A Ship Made of Paper
A Ship
Made of
Paper
[ a n ov e l ]
Scott Spencer
jo a n n
On a ship that’s made of paper
I would sail the seven seas
“Just to Be with You”
Bernard Roth
contents
Reading Group Guide for
A Ship Made of Paper
Daniel and Hampton were paired by chance and against their wishes.
They were…
Once they were in the woods, the remains of the afternoon light seemed
to shrink…
They had no idea where they were going.They walked.The crunch of
their foot…
They reached the top of the small hill they’d been climbing, but the
sight lines…
An immense oak tree lay on the ground a few feet from where they
stood.
Discouraged, exhausted, Hampton sat on the fallen tree—and immediately sprang…
Suddenly, in the distance was a pop, and then a plume of iridescent
smoke rose…
Hampton was still pinching black powder out of his back pocket, rubbing it be…
As far as Daniel was concerned, this was torture. It might be better just
to come out…
10
The problem was there was no space to walk in; the woods had imploded.They were…
11
They continued to walk, hoping to find a clearing, a way out. Once,
most of…
12
“I think we’ve already been here,” Hampton said.
“Really? What makes you think so?”
13
There was a break in the black sky and the platinum moonlight poured
down on…
14
Daniel and Iris rearrange their clothes. They are reeling. Their legs…
15
Six months pass. The spring is winding down, reverting to the insolent…
16
Despite his being in a constant state of tension from recalling and…
17
Daniel is learning how to live with one sighted eye, learning to cope…
18
Morning. Warm dusty light pours through the uncurtained windows.
Daniel and Hampton were paired by chance and against their wishes.They were
not friends—Hampton did not particularly like Daniel, and Daniel had every
reason to avoid being alone with Hampton. But Daniel’s girlfriend or partner or
whatever he was supposed to call her, Kate, Kate went home to relieve the baby-sitter who was minding her daughter, and Hampton’s wife, there was no ambigu-ity there, his wife, Iris, with whom Daniel was fiercely in love, had gone home to
look after their son. Daniel and Hampton stayed behind to search for a blind girl,
a heartsick and self-destructive blind girl who had run away from today’s cocktail
party, either to get lost or to be found, no one was sure.
The searchers, fourteen in all, were each given a Roman candle—whoever found
the lost girl was to fire the rocket into the sky, so the others would know—and each
of the pairs was assigned a section of the property in which to look for Marie.
“Looks like you and me,” Daniel said to Hampton, because he had to say something.
Hampton barely responded and he continued to only minimally acknowledge
Daniel’s nervous chatter as they walked away from the mansion through an un-tended expanse of wild grass that soon led into a dense wood of pine, locust, maple,
and oak. Aside from the contrast of their color—Daniel was white, Hampton
black—the two men were remarkably similar in appearance. They were both in
their mid-thirties, an inch or so over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, reasonably fit.
They were even dressed similarly, in khaki pants, white shirts, and blue blazers,
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
though Daniel’s jacket was purchased at Macy’s, and Hampton’s had been sewn
specially for him by a Chinese tailor in the city.
Two years after he was kicked down the stairs of his apartment building in New York City, which shattered his wrist, chipped his front tooth, and, as he himself put it, broke his heart, Daniel Emerson is back in his hometown, driving Ruby, his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter, to her day care center, called My Little Wooden Shoe.The drive is ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the weather, and though Daniel is not Ruby’s father, nor her stepfather, it usually falls to him to take the little girl in. Daniel cannot understand how she can so willingly and unfailingly absent herself from the beginnings of her daughter’s day; Ruby’s mother, Kate Ellis, cannot bear to rise early in the morning, nor can she bear the thought of having to deal with Melody, or Tammy, Keith, Tamara, Grif-fin, Elijah, Avery, Stephanie, Joel, Tess, Chantal, Dylan, or any of the other Wooden Shoers, not to mention their fathers and their mothers, a few of whom Daniel knew thirty-two years ago in this very town, when he was Ruby’s age.
It’s fine with Daniel. He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry. He believes in parental love with the fervency of a man who himself was not loved, and those ten minutes with Ruby every weekday morning, before he drops her off at My Little Wooden Shoe and then drives over to his office, where he runs a poorly paying, uneventful
[ 3 ]
country law practice, in the fairly uneventful town of Leyden, one hundred miles north of New York City, those six hundred sweet seconds are his form of worship, and the temperamental eight-year-old black Saab is his church.
Or was, actually, because, unfortunately, this is no longer the case.
The drive is still ten minutes, Ruby is still snugly strapped in her child safety seat in the back of the car, her sturdy little body encased in lilac overalls, her short-fingered, square hands holding a box of raisins and a box of grape juice, and today she is commenting on the familiar landmarks they pass—the big kids’ school, the abandoned apple orchard where the wizened old trees wreathed in autumn morning mist are so scarily bent, the big yellow farmhouse where there is always some sort of yard sale, the massive pasture where every July the county fair assem-bles, with its cows and snow cones, Ferris wheels and freaks—but today it is all Daniel can do to pay the slightest bit of attention to Ruby, because his mind is seized, possessed, and utterly filled by one repeating question:
Will Iris be there?
Daniel has been carrying the unwieldy weight of this desire for months now, and so far his behavior has been impeccable.When it comes to Iris the rules he has made for himself are simple: look but don’t touch, long for but don’t have, think but don’t say. All he wants to do is be in the same room with her, see what she is wearing, see by her eyes if she has slept well, exchange a few words, make her smile, hear her say his name.
Until recently, it was a matter of chance whether their paths would cross. Iris’s deliveries and pickups of Nelson were helter-skelter, one day she’d have him there at eight o’clock, and the next at nine-thirty—it all depended on her class schedule at Marlowe College, where she was a graduate student, as well as Nelson’s morning moods, which were unpredictable. But now, suddenly, she is exactly on Daniel’s schedule most days, her Volvo station wagon pulls into the day care center’s parking lot at virtually the same time as his. He wonders if it’s deliberate on her part. He has reached the point of thinking so often of her, of so often going out of his way to pass her house, of looking for her wherever he goes, a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
that it’s become difficult for him to believe that Iris is not thinking, at least some of the time, of him.
Daniel pulls into My Little Wooden Shoe’s parking lot and sees her car, already in its customary spot, directly facing the playground, with its redwood climbing structures, sandbox, and swings. He is so glad to know that she’s here that he laughs.
“What’s so funny?” Ruby asks, as he unsnaps her from her car seat, lifts her up. Her questions are blunt; he guesses one day she’ll be a tough customer.
“Nothing.”
“Then why are you laughing?” She smiles. Her milk teeth are tinged brown: as a baby she was sometimes allowed to fall asleep with a bottle of juice in her crib and the sugar wore away her enamel. Now the dentist says the best thing to do is just let them fall out.Yet the brown, lusterless teeth—along with her slight stoutness, and her ruddy complexion—
make her look poor and rural, like a child in the background of a Brueghel painting.
“Just crazy thoughts,” Daniel says. “How about you? Any crazy thoughts lately?”
“I want to go to Nelson’s house after day care.”
“That’s not a very crazy thought.”
She thinks about this for a moment. “I want to sleep over.”
“You never know,” Daniel says. He swoops her up into his arms, turns her upside down. She clutches her knapsack, afraid that her snack and box of juice will slip out. Daniel restrains himself from suggesting to Ruby:
Ask him, ask Nelson if you can spend the night.
Today, Iris is wearing plaid cotton pants that are a little too short for her and a bulky green sweater that is a little too large. Her clothes are rarely beautiful, and it has often struck Daniel that Iris herself may have no idea that she is lovely to look at. Her dark hair is cut short, she wears no makeup, no jewelry, everything about her says,
I’m plain, don’t bother
looking at me.
Maybe he has drifted into the periphery of her life because somehow in the grand design of things—and this private, pulverizing
[ 5 ]
love he feels makes him believe in grand designs—he is the man who must awaken her to her own beauty. Is there some casual, defused way he can say to her:
Do you have an idea how lovely you are?
He wants to hold her in the moonlight. He wants to stroke her shoulder until she is fast asleep.
She is crouched next to Nelson, whispering something in his ear. He loves seeing her with her son, the intimacy of it pierces him. She seems a perfect mother: calm, present, able to adore without consuming. Nelson is a handsome boy, strong, bigger than most of the children in the day care, several shades lighter than his mother.There is something regal and disdainful in him. He has the air of someone forced to live around people who don’t understand the full extent of his excellence. He nods impatiently as his mother speaks to him, and when his eyes light upon Ruby he bolts and the two children greet each other wildly, almost in a burlesque of happiness, holding hands, jumping up and down. Iris heaves a sigh and stands up, shakes her head.
“Sorry about that,” Daniel says.
“Those two,” says Iris.
“It looked like you were giving him some last-minute instructions,”
Daniel says.
Iris looks around to make certain she will not be overheard. “There was a note in his cubby from Linda. It seems he hit one of the other children yesterday.”
“Oh well, these teachers have a way of catastrophizing everything.”
“I just don’t want the one African-American child in the whole school to be the one committing little acts of violence.”
She never refers to race around him, and Daniel wonders if her saying this now is a way of inviting him in, or pushing him back.
“Do you have time for a cup of coffee or something?” he asks her.
She looks at her watch. “I’ve got a meeting with my thesis advisor in half an hour.”
“That’s nothing compared to the tight schedule of an unsuccessful, small-town lawyer,” he says.
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
“Where would be fast?” Iris says.
“The Koffee Kup. The coffee’s so bad they spell it with a K. And the lighting is so bad, it’s impossible to sit there longer than fifteen minutes.
I’ll race you there.”
He drives behind her, not wanting to risk letting her out of his sight, and feeling the juvenile, slightly demented thrill of looking at the back of her head, her hands on the steering wheel. A Marlowe College sticker is on her rear window.The sight of it ignites a little fizz of pity and tenderness in him—at thirty-three, she’s new to Marlowe’s graduate program, and her fixing that sticker to her car connotes some desire for definition, a will to belong, or so it seems to him. She maintains the exact thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit all the way to Leyden’s miniature Broadway, and when she pulls into a parking spot in front of the diner she uses her turn signal. Such devotion to the rules, such commitment to the principles of highway safety—it would be ludicrous to believe that a woman like her could ever entertain the possibility of some sexual adventure, of entering into the grim geometry of infidelity.