Scott Spencer - A Ship Made of Paper

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.

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 at Cosmopolitan; Lorraine had read Kate’s novel, Peaches and Cream, and had fought to have it excerpted in Cosmo, 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 Cream was 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 parents did openly 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.”