A Ship Made of Paper

“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.

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