A Ship Made of Paper (9 page)

Now, as he makes a couple of left-hand turns that bring him ever closer to Iris’s house, he is remembering those mawkish scribblings for the first time in twenty years.

Side-arming that notebook into the river did not mean that from then on he lived in some anguished exile from romance; he was not like a priest who loses his faith and then becomes a drunk or a fornicator. He did not feel bitterness, he did not feel any loss. He simply knew better and it was over.Those feelings were like his milk teeth; his bite was sturdier after that. And in place of all that inchoate desire, he went on to other pursuits: public service, respectability, sex, money. His brief childish dream of love was over, and he went on. He had relationships. He had
a life,
by which people seemed to mean a certain accumulation of days and experience, all mortared into some kind of shapeless shape by an adult gravitas. He went on to prep school, on to college, on to law school, on to a year traveling on the cheap in Europe, on to a year in Mississippi working for a civil rights lawyer, on to Minneapolis for more public service, where he lived with the daughter of a blind Norwegian piano tuner, a large, brown-haired girl with creamy skin and enormous a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

eyes, who seemed to him like an old-fashioned dessert, the kind they serve you when you’re too sated to eat another bite, and on to New York, to Kate and Ruby, and on and on and on—but had he been walking an ellipse all that time? Because here he was again, not exactly at the spot at which he had written those rhymes twenty years ago, but certainly within shouting distance of it. Around and around he’d gone, and now it seemed to all be coming to this: that phantom female, that ghostly girl, Darlin’, Baby, all those creatures of his longing, all those spirits of love and desire whom he thought he had exorcised with the power of plain old common sense, put in their place at the back of the class by irony, experience, and practicality, they had survived after all, they had not been cast out, they had merely shrunk back, they had hibernated, and now they are awake, they are swirling around and around, and they have fused into a single woman.

Juniper Street. The fashion of the playful flag has arrived. On Iris’s block Daniel counts eleven flags displayed over the entrances, and of these only two are the stars and stripes.The other households seem to be pledging their allegiance to countries of the imagination. Flags here depict a crow perched on a pumpkin, Dorothy and the Tin Man, a cobalt heaven riveted with silver stars, a golden retriever, a pair of ballet slippers. It’s after ten on a pretty morning but no one is on the street, a fact for which Daniel is grateful, since he is now driving so slowly that he may as well be parked in the middle of the road.

Iris’s Volvo is no longer in their driveway and his mind races as he tries to assign meaning to this fact. One thing he knows for sure: it means they are no longer in bed together—at least one of them is out of the house. Perhaps Iris has gone to run some errands, in which case Daniel might run into her if he drives quickly over to Broadway. Or maybe she’s gone to the campus, or across the river to one of the malls. Or maybe it’s Hampton who’s gone, in which case Iris is right there in the house.

He reminds himself not to suddenly introduce a new aspect to the plan; he told himself that all he would do is drive by her house and move on.

Now he is casting about for reasons he might knock on her door, and he

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forces himself to ignore every spontaneous scenario and to stick with the original plan.

He has seen the house. Enough. Maybe he will return in an hour or so to see if the car has returned. Maybe there will be other signs of life, little changes, clues from which he can concoct a plausible narrative of their day. He steps on the gas pedal, bringing the speed of his car up to fifteen, but as he pulls away from the house he is gripped by the idea that Iris is in there, and that all that separates them is fifteen paces and a knock on the door. And though he has promised himself no unplanned actions, he does add one thing to today’s reconnaissance. He dials her number on his cell phone.Yet on the first ring, he feels an overpowering sense of creepiness and remorse, and he pushes his thumb against the end call button on his phone with such force that he almost veers into a parked car—an old Mercedes with a bumper sticker that says commit random acts of irrational kindness.

Because he told Kate he was going to do some work, Daniel heads toward his office, for the tiny squirt of moral salve it might afford him, though not before driving down Broadway one last time and looking for Iris’s car. He pretends not to see everyone who waves hello to him, and he thinks to himself that if he had remembered more clearly all the waving or howdy-doing that goes on in Leyden, he would never have moved back here.Yet to not have moved back here is now unthinkable, a speculation that leads to an infinity of emptiness, like imagining not having been born. The equation is simple. No Leyden = No Iris. Of course, there are a million details of life and circumstance that had to fall into place to bring him to the spot in which he now finds himself. But in the end it seems to Daniel to come to this: if he hadn’t lost that case back in the city, if he hadn’t been kicked down the stairs by those three thugs, with their huge hands and reddish eyes, if he hadn’t developed the humiliating, excoriating fear of every dark-skinned stranger he saw on the street, then none of this would be happening.

He wonders what Iris will think of the story of his flight from New York. He wonders if he will ever need to tell her. He nervously imagines a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

how it will sound to African-American ears—the panicky white boy packing his bags, quitting his practice, heading for the cornfields and the pastures and the perfect white village with his southern girlfriend and her porcelain daughter in tow. Surely this will have a meaning to Iris somewhat different from the meanings to which he is accustomed, and for no other reason than she is black. He is getting way ahead of himself, but he can’t help it. He remembers Kate’s remark about Leroy from the night before:
His people came over in chains and mine sat on the porch sipping
gin. Something that begins that badly can never end well.
So will that be the contest? History in one corner and Love in the other? Fine. Ring the bell.

Let the fight begin.
Love,
he thinks,
will bring history to its knees.

At last, it is Monday, and Daniel is in court, standing in front of Judge Hoffstetter. On one side of Daniel stands Rebecca Stefanelli, who most people know by her nickname, Lulu. She is a five-times-divorced, hard-living woman in her early forties, with red hair and a tentative, defensive smile on her face, the smile of a woman who has had a number of unkind remarks made at her expense, and who would rather appear in on the joke than be its unwitting target. On the other side of Daniel stands James Schmidt, a muscular, scrubbed widower who runs a little lawn mower and chain saw repair business out of his garage; Rebecca and James had a brief, more or less geographically determined fling a couple of years ago and relations between them have been stormy ever since.

Standing next to Schmidt is a barrel-chested, white-haired, flush-faced old lawyer named Montgomery Paisley, in semiretirement but still making a handsome living representing the company that sold Schmidt his home insurance. Though summer is long past, Paisley is wearing a blue-and-white seersucker suit and light brown shoes.

Rebecca is suing Schmidt for failure to keep his section of the public sidewalk clear of ice. She slipped and fell in front of Schmidt’s house last March, sustaining a concussion, and she claims to have been suffering from debilitating headaches ever since.

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Judge Hoffstetter is manifest in his dislike of Lulu Stefanelli. “Miss Stefanelli,” he says, “I’ll thank you not to wear sunglasses in my courtroom.”

“Your Honor,” Daniel is quick to say, “my client is wearing dark glasses on the advice of her physician, as a way of warding off headaches.”

“This is not a sunny room, Mr. Emerson. Please instruct your client to remove her sunglasses.”

It’s outrageous to Daniel that Hoffstetter is harassing Lulu about her glasses. Hoffstetter used to be a state patrolman in Windsor County; in fact, it was he who gave Daniel his first and only speeding ticket, twenty years ago, when Daniel was seventeen. In those days, Hoffstetter was a hard, fit man, with an accusatory, military bearing, and he was never without his mirrored sunglasses. Now, however, the judge is fleshy; his eyebrows are a thick tangle of silver wire above his professorial half-glasses, his long, porous nose is a ruin of self-indulgence.

Hoffstetter is silent. He leans back in his creaking chair, taps his fingertips together. He peers at Daniel as if he’s about to cite him for contempt. But then he sits forward, claps his hands together.

“Okay, you two, chambers.”

“What’s he doing?” Rebecca Stefanelli whispers to Daniel. Her breath has a warm vermouth quality to it and Daniel can only hope Hoffstetter hasn’t gotten a whiff of it.

“Don’t worry,” Daniel says. And when she looks at him questioningly, he adds, “We’re right and they’re wrong and that still means something.”

Montgomery Paisley is fastening the clasp of his enormous old briefcase; he looks as if he’s carrying the folders for every case he’s ever tried. He hoists it up and, with his free arm, gestures gallantly for Daniel to go first.

Judge Hoffstetter’s chambers are really just one room, which he has turned into the Judge Hoffstetter Historical Museum, with pictures of himself on every wall, depicting the highlights of his life, from high school baseball, to his induction into the state police, to his marriage to Sally Manzardo and their fifteenth wedding anniversary in Barbados, to his late-in-life graduation from Fordham Law School and becoming a county judge.

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

Hoffstetter sits heavily behind his desk, opens the top drawer and pulls out a cigarette and a little battery-operated fan, to dispel the smoke.

“You’ve got no case, Mr. Emerson,” he says.

“Do you mind if I sit?” says Paisley.

“You do whatever you want, Monty.You’re walking out of here a winner.”

“That’s highly improper,Your Honor,” Daniel says.

“Counselor, Mr. Paisley has three statements from Leyden Hospital emergency room staff, all of them stating that when your client came in after having suffered a head injury in front of Schmidt’s house she was drunk as a skunk.”

This is not the first time Daniel is hearing this. The whole thrust of his case is to dispel the allegations of Stefanelli’s drunkenness.

“Your Honor, the salient fact of this case is not my client’s score on a Breathalyzer test, or the alcohol level in her bloodstream—though no such tests were given to her and the allegations of her being under the influence of alcohol are completely without proof.The salient fact is that Mr. Schmidt failed—and, in fact, refused—to remove the snow and ice in front of his house, thereby creating a hazard. Anyone could have fallen on that treacherous piece of pavement.”

“But no one did, Daniel,” Hoffstetter says, smiling. “No one but your booze hound of a client.”

“Your Honor, I really must object—”

“Don’t bother.” Hoffstetter sighs, shakes his head, and continues. “I must say, Mr. Emerson, I never thought I’d see you in my court arguing a case of such little merit.Why did you go to the trouble of getting such a prestigious education if all you’re going to do is practice law of the lowest common denominator?”

Is that what this is going to be about?
wonders Daniel.
That I went to Co-lumbia and Hoffstetter did law at proletarian Fordham?
Yet there is something weirdly sincere in the judge’s question and it finds its way through Daniel’s customary defenses. He is capable of feeling a bit of chagrin over some of the cases he handles, though, frankly, Lulu Stefanelli’s fall

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is, he thinks, a decent case, unlike a couple of the divorces he’s worked on, or the estate work he’s done for a few of the local pashas.

Yet, like many lawyers, Daniel looks back at his beginnings and feels that he has fallen more than a little short of his initial goals. In law school, Daniel envisioned himself practicing some kind of public service law, though exactly what kind constantly shifted. Children’s rights. Civil rights.

Environmental law. Something that could make the world a little better.

And in order to practice that sort of law he had to be in a major city, New York, Washington. His first job out of law school was with the doomed Lawyers’ Immigrant Defense Society, which lost its funding six months later. From there he went to a private law firm, with its share of corporate clients but with a reputation for doing interesting pro bono work—one of the partners had a son in prison in Malaysia on trumped-up drug charges and it resulted in the inflammation of the entire firm’s conscience.

“My client deserves some consideration here,Your Honor,” Daniel says softly, indicating with his tone that he’s ready to deal. Lulu would be happy with Schmidt’s insurance company covering her emergency room bills and maybe coming up with ten or fifteen grand for her pain and suffering.

“All this for a few measly bucks?” Hoffstetter shakes his head. “How the mighty have fallen.”

Paisley speaks from the depths of his chair. “We’re willing to pay her initial medical costs, Judge.”

“Let’s not encourage her, Monty. She’ll be throwing herself in front of cars and diving into empty swimming pools if we go along with her little scheme here.”

“Your Honor—”

“Mr. Emerson, I really did expect better things from you.”

But Daniel persists. He knows he’s getting whipsawed by Paisley and Hoffstetter, but in a few minutes he’s able to go back to the courtroom and tell Rebecca Stefanelli that the other side is willing to settle for medical expenses plus ten thousand dollars, and she is so thrilled that she hugs him excitedly and kisses him first on the ear and then on the eye. And a few minutes after that, he’s in his car, driving through a cold, pelting rain, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r