Scott Spencer - A Ship Made of Paper

“You know Hampton, don’t you?”Derek asks.

”A little.”

“What’s he like?”

“Extremely dignified, what people used to call a Credit to His Race.”

“Man,”Derek says, with a sad shake ofthe head, as he so often does when Hampton’s fate is discussed.He touches the hollow ofhis own throat, also a practically ritualized gesture between them.

“Poor Daniel,”she says.“I can’t help thinking Iris is sort ofholding him hostage.”

“Hostage?”

“Psychologically.”

Derek glances away, as ifthis were a bit rarefied for his tastes.

”Daniel feels responsible…AndIrisisnofool.She’s perfectly capable ofmanipulating the hell out ofDaniel, without even halftrying.

He’s doing her shopping, he’s mowing the lawn, he’s like her servant.”

“I can’t believe you,”Derek says.“You’re sitting here feeling sorry for him.The whole town’s talking about what a rat he is, and the person he hurt the most is feeling sorry for him.You’re a very understanding person.”

“I’m not understanding.I’m hurt.I feel incredibly hurt.It’s just…

well, it’s Daniel. He’s a sweet man.But he’s rootless, that might be the problem.I should have put it together when he came up with the plan to move back to this place.He wanted to be near his parents, strange as it sounds.All that unfinished business, it’s true what they say.Some of those unloved kids have the hardest time leaving home.They think it’s al-ways just about to happen, the things they’ve been waiting their whole life for.And then they get fixated on the idea ofpassion, some big bang theory.You know what I mean?An explosion that will create, or re-create, the world.Maybe that’s why he got so attached to this woman, this woman who is really basically a stranger to him.He wants to be res-cued from his own emptiness.And I think he sees her as the perfect mother, too—even though she was willing to throw her marriage out the window.But she’s very touchy-feely with her kid.Daniel loves that, be-cause he understands it, and it’s what he missed.Then you take all that, and you mix in all ofDaniel’s goddamned pro bono idealism, and his whole fixation on the black thing, and how they’re supposed to be more feeling than us, more emotionally present.All that nonsense.”

“Nonsense?You call what he did nonsense?”

“Daniel doesn’t want to hurt anybody.”

“But he has,”says Derek.“He’s lucky he’s not facing charges.”

“It was an accident, I think that much was obvious to everybody.It was just the worst horrible freak luck.That thing, that rocket goes off and severs poor Hampton’s carotid artery.God.It would have been bet-ter ifhe’d died right then and there.”

“He pretty much did.”

“That’s not true.He’s getting around, he’s walking, feeding himself.

He’s probably fucking that wife ofhis.”She puts her hands up as ifto shield herself.“Sorry.I don’t know where that came from.”

A silence descends upon them.From outside the house, they can hear the blue jays raucously quarreling around the bird feeder;they seem per-fectly willing to slaughter each other over a beakful ofthistle.Sometimes it seems so obvious:the world is a place ofrelentless brutality, the only reason anything is alive is that it can kill something else.

Derek has left the window down in his car and the squawk ofhis radio drifts toward the silence ofthe early evening.

“Your radio,”Kate says.

”I can hear it.”

“What’s it saying?What’s going on?”

“Not a damn thing.”And then, in a moment ofinspiration, he decides to risk it all in one sentence.Suddenly it’s easier than holding back, eas-ier than pretending he has not been dreaming ofKate, has not fallen in love with her.All that has happened has happened for a reason, starting with Daniel getting kicked down the stairs and moving back to Leyden, and then the freak early snow, and those black kids terrorizing Kate, the whole karmic chain ofevents, including MarieThorne getting lost in the woods.It all had to click together just so.

Kate is frowning at the open window, through which the noise ofthe police radio drifts.

“Should you be paying attention to that?”she asks.

He takes her hand.“Everything I really want to pay attention to is right here,”he says.

Despite his being in a constant state oftension from recalling and reliving the moment he lit the fuse ofthat Roman candle, despite his flulike feelings ofremorse over breaking up his family, despite his con-stant worry over Ruby’s well-being, her psychological health, her physi-cal health, and even her moods, despite his having taken down the photograph ofthe dear little girl because the sight ofit on his beige bed-room wall makes him weep, despite the many times he has called her on the telephone when she seems indisposed, distracted, and does not want to talk, despite his taking her to feed the swans that live near the shore ofa nearby monastery and turning around for a halfminute and her dis-appearing for nearly ten minutes, despite having received numerous nighttime drink-and-dial telephone calls from Kate, despite his some-times wondering how he could have thought for a moment that he could live without her, despite his having let down more than a few ofhis clients, despite the wreckage he has made ofhis practice, his career, and his reputation, despite his going from a respected and well-liked figure in his little town to a person about whom people gossip, ofwhom peo-ple do not approve, around whom people seem less than comfortable, despite the difficulties he and Iris have seeing each other since Hampton’s injury, despite his having developed a searing, steely pain in the middle ofhis heel, as ifit has been pierced by an arrow, especially in the morn-

ing, when he can barely get out ofbed the pain is so severe, despite the fact that his assistant, SheilaAlvarez, has turned contemptuous toward him, and snapped her fingers in his face and said,“Hello?”when he failed to answer one ofher rapid-fire inquiries, despite Iris’s little boy’s con-tinuing in his dislike for Daniel, his squirming away from his touch, glar-ing at him from across the Burger King booth, despite bouts offeverish nostalgia for his old domesticity, its regularities and comforts, despite his more or less despising where he now lives, where he has yet to get a de-cent night’s sleep, where he is obliged to buy cumbersome, backbreak-ing bottles ofspring water because what comes out ofthe tap smells like leprous frogs, where the idiot landlord, who has never had a tenant be-fore, continues to hover around, mowing the lawn on Saturday morn-ings, watering the scraggly, parsimoniously producing rosebushes, pruning the juniper bushes, which smell like cat urine, and who com-pulsively continues to chaperone Daniel’s relationship to the house as if the depressing little bungalow were a young virgin and Daniel himself a notorious Lothario, despite his having lost ten pounds ofmuscle and not an ounce offat, despite wiry curls ofgray hair suddenly appearing on his sideburns, despite his having begun fifteen books without getting to the end ofany ofthem, this is the happiest he has ever been.

Much ofthis happiness is purely physical.It is an animal joy, a stunning erotic completeness such as he has never experienced.Daniel had always secretly believed that people who went on about their sexual hap-piness wereexaggerating, they werelike those restaurant reviewers who compare a bowl ofsoup to a glimpse ofheaven.They were sexual gour-mets, they were like those wine critics who justify their expense-account indulgences with words that not only elevated their simple human plea-sure into some bold adventure ofthe senses but also claimed to be ex-tracting arcane nuances ofpleasure that only they could discern.