The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  11:16 p.m. and everyone’s asleep, Mister. Everyone, that is, but me. I poured myself a stiff one and opened the dogeared report in front of me. The pages were yellower than a cornered stoolie. “Too Much Ice,” by A. B. Shepard. Mister, it was just another old case to look over. I poured myself a slug of rye and started reading.

  A. B. Shepard’s foray into pulp writing at the age of twenty-one involved a private eye named Arthur Rhodes who looked like Sam Spade and talked like Philip Marlowe. He smoked constantly, drank copious amounts of whiskey, and kissed three different women in six pages—the heiress with the missing necklace, the gambling boat captain’s wife, and the girl behind the counter at a pawnshop. He drove a black Chevy convertible and had a tendency to comment on architecture. “I rang the doorbell and waited between the tall, white Ionic columns,” one sentence read; and another: “I looked past the barrel of the gun to the row of deserted houses, their painted spandrels glowing in the sunset.”

  But it was a decent story anyway, Ingrid thought. Ray had put in plenty of gritty knockouts, tough talk, and dames in slinky dresses. She traced the byline on the yellowed paper. A. B. Shepard was this architect with the professory glasses and nice Oxford shirts? Ingrid had always imagined the authors of crime fiction as having the same ease with guns and mobsters as their fictional creations. But Ray? He looked as if he had never held a gun in his life, and he definitely didn’t smoke Players. And as for kissing lots of women, she hadn’t even seen the Shepards give each other pecks on the cheek yet, let alone clingy embraces like the ones in the story. He looked about as much like the square-jawed Arthur Rhodes as she, Ingrid, did.

  Ingrid got out of bed and looked at herself in the mirror on her closet door. She stuck out her jaw and squinted at her reflection, then sighed in annoyance: Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Mickey Spillane and now Arthur Rhodes did not wear their dad’s old pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that said COMING IS BROTHER BIG.

  An idea came to her. She opened the door to her room and stepped out into the hall. The house was quiet and dark. She tiptoed across the landing to the fainting room and opened the closet door. She was sure she had seen what she was looking for earlier, when she was clearing off the desk. Yes, there it was. An old trench coat with a belt and wide lapels.

  Ingrid lifted it off the hanger and slipped her arms into the sleeves. The fabric was cool and heavy and smelled of men and dust. She buttoned up the coat and tied the belt, squared her shoulders and walked back down the hall, not quietly this time because now she was tougher. In front of the mirror she stuck a cigarette in her mouth and jammed her hands in trench coat’s pockets so that the sleeves wouldn’t look too long. She tried her tough face again. Not bad, if you didn’t look at her bare feet or her hair. A fedora would help. She pushed her hair back behind her ears and crossed her eyes slightly so that her face in the mirror blurred. Not bad at all.

  Ingrid glanced at the clock over the mantelpiece. 12:32 a.m. and the house was dark as the barrel of a .45 and as lonely as a lost bullet. I was looking for that bullet.

  She went downstairs to the kitchen, lit a cigarette on the stove burner and stood on the back porch to smoke it. Just looking. The sound of frogs was loud in her ears and Ingrid wondered where the frogs were, if they were in the yard or if there was a pond somewhere nearby.

  A noise in the house behind her made Ingrid turn around. Mrs. Shepard was standing in the dark kitchen, bending into the light of the open refrigerator door.

  “Hi,” Ingrid called from the porch, and Evelyn gave a strangled yelp and jumped back, clutching the neck of her bathrobe.

  “Sorry,” said Ingrid, stubbing out her cigarette on the side of a flowerpot, “it’s just me.” She came back across the porch and opened the screen door. Evelyn pushed the refrigerator door shut so that the kitchen was all darkness again. Ingrid reached for the light switch.

  “Wait,” Evelyn commanded. She turned away from Ingrid, retied the belt of her bathrobe, then flicked on the light herself. “What are you doing, sneaking around like that?”

  “I just went outside for a cigarette. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s just that I’m not dressed,” Evelyn stammered. “You never know who might be looking in the windows at you.”

  Ingrid looked at her. Mrs. Shepard’s face without makeup was lightly freckled. Why were women always worried about who was looking at them?

  “Who would be looking in the windows?” she asked. “We’re practically out in the country.”

  Evelyn tugged habitually at the sleeves of her bathrobe, then caught herself doing it and stopped—she knew perfectly well her tattoos were hidden. But thank God she’d put on her robe. She had been lying awake for almost two hours, ever since Ray had gotten in bed and woken her up. She had tried a different pillow, air conditioner off, air conditioner on, and at last given up and come downstairs.

  “There could be prowlers,” she said to Ingrid. “Or burglars.”

  “Has anyone ever tried to break in?” Ingrid asked.

  “Well, no. Not that I know of.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  Evelyn imagined untying the belt of her robe in a slow striptease, sliding the lapels off over her bare shoulders and letting the robe, and her reputation with it, fall to the kitchen floor. The success of her performance as a good suburban wife would be over, just like that. She looked at Ingrid leaning against the sink, her young and slightly mocking face tilted sideways over the lapels of a familiar-looking beige trench coat that was much too large for her.

  “Isn’t that Ray’s?” Evelyn asked.

  “I uh, I didn’t have a bathrobe. I found this in the closet so I just borrowed it.”

  Evelyn smiled. “Maybe there is something you need at the Burlington Mall, then.” It sounded bitchier than she’d intended. “Anyway, I was just getting a glass of milk. Here, have one, too. It’ll help you sleep.” She poured two glasses, handed one to Ingrid, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Ingrid, who never drank milk because calcium attracted Strontium-90, remained standing.

  In my husband’s overcoat, Evelyn thought, in the middle of the night in my kitchen. Who did she think she was? Aloud she said, “Just because this is Randall doesn’t mean there couldn’t be prowlers. It’s as dangerous here as anywhere.”

  Ingrid grinned sideways. “Yeah, you could get your toe caught in a lawnmower, I guess.”

  Evelyn wanted to shake her, shake that lucky, bored security out of her smirk. Instead she said, “You’d be surprised what can happen here. Why, a week ago, someone threw a rock through the upstairs window.”

  “No way. Really?” The smirk disappeared. Ingrid sat down at the table and leaned toward Evelyn. “Who was it?”

  Evelyn felt a tingle of satisfaction at having gained the upper hand, having frightened Ingrid into paying attention, but her heart raced at the stupid risk she was taking. “The cops said it was some kids from town,” she said carefully.

  Ingrid rolled her eyes. “The cops always think everything is kids my age. Did they catch anyone?”

  “No. But it goes to show, you should be careful going out of the house in the middle of the night.”

  “I oughta have a stake-out,” Ingrid said, and Evelyn realized she hadn’t frightened Ingrid at all. Ingrid tapped her fingers on the table. “I could hide in the shed and just watch out that little window one night and see if anything happens,” she went on, more to herself than to Evelyn. “Nobody would know I was there.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Evelyn said. “If it was just some kids, it isn’t going to happen again, and if it was a robber or something, you wouldn’t want to be sitting alone in the woodshed in the middle of the night.”

  “Aah,” said Ingrid, batting this suggestion away as if she were shooing a fly, “I’m not scared.”

  “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.” Evelyn stood up. “It’s very late. We should both go back to bed.”

  “I’m just
going to finish my cigarette on the back porch,” Ingrid said. And added, “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”

  Evelyn felt her face prickle. Stupid girl, she thought, going up the stairs. And stupid her, what was she thinking, bringing up the subject of the rock? Evelyn shut the door of the bedroom behind her. Ray stirred in bed, mumbled, “Sweetheart?”

  She’d let him go to bed without kissing him, even. That wasn’t right. She took off her robe and sat on the edge of the bed. You should be nicer to him, she thought. Stop being so moody, stop ruining dinners. Have sex with him more.

  Ray shifted without waking and flung his hand across her thigh, across the Chinese dragon inked there. She looked down at her leg. She could have shown Ingrid the tattoos—that would certainly raise her in the girl’s estimation. But there was no room for that Evelyn here. The tattooed Evelyn was the one who did things like throw rocks through windows. The Evelyn who Joe Cullen used to hit and whore around on. The one who had watched Joe die.

  Thinking of Joe, Evelyn felt him there in the room beside her. The air thickened, got more humid. She could practically see him, standing just inside the doorway, thumbs hooked in his belt loops, looking down at the sleeping figure of Ray.

  He know what you did yet?

  This could have referred to half a dozen different things, including the rock through the window, but it didn’t. There was only one thing she had done that Joe cared about enough to come back and haunt her for. And she wasn’t going to think about that.

  He’ll throw you out if you tell him.

  Oh, go away, she thought at Joe’s ghost. You’re wrong. You were wrong about the tattoos, and you’re wrong about this. And besides, you stink of beer.

  The first time Ray took her out, she’d been so worried that if he learned two-thirds of her body was covered in ink, he’d want nothing to do with her. When she agreed to go to his house on their second date, she had resolved to keep her clothes on no matter what.

  But as soon as she stepped through Ray’s front door, her ability to think clearly had vanished. He switched on the lights, and the first thing Evelyn noticed was that the foyer was the size of an Airstream. The foyer. To her left, a curved staircase with a carved newel post led up to another floor. Through a half-open door by the stairs, the edge of a bathtub was just visible, a bathtub with legs, a bathtub with iron bird claws for feet. She had never seen such a thing.

  “Give me your coat,” Ray was saying, and she took it off distractedly, staring at the brass doorknob, which was inlaid with a pattern of flowers. He led her through an archway into a living room whose tall bookcases flanked a fireplace with an ornately carved mantel she later found out was walnut. Ray knelt to light the fire that was already laid in the grate, then got to his feet and asked, “What are you drinking?”

  “This is amazing,” said Evelyn, looking up at the living room’s high ceiling, the plasterwork medallion with the lights suspended from it whose bulbs looked like the flames of candles. “I can’t believe you live here.”

  He smiled happily, but said only, “Cabernet okay?”

  She nodded, fairly sure that meant red wine, and Ray said he’d be right back. Evelyn stood in the center of the living room and stretched out her arms. So much space. So much quiet and beautiful space. She felt warm and dry for the first time since coming north. And there was another unfamiliar feeling she couldn’t name. She took a deep breath and spun around once in the center of the rug.

  I feel safe, she realized. I’m safe.

  It was as if she’d finally been allowed to enter the Dream Life world of the scrapbook she’d created as a child—a huge, beautiful house with no wheels under it, a magic place where she was the one who was the center of attention, noticed, wanted, called. She spun around again, and a surge of happiness pulled centrifugally from her chest and whirled out the tips of her fingers, flushed her cheeks, blanked her mind. She spun faster, dizzying herself with it, but then a blur of Ray in the doorway snagged her eyes as she passed, and she stopped, stumbled, stared at the floor in embarrassment. Idiot, she thought. What are you, six?

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  “What?” She looked up, still blushing. Two glasses and a bottle dangled from his hands as if he’d forgotten about them.

  “You looked beautiful, going around, your hair flying out around you. Like a red sail.” He smiled. “Do it again.”

  Was he laughing at her?

  “Do it again?” she repeated.

  “You know—” He set the glasses down on a low table between the couches, then stretched out own his arms, spun around once and tripped. “You’re a bit more graceful.”

  She, graceful? His eyes were so warm. Then, yes—if Ray wanted, she would do it again. She spread her arms, she threw back her head. Stood on tiptoe and twirled, room whirling, out and out she flew until he caught her and they staggered together and fell on the carpet. Beneath her the floor went on whirling as if the whole house might go on spinning until it broke apart, but the weight of Ray’s body on top of her held her still.

  She did not know how long they had been kissing when his hand, which had been holding the curve of her breast through her blouse with no resistance, now began undoing the buttons at her collar. All at once she froze.

  “Stop.” She caught his hand, pulled it away. If he opened her shirt that would be the end. But when he did stop, drew back, puzzled and hurt, her body, her burning tattooed body, reached out for his again and engulfed him. She wrapped her arms around him, her legs. For a minute she thought she could let him fuck her with all her clothes on. But that belonged to Joe, his coming home drunk and throwing himself on top of her whether she wanted it or not. She would not have Ray like that: nothing was worth the ghost of Joe having another fuck on her again.

  Evelyn disentangled her limbs from Ray’s, got up on her knees beside the hearth and whispered, “Look.”

  He thought she meant the flames in the fireplace. Then in one motion she pulled off her dress.

  The sweet heat of her body, the taste of her luscious peach mouth had already fogged his brain. Then the cheap dark dress was sliding up over her head, then a pale slip following like a satiny fountain, revealing—what? When he saw that her body was emblazoned with color, his first confused thought was that she must be playing some sort of joke.

  She must have drawn it all on with markers, he decided; it could not be real.

  Then he saw her face. Her mouth defiant, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “Jesus God,” he said faintly. He looked down at the hearth rug, looked back at Evelyn. The tattoos began a few inches above her breasts and angled up toward her shoulders in a graceful curve, extending like a low-cut gown of ink whose sleeves began just at the shoulders and ended above her elbows. She was fully tattooed the length of her torso, down her belly and back, and halfway down both thighs, where the forest of color ended in twin garters of dark green leaves. Ray noted vaguely the presence of a tiger, a snake, a map on her arms, but everything was crowded together. Across her belly swam a mermaid whose tail curved all the way around Evelyn’s navel, which cleverly doubled as the opening of a pink and orange conch shell. Ray put his hand over his eyes, to shut out the visual cacophony. Tattoos.

  A door slammed and he opened his eyes again. Evelyn had disappeared into the bathroom. He gazed at the door. It was one color only: white. He got up and crossed the room, knocked.

  From the other side Evelyn said, “Get me my clothes, please.”

  He opened the door and she pushed past him, a blur of pigment, and went to the fireplace, seized her crumpled dress and pulled it on. Except for her bright hair, the riot of color disappeared.

  She looked distractedly around the room. “Where’s the phone? I’ll call a taxi.”

  He went to her. “No. Evelyn, no. But why didn’t you tell me?”

  She was crying and only shook her head.

  “Just sit down for a minute. Please?” He took her wrist and led her back to the sofa
.

  Tattoos. Ray did not know anyone with a single tattoo save for Frank, the custodian at Dunlap and Scott, who sometimes stopped to talk to him when Ray was working late. Frank had a Navy tattoo on his forearm. Exposure to sun and time had blurred the original image—a girl in a hula skirt—into an amorphous creature of thick greenish lines. Hadn’t Janis Joplin had a butterfly tattoo? I always liked Janis Joplin, Ray thought. Yes, but one tattoo, not an entire body full. Ray felt a surge of despair rise in him, but it was outpaced by another, stronger swell, this one of desire. To look again, touch and taste again. Who was she, this woman plastered with the stamps of places he barely knew existed? She was like the taste of an unfamiliar spice on his tongue—she left his mouth both hurting and watering for more of her. Nothing like her was in his kitchen, in the world as he knew it.

  He reached over and laid a tentative hand on her arm. When she did not resist, he took the hem of her dress and lifted it a few inches past her knee. Saw the garland of leaves, the band of blue and purple waves. She was still crying, staring fixedly into the fire.

  “Evelyn? I don’t want you to go. I was just shocked, that’s all.” As if it were so easily past tense and he was shocked no longer, as if he were not staring in dumb fascination at her leg, as if he didn’t want to throw her dress back to her waist and stare at all of her, kneel between her opened knees, touch what was told there, fit his mouth to her thighs to see if he could taste the different colors.

  That she had ventured this far into his life, was, he realized, brave.

  “Evelyn, just look at me a minute.” He took her chin in his hand and gently turned her face toward his. Her blue eyes were red and spilling. “I still want you, you know,” he said.

  He put his arms around her. “I want you,” he said, and he could feel how true it was. He felt through the fabric of her dress how fast her heart was beating, and he felt his own heart speed up to match her frightened tempo. He wanted the warmth of this living heart, the insistence of its pounding. “I want you,” he said in her ear. His tongue retraced it, moved to her temple. Her skin was cream with a light dusting of cinnamon. The taste of her skin went straight to his cock. This was more than want, it was need. My God, he thought, what’s happening to me?