A Ship Made of Paper

by Scott Spencer

  The singer sways behind his keyboard, surrounded by customers, who are also swaying to the music—a few are singing along.It has be-come even more crowded around the bar.There are people standing three deep, talking, laughing with piercing animation, signaling the newly hired bartender for drinks.

  Standing near the bar is Mercy, Ruby’s baby-sitter.She is dressed to look older than her age—plenty ofmakeup, a tailored brown jacket over a black scoop-necked blouse, ironed jeans, heels.She looks like one of the young women at the bank—sobriety and trustworthiness mixed with a kind ofsingles-bar brassiness.She has been trying to get Daniel’s attention, and now that he has finally seen her she smiles and walks over to his table.

  “Hello, Mr.Emerson,”she says.She has put so much color on her lashes it seems a struggle to keep her eyes open.She holds a glass ofbeer with a thin slice oflime floating in its amber.

  “Hello, Mercy,”he says.He almost asks,What are you doing here?But, the custom ofthe Bistro prevents such snoopiness.

  She takes his smile as an invitation to sit.She arranges herselfcarefully in the bentwood chair, as ifshe were taking her place on a jury.The rim ofher glass is faintly red from her lipstick.“I’ve been thinking about that stuffyou told me,”she says.Her voice drops to a whisper.“About becoming an emancipated minor?”

  “It’s a big step, Mercy.It’s basically a desperation move.”

  “I really have to get out ofthere,”she replies, and as she says it the man with whom she arrived at the Bistro strides from the bar to Daniel’s table.He is more than twice her age.His name is Sam Holland, he is one ofthe area’s writers, not the most celebrated but possibly the richest, and he is someone Daniel knows.A couple ofyears ago, just when Daniel, Kate, and Ruby were moving back to Leyden, Holland’s teenage son had gotten himself into a lot oftrouble, and Sam had talked to Daniel about handling the kid’s defense.

  Whatever chagrin Sam might feel about being away from his wife, or from being seen with a girl two years younger than his son, is nowhere in evidence as he thrusts his hand out and grasps Daniel with a manly grip.

  “Hello, Danny,”Sam says.He is wearing a blazer, a white shirt, and blue jeans;his thick, suddenly pewter hair is swept straight back.“How’d your house make it through the storm?”

  Daniel thinks about this for a moment.“We took a couple ofhits,”

  hesays.

  “We were decimated,”Sam says, with a wide, radiant smile.He has dragged a chair over and sits close to Mercy.Daniel imagines their knees are touching.“Were you home for it?”Sam asks.

  “Not in the beginning.”

  “At least I was home,”Sam says.“That made it semimanageable.

  Where were you?”he asks Mercy.

  “At my girlfriend’s.They let us out ofschool early and like ten ofus walked over to her house.”

  “Party time,”says Sam.

  ”Kind of, ifyou call not being able to watchTV or wash your hands a party.”

  “That’s exactly what I call a party,”he says.“That’s the trouble with your generation, you don’t know a goddamned party when you see one.”

  He turns back toward Daniel.“So where were you when the storm hit?”

  “I was at HamptonWelles and Iris Davenport’s house,”Daniel says.

  ”My girlfriend baby-sits their kid,”Mercy says.“He hit her on the head with like a toy truck.She had to get twenty stitches on her scalp, but you can’t see them because the hair’s grown back.”

  “That’s a lot to endure for three-fifty an hour,”Sam says.

  ”Try eight,”Mercy says.

  ”Well, for eight dollars an hour I might take getting hit by a truck—

  you did say it was atoytruck, didn’t you?”He looks at Daniel, as ifhe, at least, would understand the joke:the ways we disfigure ourselves in or-der to put bread on the table.

  “No one wants to baby-sit that kid,”Mercy says.“He’s like really really mean.”

  “He’s not even five years old,”Daniel says.“Maybe your friends are reacting to something else.”

  Mercy, having no wish to antagonize Daniel, and, in fact, wanting only to keep him on her side, lowers her eyes.

  “I have to go to the ladies’room,”she says.

  As soon as she is safely away, Sam leans closer to Daniel.

  ”I’m helping her with her homework,”he says, deadpan.

  ”Take her home, Sam,”Daniel says.“You really have to stop seeing her.Her father’s crazy and a cop, it’s going to end very badly.”

  “I know,”Sam says.

  “Don’t you worry about her, Sam? Do you know what happens to those girls?They end up dancing in a cage with spangles on their nipples.

  You know what I mean?”

  “Look, it’s not that simple.I could end up dancing in a cage somewhere, too.”

  “You could end up in jail, is where you could end up.She’s a kid.”

  “I love her.I’m drawn to her, and I don’t have a list ofreasons why.

  It just happened.You think I wanted this? My whole life is in the process ofgoing down the drain.”

  “Then do something about it.”

  “I tried.Do you have any idea how foolish I feel, being here with…

  with someone so inappropriate,”he says.“But the thing is, I can’t help it, I literally cannot help it.Everyone thinks being with a young girl is like finding the fountain ofyouth.The truth is, it’s just the opposite.First of all, I can barely concentrate on sex because I’m so busy sucking in my stomach.And then, when I get out ofbed and I make these little groans, you know, the way a man does, the knee hurts, the back, a little sore shoulder, whatever.You groan, after forty-five you get out ofbed and you make a little noise, I don’t care ifyou’re Peter Pan.So I get up, straighten myselfout, and Mercy’s all breathless, panicked.‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong?’she’s asking.‘Nothing,’I tell her,‘absolutely nothing.’And she says,‘But you were making these noises.’And I have to tell her,‘Honey, that’s what you do when you wake up in the morning.You groan.’And she nods, trying to be a good sport about it, but I swear to God, Daniel, I have never felt so fucking old in my entire life.These guys who think they’re going to get a second at bat in the youth league by hanging out with some young girl, they’ve got it exactly wrong.You want to feel young, find yourselfsome old broad and run circles around her.”

  Tonight’s singer is finishing up;the applause sounds like rain on a tin roof.Daniel’s eyes habitually scan the room;he cannot let go ofthe dream ofIris suddenly appearing.He imagines her sashaying through this convivial throng, her sitting next to him, a tilted, slightly apprehensive look ofarrival and surrender on her face, her bony knee knocking against him, her night voice an octave lower, cracked with fatigue, the whites ofher eyes creamy, like French vanilla.

  Through the pack ofpeople comes Ferguson Richmond, grinning maniacally, wearing a pair ofcatastrophic brown pants, his hair slicked back.On his arm is the blind girl, MarieThorne, who, though her eyes are secreted behind dark glasses, looks festive and in high spirits.

  Ferguson greets him like an old friend, and Marie, too, is effusive.It makes Daniel think that the two ofthem have been talking about him, speculating about his having spent the night at Iris’s, and that now, seeing him here, at the nocturnal headquarters for the town’s transgressors, their hypothesis is proved.Without waiting to be asked, Ferguson drags two more chairs over to Daniel’s table.He sits Marie next to Daniel and then squeezes himself between Sam and Mercy.As he sits, he seems to notice for the first time how young Mercy is—in fact, he does an almost comic double take.

  And then, with no apparent provocation, Ferguson reaches across the table and takes Marie’s hand and brings it to his lips, and he kisses her with loud, smacking sounds, almost in a burlesque ofaffection.The ges-ture is shocking and everyone at the table laughs, including Daniel, though the sight ofFerguson’s fantastically uncivilized behavior makes Daniel’s longing for Iris all the more excruciating.
r />   Ferguson sees the dismay in Daniel’s face.“Seen much ofthe lovely Iris Davenport lately?”he asks.

  “No,”Daniel says, in a voice not quite able to bear the weight ofeven a one-word answer.

  “Old Daniel found himself at her house the first night ofthe storm,”

  Ferguson explains to the rest ofthem, curling his fingers into quotation marks when he says“found himself.”

  “So he tells us,”says Sam.

  At home that night, Kate sips her way through a bottle ofzinfandel and talks on the phone to Lorraine DelVecchio, whom she thinks ofas her best friend, though now that Kate has moved out ofNewYork City, they rarely see each other, and their phone calls, which even a year ago were daily, now take place only two or three times a month, though what they have come to lack in frequency they have made up for in duration.Ex-cept for her undergraduate years spent across the country at Reed Col-lege, where she studied Plato and abused amphetamines, Lorraine has never lived anywhere but Manhattan.When Kate first met her, Lorraine was an editor atCosmopolitan;Lorraine had read Kate’s novel,Peaches and Cream,and had fought to have it excerpted inCosmo,only to be overruled at the eleventh hour by the editor-in-chief.

  By the time the deal had fallen through, Lorraine and Kate had already established a telephone rapport.Lorraine loved Kate’s acerbic style, her pitilessness that didn’t stop with the skewering ofsubsidiary characters but also included the novel’s narrator, who was, Lorraine as-sumed, a stand-in for the author herself.But what Lorraine particularly loved about the novel was its depiction ofthe beauty business as a world ofharpies from which intelligent girls must rescue themselves—in fact, it was precisely the novel’s send-up ofdermatology, and its underlying fury at a world that attached such value to appearance, that prevented Lorraine from buying it for her magazine, where halfthe articles and nearly all the advertising were meant to encourage young women to be ceaselessly fretful about their appearance.When running a portion of Peaches and Creamwas torpedoed at the last minute, Lorraine called Kate personally to break the bad news, and she sounded so distressed that Kate agreed to meet her for lunch at the end ofthe week.

  Daniel had warned Kate about Lorraine.He didn’t know Lorraine, but he was getting a sense ofthe women who became Kate’s most passionate readers, and he had duly noted the expressions on their faces when they fi-nally met Kate and realized that she, unlike her heroine or themselves, was quite beautiful.Like the heroine, Kate had been entered into Beautiful Baby contests when she was an infant, and her parentsdidopenly grieve when her hair turned from blonde to brown, and they did give her Clairol rinses when she was nine years old and send her to bed with her hair wrapped in a scarfsoaked in lemon juice, and when, at thirteen, a birdshot spray ofpimples appeared on her forehead, her father, a doctor himself, sent her to a dermatologist inWashington, D.C.—but not, as it occurred in the novel, all the way to Zurich.The other indignities visited upon the novel’s teenage narrator—how she wakes up one day with virtually a full mustache, the involvement with a Santeria cult, her entire body being en-cased in defoliating wax, the liposuction performed at midnight like a backstreet abortion—were entirely fictional, as was the section in which the mother’s bridge club accidentally drops the narrator’s diet pills into their coffee, having gotten them confused with saccharin tablets, and the subsequent freak-out, during which the ladies go after each other like wildcats and one ofthem ends up dying ofa heart attack.

  “You’ve struck a chord with all women with unfortunate looks,”

  Daniel said.“And when they see you they feel ripped off, like you’ve tricked them into believing you’re one ofthem.”

  To Kate’s immense relief, the woman she found waiting for her at the RussianTea Room was completely presentable, in fact, great-looking—with short black hair, bright-green dramatic eyes, the serene, commanding face and ample bust ofa figurehead carved into the prow ofa whaling ship.

  ”Oh, look at you,”Lorraine exclaimed upon first seeing Kate.“You’re gor-geous, you bum.”She clutched her heart.“How could you do this to me?”

  The accusation was made humorously and it might have been meant to flatter Kate.Yet she felt she had just been slapped in the face, and de-spite the fact that their rapport soon moved beyond what Kate consid-ered the hallucinogenic stage—a kind ofjokey alternative reality in which Lorraine pretended Kate was ravishing and she herselfwas homely and doomed—and onto a truer rapport, that first remark cre-ated a shadow presence in their friendship.This shadow presence insisted that Kate was the fortunate one and Lorraine, despite her well-paying job, numerous sexual adventures, supportive family, and brownstone apartment with a fireplace and two skylights, was the hard-luck case.It meant that Kate was somehow beholden to equalize things between them, by deferring to Lorraine.

  Tonight, Lorraine has a cold, and she uses the first part oftheir phone time complaining about it.Lately, Lorraine has become a little screwy about her health.As she approaches thirty-eight, the age her own mother died of cervical cancer, Lorraine is more and more putting herselfin the care ofnot only doctors but also an acupuncturist, a masseuse, an aromatherapist, two nutritionists, and even a psychic whose specialty is disease.

  “I spent the day in bed,”she says.

  ”For a cold?”Kate asks, hoping her disapproval isn’t apparent.

  ”Yes, for a cold.And I was in a major O.J.mood.I really wanted to watch the trial in the privacy ofmy own home.Watching it at the office sucks, so many interruptions.”

  “So? Did anything happen?”Kate could not watch today’s proceedings because, oddly enough, she was too busy finishing an article about the trial—an article that Lorraine herselfhad commissioned.

  “I just had this wild premonition that he was going to crack, and stand up in the middle ofthe court and confess.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I realize that.How’s the article going?”

  “I should be done in a couple more days.”Kate feels the subtle change, she is suddenly in her writer-fending-off-an-editor mode.“Three at the most.”

  “It’s not going to do us any good ifthe trial’s over.”

  “The trial has got months to go.”

  “Not ifhe confesses.What about Daniel?What’s his take on this whole thing? I mean, doesn’t he see it as a kind ofindictment ofthe le-gal profession, this guy who has so obviously assassinated his poor wife and now he’s just dragging out the proceedings, thanks to the efforts of a team ofhigh-priced lawyers, all ofwhom have probably entered into pacts with Satan.”

  Kate is silent for a moment.“Daniel’s starting to make noises as ifhe believes O.J.is innocent.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He thinks racist cops might have tampered with the evidence.The Fuhrman thing.He thinks all sorts ofthings.”

  “He actually thinks O.J.is innocent?”

  “I don’t know.”Here is the hard part.“Let me take a sip ofwine and tell you what I really think.”

  “Sip away.”

  Kate finishes the entire glass, dabs her palm against her chin, where a single red drop clings, and then refills her glass.

  “He has a wicked crush on this black woman and I think he’s tailoring his O.J.opinions to suit her fashion.”

  “Oh, Kate, are you sure?”Lorraine’s voice sounds warm, motherly.

  Lorraine’s compassion always comes as a sort ofpleasant surprise, though she never fails to show it.

  “No, not really.But…I’m pretty sure.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “Oh, just some local mom, a perpetual grad student, with an absentee husband.”

  “I’m not getting a clear picture.”

  “Her name’s Iris.I really feel like killing her with my bare hands, I feel like O.J.-ing her.She’s reasonably attractive, in a freckly sort ofway.

  She hasAdored Daughter Syndrome, she just sort ofsits there and ex-pects all this attention.She has some demented kid who Ruby likes, so there’s all thes
e occasions to get together, Daniel and Iris.You should see them together.Daniel’s entire body becomes one big boner.”

  “And you?”Lorraine asks.

  ”What do you mean?What about me?”

  “Are you going to let this temptress take your boyfriend away?”

  Lorraine is being far too lighthearted about this, and as a way of telling her so Kate lets that last remark hang in the air for a few extra moments.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Lorraine.When I first started noticing how fixated on this woman he was getting, I thought to myself: Oh well, who cares, live and let live, screw and let screw, whatever.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s getting to me.It’s having a perverse effect.”

  “Oh yes, I know how that works.You’re starting to fall in love with him again, right?”

  “Something like that.I don’t require a lot ofcare and feeding, you know.I don’t need to be adored, or ravished, I don’t need little poems slipped under my pillow, or a rose on my breakfast tray.But, I really do notwant him to leave me.That really doesn’t work for me.”

  “We’re such idiots.”

  “It’s not as ifI felloutoflove with Daniel.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m used to him, with all the good and bad that implies.Anyhow, we had sort ofan arrangement.We’re both moderates, you know what I mean?We hate excess, neither ofus even likesRomeo and Juliet.I feel be-trayed in that way, too.Suddenly, I sense this willingness in him to be crucified on passion’s cross.Ugh.He’s becoming a different person.”

  “And then there’s the small matter ofRuby,”says Lorraine.“I thought he was so devoted to her.”

  “I’m not even thinking about that.He’s not going toleaveme.He would never do anything to upset Ruby.He worships her.”

  “What’s the café-au-lait absentee husband like?”

  “His name is Hampton.”