There was a little sigh as she let out her breath. Her body relaxed against him, trembled once, leaned into him with all her weight.
They made love on the hearth rug, on the sofa, then finally upstairs in Ray’s bed. The lights on. Everything wet and color.
It was, Ray told her later, like fucking a rainbow.
Now, lying in bed beside him, Evelyn sighed and shifted, unable to sleep. Joe’s ghost was still watching her from the doorway, Ingrid was down in the kitchen in Ray’s old trench coat. Only Ray was asleep, snoring peacefully on his side of the bed. Sweet Ray, ignorant and good. Evelyn ran her hand along his bare shoulder, then put her fingers into his thick dark hair. She loved the way his hair felt, like the fur of a well-groomed animal. Something taken care of, something loved. She caressed his temple. The cut from the flying glass was a thin scab now. She kissed it, then began kissing his closed eyes, his mouth. His mouth moved, first in sleep, then woke against hers, unfolded her kisses and made them into his own.
Outside, Ingrid stepped down off the back porch.
2:21 a.m., and someone was out there in the darkness, Mister, a wrong gee with another rock in his pocket.
Detective Slade on a night job, casing the perimeter of the house. There was the broken window with a plastic bag taped over it and every room dark as a mob boss’s heart, the whole town holding its breath while the killer breathed easy—
Ingrid froze. A sound had come from inside the house, a moan that cut the darkness and yet was part of the darkness, so dark was its sound. Ingrid held her breath, her whole body listening into the silence. Was a prowler really there after all? Had he gotten in the house?
Nothing, nothing, and then another groan. This time Ingrid identified the noise correctly. She stood very still, head tilted up toward the half-open window of the Shepard’s bedroom. The people making love in there, who were they? No relation to the woman in the kitchen afraid of being seen in her bathrobe in the middle of the night. No relation to the man in the corduroy pants who had showed her how to bolt the lids onto the garbage cans so the raccoons wouldn’t get them. The man who wrote the detective story, A. B. Shepard, was he the one in there making the woman with the red hair moan?
It was Mrs. Shepard she was hearing. Ingrid felt all the blood in her body rush to her face. The blood must have come straight from her chest, for the space around her heart felt strangely cold and empty. And her hands were cold—maybe she was smoking too much. She went back inside, climbed the stairs silently except for one bad creak, took off Ray’s trench coat. She climbed into bed and turned out the light. One cold hand strayed south, a small animal looking for warmth and finding it in the dovetail of her thighs, in the animal nest of unbidden hair she tangled in her fingers for a while. It was stupid for people to fall in love when everything was so precarious, when you could die at any moment, either from some hidden poison inside you that mutated your cells one by one, or from some half-asleep guy hitting the wrong button at his console and launching a nuclear missile. That would be the less painful way to die. The best thing to do would be to go outside into the darkness, stand in the middle of the lawn and wait. She touched and touched herself, and when she came it was to the accompaniment of the mushroom cloud in her mind unfolding in pure silence, obliterating all other noise on the planet, even the moans of those strangers writhing in the next room.
I’m not lonely. I just work alone. There’s a difference, Mister.
8.
In the morning Ray overslept, which he had not done since Evelyn and he were first dating. His wife had kept him up for a full crazed hour, teasing him, kneeling over him, her body sliding onto his and then off again and finally fucking him until he came so hard he didn’t notice the groans escaping from his body, or the pain of his head hitting the headboard as he thrashed. He was an animal alive in the pleasure of instinct, freed from the tortured abstractions of the human mind. He was also nearly an hour late for work. When he arrived, face flushed from running from the parking lot, he came face to face in the hall with Dunlap, who stopped him to inquire, with utmost politeness, if Ray was now ready for the meeting that had started ten minutes ago. Ray was still hung over enough on sex endorphins to smile and say, in a tone of genuine goodwill, that he was; then he walked straight into the conference, leaving Dunlap to follow along behind him.
His happy mood persisted all day, even through the delivery of a two-inch stack of door and window schedules for a new hospital wing: mind-numbing grunt work. They were punishment from Dunlap, brought on, he suspected, by his complaining last week about the hospital wing’s questionable lack of natural light. But who cared, who the hell cared at all when he’d made his wife groan, Don’t stop, Ray, don’t stop—? He shoved the stack of schedules into his briefcase and left work with time enough to buy Evelyn flowers on the way home.
He went up the front walk whistling, found the first floor of the house empty. Called for Evelyn, but it was Ingrid who appeared on the landing.
“Hey,” she said, coming down the stairs, “I liked your story.”
“My story?”
“Yeah, ‘Too Much Ice.’ It was cool.”
She’d liked it! He’d almost forgotten he’d given it to her. He tried to look casual.
“You really enjoyed it?”
“Yeah. Hey, nice flowers.”
He looked down at the irises and roses in his hand. “Where’s Evelyn?” he asked.
“Grocery store.”
Ray went into the kitchen and rummaged for a vase. Ingrid followed and perched on a stool, watched while he put the flowers in water and mixed a Manhattan.
Then she said, “So how come you don’t write more of that stuff?”
He sipped his drink. “It’s been years and years since I wrote anything like that.”
“Why?”
He looked at her, amused. Only a very young person would ask such a question. “I’m too old,” he said, felt old then.
“Whaddaya mean, old? You’re not too old to write that architecture stuff.”
“But I’m an architect. That’s what I do. You only have so much energy, so many hours in a day—you’ll see.”
She was looking at him but not listening; frowning as if trying to remember something.
“When you wrote the detective story,” she said slowly, “were you different?”
“Of course. I was twenty-one, for one thing.”
“Did you ever really carry a gun?”
He laughed. “No, I didn’t carry a gun; I’ve never even fired one, actually. I wasn’t in Vietnam.”
“But were you different in other ways? When you wrote that?”
“You mean, was I six inches taller and broad-shouldered with a mean left hook? No, Ingrid, I was a skinny college kid who was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown from overwork and general adolescent angst.” He sat down on the edge of the kitchen table. “While everyone else went off to Bermuda or Switzerland for Spring Break, I lay around in my parents’ house reading detective stories. A few months later I tried my hand at writing one myself, and I got lucky, it was published by the first place I sent it to. That’s all.”
“But you never thought it would be cool to write another one? I mean, if you just whipped one off and got it published on the first try, why not try it again? I mean, maybe you’re great at it and don’t even know it.”
Maybe I am. The thought crept into his mind tentatively at first, and then, meeting no resistance, spoke louder in Ray’s mind. Maybe I am.
Aloud he said, “I told you, my life went in a different direction. I have a very demanding career, for one thing, and I’m married, I have responsibilities. After dinner this evening, for example, I have to spend several hours going over the dimensions of two hundred and six doors and windows and their accompanying hardware. Speaking of dinner, any plans for it afoot?”
Ingrid ran her fingers through her spiky hair and spoke to the ceiling. “Evelyn was cooking something, but she threw it out.”
/> Ray felt his good mood evaporate. He looked at the flowers he had bought. They would be useless now; anything he said would be useless if Evelyn had worked herself into a bout of self-punishment.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Soufflé, but it didn’t. Soufflé, that is—it flatteneéd instead.”
Soufflé, he thought, who makes soufflé? And then he remembered who—a month earlier, he and Evelyn had gone to the Yeagers’ house for dinner and Marseille had made an asparagus soufflé. Why could Evelyn not give it a rest? She was great at anything involving a barbecue: she could have made barbecued chicken and everyone would have been happy. And now she was at the store buying what? Another dozen eggs to try again? He wanted to ask Ingrid if Evelyn had been crying when she threw the soufflé out; instead he opened the freezer and found, near the back, a tray of pork chops. He filled a baking dish with water and set them to thaw.
“I mean, how hard could it be?” Ingrid said.
“Soufflé? Quite difficult, I imagine. You’re relying on egg whites to support—”
“No, not that,” she said impatiently. “I mean, how hard could it be to write another detective story?” Ingrid dropped her voice in what Ray supposed was an imitation of Humphrey Bogart and spoke from one side of her mouth:
“The dame in my office was dripping money and mink like a leaky faucet drips water. And lemme tell you, Mister, the basin was full.”
Ray smiled. “What’s that from?”
“Nothing, I just made it up.”
“Well, then, why don’t you write the detective story, if you’re so keen on the idea? You’d be good at it.”
Ingrid looked away, but not before he saw her smile.
“Sometimes when I have stuff to do,” she said tentatively, “you know, make my bed or something, I start thinking of it in my head in—well, in hard-boiled words. Like: ‘8:57 a.m. The blankets were as twisted as an old bookie’s smile and the pillows were flatter than flat broke.’”
Ray laughed. “So try writing it down.”
Ingrid looked up at him. “Okay. Come on, let’s go up to the typewriter.”
“You go ahead. I’m making dinner.”
“After dinner, then?”
“As I said, I have to get started on a door and window schedule.”
“Come on, just help me get started for five minutes. Those chops have to defrost anyway. Please?”
She was so eager, Ray thought, that it would be unkind to refuse.
“All right, five minutes,” he said, and she was tearing up the stairs. He mixed another drink and followed her up. He wondered how much of a state Evelyn had worked herself into, and how he would deal with it on top of a full evening of work brought home.
“Come on,” Ingrid called.
He opened the door to the fainting room. Ingrid sat hunched over the Underwood, a pencil stuck in the corner of her mouth like a cigarette.
“Is this okay?” She rolled the paper out of the typewriter so he could read what she’d just typed.
She was a redhead, the dame who walked in, on a pair of icepicks pretending to be the heels of her shoes. When I looked up I saw why she needed the picks. A whole tray of ice clung to her neck, diamonds that would have made all the neon in Vegas look like a hand-painted sign advertising church bingo.
She took my cigarette away from me like it was never mine to begin with and used it to light her own. I’m supposed to be tough, but I started coughing when she exhaled.
“You just made this up now?” Ray asked.
“Yeah. Why are you laughing?” This said accusingly.
“I’m not laughing. You’ve got the voice down pat. Any better and it’d be—” Parody, he was on the verge of saying, but he remembered himself only a few years older than she was now, trying to step into exactly that same world, by way of the story, where being lonely was a virtue, where being tough with sentences meant being tough with the bad guys as well, meant being kissed by beautiful women. “—Almost too good,” he finished.
Ingrid’s mouth twitched, held still. But her eyes betrayed that she was pleased.
“What do I write now?” she asked.
He thought a moment. “You have to describe the detective’s office, explain what the client wants. You have to know in your head how it’s going to go, who the killer is, who the suspects are and so forth. You have to work it out ahead of time.”
“Okay, you do that part.”
“What part?”
She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “You tell me what to type and I’ll type it.”
Ray glanced uneasily at the piece of typing paper Ingrid had pulled out of the typewriter when she’d rolled in this one. The discarded sheet had been abandoned in the middle of a sentence that began, Throughout the history of twentieth century architecture, the marriage of structural integrity and applied decoration has been a rocky one, yet these two disparate elements, when seen through the earlier lens of the Victorian penchant for both craftsmanship and ornamentation, achieve a mutual—
“Come on,” said Ingrid, following his eyes. “Which would you rather do?”
Ray felt something inside him flutter open as if a door had come unlatched, the breeze blown in. Something fresh, the smell of a different climate.
“Come on,” Ingrid said again. “Just for a little while.”
He watched her chew the pencil. Her eyes and nose looked too large for her other features, as if they’d been borrowed from another, more adult face; her mouth and cheeks were still full of the roundness of childhood. Again Ray thought of himself at Yale at twenty-one, and how fragile he had been beneath his armor; Ingrid’s was punk clothes and cigarettes, his had been a slavish devotion to academics. He’d been desperate to prove he was smart, having long since given up hope of being cool.
“All right,” he said. “For a little while, then.”
Ingrid took the pencil from between her teeth. There were flecks of Faber yellow at the corners of her mouth. “But I need a real cigarette,” she said, pulling a crushed pack from the back pocket of her cutoffs. “I can’t do this without a real cigarette. Don’t worry, I won’t light it.”
She stuck one in her mouth. “So what should I type now?”
Ray thought. “Have the lady with the diamonds say why she’s come, then have the detective ogle her.”
Ingrid bent over the typewriter again.
“I need to find a man,” the dame said huskily.
“I’m not good enough for you?”
It was a little early for cracking wise but it was also a little early for low cut black cerise, which was what she was wearing. It went nice with the mink and diamonds.
“My name is Emily Roseine.” She paused. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
She sighed. “No,” she said. I haven’t made a film in years.”
“Now what?” Ingrid asked.
“She has to get to the point—she’s there because she wants to hire him, have him find her husband or something. Have her flirt with him a little. Like, ‘Emily Roseine lowered her lashes. There were a lot of them to lower.’”
“Oh, excellent,” Ingrid said, typing the line. She took the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and looked up at him. “You’re pretty cool, you know.”
“I’m flattered,” Ray said, then realized he really was flattered, and looked away.
“I came about my husband,” the dame said. “This is a very sensitive situation.”
She looked up at me to see if I was watching. I was.
“I need someone who will play straight with me. My husband hasn’t come home in three days and I’m afraid something may have happened to him. I can’t go to the police. And I can’t go into the details now. Perhaps you could come to my house later. The cocktail hour—I think that would suit both of us.”
“Now she has to pay him a retainer,” Ray said. “And then, let’s see, she has to wobble her way out of his office, and then he has to reflect o
n the situation and decide something’s fishy about her.”
She pulled out a lavender envelope, which she offered me with a delicate flick of her wrist.
“Will this do as a retainer?”
I didn’t bother to open it. Fifty cents would have been enough of a retainer, coming from her.
“My address is on the back,” said Mrs. Roseine. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She adjusted her mink, touched her diamonds to be sure they hadn’t melted in all the heat she was generating, and wobbled her way out of my office.
I’ve been in this business long enough to know when something’s fishy. And something here positively stank. But it wasn’t her perfume.
“That’s good,” said Ray.
“You really think so?”
“I do.” He felt a twinge of jealousy and pretended to himself that he didn’t.
Ingrid grinned happily and leaned back in her chair, dragged on the unsmoked cigarette. “‘A. B. Shepard,’” she said after a moment. “What’s the A. B. stand for?”
“My real name. Arthur, after my father. And Ray is short for Braeburn.”
Ingrid fiddled with her cigarette. “I have a first name I never use, either,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I’ll only tell you if you promise not to say you think it’s pretty.”
“Even if I do think it’s pretty?”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
She scowled. “Tiffany.”
Ray, despite himself, began to laugh. “You are not a Tiffany,” he said.
“I know it. Tiffany sounds like a waitress at a roller rink.”
“But you’re most definitely an Ingrid.”
“Yeah? Ingrid sounds like a German scholar with klunky intellectual jewelry.”
“You think?” He looked at her. “To me Ingrid sounds like a very bright and interesting sixteen-year-old who’s going to stunt her growth by smoking Chesterfields.”
The Fainting Room Page 10