A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer Read Free Book Online Page A

saw my father talking to Mrs. Sinclair,” Kate is saying, “and I knew she would never be allowed to bring Leroy to work with her again. And I was right. The next time I saw him, maybe two years later, he was on his way to his school and I was with a couple of my silly, awful little girlfriends from Beaumont Country Day School, and I called to him across the street—Hey, Leroy—and he just looked at me as if I was the most ridiculous thing he had ever seen, and he didn’t say a word.
    But whose fault was it? We were both caught in something so large, and so terrible. His people came over in chains and my people sat on the porch sipping gin. Something that begins that badly can never end well . . .”
    Kate looks around the table, smiling.
    “How about you, Hampton?” she says. “Did you ever fall in love with someone not of your race?” If he finds this offensive he gives no indication—but Kate quickly looks away from him, throws her slightly bleary gaze first at Iris, and finally at Daniel. “Anyone?”
    [ 2 ]
    Once they were in the woods, the remains of the afternoon light seemed to shrink away.The shadows of the trees—a shocking number of which had fallen over to the ground from the weight of last month’s sudden snowstorm—seemed to pile on top of each other, one shadow over the next, building a wall of darkness. Once, there had been paths through the woods, made by the herds of deer, or left over from the old days when there had been enough money to maintain and even manicure the Richmond holdings. But the October storm had dropped thousands of trees and the paths were somewhere beneath them, invisible now. Daniel and Hampton could not take two steps without having to scramble over the canopy of a fallen tree, or climb over a trunk, or a crisscross of trunks, slippery with rot. And where there weren’t fallen trees there were thorny blackberry vines that furled out across the forest floor like a sharp, punishing fog.
    The evening was not a success. After Kate’s story about Leroy, the silences became prolonged. When Kate ordered an after-dinner cognac, neither Iris nor Hampton ordered anything, putting Daniel in the position of having to order a cognac for himself, which he feared might create the impression that he and Kate were both heavy drinkers. As soon as Kate drained her snifter, Hampton announced that they had promised their baby-sitter an early night, and it was over.
    [ 33 ]
    In the car, Daniel and Kate do not speak. Daniel has the car’s cassette player tuned low. Etta James singing “Love’s Been Rough on Me,” then Buddy Guy doing “Hold That Plane.” When Albert King’s “I Found Love in the Welfare Line” comes on, Kate rouses herself out of her torpor and hits the off button. “No singing Negroes, please.”
    “Fine. Whatever you like.”
    “Are you feeling like Herman Melville, darling?” Kate asks, her breath rich and fermented.
    “Am I?”
    “ ‘In the soul of a man there is one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the half-lived life.’ Did you have a little peek at Tahiti and now you have to go home to your half-lived life?”
    Daniel remains silent. He doesn’t want to argue with Kate, doesn’t want to spar with her, to feel the flick and jab of her. He is content to be driving and thinking about the various little gestures Iris made during the dinner. He thinks about what she ate. He thinks about how she had refolded her napkin at the end of the meal and placed it next to her plate, good as new. He thinks about her expression as she listened to the others speak, a quality of appreciation and grace, as if her mind lapped up information like a cat with a bowl of milk. He thinks about how she continually turned her wedding ring around her finger, as if it might be im-peding the flow of her blood. She had been wearing that perfume that he had come to associate with her—Chanel No. 19. A few weeks ago, in the city, he had gone