A Ship Made of Paper

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?”

“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