A Ship Made of Paper

by Scott Spencer

  Clarence and I hope to be up in NewYork for a Conference ofAfricanAmerican Physicians Meeting from December2–5.Clarence calls it the Funference ofAfrican-American Positions.We’d love it ifyou could join us for dinner or a show or anything on any ofthose days.Ifyou could talk Iris into coming into Manhattan then we could make it a foursome.I hope you can tear her away from her school work.Maybe she can give us that Harlem Renaissance tour she’s been promising.Is her thesis still on the Harlem Renaissance—or has she changed her mind?

  Hampton stops reading.The rain continues to lash at the windows.

  Thunder booms like an avalanche ofboulders.He knew Brenda couldn’t get through a letter without a dig at Iris.Brenda couldn’t possibly care what Iris is doing to fulfill the requirements ofher Ph.D.What’s Brenda, with her intellectual curiosity measuring something like2on the intel-lectual Richter scale, planning to do? Go to some college library and read Iris’s monograph?

  Yet.His heart feels queer, as ifit is suddenly circulating blood that is a little oily and a little cold.Hampton is vulnerable to the suggestion that Iris might not be in possession ofa first-class mind.There is a vagueness to her, a lack ofprecision.Sometimes, he thinks this is a result ofher pro-foundly feminine nature, yet in his line ofwork he meets dozens of women whose minds are scientific, logical, calculating, aggressive.Iris’s is not.Both she and Hampton have been explaining her long career in graduate school to themselves and to the world at large as somehow a re-sult ofan excess ofintellectual curiosity, an unwillingness to be pigeon-holed, and the demands ofmotherhood, and Hampton is perfectly willing to stay within the confines ofthis official explanation.What he is not will-ing to say, except to himself, is that Iris is still in grad school, and no closer to the end than she had been last year, or the year before, or the year be-fore that, because she is simply too confused to complete her work;that, in other words, the machinery ofher mind is not quite up to the task.Did he consider her hisinferior?No, not necessarily—in fact, not at all.She is a little abstract.Yet she is perceptive, she can see right through him to his tender, undefended deeper nature.She is the center ofhis emotional life.

  Sex with her has more than once moved him to tears.She slows him down in ways he needs slowing down, helps him to see the fragile, transitory beauty ofthe world.He has sat with her in their house in Leyden, on the floor in front ofthe fireplace, in complete silence, watching the fire for an hour, two hours, enjoying a stillness and simplicity he could never have imagined without her.No, these are not the gifts ofa second-rate mind, yet, sad to say, he has to admit they are not the characteristics ofa mind on its way to academic achievement, either.

  Hampton places Brenda’s letter and picture back into the envelope.It occurs to him that Brenda might be the stupid one.True, she somehow made it through medical school—but in pediatrics, often considered the bottom ofthe medical barrel.

  He stares at the rain and then thinks ifthe weather is this bad in the city it’s probably worse up north.It gives him a reason to call Iris.He leans back in his Eames chair, dials the number with the same hand with which he holds the phone, his fingers moving as ifhe were playing theaccordion.

  On the sixth ring, Nelson answers.“Hello?”he cries, his voice vehement and obviously unnerved, yet distant, too.He’s speaking into the wrong end ofthe phone.

  “Hey, Nels, it’s me.”Hampton must speak loudly to be heard.

  ”We don’t have any lights,”Nelson says.

  ”Turn the phone around, Nels.You’re talking in the wrong end.”

  “We do not have lights,”Nelson repeats, after turning the phone around.“Ruby is kissing me.”His pronunciation and rhythm are robotic, every syllable separate, patterned after a Saturday cartoon android.

  Ruby?

  ”Where are you, son?”

  “We are in the playroom.”

  “Where’s your mother?”As soon as he asks, Iris picks up the extension.

  ”Hello?”

  Nelson hangs up the upstairs phone, hard.

  ”Iris, it’s me.”

  “Hampton!”She sounds just the slightest bit startled.

  ”What’s happening?”he says.Those were the first two words he ever said to her, uttered in what seems now a distant, sunlit country.Atlanta 1991.Iris had been sitting in a cruddy fifties theme restaurant called Blueberry Hill, with an economics professor who was her boyfriend for twenty minutes or so, they were quarreling, he grabbed her wrist, she yelped as ifbranded, a sugar shaker slid from the Formica table, she had never been manhandled in her whole life, never been slapped, spanked, no one had ever raised his voice to her, and here was this huge, temperamental guy, a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound Malaysian with a military brush cut and a flamboyant Hawaiian shirt he wore like a muumuu over his massive belly, squeezing her wrist, offering up a per-fect opportunity for gallant intervention.Hampton had come quickly to their table and uttered the two-word question that became somehow the touchstone oftheir intimacy:What’s happening? a question he has asked a hundred times since, each time conjuring a memory ofBlueberry Hill and the beginnings oflove.

  “Nothing,”Iris says.

  Nothing isneverthe answer.

  ”Is the electricity out?”Hampton asks.

  ”Yes.We just lost it, twenty minutes ago.”

  Justlost it, twenty minutes ago?There’s a bit ofdisarray in that sentence and Hampton senses it, the way you can enter your house and know something is wrong, some small thing has been slightly moved.

  ”That’s really pitiful.You’d think the infrastructure could cope with a lit-tle rain.”

  “It’s snowing, that’s what’s doing it, the snow, it’s been pouring snow for hours.”

  “Snowing?”

  “And the leaves are still on the trees so they can’t take the weight of it.It’s so awful.Those poor trees.They tear the power lines down as they fall.There’s sirens going all over the place.It’s total chaos out there, it’s like a war, except there’s no enemy, just the snow.It’s really strange to realize how easy it is to scramble everything.When you get here you’ll see.Everything is broken, everything.”

  She is making no effort to keep the alarm out ofher voice, in fact, she seems to be hyping it, letting him know that things are bad, maybe even out ofcontrol.Iris’s way has usually been to keep him cool, to pre-vent him from overreacting, but now she is deliberately creating a sense ofimpending emergency, and Hampton wonders why.

  “But the phone is working fine,”he says.

  “The phone lines are buried.But there’s no lights, no heat.”

  “Then why not…”The words caught in his throat.“Why not go to a hotel?”Iris is particularly extravagant in hotels, and watching her raid the minibar is an advanced exercise in forbearance.

  “You don’t understand.We’re snowed in.The roads are closed.It’s dangerous out there.We couldn’t go anywhere ifwe wanted to.”

  If we wanted to,that is an odd thing to say.Why wouldn’t she want to leave a house that has no heat, no water, no lights?

  “I’m worried about you,”he says.

  ”We’re safe in here.It’s just a little claustrophobic, knowing you can’t go out.And it might not be better tomorrow and I’m supposed to be at Marlowe for a thesis conference with Professor Shafer.”

  “Professor Shafer?”Her thesis advisorwasan old Berkeley radical named Steven Pearlstein.That she is scheduled to meet someone else means she has once again abandoned her topic for a new one.

  “He’s great.He’s new.”

  I’ll bet he is.“Who’s there with you?”

  “Here? In the house? Daniel and Ruby.They came over afterWooden Shoe shut down.”She pauses, lets it hang there, like a dancer stopping all movement, standing stock still while the beat goes on.“The whole town’s shut down.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know.Stay here, I guess.”

  He hears a sound, a man’s voice, distant and indistinct.

  ”What was that?”
<
br />   “That was Daniel.He says hi.”

  “When’s he going home?”

  Iris turns away, says to Daniel,“Hampton says hello.”

  “Is he going to spend the night?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  The possibility ofIris spending a night in that house alone with Daniel Emerson renders Hampton, for the moment, mute.

  “Don’t do this, Iris,”he finally says.

  “What?”

  Can she not hear him?Without quite meaning to, Hampton jabs his thumb onto the offbutton, breaking the connection.He had been stand-ing during the conversation, but now he feels weak and must sit.He sits there clutching the phone.He thinks about racing up to Penn Station, getting on a train, and making it to Leyden before anything happens.

  How long would it take? It’s halfpast six now.He has committed the train schedule to memory—his memory, which is like a shark looking for new things to eat, has long ago devoured it.The next train is at twenty past seven.The trip to Leyden is one hour and fifty minutes.That would make it ten past nine when he’d arrive.Ten minutes for a cab to come, ten more minutes to reach his house.Nine-thirty.Nelson doesn’t go to bed until nine.That would give Iris and Daniel just a halfhour be-fore Hampton arrived.They would probably not have gone beyond long-ing looks, perhaps a kiss or two.

  Yet as soon as he mentally goes through the paces ofthrowing a few belongings in a bag, flagging down a taxi in the rain, sitting on theAm-trak all the way up toWindsor County, making the trek to his house, and then having to do it all in reverse first thing in the morning in order to be back at work, his will to defend his wife against her own vulnerabil-ity to her desires, or from her weakness, all ofa sudden is subsumed by a vast entropy.

  This is not the first time he has sat in these rooms wondering ifIris is betraying him.He recognizes his own jealous nature, knows he could not trust the truest Desdemona, can recall with a measure ofgood-natured self-mocking that he was suspicious ofIris even when she was pregnant—he thought she had a crush on her obstetrician, a silver-haired Pakistani whom she would telephone for advice at the slightest physical provoca-tion.Before going to his office for her regular appointments, Iris would spend two hours in the bathroom, showering, sprinkling herselfwith baby powder, polishing her nails, oiling her hair—and she’d wear some-thing dark and vertically striped for the slimming effect, as ifshe wanted to camouflage her pregnancy.He saw how unlikely it was.Yet marriage to Iris made his impulse toward jealousy practically hair-trigger, his heart is like a bank that has been outfitted with an alarm system that is far too sen-sitive, one that can be tripped by a little footstep.

  Though Hampton looks back at some ofhis former suspicions and realizes they were silly and unjust, he must nevertheless continue to live with the degrading agonies ofjealousy, and during these last months in NewYork part ofhis strategy for survival has been to commit small acts ofunfaithfulness himself.He’s not sure how he came upon this plan, but the fact is he can tolerate the idea ofIris’s being touched by another man only ifhe can prove and re-prove to himself that mere physical intimacy is a matter ofrelatively small importance—he must, in fact, degrade the very thing he wishes to exalt.The adultery Hampton commits is highly controlled:he spends two or three hours a month with one oftwo pros-titutes who, for $150 an hour, come to his apartment, spread lotion over his body, massage him, and masturbate him to a quick milky climax, the vehemence ofwhich pleasantly surprises him every time.He has settled on these two particular women, after responding to several advertise-ments in the free weekly newspapers that carry in their back pages list-ings for escort services and unlicensed masseuses.He has seen ten different prostitutes in all and has had actual intercourse with none of them—though intercourse is available for an extra charge.He has come close to intercourse a couple oftimes—particularly with Mia, the Chi-nese girl, whose feathery touch up and down his buttocks, combined with the blank, stoned-out expression on her unhappy face, has proved particularly arousing—but he has, to this point, hung on to his resolve to not risk picking up a disease, and when Mia says“You wanna put it in me now?”he can, his mouth parched with desire, shake his head no.

  The other woman he hires to arouse and release him is anAfricanAmerican calling herselfAnyuh—she has given him an engraved business card with her name and cell phone number, which he daringly keeps in his wallet.Anyuh—buxom, large-hipped, with a little girlie laugh, big smutty eyes, and long peach fingernails—also costs $150 for a massage and a hand job and twice that for real sex.At those prices, most ofher clients are white.What this means is that she treats Hampton with an excess of familiarity that he finds off-putting;he does not want to be her one black client, her brotherly confidant, with whom she prattles on about her fi-nancial woes.Anyuh makes no attempt at coquetry, eschewing seduction for yawns and cabbagey little burps;while she works over his body, she places her cell phone right next to his pillow, where it continually chirps right into his ear as other clients pursue her far into the night.

  He knows Mia’s number by heart and he dials it quickly.Her voice on the phone sounds sad, a bit bronchial, but he chooses to ignore that and feels somehow that things are suddenly going his way when she says she can be over in twenty minutes.

  Mia is never early for their appointments and the rainstorm will probably make her even later than usual.Nevertheless, Hampton hurries to prepare himself for her.He goes into his bedroom and as he strips offhis dark-gray suit, his white shirt and striped tie, he also removes the framed photographs ofIris and Nelson from his bedside table, puts them in the closet, along with his clothes.Naked, he sits on the side ofthe modest double bed—the bed that he and Iris first made love in.A vision ofIris in this very bed—on her hands and knees, looking back at him over her shoulder.Oh, the pain ofthat.

  From where he sits he can see himself in the wall mirror.He sits up straighter, sucks in what little gut he has, regards himself with some entirely personal mixture ofadmiration and disgust.He lifts his arm, smells himself.

  The workday leaves him acrid.He walks quickly into the bathroom, turns on the shower, makes it as hot as he can bear.When Mia arrives, he wants her to smell only the peppermint-scented antibacterial soap, the honey and almond shampoo.He opens his mouth, lets the steaming water rush in.It occurs to him for a moment that he is drowning himself;he turns his back to the shower, bends slightly, purifying his anus.The thought that Mia might pick up a whiffofsomething offensive while she works him over is intolerable.

  Kate sits in Ruby’s room, listening to her red radio.It amazes her that there are stations playing music, it seems unforgivable, like Nero’s fiddling.With increasing impatience, she races through the dial, search-ing for news.She wants to be sure there are people out there who know that disaster has struck, who are putting it into some sort ofcon-text.How many people are trapped? How many houses are without electricity? How many roads are closed? She wants numbers.At last, she finds a news reader, a woman with a stainless-steel voice.Kate crouches forward in Ruby’s dark little room, touches the radio as ifit were a friend.

  The newscaster is reporting new developments in the O.J.Simpson murder trial, now in its tenth month.Today’s story is not so much about the case as it is about the reporting ofthe case—a reporter from one of the weekly magazines was heard calling Simpson a nigger (news radio said the reporter used“a racial epithet”but everyone knew what that meant) and now the reporter’s employers have weighed in on the sub-ject, releasing a statement to the effect that the writer’s contract with the magazine has been terminated“by mutual consent.”

  After a couple more stories and a few noisy advertising spots, the national news switches to the local reports.Now a man, presumably close by, is reading the news.An estimated seventy thousand homes are with-out electricity.All major roadways are closed.County officials have no idea when things will be back to normal.The U.S.Weather Service says there may be as much as another foot ofsnow falling in the next eight hours.There have been eleven fatalit
ies so far.“And in Leyden, there’s a report that the power outage has disabled the security system at a local lockup for wayward boys, Star ofBethlehem.According to Star ofBeth-lehem officials, six ofthe youths have left the facility and are somewhere in the area.”He pauses and then adds,“Wow.”

  Kate picks up Ruby’s radio and walks out with it, into the candlelit hall.These candles were Daniel’s purchase, scented ones, and Kate is re-pelledby their smell.She walks through the living room, where one candle burns, and into the kitchen, where she has lit a dozen votive candles.They send their plaintive light through beaded glass holders.

  She turns the radio off, preserving the batteries, and sets it on the kitchen table.The temperature in the house is dropping, degree by degree, and in the place ofhomely warmth comes dampness and a growing sense ofdisorder.She wants something to drink, something to warm her.Some-thing nonalcoholic.Tea.The stove is gas, so it doesn’t matter ifthere’s no electricity.She brings the kettle to the faucet, but the water pump runs on electricity and when she turns on the cold water, the pipes bang and only a faint unwholesome drool comes out.

  Suddenly, she sees a flicker ofmotion from the corner ofher eye.She turns quickly toward the window.At first all she can see is her own re-flection.But then she sees it again:something wishing not to be seen.

  She reaches for the flashlight, shines it through the window, but it throws its own shining face back at her.Kate then opens the window, let-ting precious heat escape, letting in a whoosh ofsnow that sweeps in like the tail ofa comet.Now she shines the flashlight into the blizzard.Noth-ing.Nothing.But then she sees them.Footprints.Cratered into the snow, several pairs, stopping thirty feet from her house.

  She feels a fear beyond any she has ever experienced, and she makes it worse by asking herself,What if they come into the house?The problem with the question is the answer—They will rape me.