Scott Spencer - A Ship Made of Paper

Daniel is above the river now, sailing past the mansions.He enters Eight Chimneys.Squirrels are in the entrance hall, wildly chasing each other around.The air is cold in the old dank house, colder than outside.

He hears a sound and finds Ferguson in the huge, cluttered, far from clean kitchen in his pajama bottoms, standing in front ofthe refrigera-tor, scratching idly at his pale bare chest.He suddenly grabs the heel of a roast beefand a carton oforange juice, and he heads back upstairs with it, with Daniel following.On the second story ofthe house, Ferguson turns right, walking past a dozen closed doors, until he comes to the staircase to the third floor, where once the servants lived.Marie is wait-ing for him at the top ofthe stairs, naked.Her little tangle ofpubic hair looks particularly black against her colorless skin.The skin around her nipples is wrinkled with cold.She stands on her toes, writhing with hap-piness and anticipation.“Hurry,”she whispers.“I’m so thirsty.”As soon as Ferguson is on the landing, Marie takes the carton oforange juice from him, sniffs it, and then drinks it down.She finishes with a loud, comical Ahhhh, shakes the carton to make sure it’s empty, and then lets it drop and puts her arms around her disheveled, confused lover.He lifts her up as they kiss, she wraps her legs around him.

Daniel flies to Iris’s house with one beat ofhis winged heart, blessing every house beneath him as he sails toward his beloved.She is in bed, awake and alone, propped up with the pillows behind her, and her portable computer resting on the hammock ofblanket between her knees.He lights next to her, puts his arm around her, nuzzles her neck, kisses her cheekbone, the corner ofher eye, and looks at the screen. Dear Daniel, she has written, but that is all.Her fingers rest on the keys.When Kate writes, her expression is avid, she is being fed and enjoying every bite, but Iris has a kind ofshyness even within the privacy ofher own thoughts, as ifshe is observing one part ofherselfwhile the other is half hidden behind a pillar.

Thank you, he says to her.Surely there is some way she can hear this.

Thank you for being so beautiful, thank you for not being too beautiful for me, thank you for your life, thank you for your breasts, let me touch them, can you feel that?That’s my hand, this is my mouth, thank you for being so open and wet, thank you for putting me in your mouth, thank you for grabbing at the sheets when I kissed you between the legs, thank you for digging your fingers into my back, thank you for letting me sit at your table, thank you for letting me play with your dog, thank you for looking at me with your deep clear eyes…

Iris lets out a long sigh and shuts her computer off.She reaches right through him as she places the little Compaq on her night table.She puts the pillows back in their normal places and lies flat, pulls the covers up to her chin.

And it is then that it strikes him:this will not end well.He has exceeded his capacities, he has somehow gotten more than he deserves, he has the sudden terrible knowledge that happiness ofthis magnitude can only lead to sorrow.Joy lifts you up and joy casts you down.

Now she is turning offthe lamp on the night table.Her touch is too emphatic, the lamp totters, but she catches it before it falls, sets it right.

Good girl .He lies next to her in the darkness, no living ghost has ever loved more fervently.He brings his nose almost into the crook ofher neck and breathes her in, the smell oflaundered cotton, and some inef-fable spice.

Airborne again, flying close to the treetops, heading home.He slips into his own bed, Kate is sleeping deeply.A scent ofalcohol comes off her skin.He props himself up on one elbow, disentangles a few ofher hairs that have gotten stuck into the moist corner ofher mouth.“I’m sorry,”he whispers into her ear.

She opens her eyes.She looks damaged, badly used.“What did you say?”she asks.

They continued to walk, hoping to find a clearing, a way out.Once, most of this land was pasture, grazed by cattle, but it hadn’t seen a plow in over a hundred years and left to its own had become a wild place.They climbed yet another hill—this might have been steeper because they both had to hold on to trees to pull them-selves up, or else they were getting tired.

And once they had scaled it, all they could see was more trees—except on one

side, where there was a sharp drop-off, leading to what looked like a large pond filled with black water.

“ We came from that direction,”Hampton said uncertainly.He was pointing

down the hill upon which they stood, and off to the left.The night was gathering quickly, the darkness was rushing in like water through the hull of a ship, cover-ing everything.

Kate has prevailed upon Daniel to take a day and a night away from home, together, and he cannot decently refuse her.They leave Ruby with Carl and Julia, and then head out oftown on County Road100A, a curving blacktop that winds its way past Leyden’s two surviving com-mercial dairy farms—sagging wire fences, Delft-blue silos, black-and-white Holstein cows—until it runs into aT-junction, at which they turn onto the road to Massachusetts, where Kate has booked them a room—

their old room, their first room—at a huge ramshackle hotel in Stock-bridge called the Sleeping Giant Inn.

On the drive, Kate reads to Daniel from the article she has just written about the O.J.Simpson case.As Kate reads, Daniel is silent, his jaw set, his eyes hooded—she has never seen him pay such fanatical attention to highway conditions, even the shadows ofthe wind-rocked hemlocks make him brake, he is continually readjusting his side and rearview mir-rors, changing the tilt ofthe steering wheel, checking the gas and tem-perature gauges, anything to escape her two thousand words on O.J.

Kate realizes that bringing up the case is not the best way to begin their Saturday getaway, but, perversely, she is unable to refrain.She isn’t about to pretend that she has the slightest sympathy for a man who so wantonly committed murder and who is now trying to buy his way out ofit.And she cannot help but feel that ifshe can only find the right fact, the right tone, the right line oflogic, then Daniel himself will snap out ofhis ridiculous spell and see, as everyone else she knows and respects sees, that O.J.is as guilty as the Boston Strangler, or Richard Speck, or any of the other monsters.

“What do you think?”she asks.They are just turning offtheTaconic, onto the road to Stockbridge, where there is an old roadside diner, with a neon sign showing a vast, noble Indian.

“Inadmissible,”he says.

”Probably,”Kate answers.“It’s for a magazine.You know? For people sitting under hair dryers.”Yet she cannot let his legal point stand un-questioned.“But why couldn’t such information be used in court? It is relevant that he’s been violent in the past, it helps establish a pattern of solving domestic issues in a completely brutal manner.”No, this is not what she wants them to be talking about, but she can’t give up the search for the right words, the verbal alchemy that would bring him around.

Even as she drills through layer after layer ofmurk, she keeps her hopes up for the ultimate strike, that surging thrilling gusher ofepiphanous recognition.

“I think ifI were accused ofsome terrible crime,”Daniel says slowly, seemingly as reluctant as Kate to discuss this case,“a lawyer or a writer could probably find some old girlfriend who’d be willing to trash me.”

“Well, I certainly never would.No matter what anybody said, I would always think you were a good man.”

He glances at her and colors.It looks for a moment as ifhe might even cry, and Kate thinks to herself: Good.One for my side.