The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  Sucker, the ghost of Joe Cullen said.

  Well, maybe it was stupid to think Ingrid wanted to be friends. And maybe it was stupid to want to be friends with her in the first place; she was so weird. Evelyn looked back at the iguana, who was lying in the flowerpot. It didn’t seem like Ingrid to just leave Melvin there. Evelyn dragged the chaise closer to the window so she could stroke him under the chin. Animals were a comfort. They did what they did because it was dictated by their nature, and if you understood their nature, you understood them. It was possible to understand them. Whereas looking at Ingrid she felt she understood nothing. The same with Ray; he was her husband, but what did she really know of him? She could predict his opinion about, say, a building, or his taste in shirts, but she didn’t know what it was like to be who he was. Was he happy? Was he actually happy being married to her, or was he just pretending? And what did she understand about herself, even, when it was clear that her answer to that question was much closer to “pretending” than to “actually.” Because there was no reason for such dissatisfaction. Ray was a good man, and this was what she’d always wanted.

  “Why do you love me?” she asked him once, in the early weeks after they were married. The question caught Ray off guard and he’d only kissed her and said, “Because you’re wonderful.” That was no real answer and he must have known it, for after they’d gone to bed he got up again without waking her; in the morning she found a single red tulip in a bud vase on her nightstand. When she put her nose to the blossom she saw the words—tiny perfect letters Ray had inked, one line on each of the tulip’s velvety petals:Why do I love you?

  Because without you I was dying inside

  Because the color of your hair has dyed my blood

  Because my blood could never have dreamed you

  Because you are brave and haven’t yet dreamed it

  Because you taught my heart to open—

  Petals stamen pollen

  from closed bud

  12.

  “Hello,” said Ray, looking up from sorting mail as Ingrid came into the kitchen. “You’ve got a card.”

  Ingrid looked at the picture. It was a photo of the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas, one of the free postcards that hotels put on the bureau in every room along with the notepad and the ballpoint pen.

  She turned it over.

  Hi, Sweetie,

  Greetings from the city that’s the civil engineering feat of the century. Got a 3 day weekend & Linda met me here. Wish you could have come too—we took an amazing tour of Hoover Dam you would have loved. Linda won $300 at the slots! Plan on coming back to Melvin for August—I ’ll be home the 3rd, will call you beforehand to arrange your flight.

  Love,

  Your Dad

  This message annoyed Ingrid in so many ways that for a moment she could not formulate a coherent thought about any of them. She tore the Sahara in half, an 8.9 earthquake, in half again, the shifting of the tectonic plates sending the nuclear reactor in Diablo Canyon into meltdown, and threw the pieces of the Sahara’s cheesy dome and imported palm trees into the kitchen wastebasket.

  Ignoring Ray’s “Is anything wrong?” she banged out the back door onto the porch, lit a cigarette, and inhaled several times as fast and deep as she could until she felt light-headed. Only then could she begin her catalogue of grievances.

  First, Linda and her father on a long weekend in Vegas was a repulsive thought to begin with. Then, there was the matter of Linda winning $300 at slots: her father thought people who gambled were idiots, he’d always said so. “The house always wins in the end,” he’d told Ingrid. “It’s a mathematical fact.” Third, it was absolutely true she would have loved the Hoover Dam, and her dad knew this, since he wrote it in the postcard, so how could he have gone without her? And worst of all was the last part of the postcard, his assumption that she would fly back to Melvin in August. She would not—she could not end up back on Cactus Flower Drive for a month, or worse, in Linda’s condo complex. Either way she’d have to listen to Melanie prattle about horses and boys, and watch her father turn into an idiot because of Linda, and deal with Linda bugging her about her clothes and her hair and her bad attitude. She’d be trapped under the constant soul-sucking gaze of people who would like her better if she were someone else. No way.

  Ray came out onto the deck and sat down on the step beside her.

  “Letter from home?” he asked.

  “You saw yourself it was a postcard.”

  “True. And accuracy is important: postcard, then.” He paused. “Want to talk about it?”

  “What is this, an episode of After School Special?”

  “All right—” Ray stood up. “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

  He went back inside. Evelyn was just coming in, a paper bag of groceries in each arm. He took the bags from her and set them on the counter, kissed his wife.

  “You’re home early,” she said. “Dinner won’t be ready for an hour at least.”

  “I snuck out of the office,” said Ray. “I’m hoping no one will notice how much work I have left to do on the Goldstein job if they don’t actually see me sitting at my desk doing it. It’ll just look like a desk; not my desk.” He opened the freezer, got out the ice tray and shook a few ice cubes into a glass, added gin. “Dunlap’s in a wretched mood. He already called me in for one bawling-out yesterday, and I had the feeling if I stayed in the office today, I’d get another. Or bear the brunt of some idiosyncratic change he’s agreed to make on a project that should have been finalized a month ago.”

  “Mmm,” Evelyn said, gazing into the open kitchen cabinets at the rows of canned food, an abstracted expression on her face.

  Ray felt rebuked. Why did he bother explaining what was going on at work if she didn’t bother to really listen? He watched her a moment, then asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Just figuring out what to do with my chicken.”

  “Want some help? We could do a Julia Child poulet a l’estragon.”

  “Actually I’m going to try something I saw in a magazine.”

  “What magazine?”

  “I forget, I cut the recipe out a while ago. Why?”

  “Just asking.” He was wondering which he should steel himself for: Woman’s Day favored canned, heavily sugared fruit whenever possible, adding cling peaches or maraschino cherries in the most incongruous places, whereas Redbook preferred to ruin a meal by dumping canned soup over it. Ray wanted a nice roast chicken with tarragon—an easy dish; there was fresh tarragon right out there in the herb garden, practically crying out to be sautéed in butter. It was perfectly reasonable to ask for something specific for dinner once in a while.

  He mixed himself a gin and tonic, took a long sip and tried to swallow his irritation along with it. There was no point in pressing the dinner suggestion. Every time he offered any help of a culinary nature, the evening seemed to end in tears. And he didn’t have the energy for it, not tonight. He wanted to enjoy his drink, have a quiet dinner, and finish writing chapter three of Victorian Architecture: A Treatise.

  “If anyone wants me,” he said, “I’ll be up in the fainting room.”

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “Working on my book.” He tried to ignore the can of Campbell’s in her hand.

  “But why in that tiny room? I thought that was just Ingrid’s thing.”

  “I can’t concentrate in the study with that garbage bag staring me in the face. Remind me tomorrow morning, would you, to call about getting that window repaired?”

  “Yes,” Evelyn said, and she went toward him suddenly and kissed him on the cheek.

  He recognized the gesture as an act of contrition but he was not sure for what. She kissed him again.

  “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready,” she said. “Where’s Ingrid?”

  “Outside being Garbo.”

  “What?”

  “She vants to be alone.”

  Ray took his gin and tonic and went up to the fainti
ng room. In the typewriter carriage was a piece of paper. He put on his glasses and read:

  Emily Roseine looked at me. She didn’t get it, but with looks like hers she didn’t have to.

  “I’ll get down to business, Detective Slade,” she said. “My husband is the president of an important company. Axtex. You may have heard of it.”

  “They make bombs,” I said.

  Emily Roseine wrinkled her nose. “An ugly word. The term Axtex prefers is ‘payload delivery systems.’ In any case, my husband is missing. I can’t go to the police.”

  She used some more of her drink. She bit her lip. It was a full round lip that looked good being bitten.

  “Knock, knock,” Ingrid said from the doorway.

  Ray jumped. “I didn’t hear you come upstairs.”

  “I’m quiet,” said Ingrid. She leaned against the doorframe and pushed the toe of her sneaker against the jamb. “Whatcha doing?”

  He reached for the pile of paper that was chapter three of Victorian Architecture: A Treatise and pulled it toward him. “I was just about to look over the section on the vernacular builders’ influence on Queen Anne style. Which reminds me, I owe you some typing wages.”

  “I haven’t been keeping track.”

  “Well, it’s a dollar a page, isn’t it? That ought to be easy enough to figure out.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She kicked at the doorframe. “Listen, I’m sorry I was a jerk outside.”

  Ray felt a tension he had not been aware of suddenly leave his body.

  “You weren’t being a jerk,” he said. “I was prying. And you are a teenager, aren’t you? I suppose you’re entitled to a few curt answers now and then.”

  Ingrid ignored this, and indicated with her chin the sheet of paper he’d pulled out of the typewriter carriage. “Did you see what I was writing?”

  “Well, yes, I glanced at it. Sorry; you left it right there.”

  “I don’t mind—you’re helping me write it, remember?” She came all the way into the fainting room and rummaged on the desk for a handful of pages. “Here—read the rest of it. I’m stuck.”

  Thinking about Emily Roseine was tiring work. While I was doing it I fell asleep at my desk.

  “Wait a second,” Ray said. “Over on this page he’s watching Emily Roseine bite her lip, and now he’s back in his office?”

  “I told you, I got stuck. This is the next scene. Detective Slade goes back to his office the next day, and this guy comes in who seems totally unconnected to the Emily Roseine case.”

  “But of course, he’s actually intimately connected. Emily’s secret lover? Or her missing husband, pretending to be someone else.”

  Ingrid stared at him. “How did you know?”

  “Well, that’s the genre. Don’t look at me like that, it’s a good thing that I guessed it—it means you have a handle on the formula.” He looked back at the papers and read on:

  I didn’t hear the bell on the door of the outer office. The gentleman standing in front of my desk looked like old money—he carried a linen handkerchief in the breast pocket of his gray flannel suit. The hanky was the same shade of ecru as his tie.

  “Detective Slade?” He held out his hand without introducing himself. His handshake felt like a dead fish stuffed in a wet dress sock. “The job I’m hiring you for should be very quick, but I shall pay you handsomely for your time.”

  “How do you know you’re hiring me?” I said.

  He didn’t like that. Rich people never do. He started to get all indignant, but then he sneezed. It’s impossible to act like a snob after you’ve just performed a loud, involuntary bodily function. I waited for him to make a big show of unfolding the pocket handkerchief. But maybe he wasn’t really old money after all because he didn’t touch the hanky.

  “Gesundheit,” I said.

  “Thank you. Now let me try again. I should like to hire you, if you will consent to take my case.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I will be meeting several gentlemen tomorrow evening to make a transaction with them. I’ve discovered—a piece of information, you could say, that’s worth a great deal to a certain group of people.”

  I stood up. “Sorry, bub. I don’t work for blackmailers.”

  “Blackmail does not enter into it. This is a normal business transaction in every way except that the purchasers, unfortunately, are not particularly savory characters. All I wish is that you accompany me while I hand over a small envelope in exchange for another envelope. I am prepared to pay you handsomely.”

  We stared at each other across my desk for a minute. I didn’t like him. But I do like eating.

  He peeled five bills from his money clip and slid them across the desk at me. I looked down at the bills. Each one was a C-note. He’d given me half a grand, just like that.

  “My minimum rate per job is less than one of these,” I said.

  “I don’t expect to receive your minimum level of service,” he said. “Good day, Mr. Slade.”

  A few lines sounded lifted either from Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald, Ray thought, but it was just as good as what he’d been able to write himself when he was twenty-one. No, it was better, actually. He looked up at her, this girl with the hair like she’d stuck her finger in a live socket, with the hacked up tee shirt that today said “GangGreen,” this girl with the shy hope in her eyes.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Write this. You have a knack for it.”

  Ingrid ducked her head to hide the wide lopsided grin that bloomed over her face. He watched her become aware of her own happiness, watched as her lips folded the smile away again. Only when she was no longer smiling did she look up to answer him.

  “Well, what I do is—oh, it’s stupid, really.” She hesitated.

  “I want to know.”

  She fiddled with a pencil on the desk. “Well, I close my eyes and I imagine everything is a noir film: the world is all in black and white and it’s all noirish, what I see. Like a man’s black shoes stepping down in a puddle and the puddle reflecting his face from a street light, and long shadows from a dark alley and a blonde screams from somewhere that’s lost in time and madness and then—Jeez.” She swung away from him in her chair and looked out the window. “You must think I’m the biggest geek alive.”

  “No,” said Ray. “I don’t think that at all.” The gentleness he heard in his own voice made him look away as well. He felt something vulnerable toward her, something tender that seemed a little unseemly. “But why all the stuff about the sneezing and the handkerchief?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “The secret formula is written on his handkerchief.”

  “The secret formula for what?”

  “Something really dangerous and deadly. He’s president of this weapons company called Axtex, and he’s been working for the government making a new kind of bomb out of the most dangerous material on earth.”

  “Uranium?”

  Ingrid shook her head. “No, deadlier.”

  “Plutonium, then.”

  “Even more deadly then that.”

  “I don’t think there is anything more deadly.”

  Ingrid scowled. “It’s something new they’re making. The secret formula is a new substance for a new kind of bomb.”

  “Called?”

  “It’s very secret. They just call it....” she paused. “X-onium. It kills everything, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  Ray looked at her dark intense eyes, her crazy hair, her young face. Her so recently-born self already so preoccupied with dying. He felt a rush of protective warmth that went through him and out toward her, leaving behind it a sense of emptiness in his chest.

  “All right,” he said. “X-onium, good name.”

  He saw the pleased look start in her eyes, warm her cheeks, come to rest on the side of her mouth that smiled.

  She traced her finger in a loop on the desk and said, “You know somet
hing? You’re easy to talk to. I wish I could talk to my dad this way.”

  “You’re a good conversationalist yourself,” he said, though what he felt inside was not so blithe. There was something lovely about Ingrid, something vulnerable and disarming that he had missed at first, hidden as it was beneath the hardcore band tee shirts and punk hair and safety-pin earrings. Something earnest and charming and bright. It was as if he’d been looking at unlit candles that suddenly burst into flame. Birthday candles, on a cake. There was something sweet to celebrate in Ingrid after all.

  “I’m a good conversationalist with you,” Ingrid said. “Not in general.”

  “You seem to be able to talk to Evelyn all right.”

  “Hey, that reminds me.” Ingrid looked up from her doodling finger. “How come you never told me Evelyn was in the circus?”

  “She told you that?”

  “What, it’s not true?”

  “No, it’s true.” Ray took a long swallow of his gin and tonic. The ice had melted and it tasted watery. “She just doesn’t usually talk about her circus days, that’s all.”

  “Well, she told me,” Ingrid said. “I asked about her arm, and she pulled up her sleeve and showed me, so then I asked how she got it, of course.”

  “Got what?”

  “Her scar, whaddaya think?”

  “Oh.”

  Ingrid looked at him hard. “You were going to say something else.”

  “No I wasn’t,” Ray said, seeing in his mind Evelyn’s painted midriff and breasts, the sun on her sternum, the mermaid undulating over the soft flesh of her belly.

  “What were you going to say?” Ingrid persisted.

  “Don’t get tough with me, Detective Slade.” Ray tried a Bogart voice of his own. “Honestly, Ingrid, I don’t know much about all that circus stuff. I know Evelyn wasn’t very happy there, and she was glad to leave it behind. If you want to know more than that, you’d better ask her yourself.”

  “Whatever,” Ingrid said, all disdainful teenager again. “What’s that you’re drinking?”