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smile, how it must have drawn her in and made her want to fathom the secret cave of self that was his smile’s source.
    “Hampton,” Kate says. “That’s an interesting name.”
    “My family’s full of Hamptons,” he says. “We come from Hampton, Virginia. A few of us attended Hampton University, back when it was Hampton Normal and Agriculture Institute.”
    “Hampton Hawes,” says Daniel.
    “What?” says Hampton.
    “He’s a jazz piano player, West Coast.”
    “Daniel knows everything about jazz,” says Kate. “And blues, and rhythm and blues.”
    The waitress arrives and presents them with yellowfin tuna, coq au vin, filet mignon, risotto funghi. “Look,” says Iris, “everything looks so good!”
    “Is that tuna?” Hampton asks, peering at Iris’s plate.
    Every marriage, Kate thinks, seems to have one person wanting what’s on the other’s plate.
    a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
    Iris smiles, but she doesn’t look pleased. “Do you want some?”
    “Okay, a taste.” He watches while she cuts her sesame-encrusted tuna in half and then transports it carefully to his plate, next to his charbroiled slab of steak and French fries and homemade coleslaw. He doesn’t offer her so much as a morsel of his food.
    “Iris doesn’t share my interest in family traditions,” Hampton says, cutting into his steak.
    “All I ever said is that sometimes they can be a little limiting,” says Iris, trying not to plead, but Kate can tell she would like to. “In America you can make your own history.”
    “Dream on, my sweet,” says Hampton.
    “All right, then I will. And in the meantime, can we just relax and enjoy being alive?”
    “So you work on Wall Street?” Kate asks.
    “Does that surprise you?” asks Hampton. “That I’m an investment banker?”
    “Yes,” she says, “I thought maybe you were a tap dancer.”
    Hampton smiles, points his finger at Kate. “That’s funny,” he says, instead of laughing.
    “I wrote a piece last year about the stock exchange,” Kate says. “I love all those men crawling over each other and shouting out numbers as if their lives were hanging by a thread. And then the final bell rings and everyone cheers and goes out for drinks. I loved the whole thing, including the bell and the drinks.”
    “That’s not what I do. But I’d like to read your article.”
    “Oh no, please, no. The only way I can churn that crap out is to tell myself that absolutely no one will ever set eyes on it.” She catches the waitress’s eye and gestures with a twirl of the finger: more drinks over here. “It’s just to pay the bills. And wrap fish.”
    “Do you mostly write about financial topics?” Hampton asks.
    “What I’m supposed to be doing is working on my next novel, but that’s been the case for quite a while. So in the meanwhile, editors call me up and I give them whatever they want. It’s amazing how easily the
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    stuff comes when you don’t really have your heart in it. Right now, I’m doing a piece about the O. J. trial and about this woman artist calling herself Ingrid Newport.”
    “What kind of artist is she?” Hampton asks.
    “She’s sewn up her vagina,” Kate says. She can practically hear Daniel’s heart sinking. He worries about her when she drinks. And then he does something that strikes her as intolerable . He actually looks over at Iris and shrugs.
    “They keep on assigning me these sexual mutilation pieces,” Kate says. “It’s becoming sort of my specialty. My little calling card.” Is this putting Iris in her place? Kate has no idea. Iris may be one of those rare monsters: a person of unshakable sexual confidence. “I tell them, ‘Hey guys, how about a piece about the reemergence of the lobotomy as an accepted psychiatric practice,’ but, no, they say, ‘What we really want is fifeen hundred words on Peter Peterson, that guy in Dover, Delaware, who crucified his own penis.’ They all tell me I write so well about gender issues,