A Ship Made of Paper

“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? Itis 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.

The early afternoon train from Leyden pulls into Penn Station, and Iris, who has slept most ofthe ride and who nevertheless can barely keep her eyes open, stands up unsteadily and pulls her black nylon travel bag down from the overhead rack.She has packed one change ofclothes, a night-gown, a plastic zippered bag full oftoiletries (including her diaphragm), and a couple ofthick, heavy books—what Hampton calls, in his Johnny Carson voice,“weighty tomes”—she has been meaning to read for thesis research purposes, and which take up more room than everything else she has brought with her to NewYork.She has settled into a kind offugue-state ofemotional neutrality, allowing the two hours’silence and the rhythmic rocking ofthe train to lull her into a strange, sad peacefulness.

She realizes this time in the city alone with Hampton may well require ofher a degree ofwatchfulness, a certain deftness ofemotional ma-neuvering.

The arrangement is that she will taxi down to the apartment, and Hampton—who is meant to play squash at the DowntownAthletic Club with a Jamaican rum bottler—will meet her there no more than halfan hour later.But as soon as Iris steps offthe train, she sees Hampton wait-ing for her on the platform, craning his long neck and trying to pick her out ofthe stream ofarriving passengers.She knows this is meant to pleasantly surprise her, but the sight ofhim makes her spirits plummet.

He looks like a teacher striding down the rows ofdesks, passing out the questions to a surprise quiz.

He sees her.He raises his hand to signal her and she sees that—horrors—he is holding a long-stemmed rose.He has undoubtedly bought it from one ofthe vendors right here in Penn Station, but nevertheless he waves the flower at her, to signal her that this Saturday in Manhattan is meant to be one ofhigh romance.

“What happened to your squash game?”Iris says, as Hampton kisses her cheek, takes her bag offher shoulder and hefts it onto his.

“I wanted to meet you,”he says.

This leaves the question about his squash game unanswered.It isn’t like Hampton to put personal life over business—actually, Iris has always likedthis aspect ofhim—and she suspects he is here on the warm, smoky, stinking-of-diesel-fuel platform because his game has been cancelled.

She lags behind him as they make their way out.There’s an escalator, but Hampton always chooses the stairs, for the sake offitness.She ad-mires his body as she walks behind him.He is wearing his Saturday at-tire:khaki pants, a white polo shirt under a dark-green cashmere sweater, brown loafers.Even his casual clothes are carefully chosen, crisply ironed, but ofcourse there are no casual occasions for Hampton, not at the dinner table, not in bed, and certainly not out in public.

“Everything okay up in the country?”he asks.“How’s Nellie?”

She doesn’t bother to answer.He doesn’t really expect an answer, he’s just recording the fact that he’s asked.Yet when they reach the main hall ofthe station, Hampton surprises her and repeats the question.

“Everything cool with Nellie?”

The simple, truthful answer would be:No.Nelson has been agitated, clingy, explosive, nagging, and oppositional.He has been putting Band-Aids on his hands and knees without any physical reason for doing so.He has been cruel to Scarecrow to the point where the usually patient and forgiving old dog will leave the room when she hears Nelson’s footsteps.

Every night since the storm—except when Hampton has been home—Nelson has come into her bed between midnight and two and slept there until he woke both himself and his mother by peeing his pajamas.And when she has whispered to him,“Nelson, get up, let’s change your pj’s,”

he has screamed at her like some crazed motorist on the freeway after a fender-bender.This morning, when she was backing her car out ofthe driveway, he was straining to break free ofIris’s sister, who had driven her sporty little green Mazda up from Baltimore two days earlier to spend a little time with Iris before the weekend, and to give Nelson time to get used to her.Whatever level oftrust and comfort he had reached seemed to be obliterated by the sight ofIris actually leaving:he was not only kicking and howling but he was also trying to sink his teeth into his aunt’s restraining hand.

“He’s okay,”Iris says.“He was nervous about my leaving, but he loves Carol, so that made it a little easier.”

“He’ll be fine,”Hampton says.He dislikes Carol, thinks ofher as promiscuous, brassy, silly, unread;he cannot bear her prattling on about her real estate business.She is unmarried, her days are full ofoffice tasks and her nights are full ofboyfriends.Yet he cannot say anything critical ofCarol, not now.It was, after all, his idea that he and Iris spend the weekend alone in the city together, and it was, he supposed, up to her to choose who would mind Nelson.

He knows that the energy is down between them right now and he has a pretty clear idea what the trouble is:she feels neglected, the ro-mance oftheir life together has been subsumed by dailiness, it’s an old story, even the men he sees in business, with whom he almost never has a personal conversation, hint that their own clever wives grumble about the lack ofattention being paid to them, even ifthe wives themselves are in business, making deals, returning calls through the night.And Iris feels isolated, maybe even abandoned up there in Leyden—it cannot help but add to the mix ofIris’s difficulties that she is swimming in a white sea.

And so, without exactly planning it that way, Hampton escorts her on a black tour ofManhattan:lunch at a black-owned, mostly black-frequented restaurant in the theater district, a place oflarge comfortable booths andArt Deco mirrors, where gorgeous black women in black pants and black silk shirts serve them crab cakes and collard greens, and after lunch a cab ride up near Harlem, where Hampton shows Iris a block ofderelict brownstones a developer is in the process ofsnapping up.The developer is looking for investors and he has come to Hampton to