel and die. And then, one day, the longing was gone. He cannot remember a precipitating event. It just happened, like the day he suddenly stopped believing in fairies and ghosts, or the day the notion of Santa Claus was abruptly ridiculous.Weeks went by without him writing in his notebook of love poems, and then it struck him that if anyone ever came upon those verses the humiliation would not be survivable, and he brought them down to the river, thinking of making a ceremony of their disposal, a kind of burial at sea, but in order to get to the river he had to trespass across one of the immense riverfront estates and by the time he was at the water’s edge he heard the rumble of a caretaker’s truck, surely on the way to roust him out, and he ended up tossing the notebook into the water wildly and running.
